First published 17th January 2011
Happy New Year and I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas. How did you get on with The Thinking Consultancy’s Christmas quiz and are you thinking about going on Who wants to be a millionaire this year?!
If you’re like most of the people who received the quiz you probably got 50 - 60% right on your first attempt. However, when you returned and tried again these subsequent visits saw you getting 90 - 95% correct.
What’s interesting is that out of the 100 questions asked you knew the answer to nearly all of them, but you could not recall them when first asked! How many times did you look up the answer and say out loud “I knew that!” So - to use an expression used on our reading and memory courses -“You knew it but did not know that you knew it!”
This statement is a true reflection of what happens and often we get frustrated that we haven’t recalled something especially if we are studying for examinations or we are striving for excellence in our jobs where we have to recall significant amounts of information. How can we acquire, manage and retrieve information? The key is:
1 Learn what you need to learn
2 Have a strategy for memorising information
3 Trust your memory
Learn what you need to learn
In business you acquire most critical information from what you read. Other information is mostly supportive. If, when you are reading documents you give as much attention to information of low importance to that of high importance, you are simply wasting time. There are 5 categories of information that are critical:
1 Information that directly affects you
2 Information that directly affects your boss
3 Information that directly affects your staff
4 Information that directly affects your team
5 Information that directly affects your department
Information you come across outside any of the above may be interesting but it’s only of use to you if it gives you a political advantage within your company.
Have a strategy for memorising information
There are as many strategies for remembering as there are people who need to remember - unfortunately they are not all reliable. A simple example is spelling.
Good spellers store a picture of the word and then, when needed, visualise the word and pick off the letters one at a time. Did you know that visual spellers can also spell words backwards!
Auditory spellers spell the word as they hear it but that does not always work. For example, expenses or expences, consider or concider? All sound correct, but the second spelling in each example is wrong. And auditory spellers rely on hearing the word and, as they cannot see it, they cannot spell it backwards.
When we work with teenagers we teach, where necessary, the NLP Spelling Strategy. They are, perhaps understandably, completely dumbfounded when have them spell complex words, both correctly and backwards. Try spelling incomprehensible or dyslexia backwards!
Note taking, especially Mind Mapping, are excellent aids for improving your memory. There are other techniques, including Image Streaming and ‘eye accessing cues’ from NLP that we cover on our memory and reading programme. My favourite though is where I would get you to recall the Morse Code in less than 60 minutes! (Mind Mapping is a trade Mark owned by Tony Buzan)
Trust your memory
In Who Wants to be a Millionaire a contestant, who is already in line to win a large sum of money, often gets stuck on a question. Then, after some deliberation, they decide to stop and take the money.
Before handing over the cheque, Chris Tarrant asks what their answer would have been. Have you noticed how often the contestants are told that if they had given that as their answer, they would have doubled their money? They knew the answer but did not trust their memory.
Those who are successful in life trust their memory and if you think about it why shouldn’t they?!
On our Quantum ReadingÔ programmes we devote lot of time convincing clients, or should I say letting clients convince themselves, of the quality and reliability of their memory. After all we are all born with a perfect memory!
Normal, healthy people ‘forget’ because:
1. forgetting is a convenient life strategy
2. they had not remembered it in the first place
3. they do not have a strategy for recalling what they have remembered
If you would like to trust your memory, and get 100% in this year’s quiz, please contact me!
