How Metaphors Can Quietly Exclude Your Audience

Here I sit, listening to another leader use sports metaphors as if every person in the room eats, sleeps, and breathes sports.

Sports metaphors are the cargo shorts of business communication, incredibly comfortable for the person wearing them. Not necessarily the jam of everyone else in the room.

When your go-to leadership language sounds like this:

• "Hail Mary"

• "We need someone to quarterback this project"

• "We can't afford to fumble the ball now"

• "This move is a slam dunk"

• "That's par for the course"

• "The ball is in their court"

• "In pole position"

• "A safe pair of hands"

…you've already lost a third of the room.

And it gets worse when a leader opens with a reference to "the big game last weekend" — speaking as if everyone shares his season tickets and his Sunday afternoon. They don't.

One third of the audience can relate, they love the sport, watched the game, and feel completely seen. One third is nodding along and pretending, because they understand that connecting with this leader requires fluency in his language. And one third (sometimes more) is quietly realizing they are outsiders in a room where they work every day.

This isn't purely a gender issue, though men do use sports metaphors more than women. And yes, 51% of women report loving sports. But there's a significant difference between understanding a metaphor and feeling like it belongs to your world. Many people have learned sports language to survive in business. It is not their native tongue.

Metaphors are shorthand.

When someone says "this contract should be a slam dunk," the assumption is that everyone in the room follows basketball, gets the reference, and knows how to translate it. What they actually mean is: "There are no obstacles in sight, this should be easy to close." Just say that.

I was at a large event where the two MCs ran a sports metaphor riff throughout the entire evening. It was clever. It was well-executed. And I kept wondering how many people in that audience spent the night feeling like they didn’t quite belong.

Here's my advice: listen to yourself talk.

Notice where you reach for metaphors and ask whether they're ones your whole audience can access, or whether they're specific to a world not everyone lives in. This includes all metaphors. Not just sports related.

I was recently leading a training with participants from over a dozen countries: Switzerland, Russia, Germany, South Africa, Spain, and more. I caught myself repeatedly leaning on a metaphor that most Americans would recognize instantly. I stopped, explained it, apologized for the cultural shorthand, and moved on. It took thirty seconds. It was worth it.

If you're still tossing out sports metaphors like you're parked at a bar surrounded by big screens and a $50 fantasy pool buy-in, it's time to pay attention. Metaphors can be powerful teaching tools until they're so genre-specific that they signal to 75% of your audience that you're not really talking to them. That's a steep price for a football reference.

I encourage you to listen to yourself. Notice what metaphors you naturally lean on, not just sports metaphors. Do a little digging. Find out the origin. What are the roots of the metaphor? And discern, does this metaphor translate well across all cultures or is it limited to my own unique interests and background?

And then consider, Is there an alternative that is more inclusive?

What metaphors do you lean on? Have you considered the impact?

I'd love to hear from you.