What is Critical Thinking?
In a simple language, critical thinking can be defined as an art or way of analyzing and processing information. In most colleges & universities of the world, this skill is taught as a part of the curriculum. Once you are adept at it, you can look forward to usefully applying the same to any aspect of life –including concepts, subject areas, questions, and problems. Critical thinking is associated with the close monitoring of your own thoughts while paying attention to the source of thoughts and how they tend to follow each other. Moreover, inculcating the notion of critical thinking involves the art of practising open-mindedness. Research by experts has revealed that inculcating the notion of critical thinking comes with its own set of benefits across all possible areas of reasoning. For instance, someone possessing the skill of critical thinking is capable of:- Asking relevant, clear questions with a limited and precise scope
- Methodically gathering information and accurately assessing it
- Reaching well-supported conclusions, and evaluating them against counter-evidence
- Displaying a sense of constant awareness of their competence limits, while monitoring things they are not capable of understanding or accepting
- Communicating with others in a productive manner to obtain the desired results –even in cases of complicated problems
Top Ways to Improve Critical Thinking Skills
As evident, we are not born with critical thinking capabilities. Critical thinking is developed over time and nurtured across our lifetime. It’s about practicing. Just like we train our bodies we need to train our minds and cognitive processes.Ask Important Questions
The better you become at critical thinking, the more clear and fundamental your questions become. When you wish to improve the overall questioning capabilities while problem-solving, you should aim at breaking the question into sub-parts. Suppose you have come across some problems in life, and you are not sure what to do. Rather than finding a narrative on social media that ‘sounds about right’ and blindly following. You can start over by asking yourself questions like:- What information related to the problem do you have?
- How are you aware of the given information?
- What is the ultimate goal? What are you trying to validate, disapprove, criticize, or support?
- What are you overlooking?
- When you raise such questions, it encourages you to reach the core of the problem.
Become Acquainted with Your Mental Process
People who realize that they are critical thinkers often turn the respective analytical capabilities outwards. However, to become a genuine skilled critical thinker, you should include abundant self-reflection. Generally, you would like to observe your mental status –how it is currently, what it appears like, and where it is going. Irrespective of how thoughtful and smart you are, you need to analyze your current mental status. Ensure that you are asking yourself what you are assuming and why certain things are happening in your life. Once you have become aware of your own biases, it could help in rephrasing some of the parts of your thinking capability.Adjust Your Perspective
As mentioned, when you are mindful of the respective biases in life, it will help in developing critical thinking. However, it only turns out to be a single step towards the gradual perspective shift. Another useful thing you can consider doing is reading about literature on biases and their overall process of operation. Once you develop this habit of reading about biases, it can help in adjusting your perspective in life. Another helpful thing can be to keep exposing your mind to other lucrative ways of thinking.Develop Foresightedness
The ultimate goal is to get better at predicting the overall impact of the choices we make in life. You should consider that possessing good foresightedness is an asset –irrespective of what you are trying to achieve. Whether you are marketing your products or preparing for job interviews, you are able to make better decisions in life if you are able to forecast the consequences way before. How to develop foresightedness for critical thinking? It is important to ensure that you are taking the time to look at all possible angles of the given decision. You can also consider making a proper list of the pros & cons of the particular decision. In this way, you can easily boost your foresight. As such, you become better at predicting outcomes effectively. The more you are capable of doing this, the less work is required for making predictions every time.Conclusion
Whether you’re studying or working, if you happen to be distracted easily, it is high time that you should look forward to developing critical thinking capabilities.Blog posts
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