Trying to achieve your long-term goals can be daunting. It can be easy to have a goal you want to achieve, but getting there can be the hard part. As anyone who has failed a New Year’s resolution can tell you, when faced with larger, long-term goals, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out how to reach the finish line. Not all things people want to achieve have simple step-by-step instructions on how to get there. The best way to identify the path that will need to be taken to achieve your goal is to first identify all the steps that need to be completed in the first place.
A great tool for helping identify these stepping stones is a mind map. A mind map is a visual way of breaking down a complicated goal or idea into smaller related concepts in a hierarchical manner. This simple tool can make it much easier to break down more complicated long-term goals and break them down into easier-to-digest chunks that can be turned into actionable items.
The goal of this post is to help walk through the process of mind mapping to help highlight it as a valuable tool for building a clear plan for achieving unclear goals.
Step 1 – Identify Your Long Term Goals
The first step in the process is identifying what you aim to accomplish. Is there a specific career goal that you want to reach? Is there a new tool or application you want to design and build? Whatever the aim is, write it down. I’d recommend doing so in a format that allows for the creation of a graph, such as paper, a whiteboard, or a virtual program like Miro. As an example, we will have the goal of becoming a great software consultant.
This central node will be the core from which the rest of our mind map will grow out, naturally leading to our next step.
Step 2 – Breakdown Your Goal
Once we have our core long-term goal in place, the next step is to start identifying any concepts that would contribute to that goal. The concepts to identify for the end goal tend to come in the form of smaller elements that contribute to the larger goal as a whole.
Using our example goal of becoming a great software consultant, we would want to identify some elements that go into the idea of being a great software consultant. Two such elements are strong developer skills and excellent communication skills. Having identified these elements, we would then add them to our mind map and have lines running from our main goal to our newly added nodes.
With these new nodes in place, we can continue on into further development of our mind map.
Step 3 – Repeat
Once the first set of nodes has been created, the remainder of the mind map exercise involves continuing to break down the elements that contribute to our higher-level goals into smaller and smaller elements. The goal is to break down each new node further and further until they have been divided into easily manageable portions.
Using our example mind map, from the node on having strong developer skills, we can add further child nodes for things that go into meeting that category, such as having good technical design, mastering your tools, or the ability to write effective tests.
This process of adding more child nodes can be repeated again and again, either until the mind map has reached a satisfactory state or until the nodes in the map cannot be broken down any further. Once you have a completed map, you will then have an easily navigable route towards the goal you aim to achieve through following your outermost child nodes all the way to the origin.
Map It Out
Using a mind map is a great way to break down and visualize the path one needs to take to reach their long-term goals. This technique further allows you to more efficiently create a plan for where to start. Its strengths as a planning tool are also very helpful in building project backlogs, where nodes in the map can be turned into stories, epics, and more. If you are struggling to determine the motivations around why you are doing specific things, this tool can also be used to break apart and understand the underlying reasoning and motivations behind things. So the next time you find yourself stuck on how to reach a long-term goal, consider giving a mind map a try.