Metacognition Magic

Welcome everybody to another episode of Halftime Talks. My name is Rahim Rasul, and you’re tuned in to the podcast where we recognize that in the middle of your game of life, whether you’re by 10 or down by 20 each of us, we all the halftime talks to uplift us, inspire us and challenge us to bring that level of performance it’s gonna take for you and I to win this game. [He raps a few lines from a 90s song.] Welcome to another episode. You know how we begin?

Got little 90s, little reference there, and now we got some full fledged appreciation. So here we go. Today. I want to appreciate those individuals and even myself for maintaining my level of curiosity. There’s something tragic that happens when people get old as they stop getting curious, they they congeal and they crystallize their ways of looking at the world. But the new, the new is not necessarily the young. The new is the state of mind, that state of curiosity that still wants to question and figure out and tinker and toil with the things of life, to discover not only more about themselves, but about the world that is evolving and adapting and transforming right before our eyes. So I would like to truly take a second to appreciate maintaining that zeal and freshness for our curiosity.

I can only begin to believe that. I don’t know when you listen to this, but as we’re recording this, this is the beginning of 2019 in 2019 marks, the fifth year halftime talks has been in existence. A lot of you guys have been with us the whole time. Some of you listen abroad. Some of you listen in different states, outside of my home state right now, of New York. And I want to sincerely thank you guys for listening. Five years of ideas, possibilities, growth, challenge, it’s been tremendous. In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about metacognition magic. It’s a topic that I’ve had on my notebook for quite a while, and I’m really excited to get to share it with you. So strapping your seatbelts, open your minds, prepare to take some notes, and even if they’re mental notes. So we can get busy. So let’s get to it. Here we go.

So I’m sure many of you are asking yourself right now, you’re looking at that title and you’re wondering, what is metacognition magic? Well, first we have to explain what metacognition is. If I were to distill it into the simplest of terms, it’s thinking about how we think. And that’s why it’s called meta because it’s one of those meta things you’re not thinking about something you’re thinking about your thinking. I’ve become fascinated with this idea of strategically thinking, that it is really forced me to see a lot of the errors in my thinking. But um, to begin this episode, I want to talk about people who look at how we see the world and how we see our own capacity for growth, and how that can affect even how we think.

And one of the people I want to bring up first is, uh, a psychologist. She’s developmental psychologist from New York. Her name is Carol Dweck, and she has a theory on the type of mindsets that people have. She has one is a fixed mindset, saying that your intelligence is somewhere within you, and you’re either smart in some areas, or you’re not so smart in some areas. And so when you do good, it’s just like, Yo, I’m naturally smart. But then you also have someone with a growth mindset, and a growth mindset understands that there is no limit, or. Adapt to how intelligence may reflect itself in different domains, so you can always have the capacity to learn more, and so you don’t close yourself off the possibilities.

This idea of metacognition is a powerful one. You know how we learn, what we learn, because I guarantee you one thing, your life and your education and your learning did not end at the end of high school. It did not end at the end of college, if you went that far, and if you’ve decided to be what I nobody else, but just me, what I deem is a academic overachiever with either a PhD, masters, doctorate, all that good stuff. It didn’t end there either. And so in thinking about thinking or learning how to learn. That’s what we’re really focused on. And the magic, the aspect that I said metacognition magic, is that it’ll seem like magic.

The more we’re able to retain, the more we’re capable of doing the resistance that we take off of our signal will just create a simpler and more direct path to satiating our curiosity, to learning more, to advancing in stages and progressions along the way. So me personally, there’s nothing that if my mind sets as a possibility of accomplishing it can’t be. I can accomplish anything. Basically, I know that sounds arrogant, but think about it like, what would you be willing to try if you knew that you could eventually get there? That’s what metacognition creates an opportunity for and some say it’s a higher order of thinking.

Some say it’s having an active sense of awareness, a lot of times, in the aspects of things that we pursue. There’s a voice, some of you are familiar with this voice, it tends to show up right in the middle of the times you are doing a task that may be difficult, but the beauty of this voice is it has the capacity to reveal to you your process, how you See The World the assumptions that you’re making on your ability, if you’re seeing yourself, like Carol Dweck said, from a fixed perspective, or if you’re understanding that the growth mindset is filled with step By Step iterative progressions, acclimating to new and more challenging levels, and understanding how we learn, understanding how we think, will put us in a position to really go after anything that we still deem possible.

So I know you’ve heard the term flawed thinking, and I know you’ve heard the term there’s a fallacy of thought or fallacy of logic. So if we have poor ingredients, we can’t really expect to bake anything of substance, anything worthy of passing as restaurant quality, and so how we source our ingredients comes from the root and the root of metacognition is our thinking. And along the way, we start understanding our style of learning. We start understanding more about ourself in relationship to acquiring knowledge. We don’t hold ourself to the standard of others and what they do well, we realize that we may be a experiential learner.

We may be a go off to yourself and study by yourself learner. You may have been seeing yourself, not within your life, not playing your game, not doing the things that put you in a position to win, and the more that we begin to understand that, first we understand how we approach problems, then we have to deconstruct it, understand how we deconstruct it. And while this is a meta, meta idea, where it’s staying. Talking about our thinking, only then can we truly see the board that we’re playing on over time. As we get older, as a year, a decade, multiple decades go by, we should have a sense of perspective of what works for us.

Though, always be something new we’re learning. And it’s easy to pull the parachute and hang out in circles of friends and say, Man, that’s just not for me. But as technology changes as the way we relate with our economy, changes as the way that we present value to the marketplace, changes we must learn. We must understand that these new generations are embracing it at paces, that we may not be but if we are to compete, if we do not want to become the taxi drivers of this generation facing Uber, if we don’t want to become the trained conductors of previous generation because airplanes came in, then we must still be curious, still be thinking, still be consuming in ways that allow us to truly see not only Just how we think, but also how we learn.

I know this sounds like I’m beating a drum, but I’m not. For me, one of the processes for metacognition that worked for me, and I’ll leave this episode on this note, is that in our mind, sometimes we think we have a grasp of understanding. It isn’t until we ground that understanding into experience. So to think about how you’re thinking, animate it, give it life. Create a small test run. Apply the knowledge that you have assumes you’ve acquired, and force it into the light, let the light, let life prepare it, let it cook it, let it massage it, let it interact with it, let it engage and see what integrity of it still holds true.

Put yourself in a company of others who are engaged in the same thinking, in the same aspects of what you want to achieve, and play around with what you’ve discovered. I did this early in my career with graphic design. I went into my lab and I was thinking and I was preparing and I was assuming, and I started designing, and I used to put all the filters on the layers all at once. And then I realized this wasn’t the way, and I was so eager to to share what it was that I was learning, that it wasn’t valid. So in order to validate how you learn, in order to understand like tricks to expedite the process, not shortcut, but expedite the junk, the noise.

Take the noise off the signal. Create a short experiment. Take it into the world, give it life and see what still stands and repeat the process. Add a little bit more repeat the process. Add a little bit more research. Add a little bit more understand what you grasp and what you don’t grasp. Understand how you acquire information. I love listening more than reading. That’s just me. I love going into my lab and creating experiments, that’s how I learn. And the more that we learn, how we learn, we don’t put ourselves in a situation where the assumption is that we’re going to learn when we’ve never demonstrated a capacity or a faculty to learn in that manner.

This is self awareness. This is a sovereignty of understanding who we are and understanding who we are. Nobody else has to be us. When we find out what works for us, we are on a new freeway. It’s us. It’s up to us to navigate between the obstructions. Think about it. What could you achieve if you knew how you best fought, how you not only fought, but how you learned, not only how you learned. How you can learn something quickly. How do you set the table so you could take advantage of this? How can your job, your career, the things you love, the passions that you seek, benefit from understanding how to acquire that next progression of information?

What will you be able to do by years in if you’re able to acquire that information sooner than you think. A lot of us do this brute force technique where we just go out, we just go out and try to force things into place. Tried and true is long and true. Tried and true takes its time, and as you acquire a grasp of understanding for how you think about thinking, you will experience a sense of metacognition magic that few are capable, not necessarily capable. Few are receptive enough to receive My name is Rahim Rasul, this has been another episode of halftime talks. I appreciate you immensely for showing up and checking us out.

So until next time, make sure you go share it with a friend. The more who knows, the more we grow. Go to halftimetalks.net. Got a whole back issue of episodes and go to iTunes, subscribe, rate and review and until next time, my name is Rahim. Hope you enjoyed. Peace. Peace, peace. You