Future Me Moment

Your Future Me Is Looking For True North

Future Me Mindset Shift #2

 "I can focus on One Thing at a time”

When you want to learn or build something new, it’s tempting to just get going. Read as much as you can, do some tutorials, work on some related projects. Short-term, this gives you a motivation boost. You feel like you’re moving forward. But, after a while, you notice that you’re not progressing as fast as you expected. You may even start burning out. Turns out, cramming content inside your brain is not the most effective way to grow. Instead, you need to develop your metacognition.

Michelangelo, perhaps history’s greatest sculptor, understood this concept to his bones. Two of his more famous quotes speak directly to it:

• Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
• I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free

For Michelangelo, the idea was already there, inside the hunk of stone, whether by divine providence or his own imagination. His eyes and hands were merely the vessels by which that idea—the art—was brought forth into the physical world as he or God (or both) originally intended.

What is Metacognition?

The word “metacognition” literally means “above cognition” — it’s one of the most powerful forms of self-monitoring and self-regulation. It’s a fancy word for something fairly simple once you break it down.

Put simply, metacognition is “thinking about thinking” or “knowing about knowing.” It’s being aware of your own awareness so you can determine the best strategies for learning and problem-solving, as well as when to apply them.

The Benefits of Metacognition?

Metacognition can help you maximize your potential to think, learn, and create, all while taking care of your mental health. Beyond the elevated self-awareness and consciousness you’ll experience by applying metacognitive strategies, scientists have investigated some of the many benefits of metacognition.

• Learn better. Research shows that high-metacognition learners identify challenges much faster and change their tools and strategies to better achieve their learning goals. Metacognition can even compensate for IQ and lack of prior knowledge when it comes to solving new problems.
• Make decisions faster. Monitoring and controlling your ongoing cognitive activity can make you aware of your cognitive biases and help avoid mistakes, or at least not reproduce the same mistakes twice. In addition, because of heightened awareness, metacognition leads to a reduction in response time, which reduces the time to solve a problem or complete a task.
• Be more creative. According to Dr Markus Lång, all narrative works of art can be defined as metacognitive artifacts which are designed by the creator to anticipate and regulate the cognitive processes of the recipient. Intrinsically speaking, creativity is thinking about thinking.
• Improve your mental health. Metacognition gives you the ability to understand your mental health and to adapt your strategies to cope with the source of any distress. As such, researchers defined metacognition as the process that “reinforces one’s subjective sense of being a self and allows for becoming aware that some of one’s thoughts and feelings are symptoms of an illness.”

As you can see, metacognition really is the mind’s Swiss Army knife. That one ability can help you learn better, make decisions faster, be more creative, and improve your mental health. So, how can you experience those benefits?

How to develop your Metacognition

“Thinking about thinking” sounds great in theory, and there’s lots of research demonstrating its many benefits. But what does it look like in practical terms? Here are some activities you can experiment with to develop your metacognition.

• Keep a learning journal. If you already keep a journal, you can add a section at the end of each day answering a few questions about what you’ve learned, what went well, what didn’t, and what you want to learn next. Plus Minus Next journaling is a great approach to keep a learning journal, or you can have more of a free-flow approach — whatever feels most comfortable. The goal is to be aware of your progress, the challenges you face, and the strategies you will apply to improve your thinking, learning, and decision-making.
• Think aloud. While mind wandering can contribute to creativity, it can also be unproductive when not paired with a phase of focused thinking. Thinking out loud may feel a bit strange, but it will help you stay on track when practicing metacognition. Another way to think out loud is to find a thinking buddy — someone you meet with regularly to discuss your progress and challenges, and to suggest metacognitive strategies to each other. You can then take notes about the discussion in your learning journal.
• Apply mental models. Mental models are frameworks that give us a representation of how the world works, a set of beliefs and ideas that we form based on our experiences that guide our thoughts and behaviors and help us understand life. For example, knowing about the availability heuristic helps you think about human relationships. Knowing about temporal discounting helps you pay attention to the consequences of your decisions, even if they are far in the future. Building your own toolbox of mental models is a productive way to practice metacognition.
• Use a tool for thought. After a while, you will start accumulating a collection of metacognitive strategies based on mental models and knowledge about yourself. To make the most of these strategies, it can be helpful to use a tool for thought so you can easily store and retrieve them based on the challenge at hand. For instance, you could tag your metacognitive strategies depending on whether they are more relevant for learning or problem-solving, or if they are more useful to deal with procrastination or creative anxiety.