Training

Willingness to learn

1. Create a Learning Mind Map

In a world where everything moves fast, it can be overwhelming to keep up with new information in a field, discovering the latest trends or the newest developments on social media. While building a business, you have to be an expert in many areas and you will have many sources of information: events, classes, books, online classes, etc. Therefore it is important to define the key fields of expertise for your endeavor so you can focus your willingness to learn on these areas and what is relevant for your specific situation.

Creating a learning mind map can help you with that by visually organizing information but also showing the relationship between different areas and their hierarchy. Here is how you do it: On a large piece of paper, write a topic that you would like to learn about for your business. Now add branches to other knowledge fields that come to mind, maybe you can add whole concepts, maybe it is an image or a single word. Which connected areas you already know about? Which ones you will have to learn about? Which ones seem important, which ones less important?

There are also a number of online tools to create virtual mind maps that you could use for this exercise, for example:

http://www.wisemapping.com
https://mind42.com
https://mind-map-online.de

2. Organize information

Keeping track of new information is a crucial aspect to the learning process. Often we lose interesting and useful information from conferences or courses because we do not have an organized system for taking notes and reflecting on what we have learned.

Below you find a template with which you can practice summarizing and conceptualizing new information as well as reflecting on how this new information is relevant for you in a personal or professional context.

Practice by watching an online video on a topic that is new but interesting for you and your business idea. Then summarize the information on the template.

Organizing Information as PDF