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 what’s the connection to business? For you to succeed in your role, to be a difference maker to your colleagues and to your clients, you have to believe. Yes, you must have a baseline of technical skill and proficiency that’s laid down through years of education and training, but for the next presentation, for this sales pitch, for this budget defense, put in the work and then believe in yourself and the capabilities of your team. Have their backs so they have yours. Timidity and self-doubt at both the individual and team levels represent the fast-pass to mediocrity and disappointment.

My goal with this muse is to gently, but purposefully change the arc of the conversation in corporate circles around the concept of empathy and empathetic leadership. In my opinion, empathy is great, but it lacks two essential ingredients—the willingness/ability to help, and the ability to detach. Compassion represents a logical extension of empathy as it combines the ability to recognize someone else’s feelings and the motivation to help them do something about it. This addition of the motivation to help requires an ability to separate or detach oneself from the challenge the other person is experiencing. Without this ability to mentally detach, their challenge or pain becomes yours and carrying around that emotional burden will ultimately lead to your own exhaustion and burnout. Yes, it’s awesome that you feel another’s pain and want to help alleviate it, but if it’s at the expense of your own well-being, what’s the point?

What’s the minimum bar for success for this self-reflection exercise? Were you able to connect with your breath and feel the rhythm of your heartbeat? If yes, then AWESOME! You just took a few huge steps forward.

Turns out that the answer to the question are you coachable is more difficult than most folks realize and it will take multiple sessions of self-reflection to make meaningful progress toward the answer.

Far too often, when confronted with a challenge, we talk. We talk to deflect. We talk because we don’t know what else to do. We talk to release nervous energy. To make matters worse, when we start talking, we usually start relaying a story of a similar challenge that’s happened to us. The individual who’s going through the challenge doesn’t want to hear about our suffering or similar situation, they want to be heard.

Applied in a business context, a team that possesses a strong sense of balance performs well under pressure and is not buffeted nearly as violently by the winds of change and external competitive pressures compared to a team that lacks a keen sense of balance. But what does balance look like in business?