At the end of some of my shows, I thank every person in the audience by name. Not just the people who came up on stage, and not just the table in front, but every single person. On a good night that’s around a hundred people, and if I have enough time before the show I can get up to about a hundred and fifty.
In my experience, though, a hundred might be a bit much, not for you but for the audience. I think 40 to 50 names is the sweet spot. After that, they’ll kind of get the point, unless you get very good and can rattle them off super quickly (which I still don’t necessarily recommend). That said, if you have the time to fill in the show and it’s a very crucial client that you want to work for again and make a lasting impression on, it could be worth doing all of them. It would be hard to overstate how often I’ve built a great relationship with a client or an event agent purely because of this one part of the show, especially because most of the time it leads to a completely natural standing ovation.
In the video of one of these, at an awards dinner, you’ll see that there are variables you’ll invariably have to overcome, such as people changing seats after you’ve already placed them at a table, someone who gave you a different name earlier than the one everyone else calls them, and guests you never got the chance to meet (one man I knew only because I’d read his name tag out in the hallway). When I got to the woman who shares my sister’s name, I said so, and you could see on her face how much it meant to her that I’d remembered that too.
When you perform this on stage, it feels incredible. It feels like you’re standing in front of a group of people you have the utmost respect for, and they respect you right back. You can feel the audience turning into lifelong fans, and you watch each person’s face light up as you say their name. Even the most cynical or skeptical audience members can’t help but crack a smile when you look at them, nod, and say their name. It’s a beautiful moment for the audience, for the person who booked you, and especially for you as a performer, because it’s one of the few things that reminds you why you work so hard to be on stages around the world. I’ve also found that it makes it much easier for people to reach out to you after the show, drop you an email, or start a conversation, because they don’t feel like they’re intruding (they assume you know and remember them, and often you will).
People assume this is a memory trick, or that I have some kind of gift. I don’t. I’m going to explain exactly how I do it, and then I want to get into the science, because the reason it works comes down to how attention and memory actually work in the brain. It has much less to do with memory than with attention and intention. Most people who say “I’m terrible with names” aren’t actually bad at remembering names. They were never really trying to remember the name in the first place. And on the rare occasion they do try, the pressure of trying usually fills their head with worry about forgetting, which makes them more likely to forget, not less.
The problem: you’re thinking about yourself
The honest truth, and I think it can be hard to swallow, is that the more insecure you feel when you meet someone, the more likely you are to forget their name. Here’s why.
Think about what happens in your head when you meet someone new at an event. You’re thinking about what you want to know from them, what impression you want to give, what you’re going to say next, whether they’re going to take you seriously, and how you’re coming across. That’s five jobs you’ve given yourself in an interaction that lasts a few seconds, and not a single one of them has to do with the other person. Somewhere in the middle of all that, they tell you their name, and it goes in one ear and out the other before you’ve even finished the handshake. Now you’re stuck in an awkward spot where you don’t want to ask them to repeat it, because you feel like you should have been paying attention. And you end up seeming less competent and less capable, which completely undermines the five jobs you were trying to do in the first place. (Research on social anxiety has found the same thing: people who are focused on how they’re coming across remember noticeably less about the person they were talking to and what was said.)
This has a name in psychology. In 1973 a researcher named Malcolm Brenner found what’s called the next-in-line effect. When people take turns speaking in a group, they remember very little of what the person just before them said, because they were busy getting ready for their own turn. You know this from the classic go-around-the-table introduction. Everybody remembers the people who went long before them, and almost nobody remembers the person who went right before them. The name was said out loud and clearly, and they heard it, but their mind was on their own line.
The research on attention demonstrates this. Fergus Craik and his colleagues ran a set of studies in 1996 where people had to learn information while doing a second task at the same time. Splitting their attention while they were trying to learn something hurt their memory tremendously. Splitting it later, while they were trying to recall, hurt much less. In other words, the damage happens at the moment you hear the name, not later when you’re trying to dig it up. If your head is full of “how am I coming across” at the moment someone says “I’m Jennifer,” you might as well be saying, “Farewell, Jennifer, because I won’t remember you 18 seconds from now.” And that number comes from real research. In 1959, Lloyd and Margaret Peterson found that when people were kept from repeating something in their heads, their memory of it dropped off sharply within about 18 seconds, even for something as small as three letters. And those were people who were paying attention to begin with.
There’s one more reason names in particular are hard. Researchers in 1987 (McWeeny and colleagues) showed people faces and told them either that the person’s name was Baker or that the person was a baker. People remembered the job far better than the name, even though it’s the exact same word. It’s been called the Baker-baker paradox. A job comes with a whole world attached to it: flour, early mornings, the smell of bread. A name is just a sound with nothing attached to it. So a name needs more of your attention than almost anything else you learn about a person, and it usually gets less.
Getting your body out of the way
This is where studying nonverbals made all the difference for me. And I don’t mean reading other people. I mean the things I do with my own body that I used to have to think about. Read what I’m saying here carefully. You’re going to get about halfway through this section and think to yourself, “Well, how is this relevant to me remembering their name?” Just trust me. Take in this information and work at learning it, because it’s going to make a significant difference once we bring all the pieces together.