Make Learning & Working Easier By Improving Your Critical Thinking Skills

Mistakes cost us time and money. As students, as workers, as family members, we’ve all had to deal with the consequences of making a bad decision, a faulty assumption, a wrong conclusion. Most of us know the pain of realizing that if we had just thought something through a little more we could have averted disaster. This is why developing critical thinking skills is so important. Being able to hone and refine our ability to see things clearly can help us see trouble ahead and make life a little bit easier.

What Is Critical Thinking?

Let’s look at what critical thinking is through the lens of classic Star Trek. You have two figures: Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Kirk is impulsive, emotional, hot-headed, willing to risk it all on gut instinct. Mr. Spock, by contrast, is cold, methodical, rooting all his decisions on logic and reason. Critical thinking involves listening to the Spock in your head instead of the Kirk. It’s marshaling your powers of observation, analysis, and comprehension to take in information and data as objectively as you can so you can arrive at decisions based on their conclusions and not on biases or emotional responses.

As you can imagine, this is much easier said than done. Many of us are prone to wishful thinking: we want things to be true because they feel true. It’s why the Is-ought fallacy (“this is the way it is because I think it ought to be this way”) is a common pitfall. Our emotions color and direct our actions: this isn’t necessarily a bad thing but sometimes they can lead us to false conclusions or cause us to double-down on bad ideas. Learning how to see things from a critical distance is an essential skill. Like all skills, it can be honed over time.

What Are Critical Thinking Skills?

Critical thinking is part of the “soft skills” family: these are interpersonal, knowledge-based skills that are a valuable part of any worker’s toolkit. Regardless of what industry you work in, possessing the ability to think critically will make you a sharper, more well-rounded person. These are a few examples of critical thinking skills:

• Observation: the ability to clearly see things as they are.
• Analysis: understanding and comprehending information without rushing to judgment.
• Open-Mindedness: being able to hear out different perspectives and process information you may not want to hear without closing yourself off.
• Inference: drawing conclusions from the material you’re working on and/or doing “deep reading” to find subtextual/”hidden” meanings in the data (i.e. conclusions that the data indicates that others may have missed).
• Communication: the ability to share what you’ve learned, to ask meaningful questions from others, to listen to them and take in what they say, and to share your own ideas in a way that can be critically understood.
• Problem solving: resolving conflicts and finding solutions through reason.

One thing all critical thinking skills have in common is tempo: critical thinking is about slowing down. It’s not about moving fast and breaking things; it’s about taking your time, really considering what’s in front of you, and making good decisions based on reasoned conclusions. In the same way there have been Slow Art and Slow Food movements that encourage people to take their time enjoying aesthetic and culinary delights, consider critical thinking skills to be a form of Slow Thinking. This is a good thing: people who take their time aren’t usually jumping to disastrous conclusions.

How to Improve Your Critical Thinking

It may sound odd but a surefire way to improve your thinking is to think about how you think. This process is called metacognition: the science of thinking about thinking. Understanding how you take in and process information can reveal your critical blindspots and also give you a better understanding of what kind of learning works best for you.

An easy starting point for metacognition is to keep a diary. Keep a succinct and honest record of your day-to-day life, just a paragraph or two, for at least a month. Going back and reading these entries can tell you a lot about yourself: how you write about your days, what you think is worth recording, and what you leave out. You can also keep a commonplace book: these are journals where you write down quotes and ideas you find interesting.

If you do decide to keep a journal, it’s best to do it on paper. It may not be as convenient as typing on your phone but handwriting has proven neurological benefits. Studies have found that writing on paper improves memory retention and stimulates cognition.

Thinking Through Art

Do you like to doodle? Visual art can be a great way to enhance your critical thinking. Drawing actually involves quite a bit of critical thinking: you have to observe something, study it, and try to render it on paper. Trying to sketch something off the top of your head or through a life model (even just a household object in front of you) can sharpen your powers of observation. While art is a deeply subjective experience, it makes you use skills that can be very valuable for objective analysis.

Listen Closely

The composer Pauline Oliveros once said, "hearing and listening are not the same thing." Oliveros believed in a practice called Deep Listening that encouraged musicians and music lovers alike to "listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you're not." For Oliveros, listening wasn't a passive activity: you had to choose what you're listening to and give it your full attention. This is as good an introduction to the idea of active listening as any.

To be a more critical thinker, you have to be a better listener. A lot of times we rush to judgment and make bad calls because we don’t hear other people out. We’re too busy waiting to speak while they talk, or we hear what we WANT to hear and not what was actually said. Active listening forces us to pay attention, to really hear people out, and to reflect on what’s being said.

The best part of active listening is that it’s a skill you can practice quite often. Whenever you’re talking to friends, family, co-workers, or even total strangers, resist the urge to take over the conversation. Let them talk. Ask them questions based on what they said to encourage them to keep talking; be the traffic cop directing the flow of traffic instead of the motorist speeding to their destination. 

One other thing to keep in mind: if someone’s telling you something you already know, don’t stop them. Don’t correct them. Let them say what they’re going to say even if it’s something you know by heart. The reason why this is good (beyond simple courtesy) is that we all perceive things differently. Someone who knows something you do may have a different angle on it that you hadn’t considered. If you shut them down or redirect the conversation to something else you wouldn’t gain that insight.

Seek Out Diversity

When we seek the word diversity, we often think of it in terms of demographics and backgrounds, but it can also mean diversity of thought and perspectives. It’s good to be around people who are not like you; it’s also very good to be around people who don’t think like you. The writer/philosopher Robert Anton Wilson came up with a concept called “reality tunnels”: he used these to describe how our belief systems and points of view can railroad us, fixing us on a path we can’t see beyond.

A reality tunnel doesn’t necessarily have to be based on one’s religion, politics, or sexuality. A person could get “tunneled” based on how they approach their work, how they interact with co-workers, or how they view technology. It can be very easy to fall into mental ruts without realizing it if everyone around you thinks the same thing. That’s why seeking out outside perspectives is important. Even if you don’t agree with that alternative perspective, understanding a different way of seeing things can help clarify what you think and believe and re-affirm it.

Article by Austin Brietta