Cognitive Training Improves Your Organization, Problem-Solving, and Communication Skills

Do you feel like you have the potential for achieving big things and building a great career, but something’s holding you back? Like you could make a productive breakthrough and reach new heights of success if you could just access the untapped abilities you have inside? If so, then cognitive training is the solution you’re looking for.

Cognitive training has many applications in different areas of life—we train parents, students, athletes, soldiers, and people from many other walks of life. However, one of the groups that stands to gain the most from cognitive training is business professionals.

Here’s a summary of how cognitive training helps you succeed in your business life by improving your organization, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Build Your Organization Skills

One of the first and most important keys to success in your work life is the ability to effectively organize yourself. You have to be able to create an efficient work space, make sense of ideas and information, plan out your tasks in advance, and manage your time well.

Success in those areas depends on developing your relevant core cognitive skills. These are the skills that form the basis for all other mental abilities and activities. You use them constantly and unconsciously, like breathing, so you’re not even aware of them.

Organization is governed by a specific set of those cognitive skills, including:

• Classification and Categorization helps you group and manage ideas, objects, actions, emotions, and time periods.
• Environmental Awareness helps you see how objects or ideas relate to each other.
• Field Discrimination helps you remain focused on a target despite awareness of distractions and other pieces of information.
• Analysis and Synthesis helps you break down, manage, and recombine ideas and processes according to the logic holding them together.
• Motor Integration helps you plan your tasks ahead instead of rushing into them.
• Abstract Sequencing, or abstract logic, helps you visualize step-by-step how you plan to organize something, so that you can strategize and correct errors before you act.
• Concrete Sequencing, or concrete logic, helps you see problems during the actual hands-on application of your plan, so that you spot inefficiencies, learn more, and are a better at training others.

At Critical Thinking for Success, we test your proficiency in each of these skills. Once we determine your areas for improvement, we develop a personalized training plain to bring them up to par. You’ll become more organized and capable of accomplishing more each day on the job, leading to greater long-term success in your career.

Develop Your Problem-Solving Skills

Organizing is only part of the battle, though. To be successful in the world of business, you have to be a problem solver. You have to be able to analyze a problem and develop effective solutions.

To do that, you develop another set of cognitive skills around processing information:

• Direction and Orientation help you understand the logic that drives relationships in the environment, and helps you give, take, and prioritize directions.
• Classification and Categorization helps you group and reorganize objects, ideas, actions, emotions, and time periods, making it easier to deal with complex tasks.
• Environmental Awareness helps you see the relations of different things to each other and develop mental templates for similar situations.
• Analysis and Synthesis helps you break tasks and ideas down into manageable pieces, understand their relationships, and see the main ideas so you don’t get overwhelmed with information.
• Motor Integration helps you suspend emotions and plan out a task before you start it.
• Concrete Sequencing, or concrete logic, helps you see what’s working and what isn’t while you’re carrying out your plan, so you can see a process’s logic, spot mistakes, and be better at training others.
• Pattern Recognition, also called rule induction, helps you see patterns and use them to create templates or rules of managing repetitive or complicated information more easily.

If problem-solving is what you want to work on, then we analyze which of these skills you need to improve on, then help you start building them up with a variety of exercises and training sessions. You’ll become better at finding solutions to the problems you encounter on the job, helping you accomplish more on a daily basis.

Train Your Communication Skills

However, what good are solutions if you can’t effectively convey them to others? To become a better business professional, you need to be good at communication. Communication skills help you make sales, share your ideas in meetings, coordinate with a team, lead presentations and seminars, and more.

Here are the cognitive skills required for good communication:

• Shape Recognition helps you anticipate and communicate meaning, including intuitively reading social meaning in interactions.
• Direction and Orientation helps you understand social proximity, delegation, and information management.
• Pattern Recognition, also known as rule induction, helps you intuitively identify social cues to better understand and navigate social relationships.

As with the other areas, we here at Critical Thinking for Success will evaluate these skills for you to determine where you should be placing your efforts. Developing these skills will make you a more effective communicator, a better leader, and a more successful business professional.

So, if you’re interested in developing your skillset, tapping into your true potential, and achieving more in your career than you thought possible, give Critical Thinking for Success a call at 847-845-0422 for a consultation. We’re always interested in helping you make the most of the most powerful tool you have—your brain!