What's Your Critical Thinking Strategy?

What’s your Critical Thinking Strategy?

A different group of Members (they’re often different people who join the café… some for the first time and others returning after a couple of months break…) made the discussion deep and inspirational… One participant used to be a Social Worker and now works with young people, finding the switch from children to adults to young people challenging and rewarding!

One of the group cited a study where the advent of the smart phone was a contributing factor in the rise of mental health and well being issues… an interesting correlation of the available data from 2010.  

One of the challenges that face young people (and older people too!) is the ubiquitous use of social media and the “proof” it delivers to us for, well, whatever it is we want “proof” for!  The consensus was that social media gives us the opportunity to think less and believe what we see.  The effort of critical thinking has been replaced with the ease of taking it all at face value... what we see is “truth”.  Is that because of time pressures?  Is it because “influencers” really do influence what we think, do and say?  I was taught to question the “facts” because, as my History teacher said, “The only things that change are facts”. 

At the time, I had to really think long and hard about that one… what do you think?  2,000 years ago, it was generally believed that the earth was flat… that light travelled through “ether”… and that objects fell to the ground because they were seeking their natural place in the universe…  I’m sure you can find a number of facts that have changed in your lifetime, let alone since we started recording them as “facts”… 

Do you accept what is in front of you (newspapers, social media, books, the council, the government…) or do you question and dig a little deeper? 

My experience and my map of the world is that my NLP training and subsequent discussions (like the Community Cafes!) have allowed me to be more aware of myself, my interaction with others and to perform an analysis (conscious and/or unconscious) when I am presented with, well, pretty much anything I encounter during the day.  It happens so fast that I don’t really know that I’m doing it until it is done or an opinion has formed.  This triggered the Four Stages of Competence discussion in the cafe where we all understood that unconscious competence was what we aspired to…  and I had been told the “fact” that this was developed by Gregory Bateson… Until I checked it now, I didn’t know that the “fact” was not a fact…  Maybe I should keep digging, even when someone who I consider to be an authority figure, tells me a “fact”…

Join us for the next Community Café so we can all dig a little deeper… and so I can further know how much I have to learn!