WHAT KIND OF COGNITIVE MAKE-OVER WOULD YOU LIKE?

Make-Over programs on television refer to improving, refreshing, rejuvenating, or completely redoing something —a house, a restaurant, one’s visual appearance (hair, makeup, clothes), etc. Similarly a cognitive make-over refers to either improving your thinking/ learning skills, refreshing competencies that you have, rejuvenating those cognitive capacities that have become stale, and/or completely re-doing your thinking, perceiving, and learning patterns. In this, there are many kinds of cognitive make-overs.

What kind would you like? What kind of make-over of your cognitive capacities would enhance your life and raise your self-efficacy to cope with the world that you face everyday?

If there are many kinds of cognitive make-overs, you may be wonder, “What are my choices? And what do each of these choices mean?” You could opt for any one or combination of the following: __ A Learning Enrichment Cognitive Make-Over __ An Enhanced Memory Cognitive Make-Over __ A Smart Decision-Making Cognitive Make-Over __ An Enriched Strategy Cognitive Make-Over __ A Thoughtful Foresight Cognitive Make-Over __ A Risk-Management of Future Consequences Cognitive Make-Over __ A Critical Thinking Skills Cognitive Make-Over __ A Creative / Innovative Cognitive Make-Over __ An Emotional Enrichment (E.Q.) Cognitive Make-Over

Cognitive Make-Overs begin with your basic cognitive (thinking) skills— how you represent information (representation systems), how you encode it (sub-modality or cinematic features), how you retrieve your ideas (memory access), the questions you ask about the variables of an experience, how you create your emotions from your thinking, etc.

Now while cognitive refers to “thinking,” in the human mind-body-emotion system, thinking includes much more than what we have traditionally thought of as “thinking.” It has been the dualistic thinking that dichotomizes thinking and feeling that has been the culprit for creating that pseudo-problem. Kinesthetic feeling is one of the basic forms of thinking along with visual and auditory thinking. And an emotion itself is a composite of meaning-making thinking plus a kinesthetic. That’s why as you think, so you feel. And also, your feelings inevitably influence your thinking. Thinking–emoting is a holistic package and cannot be strictly dichotomized.

That’s why a Cognitive Make-Over inherently entails what’s called “emotional intelligence”— awareness, monitoring, regulating, and relating. And why every Cognitive Make-Over provides a richer and more robust emotional state whether it is confidence, resilience, compassion, efficacy, etc.

Cognitive Make-Overs then move to a meta-level where you think–about–your–thinking begin with monitoring and regulating your emotions, managing your memory strategies, develop your capacities for critical thinking, creative thinking, risk-management thinking, manage your decision-making skills, planning (anticipating, setting expectations, entertaining scenarios, etc.) and much more.

Further, to expose another dichotomized myth, to think is to learn and when you learn you are thinking in new and different ways. As a result, this means that every cognitive make-over entails a higher level of learning— learning more effectively, accelerating your learning, overcoming learning disabilities, enriching your learning capacities, etc.

This is critical individually and for organizations since accelerating learning and improving the quality of learning is a key competitive advantage in today’s world. No longer is it sufficient to have learned. You have to keep learning and what’s more—you have to be continually learning about learning. You not only need to be a sharp, skillful, and competent thinker, you have to be able to think-about-thinking— meta-thinking. You not only have to learn, you have to unlearn. So, what kind of cognitive make-over would you like?

To Learn More: See Executive Thinking (2018) Creative Solutions (2017) Communication Magic (2001)