Taking Mind Maps to the Arctic and back

Justin Miles – Professional Explorer

Recently, we received an email from Justin Miles, Professional Explorer and Educator, who was eager to show his appreciation not only for the ‘Mind Maps for Business’ book but the technique itself.  In this extraordinary blog post, Justin reveals how Mind Mapping has taken him to where he is now and shows how the technique can be used for just about anything. Read more to find out how he’s done it…

As an introduction to my role I am, for lack of a better job description, a ‘Professional Explorer’ and as such I undertake challenges, adventures and expeditions all over the world. I use my adventures to support various charities and to feed an education initiative, ‘The Schools Explorer’. The Schools Explorer takes my experiences and turns them into fun and engaging lesson plans and activities for primary schools all centred around curriculum subjects.

I first came across the term ‘Mind Mapping’ years ago when my job involved creating effective programming activities for leisure centres and health clubs. My employers at the time introduced me to Mind Mapping through a book, which I read briefly and then discarded but the idea stuck a little.

I’ve recently rediscovered the concept of Mind Mapping after my partner attended a one day seminar with Tony Buzan last year. She came home absolutely buzzing and clutching the book ‘Mind Maps for Business’ – which I promptly swiped and began to read through.

After reading through the book, again, it sparked up a few ideas and now I use Mind Mapping techniques for planning expeditions, risk assessment, developing material for the schools project, approaching sponsors, planning talks; Mind Mapping has an application in just about everything that I do. Mind Mapping has opened up my creativity and helped to breathe new life into stale projects that have been sat on the shelf waiting for a flash of inspiration.

Thanks to Mind Mapping, I have managed to turn many of these stale projects into some of my best expeditions. I’m also sure that some of my ideas for developing projects for the School Explorer initiative and contents of my books would never have happened if I wasn’t Mind Mapping. The more I use Mind Mapping techniques, the more benefit I get from it and with practice, ideas seem to flow easier and become far more creative.

Hand drawn Mind Map during an expedition

Mind Mapping is also a fantastic tool for collaborative work. In August, I plan to be the first person to paddle board in the Arctic Ocean and to arrange such a trip, my team and I have been using the technique to figure out every aspect of the expedition.

All I can say is, the technique has been truly invaluable.

Justin Miles - Just for the Challenge