We’re working with the metaphor “the gears are turning.” If changing gears seems to be your healthiest approach, consider these transformation metaphors.
Overview of "The Gears Are Turning" Metaphor
NOTE: The introduction is the same for each of the four intensities of The Gears Are Turning Metaphor. If you have already read it, you may want to click to skip.
Are you being told to get it in gear? Maybe you’re telling yourself that. Are you gearing up for a presentation? Are you gearing down after a long week at work? Is something getting you geared up?
Gearing up. Gearing down. Getting in gear. Typically we identify these metaphors in our body somewhere, and we might relate it to the gears in a car. But the one metaphor that pretty much always puts us in our head, is THE GEARS ARE TURNING. And that’s the one we’re going to focus on this week.
Hello, my name is Karen, and this series grows out of my book, Emotion Commotion, and The EAT Program™. In these videos, I help you Locate, Describe & Transform™ the emotions that interfere with you making your best decisions.
Your emotions present as images and metaphors, so each week I explore new imagery, always looking at it from four levels of emotional intensity: extreme, high, medium, and low. The imagery that I present: yours can look completely different. The best way to go through this process is to focus on your imagery; just use mine as an example.
Four Emotion Intensities with Four "The Gears Are Turning" Metaphor Images
- For the extreme intensity video, I’m using gears in a robot head.
- For the high intensity video, I’m using imagery that reminds me of the Bronze Age, so it’ll be an historic issue.
- For medium intensity, I’m using golden gears that are leaving, in part, the head, and turning into vibrant bright lights.
- And for low intensity, I’m using gears that have mostly left the head – some are still in it – but there’s a multitude of bright colours that are filling, and giving me an idea of, a creative space in the head.
Changing Gears: High Intensity Emotions
The high intensity image for me brings up the idea of the Bronze Age. It’s all bronze colouring; it’s very dark. The gears are turning, but to me, some of them look rusty. They certainly look old, and that’s telling me that I’m focused on something historic. I’m getting geared up, or the gears aren’t turning well, because of something historic.
This could work a couple of different ways.
- It could be being focused on something in the past.
- It could also mean needing to change the way that you see the world, or the situation, or the person, and that you’re looking at them through an old lens – mixing metaphors there.
Changing Gears: Transformation Example
What I want to do is imagine taking out each of the gears – like we did with the Extreme Intensity video – but I see the first step is to need to clean these gears off. Some of them are rusty, some of them are broken: I want them cleaned up. I also don’t feel that it’s healthiest for me to keep these gears around.
So, we’ve located the gears in my head. The metaphor is the gears are turning, and this is the specific description that I get, this video.
My transformation: Take the gears out, clean them up, and then melt them down to bronze and turn them into something artistic – a nice bronze statue, a bronze bowl – something that seems positive.
Changing Gears: Don't Overthink Your Transformations
The general goal for you when you make a transformation, is to make it positive and alleviate any stress in your body, any tension that you’re feeling anywhere. If you imagine transforming these gears into a bronze statue, and that feels negative in your body, then it’s not the healthiest transformation for you.
Now, you can go into each of these transformations and try and figure out what they mean, but that’s not necessary to transform your emotions. That’s something that you may choose to do, but if you’re simply trying to transform your emotions in a situation, just transform the imagery and trust that your emotions will transform at the same time.
With your emotions transformed, you’ll get an intuitive understanding of what your next real world step is. You may get some understanding about what the situation is, but as long as you feel positive and you understand your next healthy step, then you’re good to go.
So, for example, when I imagined a bronze statue, that didn’t feel positive to me at all. But when I imagined a bronze vase of some sort, that felt very positive. I’m not going to try and understand why the difference; I’m just going to focus on the positive imagery.
For me, I do honestly understand the difference: The bronze statue still speaks to something that’s too historic, too ancient, too much focused on the past, whereas a bronze vase feels like something I can fill with water, with flowers, or something positive. That’s a difference to me; as I said, it can feel completely different for you. But what I know is the gears are no longer turning in my head in a rusty, historic way, and I’m able to look at whatever the situation is with fresh eyes, just like with the extreme intensity video.
I want one final transformation, and that’s to imagine rinsing all of me inside and out, to clear my head, to clear my thoughts, and start fresh.
The Gears Are Turning: Closing
The caution, with the imagery I’m using this week, is:
- Beware of robotic thought, where it’s not even your ideas that you’re putting forward.
- Beware of historic issues or historic beliefs that are coming forward, that don’t serve you anymore.
- Be aware of gears in your head that might be turning nicely, but that you just don’t need to be thinking so much, and you could allow intuition to come in.
- And finally, be aware of emotions, intuition, and thinking all being in balance.
Especially if you’re talking about group projects, extreme intensity emotions, extremely complex emotions or situations, you might need to take some private space and work through your transformations one-by-one. For low intensity emotions, for some low complexity emotions, even if they’re higher intensity, it might just take a deep breath, relax, and let the image transform quickly, while you keep going about your day.
I respectfully acknowledge that this video was recorded on the traditional territory of Mi’kmaq people.
For more information on transforming negative emotions with the Locate, Describe & Transform™ process, check out theEATprogram.com.