Ready to have a go at creating a concept diagram of your own? You can use a timer for this if you wish, but you might find it easier to go with the flow. Once you’re clear on the concept you want to illustrate, simply brain-dump onto paper – or better still onto post-it notes – what elements need to be included in your model. Then look them over –

Having established your agency, your capacity to take meaningful action, the obvious question becomes: what action will you take?

Think about something you need to produce that you’d usually look up online: a presentation, a report, a job description, a meal plan. Instead of reaching for the search box, pause a second. Grab a notepad and pen instead, and spend six minutes or so freewriting about what it is you want to achieve. Who is this for and what do they need? What’s the

What story am I telling myself about this?

Brian Eno put it beautifully: ‘If you want to end up somewhere different it is a good idea to start somewhere different.’2 What we’re doing here is giving you somewhere completely different to start, and that does something magical to your brain.

As you’ve already discovered, the process of sketching out your ideas visually gives you a different perspective to that of writing them out in a linear way. Not necessarily better, just different, and in the exploratory phase you want as many different ways of understanding your material as possible, because each new angle you try will show you so

Often the truth relates to our most fundamental needs, for example for recognition, safety, freedom and so on. Learning to identify our own ‘fingerprint needs’ (as Alice Sheldon calls them2) can

What’s my biggest advantage here? (Follow up: And am I making full use of it?)

We are what psychologists term ‘a society of selves’: