Your brain doesn’t always tell you the truth, it often lies to you.

Answer this problem quickly.

A coffee and a cookie together cost $1.10. The coffee cost $1 more than the cookie. How much does the coffee cost?

Most people say $1, which is wrong.

The coffee costs $1.05 and the cookie 5¢.

Our brain often takes shortcuts based on how important it thinks accuracy is over speed. It usually opts for speed, giving rules of thumb too much consideration over straight logic.

This is evident when we make assumptions about someone based on how they are dressed and even how they speak.

By the way, if you know of a place that sells coffee and a cookie for $1.10…let me know!

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Here I show a customized ending to a keynote for my Australian client.

One of my biggest challenges when I keynote is convincing the audience that I do NOT have an innate ability to remember things, it is not a ‘natural’ ability…it is an application of systems that ANYONE can learn, adapt and apply to their business. Adapting these systems allow you to stand out from your competition.

Watch the video, it’s just a couple min’s, it will show you the untapped power of our brains.

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.  Watch Bob in action.

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Ask the average person what percentage of our brain we use and the majority will say 10%, very few will say we use 100%, which would be the correct answer. Imaging methods have shown that even simple tasks produce activity throughout the whole brain.

So where did this 10% myth come from?  It seems to be traced back to the American psychologist William James, who in his 1906 speech ‘The Energies of Men’ said:

“We make use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”

He never actually stated a percentage, yet somehow along the way this ‘undeveloped potential’ was picked up and morphed into a percentage. One example is a 1929 ad that ran in The World Almanac, which read:

‘Scientists and psychologists tell us we only use 10 percent of our brain power’.

But it really took hold and was popularized in 1936 when American writer Lowell Thomas, in the preface to Dale Carnegies best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People, falsely stated that:

“Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten percent of his latent mental ability.”

Then there was no stopping it. Fortunes and careers have been made over the years with self-help books tapping into this myth. Individuals involved with the paranormal have championed this ‘fact’ to explain the potential for psychic powers.

Even Uri Geller, remember him? He made a career out of convincing people he could bend metal with his mind. He claims in his book, Uri Geller  Mind-Power Book:

“Most of us only use 10 percent of our brains if that.”

Having us believe that he has tapped into some, if not all of the remaining 90%.

Think about it logically, if big chunks of our brain were never used, then damaging them would have no effect on us.

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.  Watch Bob in action.

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Yet whether it’s in the corporate world, or the elementary school, learning languages is still a rudimentary struggle. Teachers hand out vocabulary lists and verb charts and students old and young spend restless evenings going over and over these lists as if literally trying to drill the words and declensions into their heads.

If any area of learning could benefit from memory systems it would be this. Learning languages, after all, is entirely about memorization. If you don’t already have the basics of a language already in your head, how can you hope to create complex thoughts and expressions?

Applying memory techniques to the learning of a language could take a whole book unto itself. The most we can hope to accomplish in this short piece is to map out a few of the basics for the beginner. With a few hints and tips your approach to a new language may just seem a little less daunting.

 Vocabulary

No matter how sophisticated or nuanced the grammar of a language may be and how well a person can learn it, no one can say that he or she knows anything about a language unless they know its basic building blocks: vocabulary. Without good vocabulary skills all other facets of a language are useless. Consequently, most of your attention and effort should be focused on the learning of vocabulary, at least when first starting out with a new language.

It becomes easier to approach foreign languages when you realize that they are usually part of much larger entities called language groups. English, for instance, is part of a group called the Indo-European languages, which includes most other European languages, such as French, German, Italian, Spanish and Latin. Consequently, each of these languages contains a number of words with similar sounds and meanings.

An example of this is the word mother. In French it is Mere, in German Muter, In Italian Madre. These similarities have much to do with the linguistic origins of modern European languages, which were predominantly Greek and Latin. Such words can be easy to remember because of their similarities to words we already know and use.

The basics for learning foreign words are very similar to the image based techniques used to memorize other forms of information. Let’s look at a few examples.

The French word for foot is pied. How can we mentally link these two words together? Try visualizing a giant bare foot squashing into a thick blueberry pie. The blueberry filling squirts out and hits you in the face. You’ve been ‘pied’!

The German word for piano is klavier. Imagine a huge piano in your front room made of CLAY, you want to sit down and play it but you FEAR it will crumble. CLAY FEAR/Klavier

The Mandarin Chinese word for hello is nee-hao. Imagine coming up to someone you’re going to say hello to. Instead of saying anything to this person, you instead deliver a swift KNEE to the groin. The person bends over, HOW-ling in pain. KNEE  HOW/Nee-hao

Now try a few examples for yourself.

The French word for ‘to eat’ is manger.

The Italian word for purchase is acquisto.

The Chinese word for Thank you is shie-shie.

The Spanish word for Dining Room is el comedor

 Pronunciation

Learning new foreign words is all well and good… until you use them on native speakers and they start laughing at you because instead of asking where you can buy a coffee, you tell them you’re wearing dirty underwear. Correct pronunciation is a crucial ingredient for affective linguistics and sometimes proper pronunciation is not all that obvious on paper. Going back to our French word for foot, although it is written as pied,  it is pronounced ‘pee-yay’.

Another one that isn’t obvious on paper is the name of the great German poet Goethe. If you had never heard the name spoken aloud before, there is no way of you ever knowing that its proper articulation is ‘ger-tuh’ with a hard ‘g’.

Memory techniques can help in this area as well. A microphone and speaker, (a personal address system) is often referred to as a P.A. system. You could imagine shoving your FOOT into a large loud speaker P.A. (pee-yay). For the poet Goethe, you can imagine coming up to the poet and grabbing or girding onto him very tightly. Girding him as if you squeeze the breath out of him and he makes a ‘tuh’ sound as he exhales. Or even the image of him reciting poetry while walking across a metal GIRDER.

So good luck, or as they say in Japan, がんばろう…but that’s a whole new chapter!

The post Learning a Foreign Language appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.

Being in the, ‘how to improve your memory’, business all these years, I’ve heard that joke many, many times.  Funny as it is, there’s a great deal of truth behind it.  Not that you will actually improve your memory by lending someone some money, but analyzing why you remember, and applying these reasons to everyday memory problems, will improve your memory.

It’s simple really, it comes down to focus and what’s important to you. You see, when you lend someone some money, let’s say $100, it’s not done without thought and focus, you don’t casually whip out five $20 bills and hand them over without any thought or conversation. No, there is a discussion, probably about why he/she needs the loan, when it will be paid back and so on, and you naturally have a laser sharp focus on those details, especially the ‘when will it be paid back’ bit, because it’s important to you.  Money is important to most of us, so we log that information into our memory; we maybe even write it down later or log it into our phone. The bottom line is, we help our memory to work more effectively because of this focus.

Ask yourself, how focused am I when I’m introduced to someone?  Do I afford them the same laser focus on their details? Will I remember their name tomorrow? How about the name of their spouse who I was just introduced to? Do I write their names down? Again, bottom line, do you place the same importance on details about your clients or customers as you do the $100?  Probably not, but when you do, that’s when you will start to tap into the astonishing power of your memory, you just need to give it a helping hand, make remembering names important to you…basically, lend your brain some money, and you will be amazed at what it can do.

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.  Watch Bob in action.

The post Do you know the best way to improve your Memory? appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.

So with the Oscars coming up a friend of mine asked how she could show off at her annual Oscar party by recalling best film winners.  This is what I shared with her for best film winners 2001 – 2010.

First of all we need an image to represent each year, so I gave her rhyming partners.  For 1, (or for our purposes 2001) I told her to visualize a Bun,  2 (2002) A Shoe,  3 Tree,  4 Door,  5 Hive,  6  Sticks, 7 Heaven,  8 Plate,  9 Wine and 10 Pen.

To each of these images I had her attach, in a crazy way, an image which would represent the film.

2001 winner was A Beautiful Mind.  She visualized a Brain (Beautiful Mind) in a hamburger Bun (1 or 2001)

2002 (Shoe) winner was Chicago, she thought of the Windy City, for Chicago, and imagined Dorothy’s Ruby Red Slippers being swept up in a Tornado.

2003 (Tree) Lord of the Rings. The rings of a Tree replaced by the Golden Ring from the movie.

2004 (Door) Million-Dollar Baby.  A huge 6’ baby nailing $1M bank notes to an ornate Door.

2005 (Hive) Crash. A car crashing into a huge bee Hive.

2006 (Sticks) Departed. Running through her favourite DEPARTMENT store smashing everything in site with a huge hockey Stick.

2007 (Heaven) No Country For Old Men.  Old Men, each holding a flag from a different country, jumping from cloud to cloud in Heaven.

2008 (Plate) Slum Dog Millionaire. A basketball player, worth a Million $’s, Slam Dunking a Plate.

2009 (Wine) Hurt Locker.  She saw herself smashing a bottle of Wine against a metal Locker, hurting herself with the broken glass.

2010 (Pen) The King’s Speech.  A Kings Crown with large fountain Pens in place of jewels, and the King uses each pen, one at a time, to write a Speech.

If you visualized each of those images as you read them, go back in your head and test yourself to see if you have them memorized.

This is a basic Peg System, which coupled with another system known as The Phonetic Index, would allow you recall, not only the Best Film winners of every year, but also the best actors, supporting actors, cinematography….. and so on and so on.

These same systems help in business, recalling model numbers, prices, speeches, presentations, clients names…… and so on and so on.

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.  Watch Bob in action.

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While at work, have you ever received a phone call from home asking you to pick up a few groceries from the store, or been told not to forget to book your dental or doctors appointment as you leave the house? How about trying to remember to write down this to-do list as soon as you sit down in your office, only to forget everything as soon as you’ve poured yourself a coffee?

I recently shared a go to memory system that I have used countless times throughout my life for recalling ‘on the go’ items, things that are thrown at us unexpectedly. It is a centuries old system sometimes called the Journey method, the Roman Room method, more recently called the Memory Palace, essentially it is an ancient Greek method known as the Loci System. (It is also invaluable for recalling presentations without the aid of notes).

Let’s say we need to be able to recall 10 items at any given time. So we first need 10 items or places (Loci), which we are already familiar with. (All memory is based on linking or joining what we wish to remember, to something we already know). The easiest 10 items we ‘already know’ would be furniture or appliances in our home.

This is how it works. Imagine walking through the front door of your home; visualize placing your left or right hand on the wall. Now move your hand along that wall until you hit the first room. This room will contain your first five items ‘you already know’. Write down the first piece of furniture, in my house it would be the living room and a piano. Now continue to mentally walk around the room, what is the next piece or item? In my house it would be a big bay window. Continue until you have written down five. My next three would be sofa, table and picture. Now continuing with your hand on the wall, mentally go to the next logical room and do the same, write down another 5, mine would be the kitchen where I use Coffee Pot, Oven, Ceramic Jars, Sink and Toaster. So we have 10 ‘go to’ items. Now whenever someone calls, or asks us to remember something, we simply mentally attach those items, in a crazy way, to the items in our home.

So you receive a call from home asking you to bring home Bread, Milk and Eggs. We simply link Bread Milk and Eggs to (in my case) the Piano, Bay Window and Sofa. I would visualize a huge loaf of Bread playing my Piano, then a huge carton of Milk being thrown at the Bay Window and my Sofa made out of Eggs, or Eggs being cracked over my Sofa. You need to remember to call the dentist, see a huge dentist drill drilling hundreds of holes into your lovely dining room table. Need to remember to book a tennis court, see your self smashing the picture on your living room wall with a huge tennis racquet. Now we are into the kitchen for another five things if we need it.

I have a 15 item check list I mentally go over before I leave for the road for my speaking engagements. I have used the same 15 items in two rooms where the furniture has since changed, there is no longer a sofa where it used to be and the coffee pot is no longer in that spot in the kitchen, but it doesn’t matter, my check list is permanently attached to those original 15 loci, which is a good thing, because I’d hate to forget to take my Tutu to a presentation, yes, if you haven’t seen my keynote, I do wear a Tutu….which is memorable!

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.  Watch Bob in action.

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After delivering a recent keynote presentation, I decided to send the client a gift basket to say thanks.  I looked up a company in Ottawa and chose a gift.  The next day I received an email with my invoice and this note attached:

Dear Bob,
Thank you for your order.
Delivery in Ottawa is $15.00.
However we offer Free Delivery to anyone who can say,
“Antidisestablishmentarianism” backwards on the spot.
Lee Anne
DreamWeaver
www.dreamweavergifts.ca

It took Lee Anne perhaps 15 minutes of her time to look up my website from my email address, watch the short video, and get a sense of myself, and then personalized the email with the $15 off.
Do you think I’ll ever use anyone else in Ottawa?
I was so impressed that I posted it to Face Book and have decided to write about it here.  It’s the small things that make all the difference.
Think how you can make your next interaction with your customers or clients more ‘memorable’.

Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.  Watch Bob in action.

The post I Saved $15 by Speaking Backwards, Great Customer Service appeared first on Funny Motivational Speaker, Entertaining Humorist - Bob Gray.