What’s your step-by-step process to try and remember something that you just learned?
Do you know why you sometimes remember new people’s names and cannot remember others?
How about when you have a big project to work on. Do you ever experience distracting thoughts constantly floating to the top of your head?
All of these scenarios are linked. They all stem from your cognitive skills. Cognitive skills are the brain-based skills that we need to carry out any task from the basic and easy to the extremely complex. Both understanding and improving your cognitive skills are essential to fueling new learning, sharper thinking, and better mental performance.
Most people do not even know what cognitive skills are. That’s fair because it’s not something that is commonly discussed or taught. In school and in workplaces we are informed of what we have to do and what is expected of us but nobody ever equips students or employees with the right mental tools to achieve these outcomes. We are telling people what to do but never showing them the best mental practices to achieve it. This is why you end up with a hodgepodge of techniques in classrooms and across corporate America which may offer major transformation but their impact is short-lived.
If you think about the education system. Scoring well on tests is central to doing well in school. The primary cognitive skill needed for tests is memory. Yet at no point are we ever taught how our memory works and how to use it. What you end up with is students who score poorly on tests then thinking that they are dumb and have a bad memory. When in fact they simply didn’t know what they didn’t know.
The beliefs that people pick up about their cognitive abilities in school typically extend to the workplace. If somebody judged themself as a slow reader or unable to study in school those beliefs will be magnified when they get to the workplace and they will feel a greater sense of pressure on their cognitive abilities.
I have seen it first hand going into hedge fund managers, clinical researchers, and even college professors. They are often very insecure about their reading ability or their capacity to focus. They are overwhelmed because they expect so much of themselves and want to reach their potential but at some point, they reach a mental barrier that is making it harder and harder to keep up.
At, The Momentum Mind, we want to give everybody the solid foundation that they need in the brain to meet their full potential. We focus on sharpening the 5 core cognitive skills;
- Thinking
- Learning
- Reading
- Memory
- Attention & Focus
By understanding how these skills work and how to optimize their abilities you are creating a success multiplier that will weave into every part of your life.
Life is so rich.
