How to Remember Names
The ability to remember the names of people that you meet is perhaps one of the most important skills that you can develop in life. In the famous book, How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote: “A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language”. Remembering peoples’ names can help you to build better personal and business relationships. Unfortunately, however, being bad with names is a short-coming that many people claim to have. This article is here to help. If you heed all of the following advice, you may never forget a name again!
The first step to improving your ability to remember the names of people that you meet is to make it a point to immediately repeat the name of the person when you meet them. For instance, if you’ve just been introduced to someone named John, you should immediately say something along the lines of: “It’s very nice to meet you John” or “It’s a pleasure to meet you John”. You should also at some point during your interaction with the person, try to ask them a question while using their name. For example: “So John, what brings you to this meeting?” or “John, how do you know Chester?”. Doing these very simple things will force you to concentrate on and pay some attention to the person’s name, even if only for a brief moment. This will help to prevent the name from simply going in one ear and out the other.
The next simple step is to try and come up with some sort of association between the person’s name and something, anything, that you already know. For instance, if the person’s name is John, it may remind you of a toilet bowl. If the you meet a woman named Alice, you may think of Alice in Wonderland. Or you could simply think of the fact that you know someone else named John, or someone else named Alice. Any association between the name and something that you already know, will suffice to make the name more meaningful and thus increase your chances of remembering it.
Another, and perhaps most important step, is to take advantage of the power of your visual memory. Your visual memory is incredibly powerful. You’ve probably at some point in your life experienced the situation where years after meeting a person, you recognize the person, know that you’ve met and seen them somewhere before, but you can’t remember their name. The reason for this is because when you first met the person, you were able to see their face with your eyes, but you did not see their name. In order to see a person’s name, all that you have to do is visualize an image that is in some way representative of the name. The association that you came up with in step 2 might help you. For instance, if you meet someone named John, you could visualize a toilet bowl. Or if you meet someone named Alice you could visualize a white rabbit. For someone named Jane, you might think of a chain. Next, use your imagination to link the visual representation of the person’s name to an outstanding feature on the person. For example, if Alice has nice lips, you might imagine a white rabbit emerging from between her lips. To make it even more memorable, you might imagine that the rabbit starts to jump around and kiss her lips! Granted, what I’ve just described takes practice, but it is a skill that you are very capable of developing. Using this technique alone, I’ve been able to memorize and perfectly recall the names of as many as 75 people in only 15 minutes.
If you are really serious about never again forgetting the name of anyone that you meet, I further advise you to keep a sort of mental journal. This merely involves periodically performing a quick mental review of the names and faces of people that you meet. At night before you go to sleep, you should be capable of at least calling to mind a rough image of what each person that you met that day looks like. Review those images and the corresponding associations that you’ve created, and the names and faces will become locked in your mind. Be advised that such reviews will only take a few minutes or less, even if you’ve met many people that day. Doing such a review each day that you meet new people, and a similar review at the end of each week, will actually make it very difficult for you to ever forget anyone’s name.
Bio
Chester Santos is a professional speaker, coach, and corporate trainer on memory improvement and mental fitness. He has helped thousands of people around the world to realize the benefits of an improved memory and sharper mind. Chester is also the 2008 USA National Memory Champion. For more information, see: http://www.ChesterSantos.net
Copyright © 2009 Chester Santos. All rights reserved.
