Changing States across many slides with one variable?

Hi,

I am creating a course with Storyline with 2 menus- a slide with a main menu and a menu on the left hand side of each slide.  Learner can choose which way they want to navigate through the course.

If a learner clicks on topic 3 (for example) using the side menu found on the left hand side of each slide, we would like for all the topic 3s on every slide to be marked as visited. (Is this even possible?)

I tried creating several variables (I tried a true/false and number variable) so that if the variable changes (either to true or if it is greater than 1 when any of topic 3 are clicked) then all the topic 3 should change status.

So my triggers on each slide look like this:

Slide Triggers

Changes state of Topic 3 to Visited when variable changes

Object triggers

-Set variable equal to true when user clicks [on topic 3]

-Jump to slide 3 when user clicks [topic 3]

However, this is not working.  What has been happening is topic 3 on the slide I clicked on topic 3 is changing to visited.

Any suggestions?  What am I doing wrong?