I am sure you have learnt about mind mapping sometimes in college or at your job (this concept was created by a British Psychologist Tony Buzan in the 1970’s of the previous century).  In mind mapping one lists the possibilities and the choices that exist (or sometimes to be created as they don’t exist) and the tree is going to look like this:

In this tree or mind map, one puts the lines as one goes, so for example, lets say that one wants to decide between a job or a business, in the middle of the map you will put the word income, and then you drew a stem for a job, and another stem for a business, and you start with either stems and  write down the possibilities; lets just say that you will start with the job; then we can make another stem on working at your home town or going to another town, in either of these stems you will list down what will you need to have and what kind of job, then what kind of salary you can expect, and if that salary can provide for the expenses that you are going to incur (house, flat, shopping, car etc), or you can put a map on the different jobs that you can do and where you can find them.  At the end you stop and go to the other side and list down what you need for the business, what kind, how much money, who would need it, can you do it online, or do you need a shop and so on; each possibility will provide you with another possibility and so on.

This mind mapping concept is just a way to let us know how our brain works. There is no one thing that we can depend on solely, there are always hundreds of combinations and permutations for every action that one takes.  Which takes me nicely into todays blog.

Life is full of great surprises.  Let me tell you about one in particular that happened to me. I had a job which was a great one, took me to so many countries and paid for my overseas trips (Including a course at Oxford University); then I had the opportunity to work in Dubai, if I wanted to stay back in my other job, I would have lost more in income, however going to Dubai provided me with not only a better job (albeit different) but also better salary, jumped a market that was not known to a lot of people (such as now), even though i didn’t know about mind mapping then, but I did take the chance without thinking. Going there changed my life completely, i worked, then travelled to do another specialisation, and then got promoted, built my own house, brought up my kids nicely and so on.  Then another opportunity presented itself and i had to weigh up the possibilities again; should I stay and continue to earn megabucks or leave and earn a higher degree and bring up my kids in a great country? I choose what suited my children of course more so than the higher qualification that I was looking for. I did hit two birds with one stone (actually three birds) as not only did we have a great time, the kids had a great education, and I got the higher qualification.

The possibilities that exists, as well as our choice and how our choices take us to a direction that is different from the one that happens if we took the other possibilities is a mind boggling miracle. Our minds can create hundreds of thousands of possibilities, and more than that, we can actually visualise what will happen afterwards and decide a route that may make our lives even more interesting. Let me give you another example!

I had a choice of retiring or continue to work? what should I do? I am not the type who can have coffee mornings, afternoon teas, movie nights and girls outings.  I love to be productive!! then I thought about the retirement, and what it actually means!! I would still be running the business, however I will not have a 100% hands on work, thus I thought I would limit my working time to the mundane things that my kids (who are now running the show) would not like to do, such us looking after banking and accounting (I do have an accountant of course) in terms of overseeing that the accounts are done properly.  The other thing that I liked to do is write.  So I focused on writing, published my first book and continued to write for the company website and this blog site; at the same time I did have some coffee mornings,  afternoon teas and movie nights. The the third thing that I liked to do is traveling, thus this item was added to my schedule, and a new mind map is created and it opened another can of worms, I had only visited 40 countries, I still have 160 more to visit. Gosh, I do need another mind map to decide on this.

Maybe in the next blog i can write down what I can do on my trips in terms of mind mapping. Maybe i have to draw one for each country. omm lots to see in the world.