What is your most valuable business asset? Leadership, sales, or communication skills? Is it your creativity or ability to reason? Guess again. The one thing that has the biggest influence on your ability to succeed is your brain- it’s what determines your ability to acquire and develop any and all new skills.

Whether you’re an executive, entrepreneur, small business owner, other professional, or newly graduated student about to enter the business world, you can benefit greatly from improving your ability to remember. In this age of Google and Wikipedia, with people perhaps becoming a little too dependent on apps, being able to actually remember things yourself will set you apart and demonstrate true knowledge and expertise.

Build Better Business Relationships

One of the most important ways you can apply this is by remembering the names of people you meet. There is no avoiding that learning someone’s name is an integral part of getting to know someone that really helps to build rapport with that person. The importance of remembering names has implications for career advancement, networking, customer service, and much more.

So, how do you develop this skill? Let’s first address the most common reason why we tend to forget the names of people we meet – we just aren’t paying enough attention to begin with! It may seem obvious, but many times when someone introduces themselves to us, we just don’t really pay any attention to their name. Our mind is wandering elsewhere to things such as: their looks, their profession or position, our own nerves, our surroundings, what we’re going to eat for dinner later, etc. Often our minds are focused on just about anything and everything other than the person’s name! You must focus on it for at least one to two seconds. The following four simple steps will help you to do this:

Step #1

Immediately repeat the name and shake the person’s hand. If you are introduced to someone named John, you will say something to the effect of “Nice to meet you, John”, or “Pleased to meet you, John”, while shaking his hand. Or you might even say the name first: “John, so nice to meet you”. This forces you to focus and pay attention to the name. That’s the only way you would be able to repeat the person’s name back to them while shaking their hand.

Step #2

Early on in your interaction with the person, use their name while asking them any simple question.“SoJohn, how do you know Chester?” or “John, what brings you to the meeting today?” are examples of doing this. I want to emphasize here that I am only recommending that you ask one simple question using the person’s name early on in your interaction. It is not necessary and in fact I do not recommend that you use the person’s name repeatedly during your conversation. One question using the name will suffice to help keep the name in your mind and prevent it from just going in one ear and out the other.

Step #3

Think of a connection between the person’s name and anything at all that you already know.I really do mean anything. The name John might make you think of John Lennon, the Gospel of John in the Bible, John F. Kennedy, or it could even simply be that you have a friend or family member that is also named John. Thinking of a connection between the name and literally anything that you already know will really help the name to stick well in your mind.

Step #4

Say goodbye to the person using their name. Before you leave the party, meeting or function, make sure to say goodbye to the people that you’ve met using their names. A simple “Goodbye, John” or “Until next time, John” or “Nice talking with you, John” will go a long way toward cementing the name in your mind and give you a much better chance of remembering it the next time you see the person.

These four steps should be fairly easy for you to put into practice right away. They will help you to put more focus on people’s names when you are meeting them. In addition, being sure to implement these steps as much as possible, will help you to take control of the social interaction when being introduced to people.

Chester Santos is widely regarded as one of the greatest memory experts in the world, with a knack for passing on valuable memory techniques in ways that are easy to understand and retain. Through workshops, corporate training seminars, speeches and presentations, he has helped thousands of people realise the benefits of an improved memory and sharper mind.

This is an edited extract from his book Instant Memory Training For Success: Practical Techniques for a Sharper Mind (published by Capstone, July 2016)