Four keys to developing your thinking skills

Thinking is the highest paying job in the world, and getting an education that will lead to thinking is the highest investing investment that you can make. Developing our capabilities as individuals in thinking and doing is how we develop ourselves and eventually fulfill the purpose of our lives. To really start learning about thinking, we need to focus on four elements that I call “nuggets of thinking”:

The skill of Self-Study

If you want to develop a specific set of skills that are very rare to come by, then take your time and practice. If you want to improve a specific set of skills, then do it consistently and enjoy the process. Learn new things, and be open to growing. This is the best way to bring in life wisdom that can help you to grow in thinking skills.

Perfecting a focused, organized, single-minded approach to your thinking goals. Just as we work to perfect specific skills as individuals, we have to work towards developing ourselves in the skills of organization and thinking. Try to develop your own approach and be willing to change it to match your own rhythm and flow as time goes on.

The purpose of learning to think. As with any other skill set, you can only think once you know how to think. This learning, this thinking process, is what helps us to be able to think clearly and helps us to develop more effective solutions to our problems.

The skill of Self-Reflection

Once you’ve spent a great deal of time thinking, the first thing you have to do is to be open to the fact that you can improve your thinking. Don’t just pretend you know everything. If you don’t know something, it’s okay to ask for help, to ask what you might be missing. You will develop new insight, new understanding, and new insights that can lead to new ideas.

To help you improve your thinking, it’s important to cultivate a reflective mind that will be able to take in more information from your surroundings than you’re used to. It’s important to look at yourself and ask, “What am I doing?” and “How might I improve?”; and it’s important to look at others and ask, “How might I improve my understanding?”

Use this reflection to look at your motives, your mistakes, your behaviors, and your decisions, and ask yourself, “Does this make sense to me?” If not, then figure out why. Then ask, “What do I need to improve in myself to make this make sense?

The skill of Collaboration

In terms of staying on top of the latest thinking and new trends, the ability to collaborate with others is a skill to have, not just the ability to read and assimilate a lot of knowledge. To collaborate with others means to engage with others, ask questions, push forward your ideas with others, and collaborate on the ideas that you share. To collaborate with others, you have to build trust with others so that they will be open to hearing new ideas and learning new things from you.

The act of listening and interacting builds more and more confidence and trust in the process of collaborating. As you do this, you will start to notice how being thoughtful about others and what they are saying really makes a difference. Listening to your spouse or partner will build your listening skills, and collaborating with them on a project will help you to better understand their point of view.

If you want to develop a more collaborative mind, then go out and practice. Start having regular conversations with people in your life. Talk with people around you. Ask questions and listen. And, of course, make sure to practice sharing and listening with your spouse, children, and friends.

The skill of Collaboration improves a lot of different areas of life. We need to be able to work together to solve complex problems, we need to be able to help each other to be successful in our work, and we need to be able to build strong, healthy relationships.

The skill of Evaluation

When you’ve spent a great deal of time thinking, you will discover new insights and new possibilities. At this stage, you will be able to know when something is not right and be open to being wrong about it. Then, you will have to develop the ability to evaluate new ideas, and you will need to develop the skill of evaluation. Evaluating ideas is essential to keeping an open mind.

A common strategy that will help you develop this skill is to put yourself into the position of your adversary. Make a list of all of the people you know who are successful in their work. Go through this list and evaluate their ideas. If you are a thinking type, you can decide which ideas are good and which ideas are bad. Then evaluate the conclusions they come to, and then listen to the counterarguments against those conclusions. You can then make a more informed decision about whether the conclusions are reasonable.

Evaluation of your ideas will help you make better decisions and will keep you from wasting time arguing with people who are different than you. It also will help you to recognize when the same solution applies to different situations and will help you to look at situations and challenges from a broader range of perspectives.

The skill of Demonstration

The final skill of thinking is the ability to demonstrate what you’ve learned. Demonstrating what you have learned is not to be confused with showing off. Showing off is showing off, not showing how smart you are. A demonstration is showing how smart you are, and you will need to develop the skill of demonstration. Demonstrating what you have learned involves sharing your knowledge with others, and providing information to help them understand a concept, idea, or problem. A demonstration should be objective, clear, and concise. It should be interesting, but not entertaining.

These skills are essential for our everyday lives. You might want to volunteer for a leading role in your local setup; I encourage you to do it. Anything that takes you out of your comfort zone will improve your skills of thinking. You never know when those skills will be needed or when you need to impress someone in order to get what you want.

The skill of demonstration will impress the heck out of someone! It’s really important because, as you progress in life, there will be times when you need to show that you’re smart, and this skill will be most useful.