A mind map of, uh, my mind

Last year at work, my supervisor directed me to start using the standard processes/workflows as the rest of the team, and I started getting more requests to attend meetings.

I had been part of another organization for about twenty years before having my old organization merged into this other organization.  Before becoming a new addition to this team, I had been a team of one with the luxury of independence and the benefit of streamlining my processes to the max to get as much stuff done as humanly possible all by my lonesome (read: agile, not fragile.)

Suddenly, and strangely to me, the change in process and the demand to attend more meetings turned into strangely huge challenges for me (they still are.)

Although the processes/workflows felt like the clock had been turned back to the early nineties, I could make peace with it all by treating it as just a problem to solve.  I'd figure out some workarounds while working within the boundaries.

So why was I still anxious about changes processes/workflows?  My first reaction was: "Oh no, have I become resistant to change?"  That really worried me.

And why would I be so anxious about meetings?  I like all of these folk, so what's the problem?

Needing to do some introspection, I dug deep and tried to relate these anxieties to other times I've felt the same way, and I tried to identify things that seem to defuse those anxieties.  Although I didn't yet know of the word "intertwingularity", I knew I had way too much interconnected/interrelated fragments of information swirling up in my sponge to make any sense of it.

So I decided to put together a diagram, a mind map of, what it would turn into, things about how my mind works:

(Click on the drawing to view it full screen)

This turned into an amazingly therapeutic exercise.  I found immense relief having the jumbled mess (the intertwingularity) in my head visually laid out in an organized way such that I could start really making sense of it.

The bonus:  this map now provides me with substantial material, to blog about.  So you and I have a fairly good idea about the scope/purpose/direction of this blog.

YES !!!