Five Questions to Evaluate The QUALITY of Thinking?

The quality of your life is given via the quality of the thinking you have done.
Thinking, in general, is more about discovery for either understanding things or creating new things. The thought does not precede the thinker; the thinker precedes the thought and the consciousness of the thinker precedes the fact of his/her being a thinker.  Digital professionals today need to learn how to explore and evaluate the variety of thinking in their mind. Here are five questions to assess the QUALITY of your thinking.

How positive is your thinking? Positive mental attitude is focused on strength, opportunities, and inspired actions. People with positive thinking convey strong will to make changes and have a future orientation that makes them more prone to overcome barriers and handle adversities. They show a positive mindset about their circumstances to make the positive influence in their surrounding. Positive thinking is the high thinking capability with capacity (inward strength) and ability (outward action) to reframe the experience of adversity. The amount of energy expends to both positive and negative thinking is the same, but the results from the two are so different. Knowledge is neutral and can be used for good and become beautiful -- or it can be used to harm others and becomes ugly. Thus, the positive mentality is a crucial element for deciding the QUALITY of thinking, because fundamentally positive thinking is the driving factors to lead progress either individually or collectively.

How creative is your thinking? Creativity is an innate thought process to create novel ideas. Creativity is the one which deals with any sort of idea necessary to solve a situation. Creativity is a high-level quality thinking because it evolves different thought processes for connecting dots and thinking differently. Questions, doubts, uncertainty surely do trigger creative thinking because the human mind is made to want to find better solutions to problems. Creativity is high QUALITY because it often imposes a higher cognitive load as you think 'harder' and consciously uses different kinds of thought actions and thinking tools like association, perspective shifting, opposites etc. Creative thinking is high quality, not just because it is often complex, the QUALITY of thinking is about how it can help to simplify complicated things through intuition. In fact, positive thinking + creativity is an intimidating pair of thought processes to push the world forward.

How deep is your thinking? Back to the root of the word “profundity,” it means insightful and understanding. Climbing Knowledge-Insight-Wisdom pyramid is important steps in thinking deeply and gaining profundity. it requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information, Assumptions and prejudices are due to lack of deeper understanding. It reflects superficial understanding and knowledge that has happened to the ego and neither deep understanding nor wisdom. Without deep thinking and true understanding, the real problems cannot be diagnosed and the complex problems cannot be solved in a structural way. Thus, it is the responsibility of each individual to examine themselves and to make sure they are open to true understanding. The deep thinking occurs when you look for internal understanding in order to find a way to contribute something of value, that is an expression of your understanding based on your internal review of personal understanding and experience.

How progressive is your thinking? The advanced mind is the brainpower and driving force behind any kind of progress. A progressive mind is all about the desire to learn, grow and make the progress with scalability. If it’s done right, learning should provide a lot of fun and enjoyment, as well as a sense of achievement and a growing bonus of self-worth and human advancement. The modern society is a dynamic continuum with collective human progress. Real societal progress is made through the work of progressive and foreseeable minds.  The progressive thinking in a collective setting can sustain a balance of diversified viewpoints, forward thinking, creativity, discipline; opportunities and risk; individualism and teamwork, democracy and unification; science and art, and intuition. The progressive thinking is high QUALITY because the most ADVANCING things in the world is an advanced mindset and the progress it drives from one generation to the other generation.

How sophisticated is your thinking? Every intelligent thing has a certain level of sophistication in it. Real thinking is a sophisticated thinking process which combines many different thought processes. it diverges and converges; it comes consciously, subconsciously, or super-consciously. The sophisticated thinking is high QUALITY when the thinkers can think both hard and smart, fast and slow, be mindful, nonlinear, multidimensional, and holistic. They can master different thought processes skillfully because often you need complexity to understand and appreciate simplicity, and vice versa. It’s all about balance and perception. Thinking is wider than decision-making and deduction. For those who are trying to solve problems, it is important to apply diverse and quality thought processes in a recursive way for both problem identification and problem-solving.

At the individual level, as the saying is going: The quality of your life is given via the quality of the thinking you have done. In other words, what you are experiencing is the continuous flow of your thoughts and the total sum of decisions you have made. It requires that we move from mind SET to mind FLOW, from fixed mind to growth mind. Making an objective assessment of your thinking is perhaps the first step to improve digital fit and professional competency at the dawn of the digital age.

Posted in: Leading by Questioning,Mindshift,Quality,Thinkingaire