There are times when we have to make decisions in a split second. And a little delay can make matters worse for us. For example, if you want to buy a stock at 100 dollars and you are looking for its fall on or below that level, you need to wait patiently. If a scenario arises that it keeps on falling, you have to make a decision very quickly, but keeping market sentiments and overall economic indicators into consideration. 

In the above example, many scenarios can occur and can make your decision making really difficult. What if the stock keeps on dropping even below the 100-dollar mark, you have in mind? Will you wait for it to drop down to 95 or 90? What if it bounces back right after you purchased it or stuck at 101 and doesn’t fall? What will you do? These are all part of scenarios where your decision-making and critical thinking is tested.

How to Make Things Work for you, Every time?

The scenarios mentioned above can happen anytime to any one of us and multiple times too. Because we don’t have much time to think about a particular issue or problem and think rationally about it, we don’t get a good result every time. So, what’s the remedy here? Critical thinking is the answer. To achieve any result, we all need to think in an organized and rational manner. That’s how anyone can understand connections between ideas and facts and get to a solution. 

I’ll be using the example at the start of this blog post throughout to explain this topic. Becoming a critical thinker to make a good decision in buying/selling some stocks or making a decision to hire a team for your new project, for example, is all that we look forward to. Simply, put its thinking creatively and rationally about whatever you need to think to make things perfect for you every time. 

How to be a Critical Thinker? 

If you have an idea that if you have studied for many years in a top business school and have made several research reports/case studies, you can make a perfect decision each time, it is not true. It takes much time and patience to get to a level where you can be termed as a critical thinker. No one is perfect, and you will improve with time for sure. 

Steps of Critical Thinking

Don’t think that it will take years to perfect the critical thinking skills. With some effort in a positive direction, you can succeed. Start by identifying the problem, gather data, then analyze your data, identify assumptions, make a decision, reach a conclusion and then present and communicate the result to the audience. 

Best Critical Thinking Skills 

Several critical thinking skills vary according to exactly which industry you want to serve and your target audience. While every skill can be applied to any industry, it is feasible that you think about what exactly is needed according to your particular problem. In the workplace, whether you are working as a supervisor or an employee, you need to think critically to make things perfect for you. 

Analysis and Evaluation

The analysis is the first part in which you have to deal with identifying the problem and think about how to be as precise as possible. Gathering the data is another aspect where you have to go one step ahead of the previous step and have to find several sources that present different ideas and points of view. In the evaluation step, you need to check the reliability of the sources so that you can be cent percent sure of what you are trying to find and relevance with the data. 

Explanation 

You need to think about attaining the skills related to the explanation of data you have found and what you need to explain as a finding. If you can’t communicate exactly what you have found out as a result of hard work, all your efforts will go in vain. As a manager, you can start using a task management tool so that as soon as you explain it, you can then delegate the task to your subordinates and can manage it through any such tool. 

Problem Solving 

It all comes down to this, as here you need to resolve conflicts and able to show everyone that you are an expert in critical thinking and offering the best results for any problem whatsoever. Think of the problem I mentioned at the start of this blog, the stock buying a share at or below the price of 100 dollars. Let’s analyze that problem right from the start and offer an audience what you have concluded after all that effort.

The problem was not that difficult if you go through it casually, but in essence, it can turn out to be crucial for the person involved. Imagine the person is looking to buy around 10,000 shares of stock as soon as the price touches 100 or lower. You don’t need an economist to know when exactly that will happen as market sentiments and future predictions can predict the exact day about this. But once it touches 100, not much you can predict after that point. 

You need to evaluate what can happen after the stock touches 100. It can go down below 90 or rebound back to over 110. Of course, you won’t buy it if it keeps coming down, but what if you buy that share exactly at a hundred, stays on there for one or two days and then start coming down. What will you do to minimize the loss? 

There are many solutions to this problem. One of the easiest ones that any stockbroker or person familiar to the share trading will tell you is about to start selling your stock as soon as the price starts getting down. The average loss you will bear on per share will be less as compared to when you will start selling it on the price of 90 or even below this. 

Over to you

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