This paper examines the way Higher Education (HE) students use metaphors to make tangible the lived and living experience of learning. The article provides a contemporary development of the ethnographic paradigm by offering a new model termed "proximal ethnography" to capture the sense of inside-out-inside research, of being what one has studied. In this innovative model, the researcher shares the same experiences as the observed but does so outside their specific domain. Semi-structured interviews were held with eight trainee educational professionals at intervals during their two-year courses, and an online survey was sent to students on the same courses in regional Further Education colleges. Results show that students possessed a hierarchy of motivating drivers; some of these remained stable while others fluctuated. Acceptance of this instability helped them succeed on their course. Some students used metaphor to associate their trainee identities with previous successful professional characteristics to help them cope with the demands of HE study. If HE institutions can incorporate these findings into student induction and peer support programmes, there is the potential to normalise feelings of uncertainty, providing simple approaches to staying motivated and succeeding.