How improving your memory is the key to demonstrating business expertise

By memory expert Chester Santos, on how improving your memory is the key to demonstrating business expertise.

Even in the Google age, remembering certain things can give you a huge advantage in business. You’ll definitely find an edge if you’re able to recall important business-related facts and figures, if you can give presentations from memory using little or no notes, if you remember foreign language vocabulary easily, and recall people’s names and other things about them.

Most of the techniques I teach originated with the ancient Greeks. Back then, everyone was educated in what was called the “art of memory”. But somehow, that got lost over time. Nowadays, we’re expected to remember a lot of information, but we’re never taught how to remember it. With a little application, however, and using my three step process, you’ll be able to improve your professional knowledge and demonstrate your expertise. The bottom line is this: we always want to do business with the person we view as being the smartest, and we view people who have razor-sharp memory ability as smart. Memory is huge in terms of how people perceive you.

Although you may not believe it, you already have an amazing memory, and with the following tips I can help you unlock your full memory potential.

Three steps to success

The first step is to visualise what you’re trying to remember. Turn it into a simple image or series of memorable images.

Once this is in your head, try to involve additional senses. The more senses involved, the more of your brain you’ll be using and the more connections in your mind to the information you’ll be building, so it will be much easier to remember.

Next, use your creativity and imagination to make what you are seeing and experiencing in your mind crazy and unusual. This is important so that you can take advantage of the psychological aspect of your memory – images that have an impact on us psychologically and that graphically hold our attention are much easier to remember.

Let’s put the three principles that I just described above into practice and use them to commit to memory the following random list of words: monkey, iron, rope, kite, house, paper, shoe, worm, envelope, pencil, river, rock, tree, cheese, euro.

To memorise the word list, I’d like you to relax and have fun while visualising the “story” that I describe. Just see it happening to the best of your ability almost like a cartoon or movie playing in your head.

Firstly, picture a monkey. This monkey is dancing around making noises. The monkey next picks up an iron. The iron starts to fall, but a rope attaches itself to the iron. You look up the rope and see the other end attached to a kite. The kite now smashes into a house. You notice that the house is covered in paper. A shoe appears out of nowhere and start to walk on the paper. The shoe smells bad, so you look inside to find a worm crawling around. The worm now for some reason jumps into an envelope. A pencil starts to write on the envelope. That pencil now jumps into a river with a huge splash. You notice that the river is crashing into a giant rock. The rock flies out of the river and crashes into a tree. This tree is growing cheese! A euro now flies out of each piece of cheese.

Read through the story just one more time while visualising everything described. Now, go ahead and recite all the random words from memory by simply going through the story in your mind and recalling each major object that you encounter. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is.

What’s in a name?

You’ve just learned the “story method”, and it’s one of many powerful techniques for improving your ability to remember things. It’s important to note that the images in the story can represent much more than random words. The images could, for instance, remind you of key points to a speech or presentation that you need to give.

The principles applied in using the story method can also be applied to helping you get better at remembering names, crucial in business networking.

So, if you meet a woman named Jane with beautiful hair, you might imagine that her hair is made of chains that are clacking together making a loud noise. The next time you see Jane and notice her hair, the imagery of the chains will come back to you and chain might effectively remind you of Jane. If you meet a man named Mike with large eyes, you might imagine a microphone or mic popping out of each of his eyes.

Although this might seem a bit strange, going through this exercise when trying to commit a person’s name to memory is going to help you recall the name later.

Practice makes perfect

One handy memory trick to use in conjunction with the tips above is to review important information just before you go to sleep. You’ll wake up the next morning knowing the information much better than you did the day before.

Your memory is your secret weapon – invest a little time developing memory skills and you can soon be enjoying more success in your career.

Chester Santos is a world leading memory skills expert, speaker and author See http://www.InternationalManofMemory.com for more information.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking