In my book The Secrets Of Business Mastery, I mentioned mindmapping as a very powerful way to help you brainstorm your vision for your business. Mindmapping is a powerful tool and it has value even beyond creating a vision for your business. I encourage you to use it in all aspects of your business – from creating a vision to developing strategy to solving problems to planning meetings. There are so many applications. Here are 8 tips to help you create powerful mindmaps:
1. Mindmaps value content over form.
Mindmaps are powerful tools because they strip away format and structure and allow us to simply get ideas down. (For this reason, mindmaps are powerful tools for brainstorming and problem solving.)
2. Mindmaps come before lists.
Some people look at mindmaps and only see messiness, preferring an orderly list of things. However, mindmaps are a useful first step prior to lists. Lists tend to put things in order while mindmaps get all of your thoughts down. So create mindmaps first and then create a list from that mindmap.
3. Turn off your inner critic.
Your inner critic tells you to stop doing something. But a mindmap, especially one that is derived from brainstorming, is no place for an inner critic. Just let the ideas flow and then apply some critique later.
4. Categories help but they’re not essential.
In the example I gave in my book, I mentioned that you start at the center, then create spokes with categories, then get more specific after that. But you don’t need categories first. If you just spoke out from the center all of your ideas, you can draw connections later to create categories.
5. Mindmaps capture ideas quickly.
Mindmaps are useful to use in meetings where everyone is shouting out ideas because you can jot down ideas and connect them to other ideas quickly and visually.
6. Mindmaps give a visual picture.
This is an overlooked but powerful benefit of mindmaps: You can visualize them very easily (comparted to a list), which means you are more likely to remember something if you mindmap it first.
7. Draw new connections.
Mindmaps help you to draw new connections. As you write down ideas, they may seem scattered but this aids in your ability to identify relationships and connections you may not have realized before. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of the situation you’re mindmapping as a result.
8. Mindmaps have so many applications.
You can use a mindmap to quickly outline your daily schedule before writing it in a more formal sequence; you can use a mindmap to outline a meeting before creating an agenda, you can use a mindmap to think about all the components of a problem before you create a solution, you can use a mindmap to take notes while on a phone call… there are so many powerful ways to use mindmaps!
For more information about mindmapping, check out this video I created for you
