Mindful mapping
Develop skills in mapping by practising on your own or with someone for ten minutes every day. Like meditation but with a map
The helper's dance list
A widely used checklist of 20 ways that helpers interact that are worth keeping in mind to reflect on progress, breakthroughs and difficulties
Templates for mapping
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Doing and feeling
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Hopes and fears
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Hide and seek
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Here and there
Open story method
When we are trying to help each other change we need to keep open and separate four different stories. One story is about our lives in the present. Another story is of our lives in the past. A third story is how we understand our problems and finally the fourth story is about how we create a journey of change.
Relational awareness measure
We need a measure that can show if map and talk helps us become more relationally aware. Or whether other methods are equally or more helpful. The relational awareness measure still in its pilot stages is our contribution
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Find out more here
Why does map and talk help?
It helps us talk and have better, deeper, wider and more open conversations. This helps us think more freely and develop reflective, relational self-awareness.
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When we talk well together, we are thinking out loud and thinking and feeling interactive. Mapping helps us reflect on the process of talking whilst comparing and contrasting each other’s ideas. We are negotiating our feelings and thoughts and this quality of conversation opens our minds, training them to be in more reflective dialogue. Mapping helps enable an open quality of listening together and keep track of where the conversation is going.
When we recap and review the conversation through the words written spontaneously on the map to keep track of it, we can shape where our discussions go. We can share control of our thinking and feeling. We have less chance of getting lost or going somewhere we don’t want to go. Better conversations bring out better thinking and space to navigate and negotiate our values and beliefs. We can see patterns of interaction from the stories we tell each other of our memories and experiences. These patterns of interaction can help in the moment for the local story, but they can also serve as a template to see the same pattern with variations in other stories and other people’s lives. Mapping and talking in these ways, helps us live with complexity and maintain and develop empathy for each other despite our differences of background or context.
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Ultimately mapping and talking helps improve our reflective capacity through enabling our ability to hover and shimmer, zoom in and out between picture and detail, make links between past and present, self and others, one part of our lives and another part.