Picture this: Your manager walks into the room and says, "We need to crush this deadline."
Before you can even process the words consciously, something happens in your body. Maybe your jaw clenches. Your shoulders tense up. A wave of competitive energy—or maybe anxiety—washes over you.
Meanwhile, your colleague sitting next to you hears the exact same sentence and lights up with excitement. They're energized, motivated, ready to tackle the challenge.
Same words. Same situation. Completely different reactions.
What's going on here?
The Secret Power of Metaphors
Most of us think we're responding to the deadline itself, to the urgency, to our manager's tone. But here's what research reveals: that single word "crush" is doing something much more powerful than we realize.
Metaphors aren't just colorful ways of speaking. They're cognitive switches that operate below our conscious awareness, shaping how we think, feel, and act.
Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrated this beautifully in their groundbreaking work. Metaphors form the invisible architecture of our thoughts, determining how we perceive reality itself.
And science backs this up with some fascinating findings.
The Crime Experiment
Psychologists Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky conducted an elegant experiment. They presented people with identical crime statistics—everything was exactly the same except for one word.
When crime was described as a "beast" ravaging the community, people overwhelmingly supported hiring more police and imposing harsher sentences.
When that same crime was called a "virus" infecting the city, people preferred addressing root causes through social programs and reform.
One word. Completely different policy preferences.
The pattern shows up everywhere. Frame cancer as a "battle" and patients may feel guilty if they don't recover. Call it a "journey" and they're more likely to find peace with their situation. Label an interaction as "competition" instead of collaboration, and people become measurably less cooperative—even when the rules stay identical.
Metaphors don't just describe our experience. They fundamentally alter our emotions, decisions, and behaviors.
Taking Back Control
The good news? Once you understand how metaphors work, you can take control of the language shaping your work life. Here are three practical ways to start.
1. Pay Attention to Your Body
For the next three days, just notice the metaphors flying around your workplace. You don't need to track them formally or keep a journal. Simply tune in.
When someone says "we're going to war on this project" or "let's crush our goals," pause. Check in with yourself. Do you feel energized or drained? Open or defensive? Relaxed or tense?
Start noticing patterns. Does military language correlate with your afternoon stress headaches? Does "building" or "creating" language feel more sustainable to you?
Your body knows before your mind does.
2. Run Your Own Experiment
Think about the metaphor you use most often at work. (Hint: it's probably something involving battle, competition, or crushing.)
For one week, deliberately swap it out for something different.
If you typically "fight" deadlines, try "tending" your projects instead. Think about pruning what doesn't serve you, harvesting insights, accepting that different seasons bring different kinds of growth.
If you "crush" goals, experiment with "cultivating" outcomes.
If work feels like a "battlefield," reimagine it as a "laboratory" where you run experiments, learn from failed hypotheses, and stay curious about results.
Pick a frame that genuinely resonates with how you naturally think—but one that's different from your usual pattern.
At the end of each day, rate your energy level on a scale of 1 to 10. After five days, you'll have real data about whether the new frame serves you better.
3. Reframe in Real Time
When someone uses a metaphor that triggers your stress response, try offering an alternative on the spot.
If a colleague announces "we're going to war on this deadline," you might respond: "Or we could treat it like a sprint—focused effort followed by recovery."
You're not correcting them or being difficult. You're simply offering a frame that works better for you.
(A quick note: This technique works best with peers and colleagues. With managers, you might want to use the reframe privately, just for yourself.)
The Meta-Point
You've probably noticed this article is packed with metaphors while making a case for metaphor awareness. "Invisible architecture." "Cognitive switches." "Taking back control."
That's exactly the point.
We can't think without metaphors. Our brains are wired to understand abstract concepts through concrete comparisons. But we can choose our metaphors consciously instead of letting inherited language choose for us.
The frames dominating your workplace aren't inevitable. They're products of organizational culture and unconscious habit, repeated so often they become invisible.
Your work can be a war, a garden, a laboratory, a journey, or a hundred other things. The question isn't which metaphor is objectively correct.
The question is: which one helps you become the professional—and the person—you actually want to be?