Listening is about taking time and being deliberate. Success comes easily when you take a moment to remind yourself you are getting inside someone else’s point of view, to let that be important. Sounds like psychobabble, I know, but most of the skills of good listening work pretty naturally in this context. Like a good golf swing or a martial arts punch, it’s easier to think of starting the movement in the right place than to think of it as a collection of discrete steps.

This is in stark contrast to remembering people’s names.

I can forget them regardless of my desire to remember. I don’t think name-recall is only a function of listening quality. I can leave a conversation in which I learned a lot about someone, except their name. I can even recall this weeks or months later… sans name.

Remembering names is highly amenable to techniques.

I learned some power name-remembering techniques while “floating” (assigned to work randomly) on nine psychiatric hospital units — sometimes had to learn 25-30 names in a day. The best techniques I found mostly consisted of playing name games like JoAnna mentioned or those you listed above.

I seem to be a visual learner too, so I’d superimpose the face of someone else I knew with the same name. If I didn’t know another name, I’d make up a more elaborate mnemonic. For example, I’d remember your name with the mnemonic The Mage and the Motorcycle. Merlin (famous wizard) Mann (the Isle of Man TT is a crazy motorcycle race). Sounds weird, but the image of Merlin (the wizard) on a Ducati in a tight curve is hard to forget.