Tip Thursday - Learning for Success

Our jobs typically require us to learn vast amounts of information, often having to read and try to retain as much as possible.  Most of us fall back on 'learning' skills we picked up in school, such as highlighting and re-reading important points. Research, however, indicates that this is all wrong! (figures!)

One study showed that students who read an article and were quizzed on what they read retained over 50% more of the information even a week later than those who simply read it.  You don't have to rely on a teacher or boss to quiz you over your learning... use self quizzes to help you gauge and improve your retention of the information.

A small trick that can help you learn better and faster - now THAT's a Success Tip!

Tip Thursday - Improving your Memory

As it turns out, your memory operates similar to a Camcorder.  if you don't turn on the record button then it doesn't matter where you point the lens, you won't have a record of what you saw. When it comes to your memory, attending to a conversation or lecture is not enough to positively impact your recall.  You need to 'turn on' your memory prior to engaging. In essence, knowing that you will want to remember something, prior to experiencing it, significantly improves your memory and recall of that information. So next time you are listenign to something you feel could be important... make sure you push that mental 'record' button first!

Building a Memory Palace

In working with business presenters, one of the big hurdles many need to overcome is their dependency upon notes. Whether fully typewritten sheets or even cue cards, a speaker's reliance on referencing their notes creates a distance between themselves and their audience that often proves difficult to breach. In an effort to rid themselves of the dreaded paper crutch, many will work to memorize their speech word for word, line by line, which leaves them typically sounding robotic and fully at a loss if they lose their mental place.

Instead, there is value in learning new methods for remembering 'what comes next' in your speech and the Memory Palace is one such method.  In fact it is one of the most widely used mnemonics (memory aids) out there.  The Memory Palace is, quite simply, a way of structuring your thoughts in your mind that you need to remember.

Let's take a look at the how-to's of constructing a Palace of your own...

Create a Blueprint

Although your Palace is technically a place in your mind, you may find it easiest to begin building yours based on a room or building you are already familiar and comfortable with.  You may start with a basic palace that is only one room, to start, making it as detailed as possible.  The more detailed the room (building) the more 'stuff' you can stuff into it!

Plan your Route

Typically we need to remember things in a certain order, such as when we are giving a speech.  If so, then we need to ensure that we follow a predefined route through our palace so that we pass our memory triggers in order.  If your palace is just one room then your route may be as simple as entering, turning left and walking around the room in a circle.  

Identify your Storage Spots

Every item within your castle serves as a storage receptacle of information.  As you walk through your palace you will anchor different ideas and concepts, different parts of your speech, various facts with different objects along your route.  This is why you want to spend time upfront making your palace as detailed as you can.  Each item in your palace effectively becomes a storage bin of information.  

Memorize your Palace

In order for your Palace to be truly effective, you need to ensure that you can recall it perfectly. To help your mind become clear about the contents it is helpful to draw out your palace blueprint, highlighting the storage locations you have chosen.  You can then test your recall by visualizing your palace and checking your mental recall against the map to determine if you have remembered everything and in the order you want.  Again, the more detailed you make each storage item (colour, size, feel, smell...) the easier you will find you will be able to recall it.  

Now Start Storing

Once you feel comfortable with your Palace and the storage spots you have placed in it you are ready to begin storing information into it.  Here you want to place a manageable amount of information into each item without overloading it.  If you have some items that need to be kept separate from others then ensure that you put them into separate places.  If you are delivering a speech and reach a point where you have three key points to make you may want to highlight that by placing each point into a different, but similar item, such as one of three paintings on the wall, one of three candlesticks, etc. 

Know that you don't have to continually keep adding to your palace, your rooms and objects can be 're-used' once you no longer need to recall the previously stored information.  

Get Creative

A speaker friend of mine has a number of key speeches that he delivers numerous times.  He has found it useful to create a Picture Gallery within his palace.  In essence, each painting in his gallery represents a different speech he delivers.  He paints a visual painting for each speech which contains all of the preset triggers he needs to remember each speech.  To help him with this he uses other mnemonic devices to help him, including the use of symbols and images, that evoke larger concepts. Many of these images will prove unique to you and are often based on your past experiences.  He has become so proficient at anchoring his speeches that he can stroll up to any painting and, by simply mentally looking at the painting, he can deliver a full hour without any refresher!

Explore your Palace

When you have created your palace you need to visit it periodically, even when it is not formally in use.  The more you explore your palace the more comfortable you will become with its structure and contents, thus making it easier to recall them.  My speaker friend above takes regular walks through his Picture Gallery which serves to refresh his memory of his various speeches and talks.  He ensures he is familiar with the landscape of each of the paintings he has created and is therefore ready to deliver any of them at a moment's notice.

Take a Virtual Tour

Okay, I know this is somewhat crazy sounding, asking you to take a Virtual tour of a Virtual reality, but I'm likening this to when you are house-hunting and viewing a walking video of the prospective home online.  Research shows us that we remember things better when we mentally take note of the need to remember something, prior to its occurring.  It serves to have our minds turn on mental videotape and enhances our recall.  Use this when touring through your palace, consciously walking through with your virtual camcorder in hand.  

Speeches and presentations are obvious uses for your Memory Palace but so too are the details of your latest project, facts and figures you need to recall, information that is important for you to access quickly.  If you find it impossible to second-guess what information the boss may ask for at the next meeting you may want to begin building your palace and storing all relevant information into it - ensuring that you always have access to whatever they may ask for just one virtual step away.

Colouring: Not Just for Pre-Schoolers!

Colour Psychology can tell us a lot about what colour to paint the office, depending upon what emotions and behaviours we want to drive. Savvy retail spaces use colour as a strategic design element to enhance the customer experience.  Most of us know a little about this and likely have intuitively used some colour psychology when selecting the paint colours for the walls in our home.  Granted, we may have consciously simply selected the colour we 'liked', but we know that our subconscious choice was based more upon how the colour made us feel than simply on how it looked.

However, few of us strategically use colour in our day-to-day business processes... but we should!  If you
are anything like other business leaders, you likely find yourself in numerous meetings each week, if not each day.  In order to keep ourselves on track we typically will take notes during each meeting, to ensure we have a record and reference of what information was shared, what actions were agreed upon etc.   Unfortunately though, we rarely go back and read through our notes and, when we do, we are overwhelmed by the volume of information and give up on making sense of it.

Research into mind-mapping though is now also indicating that we should be using colour to 'code' the notes we are taking.  It seems that not only does using colour improve our recall time but it can also save us reviewing time and serve to form some connections between ideas we might have missed otherwise.

Here's the basic premise...

• If you are using mind-mapping techniques as your preferred note-taking style, then using different colours to separate the various 'branches' of your map will help stimulate the creative side of your brain, which helps to create a stronger visual recall of the contents.  
• Using colour with any form of note-taking helps you to stay focused on more boring topics - longer. Adding that dash of colour serves to liven notes up, instantly making them more memorable and interesting.  Easier to find and review later.
• Many who use colour during note-taking assign specific meanings to various colours.  For instance, Black for general information, Blue for client's comments, Red for immediate action items and Green for new ideas.
• Lawyers have used colour-coding for their notes forever, learning the technique early-on in law school.  Rather than writing with different coloured pens, they will use highlighting to capture key information: Red for holdings of a case, Green for general law, Yellow for Facts, and so on.  This allows them to see the ways that their cases are structured and significantly enhances their recall of the case information.  Note though that you must be selective in your highlighting... colouring everything fails to offer any kind of distinction or time saving.  

I have long used colours when creating my mind maps and also use different coloured pens in my Desk-Journal - a book that I keep on my desk to jot down all of the bits and pieces of information that cross my desk (and my mind) each day.  Quotes I resonate with, small clips of information, book recommendations, fun facts, key insights, questions I want to address later... all get recorded in the journal, which I flip through periodically. All the thoughts are located in one place, avoiding them getting lost (which used to happen when I always wrote them on sticky notes!) and the journal itself serves as a great reference and motivational tool. The picture on this blog is a photo taken of one of my journal pages.

Regardless of how you intend to use them, you might want to consider adding a little colour to your life and to your notes!  Another skill learned in Kindergarten that serves you well in business.

 

Doorways and Forgetfulness

We have all had the experience of walking into a new room in our home, on a mission to get something, and... we completely forget what we were looking for!  We look around, typically in vain,searching for something to jog our memories, something that will serve to remind us what we were looking for.  Before blaming the lapse on your misspent youth and the number of brain cells you inadvertently killed off in the pursuit of a party, research offers a unique perspective.

It was the doorway.  Walking through doorways empties your mind and causes forgetting.  Really!

According to research conducted by Gabriel Radvansky and his associates, doorways create a disruption in our situational models, our internal pictures of our environments.  In their experiments (both real and virtual) they asked participants to pick up objects and move them from one table to another, picking up a new object and moving it to another table.  The distance travelled from table to table was consistent and the participants could not see tables and objects left behind from one table to another.  Periodically they would be asked about the object they were carrying and the object they had just put down.  

Whether in virtual environments or the physical reality, when people walked through a doorway they had more difficulty not only remembering the object they had just put down, but the object they were carrying as well.  Radvansky also studied whether returning to the original room served as a memory jogger, re-instating memory.  As it turns out... not really.

It seems that we construct situational models of our environment.  They are not particularly specific because we are living in that environment currently.  We don't need to hold a strong mental map of it because we can check in with our environment at any time to pick up more details.  These situational models include not only information about the environment we are in, but also some vague information about ourselves within that environment (including insights into what we are carrying and doing).  Doorways though are entrances into new environments which require us to construct a new situational model.  This new model erases and over-writes the pre-existing model... causing us to 'forget'.

Changing the environment causes us to lose hold of the vague information that we have loosely been holding in our heads.  Walking through the doorway causes us to replace this vague concept with another vague concept.  Not early-onset Alzheimer's at all... just the doorway.  So... the next time you are walking behind me and I pause just before walking through a doorway...  know that I am not doing it to drive you crazy, just taking a mental note, reminding myself why I was going through that doorway in the first place!