How I did it: The single biggest thing that helped was actually writing down names of new people I met. Adding some information about where I'd met them, some personal details and what was discussed also helped me remember them. 

All the advice I'd ever read before says to repeat the person's name when you meet them, and then use it in converseation.  I found this really didn't do it for me.  Also, some of the situations where I really wanted to remember names were work meetings where I didn't have the opportunity to repeat a name and talk directly to the person.  I noticed other people would write names down in the order people sat around the table, so I did that too.

Thinking about this some more, I realise that the way I've successfully learnt things in the past, such as foreign languages, dates and events in history etc, has been by writing things down.  If I want to do well in an exam, taking notes in class then rewriting and summarising them is the way to go for me.  Once I thought about my learning style, it became obvious that I could and should apply this learning people's names.

I'm still not 100% wonderful at this, but I'm a lot better than I used to be.

Lessons & tips:

• Identify how you've been successful at learning other things in your life
• Apply the same methods to learning names
• In my case, writing down names worked really well.

Resources: Pen and paper

Jul 11, 12:49AM PDT | 1 comment | 7 cheers