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What you’ll learn in this episode:
Have you ever made a mind map of your thoughts?
Not the typical mind map of the floating head with the spokes and the circles with the words in them – I mean a real mind map of your thoughts.
In this podcast episode, I’m going to give you the three things you need to do in order to create your very own intentional mind map.
This mind map will blow your mind. Not only will you see a map of your brain, but you will be able to make changes on the map – and those changes will happen in your brain too!
Does this sound unreal or far fetched? I have seen the results in my clients, and in my own career, and the results have been amazing!
Here’s a glance at this episode:
- Your thoughts are either serving you or slowing you down – just like driving with the e-brake on.
- Your thoughts right now are your results right now.
- If you see thoughts that are slowing you down, don’t beat yourself up. This is the time for you to get curious, expand on your positive thoughts, and tweak your negative thoughts.
- It can take just 30 minutes to calibrate your thoughts so that you can have breakthroughs, impact, and more success.
- Success isn’t just doing. It’s also being.
Mentioned in this episode:
Amy Flores Young (Transformational Travel)
Work/Connect with me:
Business and Rejuvenation Retreat
[00:02] Jessica: Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Practical Mindset Podcast. I’m Jess Miller, certified coach, and I will be your host for today’s episode.
[00:10] Today, I want to talk to you about the concept of an intentional mind map. This is not a mind map like you’re probably used to hearing about – that mind map where you see the floating head in the middle of the page, and all the spokes coming off, and the circles and the words. It’s not that kind of a mind map. This is going to be a different mind map that you build intentionally to help lead you to the results that you want to create.
[00:39] If you want to move through your days with increased impact and intentional extraordinary results, you need to create a mind map of your intentional thoughts.
[00:52] I believe that success is really two-pronged. One part of the success equation are the things that you’re doing – they’re the actions that you take. The other half of the success equation are the things that you’re thinking – it’s the way that you are showing up in your life. It is the actual thoughts that are going through your brain moment by moment. They are essentially two sides of the same coin, but without one or the other, you will not be able to create extraordinary success and impact in your life.
[01:36] When I was in corporate, and when I started as an entrepreneur, I recognized that I was a person who loved results. I loved momentum, and I loved being successful because of it. When I worked in corporate, and started my career as an entrepreneur, I would do all the planning, and I would put all the things in my calendar, and I would map it out in my fancy planner (which, by the way, I totally love. More on that later). But it always kind of felt like I was being held back or slowed down by something. Kind of like, you know how when you’re driving down the road and you don’t realize that you’ve left the emergency brake on, and you’re just pushing and pushing, and it feels like something is off, and you can’t quite figure out what it is that’s making it so hard, but it’s slowing you down? I was having that experience. I started to think, if it’s not what I’m doing, because I’m doing all the things, and I have all the things in my planner and they’re on my calendar, but I’m still left with this feeling that there’s more momentum than what I’m experiencing, then what is going on here? That is when I realized that if it wasn’t the things that I was doing, then it was something else in me – something else that was going on in this equation. So, that naturally led to the conclusion that if it’s not what I’m doing, it has to be what I’m thinking. When I started to explore this, I started to notice that I was thinking things like, “there’s got to be something wrong with me” or “this is not working”, and I started to notice that being in all the doing with these thoughts like “there’s something wrong with me” or “this is not working” were what were creating my current results in my life. That is when I really started to dig into this work around mindset and noticing your thoughts, and choosing what you think, and testing it and measuring it in a practical way. And now, every week, I sit down with my planner and I map out my to-do’s, and then layer over it my intentional mind map of how I need to think in order to bring the doing into alignment with my results and my thinking.
[04:13] Once I started doing that, that is when the breakthroughs started to happen, and I promise you, if you try out the things I’m about to share with you, you too will create breakthroughs just like I did, and just like my clients do.
[04:29] In fact, one of my clients in particular, Amy Flores Young, had a thriving travel business, and she was doing a lot of planning and a lot of hustling. She was essentially doing all the things. She was successful, although exhausted, and then Covid hit, and everything shifted. She realized that the way of doing all the things wasn’t working anymore. Now, I’m going to tell you what happened with Amy and how she came out with flying colors on the other side, but first I’m going to walk you through the exact process that I taught her so that you can create similar results for yourself.
[05:14] The first thing I want you to do is called mapping your brain. What this essentially is, is a looking at how you’ve been showing up in your days that is creating the results that you’re having. How are you showing up? What are the thoughts that you are entering into your days with? When you sit down, and you pick up your calendar or your to-do list, or you move into your days, what are you thinking? I want you to write this down, because what happens when you write this down is that you essentially create a map, a mind map, of your current brain. You get to see, on paper, the thoughts that you’re having right now that are creating your current reality.
[06:13] I just want to pause for a second here to say this: if you have ever wondered, “how did I get here?” Or “why am I creating the results that I’m creating?” Or “why am I making X amount of money?” or “why do I have X amount of clients?” This is your answer. Your current reality, and the results, lie in this map of your current brain. Everything that you think right now are creating the results that you are having right now. So, give yourself 5 minutes of time, uninterrupted with no judgement, to create this map and really put the things down on paper that are happening in your brain.
[07:03] The second thing I want you to do is I want you to mine for gold and coal. This is essentially the step of mining for your thoughts. What I want you to do is look at the piece of paper where you just wrote down all of these thoughts that you pulled out of your brain that show up what you think about your day or your week, all of the things that you have written down to do, all the thoughts that are showing up there – I want you to look at those and I want you to notice which thoughts are serving you, and which thoughts are hindering you. Which thoughts are propelling you forward, and which ones are pulling up that emergency brake and slowing you down?
[07:49] This is not an episode of beating yourself up, or judging yourself for your thoughts. This is really an experiment in curiosity. This is a way for you to get curious about what is happening in your brain – get curious about your thoughts. When you look at these thoughts, you can do this in two different ways. This is the way that I do it:
[08:16] One is I use logic. I use the prefrontal cortex of my brain to look at the thoughts that are written on the paper to decide if they are serving me or not. So, for instance, let’s pretend that on my plan for this week it’s to run a mile. So, if I look at the thoughts on my paper, and I see the thought “I hate running”, it’s pretty clear to me that that thought is not in service to the result that I want of running a mile and enjoying it. So, I can look at these thoughts and I can see, from a logical perspective, which bucket they fall into – serving me, or sort of slowing me down.
[08:56] Another way to do this is to sort of feel into it – when you read the thought and you’re thinking the thought, how does it feel in your body? What is that vibration in our body related to this thought? Is it something that’s propelling you forward and closer to the thing that you want to create, or, again, pulling you back, holding you back, pulling up that e-brake in your car? How does it feel in your body? Then I want you to put that thought in the appropriate bucket – the one that’s serving you or the one that’s holding you back.
[09:36] Third, I want you to create an intentional thought map for the thinking that you’re going to take with you into your days and into your week. So, if you have thoughts that serve you, I want you to really look at those. I want you to expand on them. I want you to tweak them and make them even more potent and powerful in service of the things that you want to create. If the thoughts are not serving you, I want you to tweak them. It’s not reasonable to, for example, go from a thought of “I hate running” to “I love running”. Your brain is going to hear that and it’s going to think, “I don’t believe it.” But what I suggest that I learned from Martha Beck is, you want to take a little turtle step toward where you want to go – toward your success. So, instead of “I hate running”, maybe a turtle step would be “I am going to attempt to run today” or “it’s possible I could like today’s run” or “I’m going to run for just this one time”. It’s one tiny little thing that you are moving toward where you want to go, which is running with enjoyment. So, I want your to try to turtle step it along the way, and once you do that, you will then have, in front of you, your intentional mind map. You will have a map of literally the intentional thoughts that you need to think in order to create the success and the results that you want in your business and in your life. This will show you not only the overarching thoughts, they’ll be some very big thoughts, but they’ll also show you the little granular thoughts that are key components to creating the outcomes that you want. When you look down at your intentional thought map, you will be able to see what you can put into play in a practical way, and tie it to, and connect it to, your to-do list or your calendar.
[12:01] This will become second nature to you, the way it’s become for me, but one of the ways I have gotten into this habit of checking in with my thoughts and recalibrating, is before every call, or item on my to-do list or on my plan, I check in with what I am thinking and feeling. I have this moment where I pause and I choose my thoughts. So, for you, I want you to literally use your calendar as an anchor, and before you have a transition, as you move from one thing to another in your calendar or on your list, you use this as a moment to pause, recalibrate, notice what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling, and then choose the thought that you want to intentionally go into. Again, you can do this at the beginning of the week, like an overarching thought, or at the beginning of your days, but then as you move into each item, you want to really choose what you want to teach intentionally. That goes for “I have to sit down and pay my bills” or “I’m going to record this podcast” or “I have a difficult client at 2 o’clock”. Who do I want to be, what are the thoughts that I want to choose, before I actually go into that task or call, or whatever it is?
[13:30] Then, you experiment and you collect the data, and you assess, and, for me, I do all of these things and a closing ritual each week, that really helps me anchor myself in “what have I created, what are the outcomes, and am I able to measure that back to the thoughts that I had in this intentional mind map that I have put into place?”
[13:55] Circling back to my client, Amy. Want to know where she is now? Well, she was doing all the things, but when we started to dig deeper and work together, and dig into not just what she was doing, but what she was thinking, that is when everything shifted for her. She moved from a thought model of “no one wants to travel right now during Covid, and no one is going to buy what I have to offer” to “travel is an integral part of the businesses that I work with, and when the time comes, and the time will come when things open up, I want them to think of me first.” So, now, Amy has a thriving business, Transformational Travels, that not only plans travels for individuals and businesses, but she also has created an entirely new arm of her business where she helps business owners, like me, create high-end retreats that are swoon-worthy, and she gets to travel all over the world supporting entrepreneurs and business owners, and getting paid for it.
[15:09] So, I want you to take these three steps: the one of the mapping your mind, number two of mining for gold and coal, number three of creating your intentional mind map, and I want you to take 30 minutes and just walk through this exercise so that you can get a picture of where your brain is now, and create an intentional mind map to get you to where you want to go in the week ahead. Remember, success is not just in the doing. Success is also in the being. It’s in the thinking. It’s in how we’re showing up in our days, in our weeks, with that combination of what we’re thinking about and what we’re doing to create all of the success and the impact in our lives and in our businesses that we want.
[16:10] If you have enjoyed listening to the Practical Mindset Podcast about intentional mind mapping, we want to hear from you. We want to hear about all of the thoughts and all of the breakthroughs you’re having when you intentionally create a mind map for yourself. Please email us at support@jessicamillercoaching.com and tell us everything. We want to hear it all. If you enjoyed this podcast, and you want to hear more of this, please subscribe and follow us on all of the podcast forums that you listen to your usual podcasts, and please share this with others that you know can get value from this as well.
Thanks very much, everyone, and see you next week.
