Metacognitive Skills

Metacognitive skills are perhaps the most transformative of the mental skills I’ve ever learned. Metacognition is about the ability to notice and observe one’s own thoughts and emotions rather than be carried away by them. Being aware of what you’re thinking … having a meta view of your emerging ideas and impulses, is vital to personal mastery. Noticing your narratives instead of being hijacked by them leads to calmness under pressure and better decision making.

Metacognition is an awareness of one’s thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. Metacognitive skills are strategies that leverage the understanding of these processes and patterns toward better living. They mitigate the negative effects of habitual patterns and strengthen access to personal wisdom.

The client who texted me the message above did the work of truly understanding herself, and from that foundational transformation, really elevated her results in life.

Cognitive biases:

"Thinking problems' happen because we are wired in very particular ways, and there are often good reasons for that. Reasoning errors are mostly by-products of our highly evolved cognition, which has allowed us to get this far as a species and to survive and thrive in the world. As a result, the solutions to these problems are not always easily available. Indeed, any kind of de-biasing is notoriously challenging."

- Woo-Kyoung Ahn, Yale University Professor of Psychology

In my leadership coaching work, I’ve found these to be the most common cognitive biases that affect the ability to make wise choices:

• We tend to interpret a reflexive narrative as “truth” rather than understanding it’s actually a story we’ve auto-generated in response to the circumstance we’re in.

• We tend to overweight worst case scenarios and fear of loss.

• We tend to see a single negative event as a permanent pattern or character trait.

• We tend to disqualify the positive, like they “don’t count” for some reason.

• We tend to only favour details that align with the point of view that we’ve already decided on.

• We tend to prefer a choice that offers short term benefit over a choice that leads to greater long term success.

We will always be influenced by emotional impulses and cognitive biases. They are part of what it means to be human. Many of our impulses and thinking heuristics are designed to keep us safe from harm. The problem is that sometimes these reactions lead to bad descisions and actions.

Awareness and Deliberate Choice:

Awareness is #1. Being able to notice automatic reflexes showing up in the moment allows us to choose more wisely and less reactively. Elevated personal mastery comes from first becoming aware of these influences and then deploying strategies. This allows us to be at our best regardless of circumstance.

The Practice:

• Learn how the human mind works. Learn how your mind works.

• Build your ability to notice disempowering thoughts and emotions. How: mindfulness training.

• Get good at choosing how you look at a challenge or negative situation.

• Becoming skilled at letting go of unwise reflexive beliefs.