When my mother went over dating rules with me as a young teenager, she added, “And you make decision what you’re going to do right here, sitting at kitchen table, not in back seat of a car, because then you won’t be thinking.”

Will power is a term that’s gone out of favor, but we do have a “will” – ability to make decisions and hold to them. We also have personal power to manage our emotions and those of others’ under most pressing of circumstances.

Other pressure situations might be being asked to do something illegal at work, being tempted to do something unethical, feeling angry enough to hit someone, having an opportunity for an affair, investing in stock market, resisting drinking when you’re in recovery, or going to work when you’d rather go fishing.

Emotional intelligence includes Intentionality, and other competencies such as intuition, creativity, resilience, impulse control and stress management. These competencies can be learned and there are assessments to tell you where your strengths and weaknesses are.

Developing your EQ allows you to put in a floodgate when you threaten to be overcome with emotions, which is called “neural hijacking.” This is when emotions swamp you to point where you make decisions or do things that are harmful to yourself or others.

EQ matters more to your success and happiness than IQ. Why not make it one of your goals this year to increase your emotional intelligence?

Longer Lists

What if you have an extremely long list of items to remember? Try breaking it down into more suitable sub-chains and apply same rules as above. Better still – see if you can organize list better, put similar or like items together. Are you able to form acronyms from any of items? Can you separate list in such a way that acronyms form words and then you can combine these words? Remember, more ridiculous thought – stronger impact and better it will stay in your memory.

It helps if either acronyms or associations you create can form mental images. What you can see in your mind is very strong and stronger something is, better you can play with it and easier it will be to remember. What may be difficult at first will come with practice.

Sketching Details

Visualization is a very strong skill. Try thinking in pictures and forms. When you have to remember directions – use a series of arrows to lay out route. If you have to remember blood flow in body – wouldn’t it be easy to lay out a diagram of heart, lungs and other organs and then add arrows to point direction? Wouldn’t that be easier to remember than a simple word description? Associate a certain shape with a certain organ and then it becomes even more vivid.

Relate Facts

If a piece of information doesn’t relate to you, then try finding something about it that does. For example, human body has 60,000 miles of blood vessels. Kind of hard to believe? Think that that means ten round-trip drives between Los Angeles and New York and it will take on meaning.

Do you have to remember physical dimensions for a room or a field? Compare it to something you know already. If you’re a sports fan, chances are you can picture size of playing field. How does that compare to space you are trying to remember – bigger smaller, would it fit into a football field – how many times?

For more free techniques send a blank e-mail to mailto:memorize@getresponse.com