Critical Thinking and Personal Success: Mental Strength Tip #157

Critical thinking is an essential aspect to train for personal growth and personal success.

In order to progress in our human development we must take time to ask questions and contemplate various topics of personal growth, such as critical thinking, which is exactly the intention of these virtual personal coaching sessions.

Personal success is achieved through the disciplined execution of a fully established personal development plan.

This virtual personal coaching session is designed to assist you in your self-improvement, personal growth and personal development.

It is intended to create self-empowerment and inspire you to take action, so that you can reach your personal goals and personal success.

I take a personal growth topic, in this case critical thinking, and give an overview about it.  Then I’ll continue by asking a series of mental strength questions.  I’ll wrap-up with a summary and some final thoughts.

Take your time with this topic, carefully consider your responses to the questions and write them down.  Personal growth is not supposed to be easy, it takes courage to face yourself.  But when you develop the courage and mental strength to do actually this, you will be building confidence.

[color-box]Start improving your critical thinking and take back control of your thoughts and emotions no matter what!  Pick up a copy of Develop the Mental Strength of a Warrior HERE[/color-box]

Objective of this Mental Strength Tip on Critical Thinking

To help you make the distinction between the five levels of thinking and to embrace the highest level which is critical thinking.

Let’s Get Started:

The obvious place to start discussing critical thinking is to talk about thinking itself. What is it? Can we get better at it?

There are lots of ways of thinking about thinking!! Sometimes thinking is an unconscious act. Have you ever solved a problem in your sleep? Have you ever set a problem aside only to find that the solution presents itself to you in the middle of a meeting? Thinking isn’t always verbal. Sometimes we think in images instead of words. What about your dreams? Is that a form of thinking?

Vincent Ruggiero has developed a more formal definition for thinking that we can use in the context of academics. In The Art of Thinking, he writes “Thinking is any mental activity that helps formulate or solve a problem, make a decision, or fulfill a desire to understand. It is a searching for answers, a reaching for meaning.” He reminds us that the mind engages in all sorts of processes in support of thinking:

• Careful observation
• Memorizing
• Remembering
• Wondering
• Imagining
• Inquiring
• Evaluating
• Judging

Questions to Uncover Beliefs about Critical Thinking:

• At what level does the average person think?
• What are your thoughts about positive thinking?
• Does negative thinking have any value?

Unsupportive Beliefs about Critical Thinking

• Critical thinking means being negative.
• Critical thinking doesn’t feel as good as positive thinking.
• Critical thinking is the same as positive thinking.

Mental Strength Beliefs about Critical Thinking

• Critical thinking forces you to base your decisions on more stringent criteria.
• Critical thinking reduces poor decision making.
• Critical thinking eliminates emotionally clouded judgment.

Outrageous Questions:

• How do you know if you’re using critical thinking?
• How is critical thinking different than positive thinking?
• Why do positive thinking purists despise critical thinking?

Reflective Questions:

• What percentage of your business and life decisions are made from critical thinking?
• Is critical thinking more average or mental strength thinking?
• How can you use critical thinking more often?

Mental Strength Coaching:

Here are a few ways in which you can improve your critical thinking.

• Be Aware. The best place to start is by being aware, by being thoughtful. You’ll want to examine your own ideas about knowledge, truth, and opinion.
• Challenge Yourself. You’ll want to challenge yourself, to push yourself in problem solving, in investigating, in identifying and defining.
• Be Critical. Don’t think of criticism as a negative term. To be critical of something is to assess it in terms of strengths and weaknesses-it’s not about tearing something apart!
• Communicate. Finally, you’ll want to be able to articulate what you discover in the process of thinking thoughtfully about something. Communicating what you’ve discovered is essential.

[color-box]Start improving your critical thinking and take back control of your thoughts and emotions no matter what!  Pick up a copy of Develop the Mental Strength of a Warrior HERE[/color-box]

Final Thought

As indicated on CriticalThinking.org

Critical thinking can be seen as having two components: 1) a set of information and belief generating and processing skills, and 2) the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behavior. It is thus to be contrasted with: 1) the mere acquisition and retention of information alone, because it involves a particular way in which information is sought and treated; 2) the mere possession of a set of skills, because it involves the continual use of them; and 3) the mere use of those skills (“as an exercise”) without acceptance of their results.

Critical thinking varies according to the motivation underlying it. When grounded in selfish motives, it is often manifested in the skillful manipulation of ideas in service of one’s own, or one’s groups’, vested interest.

As such it is typically intellectually flawed, however pragmatically successful it might be. When grounded in fairmindedness and intellectual integrity, it is typically of a higher order intellectually, though subject to the charge of “idealism” by those habituated to its selfish use.

Critical thinking of any kind is never universal in any individual; everyone is subject to episodes of undisciplined or irrational thought. Its quality is therefore typically a matter of degree and dependent on, among other things, the quality and depth of experience in a given domain of thinking or with respect to a particular class of questions.

No one is a critical thinker through-and-through, but only to such-and-such a degree, with such-and-such insights and blind spots, subject to such-and-such tendencies towards self-delusion. For this reason, the development of critical thinking skills and dispositions is a life-long endeavor.

Get started today on creating your own critical thinking and request your Introductory Consultation by going HERE.