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Brian uses a fancy word to talk about critical thinking in your life and business.

Transcription

Metacognition and your business.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I want to talk about metacognition, which is basically the science of, you know, thinking about your thinking, okay. I love this topic, it’s one of my most favorite things to talk about is something having to do with our thinking.

And it all starts with us thinking about what we’re thinking, not about what we’re thinking, but thinking about our thinking or itself, thinking about the thinking process, thinking about how we think, why we think, and everything around that idea.

This is the most some of the most fascinating things that I’ve ever thought about. And considered and actually made some of the largest changes of my life based on the concept of metacognition.

Now I’ve never, honestly, I’ve never used the term metacognition, I think I may have looked at it once when I was taking psychology classes in college but forgot about it.

And just recently, I was looking at things all about thinking about your thinking, and that term came up. So I thought I thought that was interesting.

Besides the term itself, this is something that gets brought up a lot by Dan Sullivan.

If you ever listened to Dan Sullivan, you could find him on a whole lot of podcasts out there, including one of my favorites. So, Welcome To Cloudlandia, this was the one that was that’s hosted with Dean Jackson.

It was also previously called, The Joy of Procrastination.

I’ve discussed it before, Dan Sullivan is the one that heads up that he’s both the creator and the lead mind over at Strategic Coach, where they talk a lot about thinking and stepping back and looking at why we do the things we do and how we can make slight tweaks to be able to create different results in our life.

And this is another thing that came into my mind when I was going back and looking at this book, Keep Going. I’ve talked about this one before previously, keep going by Austin Lleon, Awesome book.

I love Austin’s books, they’re simple, they’re straightforward, very little to read on each page.

So you can make a whole lot of progress quickly and this the idea that he brings up, I don’t always agree with every last idea in here. But they’re definitely causing you to think about what you’re thinking.

This particular page I wanted to bring your attention to, he says pay attention to what you pay attention to. It’s really kind of a microcosm of thinking about your thinking. And I really liked what he says here, I wonder I wanted to read some of this for you.

He says your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First, you must protect it. And then you must point it in the right direction.

As they say in the movies, careful where you point that thing. What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of my experience is what I agree to attend to psychologist William James wrote in 1890, only those things which I notice shaped my mind.

We pay attention to the things we really care about. But sometimes what we really care about is hidden from us.

I keep a daily diary for many reasons. But the main one is that it helps me pay attention to my life, by sitting down every morning and writing about my life. I pay attention to it. And over time, I have a record of what I’ve paid attention to.

And he goes on and on about the importance of diary or journal writing. Great stuff.

I think the first step is to realize I think we all to some extent or another think about what we’re thinking, think about how we think, think about our thinking and some context, but probably we don’t do it enough and we don’t question it enough.

We don’t question what where thoughts are coming from or whether they’re necessary or whether they’re habitual and everything else and how to go about either maneuvering around them, ignoring them, backing up from them, questioning them, you know, how do you go about doing that, but the first step I think is really paying attention to what you pay attention to.

That comes on a moment-by-moment basis. But it also comes at looking at it on a daily basis and whatever you need to be able to do that.

One of the things that I do is I got it. The easiest way for me to be able to work person through this process, because I’m a business strategist. So I work with different people that own businesses and help them get from point A, where they’re at, to point B where they want to be, right?

And to get you just focused on that point, and taking you day by day and said, Okay, why were we not able to make this step from here to here, what’s getting in our way?

That brings us all back to mindset. And the people that I work with the best of the people that are most open, about digging in there, into their own brain, watching what you’re doing on a daily basis, watching your thoughts on a daily basis, watching your emotions on a daily basis, and not getting obsessed about it.

But quite the opposite, just having enough perspective where you notice it, if you could just start noticing things, your whole life will start changing, I can pinpoint a period of time when I started noticing my thoughts.

And over time, I’ve gotten better and better and better.

At least I hope I’ve gotten better at backing away, and not getting caught up with it with all the things that I’m going through. But in the best-case scenario, being subjective to it. I mean, being objective to it, excuse me, at little Freudian slip there being objective to it being just far enough away, that I don’t have to claim it.

And I can just kind of watch it and see it and see where it leads me and not get take so much credit for everything that goes through your brain as if you intentionally meant for it to be there, right?

I know there’s a little bit of a deeper thing. But if you could start just noticing things, it’ll make a huge difference, of course to your entire life, and then initial and then eventually it’ll, it’ll result in better business, which is what we try and promote here.

So if you really want to build a better business, go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. These are more wide range concepts of ways that you can change your business in the long run. These aren’t going to make huge dramatic changes overnight. This is more long-term strategic changes. 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

You could buy it anywhere but you can also get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night. In the meantime, get out there, start noticing things and let the magic happen.