Three Easy Tips for Remembering Names
Facilitator Tips Episode 27

How To Remember People’s Names

This week’s Facilitator Tips episode reveals three useful techniques and strategies for remembering names.

<< Go to Episode 26   Go to Episode 28 >>

If you work with groups all the time—especially if you’re a teacher, group leader, corporate trainer, or professional educator—then you’ll find this video very helpful.

It’s not rocket science, but a bunch of time-tested tips from a long-time group facilitator – Mark Collard.

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Useful Links & Resources

• Group Games to Learn Names – also known as name-games, there are dozens of fun group games and activities that will engage your group in a fun atmosphere to help them remember names. While nothing can ever be guaranteed, in my experience, these games have been more successful at learning names than adopting the standard ‘parrot-learning’ or ‘memorisation’ techniques.
• How To Remember Names – click the link to visit a wonderful article that will expand your skillset for remembering people’s names.

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Video Transcript

Hi there and welcome to Episode 26 of the Facilitator Tips video series.

My name is Mark Collard. I’m an experiential trainer and author, and today I want to share with you something that comes up a great deal when I work with groups. And I’ve been in this industry now for about 28 years, and the tip that I want to share with you today is related to the importance of people’s names.

People often comment. They know that I work with groups, often very different groups all the time, they go wow, you’re really good with names. Now I don’t know that I’ve got any special talent for names any more than anyone else, but I just have a couple of good strategies, and these are those.

First of all, I’m going to use their names all the time. People really love it. It affirms them when you can remember someone’s name which is why I work a little bit harder about it. But when you perhaps have someone make a contribution, before you think back to them maybe integrating what they’ve just said, just quickly ask for their name. Oh, what was it that you said and could you remind me of your name, please, and they’ll say that name. Not only does that benefit you but it benefits everybody else in the group too.

Maybe when you ask for someone’s contribution ask for that by their name. And again if you don’t know it it’s okay to ask. We often have a real hang-up about wanting to remember names and if we can’t we often don’t want to use them at all.

Well, I would suggest that it’s always better to ask for the name because that says you care that you want to know the name not that you’re stupid and forgot. And even just that simple reframing can make a big difference to the way other people relate to each other in the course of your program.

And here’s the other strategy, listen carefully. Just in the normal interactions the group have, names will be sometimes used, maybe even nicknames. And if you could just pick up on that and then connect it to those individuals, it can make it look like you’re really really smart, and of course, it’s all about how you look, right? We all understand what I mean.

But these are just a few little tips that I’ve found useful, and there’s many more tips of course that we share throughout all of playmeo’s innovative resources. So to go to the show notes or to pick up some further links about this topic, go to www.playmeo.com Episode 27. And naturally, all of our, free content is curated through our app.

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Okay, I’ll look forward to seeing you at the next episode.

Bye for now.