Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

55 Seven Ways to Improve Your Conversations
Recording your ideas on paper 
In my experience, conversations nearly always benefit from being 
recorded visually. The patterns and pictures and diagrams and 
doodles that you scribble on a pad help you to listen, to 
summarise and to keep track of what you’ve covered. More 
creatively, they become the focus for the conversation: in making 
the shape of your thinking visible on the page, you can ensure 
that you are indeed sharing understanding. 
Recording ideas in this way – on a pad or a flip chart – also 
helps to make conversations more democratic. Once on paper, 
ideas become common property: all parties to the conversation 
can see them, add to them, comment on them and combine 
them. 
What is really needed, of course, is a technique that is flexible 
enough to follow the conversation wherever it might go: a 
technique that can accommodate diverse ideas while 
maintaining your focus on a clear objective. If the technique 
could actually help you to develop new ideas, so much the better. 
Fortunately, such a technique exists. It’s called 
mindmapping. Mindmaps are powerful first-stage thinking tools. 
By emphasising the links between ideas, they encourage you to 
think more creatively and efficiently. 
Mindmaps 
Mindmaps are powerful first-stage thinking tools. By 
emphasising the links between ideas, they encourage us to 
think more creatively and efficiently. 
To make a mindmap: 
• Put a visual image of your subject in the centre of a plain 
piece of paper. 
• Write down anything that comes to mind that connects 
to the central idea. 
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56 Improve your Communication Skills
Mindmaps are incredibly versatile conversational tools. They can 
help you in any situation where you need to record, assemble, 
organise or generate ideas. They force you to listen attentively, so 
that you can make meaningful connections; they help you to 
concentrate on what you are saying, rather than writing; and they 
store complicated information on one sheet of paper. 
Try out mindmaps in relatively simple conversations to begin 
with. Record a phone conversation using a mindmap and see 
how well you get on with the technique. Extend your practice to 
face-to-face conversations and invite the other person to look at 
and contribute to the map. 
A variation on mindmaps is to use sticky notes to record 
ideas. By placing one idea on each note, you can assemble the 
notes on a wall or tabletop and move them around to find logical 
connections or associations between them. This technique is