What an 85 year old Maltese psychologist taught me about thinking
Imagine your brain is like a computer. In the same way that a computer is only as good as the software running on it, your brain is only as good as the quality of your thinking.
Unfortunately, the software, or thinking process, many of us still use today was designed 2,400 years ago, by the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
This process is called ‘argument’ — you have an idea and I have a different idea, then we both argue with each other to find out which one is better.
It’s slow, stressful and the best idea doesn’t always win.
The time has come for us to ‘upgrade’ our thinking. To do this you need to practice thinking differently.
Why you need to practice thinking differently
Just because you spend a lot of time thinking, doesn’t actually mean that you’re getting better at it. You only get better at the specific type of thinking you’re practicing.
“If you’re a bad thinker and you practice a lot, you’ll be excellent at thinking badly.” — Dr Edward de Bono
It’s just like if you type with two fingers, you won’t be as good as someone who touch types. It’s also unlikely you’re going to switch from two finger typing to touch typing unless you make a deliberate decision to start practising touch typing.
The most important thing Edward de Bono has taught me is that thinking is a skill, and like any skill, it can be learnt.
In fact, he’s spent more than 50 years teaching people how to think. His methods are used by Nobel Prize winning scientists, chief executives in major corporations as well as schools and universities around the world.
A fresh perspective
There’s another analogy I find useful for understanding how to think differently.
Your brain is like a smartphone
Imagine, now, that your brain is like a smartphone, your mind is like the operating system (OS) and your thought processes are like apps.
I like to call these different thought processes ‘mindapps’.
You generally use an app on your phone to get something done e.g. you feel hungry, you open Deliveroo and you get some food.
You use mindapps in a similar way e.g. you feel hungry, so you might use your creative thinking mindapp to come up with ideas for what to cook/eat.
How to use mindapps
You tend to use one app at a time on your phone. You do whatever you need to get done in one app and then you move onto another. You can call this ‘separation’.
However, when we think normally, we try to do everything at the same time. We might try to be creative, cautious and intuitive simultaneously which can cause stress. It’s much better to do one thing at a time.
It’s useful to apply separation to working on your own or with other people. When you use separation with other people, it’s called ‘parallel thinking’.
Six types of mindapps
There are six different types of thinking listed in the Six Thinking Hats method created by Edward de Bono. I like to call these types of thinking mindapps.
It’s so easy to get boxed into using certain types of thinking all the time. What’s great about the Six Thinking Hats method is that it offers you alternative mindapps. All of them are good.
Here’s a summary of what they look like.
- Strategic 🎯 — setting clear objectives, making a plan for how you are going to achieve them and measuring progress along the way.
- Creative💡 — Generating ideas, imagining new possibilities and experimenting with alternative ways of doing things.
- Critical 🔍 — Identifying the problems, difficulties and risks associated with an idea.
- Positive 👏 — Identifying the benefits of an idea as well as the logical reasons to test it and ways to make it work.
- Emotional 🎭— Openly expressing your feelings, opinions and intuition about a situation.
- Fact based 📊 — Doing research and collecting the information you need about a subject you are working on or sharing your experiences of it.
The one thing I’d like you to take away from this post is that thinking is a skill that can be developed through practice.
I encourage you to pay attention to which types of thinking or mindapps you use most often and to consider using others.
