Blog Talk About Career Ownership | Thinking Rich | Inner Experience

Mind Your Own Career: Your Guide to Right Working for Right Living can help you to explore important questions about how you, your work, your career and your life are integrated, and to understand, and even to change, the answers you find.

The guide lays a foundation with a basic philosophy and some practical tips for changing your answers to these questions, so your answers become more suitable for who you are, what you need and what you want – in your work, as well as in your larger life.

Play Mind Games To Develop Your Thinking Ability

You can develop your thinking ability by routinely engaging in games, alone or with others, which help to enhance your capability and capacity with different aspects of thinking clearly, e.g. words, numbers, images, memory, logic, etc.

Such games are especially effective for developing your thinking ability if they incorporate several different aspects and if they require you to engage in whole-brain thinking. You may also benefit from games that emphasize right- or left-brain thinking as a way to balance your preference for one or the other way of thinking.

You can also improve your thinking ability by educating yourself on the thinking process. In Managing Your Mind The Mental Fitness Guide, Gillian Butler Ph.D. and Tony Hope, M.D. describe four common thinking mistakes and offer ways to avoid or overcome them:

You can be misled by your theories, beliefs and assumptions – when you allow your working models to become too rigid and ingrained, you tend to discount, distort or deflect new information that does not fit with your models. You can keep your working models working for you by:
- Routinely seeking evidence that contradicts some aspect of your model or that highlights the flaws or limits in your model.
- Reflecting on contradictory or revealing evidence to be clear about your model’s usefulness or to determine whether your model needs to be modified.
- Being constantly aware of your personal preferences for how you perceive and how you interpret, and of your personal inclinations for particular possibilities, actions and results.
- Being ever willing and able to let go of all or part of your theories, beliefs and assumptions that no longer serve your working model.
You can be misled by what springs to mind – when something is important to you, arouses strong feelings, happened recently or attracts your attention in an unusual way, then you are more likely to remember it and to have your thinking influenced by it. You can guard against this form of bias by:
- Taking your time to think through a situation and your choices, setting aside any snap judgments while the whole story unfolds.
- Stepping back from a situation and your choices, delaying your interpretation and resolution while the probability and impact of any undue influence naturally diminish.
- Validating your thinking about a situation and your choices with others.
You can be misled by the influence of others – when you take the opinions of others into account and allow your interpretation of a situation and your choices to be skewed by your perceptions of those people and their opinions. You can keep your perceptions and interpretations clear by watching out for undue influences, such as:
- Giving more or less weight to a person’s opinion based on your opinion of the person, for example, inflating the opinion of someone you admire, or even of someone who has an arbitrary characteristic you admire, such as their profession, nationality, age, etc.
- Giving more or less weight to an opinion based on how well or poorly the way in which the opinion is expressed appeals to you.
- Giving more or less weight to an opinion based on your preference for the way in which the opinion is expressed and justified, such as providing evidence as a scientific or a spiritual argument.
- Giving more or less weight to an opinion based on temporary circumstantial or situational factors, and neglecting to consider more enduring factors that may change the opinion.
You can be misled by associations – when you mistake coincidence for a cause and effect relationship. You can be clearer about coincidence and about cause and effect when you dig a little deeper by:
- Scanning for significant differences until you can confirm whether apparent similarity is just coincidence or truly cause and effect.
- Checking your expectations and your intentions to ensure that you are not just seeing what you want to see.

The single, most important factor in developing your ability to work effectively with your thinking is to always remember that your thoughts are your interpretation of whatever you can sense and intuit about a particular situation.

Note that effective interpretation emerges from the dynamic interplay between your rational mind and your intuitive mind - between thinking and feeling.

You can strengthen a mostly rational interpretation by asking yourself: "How do I feel about this thinking?"

You can strengthen a mostly emotional interpretation by asking yourself: "What do I think about this feeling?"