Visual Language

One of the major elements that widen cultural gaps between people is the multitude of languages spoken across this continent. Stop thinking for a second and go back to your thoughts as your eyes approached this article. Can you recollect what exactly were the words scrolling across your mind as you began to read? Can you recollect in what language were these words? Chances are that if your native language is not English then you might have been talking to yourself, in your mind, in the language of your childhood. That is the language of our thoughts.

Many of us, especially in North America speak more than one language. In the business world the language of the day may be English but in our heads we communicate in Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, Hindi or Malaysian.  That is because the basic building blocks of our early learning were assembled kinesthetically, and all these kinesthetic inputs are labeled in the language that our mothers spoke.

The downside of such a situation in the mostly English speaking world is that every time a Chinese thinking, English speaking person speaks to English thinking, English speaking person his thoughts need to go through a translation process in his own head. This translating process is tedious, strenuous and can cause errors in communications.

Several years ago, in Hong Kong, I was in a sales meeting with an apparel buyer from the USA. These meetings would take hours and we would go through numerous designs, specifications and pricings in many different ways.  Halfway through our discussions I’d be exhausted while he was alert and raring to go. I was taken aback when he asked me, “Raju, what language are you thinking in?”   I realized that when it came to analyzing figures and specifications, I was thinking in English but when it came to making decisions which required an emotional input, my mind would unconsciously switch to my native tongue. These mental switches in thinking and the communicating would leave me much more exhausted and strained than him during our interactions.

Today, brain research tells us that not only do we shift to the language of our childhood when it comes to emotional matters but we also largely think in pictures when we think across languages. The basic building blocks of our language were generated through touch and vision. 

Therefore to ease the strain of shifting from one language to another in our thoughts, it would help if we recognized that pictures are a universal language. It will help if we can do a lot of our idea generation, problem solving and decision making with pictures. The words ‘manok’ in Tagalog, ‘murgha’ in Hindi or ‘kwe’ in Chinese conjure up the image of the same chicken. A picture does speak a thousand words.

The art and science of Mind Mapping® as originated by Tony Buzan largely depends on converting information, thoughts and feelings into a multi-colored, two dimensional picture of our thinking process. It makes cross-cultural business meetings, problem solving and planning a breeze