7 Critical Thinking Mistakes That Might Be Affecting Your Reputation

Critical thinking is essential for gaining a deeper understanding of any topic situation, or issue. If you have barriers to the critical thinking process, it can seriously harm your ability to move forward in your career, business, and life.

When you’re aware of these barriers, you can be better prepared and focus your thinking on what’s going to help you get ahead.

Here are 7 barriers that can impede your critical thinking process:

1. Lack of Patience — Many people just don’t have the patience or propensity to think. They are quick to make up their minds, even if the situation warrants a deeper study.
2. High Suggestibility — According to Wikipedia, “Suggestibility is the quality of being inclined to accept and act on the suggestions of others. One may fill in gaps in certain memories with false information given by another when recalling a scenario or moment.” The higher your suggestibility, the more likely you are to accept suggestions as facts or commands. If this is affecting your career, it is time to make amendments.

The higher your suggestibility, the more likely you are to accept suggestions as facts or commands.

1. Black and White Thinking — Some people ignore a situation’s intricacies and inter-connections by thinking that there’s only one way to solve a problem. The problem is placed in a category, given a label and that’s the only way that matters. Thinking in black and white comes from our need to have certainty in our lives, but it’s defective logic to assume there is one way to approach the situation.
2. Egocentric Thinking — is thinking with too much focus on oneself and a lack of understanding of the wants and needs of others. It limits your thinking to only your point of view and doesn’t provide room for the ideas of others. This thinking process is deeply embedded in our psyches due to the drive to survive. Concerted and deliberate efforts are often needed to overcome this.
3. Popular Thinking — When you are not paying close attention to what is actually going on around you, you might actually fall easy prey to adopting the popular point of view — or — the way that our spouse, companions, parents, and friends think. You are then outsourcing the thinking to the group, increasing the chances of acting on peer pressure and dealing with associated consequences.
4. Authoritative Thinking — Just because someone in authority says it’s true doesn’t mean it REALLY is. You have likely been swayed at one time or another by political leaders, religious leaders, corporate leaders, doctors, scientists, or experts who say one thing is true only to find out later that it was a misleading way of thinking. The authority could be a person, peer group, institution, or anything that makes you think that they are right; just because they are in an authoritative position or seemingly have access to ‘special’ information.
5. Judgmental Thinking — When you judge something or someone based on moral evaluation it’s usually done in haste and based on our past in some way — such as the way we were raised, educated, our values, our beliefs — our wiring. Judgmental thinking is usually non-rational thinking and can block understanding and insight about a person, situation, or issue.

It’s important that you recognize your own barriers to the critical thinking process and replace those barriers with rational and reasoned thinking and then make a concentrated effort to avoid them.

Call To Action

Critical Thinking is a broad topic, but here is how you can get started today! When you are confronted with a key situation, silently ask yourself the following three questions

1. Is this a fact or an opinion? If it is a fact, what makes it a fact?
2. Is this an opinion without clear evidence?
3. What assumptions are being made here?

Before you rush to conclusions — stop and think, critically.

About the author:

Manoj Vasudevan is an internationally renowned Next Level Leadership Readiness expert, management consultant, and the World Champion of Public Speaking. He helps executives and entrepreneurs to break through to the Next Level in career, business, and life. Manoj is known for his expertise in simplifying complex topics into practical strategies. He is the CEO of Thought Expressions and holds an MBA from Imperial College, London. His books include the international bestseller Mastering Leadership The Mousetrap Way. and How to become the World Champion of Public Speaking. He speaks at international conferences, multinational companies, universities, and around the world. As a coach, Manoj has a proven track record in personal transformation and breakthroughs. CEOs, Senior Executives, UN Diplomats, Celebrities & Professionals from over 50 nationalities have benefited from Manoj’s coaching. To contact the author’s team, click here.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com/in/manojthecoach.