Bananaman88

When you say shorter, are you wanting the overall height of the plant to stay shorter or are you wanting the bottom-most leaves to be closer to the base of the plant? Either way, it's sort of a losing battle. If you cut it back, yes, the bottom leaves will then, temporarily, be closer to the base but the bottom leaves eventually yellow and die. It's just the natural process. Just cutting the plant back will only keep it shorter for so long. It's going to grow. Bananas naturally lose their lower leaves and keep putting out new ones, getting taller as they go with more clear trunk all the time.

One thing you could try since you work at a nursery, is to see if they have any type of growth regulator, such as B-9 or Attrimec. These are used in the horticultural industry to reduce the space between a plants internodes by destroying apical dominance (meaning most of the energy goes into the tip of the main stem, say like in a pin oak or a cypress where you have one main leader), effectively keeping the plants more compact. I don't know if anyone has ever experimented with this on banana plants so you may be risking your plant but it's really all I can think of if you are determined to keep your plant short.