The Positive Woman. Gael Lindenfield

and my daughters are living in a very different educational world, but I know that many women are still hampered, not just by lack of opportunity but by deep wounds to their intellectual self-esteem and the general negative images of ‘blue stockings’ and girls in glasses rooted deep in our collective unconscious. We certainly have a right to be angry about such blocks and handicaps but it would be naïve to think that having a good shout about the injustice will give us adult women enough of the opportunities we need and deserve, even if it may help our daughters.

      Improving your memory

      Your mind is not a sieve – it is a brilliant computer with a vast capacity for storage.

      There is considerable evidence to support the suggestion that our brains do retain far more information than is generally thought perhaps even all of it.

      Tony Buzan

      

      So you must already have a mountain of information which you can usefully draw on – all you need to do is improve your ability to recall it. This can be done by a regular programme of exercises or making sure that you give yourself plenty of opportunity to practise your recall skills. Your memory was probably functioning much better when you were at school, mainly because it had so much exercise!

      Here are just a few simple ideas:

      Keep a daily diary.

      Learn a language.

      Learn some poems or quotes off by heart.

      Psychologists have also shown that we can also improve our ability to retain information by:

       – keeping our study periods short

       – constantly reviewing what we have learned

       – repeating information, such as a name, several times as soon as we hear it

       – using mnemonic techniques which help us make links

       – using highlighting colours

       – using symbols and drawings to reinforce ideas

       – asking others to test us.

      Improving your ability to look and listen

      Highly tuned observation and listening skills are essential to clear rational thinking. Our eyes and ears are incredibly adept at selecting out information according to the mood we are in – if we ‘get out of the wrong side of the bed’ we don’t even look for the blue sky, or if we’ve been told to expect a boring speech, we’ll sleep through the juicy bits!

      Here are some ways in which you can take better control of these senses and encourage them to give you beneficial information:

      

      – Practise your concentration by spending five minutes a day selecting and focusing on certain sounds such as bird song or a ticking clock, and consciously switching off other distracting sounds.

      – Check that your body is in an alert position – no slouching or wandering eyes.

      – Close your eyes occasionally and practise recalling in detail what you have just seen.

      – If you find yourself ‘switching off’ from someone who is boring, put yourself into the role of constructive critic.

      – Use the classic counselling technique of ‘Reflection’ to check out your listening skills, i.e. summarize what has been said by repeating back to the speaker what they have said. If you use slightly different words you won’t sound like a parrot!

      – Use drawing regularly to observe detail (not to produce great works of art for public consumption!)

      – In the privacy of your own home, practise the art of ‘mimicking’ various people, not to make fun of them but to improve your ability to observe their finer points. (This is a skill we were all born with – what young child can’t mimic its parents with uncomfortable accuracy!)

      – Take notes – but don’t play stenographer, just jot down key words.

      – Look after your ears and your eyes by not overloading them and giving them plenty of time to rest.

      – Continually make a conscious effort to switch your body into a relaxed state, as physical tension impairs both sight and hearing.

      Improving your reading and note-taking

      Reading can have many uses – it can give information and offer relaxing distraction, but if used in collaboration with thinking it can stimulate imaginative and energizing thought.

      When you picked up this book, did you open it at the beginning and begin dutifully reading each page in sequence? I hope not. Although I, as an author, have tried to work to some kind of order (and may feel quite protective of that order if my editor should start wanting to move bits and pieces around!), I do know that the way I have arranged information is not going to suit the needs of very many readers. So I would like to think that when you picked up this book, you did a quick flick through to see what bits were of interest to you as an individual with particular needs and that you then selected the chapters you wanted, and needed, to read. If you did this you may not, of course, actually need to read any more of this section because you have already developed a flexible approach to reading!

      For those of you who are choosing to read on, here are some tips which have helped me and many of my clients:

      • Vow to make reading a pleasure and don’t tolerate boredom. Whenever possible skip the boring bits and give yourself full permission to change your mind. (I dread to think how many hours of my life I used to waste reading books to the bitter end just because I had started them!)

      • To aid concentration, always check that you are sitting reasonably upright but comfortably.

      • For speed-reading a text, use a pencil or similar marker to guide you along the lines. This technique is supposed to increase reading speed by as much as 100 per cent, because it focuses attention and improves concentration.

      • Read the contents tables and the beginning and end of chapters before ploughing through a long text. Use the index to find particular sections of interest and go to those first.

      • Keep you eyes working efficiently by regularly looking away, blinking or cupping your hands over them.