Sachin Patel advises clinicians/communicators in functional medicine to use simple metaphors and analogies (e.g., trees, cars, gardening, parenting, food prep) to make complex ideas immediately relatable. He emphasizes tailoring metaphors to the client's familiar world (gender-neutral but culturally-aware examples), and illustrates the power of a gardening/cucumber metaphor to teach patience and increase patient buy-in.
Chapters
One of the most effective ways to get your message across to people that I found over the years is using simple metaphors and analogies. You know, Albert Einstein says the greatest sign that somebody understands the complexities of what they're talking about and have mastery on their topic is that they can explain it in a really simple way. What I found is that nature has created so many beautiful metaphors for us. We can use plants as an analogy. We can use trees as an analogy. There's so many things in the natural world that can be used to get our message across. One of the things that I also love using as analogies is a car analogy and thinking about the car itself, thinking about the environment that that car is being driven in, thinking about the driver themselves and how they're driving their car, and the awareness that they have of the rules of engagement. So there's a lot of metaphors that you can unpack there. What I invite you to do is actually take strongly into consideration the world that your client lives in. What are some things that are highly familiar to them. So without being stereotypical, men are probably going to really resonate with car analogies. They might also resonate with gardening analogies or home repair analogies, and the same could apply for women. However, women may also resonate with gardening analogies. Analogies related to raising children, analogies related to, you know, taking care of the home and the homestead, also analogies of food preparation and so on and so forth. And again, the goal here is not to paint any stereotypes, but just to be understanding of what is it that this person, male or female, is going to resonate with, and how do you explain it in their terms, Using words that are familiar with them, using metaphors and analogies that are familiar with them, that also paint the picture of what you're trying to get across. So find analogies that really quickly get people to understand and see things the way you do. I've got a whole video that I do on functional medicine analogies that I love using. So I won't unpack all of those here. But I love analogies related to trees. I love analogies related to automobiles and cars. I love analogies related to gardening. In fact, I just had a friend over the other day, and I was trying to teach him the value of patience. And doing all the right things still requires patience. And that in nature, nothing is rushed, yet everything is accomplished if we stay the course, if we stay on the path that we need to. And that clicked for him, and he grabbed a few cucumbers from my yard and has been munching on them and putting them into everything over the last few days. In fact, I just got a text with him. But more importantly than the cucumbers, the metaphor of the cucumbers allowed him to stay the course of what he's been doing. He knows it's working. He knows that it's moving him in the right direction. But now I use that analogy to demonstrate the power of patience for him and now he's got even more buy in. So what are some things that you can do to get your message across to people that lands for them, that makes them instantly click with what you're saying and then they continue to stay the course on their health journey? So use analogies, use metaphors. And that's going to make your job so much easier for people to see what you do and be so good that they can't unsee it. And they never look at the metaphor that you gave them. They never look at anything the same way ever again.
