Using a Mind-Map to Dissect Your Goals
Ever since I’ve started my personal blog, The Skool of Life, I have always been an avid user of mind-maps. I love mind-maps because they give you an opportunity to for free form thinking. When it comes to goal setting, I highly recommend you consider the power of goal setting, autosuggestion, commitment and consistency. I also urge you to give in depth consideration to the question “How often do you decide not to brush your teeth?” These things will get you really geared up for rapid progress towards your goals. But, let’s talk about dissecting your goals.
No matter what your goal, one of the key components of goal accomplishment is ACTION. Often this is where were get caught up and end up giving up on our goals. By using a mind map to dissect your goal you’ll find that coming up with actions to make progress towards your goal will be much easier. Let’s take a look at this in 2 concrete examples.
3 Examples of Goals for which I used a Mind-map
Earn 5000 dollars per month in disposable income: One of the things that you’ll find by going through this exercise is that you will brain dump tons of ideas that you didn’t have before. For example, I recently started posting ads on craigslist for my services and have started to pick up freelance business.
Improved Confidence and Charisma in Social settings: While I’m not antisocial and don’t have any real issues talking to people, it’s definitely an area that I want to master to a point where I have natural charisma. As I dissected this goal more, it made me want to understand characteristics of charismatic people. I also discovered several worthwhile actions to take which included affirmations, visualization, and even listening to some new tape programs specifically focused on charisma.
Using a Mind-map to Find Your Dream Job: One of the mistakes I’ve seen people make in finding their dream job is that they just use a job title or keywords. But, wouldn’t it make more sense to make a mind-map of all the ideal characteristics of your dream job. When I did this, I got a whole new list of search results and options for positions that interested me.
Implementing this process into your goal setting efforts:
1. Write down your top 10 goals
2. Put each goal on a mind-map
3. Identify a series of actions for each goal
4. Find the easiest actions you can take immediately
5. Wash, Rinse Repeat
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and how you come up with the appropriate actions towards goal setting.
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About Srinivas: Srinivas Rao is a personal development blogger and avid surfer who writes at his two blogs The Skool of Life and Stoked for life. Follow him on twitter here. |
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Mindmapping is one of those processes that I have heard of, thought it was interesting but never got around to actually doing – which is sad because I definitely have a whiteboard that I do use frequently but it has a lot of static things on it.
I’m gearing up for a big move in the next 5 months and now would be the perfect time to do this – so thank you for giving me another virtual “push” to do it
@Jessi,
I’m glad to help in any way I can, except with the physical labor involved in your move
. I just moved and I think I’m done with moving for a while.
its funny I just read about not mind maps but something like it…and I just started applying it to my daily task and it really helps me keep track my progress and really guide me like a map does with directions its like a map for life.
@Wilson, good to see you here at Lifescape Artists. The mind map process is something I use in so many different areas. Right now I’m tasked with brainstorming ideas for my new job and I’m using a mindmap to do it.
Like the picture, I think my mind maps would start with “cake” in the middle. I love cake. I recently read a book titled “What color is your parachute.” It has an excellent mind map activity for finding a career that is a good fit for everything you like. I didn’t actually try it, but it looked really good.
Srini:
As usual, this is an excellent post, and I would also like to compliment you on your blog, the Skool of Life. You inspire me.
However, I beg to differ on one point: you already have natural charisma. You just need to look inward and let if flow, and it will pour forth with the power of a Niagara Falls.
And if you are looking to learn more about “charisma,” there is a lot of literature out there on leadership. For example, many times we have been told that “charismatic leaders” just seem to have an aura about them and they are able to mobilize crowds.
These days, MBA programs seem to be salivating over “leadership studies” because you also need “charisma” to run a multi-national corporation as a head honcho or CEO. However, charisma is not just limited to politics (Mahatma Gandhi) or running a business (Bill Gates). My grandmother had more charisma than I can even dream of, and she was unschooled and a stay-at-home parent.
My recommendations? Well, the usual suspects, really: Wayne Dyer, Napolean Hill, Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey. And be sure to read “Psychology Today.”
Goal setting is very important specially if you want to plan long term.*;,
goal setting is very important in life an also in business;.~