How to Improve Critical Thinking

I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is November 9, 2024.

I talk a lot about skills and skill development in this forum, and also on my other show The Balancing Act Podcast. One of the most impactful skills to career success and achieving personal economic success is critical thinking.

Since I talk about this skill frequently, I get asked fairly often how an individual can improve this skill. So today, I’m going to provide listeners with a tool to improve critical thinking. Before we get started, a word of caution—improvements in critical thinking seldom happen overnight. Critical thinking skills are developed over years and maintaining this skill takes real effort—critical thinking can atrophy quickly if we abandon or reduce our commitment to continuous improvement and lifelong learning. It is sooo easy to get lulled into the status quo and easy to adopt a fixed, unyielding mindset.

So let’s start with the definition. What is critical thinking? According to Oxford Dictionaries, critical thinking is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.

From The Foundation for Critical Thinking:

Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. People who think critically consistently attempt to live rationally, reasonably, empathically. They are keenly aware of the inherently flawed nature of human thinking when left unchecked. They strive to diminish the power of their egocentric and sociocentric tendencies. … … They realize that no matter how skilled they are as thinkers, they can always improve their reasoning abilities and they will at times fall prey to mistakes in reasoning, human irrationality, prejudices, biases, distortions, … …, self-interest, and vested interest. They strive to improve the world in whatever ways they can and contribute to a more rational, civilized society. … … They avoid thinking simplistically about complicated issues and strive to appropriately consider the rights and needs of relevant others. They recognize the complexities in developing as thinkers, and commit themselves to a life-long practice toward self-improvement. They embody the Socratic principle: The unexamined life is not worth living , because they realize that many unexamined lives together result in an uncritical, unjust, dangerous world.

~ Linda Elder, September, 2007

There is a lot to unpack in this longer definition and its breadth and depth punches the point that critical thinking is a multi-faceted skill that relies on many sub-skills and takes years to hone. As a result, many people are turned off by the concept and tell themselves that they can’t do it.

However, since (a) an individual’s life experience is defined by the decisions they make over time, and (b) critical thinking is a necessary condition for making better decisions; if an individual wants to (c) live a rich, meaningful life and achieve economic and professional success, then (d) it is essential to build critical thinking skills so they can make more good decisions than bad. Put differently, if an individual wants to be successful, by whatever definition of success matters to them, the path to success depends on investing in critical thinking and decision-making.

So, what’s are today’s tip to get started honing your critical thinking skills? Listen.

To be blunt—stop talking so much and when you’re not talking, stop trying to come up with something to say that will show how smart you are. Instead, quiet the mind and open the ears to truly listen to what’s being said and evaluate the non-verbal cues that are all around you.

That’s where we’ll leave it today. We’re going to continue the conversation about critical thinking over the next episode or so, and work to make the concept more approachable. For now, your homework is to exercise your lips and jaw by closing them while others are speaking. And yes, the lesson is that simple. Talk less, listen more.