Tidy Up!

The best way to improve your memory is to tidy up your mind. Instead of having a mind like a library full of books scattered around the floor, we can proactively and retrospectively go through our minds and tidy the thoughts up. We can put our memories in some sort of sensible order so that when we want to search our memories for facts, thoughts or ideas for our creative processes, we can actually get to them. Have you ever had a friend or relative remind you of a certain past event, telling you details you thought you’d forgotten and yet as you hear it you remember that you hadn’t forgotten? That’s because parts of the memory of that event were stored in different places (actually with different associations) throughout your memory. Constructing an autobiography, even just a simple one, of your life is a good way to start.

Create a mind-map for every year of your life so far with the first spokes off from the year in the centre being things like where you lived, what people were around you, where you went on holiday, how you spent your time etc. For the early years record who your teachers were, what toys you played with, what friends you had. From these, enlarge the mind-map to the next level by adding specific memories that are triggered by these facts. What you’re doing by externalising these facts is to re-associate the memories into certain categories. By doing this you’ll start to remember things you’d thought were long forgotten. In my workshops we do a version of this where the delegates access their earliest memory by creating a mind-map in reverse by remembering where they lived, what they got for Christmas, what they did at school to work backwards to the earliest accessible memory with startling results.

You'll find more strategies in my book, '7 Keys to Creative Genius'. Click here to find out more.