A Journey to Remember

Mind Tools Showcase #4 - 24th April 2007 This newsletter is published by Mind Tools Ltd of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY, UK. You have received it because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. To subscribe or unsubscribe, just click the links at the bottom of this email.

Contents: How Big Are Your Thoughts? The Journey System Mind Tools Store A Final Note

Our thinking and memory skills are fundamental to pretty much everything we do. And yet most of the time, we give them little thought.

So, this Showcase Newsletter is here to change that, and remind you that there's much to be gained for busy minds and busy lives when you think and remember more effectively!

There are many tools and techniques at the Mind Tools site to help you do this. In this Showcase, we're featuring a memory technique known as the Journey System, which helps you remember large amounts of information in a structured way.

Techniques like this help you build expertise more quickly, increase your retention of important factual information, and improve the way you perform memory-based skills like learning new languages. For some jobs, this is vitally important. For others, it is less so. However, even if your job doesn't need a lot of this, you're sure to find the Journey System fun to use!

More than this, this kind of skill gives you more mind space for your “bigger” thinking – which happens to be the topic of today’s "Thought for the Day" from Dianna Podmoroff. In this issue, Dianna asks “How Big Are Your Thoughts?”

Enjoy this Mind Tools Showcase!

  

James & Rachel

James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

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Thought for the Day
How Big Are Your Thoughts?

From the “Thought for the Day” series, a regular feature at the Mind Tools Career Excellence Club.

“As long as you’re going to think anyway – you might as well think BIG!” - Donald Trump.

Instinctively, we think small thoughts. As children, our thoughts and actions have little effect beyond our immediate world. As we grow up, it's easy to retain small expectations, or only to increase our expectations little-by-little. But what of the people who build skyscrapers, run economies, or write books that change the way the world thinks? They're not thinking small!

Our thoughts drive the scale of our success. When you think big, your mind will follow – and help pave the way to achieving more of what you want in life. Napoleon Hill, pioneer of success thinking, said, “We are the Masters of our Fate, the Captains of our Souls, because we have the power to control our thoughts.”

If you think about it, everything you have, or have ever achieved, started out as a want or a dream. These things you have now, you wanted, and you probably want to achieve much more… The truth is, if you really, really want it, it’s much more likely you’ll achieve it.

This isn’t to say that you literally can “think” yourself to success. There is a lot of work that has to go into it too. But unless you actively think about what you want from life, and really desire it, you’ll wind up achieving a whole lot less than your full potential.

TIP: Think BIG and desire BIG. It isn’t hokey mental gymnastics. Rather it’s the stage setter for achieving what you really, really want from life.

What Members Say About the Career Excellence Club: "I have recommended the club to many people. I tell them just to go to the website and check it out. I have almost completed the leadership programme. It has shown me where I need to grow, and given me lots of inspiration. This is my favorite website ever!!!!" Julie Toby, Queensland, Australia

Showcase Article
The Journey System
Remembering Long Lists

The Journey System is a flexible, effective and fun mnemonic based around the idea of remembering landmarks on a well-known journey. It combines the narrative flow of the Link Method and the structure and order of the Peg Systems into one powerful system.

How to Use the Tool:

You start to use the Journey System by thinking about a journey that you know well. This could be, for example, your journey to work in the morning, the route you use to get to the front door when you get up, the route you follow to visit your parents, or a tour around a well-loved holiday destination.

The important thing about this journey is that it has landmarks on it that are easy to remember. These might be striking buildings, bridges, shops, junctions - or even memorable trees or plants. Because you're familiar with the journey, you can recreate it "in your mind's eye", and remember the precise sequence of landmarks.

Once you have these landmarks in mind, you can associate the things that you're trying to remember with them. This involves creating vivid, striking, and sometimes funny mental images that link the items, so that when you think of the landmark, immediately the linked image comes to mind.

Linking Information to Landmarks

To use this technique most effectively, it is often best to prepare the journey beforehand. In this way the landmarks are clear in your mind before you try to commit information to them. One of the ways of doing this is to write down all the landmarks that you can recall in order on a piece of paper. This allows you to fix these landmarks as the significant ones to be used in your mnemonic, separating them from others that you may notice as you get to know the route even better.

This is a highly effective method of remembering long lists of information. With a sufficiently long journey you could, for example, remember elements on the periodic table, lists of Kings or Presidents, geographical information, or the order of cards in a shuffled pack.

The system is extremely flexible: All you need do to remember many items is to remember a longer journey with more landmarks. To remember a short list, only use part of the route!

One advantage of this technique is that you can use it to work both backwards and forwards, and start anywhere within the route to retrieve information.

You can use the technique effectively with other mnemonics. This can be done either by building complex coding images at the stops on a journey, or by linking to other mnemonics at each stop. You could start other journeys at each landmark. Alternatively, you may use a peg system to organize lists of journeys, and so on.

See the introduction to the Mind Tools Memory Techniques section for information on how to enhance the images used for this technique.

Example:

You may, as a simple example, want to remember something mundane like this shopping list:

Coffee, salad, vegetables, bread, kitchen paper, fish, chicken pieces, pork chops, soup, fruit, bath tub cleaner.

You could associate this list with a journey to a supermarket. Mnemonic images could be:

1. Front door: spilt coffee grains on the doormat
   
2. Rose bush in front garden: growing lettuce leaves and tomatoes around the roses
   
3. Car: with potatoes, onions and cauliflower on the driver's seat
   
4. End of the road: an arch of French bread over the road
   
5. Past gas/petrol station: with its sign wrapped in kitchen roll
   
6. Under railway bridge: from which haddock and cod are dangling by their tails
   
7. Traffic lights: chickens squawking and flapping on top of lights
   
8. Past town hall: in front of which a pig is doing karate, breaking boards
   
9. Under office block: with a soup slick underneath: my car tires send up jets of tomato soup as I drive through it
   
10. Past car park: with apples and oranges tumbling from the top level
    
11. Supermarket car park: a filthy bath tub is parked in the space next to my car!

Key Points

The Journey System is a powerful, effective method of remembering lists of information, by imagining images and events at stops on a journey.

As the journeys used are distinct in location and form, one list remembered using this technique is easy to distinguish from other lists.

To use this technique you need to invest some time in preparing journeys clearly in your mind. This investment pays off many times over by the application of the technique.

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The Mind Tools Store:

• The Mind Tools E-book: The public tools on the Mind Tools website in one convenient, easily-downloadable, easily-printable PDF file. We have excluded advertising to enhance clarity and have formatted sections to be easy to read, print and use. More >>
  
  
• The Career Excellence Club (The Mind Tools members area): Make career development and every-day part of your life with member-only discussion forums, the Mind Tools Extended Toolkit, downloadable MP3-based Book Insights and Interviews, regular coaching, training, and much, much more. More >>
  
  
• Make Time for Success: Learn 39 essential personal effectiveness techniques that help you bring your workload under control and maximize your productivity, so that you can make the most of the opportunities open to you. More >>



• How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You: Learn the 48 simple but essential skills you need to create an inspiring vision of the future, get the very best from your team, and become a top leader in your industry.. More >>

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A Final Note from James

So, are you all set to remember things more easily, and free up thinking time to think BIG? I hope so. Stay tuned for the regular and showcase newsletters to bring you new tools as well as old favorites, to keep your thinking and career skills in tip top form.

And if you are “thinking big” about the next step in your career, you might be interested in joining us at the Career Excellence Club. Now with more than 2,000 members, this community area at Mind Tools features an extended toolkit of thinking and personal effectiveness tools, podcast reviews and interviews, and a thriving forum where members share problems, ideas and support. At only US$1 for the first month’s subscription, why not give it a try?

Next week, in our regular Mind Tools newsletter features we’ll bring you the latest new articles from the Mind Tools site, and our feature article on "Saying No!"

Join us again then, and in the meantime, have a truly excellent week!

James

James Manktelow

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