Faith Venture

Jerry Lucas brought his traveling memory show to Sidney, Ohio this week. He has a calling from God to develop his techniques for memorization to change and improve education of people. One session dealt with remembering people. Lucas’ unique contribution is to turn everything you need to remember into pictures based on the theory that you remember tangible objects better than concepts.

However, his system has a few basic components apart from the memory aid. These are things you should be doing anyway. First, listen. The famous baseball figure/philosopher Yogi Berra once said (so the story goes), “You can hear a lot just by listening.” Where is your mind when you meet someone and you are given their name? Is your mind on them, your attention focused on them? Or is your attention more on what you are going to say to them? So, first pay attention to the person you are meeting. Listen as they say their name.

Next, observe. What do they look like? Notice unique things about appearance or facial characteristics. In other words, pay attention to them.

The thing is, Lucas works very hard at remembering. He puts a lot of energy into it. He has a list of people that he needs to remember. He reviews the list, which by the way has notes on appearance, the picture he formed to remember them and other notes. That’s not a bad idea. You might think it’s a lot of work, but only the setting up of the list is hard. The reviewing only takes a few minutes a day/week. I have over 2,700 names in my contact database. I don’t do the picture thing that Lucas developed. But I review the entire database periodically. Some I’ve never met, but if I have, I try to picture them. That way I remember.

While I was thinking about this process, I started to reflect on the example of Jesus. He had the ability to focus on the person, even when they interrupted him while he was on the way to do something else. He could take in everything about a person. How do you think he did that? By giving complete attention to the person he was with. That’s a good example to follow.

Tags: attention, focus, lifestyle

This entry was posted on October 28, 2010 at 7:12 am and is filed under Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.