How These Two Words Can Improve Your Memory

Have you ever played “Name That Tune” with someone and they just have the ability to blurt out the artist and name of the song within seconds of it coming on? 

...and you haven’t even recognised the song yet, let alone remembered its name.

This is pretty much every member of my family except for me and my dad.

Needless to say, whenever I played this game with them it made me feel that I had a terrible memory and clearly no musical ear. 

As a result I would tell myself: “I just don’t have a very good memory”... and blame it on my dad’s genetics.

I repeated this story about myself through most of my adult life, relying entirely on my phone to remember things and never even attempting to improve it because “I just didn’t have a good memory”.

What are stories about yourself that you’ve always held as true? 

Maybe you’ve thought that you weren’t good at learning languages… Maybe you thought you could never dance… Maybe you thought that reading was just not for you…

It wasn’t until recently that I learnt the power of language and how the language we chose to describe our life shapes our world and our thinking around what is possible.

If you constantly tell yourself you have a bad memory, of course your memory is going to stay bad. The same goes with our ability to deal with challenges and opportunities. 

It wasn’t until I stopped telling myself that I had a bad memory, that I was able to drastically improve it. 

So if you want to get good at something, learn something new or modify an old story about yourself, the first thing you need to do is change the language you use when describing your ability to do it. 

You don’t even have to lie and pretend that you’re good at something you’re not, instead use these two simple words: “...until now”.

Next time you catch yourself using any type of negative permanent description of your abilities, add “..until now” to the end of that sentence. 

I’ve never been good at learning languages… until now. I’ve never been able to dance… until now. I’ve never been a big reader… until now. 

Adding those two words will take away the permanency and tell your brain that you can in fact change. 

Obviously, this needs to be combined with effort and hard work but it all starts with your language. 

Try this out for a few weeks to see how it goes and let me know one story about yourself that you will use this for!