Why YOU Should Upgrade YOUR Thinking Skills

Have you ever thought to yourself:

"There's gotta be a better way to.....get this project done...spend quality time with my family....achieve those financial goals....tackle global warming...etc"??

If so, then great!

You've just given yourself the reasons why you should "Upgrade your thinking".

Personally speaking, I know of many times in my life where good thinking produced good outcomes...and bad thinking led to pretty poor outcomes.

I remember an aweful experience, when I was a Junior Officer at a unit in the Air Force that I was posted to. It was a section made up of much older blokes than myself: they were Senior Enlisted men (Sergeants and Flight Sergeants) who had been in the Air Force a while...longer than I'd been alive in some cases. And there I was, a Junior Officer not long out of officer training, very little experience.

To say I had very little idea of what I was meant to be doing, would have been an understatement. I did not have good thinking skills at the time ("thinking skills - what are they??").

And so, when it came to planning, when it came to prioritising and deciding what to do, what to work on, and how best to achieve those outcomes, I had no idea!

And it showed. There was internal division in the section. Everyone had their own idea of what needed to be done. As the "leader", I did not exhibit good thinking, or good leadership for that matter.

And then one day, the boss calls me into his office and tells me that the section seems to be just "spinning its wheels"....That the CO of the unit always wonders to himself if any work gets done in there! Gulp!! This was not looking good.....

The next year I got posted on from that section, but not before it imploded, by two of the blokes just about having a punch up (some minor personality differences, tis all...).

As difficult an experience as it was, it taught me 3 Things about thinking.

1) Poor thinking (or no thinking!) more than likely leads to poor results;

2) To lead well, I need to be a good thinker, and to encourage my people to do good thinking.

3) Thinking is a skill: like any skill, some people are naturally better at it than others. But like any skill, it can be learnt, and improved upon ("Upgraded").

This Blog is written with the intent of helping both you and I upgrade our thinking, by giving us the thinking skills and tools that we need...tools and skills that education doesn't necessarily teach us (usually we're taught WHAT to think, not HOW to think).

I'll be reading through some good books that teach thinking, not least of which include a book by author John Maxwell (Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life andWork), and of course, the Master Thinker himself, Edward DeBono (Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas, and Teach Yourself How To Think). Another book that I'll be interacting with is an absolute must have for business people that are serious about thinking, namely businessThink: Rules for Getting It Right--Now, and No Matter What).

So strap on your seatbelts, and lets get thinking!

Akos