FOUR HABITS THAT UNLOCK YOUR MENTAL CAPACITY

If you’ve read this far, I’d like to thank you for your patience and acknowledge that you may be keen to know more about the “how-to” of practical intelligence. At least, that’s what I would be feeling at this point.We have the needed inventory of basic concepts for understanding PI, and now we need to get specific. How does it work? How do we learn it? How do we put the methods to use every day? We will begin by “cleaning out the attic”—tuning up four key aspects of the way we process information that profoundly influence almost all of our other mental processes. These four mental habits— features of our mental “software”—enable us to put our natural, inbuilt range of mental skills to effective use. Let’s review them briefly, and then explore each one in greater depth in the following chapters.
1.Mental Flexibility—the absence of mental rigidity.When you free yourself from narrow mindedness, intolerance, dogmatic thinking and judgments, “opinionitis,” fear-based avoidance of new ideas and experiences, and learn to live with ambiguity and complexity, you become more mentally flexible. Mental flexibility is at the very foundation of your ability to perceive clearly, think clearly, solve problems, persuade others, learn, and grow as a person.
2.Affirmative Thinking—the habit of perceiving, thinking, speaking, and behaving in ways that support a healthy emotional state in yourself as well as in others.This includes consciously and continually deciding what you will accept into your mind, what you will and will not devote your attention to, and which people and messages you will allow to influence your thinking and your emotional reactions.We’ll go beyond the usual “positive thinking” slogans and the “glass is half full” clichés, to explore how affirmative thinking really works.
3.Semantic Sanity—the habit of using language consciously and carefully so as to promote your own mental flexibility and affirmative thinking, think more clearly and less dogmatically, and persuade others much more effectively than by using the customary methods of arguing and verbal combat. Revising the way we talk forces us to revise the way we think; therefore, adopting language habits that are “semantically sane” contributes to mental health and emotional well-being as well as more intelligent thinking, problem solving, and communicating. .Valuing Ideas—the habit of saying a “tentative yes” to all new ideas at the first instant of perception—however strange, unfamiliar, or different from our own—rather than reflexively shooting them down.Valuing ideas means letting the ideas of others live long enough to present their possibilities, capturing your own fleeting ideas with a pen and note cards, thinking up lots of new ideas—“option thinking”—and encouraging others to do the same. And we’ll go beyond the usual slogans about “thinking outside the box,” to learn about mental boxes and “metaboxical” thinking. Once we’ve started working on these four upgrades to our mental software, and realizing that we need to upgrade them continually, we can then understand much more clearly how to make good use of the four “mega-skills” for thinking that all of us have.