Episode 11: Mind Mapping: Why Every Business Owner Needs To Try This Visual Brain Dump Technique
As small business owners, we are carrying a huge mental load, juggling everything from campaign ideas through to staff management challenges. In today's tip episode, Fiona share one of her favourite tools for getting ideas and thoughts about business elements out of your head and onto a mind map. What is mind mapping? Why should we use it as small business owners? Fiona discusses the answers to these questions and more in today's episode. Listen and learn now.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction [0:55]
Mindmapping [2:05]
History | Where it came from [2:46]
Why we want to use it as small business owners [3:30]
Reasons why it’s useful [4:41]
How do you work with it? [6:44]
How to get started [7:42]
MindMeister (Recommendation) [9:26]
Resources mentioned in this episode:
MindMeister [5:30]
Transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 11.
I am pumped, as always, to be here today, and I'm really excited that I'm going to be bringing to your attention as a small business owner, another great, quick, easy to implement tip tool or tactic, because today you are listening to a tip episode.
So today's episode is all about a tool. And I guess it could even be a tip or a tactic, really, depending on how you use it. But this is a tool. It's something I use a lot and it's one that I'm constantly discussing and recommending and working on with clients. And I'm not sure what you're like, but I am quite a visual person. I'm constantly drawing. I'm pretty old school. I often use pen and paper. Maybe one day I'll get a Wacom tablet. But for now, it's mainly pen and paper.
While on coaching calls, I sketch up frameworks or website wire frames or revenue stream maps, and I use this tool consistently to do this. So what is this tool? Let's find out.
So today's tool is mind mapping. So what is this? Or you might have heard of it. If you haven't, let me explain. In its simplest form, it's basically a diagram that helps you visually organise and structure information. Now, I like to think of it as a bit of a visual brain dump. But even sort of saying that those words brain dump kind of dilutes how important and useful this tool can actually be, especially as a small business owner. So mind mapping can be super useful in just pretty much every situation in business, but really useful. Everything from like figuring out your content strategy through to mapping out a photo shoot or your revenue streams or even your organisational staff chat with people that already work for the business. And then people who you would love to work for your business in the future.
So first, let's go back to where this actually came from. Like, I had to actually look this up because I've always used mind maps. Every time I've worked, I've used mind maps. And I wasn't necessarily ever taught in any kind of real way about why they exist or where they come from. So I did, you know, what we all naturally do a good Google search and found out that mind maps were popularised by a British popular psychology author and TV personality, Tony Buzan, in the 1970s. But actually that the art of mind mapping goes back centuries and way back with graphical records like modern mind mapping being seen in the third century. So they've been around for a long time.
But let's think about why we want to use mind mapping as small business owners. So firstly, take a minute and consider the last campaign or collection or piece of content or something new that you were trying. In your business and really ever think about when you tried to do that. The initial like really at the very early stage of the stages of kind of having that idea. We often go to write or type down our ideas. And when we go to do that, it's as if your brain is working so fast and your fingers can't keep up. I don't know if you've had that experience, but I definitely had it. When I've got all these ideas and concepts and things running around in my head and I'm trying to get it down on paper, and if I'm trying to write in full sentence structure, it can seem to take a long time to get out what is in my mind.
So mind mapping allows us to literally, you know, draw circles or diagrams of ideas and relating concepts and link things with a line or a squiggly circle or use different colours or fonts or other kind of coding systems to get the information out of our mind and onto paper or onto a digital sheet faster. So one of the reasons that we use mind mapping or one of the reasons that it's thought that it's so useful for people in business is the productivity or the kind of timesaving aspect of it. It's often thought to be one major drawcard. And second reason is memory, so mind maps don't have to be logical, or at least not initially in the same way that, say, putting together sentence structure is. That has to be legible and readable and you have to understand. What do I mean by this sentence? Whereas mine maps don't necessarily have that same level of I guess you could call it pressure. We can use symbols in mind maps instead of long drawn out text, heavy paragraphs. And mind maps are fantastic for providing mental triggers, such as using a particular image or colour as a code for something else.
Now, one of my all time favourite platforms, chroot for creating mind maps visually is MindMeister, and I'll talk about that in a second. But on MindMeister, they have lots of information about why mind maps are useful. And one of the things that they claim is that mind maps help our brain process and memorise large amounts of information. And they have studies on there that found that it can improve our memory by 10 to 15 percent or even improve our memory by up to 32 percent. So, again, all of us learn in different ways. But you might be someone like me who, when I see something, it often stays longer than necessarily if I'm reading something. I don't know if that makes sense. Like, I will often remember diagrams from a book that I've read rather than the exact text if that makes sense.
So another reason that it's thought that people love to use mind mapping is that it promotes creativity. And it does that because you can scribble or sketch or create characters or draw little icons all all of these little kind of cool visual things that you can do all the while creating a visual storytelling of a concept or idea or a script or a book or whatever it is that you're using the mind map for.
So how do you actually work with mind mapping as a tool for small business? Now, there are many, many, many ways that you can do this. And if you've never done it before, challenge yourself to think of something that you're working on right now in your business and how you could create a mind map for it. So this might be a rebrand. It could be how you're going to get your team back to working from home. This has recently happened to me in Melbourne. I'm in Melbourne and we are on a second round of lockdown. A shout out to my fellow Melbourne business owners who are listening to this whilst in lockdown again. So you could be thinking of, you know, how am I going to get my team back working from home when we've all just come back into the office? It could be the opposite. It could be. How are you going to slowly reopen your business if you're lucky enough to be in a place that is not on lockdown or any other number of things? But think about, you know, what is it that you're working on and how you could create a mind map.
So what you want to do is really start with the central idea in the middle of a page. And you can do this on blank piece of paper or you can do it online on a Google doc or any other kind of platform where there's just a blank canvas and you put the central idea in the middle of the page and you can write this idea down and enclose it within a circle or a square or a bubble or triangle or whatever works for you. And then you want I just have a think about all the other things that come to mind and you might create a separate square or circle or triangle for each of these and then you link them where relevant. For example, you might be working on launching a blog. And so you have a blog in the middle of your page in a circle, and then you might think about how you'll make that blog accessible. So you might have the word access written in a circle and you might put an icon or a little drawing of an ear. because you want to have an audio version of the blog.
For people who are vision impaired or for those who are time poor and want to listen instead of read, and then you might consider rich media. So like video content, images that you'll need for the blog. And so you might write the word images and put that in a circle and then any bullet points or ideas for that. And then you might be thinking about contributors. So again, you might write people and then you might even draw lines between some of the things that you've written. So, for instance, a line between images and people, because you actually want to have some of the contributors be amazing photographers. Then tell their story as well and so on. And so, like I said, there are so many ways to create a mind map. I tend to use pen and paper a lot or a whiteboard. I am a huge advocate for whiteboards. I have them all over my home office. But I also love that today, we have so many online platforms to do this.
So one of my favourites, and this is not an ad, I'm not sponsored by these guys is MindMeister. You can find the link for that in the show notes as usual. But I use this tool. It's an online tool with many of my coaching clients when they're mapping out their revenue streams and their profitability goals and other areas of kind of their money and their finance and stuff. And it's an online tool where you can begin your mind map. And then you can share it with others, such as your team members or business coach or whoever it is. And then I can add to these people's or I can edit things. And likewise, your team members can do that. So it becomes a much more collaborative thing.
And it's fantastic for things like site mapping for a new Web site, or even mapping out things like chapters for a book or a e-book or modules and lessons for an online course.
The thing about mind maps is they don't have to be perfect. It's not the same as, say, putting together some huge strategy document that's going to go to stakeholders. A mind map is kind of more fun, free flowing way to organise information. And it definitely can become a lot more structured and and perfect. And then may have to go do the rounds of stakeholders and such. But I find it a really enjoyable way to get information out of my brain and my mind and onto paper and definitely a way to show other people, particularly when I'm coaching and I've kind of got these concepts, I find a visual representation like a mind map really clear for both of us to look at.
So there you have it. A really quick information on a tool that is mind mapping. And if you want to dive deep into this, check out the show notes for this podcast. And you can do that over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/11 where you'll find the full transcript of this episode, plus a bunch of links to really relevant great articles on mind mapping, if that's something that you want to explore for yourself and for your team and for your small business.
If you enjoy this episode, I would be forever grateful if you could share it with your other small business friends and provide a review on iTunes. This just really helps other small business owners to find this episode and hopefully begin mind mapping themselves if they're not already doing it. Don't forget to subscribe, so you get all of these tip episodes, plus my longer coaching ones and of course, my in-depth interviews with amazing small business owners across the globe. There it is. Hope you enjoyed it. Have a great week. See you next time.
If you want to dive deep into this, check out the show notes for this podcast. And you can do that over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/11 where you'll find the full transcript of this episode.
If you enjoy this episode, I would be forever grateful if you could share it with your other small business friends and provide a review on iTunes.
Don't forget to subscribe, so you get all of these tip episodes, plus my longer coaching ones and of course, my in-depth interviews with amazing small business owners across the globe.
Further Articles on Mind Mapping
https://www.mindmeister.com/blog/why-mind-mapping
https://litemind.com/what-is-mind-mapping
https://mindmapsunleashed.com/the-mind-mapping-concept
https://orissadiary.com/the-benefits-of-mind-mapping-for-busy-professionals
