After reading the title of this post, I’m sure the first thing some of you are thinking is, “What in the world is metacognition?” The definition of metacognition is, simply put, thinking about thinking. That is, metacognition is the practice of consciously thinking about your values, judgments, and decision-making processes to evolve and increase the variety of ways you can address a situation. The majority of people don’t do this consciously, if at all.
Try this exercise at work: When you’re in a meeting in which a decision needs to be made, do the mental exercise of taking on the thought process of someone who holds an opposing view to your own. What you’re doing in that case is using metacognition. You are thinking about how you think. You’re exercising your ability to use different criteria and value systems, thus growing the variety of ways you can make judgments.
Trying to see things from other people’s perspectives will, over time, inevitably increase the total amount of varying perspectives that you’re comfortable with.
In summary, learning this skill doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years to grow your metacognitive skills. But over time you will find that your ability to understand other viewpoints and employ them as necessary increases. The goal is to grow your ability to use multiple decision-making processes.
In a future post we’ll talk about how metacognition leads to something called fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence can transform you from being a one-dimensional practitioner to a multi-dimensional expert. After that, we’ll talk about how metacognition can make you happier.