The interactions you get into throughout the day can leave your mind numb.

You have to remember names, speak with clarity and purpose, and make a positive mark on your listeners overall. If you’re a person who cares for making a positive mark on the world you live in, then you take all conversations you partake in seriously. A simple conversation can be the birth of a great idea that shifts your life’s focus. A simple conversation can paint you as someone who can be trusted and depended on, thereby propelling you further into someone’s life.

We tend to be conscious of how we begin conversations, and of our behavior amidst them. However, it’s important to not overlook our methods of exiting them as well.

Your exits out of conversations are what will stick in the short-term memory of the ones you interact with. This recency bias can serve to either amplify the perception of the conversation, or influence others to forget of its importance. In hopes of ensuring that your exits out of conversations serve to make them stand out, there are a couple of things that you can do.

This article hopes to present things to remember when ending conversations in memorable ways.

Summarize What You’ve Heard in a Positive Light

“I’ll be sure to remember what you said about ____, it opened up my eyes to that possibility.”

As your conversation comes to a close, think back at what you heard from the other person. In a rather convoluted way, it seems that showing the person with whom you’re conversing that their points were listened to and accepted encourages them to remember your points and subsequently accept them too.

Think back at what your partner in conversation has said, and what you thought about their dialogue.

Summarize your thoughts out loud by presenting their points back at them. You’ll serve to show that you were attentive in listening to their dialogue and found their input important.

The sense of importance someone feels when their points are positively validated encourages them to reciprocate. They will feel a need to remember what you’ve said and analyze what they can take away from your own contributions to the conversation.

Summarizing what you’ve heard from the people you’re in conversation with also serves to give meaning to the conversation. Rather than jumping from topic to topic and ending the dialogue without a summary, you’ll do the job of organizing the contents of your talk. It will make the conversation easier to remember as they’ll be saved the work of organizing its contents.

Ask About Future Plans

After you’ve summarized the points of the conversation in a positive light, you should use that information to help yourself in asking about future plans. Asking the people you’re talking to about their future plans once again plays to building up their feeling of importance.

It allows them to present their visions, dreams, as well as their more down to earth ideas. They will feel authentically listened to, as talking about our goals and visions for the future is a rather personal endeavor.

It’ll serve to guide you out of a perhaps mundane topic of conversation, to one which is not bound by reality quite yet.

Even if the contents of the conversation were negative by nature, future plans can always be steered to sound positive.

Asking about your counterparts’ future plans will give them the chance to seem desirable. It will give you a reason to keep in contact, as you can always check on how their plans are shaping out to be as time goes by.

Steering the conversation to look into the future does well in bringing it to a close. If the people you’re speaking with tend to ramble and not be cognizant of the time you’re committing, asking about the future does a good job of turning the current conversation into one of the past.

Remembering these two points when ending conversations with others will help you keep your conversations timely as well as memorable. Establishing a vision for the future in your conversations will inherently place you closer to being a part of that future.

The points of focus you should remember are providing structure, a feeling of importance, and hope for the future.