There are invisible skills that most people are born with and build through school, play and practice. However, for those that are not born with certain “Social EQ” or “Executive Function” skills (and who don’t track with their peers) there isn’t a learning course that helps one early in life to build those skills unless you are identified with a learning difference. Once that happens you are, hopefully, aligned with professional, therapeutic tutors, therapists, etc. to help you procure those skills.
The grand-daddy invisible skill that can be hard to cultivate unless you put forth a concerted effort is ATTENTION. Attention building can change your memory vitality over night!!! Who remembers the most? Those with good attention. However, who RETAINS the most is a collaboration of a variety of Executive Function (EF) talents (or skills) syncing to create easy recall. Some of these EF skills to sync to attention will come later such as associations, connections, visualizations, prioritization, sequencing–some we have also briefly discussed in earlier posts and I will continue to blog about them endlessly.
This begins our 5 part Winter Series; How to Improve your Memory by Building your Attention and Resilience.
OBJECTIVE: Learn how to build attention resilience in order to build memory retention.
PART ONE: THE BORING TASK & RESILIENCE.
In order to build your memory muscle, learning the discipline of attention resilience is huge. Start by building attention to difficult or unwanted tasks. Let’s take paperwork, the bane of my existence. If you hate paperwork sorting as much as I do especially during tax season you, like most of us have been procrastinating. Or, that never-ending project that needs completion: how long has the attic or basement been in disarray or that ‘back-burner’ project at work?!
Here is a simple way to tackle boring tasks and increase your attention resilience that you’ve been putting off.
- Mindset: Get your “growth mindset” on and be sure to use the positive coaching “I can do this if I follow these steps. The result will feel so good and the benefits are…” Or, If I miss a commitment, I can get right back on it tomorrow.”
- Chunk the time instead of doing all at once. Break it out into increments that are smaller and schedule in your phone with alarms. Here are success tips for this step:
- Be sure to add time before and after (say 15 minutes?) to ramp into the project and ramp out of the project. Or track your ‘distraction habits’ and see how long you need over the course of a few days to hunker down into a project or assignment. Some of those distractions are checking emails and responding, feeding the dog, talk to a colleague, getting your fav warm morning brew.
- If it’s the last day of your project, try not to schedule anything an hour after so that if you are super motivated to finish–you’ve want wiggle room to capitalize on your motivation and focus.
- Schedule in Breaks. This can be tricky. You want to be sure not to include the distractions that take you away permanently from your time commitment. Perhaps no phone/email checking on break. Perhaps it’s more like a walk around the office or a quick ‘green walk’ (get outside.) Maybe it’s a water cooler or snack break.
- Negotiate the time extension with yourself to build endurance (this is super important!)
- Example: you planned 60 minutes however you schedule 90 because you’ve got 15 minute grace period on either end.
- It’s 15 minutes into the project and you want to check your phone! Use your self talk and negotiate yourself down and resist, resist, resist.
- Perhaps you are using the script: “I can do anything for 15 more minutes.” Or, this is like doing cardio, I’ve got to complete the time commitment task because it’s grown my mental 6-pack.” Make yourself stick to it. Worst case scenario, split the difference but DON’T GET UP until it’s break time.
- Set BREAK OVER alarm. If your alarm is set for 30 minutes into the task, set another one for 45 minutes into the task and DON’T PRESS THE STOP BUTTON until you go back to the task.
THIS IS ATTENTION RESILIENCE 101. Are you ready for the challenge?
Remember me until next time,
Jenn Bulka, Memory Specialist
My Memory Pal . com 
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