How To Improve Your Critical Thinking

Improving critical thinking works differently for different types of people. Therefore, I would like to emphasize that to improve your critical thinking, you need to try things out and see what works for and what does not work. I will provide a few ways on how to improve your critical thinking and the ways will be based on my own knowledge and experience.

First, you need to understand and know what is critical thinking as well as why is critical thinking important. This will let you briefly think of critical thinking terms as you go through the ways to improve your critical thinking.

What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the process of thinking about ideas or facts deeply where you connect things together by evaluating the ideas and the information you are provided with.

Why is Critical Thinking Important?

Critical thinking is important because of how powerful it is and many people are willing to improve their critical thinking to use for many things in life. I am sure it is important to you since you have searched for it. By thinking critically, you can solve problems because you can understand the ideas and logic between everything going around. Improving your critical thinking will increase your ability of thinking, which will make you smarter. I personally work as an engineer and critical thinking is important to me when it comes to solving plant problems, studying the issue of any equipment, procuring newer equipment, and much more. This is because I have to do a lot of research and read some ideas and facts. After that, I have to connect everything together to come up with a solution.

4 Ways to Improve Your Critical Thinking

  1. Ask many questions
  2. Do your own research
  3. Active listening
  4. List all of the possible ideas and evaluate them

Ask many questions

This is such an important thing to do when it comes to critical thinking. This is because you will get a lot of thoughts and ideas. Be sure to ask many people and not just one person. Let’s say you are working on a project that requires you to create a website and your task starts with choosing the best web hosting out there, which is Bluehost as the web hosting and this is your initial phase of the project, but you are not sure what to do next.

For that, you have to go ahead and ask others about the next step and ask many different people around you with that same questions and see which answer seems to be more logical to you. This will let you connect other people’s ideas and see what makes sense as from there you will start thinking critically to come up with the best solution that fits your needs. Make sure to fill any gap in your brain by getting all of the questions answered.

Do your own research

Researching is the best thing you can do to think critically because you are going to read a lot of information out there. As you know we nowadays can easily reach and get any kind of information and resources. This could make things useful but confusing at the same time. Because there are a lot of things for one thing you are trying to research, you can feel confused. This will let you have a doubt on what to choose or which resource to trust. Therefore, in this part, you have to REALLY think very well which ones are great ideas and which ones sound logical to you. Researching is a great way to improve your critical thinking by reading many different resources.

Active listening

Listening is VERY important! When you listen you capture ideas and information. Therefore, to improve your critical thinking you need to actively listen to the thoughts of other people. Personally, when I have a meeting, I do my best to not think of anything else nor talk. This is because my full focus becomes on the person who is speaking. This makes capturing information so easy. Once you capture ideas and important notes, you can analyze them based on what was said.

List all of the possible ideas and evaluate them

Let’s say you have asked many questions and actively listened to many different thoughts as now you have the ideas or solutions that you will want to approach. However, you are not that satisfied, so you had to do your own research. From there, all you have to do is listing all of them and use critical thinking to analyze and evaluate all of the ideas. The question comes, how to use the critical thinking approach to evaluate all the ideas. You have to use your experience when evaluating and seeing what seems more logical to you. The evaluation will always be focusing on asking yourself questions to know why this is the idea or solution you are looking for. Doing this will let you think deeply about the thing you are working on, which enhances your critical thinking.

Conclusion

These methods are always working very well for me as I implement them everywhere whenever needed. This is especially being used at work as critical thinking is needed. It is important to note that everybody has his or her own style of critical thinking, but this will work for all of you if you utilize them correctly. Therefore, you can easily use the listed ways and see what works for you. But, if not everything works, you can still do one of the ways and ignore others. It all depends on you. However, the more you use, the better to become a really good critical thinker.