hello everybody is dayna morales with the happiness buckets productivity tool box and today's training tip is going to be about mind mapping mind mapping is really a graphical way to represent your ideas and your concepts on paper so or on the computer whichever medium you want to use but ultimately it's just another way to brainstorm and to get the ideas out of your head and onto paper I really recommend that people specifically small business owners or anyone who's trying to produce a product or look at a process or implement a new implement a new product that you go through this process this is something that is really heavily used in project management and it's not necessarily mind mapping in general but just the brainstorming process and really breaking down the project into workable tasks so that's what I want to kind of talk to you about today and walk you through the tech this specific technique of mind mapping to help get you to those granular tasks that you can focus on so the ultimately the reason why I love this this method or this process is because it allows you to get the ideas and the thoughts out of your head and on paper which then allows you to see where you're missing some key components or where you need to think more deeply about something so for example I'd like to use the example of a wedding because everybody can kind of relate to that so if if I say come on let's sit down and plan a wedding for some that would be completely and totally overwhelming you wouldn't know where to start or you'd be afraid you're missing something or what should come first or any of that and so what I say is ok let's start planning the wedding but we're going to use mind mapping to do that so I can show you how this process works so what I have done here and what you see here on the screen is actually am I a free mind mapping tool now let me just say this my mapping you do not have to have any kind of tool you don't have to go by any software you don't have to do anything like that I just needed a way to graphically show you without showing you a piece of paper right and so I knew there were tools out here so i just googled free mind mapping tool and found this one and popped it up so we're going to give mine mop calm a shout out because that's who came up first and it looks like it's gonna work i have never used this software oh we're just gonna jump right in and and make sure that hopefully it'll work the way it's supposed to work for me today so in most my mapping tools or even if you're just joining us on your own you want to have just your nucleus your center um topic or whatever you are trying to do so in this particular example i use planning your wedding right and you can say you know Bob and James wedding whatever you want to say here but ultimately I'm just going to a wedding for now and so you want to branch off of that so you have your Center idea and then you're going to say ok now I need to branch off of that so what do you need when you have a wedding ok you need to have a location you need to have food you need to have and all of this is coming off of the main right you need to have people attendees ok what else you need to have a dress or well that's off of that let me click here you need to have a tire for the party ok that made me think about ok under people we can branch off of that and say ok we meet we have the the wedding party and then we also have the people who are attending right the actual attendees and then under attendees we have two different lists we have really four different lists if you know about weddings you have the bride's list and you have the groom's list one the bride's you have hers and her parents but I'm not even going to go there right now we've got the groom's list and then you have the parent the bride's parents list and some of you are laughing because you dealt with with this and so you know why i'm adding this here right so you have your attendees okay so your location you need your reception location and you need your ceremony location sometimes those are one in the same but sometimes they're not so there needs to be a thought process in that you need let's see what else we've got food so from food we know we need cake right and the cake you have your main cake and you also have a groom's cake right and then additional food so are you having a a some kind of you know a sit-down dinner or is this a branch I don't know how to replicate that but just say attending food choice just cuz I don't really know how you know is it a brunch or is it whatever you can say see beverages and maybe you don't know so here you can say beverages alcohol or non alcohol or maybe you have both but that's just something for you to think about so this is the way the Chi Mon meant no granted right now I'm struggling because I have never used this program and so I'm having to click and and do this a little slower one on camera but ultimately on a piece of paper you can see where this cold pretty quickly so you're just branching off a wedding what are the things you need for a wedding and you're putting those down so like even right now is just thinking okay you need your your table you're thinking about your table your decor I should call that the cool right and so we're thinking what kind of decor do we want you've got your tables oh that's another parent node will fill that one in later okay so you've got your table decorations you have your venue entry may not need that but you want to think about it you need your cake table before right gift table and we're going to say this is the guest guest tables let's differentiate this okay so then this branching off of here we know that you need a guest book right and there may be some other other things that you want to branch off of here you know any of these so this is pretty much how you go about doing a mind map and you're just building off of these so based on those first few things that I came up with then it started branching off and as I thought of other things you know as I start you know reception ceremony ok what does i have in our reception or what do you need at your reception what do i need to think about you know with the parties the attendees I need to think okay from the wedding party I need to think about wedding gifts so this is the way that you start building off of your mind map and how you can can pretty much think through your entire process your entire project implementation a new product launch anything that you have going on you can do a mind map and make sure that you have all of the granular pieces now this to me is the first step because I think an important second secondary step is first of all you need to walk away from this you need to to do your initial mind map take a break a day or two maybe a couple of hours or a day or two and then come back to it and read through it and see if anything else triggers you when you look at it so are you thinking about anything else that's may be needed so the first thing you know while I was sitting here talking to you I was thinking okay we have our attendees we have all of this but ultimately somewhere in here we're going to need to get invitations so we know our attendees list but we need invitations as well and like in this particular case I'm not really sure where it should fall should it fall under the core or the people that I'm going to put it here and then you know figure out you know all of the different things that you need when it comes to your invitation okay and so you just build off of it so you'll start thinking more and more so that's kind of second layer so the first layer is you are just going to do a brain dump and get it all out you're going to walk away come back to your second layer which is to just bring you know read what you have and see if anything else comes up just in your own mind of you know you thought about it some more you looked at something and realize oh yeah what about this the third layer and this is a really important layer in my opinion is that you need to get someone out someone else to look at it so specifically in this case maybe you get your parents or you know your mother or your groom or someone else to really think about it who wasn't involved in the initial process right get someone else to look at it and see if they see any holes this is one of the things that I do with my clients is that on that third layer right they've kind of gone through the initial process and then they provide it to me so I say go ahead you know do your mind map let's brainstorm get it on paper and then we're going to come together and I'm going to look at your mind map and see where I see hold and what it is if you're trying to do and and that helps them build out the process and determine you know what all they need to take care of to make this successful this also helps you to find your overall timeline because if you see you have all of this you need to start thinking through okay so how can I knock these out I need to get answers to these so then I can say okay how many people are we really going to have because all the locations require us to know kind of a general count you know when you're looking at them so if you think you're going to have anywhere from a hundred different set of locations than if you give you a perfect example when I my husband and I were getting married we have set a you know we said we're going to have a hundred and fifty people we're we don't think it means you didn't want a really large wedding well hello lesson learn which is why I added this bride's parents and groom's parents because my parents came up well my parents ie my mother came up with this whole long list of people I didn't even know that she wanted to invite to the wedding and so our wedding balloons from a hundred and chain the number or the type of location that I can have my event at right and so luckily for me it did you know we had kind of planned for we kind of knew those numbers before going in and finalizing a location but that's important for you to know especially if you have your eyes set on a specific location for your event or whatever it is that you're doing let's say you're doing a live event and you have it at a little quaint place that only can hold have to make that kind of a well known fact in your in your public publications that's not the work for I want to use your advertisements that you only have waiting list if you choose to have one or you say there's not going to be any walk up sells or you know whatever your answer to that is you know that you only decide instead of having one event maybe you have three different events at different time slots to allow for more people so those are things that you need to think through ahead of time so hopefully you find this helpful and you can now sit down and do your your mind map so one thing that I am going to do for our facebook group members is if you create your mind map and and post it in the group i will add you know first of all I think it's just beneficial for you to add it to the group so that others can provide their feedback to you because I'm not just the wrong you know I don't not the only one who can provide feedback I think that you you should do that and get feedback from your peers right but I will commit to responding to those who post in the facebook group it's a week after I post this in the group I will respond to anyone posts a mind map there and I will respond to those and let you know where I see holes okay so hopefully you found this helpful and until the next time I'll talk to you later bye