My Goal Setting Tool 23 Years On
I discovered Tony Buzan’s ‘Use Your Head’ book
1 - Use What Works:
Students doing their best to follow a demanding examination curriculum were very familiar with taking pages and pages of notes. After all, teachers like me exhorted the value of note taking as a learning tool in its own right. So you can imagine that my senior classes were at first mildly amused and then appalled by their teachers volte face! For the beginners we were back then, mind mapping seemed to work primarily when combined with traditional note taking. Attempts to rock the boat were resisted!
Goal Setting Lesson:
Try out mind mapping on selected subject areas and use more detailed note taking as a supplement.
2- Feeding The Habit:
While taking mountains of notes certainly requires time and effort, it also cultivates the lazy mental habit that is mindlessly copying chunks of information from a textbook or blackboard word-for-word. Alas, my classes loved to be drip fed notes.
Goal Setting Lesson:
Take your favorite personal development book and read one goal setting chapter. Then close the book and summarize the title of that chapter as one word in the middle of a piece of paper. Then let your imagination go to work and recall at least five keyword concepts from the chapter and add them as single word branches to your map.
3 - Patience:
Novice mind mappers often get annoyed with their limited ability to remember keywords from the pages they have just read. The main thing here really is having the ‘patience’ to ride out the mistakes made when learning and applying yourself to mind mapping.
Goal Setting Lesson:
Begin your mind mapping journey with books you really enjoy. With regular practice, more and more ideas will bubble up from your memory banks as you concentrate on the main keyword. Remember to add them as single keywords to the map using a pencil, not a pen! For my science classes this was never easy because many teachers and role models had drilled into them throughout their school years the ‘fact’ that pages and pages of notes were absolutely a requirement to pass exams.
4- One Word:
This is probably the most difficult task of all! It is much easier to write volumes than fine tune the meaning into just one word. Of course there are issues when applying the keyword method to academic areas such as mathematical equations or science formula. Again, remember the advice in section a) about using what works.
Goal Setting Lesson:
Pick out the optimal summary keyword and start with that, leaving the nested sub-branches and supporting linear notes to take care of the details as and when they come to you.
5 - Review:
Good old-fashioned homework! Not quite. Most goal setting mind maps are invariably a work in progress and will require periodic review to remain relevant. 25 years ago this was somewhat of a chore to do using pencil and paper -my students sure didn’t like it! Nowadays there are great mind mapping software packages which can be used as a very effective goal setting tool. I use ‘MindGenius Business’ from the Scottish company, Gael software.
Goal Setting Lesson:
Review the features of commercial and freeware software packages with respect to using them as a goal setting tool. A lot of software packages have free “try before you buy” capability. Take advantage of that.
The Goal Setting Article Directory is now open at:
http://www.goalcreationmaps.com/art
Mark McClure is a certified career coach and business owner.
Tags: goal setting, Goals, mind maps, teaching