How To Improve Communication Through The Use Of Mind Maps: Today, communication has become heterogeneous and complex. We can communicate through many tools and platforms, which opens up endless possibilities, each with its codes and standards. This article will discover what the communication process based on mind maps is and its main benefits.
Within this context, mind maps are presented as a valuable tool to achieve the best results of the process and its elements: How To Improve Communication Through The Use Of Mind Maps both for the person who creates it and for the person who receives the message and interprets it.
Mental Maps And Communication Processes
The mental map is a way of schematizing information that is incredibly illuminating and easy to retain. It is a representation of ideas structured visually: related ideas that arise at different levels are presented around a central idea or approach. How To Improve Communication Through The Use Of Mind Maps This way of structuring information by groups allows us to clearly understand the order, priority and relationship between all of them.
The main advantage of the mental map is that it helps us structure information. Therefore, although they usually have the objective of communicating, sometimes we can use them only to organize ideas or information. Bearing all this in mind, mind maps can be simple or complex, with a great design job or made by hand as a draft, but in any case, they will fulfil the function of collecting and outlining the information to present it clearly and.
How To Make Mind Maps?
The goal of the mind map is to make it understandable to anyone regardless of their knowledge of the subject. Since the information is outlined and not explained, we must follow specific guidelines to achieve perfect understanding:
- In the mind map, we do a work of synthesis, so we reduce the text as much as possible to express the main ideas with the fewest number of words possible. Figures or images can also be used to help represent ideas.
- The main idea is located in the centre of the diagram, and in many cases, this idea will give the mental map its title.
- As a result of the main idea, concepts or related ideas arise that branch out around it. The pictures are linked with lines or strokes that allow the reader to understand where they come from and where appropriate they lead us.
- These ideas will give rise to the development of new ones: the third subgroup of concepts that are presented around the secondary ideas (following this scheme, thoughts of third, fourth level… can arise). On the other hand, the farther from the centre an idea is, the less important it will be.
- To interpret a mental map, we must follow the clockwise direction, which allows us to track the ideas’ order (by priority, temporality…).
- The use of elements such as colours, balloons, lines, and images will improve the retention of information.
Advantages Of Communicating Information Through A Mind Map
We must not lose sight of the fact that mind maps are easy to create and versatile tools, but with great communicative power, which has led to them becoming essential in business or education. How To Improve Communication Through The Use Of Mind Maps
Next, we present the advantages and importance of communication through mental maps:
- Improves understanding and learning. The main advantage of mental maps is that they convey information visually, which helps to understand the relationship between ideas and their hierarchy and retain them. For this same reason, they have been revealed as a critical tool for improving the learning process.
- Synthesis and schematization. The idea map facilitates the communication process and the assimilation of large amounts of information. The content of an extensive dossier can be collected schematically in a mental map, and it will not offer us the same degree of detail. Still, it will manage to transmit the most relevant messages.
- Stimulation of the creative process. Another advantage of idea maps is that they are instrumental in creative processes and brainstorming. On the one hand, they allow a clear reflection of the evolution of the creative process and each of its milestones. On the other hand, by outlining the information with which we are working, they prevent us from getting lost in it and centralize the content of the message, allowing us to go further. They are also helpful when outlining information in meetings, presentations…
- Analysis. In the same way that the mind map can improve creative processes, we will find it a valuable tool in decision-making processes or problem-solving. In these cases, the mental map becomes an analysis tool that allows us to collect and consult all the variables, factors, and options at a glance.
- Structure. As its name suggests, a mental map offers us a guide and a system. When preparing documents or presentations, they will be instrumental since they will help us correctly collect and present all the information that we want to transmit; the same applies to planning projects, events, or plans for the future.
We can speak of the mind map communication process as a tremendously effective communication tool. Whether what we are looking for is to transmit information or if what we want is to work more efficiently with what we handle in our daily activities, mental maps will help us improve the communication of messages and be more efficient.
