By Danielle Ellis

General Conference is upon us again. It’s a wonderful time to listen to Latter-day prophets, recharge spiritual batteries and hear direct counsel on the current situations in your life. It’s also, by the last hour of the afternoon sessions, a bit hard to ward off a nap. After all, hours on end of listening to soothing voices while sitting still does take its toll!

So here are some ideas for how to make the most of those inspired messages.

Visual Learners

Visual learners need to see the teacher’s body language and facial expressions to get the most out of the message. They like to have no visual distractions, like kids running in front of the television. Visual learners like to take detailed notes. In a conference setting, visual learners will clue in to scriptures, quotes or pictures on the screen. Those will be important concepts to the talk.

Visual learners can get the most out of a conference talk by adding in diagrams, concept maps and webs to show relationships between ideas. By creating visual links between concepts, they increase critical thinking about concepts and are able to recall details about each concept. Retention increases when visual learners can tie the conference talk to the concepts in their notes. The highest retention occurs when new concepts are tied to previous knowledge.

Auditory Learners

Auditory learners do very well in a setting like conference because they learn underlying meanings through tone of voice, pitch, speed and other nuances. Hearing the words is the best way for them to grasp the meaning. Auditory learners prefer not to look at the subject because the visual connection is a distraction to them.

Notes are more of a distraction to an auditory learner, because they are able to memorize the information as they hear it. An auditory learner might do best to listen to conference on the radio, or on streaming internet, or just close their eyes to listen to the video broadcast.

Kinesthetic Learners

Kinesthetic or tactile learners absorb information by touching or doing. They find it hard to sit still for long periods of time. Merely watching and listening do not provide a good basis for learning. This provides a bit of a challenge for a church meeting that is visual and auditory, and during which physical movement is frowned upon. One friend with this learning style has found that doing jigsaw puzzles during conference helps her to focus on the message. Keeping her hands moving helps her brain to stay focused on the message.

The Mix

Once you understand how you learn, you can adjust your conference experience to your learning style. However, if you watch with other people, things may get interesting. My wanting to watch and take notes without visual distractions (visual learning) may get in the way of my children and husband wanting to cook and play scripture bingo with the television blaring in the background (kinesthetic learning). As a result, you may need to find a creative solution.

One family I know has every television in the house going with conference. Mom and Dad watch in peace and quiet in their bedroom. Some of the kids watch in the family room, while the grandkids play in the toy room with conference on in the background.

Organizing Your Time

Of course we look forward to conference weekend, but it’s still difficult to take a whole weekend to watch it. There is still laundry to be done, meals to be fixed, eaten and cleaned up and always plenty more things that don’t just go away because it’s conference time. Perhaps it’s time for some creative problem solving.

First, do some planning beforehand so that the to-do list for the weekend is as short as possible. Then figure out how to simplify what’s left. Maybe even prepared meals or delivery foods would be a good option. And maybe get your kinesthetic learners in the family to sort, wash, dry and fold the laundry while they watch! Then again, you could use a video recorder or Tivo to record all the sessions and watch them as time permits.

Prayer First

First and foremost, general conference is about revelation from the Lord, through our church leaders, about what we need to know and do right now. We may have specific problems we need counsel for, or we may just participate looking for a good message.

But the Lord knows not only what we are facing today, he knows what we will be facing over the next six months. He knows exactly which counsel will pertain directly to us. If we go to Him in humble prayer before the conference begins, asking to have clear guidance for our lives, He will magnify our learning and touch our spirits in ways no temporal learning can approach.

Take Two

No matter how you prepare for general conference, there is more to be gleaned from each message than you can process at one time. Thankfully, all the messages are in the Ensign. A careful observer once pointed out to me that there are the same number of addresses as there are weeks between conference sessions. So conference talks can be studied in greater depth and their messages reinforced in Family Home Evenings throughout the year.

I have found that there are certain apostles whom I adore, and can hear them speaking as I read their talks later. I also have some whom I can’t even follow during conference, but when I revisit their printed talks in the Ensign, I find them brilliant and insightful. Maybe that goes back to learning styles.

I have also found that when I revisit the talks (easy to do on lds.org!) with new problems to solve or topics to research, I find new wisdom I hadn’t seen before. It seems only right that that we should spend more than a few minutes on each message. They are, after all, inspired messages from specially called and qualified leaders. If these messengers have labored over their messages and prayed for the Lord’s guidance in crafting them, surely there is a spiritual feast waiting for their audience.

Behold, they stand at the door and knock. Let’s decide to let them in.