Awareness of how we think – or metacognition – is an invaluable asset for us in life.
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Have you ever received a text that says, “Do you have time to talk?” and were immediately filled with dread because it seemed like you were about to get bad news? In reality, it is actually a considerate question; someone is being respectful of your time and politely asking when you might have time for them.
Even if you’ve never experienced the question as the precursor to bad news, you might still react with dread just from the mysteriousness alone. Your first reaction might be to text, “What happened??? What did I do wrong???”
How we respond, however, depends on whether we let ourselves fall prey to the panic or just realize it’s a benign question that deserves an appropriate response.
In order to respond appropriately, however, there has to first be awareness and understanding of the thought processes going on in your mind, what is called metacognition. This awareness of how we think – or metacognition – is an invaluable asset for us in life, both personally and professionally.
If you lend the moment some awareness around your thought process, you might realize you’re reflexively reacting with dread, you might realize you have a habit of expecting the other shoe to fall, you might realize this scenario hasn’t presented anything negative in actuality, and you might simply text back, “Sure, what works for you?”
Metacognition is what enables us to respond to situations accordingly, rather than with knee-jerk reflexes. Not only is this awareness helpful when a situation triggers dread or panic within us, but with any scenario in life where we might fall back on our most comfortable response, simply because it is comfortable.
In a given day, there are texts, emails, phone calls, social media posts, breaking news stories, memories that resurface, projects and assignments hanging over our head. Even on a light day, when we feel like we don’t have much to do, we are still bombarded with stimuli. Each of these events triggers a response in our head where we typically arrive at a quick and hasty conclusion:
→ that’s interesting
→ that’s stupid
→ that’s ridiculous
→ that’s great
→ I can’t do that
→ I can do that
→ I don’t know if I can do that
→ I’ll never do that
→ that’s not for me
→ that’s for me, etc etc.
For the most part, these daily mental conclusions are benign and don’t have any major consequence for our future. But they can add up over time, and create ingrained habitual tendencies. And these ingrained, habitual tendencies potentially hinder us from reacting to situations with open awareness.
Much like anything in life, the more time and attention you give something, the more power it has. If you create a habit of daily exercise, then over time that habit gains power and momentum.
If you exercise once a week, then the other six days a week are going to have more power and momentum than the one day of exercise. In the end, the momentum of non-exercise over those six days will probably win when it comes time to make a decision to exercise or not.
Similarly, the more time we yield to our reflexive, habitual thoughts the more power they will have over us when we need to respond intelligently and accordingly to a situation.
On the flip side, the more awareness we create around our thought processes, the more power we give the art of metacognition in our lives. And consequently, the more productive and self-serving our responses to scenarios will be, both personally and professionally.
Let’s say you’re in a brainstorming meeting at your company and everyone but you is throwing out ideas. Feeling down that you didn’t contribute you might conclude that you don’t have anything to offer and, if you were to really let yourself go down the rabbit hole, decide that you’re in the wrong profession. Applying awareness to your thought process, however, can create space in your mind.
It allows you to reflect on how you think and reflect on how you feel, and how you respond in certain situations. The first response might be emotional, which is often not reliable. Once you get past that, you can look back at the meeting and you might conclude upon reflection that you don’t do well in that type of brainstorm environment because you are more of a reflective thinker.
Perhaps you need quiet and space and isolation to come up with ideas. Perhaps all the frenetic activity in the meeting is the very thing that prevents you from coming up with ideas. With this awareness, you can now adjust your response to the situation, i.e. it isn’t that you don’t have ideas, it’s that your brain thrives in a different setting when trying to innovate.
You could then spend some time alone thinking up ideas and submitting them to your team separately, as well as providing some clarification on why you didn’t contribute in the meeting.
Conversely, if you are the leader in said meeting, you might hastily conclude your employee isn’t worth their weight, since they’re not contributing. With awareness of your thought process, however, you might create the mental space to arrive at alternate conclusions; those being the same aforementioned conclusions that the employee arrived at.
The more you start thinking about how you are thinking, you will notice assumption patterns that interfere with your ability to be open and flexible when it comes to reading people.
That is but one scenario. When you start to think about your daily life and each interaction, each response you have to everything that comes your way, you begin to see where you might have had a metacognitive moment and when you let yourself be dragged away by the power of your thoughts.
Being aware of your thought processes – if one is truly willing to examine how their mind works when left unattended – will also help combat status quo thinking. If you are tasked with coming up with a solution for a client, you might naturally fall back on solutions that worked in the past for other clients. And they might work for the current client. They might also be stale, or there might be an even better solution out there.
Being aware that you’re falling back on the most comfortable, easily accessible solution can motivate you to keep thinking, break out of the box, and see what else is out there.
So it’s not only about creating awareness around habitual negative reactions; it’s also about creating awareness around any default mode of thinking. In essence, it’s about creating awareness around the full spectrum of your thought processes.
The great part about all of this is you can start at any time, and it’s free. You already own all the resources you need to broaden your awareness around your thought processes; you need only a willingness to raise your emotional intelligence.
