Metacognition or Thinking about Thinking:

What’s Going on in Your Head

Gerd Altmann • Freiburg/Deutschland Pixabay

You may often wonder what other people are thinking, but how often do you think about your own thinking? It’s easy to ask, “What were they thinking?” when someone else makes a mistake. When you’ve made your own mistakes, you may ask yourself, “What in the world was I thinking?”

These are good questions, but they do not get to the heart of examining your own thinking.

Thinking is something we do without thinking about it all the time. It’s a process that happens just like our heart beating and our lungs taking in and releasing air.

The better question may be:

• How can we maximize the benefits of thinking to make our lives better?
• How can we use our thinking to gain knowledge, to make decisions, and to analyze input from the world around us?
• When it comes to our belief system, do we examine how our thinking led us to believe the things we believe?
• How can we consciously observe and analyze our own thinking?

We must think on purpose to examine what we think. One way to be more aware of what we are thinking is to write it down.

Thinking on purpose: