What on earth is Mind Mapping?
Look through a few holiday photos of a beautiful sun drenched island. Then read a few paragraphs describing a similar venue. Tomorrow morning which one will you remember? I bet it will be the one with the photographs. That's how our brain works best - with images not text. If you need to remember, or understand anything, making it into a visual image rather than a list, helps enormously. This is the principal behind Mind Mapping - presenting text visually with accompanying images. It's the images that stick in the mind. So you can use Mind Mapping to 'Bone Up' on anything you need to learn and commit to memory.
There are a number of ‘rules’ to make your learning experience easier – don’t use long winded sentences, just single words where possible – make the map radiate out, like the branches of a tree – make it colourful and very graphic. All these will make the complete map easy to visualise later.
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Mind Mapping in Business
Although conceived with remembering as it’s key function, Mind Mapping is extremely useful in the business environment. Thinking ‘radially’ is a logical way to explore an idea or project fully. Let’s give you some examples:
Brainstorming is probably something we are all familiar with - the listing of random thoughts and ideas on paper. The problem is that they tend to be disjointed, often repeated, and can be difficult to re-organise later. With Mind Mapping you start in the centre and work out, creating branches for each primary thought or idea and then producing sub-branches out from there. It looks a bit like the structure of tree branches, except that you have a full 360 degrees to work in. Grouping similar thoughts together helps give clarity and It's easy to go back to branch section later and add further thoughts.
Planning a presentation or talk is often people’s worst nightmare. They stare at a blank sheet of paper wondering how on earth than are going to bring together a professional performance. Using Mind Mapping you would start by creating branches out from the centre for each of the key points you want to get across in the presentation. Let your mind flow and jot down all the things you know about each key point. It’s a bit like word association, but with structure and purpose! If you ‘dry up’ on one move to the next and come back later. Typically after just a few minutes you will have more than enough material to build an interesting talk.
Mind Mapping methods
There is no reason why you shouldn’t do your Mind Mapping with pen and paper, that’s how it’s been done for years, but that has it’s difficulties. If you decide that one primary branch should really be a sub branch of something else it’s a bit of a task to move it all.
The advent of computer based Mind Mapping has given mappers the ability to ‘drag and drop’ branches, restructuring a map at will. This has really opened up the Mind Map principle to business use. Many companies now use Mind Mapping software for their business plan, marketing, sales and project plans along with task lists.
We at AlloyCRM use the software version of Mind Mapping - Mind Manager - to plan and organise (our web site was first created on a mind map) and a good number of our customers have walls littered with them, covering everything from their business plan to their re-location in new premises. Download a fully functioning trial version and see how you useful you find it.
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