The power of the images

Mindmapping success to my opinion resides on the seductive attraction that images provoke in our brains. To illustrate this I will make some examples showing up.
How do you explain how a bison is? You can start talking it is a four-legged animal, brown, etc I estimate 10 minutes to get your mate knowing what you are talking about (obviously if you don´t say the word "bison"), I presume there will be lots of TV contests around that. If you show her an image of a vison, she will understand immediatly, so you save 10 minutes less some seconds.
OK, let´s get back thousands of years ago in a cavern located in the north of Spain (Altamira), the same episode with paintings to explain other mates how a bison was (the photo).
So we haven´t evolved so much, in that sense!!! --)))
Next example. During many years the radio was the preferable way of communication in the world, till TV showed up and the radio reduced drastically its influence. The main advantage was the image vs the oral communication. More easy to understand, more easy to interpret, more easy to remember.
Third example. The communication problem, when something is explained to you, just a little percentage of the original message can be understood by you (cause of the channel, of the talker interpretation and also the listener interpretation,...). This communication losses are much more lower with an image, cause you get directly the original message.
Fourth one, how many memories from you are not tied up to images? Our memory is based on images received from our visual sense.

So far, so good!

36th Birthday map

Mindmapping for clearifying ideas

Last week, as every month, I had a meeting with my CEO to talk a little bit about the results, evolution, budget to-day fulfillment, strategies, actions plans, investments and so on.
I am also located in a part of Spain, where we of course are suffering part of the global economic crisis, specially in its industrial part (due to the lack of financement and also to the bad sales in constructution and automotive environment). I was preparing the night before, what to talk about the different issues, in order to have all of them clearly defined in my mind and with all the differente links connected and that was when this map showed up. I was thinkg and suddently it came up to me.
The differente colors and images helped me to have it on my mind when I was on that "hard" meeting.
I have taken some "licenses" in this particular case, cause I am talking about current issues, I have deleted some companies names, investments names and so on, cause I think the important it is to show how mindmapping can help you to put your ideas in order oriented to a concrete goal and that was the case.
Let´s wait mindmapping can help me improving the results.

Interview at Usine Nouvelle

To those of you familiar with French language, there is an interview in Usine Nouvele where some of the intervinients were Philippe Boukobza and me.
In my personal case, I talked a little bit about how putting both brain hemispheres on something, can take you to get new ideas, points of views and so on, which otherwise could be impossible.
The French magazine has made an extrordinary report on mindmapping from different approaches.

Mindmapping reading books - colorful version

That´s another example about taking notes when reading books.
That thing helps me to:
1.- Keep focused on the topic.
2.- Connect ideas with previous knowledges (making links)
3.- Store the information deeper in my mind.
An advice, don´t ever lend me a book! Otherwise I will bring you back colorful mindmapped.

Mindmapping reading books

One of the most important mindmapping features is the ability to link different concepts. I mostly use it whenever I am reading a book, linking the new concepts I got with the previous concepts I had.
This was the case when reading the Jean-Luc Deladriere and his friend´s book (extraordinary to my opinion, I do recommend).

Particular time management

One of my main problems, in my professional life, is the amount of issues I must deal with or I must be involved in. Too many in too little time.
In such a environment you need either getting a suitable and comfortable method to take the most of your time or be prepared for your crash.
Of course, I use mindmapping but I also use continously different pieces of paper with different maps to optimize time.
Being able to take to the higher levels the optimization your time is the key to transform yourself in to high performance (recession-proof) worker, let´s deserve that!!