Dream a little

This week, we finally got to dream a little.  We each did a visualization exercise to dump all of our ideas onto paper.

• What do I want to do with my business?
• What is the purpose of my business?
• What inspires me?
• What are some key objectives of the near future?

So we used a technique that many are familiar with called Mind Mapping.  I've had little interest in this in the past.  I've seen some mind mapping done within IT and it just looks like some crazy dump of words that mean nothing.

But I did a quick mind-map one day to figure out the main areas that I wanted to focus on for my career and realized that it was a good tool to jump dump everything that is on my mind.  It allowed me to see everything that was hidden up there and bring light to those things that I didn't realize I had been thinking about.

Former Google career coach and job strategist, Jenny Blake recommends creating a mind map, a visual diagram of your interests and goals. It's a brain storming activity that allows you to throw your thoughts about a subject onto paper. Here's a short video from her that I found useful to describe the activity.

So each of us did our mind map and we all agreed that not only was a good tool, but it would allow us to refer back to it in the future to make sure we don't forget things.

I've referenced Dreambook before and ironically, they use mind mapping to create goals for the year, 3-years, 10 years and life goals.  So it was funny that I had been thinking about it and it came up at the same time as I was working through my Dreambook.  Perfect timing.

So here's my MindMap. 

This was focused specifically on this program that I am working on creating.  The spokes lead to some main themes or areas that I believe I need to work on - Program deliverables, Business setup (including naming the business), Social Media, mini-courses and speaking.

Some of these are things that I need to do to set up the business and some are foundational things that I need to do to start stirring up interest. And there are a couple that I will put off for later. 

This allowed me easily take on my next task, which was to focus on a few areas for the pilot. 

I will hang this on my wall.

Read my previous post in the program pilot: The Power of the Kick Start