We did this activity today as a day after Mother’s Day family activity while the baby was napping – we mind mapped our family values.
I was interviewing my friend Caroline Welier the other day and she has a business called Visual Story Mapping, where she will sit down with you and do a big mind map of your life history or brand or whatever, so you can really see your story laid out in front of you on the page. She said, “With a mind map, you don’t address the ideas in the order you have them but because they are all out there on the page you can evaluate them equally”.
So I suggested to Heidi that we do our own visual story map. I know that Heidi really likes art and she has these watercolor pencils, so I thought it would be a little family art project or something.
A mind map can be about anything, it just needs to have some central focus. The other day, I did a mind map of all my important relationships, maybe the top 150 people or so in my network.
Our family map could have been about our shared history or plans for the future, or things we have seen together, but we ended up mapping out our family values.
So we started writing down lots of values, and there were some good ones, like generosity, and some random ones, like hairstyle.
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We treated this like a brainstorming session, and one of the important rules of brainstorming is that you don’t say no or throw out any ideas. That can be done later. This way, you separate the generation of ideas from the assessment of ideas. Basically you ignore that pesky internal editor and you get everything down on paper, including all the wild and crazy ideas. In the case of mind map you end up starting to see themes and groupings of ideas.
So we started writing down lots of values, and there were some good ones, like generosity, and some random ones, like hairstyle. But again, you keep everything, and I guess we do like to be well groomed.
We found a few different groupings that really stood out:
We put down a lot of words about valuing the outdoors: adventure, travel, nature, wilderness, camping, outside time, sunshine etc.
We also really love to host people for dinners and create community and throw events and be generous and involved, so we grouped those values together as a segment as well.
We put words on our map for values surrounding mealtime like good conversations, appreciation of wine, family time, sharing stories, being generous, learning about each other, tasting the food, cooking the food, etc.
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Lately we have been really enjoying this fresh food at the market here in Croatia, as they don’t use pesticides and the food is super fresh – from less than 20 miles away. We have people over for dinner all the time for these amazing meals. We put words on our map for values surrounding mealtime like good conversations, appreciation of wine, family time, sharing stories, being generous, learning about each other, tasting the food, cooking the food, etc.
We learned that we value purchasing high quality, durable possessions and minimalism. Partly because I lived out of a carry on bag for two years, I know that I can be perfectly happy with just four sets of clothing, although I am slightly happier with eight outfits, which is what I have now. Travel helps you keep things simple anyway, because you can only carry so much. And we give our baby rocks to play with sometimes with instead of fancy toys.
We learned how much we value our extended family. Like the time we drove ten hours to Tennessee to introduce Axel to his great grandparents, even though he was crying frequently during the drive. Or the time we flew him to California to meet his other great grandmother. Or prioritizing being present at important moments like weddings and birthdays and graduations and calling home ever Sunday night.
This mind mapping process helped Heidi and I feel like we were a unit and a team as we named all these values together. It was cool to find out that we knew each other well enough that we could come up with this big set of things we value. Maybe it is easy to come up with a list of things you like, but its really nice t o visualize it and group it together.
We were also pleased to note that we are spending most of our days doing the things that matter most to us. We gave ourselves a pat on the back because we have worked really hard to set all this up, moving to the Dalmatian Coast for the summer, doing work we love, finding amazing friends and having them for dinner, cooking daily, spending time outside in the sunshine exploring, you name it.
What would you like to map out in your own life?
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Photo: Getty Images