Your First Systems Map
How to make the invisible connections visible and permanent
Picture this: You've just had a breakthrough conversation with a friend about a pattern that's been stuck in your life for years. Everything suddenly makes sense. You can see how different pieces connect, why things happen the way they do, and where you might be able to create change.
You walk away feeling enlightened and empowered.
Three days later, you can barely remember what felt so clear. The insights have gotten fuzzy. The connections that seemed obvious now feel slippery and hard to grasp. You're back to feeling confused about a pattern that you swear you understood completely just 72 hours ago.
Sound familiar?
This is the problem with keeping insights in your head - they shift, fade, and get distorted by your changing moods and perspectives. What felt like a profound revelation on Tuesday feels like wishful thinking by Friday.
The Camera for Your Mind
A systems map is like taking a photograph of your insights before they fade. It captures the connections you can see in a moment of clarity and makes them permanent, shareable, and actionable.
Think of it as creating a story map of your life patterns. Just like a detective writes down clues and draws lines between evidence to solve a case, you're going to write down the elements of your pattern and trace the connections between them.
The best part? You don't need any special software, artistic skills, or training. A piece of paper and a pen are all it takes to transform fuzzy insights into crystal-clear understanding.
The Kitchen Story That Changes Everything
Let me show you how this works with Sarah's story, and I'll walk you through exactly how she mapped her pattern using simple words and descriptions.
Sarah came to me frustrated because she could never keep her kitchen clean. She'd spend hours organizing everything perfectly, then within days it would be a disaster again. She'd tried different systems, storage solutions, even hiring a cleaning service. Nothing stuck.
When we mapped out her pattern, here's the story that emerged:
Chapter 1: Sarah feels stressed from work or life pressures.
Chapter 2: To cope with stress, Sarah decides to cook an elaborate, comforting meal. Cooking feels creative and nurturing to her.
Chapter 3: The elaborate meal requires lots of ingredients, multiple pots and pans, and complex preparation steps.
Chapter 4: After spending two hours cooking, Sarah is exhausted and just wants to eat and relax.
Chapter 5: She leaves all the dishes in the sink, promising herself she'll deal with them later.
Chapter 6: The next day, the pile of dishes feels overwhelming, so she avoids the kitchen entirely.
Chapter 7: Because the kitchen is a mess, Sarah orders takeout instead of cooking.
Chapter 8: Ordering expensive takeout makes her feel guilty about money and unhealthy eating.
Chapter 9: The guilt creates more stress, which makes her want to "reset" by cooking something elaborate and healthy.
Chapter 10: We're back to Chapter 1, and the cycle repeats.
When Sarah heard her pattern described as this ten-chapter story, she had what she called her "holy crap" moment. She could see that she wasn't lazy or disorganized - she was caught in a loop where her solution for stress was creating the very problem that generated more stress.
The Story Mapping Method
Here's how to create your own story map using the pattern you discovered in our previous exercise:
Step 1: Write Your Starting Point
Begin with the situation that kicks off your pattern. This is usually a feeling, event, or trigger that starts the whole cycle.
For Sarah: "Feeling stressed from work"
For someone always running late: "Waking up and immediately feeling behind"
For a chronic people-pleaser: "Someone asks me for a favor"
Step 2: Follow the Logical Next Step
Ask yourself: "When this happens, what do I typically do next?" Write that as Chapter 2.
Sarah's Chapter 2: "Decide to cook an elaborate meal to feel better"
Step 3: Keep Following the Chain
Continue asking "Then what happens?" and write each step as the next chapter in your story.
The key is to be specific and honest about what actually happens, not what you think should happen.
Step 4: Don't Stop at the Problem
Most people stop their story when they reach the obvious problem. Don't stop there. Keep going. What happens after the problem occurs?
Sarah didn't stop at "kitchen gets messy." She continued: avoids kitchen, orders takeout, feels guilty, gets more stressed.
Step 5: Look for the Return
Keep writing chapters until you see the story circle back to where it started. This is your loop - the engine that keeps the pattern running.
Sarah's story came full circle when guilt about takeout created more stress, leading her back to wanting to cook elaborate meals.
Step 6: Read Your Story Out Loud
Actually speak your story from beginning to end. You'll hear things you didn't notice when just thinking about it. The logic gaps, the missing steps, the places where you skipped something important.
The Three Types of Stories You'll Discover
The Boomerang Story: Your solution creates the problem it's trying to solve.
Example: Working longer hours to reduce work stress, but working longer increases stress.
The Seesaw Story: You swing between two extremes, with each extreme triggering the other.
Example: Strict dieting leads to binge eating, which leads to guilt and stricter dieting.
The Snowball Story: Small actions accumulate and eventually create a big problem that forces you to start over.
Example: Avoiding small tasks until they become a crisis that requires massive effort to resolve.
What Your Story Map Will Reveal
The Real Villain: You'll discover that your "problem" isn't the villain - it's usually a symptom. The real villain is often something much earlier in the story.
The Hidden Hero: You'll see that you're not making random bad choices - you're responding logically to each situation as it unfolds. Your behavior makes perfect sense within the story.
Multiple Plot Twists: Instead of one overwhelming change you "should" make, you'll see several places where small changes could redirect the entire story.
Why Previous Endings Failed: You'll understand why your past attempts didn't work - they were trying to change the wrong chapter of the story.
Finding Your Intervention Points
Once you have your story mapped out, look for these intervention opportunities:
Change the Opening Scene: What if the trigger that starts your pattern happened differently?
Rewrite the Middle: What if you responded differently at one key moment in the middle of the story?
Choose a Different Ending: What if you broke the cycle before it loops back to the beginning?
Sarah found several intervention points:
- New opening: Handle stress differently (exercise instead of cooking)
- Rewrite the middle: Choose simple meals when stressed (15-minute recipes instead of elaborate ones)
- Different ending: Clean as she cooks, so there's no overwhelming pile later
The Power of Hearing Your Pattern
When you describe your pattern as a story with clear chapters, something magical happens. The pattern that felt mysterious and uncontrollable becomes logical and predictable.
You shift from "Why do I keep doing this to myself?" to "Oh, I see exactly how this works."
That shift - from confusion to clarity - is the beginning of real change.
Your Story Assignment
Take the pattern you identified in our previous exercise and write it out as a story with clear chapters. Start with the trigger that begins the cycle and follow it all the way through until it loops back to the beginning.
Read your story out loud. Listen for the logic. Notice where you could change the plot.
Don't aim for the perfect story - aim for an honest one. The goal is to make the invisible visible by putting it into words that make sense whether you're reading them or hearing them spoken.
When you're done, you'll have transformed a fuzzy sense of "why this keeps happening" into a clear narrative of how it works.
That story is the beginning of rewriting your ending.
Beyond Personal Stories
The same approach works for any complex situation - family dynamics, workplace problems, relationship patterns. Every stuck situation has a story structure with characters, triggers, and plot developments that loop back on themselves.
Once you can map the story, you can see where to intervene to create a different ending.
Welcome to the world of story mapping. Once you start seeing the narrative structure of patterns, you can't unsee them - and that's when everything becomes changeable.
In our next article, we'll learn to spot and understand the feedback loops that keep these stories repeating - the hidden cycles that make problems self-perpetuating.