by Calvin Harris H.W., M

One of the things that I find more and more important to me and what I enjoy in my long-term love language with friends, family, or imitate partners is Critical Thinking.

Critical Thinkers are essential!

So, what is a Critical Thinker?

Well, that is not the person who is quick to consider or say everybody is wrong about everything. That person only thinks they are a critic.

Rather a Critical Thinker is a person who has judgement. Who thinks carefully about all the different possible solutions to a problem before coming to a reasoned conclusion or solution, now that to me, is more in line with a critic, and applying the thinking of a Critical Thinker.

Getting into a state of Critical Thinker, takes conscious work.   First step is to stop or not try to be right all the time, (Now I can tell you that is hard.),  

Because what is beneath that action is that you do not want to be wrong. To let go of that response is to stop acquiring knowledge as a competition tool, where being right means you win.

That is not what Critical Thinking is about or how it works.

Critical Thinking requires you first to be open-minded and open-ear-ed. You need to be willing to be curious and listen to people. That may require you to ask the question, who, what, where, when, why, and/or how. of them to better understand their position in their conversation with you.

This is different from being in an echo chamber of your own mind. You cannot dwell in an echo loop of thinking. You must be willing to get out from under the safety blankets of your own thinking, to talk and listen to people, who you might not normally be disposed of to listen to.

I like the analogy of very young children. They are inquisitive, they ask questions all the time and they are open to hearing all sorts of answers, we call that being open-minded.

So if you want to get better at Critical Thinking, think more like a child gathering information.

Next consider yourself like a computer, analyzing data, then systematically cleaning, transforming, and modeling data to discover useful information, draw conclusions, and support decision-making. It involves defining objectives, gathering data, cleaning out opinions, prejudice and ignorance to gain accuracy in your conclusions (what we call unlearning), by applying tools and techniques that bring about unpredictable good, as a result.

That takes a lot more mental activity than giving people the first thing that comes to your mind. But it allows you to be in a Conscious state of giving and receiving. 

What a loving moment for two or more people to be in that state of  Consciousness.

Calvin