Do You Really Have To Use Memory Systems?

Hey guys! I want to talk about something that I think everyone is kind of really feeling when they sign up for a memory course or memory training,  but they don’t always verbalize it.

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One of my coaching clients said to me last week,

“Ron, I really don’t want to get better at remembering numbers or decks of cards or words. I just want my natural memory to be better. In other words, I want to remember when I make a mistake that I will do better next time and avoid making that same mistake again. I just really want my natural memory to be better. I’m not really wanting to go through this process you do to memorize numbers or cards or words or that kind of stuff.”

And my response to that is, I think that’s what everybody wants. In reality, when somebody signs up for my memory class or they search a youtube video on memory training, I think that’s what we’re all wanting. We’re all wanting this overall sense or magic and I hate to use the word magical, but almost a magical improvement in our memory. We all want a natural good gift at memory and I think that’s not going to happen. Here’s a scenario:

Let’s say you want to play baseball and you go to your baseball coach and he says “Okay, to throw the ball on the third base, you need to put your arm back here and put your toe here and twist this way and throw like that” and he’s giving you all these directions, and you say “No, I don’t want to put my toe here and my arm there, and I don’t want to do that, I just want to be naturally able to throw it there.”

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My question to you, is this, “Can you naturally throw the baseball to first base, accurately right now?” If the answer to that is no, then you’re going to have to do these steps.

With memory training, do you naturally have a great memory already? With no work, with no system? If the answer to that is “yes,” then fantastic, but if the answer to that is “no,” then you’re going to have to use a memory system.

If you want to remember just everyday details of life, my suggestion is the Mind Palace, which is where you memorize a map of your home and the rooms in your home and then you take whatever you want to memorize and visualize it as a picture.

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Now everything is going to be different, you’re not going to put everything in the Mind Palace, but you are going to need to go through the process of visualization, the process of storing the data in a location, whether it’s in a Mind Palace or some other way, in the process of review. So if you naturally can throw the baseball to first base, then you don’t need to do this, but if you naturally can’t, this is the process you use to memorize anything.

Sometimes it is names or numbers or decks of cards, and sometimes it is a life lesson. When you have that life lesson that you want to memorize, my suggestion to you is to create an image about it or a story, a real cartoon image and see it interacting with the location where it happened.

If you are at a restaurant, and you said something that maybe offended somebody, and you don’t want to say that again, turn it into a cartoon, and visualize that cartoon inside that restaurant. The restaurant becomes the location that holds the experience in your mind.

Food photography - Park Restaurant, Westmount, Quebec. April 2012.

So you do have to use a memory system, I hope this answers the question, it’s kind of a dirty little secret about memory training, when somebody purchases my memory training course, that’s what they’re really wanting but nobody really verbalized it until my friend verbalized it to me last week. Kudos to you Ben for verbalizing what everybody is thinking. Yes, I do believe you have to use a system of a process of visualization if you don’t naturally have a good memory.

To learn more about memory training, Watch the video below: