It’s been a busy week. In just this week, I met with my dear friend Francois Barton in Aberdeen before leaving home for overseas.
From time to time, Francois and I have been exchanging messages reminding each other to slow down. Today, after presenting 2 keynotes and 2 workshops, the first one at the Danish Maritime Authority and then later at the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Energy Regulator in Newfoundland, I have eventually arrived in Vancouver for my final leg of Americas travels.
It’s a Sunday morning here in Vancouver, I’ve had good sleep and I woke up with the view to writing something. I usually don’t begin writing with keyboards or tablets. I start with some ideas on a whiteboard, an A4 sheet or like today, a glass window in my room.
When we type using a keyboard, we are restricting to using fingers only to engage with our thoughts. Mapping and drawing on the other hand engages the full body. If there’s one or more persons with you (speaking), you are making their verbal language visual to them and yourself. It is a powerful somatic (bodily) and relationship building exercise. Watching our words appear on the board impromptu helps us and others to see the hidden assumption in our dialogue (oh my god, did i just say that!).
Mapping allows you to make connections between themes in ways that typing (from top to bottom or left to right) cannot. You can start to connect between ideas and ‘see’ the wider perspective.
Mapping slows us down. As we curve and twist and move our hands and bodies when we scribble, our words slowly start to ‘make sense’. More ideas emerge and our creative capacity enhances. Patients of mental health and trauma find it cathartic to watch their emotions and expressions turn visual. It’s a healing exercise too.
Mapping makes us imaginative. Not only words but we can also use icons and symbols to express our feelings. We are not limited by words only.
Mapping is accessible to almost all of us. Even those who cannot read and write (such as people on the front line) can map, draw and express their ideas. Much before we could write or read, we were already communicating in images. All biblical stories are told in images.
Take some time to slow down and map your ideas using a visual medium. Use colours and arrows. You will enter a new world of imagination and creativity. It’s a skill that will only get better.
In Social Psychology of Risk, visual mapping is at the heart of all our methods and tools.
Over the next few days, I will share some stories that came from slowing down and mapping my thoughts on this glass sheet.
