Improve Your Coaching Skills with Mind Mapping

You may be inundated with information, but the key to making decisions is organizing and understanding that information. The best coaches know how to absorb and arrange information to get results for their clients. One way to do this is through mind mapping, a note-taking skill that helps organize thoughts and ideas in the form of a diagram. By creating mind maps, you can visually map your knowledge and make connections between ideas.

To start a mind map, choose a main topic such as a school of thought, an internship, or a struggling client. From there, branch out and explore your thoughts, defining terms and exploring both application and understanding. Mind mapping improves the depth of your understanding by connecting new information with previously held ideas.

Once you have multiple mind maps, you can start to find similarities between maps, which will help you identify your beliefs and principles. You can also use mind mapping to build a model, a diagram or flowchart that represents how your coaching process works. Models guide you in what you’re trying to achieve and how you’ll know when you’ve obtained the goal.

One of the benefits of mind mapping is that it helps identify gaps in knowledge. By reviewing your mind maps, you can find where you have questions or where you couldn’t make connections. These gaps can then direct your future learning strategies.

Source: Mind Mapping: Information is Good, But Knowledge is Better