Michael Jackson and your ability to GROK
I first discovered the word ‘Grok’ in Joyce Wycoff’s book, Mindmapping about 15 years ago. I covered the word in my article ‘The Mind’s unknown potential’ based on a chapter in her book.
‘Grokking’ falls into the category of gestalt psychology, where humans are able to see things as a whole despite apparent contradictions and ambiguities. One’s understanding of the situation is so good that it becomes a part of us. Its pattern is understood completely as a gestalt.
Gestalt psychology also covers things like eemergence, reification, multistability and invariance.
From Wikipedia:
Emergence
Emergence is demonstrated by the perception of the Dog Picture, which depicts a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground in the shade of overhanging trees. The dog is not recognized by first identifying its parts (feet, ears, nose, tail, etc.), and then inferring the dog from those component parts. Instead, the dog is perceived as a whole, all at once. However, this is a description of what occurs in vision and not an explanation. Gestalt theory does not explain how the percept of a dog emerges.
Reification
Reification
Reification is the constructive or generative aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.
For instance, a triangle will be perceived in picture A, although no triangle has actually been drawn. In pictures B and D the eye will recognize disparate shapes as “belonging” to a single shape, in C a complete three-dimensional shape is seen, where in actuality no such thing is drawn.
Reification can be explained by progress in the study of illusory contours, which are treated by the visual system as “real” contours.
Multistability
Multistability (or multistable perception) is the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations. This is seen for example in the Necker cube, and in Rubin’s Figure / Vase illusion shown. Other examples include the ‘three-pronged widget’ and artist M. C. Escher’s artwork and the appearance of flashing marquee lights moving first one direction and then suddenly the other. Again, Gestalt does not explain how images appear multistable, only that they do.
Invariance
Invariance
Invariance is the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features. For example, the objects in A in the figure are all immediately recognized as the same basic shape, which are immediately distinguishable from the forms in B. They are even recognized despite perspective and elastic deformations as in C, and when depicted using different graphic elements as in D. Computational theories of vision, such as those by David Marr, have had more success in explaining how objects are classified.
Now what has this to do with Mind Mapping and Michael Jackson?
Mind Maps allow you to see the ‘whole picture’. If you memorise a Mind Map of a topic, you create the hooks for your brain to create memory associations. Your brain will automatically fill in the blanks and complete the picture, making it easier to recall detailed information, even if you only memorise the main branches.
When you think of Michael Jackson, what picture do you see in your Mind’s eye?
If you have a look at the following pictures, your brain will immediately know that it’s Michael Jackson, despite the radical changes. Your wonderful brain naturally builds the neural networks to associate the various pictures of him as being the same person.
The pattern is understood completely as a gestalt. i.e. you have Grokked it!
read more
Managing your career with Mind Maps
Mind Maps in the beginning
Tony Buzan, the inventor of Mind Maps, was doing research on the working of the brain when he invented Mind Maps. The result of his efforts, the Mind Map, enabled people to discover the wonders and unlimited potential of our wonderful brain. It also gave the ordinary person the ability to awaken the genius within.
The main focus of his landmark work, ‘Use your Head’, was how to improve your memory with Mind Maps. A secondary theme was how to improve your reading and how to improve your reading speed, while increasing your comprehension.
While he touched on a few other topics, such as speeches, meetings and writing, the bulk of the book was on memory and reading.
Mind Maps today
Over the years Mind Maps have been used in very diverse applications. I’ve written about many of them on my website, MindMapTutor.com.
With Mind Maps you can learn:
- How to improve memory
- How to improve reading
- How to improve writing
- How to improve communication skills
- How to improve planning
- How to improve time management
- How to improve career growth
- And much more…
Today, I will provide you with a comprehensive Mind Map on the components needed to manage your career. We are putting together a set of Mind Maps for each of the components in this Mind Map.
What authority do I have?
You may be wondering what authority I have to write on this subject. You may wonder whether I am extremely wealthy, or whether I profess to be one of the management gurus, or whether I am qualified to give advice on careers, or whether I do this for a living.
Well, the answer is ‘No’, on all accounts.
- I am not extremely wealthy
- I am not a management guru
- I am not a career counsellor
- I don’t do this for a living
But, what I can say is:
- I am happy with what I am earning
- I am a senior manager at a large fashion retailer
- I have mapped and actively managed my career
- I am writing this because I have a passion for what Mind Maps can do for mankind
A bit of career history
For those of you that know a bit of South African history, you will know that South Africa was under apartheid rule for decades. It was under these circumstances that I started working.
Due to factors out of my control, I was born with a darker skin. I therefore had to face job reservation, disparate salaries and little opportunities. Despite these factors, I always had a belief that my success laid in my own hands.
I started as a technician, repairing telex machines. Today, I head up the Business Intelligence division of a large corporate. Did this come about by luck?
To answer this, let’s take a quick tour of my career.
As I’ve just mentioned, I started my career as a technician. One day, on my way to the ‘store’, where we booked out the spare parts for our repairs, I saw a guy in front of a terminal typing away. He was an expert that came to do some work on our inventory system.
On questioning him, I learned that he was working on a product called Oracle running on a mainframe computer. What he showed me was very exciting. Over the next few days, I peppered him with questions, which he gladly answered. While this came as a surprise at the time, I later realised that there are many people with knowledge who are willing to share information freely. All you have to do is ask!
I remember quite clearly saying to him, ‘I also want to do this!’, little realising that Oracle would one day become the second biggest software vendor in the world and the world’s largest enterprise software company.
That was in 1990. In 1998, I left South African shores to work in The Netherlands as a Senior Oracle DBA (Database Administrator).
In databases, I found the love for the use of data in an organisation. Today, I head up a Business Intelligence division, which takes raw data, turns it into information and gives companies a competitive edge. The company’s only sustainable advantage is its ability to learn faster than its competitor.
On the way to becoming this, I spent time as a database programmer, a database administrator, a database designer, a database consultant and finally a manager.
I did not gain all this experience by chance. While it was not planned as well as it could have been, there was an underlying plan and direction.
This plan, coupled with my passion for data and finally turning it into information, enabled me to continuously grow my career, get international experience and do the job that I love.
Managing your career
The ability to maintain a dynamic career path and develop a portfolio of skills and achievements is a must for today’s worker.
I have put together a series of Mind Maps to help you map your career by building on past experience and maximising your opportunities to achieve success and fulfilment in your working life.
It covers reviewing your current situation, exploring career options, monitoring development, and handling crisis and change. In fact all the key aspects of managing your career are covered.
There are also practical tips and self assessment exercises to evaluate how well you have managed your career to date.
Components of career management
Mapping the future
Effective planning is at the heart of career success. Assess your position now, decide where you want to be, and then use your experience to help you map the best route for the future.
Exploring career options
It is important to be aware of the kind of work that is currently available in the marketplace. Do enough research as possible and use your network of friends and contacts. These days, networks can be extended across the globe with Social Networks like Facebook.
Developing your Career
Career changes happen at intervals, but even the most determined job changer will have to work in a particular role most of the time. Learn how to manage your working life between the changes.
Achieving Career Success
As your career develops, twists and turns are inevitable. Be prepared to overcome obstacles, change direction when necessary, and turn events to your advantage to that yo can continue to thrive.
I hope this brief introduction to managing your career makes you realise that your career is more in your own hands than you think. I also hope that it will get you to start taking action and actively begin to manage your career.
read moreHow to improve performance with Mind Maps – In The Zone
As a South African, I am so pleased when I pick up a book and find that it can compete with the best the world has to offer. One of those books, is ‘In the Zone’ by Michael Cooper and Tim Goodenough.
The book uses successful South African sports heroes to illustrate how to achieve top performance in sport and life.
Athletes often talk about being in the zone and how being in the zone is the key, the secret and the power. What they have not known is that there are techniques to get you into The Zone consciously and intentionally. They often relied on superstition, lucky charms, cheering of the crowd, rituals and other ‘strange’ behaviours.
The writers have done a lot of research in this field and have come up with a set of principles, which they believe can get you into the zone, whenever you want to. They also use the stories of South African sports heroes to illustrate their points.
While I can’t necessarily help to get you into the zone everytime with this article, I hope the Mind Map Summary of the principles will inspire you to explore this topic further. You can also use the Mind Map as a guide and a checklist to see how many of the principles you apply in your life. You could also use it for inspiration when you feel violated or underperforming at home, at school, at college, at university and even in the workplace.
While the book uses sport people as examples, it has actually been written as a motivational book for all of us. I think it’s simply brilliant!
I will list the principles in order of maturity, Level 1 being at the bottom and Level 4 at the top. In the book, this is depicted as a pyramid. Each level has a number of skills, which are listed on the Mind Map. Being skills, each and everyone of us can acquire them with the correct work ethic.
Base Skill: Work Ethic
This skill underpins all the other skills. This is the foundation skill as every other skill takes effort and commitment to build and apply. You may have fantastic mental, physical, or other skills, but if you don’t do anything with it, you won’t achieve high performance.
Level 1: ‘Being’ Skills
Performing from one’s highest intentions.
Simply put, if you know WHY you are doing something, everything else falls in place. You should find a big enough WHY in your life, then you could do any HOW.
I’ve written many articles on finding your passion and spending your life following that passion. You will find many of them on MindMapTutor.com.
Internally referent
Psychologists call this ‘internal locus of control’.
I describe this as my circle of control. If you were to draw a circle of the things that control you, would you be standing inside or outside the circle? Successful people generally feel that they are in control and they work within their circle of control.
While successful people are internally referent, the most successful people have external checks. To do this they often seek the services of a coach or mentor. Even though they may use a coach or a mentor, they still believe that success ultimately lies within.
Distinction between self confidence and self esteem
This simply means that you should never confuse what you do with who you are.
To illustrate the point, imagine you are a soccer player and you’ve been honing your skills for years? As your skills grew, so did your confidence. Now, ask yourself how good are your ballet skills?
If you are purely ‘confidence driven’, you will be afraid to make mistakes, as your confidence is based on your ability to perform well. If you have a high self esteem, you won’t mind making mistakes as you can separate who you are from what you do.
In the sporting world, athletes with high self esteem continue to grow their careers long after they no longer can perform on the field.
Level 2: Career Skills
Resilience
Life is full of setbacks. Do you see setbacks as an opportunity to grow, or do you tend to dwell on the negative aspects of what has happened?
Resilience is the ability to experience a setback, disappointment, defeat, trauma or other ‘bad thing’ and still have the motivation to do your best and believe in your recovery.
Michael Jordan is remembered as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. If you search YouTube, you will find numerous clips of his brilliance and match winning shots. Yet this is what he has to say:
‘I’ve missed over 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I’ve been trusted to take the winning shot… and missed. I’ve failed over and over in my life. And that is why I succeed.’
Managing anxiety and confidence
Strangely enough, overconfidence kills peak performance as much as anxiety. This can be seen as the anxiety/confidence see-saw. If the see-saw is tipped far over to any one side, performance will suffer.
Michael Johnson, set a new world record in the 200m at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. When asked how he felt before the race, he had this to say, ‘Well, I was nervous… But I felt comfortable. Actually, if I hadn’t felt nervous, I would have been uncomfortable.’
Your ability to keep the confidence/anxiety see-saw balanced is therefore the key to performing well under high pressure situations.
Un-insultability
In the workplace, this skill is most needed during performance appraisals. If you see the feedback as input only, you will maintain your self esteem and continue to improve.
For a sports person, this is required nearly everytime they step on the field. For those of you that remember Zidane’s famous head butting incident in the 2006 Soccer World Cup, can you see how important it is that you need to be ‘UN-INSULTABLE’ to perform at your peak?
Level 3: Advanced Skills
Practice makes perfect
Engaging in meaningful and high quality practice is often the result of having a strong work ethic and being internally referrent. Great athletes carefully plan, track and record their training. Each session fits into a bigger picture of skills development.
Your ability to focus on something and work at it until you perfect it, will not only get your performance up, it will also improve your learning. Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mind Map, says that each trial should not be simply to get better, it should be to learn. He proposes a method he calls TEFCAS, which I wrote about on MindMapTutor.com.
Mental Preparation
Do it in your mind first! There is nothing like rehearsing for creating something great.
I have written quite a bit about visualisation and how you can use Mind Maps to build vision boards on MindMapTutor.com.
Meta-Detailing – The ability to simplify
‘In the Zone’ mentions that attention to detail is the hallmark of a champion.
My response is, ‘The ability to simplify is the hallmark of a great leader’.
A Mind Map is the most amazing tool you will ever come across to simplify complex subjects. Once you’ve read this article, go back to the Mind Map above and look at each branch one by one. You will be amazed at how much detail you can recall from the Mind Map.
Mind Mapping has given me the ability to take complex topics and simplify them with the greatest of ease. You can achieve this too, if you continue to work on your Mind Mapping skills.
Level 4: Elite Skills
Active Identity Shaper
All of us have many identities. We wear many hats. How many roles do you have? What are the labels you give them?
Are you a teacher, programmer, father, mother, son, daughter, tennis player, swimmer?
These are just labels, but does your performance depend on the label you give yourself? Let’s assume you swim well at school and practice very hard. You begin to do well and start breaking some school records. Later on you begin to break provincial and national records.
At what point will you start calling yourself a swimmer, versus somebody that just swims well? The difference in how you label yourself can be the difference between success and failure!
This is often referred to as the ‘Pygmalion effect’, where students perform better than others simply because they were expected to do so.
Elite athletes often decide early on in their lives that they are going to be world class and start shaping their identities actively to meet this goal. That is how ‘sporting families’ continue to deliver top class sports children decade after decade.
Regular Zoning
Most athletes and coaches interviewed felt that getting ‘in the zone’ happened co-incidentally or by chance. Many felt that it would be great if it could happen more often, but were unaware of how it could be done.
People who have the skills mentioned above will naturally ‘Zone’ more than others. The more of these skills you acquire, the better your performance will be.
So, off you go. Memorise my Mind Map and practice those skills daily. Success is sure to follow!
read moreMind Maps and Collaboration
As I mentioned last week, I attended the Gartner Symposium/IT Expo 2009.
On my return to work, I was asked to present my views of the Symposium to the rest of the management team.
Luckily, I had my hand drawn Mind Maps to help me summarise three days of presentations into a one page Mind Map that I could present in about half an hour.
We use Mind Map Software at work, which allowed me to project my Mind Map onto a big screeen and work through it interactively during my presentation.
Collaboration is the key to the future
The main theme of Gartner was ‘Planning in uncertain times’. My summary of the solution to this problem was ‘Collaboration’.
This does not only apply to software development, but any sizeable project.
Strangely enough, there wasn’t a single Mind Map in any presentation given during the three days. It just goes to show that there is still a lot of work to be done by us ‘Mind Mappers’.
Collaboration in Mind Map Software
Interestingly, one of the biggest changes to Mind Map software in recent months, is their ability to share Mind Maps. Most of them have a web publishing facility today. Some even have online collaboration features.
I think this is going to be big in the future of Mind Mapping.
Social Software leads the way
The biggest contribution to collaboration today is the Social Software that most Web users use on a daily basis. In case you don’t know what Social Software is, Facebook, Twitter, Wikis and Blogs are all examples of Social Software.
This is part of what is known as Web 2.0 technology. With Web 2.0 technologies, content becomes dynamic. People can comment on, and sometimes even edit, content written by others.
In this way, we are able to share our collective knowledge to create solutions better than we could have produced as individuals.
Let’s hope that Mind Map Software goes in the same direction as the ‘Facebooks’ of this world, giving us good collaborative software that is easy to use and does not cost us an arm and a leg.
read moreThe best study method in the world
What is the best study method?
You might be thinking that this guy is very bold to even attempt an answer to this question!
The answer is quite simple though – Any method that utilises the whole brain!
Scientists have now almost universally agreed that the left and right halves of the brain largely have different functions. (For those of you that don’t know, the brain looks very much like a walnut, with two visibly distinct halves.)
The left side of the brain is the logical side and deals with lists, numbers and structured information etc., while the right side of the brain is the artistic side and handles colour, sensory experiences and unstructured information.
While the above is not entirely true, as both halves share some functions, using both the artistic side and the structured side in learning will greatly improve retention and understanding.
You now have a very good yardstick to measure any study method by.
Why is our study method so special?
This is even easier than the first question – our study method is so special because it actively incorporates both sides of the brain!
It uses Mind Maps®, and the Cornell Method. The artistic, visual learners will be more comfortable with Mind Maps®, while the logical, linear learners will be more comfortable with the Cornell Method.
The Cornell note-taking system is a widely-used note taking system devised in the 1950s by Walter Pauk, an education professor at Cornell University. Pauk advocated its use in his best-selling How to Study in College, but its use has spread most rapidly in the past decade.
Only by using both these methods, will the whole brain be used.
What are these methods?
Mind Mapping
The Mind Map Study Method uses Mind Mapping. Mind Mapping is a visual learning tool developed by Tony Buzan. It allows you to record whole chapters, sections and even complete books on a single page. Each page on this website has an overview Mind Map on the top of the page. I will devote a whole section on this website to Mind Mapping.
Simply put Mind Mapping consists of the following:
- Central Image
- Main Branches
- Sub Branches
- Details
If you are new to Mind Mapping, just browse this site and look at the examples to get a general feel of the concept. A Mind Map® can be overwhelming initially. If this is the case, simply focus on one branch at a time and soon your mind will build the necessary hooks for the information to attach to. I will show you how to convert a Mind Map® to a linear note, making it easier for those more used to regular, linear notes.
The Cornell Method
The Cornell method is actually quite brilliant in its simplicity. To use the method, simply take an A4 sheet of paper and draw a 6cm column on the left hand side.
Key Words will be placed on the left hand side and details on the right hand side.
That’s it! No complications, no fuss. Just easy to use, brilliant methods.
These methods are incorporated in our Learning Management Programme.
Cornell and Mind Maps Working together
If converting from a Mind Map® to the Cornell Method:
- The central Topic becomes the main heading
- Each Main Topic becomes a heading
- Each SubTopic becomes a Key Word on the left hand column
- Each detail branch gets recorded on the right hand side, with Key Words possibly highlighted.
If converting from a Cornell Method note to a Mind Map:
- The main heading becomes the central topic
- The headings become main topics
- The keywords on the left hand side become SubTopics
- The paragraphs on the right hand side get converted to detail branches.
These methods are described in more detail in the Study Methods module of our Learning Management Programme.
So whether you use our method or not, ensure that you use methods that appeal to your whole brain to get the best possible results when learning.
And stay away from those boring, dull linear notes!
read moreFree Ebook on creating and Using Mind Maps
Get this Free Ebook today by filling in the form below.
Learn Faster and Easier
'Your ability to learn faster than your competitor may be your only sustainable competitive advantage'. - Arie de Geus
Yet, how much time have you spent learning how to learn?
Click here to read more about the Ebook and Bonus Interactive Mind Map
English Grammar Mind Map Tutor
