DO YOU HAVE A GOOD MIND?

 

To succeed at anything-business, relationships, politics, health, fitness-
requires that you have a good mind.  That's because when you have a good
mind, you can figure what is going on, understand and accept reality, and
then generate good ideas about what to do.  You can do that because you have
learned a basic human skill-how to think effectively.  That's what gives you
a good mind.

 

Imagine the opposite.  Imagine a poor thinker.  That person will have
troubles defining the current situation, figuring out what to do, accessing
resources, and thinking through the consequences.  When someone is a poor
thinker, he falls back on the childish thinking patterns of the cognitive
distortions.  She over-generalizes, does either-or thinking, personalizes,
emotionalizes, blames, has tunnel-vision, etc.  No wonder the poor thinker
cannot effectively deal with reality and has troubles getting along with
people!

 

Effective thinking enables you to first of all comprehend the current
reality so you know what you are dealing with.  In effective thinking you
begin by openly considering all of the factors and variables before you
jump-to-conclusions.  Once you effectively define, detail, and distinguish
what is, then you look for effective solutions and resources.  You establish
a well-formed outcome, problem, solution, and innovation.  This is what it
means to have a good mind-a mind that enables you to figure things out and
create actionable plans for taking productive action. 

 

In this sense, no one is born with "a good mind."  A good mind is developed.
If you have a good mind today, it is because you have developed it.  You
have learned how to think accurately, precisely, critically, creatively, and
productively.  That doesn't happen without effort and direction.  That
doesn't happen without the discipline of learning how to use your brain and
"run your own brain."  Even basic school education does not guarantee that.
And why not?  Because even to this day, schools teach kids what to think,
they do not teach kids how to think.

 

Given that, who teaches people how to think?  That's a great question and
the answer is "Generally, no one."  Most people who have learned how to
effectively think have learned it on their own.  And they usually learned it
after some debacle where what they had learned generated more problems and
misery than help.  So they sat down to learn how to learn and how to think.
That's when they went meta to their thinking and learning and discovered
meta-thinking and meta-learning.

 

Who teaches how to learn?  NLP does, although mostly in an indirect way.  I
mostly learned how to think when I learned NLP.  It was one of the
unexpected and unintended consequences of learning NLP.  That's when I
learned that the first level of thinking begins with the sensory-based
information I picture in my mind.  I then learned that language is the
meta-representation system -a system about the sensory-systems. Then in
Neuro-Semantics we articulated that there are many more higher or
meta-levels of "thinking" coded as beliefs, decisions, permissions,
knowledge, concepts, etc.  So today, the people who teach thinking are most
the Neuro-Semantic trainers and sometimes, some NLP trainers.

 

Teach a person how to think and how to effectively manage one's thinking
powers, and that's how you create a good mind which can generate good ideas
that can change one's life and/or change the world.  Yet in reality, that is
just the beginning.  Success and productivity certainly begin with people
who are good thinkers who produce good ideas, but that is not enough.  It is
a great start, but only a beginning.  We also need good strategies-a
specific and workable strategy that will achieve a specific objective.
That's because without effective strategies, you will not be able to
implement your good ideas.  A good strategy answers the question, What
specifically will you do and how will you do it?

 

Thinking strategically means that you begin with a well-formed objective and
then think about the processes required for making that objective real.  A
wonder goal without the ability to plan intelligently is not sufficient.
The problem with not knowing how, that is, being ignorant of the how, your
brain will fill in your ignorance.  David Dunning explains how this works:

"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that's
filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences,
theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors,
and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate
knowledge.  This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest
strengths as a species.  We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate
theorizers.  Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day,
or at least to an age when we can procreate.  But our genius for creative
storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can
sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunat e, or
downright dangerous- especially in a technologically advanced, complex
democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with
immense destructive power."

 

If you want a good mind, then first and foremost, you need to learn how to
truly think.  That means to not assume that "good thinking is natural and
inevitable" or that "you don't have to learn how to think to be an effective
thinker."  Good thinking builds up a good mind; they go hand in hand.  The
problem is that there are many forms of non-thinking- pseudo-experiences
that masquerades as thinking.  In Brain Camp I we identify seven of these
masquerades of the real thing as a way to stay alert.  Then we cover the 14
essential thinking skills.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall@acsol.net