Critical thinking skills are essential for everyone, and we all need to practice developing them as they benefit us in every sphere of our life. The good thing is, contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to spend years practicing to improve your critical thinking. There are small and easy-to-integrate critical thinking habits that can lead to significant improvement in your abilities.
Critical thinking is not an elaborate affair. It is the process of knowingly and systematically analyzing available information. It helps people gain a better understanding of the world, and enables them to make better decisions.
Importance of critical thinking
Critical thinking is unlike the normal daily thinking that we apply to routine tasks. As the process is complex, focused, and analytical, applying it to routine tasks would drain us quickly. However, what if we run into a problem or a challenge that requires out-of-the-box thinking?
In real life, critical thinking helps us in various ways such as:
- Intellectual development throughout life
- Ability to take tough decisions
- Understanding peoples’ motives and save us from manipulation
- Improving one’s employability and earning potential
There are various ways of developing critical thinking ability through habits. Let’s take a look at some of them in this article:
7 Highly Effective Everyday Critical Thinking Habits
1.Probing:
Critical thinkers don’t take facts lying down, they ask a lot of questions. They base their habits on finding through questioning. Whether it is a simple task such as deciding the menu or making major investment decisions, critical thinking can help you in all your endeavors. The best way to develop the habit of asking questions is to choose any topic of your interest. Start framing questions related to that topic, and eventually to search based on those questions. The information gleaned from such probing will get better as you practice the habit on a daily basis.
2.Prepare structured lists:
The ability to organize tasks as per priority helps in streamlining everyday life and the decision-making process. By streamlining tasks, we are able to focus better, find things easier to manage, and achieve more productivity.
3.Talk with people:
Conversation is not just a random exchange of pleasantries and ideas. Used effectively, it can help develop active listening and learning habits as well as the ability to plan your actions. By holding conversations, you become receptive to new ideas and information which can help improve your worldview, adopt different approaches, and have an open mind.
4.Identify weaknesses and work on improving them:
We all have some habits, emotions, or skills that we wish to get better at. Identify one of your weak areas and start taking steps to improve it. For instance, you might be keen to become an author but have lost touch with writing. So you can start with a daily habit of writing five-six sentences and gradually increase over time.
5.Set quantified goals:
Goal setting is a crucial part of living successfully and happily for most of us. Our goals make us strive harder and make our physical, mental, and spiritual self-superior. Critical thinkers set SMART (S-Specific, M – Measurable, A – Attainable, R – Realistic, and T – Time-bound) goals.
6.Start small:
Critical thinking is a problem-solving ability and you can start developing the habit by solving a small problem a day. Once you get into the habit of analytical problem solving, you will notice how over a period of time you will find it easier to solve bigger problems.
7.Learn new things:
Life is about constantly learning, and there is always something new, important, and beneficial to learn. Lifetime learning keeps one’s mental faculties sharp. Henry Ford had said, “anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”
In the digital age, honing one’s critical thinking skills is not a difficult task. There are some highly effective online courses available from personal development platforms that can help you master the art. All you need to do is to take action in the right direction.
