Memory
Training Exercises and Resources

During a training course several topics are often covered. Each of these topics leads to a number of actions that will help improve delegates’ behaviour or skills in the future.

However, many of these actions might not be carried out. After the course, delegates can easily get carried away by other demands on their time and soon the ideas explored in the course will be forgotten.

In order to help delegates apply the learning from course to their lives you can get them to commit to certain actions and increase the likelihood that they will engage in specific post-course activities to reinforce learning.

This exercise helps delegates identify what might stop them from committing to the tasks and identify solutions for each obstacle. The exploration of these obstacles is fun and the exercise helps to motivate delegates in following up with actions after the course.

Ideally, you should run this exercise at the end of the course just before recap and end-of-course summary.

This exercise helps to refresh delegates’ memory about what you just taught them. It encourages them to think about the training lessons covered so far and make a few statements about what they have learned. Specifically, it allows delegates to draw up a number of actions to do after the course to get more from the lessons.

Ideally you should run this exercise just before going to a tea or lunch break. It helps to summarise the points covered in the current lesson or all previous lessons (depending on your choice) and also acts as a closing exercise on a particular topic.

This exercise helps delegates to understand the importance of focusing and concentration when they are in a fast changing environment.

We all deal with lists almost on a daily basis. However, as we all have discovered, lists can be difficult to memorise and remember. Research shows that we have significant problems remembering a list as the list becomes longer and longer. The problem is mainly to do with the linearity of the list and its inherent lack of detail. When memorising a list we mainly use our left-side brain to make logical connections and improve our chances of recall.

In addition to our left-side brain, we can also employ our right-side brain to significantly increase our ability to memorise and recall successfully. This exercise demonstrates the significance of right-side brain abilities and how to employ it.

The purpose of this exercise is to help delegates practice memorising and paying attention to detail. Repeated exercise can increase focus and help people to become more aware of their surroundings as it encourages careful looking. It also highlights the importance of using all non-verbal senses, such as touch to increase memory retention and recall. The exercise is also useful for teamwork, communication skills and leadership skills. 

This is a powerful team building activity that brings out the potential qualities of a good leader. It is a fairly physical exercise and you may need to brief the participants beforehand so they can come ready to participate in this exercise (for example, come with comfortable cloth). It is an ideal exercise for team building where you can explore a range of topics on management and how to respond to a manager’s instructions.

This is a famous entertaining game were a player must guess the name written on a card by asking closed questions where the answers can be “yes” or “no”. The objective is to find the name as quickly as possible. Many variations can be used to bias the exercise based on your specific training needs. A variation of this exercise can be used to teach the importance of asking open questions as opposed to closed questions to maximise information transfer. See Variations for a guideline on this.

This exercise has become immortally famous by Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.