Guest Post: Giulia Remondino, MD at Genius in 21 days UK – London “I am often asked: “What creates a productive workplace?”. Some answers we know and, in some cases, apply: managing time effectively, removing distractions, having a clear goal, organising breaks to recharge, rewarding and appreciating people, fostering a strong team spirit, having incentive plans to motivate employees and developing strong management – just to mention a few. Most of these require not just the right skills to develop, but months, if not years, of work. However there are other factors that contribute to productivity, that are much quicker to develop and implement, but as they are less “conventional”, they may be forgotten. Ironically, one of them is memory. Think for a moment about how many hours you have spent reading books in your life, how much information you have tried to take in, repeating out loud, re-reading and re-writing. If every piece of information was a brick, and you had to pile up all these bricks, how big would the tower be? If next to that tower you placed the towers of all your workforce, it would be even taller and more impressive, wouldn’t it? That tower represents your fortress – the starting point to build all the results you want to achieve, both as an individual, and as a company. Now remove all the bricks from that tower which represent all the information you no longer remember. Oops! What just happened to your fortress? It probably doesn’t look so stable and vast anymore. Unfortunately, this is what years spent applying the wrong methods have created: a hollow fortress. Now imagine if you could learn anything extremely fast, if you could have fun while learning it and if you could recall it forever. How many more bricks would you have in your fortress? It may sound like an impossible dream, but it’s actually something that our brain is designed to be able to do. From surviving to evolving, from creating new ideas to solving problems, from looking back to the events in our life to imagining future scenarios, memory is something that we have always needed, since the beginning of time. We have been programmed to use it properly. It’s just a matter of knowing how to access to the incredible power of our brain. Investing in teaching your staff extremely effective mnemonic techniques will allow them to be able to recall any type of information that they will “store” in their brain with ease. As a consequence, it will allow the company to prosper. In a world that is constantly changing, being able to keep up and absorb as much information as possible, becomes the key to standing out from the competition and raising not only the productivity of the workplace, but also the profile of the firm/company. I’ll leave you by sharing some key concepts that can help you get started on your journey to become a “genius”! There are some characteristics of our memory that, when applied, will help you improve your results immediately. Firstly, our memory is mostly visual, which means that images are easier to retain than abstract information. How can you use this? When you need to remember a detail, picture it vividly in your mind as an image to make sure it becomes more memorable. Secondly, our memory is associative, so it works like a chain. Once you pull the first ring, all the others follow as a consequence. So when you need to memorise something new, link it to something that you already know and you will notice how much longer you will be able to retain it for. Thirdly, our memory is emotion-based. When there is a strong emotion involved, it is much easier to remember anything. Our mind finds it particularly easy to recall something that we find funny, sexy or scary. If you can make the information “emotional”, then you’ll remember it! Fourthly, remembering places comes naturally to most people. When you picture an object in a specific place, it will be easier to recall it, rather than picturing it with no context. Of course this is just like learning to count to 3 in order to become Einstein, but if you start applying these three characteristics you will already see a lot of improvement.” About the Author: Giulia Remondino, MD at Genius in 21 days UK – London Giulia Remondino is an experienced Trainer and Mentor and has been the MD of Genius in 21 days UK since 2010. She specialises in bringing out the best in people by teaching advanced learning techniques. Becoming a Genius in 21 days means to learn not only how to double your speed at reading, organising and memorising, but also how to make sure you know what your ‘why’ is. Her goal is that more and more people learn how to master their time instead of being mastered by it and therefore fulfill their dreams with new abilities they thought impossible before. Running one of the branches of Genius in 21 days, Giulia teaches techniques about speed reading, fast memorisation, long term memorisation, mind mapping, relaxation and concentration, creativity and motivation. She also mentors people after the course. Giulia is an experienced speaker and has delivering numerous workshops on public speaking, communication, leadership and time management. For more information visit www.geniusin21days.co.uk Post navigation What does the Living Wage really mean for employers? Guest blog: Why employers need to look after the health and wellbeing of their workforce
