Being able to think critically and plan well is important for success in many areas of life, such as work, relationships, politics, health, and fitness. We can handle the complexity of the world, make good choices, and come up with solutions that work when we have a good mind. In this piece, we’ll talk about why critical thinking is important and how it helps you have a smart, capable mind. We’ll also talk about how to improve your thinking skills and how important good planning is for making your ideas come true.
Think about the opposite. Imagine someone who doesn’t think well. That person will have a hard time figuring out what’s going on, what to do, where to find help, and what the results will be. Cognitive distortions are ways of thought that people use when they can’t think clearly. She makes too many generalizations, thinks in either/or terms, gets too personal, sensitive, blames, has tunnel vision, etc. So it’s not surprising that the poor thinker can’t deal with reality well and has trouble getting along with other people.
Effective thinking lets you first understand what’s going on right now, so you know what you’re up against. Before you jump to conclusions, you should think about all the factors and variables in an open and honest way. Once you have clearly defined, described, and separated what is, you can start looking for good solutions and tools. You come up with a clear result, problem, answer, and new idea. This is what it means to have a good mind: a mind that lets you figure out what’s going on and make plans for how to do things in a useful way.
In this way, no one is born with what we call “a good mind.” The mind is made better. If you have a good mind now, it’s because you’ve worked to make it that way. You have learned how to think clearly, exactly, critically, creatively, and effectively. That doesn’t just happen. It takes work and planning. This won’t happen unless you train yourself to use your brain and “run your own brain.” Even going to elementary school does not ensure that. Well, why not? Schools still tell kids what to think, but they don’t teach them how to think.
So, who teaches people how to think, given that? That’s a good question, and the answer is, “Generally, no one.” Most people who have figured out how to think well have done so on their own. And they usually learned it after something went wrong and what they had learned made things worse instead of better. So, they sat down to learn how to think and learn. Then they thought about how they thought and learned and found out about meta-thinking and meta-learning.
Who helps people learn? NLP does, but most of the time in a roundabout way. When I learned NLP, I mostly learned how to think. It was one of the things that happened when I learned NLP that I didn’t expect or want to happen. That’s when I learned that the first level of thinking starts with what I picture in my mind based on my senses. Then I found out that language is a meta-representation system, which means it is a system about sense systems. Then, in Neuro-Semantics, we explained that there are many more meta-levels of “thinking” that are coded as beliefs, decisions, permissions, knowledge, ideas, etc. So, Neuro-Semantic trainers and sometimes NLP teachers are the people who teach thinking today.
If you teach someone how to think and how to use their thinking skills well, they will have a good mind that can come up with good ideas that can change their life and/or the world. In fact, though, that’s just the start. People who can think well and come up with good ideas are a good start for success and getting things done, but that is not enough. It’s a great start, but it’s just the start. We also need good plans—a clear, workable plan that will help us reach a certain goal. That’s because you won’t be able to use your good ideas if you don’t have good plans. A good plan tells you what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.
When you think carefully, you start with a clear goal and then think about the steps you need to take to make that goal happen. It’s not enough to have a great goal if you can’t plan smartly. When you don’t know how, or don’t know how to do something, your brain will fill in the gaps. How this works is explained by David Dunning:
“An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous— especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power”
If you want a good thought, you need to learn how to think first and foremost. That means you shouldn’t think that “good thinking is natural and inevitable” or that “you don’t have to learn how to think to be an effective thinker.” Good thought makes a good mind, so the two go together. The trouble is that there are a lot of ways to not think, or fake experiences that look like thinking. As a way to stay alert, in Brain Camp I we learn to spot seven of these fakes that look like the real thing. Then we talk about the 14 most important ways to think.
Curated by Danielle Tan.
Reference:
- [Neurons] 2023 Neurons #37 DO YOU HAVE A GOOD MIND? by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Executive Director, ISNS.
