👉🏽 "I am bad with names."
Have you said or heard that before?
What motivates you to get better with names that are not (yet) familiar to you?
--- phone call ---- 
📲 "Oh, that's a hard one...Can I just call you Dr. George?"
📞"No.", I said, with confidence. "...I prefer that you use my last name if you would call me by my title. Otherwise, George is fine."
After a brief moment of silence, they asked. 
📲 “show me how you say your [last] name again”.
📞 “A-Jah-Pong”. The “gy” sounds like a “j”.
📲 “A-Jah-Pong?"
📞 “Yes”.
📲 “Oh that was easy, thank you!"
--- call ended ---
I felt a huge relief afterwards. For the first time, I had stood up for myself. Before, I had yielded this agency to fit in appease those who [just] called me by what felt simplest and convenient to them. I had grown accustomed to being OTHERED in spaces where I thought/felt I would otherwise belong; subtle forms of disinterest in the sound by which the world acknowledges my existence - my name (a string of letters). Over time, I realize that I consider the choice and effort learn to honor another person's preferred name shows how much power they exert, real/implied even if "unintentional".
As a soldier, my Drill Sergeants decided to call me “YOU” throughout my four-month training in Army Medic school, because they wielded a certain power over me. Similarly, as a student and a physician now, I have had some superiors, colleagues, and patients ask (my permission) to replace my last name with substitutes that seem easier and/or familiar to them - “Dr. A”, “Dr. AJ”, or “George”. Someone asked me to repeat my last name more than three times, and then asked if they can call me “Dr. George”.
Inertia or lost cause?
It takes mental energy to ask, learn, and practice pronouncing an unfamiliar name. But it takes a certain audacity to ask someone's permission to call them by YOUR preferred version of their name. That power one wields - whether real or implied/perceived - could cause harm, especially if the dynamic between the parties is asymmetric; imagine who is likely to assert such power and who may be harmed thereby. If only we channelled that audacious power with intention, to ask, learn, and practice (ALP - as proposed by Dr. Emmanuel C Ohuabunwa MD MBA) names that we readily dismiss with unintentional disinterest and alienating power.
As I learn to navigate these challenges, even as one who may wield such audacity, I share three tips for those who feel/think they are “bad with names”.

1. Do not ask permission to disregard another person's name/agency. Whatever your reason may be, doing so could alienate, dehumanize, and harm them indelibly even if unintentionally.
2. Channel your power and the audacity to ask such permission into inclusive intention. Ask, learn, and practice people’s names.
3. Normalize practices and tools that allow people to exercise the agency inherent in their names. See the links in the clip below (more in the comment).
   How good or bad are you with names?
   How do you learn to pronounce people’s names correctly?
   Share your "bad with names" moments and tools you use.

First shared via Linked post.