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.

The sources of insecurity abound. Jealousy, unresolved failure, challenging relationships, lack of skill/education, poor planning, bullying, institutionalized bias, and the absence of a sense of belonging are but a few. To punch the point regarding the fluid nature of insecurity, just spend a little time with the preceding list and explore how easy it is to find examples where these issues apply both at home and at the office.

Most importantly, ask yourself if your reaction to a new acquaintance is based on the response that our hyper-polarized society expects you to have, or are you willing to learn and grow your thinking and your network beyond the confines of a fixed mindset to an issue, people, or culture.

A balancing act all leaders must grapple with is the short-term benefit of moving fast with minimal drag from a personally curated “Team Yes,” versus the long-term satisfaction that comes from building a diverse team that will simultaneously challenge, support, and push the boundaries of your current state positions and thinking.

We learn and grow as humans when we look at a challenge through multiple lenses and take onboard information from multiple perspectives. To me, this is true freedom - the ability to learn from our mistakes, test and expand our capabilities through experiences and education, pursue individual happiness and self-actualization, and meaningfully contribute to society with our unique gifts and talents.

I’m nearing my 60th birthday at the close of this coming summer and face a choice very similar to the choice that my parent’s generation faced in the late 1990s. I can either learn more about NLP, LLM, and what’s coming next, or I can tell myself that “I’m too old to learn something new” and be left in the dust—begging my children’s generation for the remainder of my years to help me use the avalanche of new tools and technologies that will undoubtedly sprout from today’s LLM seeds.