The metaphor hiding in your plainest sentence

“We have a big piece of work ahead of us.” A flat sentence for a Monday meeting, no trace of poetry in it. And yet time has already turned into a road, the task has turned into a distance, and the people in the room have turned into travellers who have to cover it. Nobody noticed. The metaphor worked silently, and the silence is the whole point.

Images run through ordinary speech so densely that most speakers never register them. That matters for anyone who sells, because the image a person is standing inside decides which offers they can even consider.

Metaphorical thinking comes first, not second

There is a comfortable hierarchy in which metaphorical thinking sits below logical thinking. Images belong to poets and to children; adults solving serious problems use concepts. The hierarchy is convenient and wrong. Metaphorical thinking is the base layer. It precedes the conceptual apparatus rather than serving it.

Before there were definitions, categories and logical operations, a mechanism was already running that took something familiar and bodily and used it to assemble the sense of something that had no shape of its own. That mechanism did not retire when logic arrived. Logic was built on top of it, and the older layer keeps working inside every sentence, including the driest line in a quarterly report.

This is why a brand can do everything right at the level of argument and still fail to be heard. The argument arrives at a mind that has already drawn the situation as a picture, and the picture came first.

Reading the space in what a client says

Time is most often described through space, and it is the most frequent example of the mechanism at work. “Ahead of us”, “we have come a long way”, “that is behind us now”: in all of them time is a road and the speaker is someone moving along it. Nobody consciously thinks that time is space. The metaphor runs automatically, like breathing.

The same principle governs how an analyst listens to another person. Call the skill imaginal hearing: the ability to follow the meaning of what is said while also seeing the space the speaker is drawing around themselves, with its roads, boundaries, significant figures and distances. The model of the psyche is spatial in itself, so imaginal models regularly come out as arrangements of elements in space. When a person says something is pressing on them from every side, or that there is nowhere for them to go, they are not reaching for random words. They are describing a specific configuration they are standing in.

A developed version of this listening lets you mentally shift one element of the picture and see how firmly it is fixed. If a client describes the future as a wall, you can ask what would change if it were a door. The reaction to that shift is diagnosis rather than an idle exercise: it shows how far the image has fused with the experience and how far it can be reassembled.

In commercial work this is the difference between a discovery call that produces a transcript and one that produces a map. Two clients can report the same fact, that sales in Russia have stalled, and be standing in completely different pictures. One is at a closed border. The other is in a swamp. The first will hear an offer about breaking through. The second will hear nothing until someone offers firm ground.

Where this bites a foreign company selling into Russia

Copy written for a home market carries the images of that market, and translation moves the words while leaving the picture where it was. This is the most expensive quiet failure I see in Russian launches, and it never shows up in an account audit, because every setting is correct.

Western B2B copy leans heavily on a small set of pictures: getting ahead of the competition, owning a category, climbing, accelerating, winning. They read as neutral business language at home because a whole market has been speaking that way for decades. Rendered into Russian they often stay grammatically perfect and become a company describing its own ambitions to an audience that was asking about something else. The Russian buyer’s picture of the same situation is more often about reliability of supply, about whether the thing will still be here next year, about who answers the phone when it breaks. Those are pictures of ground and of shelter rather than pictures of a race.

Google and the Western market let you paper over this with volume. You can run many creative variants, let the machine find the one that resonates, and never learn why. Yandex Direct gives you less room for that. Headlines and texts are short, Russian words are longer than their English equivalents, and a large part of your reach sits in the ad network where your image competes with content the person actually came to read. An image that needs a sentence of context has nowhere to put that sentence, and the shorter the format, the more the underlying picture has to do the work alone.

There is also a research consequence. Keyword sets translated from English carry the source metaphor into the search query, and Russian users then fail to type it. The phrasing people actually use is visible for free in Yandex Wordstat, in your messenger threads with Russian clients, and in the search terms report of a live campaign. Read those for verbs and prepositions rather than for volume: they carry the picture. This is a large part of why I treat customer research as the first step of a Russian launch instead of a nice extra after the account is running.

Hearing the metaphor that narrows the choice

The practical use starts with the simplest move: hearing your own images. Most sentences people say about themselves feel like neutral descriptions of fact while already carrying a whole picture.

“I can’t carry this load.” That is a metaphor of physical weight, something you either bear or do not, with no option of dividing it or changing its shape. “This situation is suffocating me.” That is a metaphor of a sealed space with no air. Each sentence has already decided which solutions look available. A load can be carried or dropped. A sealed space can be escaped from or died in. Nothing else appears on the menu.

Once you notice your own image you can test it deliberately. Is it actually true that there are only two options, carry or drop? Often the picture imposed a narrower choice than the situation contains, purely because it arrived first and was never revisited since.

Management teams do this constantly, and it is worth watching for in strategy sessions about Russia. “The market is closed to us” is a picture of a door, and a door suggests waiting for it to open. “We have lost ground there” is a picture of territory, and territory suggests retaking it. Both may describe the same set of facts about regulation, payment routes and competitors, and each one hides a different set of available moves. The work of a marketing strategy is partly the work of putting the current picture on the table where people can look at it, because a picture nobody has named is running the discussion from underneath.

The same applies in conversation with others. When a colleague, a partner or a customer describes a difficulty through an image, the useful response is to name the image out loud rather than silently agreeing with it or immediately correcting it. “It sounds as though something is pressing down on you.” Often that naming alone lets the person see the picture from outside and move it slightly. Not because the image was wrong, but because once spoken it stops being an invisible frame and becomes an object you can handle.

Why the “unscientific” label is a mistake

The label sticks to metaphorical thinking out of inertia, because it does not operate on provable facts the way logic does. But logic describes its own operations metaphorically. A conclusion follows. An argument does not hold up. A proof collapses. These are images of falling, of bearing weight, of walking a path. Strict reasoning rests on bodily pictures and simply does not admit it out loud.

Metaphor is not competing with precise thinking for the title of more reliable. It is the layer on which precise thinking becomes possible at all, because before you can prove something you first have to see it, and the psyche always sees through an image, even when it later forgets that it did.

For a company selling into a market it did not grow up in, the practical version is short. Collect the images your Russian audience already uses, in their words. Check which picture your own copy is carrying after translation. Name the picture your strategy meetings are standing inside. The arguments come after that, and they land or fail depending on whether the picture underneath them was ever examined.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: «Ненаучное» мышление, без которого не работает ни одна наука