Geo-Emotional Mapping – really?

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Geo-Emotional Mapping – really? How to gain clarity from the past to facilitate our success in the future. Metaphorically speaking we all travel along our own River of Life. Yet how often do we step out of the river and take a good look back at our journey? And when we do, how do we learn from it and take those lessons to move us forward with positivity and strength? In fact, does looking back actually help us to move forward?

I have always been a ‘live in the moment, looking forward’ kind of person. Whilst that has its merits, I was missing out on the treasure trove of lessons learned from my past experiences. Yes, my subconscious mind had them all stored away, yet I could not see them clearly, or use them effectively to grow and develop, particularly in my business.

Do you have a clear understanding of who you are, the journey you have been on and how the lessons your experience has taught you can serve you in the future? Do you know how to get that?

How did I get that clarity?

A few months ago, I took a journey of enlightenment. I was taken through a methodology that enabled me to look back at my life’s journey by mapping my life’s pivotal moments in terms of emotions, rather than just as events and dates. My personal and professional life were changed instantly for the better.

So, how will the methodology of Geo-Emotional Mapping make that difference for you?

As individuals, we can graphically capture our journey through our past, establish where we are now and plot a course for our future. In capturing that journey, in terms of emotions rather than a typical CV kind of record of your past, you will be able to take a step back and see, from a third-party point of view, what you have achieved, where you have struggled and what your core strengths are. 

In simple terms, you become more self-aware, of your capabilities and possibilities. You will understand the simple fact that at any moment in time you are a survivor of all that has gone before and that through all of your experience and lessons learned, you have the tools to move forward with confidence and positivity towards your own goals.

This is a creative and extraordinarily powerful methodology. A process for mapping that can be applied not just to our whole life but also specific situations, relationships and journeys, like our career, marriage or even in analysing a stand-alone project. 

As a leader, a manager of teams or a decision maker, Geo-Emotional Mapping can provide you with a tool for growth in multiple situations, for example:

  • Improving team collaboration through the sharing of personal or professional journeys
  • Developing strategies for business growth by analysing areas such as stakeholder interests, market requirements, intercultural differences, international trade etc.
  • Developing project plans as a journey towards the required outcomes
  • Analysing your business in order to develop strategies for growth

Every individual is the expert in their own life, every manager and leader is the expert in their field and their team. Therefore, how you draw your map, where you start, where you end, all of that is up to you and completely dependent on the situation you are mapping, who is taking part and what the desired outcome may be.  

Of course, every map follows a river, the River of Life.

The Methodology

First, get out your paper and colouring pens, this is fun! (Which makes it a particularly great exercise for team building!)

We choose a place to start, a real place that we associate with our earliest memories. Maybe you choose to begin before you were born, before you knew anything, a place where you were waiting or living another life. Wherever you plot the starting point on your map it tends to be either at the source of the river or in the sea.

Having chosen your starting point you then associate that place with how you felt at that time, your emotional state. You then move from reality to imagination think about a geographical feature, astronomical phenomenon or element that resonates with the emotion you felt in that moment. Finally, you combine the name of the geographical element with the emotion to create the name of the place that you will draw on your map. Yes draw, a picture of what that place looks like for you.

For example.

I might choose the sea as my starting point as I was born near the sea, on the estuary of the river, and work back up the river to the source. I don’t remember being born but as I move to imagination, I see a sunrise, a new beginning. I feel aware, I am born, I live, all summed up in the emotion of ‘awareness’. So, I name this starting point on my River of Life ‘the Sunrise of Awareness’. And I draw my interpretation of the sunrise.

Honestly no artistic talent is required, as long as you know what you mean!

In this way you continue to plot the key events of your life along the river, sometimes stepping onto the bank, maybe taking a diversion along a tributary, but always coming back to the flow of the river.

To help you on your journey we give you some geographical places, phenomena and features along with different emotional states you might experience. We do this in two wheels. No rules, you can use these or make up your own places and emotions. Whatever works for you. The key here is to both visualise a place in your mind’s eye and really take notice of your emotions, how you feel in that moment in time.

We travel through our past, into our present and onto our future, and beyond, plotting those pivotal moments in terms of the geo-emotional names we have given each place. Thus, we create the Geo-Emotional Map of our River of Life.

So, how will creating my Geo-Emotional Map help me? I hear you ask.

Now this is where the real power is. You share your map. Either one to one with someone you trust or in a group situation. 

The way you do this, is as if you were telling the story of your life, talking about each place on your map in terms of how you felt, what you learned there and how it affected you. As you tell the story you will feel slightly detached from it and this is good. It means you will be taking a more objective view of your life story and so will see things more clearly.

It may seem odd that creating a map full of your emotions can actually become a way of detaching from those emotions, yet it really works. 

And so, as you share your map you understand, discover, realise and see so much about yourself that you may not have been able to see clearly before. 

Hearing others share their maps also helps you to understand two key things, 1. We all go through very similar things and 2. You are not alone. This makes it a particularly magic exercise for team building.

So how does that help you to grow and become more significant?

As an individual, when you draw your map, you begin with your past up to your present then you continue into the future thinking about what you want to achieve. In the sharing of your map, you look again at the future places you have plotted but this time with the knowledge and understanding you have gained from sharing your past and present places. 

As mentors we ask you to consider how you will achieve that success, that course of action, that dream, that goal? What have you learned about yourself that will bring you the results you want? 

From that, you then record your strengths, your skills and your competencies and using these, draw up a strategy for achieving your goals.

When you begin to understand who you are, what you are capable of and the skills and strengths you have then you are so much better able to plot a course towards future growth and significance in your life. 

For leaders and managers, your mapping sessions will be specific to certain situations, projects and challenges and so the analysis is going to be a little different. You will be identifying the strengths and skills of your team, or the successes of your business to date and how to build on those, or even analysing how a project should proceed based on the discoveries made about the stakeholders, client, markets etc. 

Metaphorically speaking we all travel along our own River of Life. Yet how often do we step out of the river and take a good look back at our journey? And when we do, how do we learn from it and take those lessons to move us forward with positivity and strength? In fact, does looking back actually help us to move forward?

I have always been a ‘live in the moment, looking forward’ kind of person. Whilst that has its merits, I was missing out on the treasure trove of lessons learned from my past experiences. Yes, my subconscious mind had them all stored away, yet I could not see them clearly, or use them effectively to grow and develop, particularly in my business.

Do you have a clear understanding of who you are, the journey you have been on and how the lessons your experience has taught you can serve you in the future? Do you know how to get that?

How did I get that clarity?

A few months ago, I took a journey of enlightenment. I was taken through a methodology that enabled me to look back at my life’s journey by mapping my life’s pivotal moments in terms of emotions, rather than just as events and dates. My personal and professional life were changed instantly for the better.

So, how will the methodology of Geo-Emotional Mapping make that difference for you?

As individuals, we can graphically capture our journey through our past, establish where we are now and plot a course for our future. In capturing that journey, in terms of emotions rather than a typical CV kind of record of your past, you will be able to take a step back and see, from a third-party point of view, what you have achieved, where you have struggled and what your core strengths are. 

In simple terms, you become more self-aware, of your capabilities and possibilities. You will understand the simple fact that at any moment in time you are a survivor of all that has gone before and that through all of your experience and lessons learned, you have the tools to move forward with confidence and positivity towards your own goals.

This is a creative and extraordinarily powerful methodology. A process for mapping that can be applied not just to our whole life but also specific situations, relationships and journeys, like our career, marriage or even in analysing a stand-alone project. 

As a leader, a manager of teams or a decision maker, Geo-Emotional Mapping can provide you with a tool for growth in multiple situations, for example:

  • Improving team collaboration through the sharing of personal or professional journeys
  • Developing strategies for business growth by analysing areas such as stakeholder interests, market requirements, intercultural differences, international trade etc.
  • Developing project plans as a journey towards the required outcomes
  • Analysing your business in order to develop strategies for growth

Every individual is the expert in their own life, every manager and leader are the expert in their field and their team. Therefore, how you draw your map, where you start, where you end, all of that is up to you and completely dependent on the situation you are mapping, who is taking part and what the desired outcome may be.  Of course, every map follows a river, the River of Life.

Geo-emotional mapping can make the difference.

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Ali Bagley
Ali is a Business Impact Coach, Writers Coach and a qualified Project and Proposals Manager. She is an author of guides for coaches starting out in their business and various journals and other business support books. She is also a Geographer of Emotions, helping people to grow and develop personally and professionally through the methodology of Emotional Mapping. Her background is corporate project and proposals management, leading teams winning multi-million-pound contracts in infrastructure. She went to university at 41 years old and graduated with a BA (Hons) in Business and Finance Management in 2009. She has successfully run independent businesses for many years, before and after her time in corporate, gaining great insight and understanding of the pressures that being a small business owner can bring. Throughout her career Ali has coached and written, these are her two passions. From running Weight Watchers meetings in the 1990’s to running her own businesses in Insurance and Retail, her life has been a rollercoaster of highs and lows, both personally and professionally. Ali totally embraces all of the learning experiences that have brought her to where she is today. She believes that to be able to help others achieve, you need to have learned from failure, to know joy you must first experience pain. She has been knocked down more times than she can count but has always got up again. Ali is now living her best life, full of confidence, self-belief, love and purpose. Her journey now is to bring that light and positivity into the lives of others, through her coaching and her story telling. Ali is also very proud and excited to be the Director of Business Services for Emotional Geography UK Ltd, Eliciting, Mapping and Managing Emotions.