3 Tips For Improving Critical Thinking In Business Settings

Are you open to changing your mind? Do you strive for success? Are you willing to adapt and pivot if need be? These skills are vital to being able to grow and flourish in a business and your personal life. Critical thinking is at the basis of these tasks & having the capacity to really think through a situation and analyze whether it can be done more effectively is one of the best skills you can have as a business person. 

Some ways to challenge your thinking and help expand your growing process include, talking to someone with a completely opposite viewpoint from you, looking into alternative ways of accomplishing something, and talking with other successful people in different realms than you. Here are 3 tips for improving critical thinking in your business setting: 

1. Be willing to question your reality.
   
   Reflecting on your current reality and allowing for differing opinions is an important step in critical thinking. One who stays in their own bubble of knowledge and beliefs will have trouble branching out to reach others. When wanting to expand and grow in your business endevors having a wide view is always going to help you relate to more of your audience base. This will also allow you to see other sides of situations when conflict arise within your employees or miscommunications occur.
   
   
2. Seek out counter information.
   
   Relating to the last tip, it’s not enough just to allow for the opportunity of new knowledge, but being intentional about actively seeking it out will allow you to expand the ability to critical question and think about new information. There are so many ways to do this. With guest speakers or watching videos or even just having a conversation with a co-worker that is from a different background than you, it will become obvious how your mind is adapting to these new ideas. This is also a great tactic to bring to your place of work as well. Conferences or speakers that can expand the entire company’s knowledge is a great way to build unity and critical thinking around the board.
   
   
3. Become aware of how you feel in the moment.
   
   Feeling are not weakness, and overcoming the idea that they are is a huge step. Sometimes when learning to think critically of situations our ego can come into play. Realizing how you feel about being faced with new information is a huge first step in being able to overcome that road block and learn new things. Feeling any certain way isn’t wrong, but if you are seeking to grow, then analyzing how certain views trigger your feelings is essential. 

Never stop learning. This is the key to success in whatever it is that you want in life. Learning to be a critical thinker will help you analyze every situation and find ways to always be improving.