mind maps are seriously powerful and I learned pretty much everything using them but a lot of people struggle getting started with mind mapping so if you've ever tried mind mapping and you found that it was overwhelming or you're just staring at a blank page not sure what to put down or you're even insecure about trying it then I'm going to tell you exactly why you feel that way and what you can do about it now I travel around the world delivering workshops on how to learn more effectively and mind mapping is a common technique that I'll teach and the way that I teach it now is actually very different to how I taught it 10 years ago 10 years ago I would just say here's how to my map go and do it and then 5 minutes later I'd look around and everyone has a blank page in front of them confused and they don't know where to start and at first it confused me because I'm literally giving step by step instructions on how to do the technique like why can't you just do it but then over the years I realized that there are two very common and Powerful mental barriers that people form over their academic lives that seriously hold them back and it's not just for mindmapping these mental barriers which are basically habits that we form will hold you back for pretty much any effective learning technique that you can ever learn so what are these mental barriers the first thing is that you have to trust your brain what does that mean okay imagine you're sitting there in a lecture most people if they're awake will just be listening sitting there and writing or typing down their notes constantly just listening and writing it down straight away like a human photocopier and if that's you then you're really going to struggle to learn more efficiently and I'll explain why in a sec but first here's a question for you if you write notes constantly while you are consuming new information why do you do that why don't you just listen to it first piece it all together think about it synthesize it and then output it in a nicely formatted organized set of notes the answer is that number one you probably don't know how and that seems really overwhelming and number two you don't trust your brain to be able to do that in the first place after all you've never been able to do that before and you might think that your memory is like a Civ so there's no reason to believe that your brain could hold on to all of that information put it all together nicely and then write a set of notes right at the end but this is a self-fulfilling prophecy and it's not a good prophecy the prophecy says you are going to struggle to learn forever because I want you to think about how learning actually works let's say I'm learning from this book if I just look at this book how much do you think I'm going to learn not a lot now what if I open the book and look at some pages am I learning now yeah probably not yet but what if I now read the words that are on the page am I learning now yeah a little bit more than before okay what if I now read the words think about them ask myself some questions and then go back to try to answer those questions flicking back and forth within the book to answer that and then write down my notes that summarize my thoughts obviously that last one will probably result in the most amount of learning and the key difference between those examples I just gave you is how much your brain is involved in that process so when we think about us reading something that information coming into our brain then us writing some notes about it learning is the part that happens in the mle middle in the gap between where information goes in and then comes out again in fact research tells us that writing notes immediately after listening or reading to something like at the same time makes us worse at learning and that's because this space and between information coming in and going out gets so so small that there's no opportunity for your brain to do any thinking in the first place so if you want information to come into your brain and stay in your brain then you have to actually let your brain in on the action you need to give it the time and the opportunity to think and pull it apart and ask questions and connect it all together again because your job as a learner isn't just to take information and document it for later your job as a learner is to take in information so that your brain can process it and honestly if all you're doing is reading something or listening to something writing some notes and then later going to reread and then rewrite those notes you are not letting your brain in on that process at any point unfortunately if you like most people spent 10 years just writing notes endlessly as your main form of studying and then someone like me tells you to stop doing that and try mind mapping instead that's going to feel uncomfortable it's different it's new it's unknown it can make you feel anxious and insecure what if it doesn't work what if you start with the wrong fact or concept what if you forget and you write down the wrong thing or what if you put down the wrong relationship or connection what if the world explodes you know all sorts of terrible things can start happening if you mindmap and if that's you and especially if you've been following my content for a while and you want to give mind mapping a go but you just feel like you don't know how to start then I want you to understand two things number one anything new is uncomfortable you either live with a discomfort of learning something new or you live with a discomfort of never learning and growing and number two it's actually not hard at all if you take it one step at a time so here's a couple of strategies that have worked really well for my students in the past to help them unlock their first proper effective mindmap first thing I call delayed note taking the concept to this is simple because learning happens inside the brain and if we just writing notes immediately as soon as that information comes in we're effectively bypassing the brain with delayed note taking we're just going to increase this space we're going to increase that Gap and give our brain more of an opportunity to jump in on the process how do we do that I literally just waiting and taking in more information before we write our notes for example let's say you normally write notes constantly and straight away then you'll be writing notes on a word for word basis as soon as someone says a word you write that word down and then would look something like this so here the lecturer would just be talking to you or you're watching a video or you're just reading a text book and you are just constantly writing writing the notes basically no gap between the information coming in and the information going out zero brain actually involved now here's what it would look like with a sentence level of delay we're first listening or we might be reading something uh and after a sentence then we're writing it down very quickly and then we're going to be listening again we're thinking about it and then we're writing it down again and again we're listening or reading and then we're writing it down again so you see there's more time spent in my brain and less time spent just on the keyboard we're creating a pause between the information coming in and the information going out and therefore we're introducing an opportunity for real learning to take place now the secret to making this actually helpful for you is that you have to activate this cognitive switch and this is important because this cognitive switch is actually crucial to do any form of effective learning especially mind m in fact I guarantee you talk to any top learner and they are already doing this cognitive switch without them even realizing it here's how this cognitive switch works when we add a small delay like just two or three sentences then our brain is in this juggle mode we're basically just trying to hold on to and juggle mentally all this new information that's coming and desperately try not to forget it until we can write it back down that's juggle mode and that kind of thinking is not helpful for learning it's not going to help you build a good memory and it's certainly not going to help you apply what you've learned but once that delay in our note taking starts widening even further really interesting thing starts happening in our brain this graph represents how long we delay our note taking for and then here on the left that's zero that's basically as soon as I hear it I'm writing it down again and then here on the right let's say this is you know a 10 minute delay which means that after I hear something new for the first time I'm actually holding on to that for 10 minutes and continually consuming 10 minutes worth of information before I'm writing it down and have a look at what happens to our mental effort and memory on the y axis so at first our effort involved in doing this is basically zero it's you know it's easy to do and our memory on this is almost zero as well this is extremely easy but also extremely useless now once we start delaying our note taking for a little longer like a few sentences what we'll find is that the amount of mental effort goes up a lot where in juggle mode we're trying to hold on to all of this new information before we can write it down again but remember I said juggle mode is not an efficient way for your brain to encode new information so even though the effort goes up rather rapidly our memory doesn't really go up by much at all now here's where it gets interesting because after we introduced a delay of more than let's say 1 or 2 minutes we're taking in so much new information that it's pretty much impossible for our bra to hold on to everything without forgetting it our effort is already going to be at its limit and we're going to be forgetting most of what we consumed during that time anyway so this situation which feels quite overwhelming is exactly where we want to put ourselves because this is what puts us into that cognitive switch from juggle mode into organizing mode and learning to think in this organizing mode is crucial to do any kind of effective learning in organizing mode we're not trying to hold on to every new piece of information and and juggle it in our in our brain so we're not going to forget it because it's impossible it's too much in organizing mode instead we're focused on trying to group it to simplify it to summarize it so that there are less individual things to hold on to we're transforming it into something that feels easier to remember and makes more sense and research Arch as well as my own observations from coaching thousands of people have shown that this process of organizing these separate facts and Concepts into groups is critical for forming stronger memory and deepening our ability to apply that knowledge it's kind of like folding and putting your clothes away instead of just trying to hold on to all of your laundry at once you know where to find your socks because they are logically in your sock drawer together in the same way your brain knows how to access certain information because it's been actively organized in a way that makes sense so if we look at this graph again once we flick into this organizing mode then our mental effort actually starts going down and we'll stay at this more reasonable level it's not going to drop to zero because you still have to spend effort on trying to find ways to group it and organize it together but it's a lot easier than just holding on to and trying to remember everything but more importantly our memory and our depth of understanding shoots up massively now an efficient learner can usually delay their note taking by around 5 minutes or more depending on how dense and complicated the information is however diligence is key it could literally take you years to delay your note taking by up to 3 to 5 minutes which is really the level that you want it to be if you want a chance at mastering mind mapping and in fact it's going to take so long that you're probably going to give up before before you actually crack it which means if you want to improve your memory and retain more and solve more complex problems and improve your performance and assessments without studying all day then you have to work on your learning skills consistant every week and even if you found me on YouTube today I worked on this every day for years just why to try to make this as easy as possible for you so that you don't have to spend every day for years I make videos like this but I also have a free newsletter it's called The Learning drops newsletter it's a completely free newsletter that you can sign up to and I'll email you every single week practical things that you can do to get better and faster at learning every single week the emails only take 3 to six minutes to read but they aim to save you hours per week in study time while improving your academic performance and without spending years to figure it out like I did I'll leave a link in the description if you want to join now if you give delayed not taking AO you're going to run into another problem which is that you don't have enough time to write your notes because if you're just listening and sitting there like listening or reading something for 5 or 10 minutes and then you are writing your notes then you need to write those notes very very quickly otherwise you're going to miss the next 5 minutes worth of stuff or if you're reading and it's a self-study session this study session is going to take you hours but if this happens to you then that's probably because of another bad habit that you have and this is the second major mental barrier which is the belief that writing more notes is better cuz for a lot of people there's a sense of security with writing lots of detailed comprehensive notes research actually shows that having longer wordier notes tends to reduce your academic performance and the reason is because of what I mentioned before if you have lots of notes it probably means you did more constant writing which means you actually thought about what to write less so on top of delaying your not taking I also want you to actively drop your word count by writing less not only does it save time but also forces you to think about another way that you can represent that same information which in turn forces us to think about the information more deeply and honestly rather than delaying the note taking it's this dropping the word count part that I found most people find more challenging and it's probably because writing lots of notes keeps you in the illusion of learning the illusion of learning is when we are doing things that make us feel like we're making progress when we're actually not for example I know a lot of people that buy a lot of like books or audio books and it just goes from like the delivery person to their shelf like they never even read it that is the illusion of learning you're doing something usually something very easy that feels like it's productive when it actually isn't making a difference to the the thing you're trying to improve writing notes is the same thing anyone can write a lot of notes and when you get to the end of a long study session and you've got 30 pages of beautiful comprehensive notes you look at that and think wow that's so beautiful pet yourself in the back I've been so productive except that's a lie and we all know it because a week later we're probably going to forget half of it and we're not even going to read the other half again anyway but once we force ourselves to drop the word count it strips away the illusion of learning it's forcing us to engage with the proof process of learning directly if we struggle with that learning process it becomes painfully obvious because we can literally see it in our notes so to make it a little easier for you to escape this illusion of learning more successfully let me show you a stepbystep progression of what it would look like as you progressively drop your word count we start with your original notes that might look something like this so we're going to take the first step now of shortening it which is just reducing down some of those unnecessary sentences turning some of them into bullet points just just taking out unnecessary obvious filler words all righty and this is the simplified word drop version straight away just comparing it back and forth there's literally no useful information that was Stripped Away between the two versions here so that's the first step of dropping the word count so now what we're going to do is take the next step where we're not necessarily taking away more words but we're now seeing how we can start using spatial Arrangement some lines some basic arrows and connections to just express some of these obvious relationships and ideas without having to physically write it out and you can see at this point it's even simpler and again there's no useful information that was stripped away in fact I'd say that this final one is actually a little better at showing the relationships uh and showing the overall picture of how I should understand it you can see at a glance it's actually easier to see as well at this point you can see it's actually almost starting to naturally form a kind of mindmap so even though with each of these iterations there's less and less on the page there's more and more learning that is happening in the brain Less on the page more in the membrane this is how you're meant to create a mind map this kind of natural prog here most people when they think about doing a mind map they start with this big central theme on a page and all these things Branch out of it but that's not the point the a mind map is just a representation of the relationships and the connections that you discovered and synthesized based on thinking about how the information is related and can be grouped together and by getting to this point alongside some delayed note taking that's going to help you unlock a better memory which means that you're going to forget less of what you studied and better knowledge application which means that you can use what you've learned to solve more problems and do better in your exams so how long does it take to go from this here all the way through to this final version if you are a total beginner who has only done linear note taking before and you feeling really really insecure and uncomfortable about this it's going to take you probably one or two weeks if you are diligent with practicing it and from this point to get to a fully supercharged memory boosting mind map will take another two to six weeks with guidance or two to six months if you're doing it alone again it depends on how deep your old habits are and how diligently you practice if you want to make this all easier remember there's a link to my newsletter in the description which you can join for free I hope you found this helpful thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time