Eric Blue's Blog: Use Mind Maps to Achieve Your Goals

Why is it that the beginning of the year always feels electrical with the excitement of *this year* being the one where you achieve all of your most important goals? Like most people, starting on New Year's, I spend time thinking about my goals, write many of them down, and start taking action. While I am happy with the progress I've made in the past, I've had the feeling that many of my goals seem to lose momentum after a few months. Starting a couple months ago I began researching how I could effectively be reminded about my goals on a daily basis, but not be overwhelmed by tons of information or underwhelmed by boring goals written on a piece of paper.

My research has paid off. I've leveraged my interest in information visualization, organization, and mind maps to create a unique approach to goal setting, and I want to share this technique with you. The entire process of getting your goals into the mind map takes 4 steps:

Overview
Step 1 - Find Your Purpose and Passion
Step 2 - Create Your Vision
Step 3 - Download the Mind Map Template and Install Mind Mapping Software
Step 4 - Write Down Your Goals

Overview

The mind map template I've created serves two purposes:

1. Give a quick overview - All of your goals can be easily printed and viewed on a single 8 1/2 X 11 piece of paper. Goals are organized by a particular area of your life (Physical, Financial, Relationship) and allows you to be reminded to keep a healthy balance. And, all goals have visual markers to show their priority in relationship to each other.

2. Save detailed information - Since the mind map will also be saved on your computer, you can add much greater detail than the printed version. This detail includes specific information for how you will achieve your goal (who, what, when, where, and why). And, also allows you to write down your longer-term goals, and even keep a personal journal.

The Internet and Blogosphere is literally filled with thousands of e-books, articles, blogs, and websites with tons of information on how to set goals. I'm not going to try to reinvent the wheel for this article, so I'm just going to give some pointers to some of the more useful resources I've found. OK, so let's get started.

Step 1 - Find Your Purpose and Passion

Many people (my past self included) usually start setting their goals, and don't spend a lot of time figuring out who they are, and if these are the things they really want. It's like the analogy of making progress climbing the ladder, but only finding out that your ladder was up against the wrong wall the whole time. The point of finding your purpose is to locate the one thing that your absolutely passionate about in life, and then realign all of your activities and goals to that purpose. Here are some great links:

Steve Pavlina - How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes

Curt Rosengren (Passion Catalyst) - The Occupational Adventure Guide

Personal Development Ideas blog - Discover Your True Self

Step 2 - Create Your Vision

Once you've uncovered your true purpose and passion, you should be feeling a lot clearer about the direction you want to take. Let's take it one step further and create your vision. You're vision is the long-term plan for what you *really* want in your life. Visualization is key, and there are some fantastic techniques you can use.

- Visualization

Instigator Blog - Achieve Your Goals With 3 Types of Visualization

- Written Vision Statements

Radical Mutual-Improvement - Write your ideal scene

- Vision Collages (Treasure Map)

Curt Rosengren (Passion Catalyst) - Treasure map

- Video Vision Statements

I've started blogging about this recently. Malcolm Cohan has created a fabulous way to make your own video vision statement. I'd highly recommend this!

Malcolm Cohan's Website
Eric Blue - Vision Statement: The Power of Goal Visualization
Eric Blue - My Personal Vision Statement

Step 3 - Download the Mind Map Template and Install Mind Mapping Software

I used MindManager to create the mind map template, however I can recommend some other (and free) mind map applications.

Mindjet MindManager 6 (Free 5-day Trial/Commercial)

FreeMind (Free/Open Source)

ConceptDraw MindMap (Free 30-day Trial/Commercial)

IMindMap (Free 30-day Trial/Commercial)

Now you're ready to download the goal mind map template:

Online Preview

Online Preview Using MindMap Viewer (flash)

Downloads
[Right-click and select Save Link As]

Goals Mind Map Template (.mmap)
(63KB, Mindjet MindManager format)

FreeMind (.mm)
(24KB, MM format)

Goals Mind Map Template (.xml)
(246KB, XML format - can be imported to other programs)

Screenshots

Step 4 - Write Down Your Goals

OK, this is it, the moment you've been waiting for! Fire up your mind mapping software, and load the template you just downloaded. To make your goal mind map most effective, I'd recommend setting a few guidelines when settings goals:

1. Balance in your life is important. I've created 8 major areas for categorizing your goals, ordered from right-left: (1) Physical/Health, (2) Career, (3) Contribution, (4) Finances, (5) Rest/Play/Hobbies, (6) Relationships, (7) Mental/Emotional, (8) Spiritual. These are not set in stone, so feel free to rename or modify these categories.

2. Try not to have more than 5 goals per each area.

3. S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Based) guidelines should be followed
*Who: Who is involved?
*What: What do I want to accomplish?
*When: Establish a time frame.
*Where: Identify a location.
*Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.

4. Assign each goal a priority within each respective area.

1 = Most Important: Critical!
2 = Desired
3 = Nice to Have

5. Focus is on short-term goals, but long-term goals are listed to keep perspective. Write down 3 year, 5 year, and lifetime goals.

6. Emphasize between 1-3 Top goals for the year. These take precedence over all others.

Posted by EricB at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (1)

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Up until now, I've used mind maps for a variety of things: brainstorming, study aid, goal setting, note taking, and product research. Recently, I've been exploring the idea of using mind maps to help consolidate all of my information relate... [Read More]

Comments

Have you looked at 3D mindmapping? Topicscape does that. It's best for organizing information for projects, or reference sources because each node can have many files linked to it (none of this spider's web of links to multi-part web articles cluttering up the mindmap).

Posted by: Argey | March 5, 2007 01:59 AM

I've updated the post to include some minor formatting changes. And, made it a bit easier to find and download the template.

Posted by: Eric Blue | March 6, 2007 07:53 PM

Eric,
Good article utilizing goal setting with mind mapping. I have long wrote and talked about goal setting, and now have recently started working with mind maps. This makes another great resource.
Thanks.

Posted by: Larry Hendrick | March 8, 2007 04:35 AM

Hi Eric,

Using a mindmap to manage your goals is a great idea. I downloaded the template to try it out. Thank you!

Posted by: Rick Cockrum | March 10, 2007 09:11 PM

Thanks Rick!

Posted by: Eric Blue | March 11, 2007 07:04 PM

Eric

I am just a new user of Mindmanager. I like your goals map and tried to dwnload both. It won't download. All I get is web page full of this PK��-e6;6�g��`��,��bin/6D942D2E-A71A-430C-A06B-FC20A3DD8919.binŔKHTQ��j:�c�ڸ�""�܄��]�6�z��hQ�MO�2�u|M>��(dI�hH1�\��Ej𿦷�\�L��EЅ�qϹ�|��!��n8�]3��q�i�G�iv��7ʹSgN��8��`;8'�E�'��+�'E��".�l�&Ίqo��
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Any tricks or suggestions to get the download.

Thanks

Posted by: Terry Slinde | March 14, 2007 07:47 AM

Hi Terry,

You should be able to right-click on the link, and then select 'Save Link As'. You'll then be prompted to enter a filename and location to download.

Posted by: Eric Blue | March 14, 2007 08:03 AM

For future reference, I fixed the .mmap download so you can just click on the link to save. No need to right-click and 'Save As'.

Posted by: Eric Blue | March 14, 2007 03:20 PM

For goal setting and goal tracking applications, GoalEnforcer beats any other mind mapping software out there. Check it out
http://www.goalenforcer.com

Posted by: Adam | June 15, 2007 01:13 AM

This is a great article thank you for making it avaiable.

I'm having trouble using the template...how can I import the template into freemind?

Thanks

Posted by: clyde | June 9, 2008 11:44 AM

Clyde,

Thanks for your comment. I actually converted this map to FreeMind using my MindMap Viewer. You can view the map online here:

http://eric-blue.com/projects/mindmapviewer/display.cgi?mmap_url=http%3A%2F%2Feric-blue%2Ecom%2Fblog%2Fdownload%2FGoals+Mind+Map+Template%2Emmap&format=flash

Or, download the FreeMind file here:
http://eric-blue.com/projects/mindmapviewer/maps/efccb77c3bfe2faf14551aa65041c24f-1173073256.mm

Posted by: Eric Blue | June 10, 2008 08:09 PM