Many of us believe that various thinking techniques can be mainly applied to some professional field. At work we long for better organization of meetings, process of generating ideas and collective decision-making. At the same time, we seem quite slow at applying our skills to personal issues. We spend hours reflecting on problems and analyzing facts. We keep thinking over them in our minds instead of sitting down for five minutes to sketch pros and cons or brainstorm a solution.



However, problems we face in daily life may turn more complex and important than professional ones. The solutions we find may seriously influence such vital issues like family well-being, health and plainly personal happiness. The brainstorming and mind mapping techniques are quite helpful in finding answers to many personal questions. Brainstorming is a technique simple by essence. It is based on the concept of relaxing and freeing your mind from any critical judgments in order to generate as many ideas, solutions or variants as possible for a short period of time. They may as well be variants of solutions to your problem, list of your strong sides or just ideas as for a picnic. Whatever the topic is, brainstorming allows generating of maximum number of diverse ideas: funny, non-standard, and sometimes even crazy ones. Work with mind maps is another good method for memorizing large amount of information, for analyzing numerous variants and their possible outcomes to help you make the only right decision. Mind map is a kind of tree full of ideas. In the center there is main topic with spreading branches which represent related ideas. Main branches may have their own child branches. Both brainstorming and mindmapping techniques suggest a more creative approach to solving personal issues. They help to make your life and your relations a lot brighter and far more interesting. And finally, they help focus on the field that constantly evades our attention and find the long awaited balance between our work and personal life. The use of thinking techniques for solving problems minimizes negative emotions and helps us get focused on search for solutions and not on the problem itself. The search process is positive by itself and helps eliminate negative emotions connected with the problem. There can be many applications for these techniques in our life. Here are just some of them:

- Set goals;

- Generate methods for achieving goals;

- Create a plan for career development;

- Analyze one's week and strong sides;

- Generate a celebration speech;

- Choose a present for a friend;

- and many other.