An excerpt from Dr. Wagner’s speech about mind mapping

3 main advantages of taking notes using mind mapping:

A mind mapping is a diagram of how your brain learns, understands, stores, and hen retrieves information. Your brain doesn’t know what to do with isolated pieces of data, or even facts, unless it can relate the new information to somehow it already understands. Associations can be made to past experiences, similar information, a connection to feelings or senses experienced before, or an analogy that just helps explain something new.

• When you draw or diagram the new information showing how it is related or connect to older information you help your brain…and later when you need to remember you will be able to do so much easier.
• Another advantage of mind mapping is to take complex information or a long speech or article and organize it for understanding, for picking out the most important points, for getting down to its essence.
• Finally taking notes as a mind map keeps the writing to a minimum allowing you to pay attention to the speaker and the meaning of the words rather than rushing to write everything down. It even lets you keep eye contact and pay attention to body language which can often be more telling than he words.

A response from an audience member: “I can’t wait to share mind mapping with my business partners and my family, too. I believe my children can use this to study and do better on tests.”

Critical Thinking - What You Need From Your Brain in Professional/Business Situations

You are being paid to think! In fact to think better, clearer, more logically,more critically and more creatively… and that is why you are a project manager. So what are you doing to continually improve your thinking? Come away with tools that will help you for the rest of your life.

Thinking more critically and knowing it gives you more confidence in your decisions.

Thinking more critically and being able to demonstrate it gives others more confidence in you.

Your results will be better decisions, more self-confidence, and more respect at work. Isn’t that worth an hour or so of your time?

An excerpt from Dr. Wagner’s speech about Emotional Intelligence:

How would you like to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence and your Social Intelligence?

When I was in school (too long ago) in 3rd or 4th grade, we all had to take something called The IQ Test. At that time we all were under the impression that the results of the IQ test were immutable and predicted how well we would do in school as a result of how ‘intelligent’ we were. It was thought that IQ was determined at birth and not learned. Nature, not nurture, was thought to cause the level of IQ.

A lot has come to light and changed since that time. One thing we have found out is that reading to and teaching children from a very young age will make them more successful in school subjects. Also, the IQ test was in a way self-fulfilling since it primarily tested logic-mathematics and verbal skills which are the dominant subjects in school.

A very important area of progress in the subject of intelligence has come from the research into the subject of multiple intelligences.

Social intelligence refers to your ability to recognize and understand others well. It includes your ability to listen effectively and so that the other person feels listened to. It also includes being able to read body language and tone of voice for the message beyond the words or perhaps instead of the words when they contradict each other.

Emotional intelligence is a measure of how well you recognize and manage your own emotions and reactions. This doesn’t mean you have to conceal your emotions, only that you not let them take over how you manage yourself based on the situation.

A comment from an audience member: “I’ve known people who had high IQs but didn’t know how to work well with co-workers. Now I understand what was going on.”