When you enter the workforce, most of your everyday brainpower will be dedicated to fulfilling routine and/or automatic tasks. Obviously, that highly depends on your actual job, but most jobs that consist of fulfilling tasks with enough time will start to feel like they are done automatically.
However, that shouldn’t be the end of your responsibilities. Once you’ve mastered your actual tasks, it’s time to go even further. It’s time to ask yourself: Where do I go next?
Unfortunately, we can’t answer that question for you, but we can help you find it yourself.
The trick is not focusing only on the way you perform, but also on the way you think. Improving the way you solve high or low-priority issues around your workspace will help you be an indispensable person in your working area.
That opens the possibility for a raise, a promotion, or even a better option for future recruitment!. But, how can we reach this mental state? What can you do to become a problem solver?
The first step is right here.
In this article, we are going to show you how to become a problem solver. Your journey will begin by learning how to develop or improve critical thinking.
Let’s begin!
What Is Critical Thinking?
Critical thinking is the process of analyzing information to get the best answer to a question or problem. By drawing upon your own experience, reasoning, observation, and communication with others, you can make informed decisions that yield positive solutions.
This applies in the workplace when you sort among useful and arbitrary details to come up with a big-picture perspective that leads to an impactful decision or solution to a problem.
On the other hand, If you find yourself stuck in your career path, many times, it’s due to a lack of critical thinking.
Critical thinking skills are immensely valuable in the business world. Recruiters and employers are always searching for people with this skill set because these freelancers or employees often become high performers.
Why Critical Thinking Is Important
Here’s a list of various ways to improve critical thinking skills in the workplace. There’s no actual order to them, so feel free to begin with the one you feel the most comfortable with. At the end of the day, when you fulfill them all, we assure you that you’ll become a stronger employee!
Improve Your Self-awareness
You can start by thinking objectively about your likes and dislikes. When you understand your personal preferences, strengths/weaknesses, and biases, you’ll be aware of why you approach specific situations from a certain perspective.
This means considering your thought process, values, morals, ethics, and other beliefs to understand the why of your own decisions.
Understand Your Mental Process
Here, you’ll start by understanding how you listen, then interpret, and finally react to information. Try to become an active listener! By doing this, you’ll start to identify and evaluate how you receive and process information, which is vital to becoming more mentally efficient in the workplace.
Take the time to analyze your own mental process prior to making work decisions and you’ll start to be more objective. That’s the fundamental of being a critical thinker, to recognize your own prejudices and how they influence in solutions and decisions.
Start Thinking Ahead
Did you know that it is possible to develop foresight?
Well, it’s not actual foresight like a magician’s skill, but rather considering how others might feel about a situation or the decision you make and determining the possible outcomes of a situation.
Think about what might change, both positively and negatively, when you make a decision, and you’ll start to develop a foresight to predict the reactions to the actions you’ll make and by looking for the positive one, you’ll make the right choice.
Ask Questions
When you’re unsure about something, always ask questions.
A quick tip is to start with what you already know and confirm you have all of the details correct, then move to what you don’t know or don’t understand very well. Remember that you can always ask to have points repeated, and ask for more details.
At the final of this process, we recommend you ask yourself if something is a fact, an opinion, or an idea in order to properly assign purpose and value to a piece of information.
Evaluate Existing Evidence
Here’s where previous experience comes in handy. When you’re facing a challenge that feels rather similar to one that you’ve faced before, it’s time to ask yourself “What did I learn from that experience”?
And if you’re facing a challenge that you’ve never faced before, this doesn’t mean you have to go blindfolded. Maybe in your own working area, there are people who have overcome the same challenge before, so we encourage you to ask them instead.
Here, you’ll not only be applying this tip but also tip #4, so remember to check it out again if you have any doubts or contact us for more questions!
Remember that by conducting research, sorting facts, and using previous experience as existing evidence you can arrive at a more applicable and effective solution to work within your present.
At Freelance Latin America we encourage this critical thinking behavior in all of our freelancers, focusing not only on our customers by providing them with an amazing workforce to fulfill their projects, but also on our freelancers, we give all of them the opportunity to grow personally and professionally alongside us so that we can fulfill all of our projects!
We also invite you to work with us as a freelancer! But before applying we recommend you to check our website, blog, and social media so you get to know more about us.
Once you’re done you can contact us right here!
See more articles by Ender Cárdenas.
