Today I am training a group of people in mind mapping, smart reading (I prefer this over speed reading) and memory training. Since I am writing this early in the morning… I will keep it short. Only a reminder of a small yet important piece of advice you received earlier.
During my training courses (and today) I advice people to create only a few maps each week. This could be one for (all) your projects and one to clear your mind or even capture your current state of mind (we’ll talk about this later). Don’t create many mindmaps each day.
People who start using mindmaps often create mindmaps for every tiny piece of information. I once even saw a person mindmap my name and mobile telephone number!!! – Really.
My main reasons for warning you about creating too many mindmaps are:
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There are a lot of people who stop using mindmaps, conceptmaps and visual maps in general because they get stressed when creating the maps. This is of course very sad and should be prevented. After all… your brain enjoys mind mapping and you should continue using the brain friendly and practical technique.
Therefore I would like to confront you with 6 causes of stress people experience when mind mapping. Here we go:
- You are not yet confident in mind mapping and feel you are not using it correctly
- You are feeling overwhelmed by the information you receive and feel you miss something
- You can’t find the right images fast enough which makes you lose track of new information
- You are afraid you won’t be able to understand your map content next time
- You feel you lose track of all the content of the map because of the huge amount of data you added
- You (no matter what) use mind mapping or your mindmap tool, and have the feeling you are limited because of the tool
(how many of these are you familiar with?)
These are the most common causes of stress people experience when creating mindmaps. I have to tell you that I experienced all of them. Sometimes I have the same feelings again when I look at the maps people create.
As you can see, all these causes are starting with one word, which is YOU!
You are the cause of the stress. The mind mapping technique itself will do wonders for you… if you know how to use it. Since you are the cause, it is YOU who is the solution to reducing or removing stress.
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This morning I read a story about a former congressman. I would like to share what I learned and how you can apply that immediately in your own life. After all… isn’t life all about experiences and sharing them? Here’s the story.
While in office, the congressman received hundreds of letters and thousands said they were his friend. You could say he was really popular.
Then he lost his seventh campaign. Instantly he noticed that he did not receive that many letters. People did not want to be near him. He said he could count his true friends on both his hands…
The lesson he learned what that you could better have a few real friends than many friends who only claimed to be your friend. In other words:
You should prefer QUALITY over QUANTIFY.
This made me think about my mindmaps.
There is one thing I always tell people who start mind mapping. One thing they should stick to for at least a few weeks. This is it:
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Visualmaps are really good tools when you need to get a grip on your information. Especially nowadays, when we receive so much information and have more to do than ever.
In times of prosperity, there is not really a need to manage your information effectively. Right now, we are in a time where many people have to be more effective just in order to keep their jobs!
A visualmap, mindmap, flowchart, summap or concept map can really help you in getting more overview and order in your information. To people only making nice stand-alone mindmaps, this may be strange or even hard to understand.
We will focus right now on mindmaps. Let’s have a look at the way most people use them.
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