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The Importance of Being Memorable - Five ways to help people remember you (in a good way!)

Five ways to help people remember you (in a good way!)

From Scott Allen, former About.com Guide

Have you ever attended a networking event, collected a bunch of business cards, and when you go through them the next day, you can't remember who many of them are? Or try to think of someone you met and had a conversation with, but you can't remember their name or their business to look them up?

Well, you certainly don't want to be one of those that other people can't remember, do you? It's all well and good to pass out business cards, but if people don't remember you well, they probably won't be calling you to follow up, and they certainly won't keep you in mind for their future needs or possible referrals.

Here are five tips on how to make yourself memorable (in a good way) when meeting other people face-to-face:

1. Be distinctive.

A brightly-colored, hand-painted tie, an unusual necklace or other jewelry, a good (but not overpowering) cologne, even just impeccable grooming can all help you stand out in a good way. It's not that you want to be remembered and identified for that, but anything that helps people separate you from the crowd helps them remember the rest of you. You don't have to be outlandish -- although some people work that quite well -- just don't blend in completely with the crowd.

2. Be fully present.

Be fully engaged and fully aware of the people you interact with. You can break this down into smaller, somewhat mechanical pieces -- listen well, respond promptly, maintain eye contact, etc. -- but if you are truly present in the moment, those things will happen naturally. Many people only seem to be "half there", so being fully engaged helps you stand out.

3. Ask thought-provoking questions. 

Networking expert Bob Burg has some good suggested questions in his book Endless Referrals: Network Your Everyday Contacts into Sales, such as "How did you get started?" or "What do you enjoy most about what you do?" But the very best questions can't be communicated in a book because they're specific to the person you're interacting with and will arise in response to your initial conversation. Do #2 and this will flow naturally.

As Dale Carnegie suggested, you must "take a genuine interest in other people".

4. Reinforce your keywords.

People aren't going to remember long descriptions of what you do, or likely even that 15-second intro that many experts teach you to make. People will at best remember a few key things about you:

Your name Your company name Your business/industry (in three words or less) Your product Your location What you want to do is find ways to unobtrusively increase the occurrence of these things in your conversation. For example, is there some kind of story behind your name? Have it ready to use if there's an opportunity. Does your business have an unusual name? What's the story behind it - what does it mean? Refer to your place of business when telling an incident that occurred ("I was driving down 17th Street leaving my store, when..."). Anything you say that reinforces one of the five items above helps make you more memorable. And if they can remember just three of them -- "Joe the barber from Soho" or "Maria the translator who wrote 'Spanish in Six Weeks'" -- you're doing great.

New Research: How Employee Engagement Hits the Bottom Line

by Tony Schwartz | 9:00 AM November 8, 2012





What would contribute most to your being both happier and more productive at work? How about feeling truly taken care of, appreciated, and trusted by your employer?

More than 100 studies have affirmed the connection between employee engagement and performance, but the Towers Watson 2012 Global Workforce Study — 32,000 employees across 30 countries — makes the most powerful, bottom line case yet for the connection between how we feel at work and how we perform.

This new study concludes that the traditional definition of engagement — the willingness to invest discretionary effort on the job — is no longer sufficient to fuel top performance in a world of relentlessly increasing demand. The problem is that "willing" doesn't guarantee "able."

What's required now is something called "sustainable engagement." The key factor, the study finds, is a work environment that more fully energizes employees by promoting their physical, emotional and social well-being. I'd add to that mental and spiritual well being — or more specifically, the added energy derived from the capacity for absorbed focus and a strong sense of purpose.

"Many employers are pursuing a variety of wellness efforts, typically focused on giving incentives or penalties to people who embrace healthy behaviors like exercise, good diet or effective management of a chronic illness," the report concludes. "These are important, but to sustain energy, employers have to go beyond these core programs and embrace the notion of workplace energy on a far broader plane."

When they do, the consequences are nothing short of staggering.

In a broader analysis of 50 global companies, Towers Watson found that companies with low engagement scores had an average operating margin just under 10 percent. Those with high traditional engagement had a slightly higher margin of 14 percent. Companies with the highest "sustainable engagement" scores had an average one-year operating margin of 27 percent.

Forty percent of employees with low engagement scores said they were likely to leave their employers over the next two years, compared to 24 percent of traditionally engaged employees, and just 18 percent of employees with the highest "sustainable engagement" scores.

So what is energy, exactly? In physics, it's simply the capacity to do work. In other words "energy" and "capacity" are essentially interchangeable. In simple terms, energy is the fuel in our tanks — what's required to bring our skill and talent to life. Without sufficient energy, skill is rendered irrelevant. You can't run on empty and that's increasingly what employees are being asked to do.

Feelings of overload and burnout are default emotions in today's organizations. Nor is this likely to change soon. Higher demand and fewer resources are the new normal. Effectively addressing the issue of capacity — energizing the workplace — depends on the willingness of individuals, leaders and organizations to each take responsibility for their roles.

For organizations, the challenge is to shift from their traditional focus on getting more out of people, to investing in meeting people's core needs so they're freed, fueled, and inspired to bring more of themselves to work, more sustainably.

Specifically, Towers Watson concludes that organizations must create policies and practices that make it possible for employees to better manage their workload, live more balanced lives and exercise greater autonomy around how, when, and where they get their work done. Policies focused on flexibility and working remotely contribute to a more energized workplace, we've found, and so does setting organization-wide boundaries around the length of meetings and the hours during which people are expected to respond to email.

For leaders, the key is to begin thinking of themselves as Chief Energy Officers. Energy is contagious, for better and for worse, and disproportionately so for leaders — by virtue of their influence. "The manager is at the heart of what we might think of as a personal employee ecosystem," the Towers Watson study concludes, "shaping individual experience ... day in and day out."

Among sustainably engaged employees, for example, 74 percent in the study believed senior leaders had a sincere interest in their well-being. Only 44 percent of traditionally engaged employees felt the same way, while only a miniscule 18 percent of disengaged employees felt their managers genuinely cared about their well-being. No single behavior more viscerally and reliably influences the quality of people's energy than feeling valued and appreciated by their supervisor.

For individual employees, the challenge is to take a measure of responsibility for their experience, and not allow themselves to default into victim mode. It's bracing to discover how two people can experience the same workplace, and even the same set of demands, in entirely different ways.

Employees willing to take more responsibility for how they manage and take care of themselves — regardless of the sort of organization and supervisor they work for — end up feeling better and performing better than those who see themselves as victims. The mantra we use is a variation on the Serenity Prayer: "Invest your energy in what you have the power to influence. Don't invest energy in what you can't influence, and have the wisdom to know the difference."

A workplace that really works? It begins with employers and employees truly valuing and investing in one another.

Here's a short article on the Call of the Wild website about mental toughness seeking to explain how we react when under pressure and how best to combat it. For more information on our approach to team building visit the website.

More blog posts by Tony Schwartz