I am a great fan of Mind Mapping as a Memory and Study Tool but not much of a fan of Acronyms for Memory (acronyms only help you remember things you already know quite well – example ROYGBIV to remember the colours of the rainbow is not much good if you don’t know your colours in the first place. If you do know all the colours then the Acronym is quite useful to arrange the main colours in their correct sequence (Red, Orange, Yellow.Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet)However the acronym STINKS is of no use in remembering this list of Mind Mapping Benefits but it was good in grabbing your attention. If you think you hate Mind Mapping because it never seemed to work for you, you come here for mutual support. My message to you would be find a really good teacher who will guarantee you will get it or your money backORYou are a champion of Mind Mapping – you saw the headline and thought “what drivel is this guy promoting?”So anyway here is STINKSMind Mapping:
- Is great for SORTING the thoughts and Ideas you have in your Head. We often suffer from Mental Clutter. Mind Mapping is a great de-clutterer for your thinking. Mind Mapping is first and foremost a “Thought Organisation Tool”
- is a great tool for TEACHING. Teaching yourself to learn and using it as a guide to help you help others learn. Mind Mapping was originally devised by Tony Buzan as a tool for study and learning
- is exceedingly useful for INTEGRATING thoughts and Ideas. Helps you see the wood from the trees and in doing so helps to integrate important ideas together into a new ‘whole’
- means NO MORE LISTS. Well not quite. Lists are very useful if they are for temporary stuff – like doing a to-do list, stuff that you want for today but you won’t need it for tomorrow. The great thing about lists is they take no time to prepare. However for stuff that you need to remember for the longer term Lists are useless and they are lazy. It takes much much more time to learn and remember a list than it does a list that has been reformatted as a Mind Map. (But it takes longer to format a Mind Map than it does a list). So the golden rule lists for temporary stuff Mind Maps for remembering stuff
- helps you to uncover the KNOWLEDGE that you didn’t know you knew (the ‘trigger’ effect of Mind Maps can rekindle past memories)
- is very good for SPEAKERS. Good to plan a speech, rehearse a speech, and deliver a speech – it just saves so much time compared to any other technique (I did a presentation on this last year at the Annual Convention of the Professional Speakers Association that went down really well).
Oh and the ‘S’ can also stand for SEXY. Mind Maps are just so much sexier than lists or bullet points.So there you have it. Mind Mapping STINKS
