DO YOU HAVE A GOOD MIND?

To succeed at anything—business, relationships, politics, health, fitness— requires that you have a good mind. That’s because when you have a good mind, you can figure what is going on, understand and accept reality, and then generate good ideas about what to do. You can do that because you have learned a basic human skill—how to think effectively. That’s what gives you a good mind.

Imagine the opposite. Imagine a poor thinker. That person will have troubles defining the current situation, figuring out what to do, accessing resources, and thinking through the consequences. When someone is a poor thinker, he falls back on the childish thinking patterns of the cognitive distortions. She over-generalizes, does either-or thinking, personalizes, emotionalizes, blames, has tunnel-vision, etc. No wonder the poor thinker cannot effectively deal with reality and has troubles getting along with people!

Effective thinking enables you to first of all comprehend the current reality so you know what you are dealing with. In effective thinking you begin by openly considering all of the factors and variables before you jump-to-conclusions. Once you effectively define, detail, and distinguish what is, then you look for effective solutions and resources. You establish a well-formed outcome, problem, solution, and innovation. This is what it means to have a good mind—a mind that enables you to figure things out and create actionable plans for taking productive action.

In this sense, no one is born with “a good mind.” A good mind is developed. If you have a good mind today, it is because you have developed it. You have learned how to think accurately, precisely, critically, creatively, and productively. That doesn’t happen without effort and direction. That doesn’t happen without the discipline of learning how to use your brain and “run your own brain.” Even basic school education does not guarantee that. And why not? Because even to this day, schools teach kids what to think, they do not teach kids how to think.

Given that, who teaches people how to think? That’s a great question and the answer is “Generally, no one.” Most people who have learned how to effectively think have learned it on their own. And they usually learned it after some debacle where what they had learned generated more problems and misery than help. So they sat down to learn how to learn and how to think. That’s when they went meta to their thinking and learning and discovered meta-thinking and meta-learning.

Who teaches how to learn? NLP does, although mostly in an indirect way. I mostly learned how to think when I learned NLP. It was one of the unexpected and unintended consequences of learning NLP. That’s when I learned that the first level of thinking begins with the sensory-based information I picture in my mind. I then learned that language is the meta-representation system —a system about the sensory-systems. Then in Neuro-Semantics we articulated that there are

many more higher or meta-levels of “thinking” coded as beliefs, decisions, permissions, knowledge, concepts, etc. So today, the people who teach thinking are most the Neuro-Semantic trainers and sometimes, some NLP trainers.

Teach a person how to think and how to effectively manage one’s thinking powers, and that’s how you create a good mind which can generate good ideas that can change one’s life and/or change the world. Yet in reality, that is just the beginning. Success and productivity certainly begin with people who are good thinkers who produce good ideas, but that is not enough. It is a great start, but only a beginning. We also need good strategies—a specific and workable strategy that will achieve a specific objective. That’s because without effective strategies, you will not be able to implement your good ideas. A good strategy answers the question, What specifically will you do and how will you do it?

Thinking strategically means that you begin with a well-formed objective and then think about the processes required for making that objective real. A wonder goal without the ability to plan intelligently is not sufficient. The problem with not knowing how, that is, being ignorant of the how, your brain will fill in your ignorance. David Dunning explains how this works: “An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunat e, or downright dangerous— especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power.”

If you want a good mind, then first and foremost, you need to learn how to truly think. That means to not assume that “good thinking is natural and inevitable” or that “you don’t have to learn how to think to be an effective thinker.” Good thinking builds up a good mind; they go hand in hand. The problem is that there are many forms of non-thinking— pseudo-experiences that masquerades as thinking. In Brain Camp I we identify seven of these masquerades of the real thing as a way to stay alert. Then we cover the 14 essential thinking skills.

For more: Start with Executive Thinking (2018) then dive into the series of Thinking Books. And join us on the next 3 Neuro-Semantics WISDOMS.