You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

keeping a date
I
magine if, month by month, you could trust yourself to remember all the
birthdays and other anniversaries you need to acknowledge and could see them
looming as the date approaches; and if you could also recall the dates for

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business meetings or deadlines at work. Imagine too that you can do this without
having to rely upon pieces of paper, a diary or an assistant. Socially, you would
be able to respond immediately when someone asks you if you want to meet up
with them next week; you would always make your partner feel special by not
having to be reminded about your most important anniversary; and in business
you would impress clients and employers alike with your mental reference of
schedules.
You can use the journey method to construct a mental monthly planner that
will help you remember important dates. The basic idea is to allocate each key
event to up to 31 stages in a preselected journey (see exercise, right) – each stage
representing a day of the month. Of course, there will be some days that will
need to have more than one piece of information attached – perhaps two
meetings in an afternoon or a day when two friends share a birthday. In such
cases, you will need to use your imagination. You could imagine a meeting with
a surreal hybrid agenda – if one meeting is about money and the other about
quality control, you might conjure up in your mind a damaged banknote. Or you
might visualize the two friends together at the same event – what would be the
chemistry between them? As always with the more elaborate memory systems,
they are most effective if you experiment and adapt until you have a working
method in which you believe.
using a mental diary
EXERCISE FIFTEEN
This exercise will help you to create your mental monthly planner.
1. Choose a journey with 31 stages – each stage represents a day of the month (it
does not matter that some months will fall short of the entire journey). Try to
begin at a high point, such as the top of a hill, where you can easily survey the
route, and so the month ahead.
2. Reinforce the midpoint of the month (15th) by giving it a particularly unique
or interactive attribute – perhaps the stage is marked by a ladder that you have
to climb or a stream that you have to jump across. This will make it easier for
you to pinpoint your “current” position in relation to the rest of the month.
3. Distil each appointment into a single symbol – perhaps your anniversary is
symbolized by your partner using an outsized wedding ring as a “hula hoop”.

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Place each symbol at the relevant stage of the journey. Try to make the symbols
and stages interact. If a meeting with your boss is on the 4th, say, and the fourth
stage is a belltower, you might imagine your boss swinging about on a bell rope.
At the end of each month, visualize wiping clean the stages, and post any
prearranged appointments for the new month.