April 01, 1999
Meetings & Conventions: Short Cuts April 1999

April 1999
Short Cuts:TOTAL RECALL
Marguerite Ham
The elite sales force has a month to bone up on a new product in
two languages&You’ve got an hour to learn the names and titles
of 20 VIPs attending tonight’s banquet&Don’t panic. Bring on
the memory experts.
Offering everything from two-hour workshops designed to teach
the simple skill of matching names to faces, to weeklong immersion
programs for specific training purposes, pros versed in the art of
memory recall are in demand.
“The bottom line of memory training is confidence,” says Ormond
Beach, Fla.-based Jon Keith, The Memory Trainer
(904-677-8118; www.MemoryTrainer.com). “You
work better, and your productivity increases when you remember,”
adds Keith, whose seminars on building memory skills have attracted
the likes of IBM, Chevron and Ralston Purina.
The secret to having a great memory, says Marguerite
Ham of Memorease in Elizabeth, Colo., (303-646-2857) is
recognizing how you learn. “If we know how we learn, we can shorten
our learning curve,” says Ham, whose interactive sessions encourage
attendees to use touch, smell and auditory senses to work a room.
“When I work with a corporation, I take that new product line and
integrate it into my seminar,” says Ham. “When they walk out, they
walk out knowing that product line.” Last year, she was called in
to help 47 Denver police sergeants cram for the Denver Police
Academy’s final exam.
Don Lofland, Ph.D., a physics teacher at West
Valley College in Saratoga, Calif., and founder of
Powerlearning®Systems (831-425-7971; www.power-learning.com) in
Santa Cruz, Calif., offers learning technique seminars, which he
begins with a lesson in Portuguese. “I began in this business with
the angle that super memory depends on learning methods,” says
Lofland. “I teach my students 80 to 100 words of Portuguese in an
hour, and they are able to retain 85 percent.” Why Portuguese?
“It’s a very difficult language to learn. And that shows them if
they can learn those words, they can apply the method to anything
in life.”
CHERYL-ANNE STURKEN
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