Mind Mapping
What is Mind Mapping?
Mind mapping is a visual brainstorming technique that organizes information hierarchically using a central idea and branching connections. By linking related concepts with keywords, colors, and images, mind maps enhance creativity, memory retention, and problem-solving, making them useful for learning, project planning, and decision-making.
The Basic Idea
You’ve decided it’s time for a career change—you’re feeling stuck in your current role and want to explore other opportunities. There are a lot of variables to consider as you plan your next move: what skills you have, what industries you are interested in, what benefits are important to you, the job market, and so on. Suddenly, you feel very overwhelmed. There’s far too much to consider to have a clear idea of your next steps!
This is where a mind map can come in handy. Mind mapping is a tool to help capture and organize all the thoughts circling in your head by displaying them in an easily digestible visual format. Mind maps help you to break down larger themes into smaller components to enhance understanding. It’s helpful to visualize a mind map as a tree—the main idea is the root, with branches connecting to the central theme and twigs sprouting from the branches.1
For this problem, you would place “Career Change” as the central idea. Then, you add the branches “Skills,” “Industry,” “Benefits,” and “Job Market” connecting to your central idea. From each of these branches, you connect “twigs." For example, you may write “Communication” and “Data Analysis” connecting to “Skills” or “Personal Time Off” and “100-120k Salary” connecting to “Benefits.”
The mind mapping exercise has helped you visualize what is most important to you and connect it to employer needs and hiring trends. You now have a better idea of what roles you are interested in and what to look out for in job descriptions. What once seemed daunting is now a clearer image!
Mind mapping is a technique based on memory and creativity and comprehension and understanding, so when the student or child uses the mind map, they are using their brain in the way their brain was designed to be used, and so the mind helps them in all learning and cognitive skills. It simply helps them in what the brain does naturally.
— Tony Buzan, British psychologist who coined the term “mind map”2
About the Author
Emilie Rose Jones
Emilie currently works in Marketing & Communications for a non-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. She completed her Masters of English Literature at UBC in 2021, where she focused on Indigenous and Canadian Literature. Emilie has a passion for writing and behavioural psychology and is always looking for opportunities to make knowledge more accessible.
