A good 2016 New Year resolution might be to pick up mind-mapping to organize and grow your knowledge better. This post shows how this can be done.I subscribed to Geoffrey James of Inc.com posts. We should do subscriptions to the thought leaders of the topics that are of interests or important to us. In his recent email, there is the topic, 33 Easy Ways to Avoid Stress in 2016 | Inc.com. Now, 33 ways are a lot to remember. What we usually do is to scan through the list and pick up some tips that may be of importance to us and forget the rest. That is throwing away a lot of knowledge.
As I am a trainer and consultant, I like to make sure that my knowledge on any topic to be comprehensively broad and also be of practical details and depth. So I must have a way to organize and grow the knowledge. The mind tools to use is a software mind-map. Hand drawn mind-map could be useful if knowledge do not change. Once a knowledge has reached a reasonable stable state, you can invest the time to redraw the mind-map in a beautiful and attractive form to share and teach other. However, for a dynamic and growing knowledge, we need a tools that is easy to re-organize and grow with the growth. Computer based software mind-map is such a tools. Try the free Freemind or Freeplane.
Back to the list of 33 ways. I need to way to re-organize them into small groups for easy of remembrance and recall. My spending a bit more time, we can find some similarity among the 33 ways to regroup them. It so happens that I have a Whole-Man model about human behavior, which essentially is body, mind, heart and relationship. So I will start with my Whole-Man model to regroup them. Here is the result of the 33 ways regrouped.
How do you find the re-org mind-map version? Does it help you to remember and relate better?
When I do a search on my computer to find related maps on stress, I discovered I have one done before already. So I just merge the two maps together with some rephrasing and grouping and this is the latest map that I got following the color and format of my earlier map on stress:
Hope you find the latest mind-map on "Handling Stress" a lot easier and richer than the linear list of 33 ways that we started form.
Hope you can adopt this mind-mapping way of building up your knowledge and that you can be assure to be wiser and wiser over time.
Lim Liat (c) 14 Jan 2016
