Learn How Cognitive Training Can Benefit Your Problem-Solving Abilities
The most striking quality about powerhouses like Bill Gates or Elon Musk is their extraordinary ability to innovate creative solutions. Admittedly it’s easy to feel like they’re somehow different from us—somehow more naturally inspired and resourceful than the average person. But believe it or not, you can also train your brain to think like a genius. In fact, you can accomplish amazing feats just by sharpening your problem-solving skills and learning to navigate challenges.
It all starts with cognitive training.
No matter who you are, your problem-solving abilities depend on the core cognitive skills you use every day. Cognitive training helps you hone those skills so you can accomplish more in the day-to-day of your professional life. Let’s take a closer look at those skills.
Cognitive training makes you better at solving problems alone or in a team.
How Does Problem-Solving Depend on Cognitive Skills?
Essentially, cognitive skills are the building blocks of all your thought processes. In fact, they’re used so frequently that most of the time you aren’t even aware of them—much like breathing. However, once you start noticing and actively working on them, you’ll become more capable and effective than ever.
Cognitive skills related to information-processing and problem-solving:
- Direction and Orientation: These skills make it easier to understand relationships in the environment. They allow you to give, take, and prioritize directions.
- Classification and Categorization: These skills allow you to group and reorganize ideas, emotions, objects, actions, and time periods. They help you deal with complicated tasks.
- Environmental Awareness: This is how well you see how different things are related. It helps you develop mental templates for dealing with similar situations.
- Analysis and Synthesis: These skills break down ideas and challenges into smaller, more manageable pieces. They keep you from becoming overwhelmed by too much information.
- Motor Integration: This skill makes it easier for you to set aside emotions and plan tasks out ahead of time.
- Concrete Sequencing: This skill makes you more aware of what is and isn’t working when carrying out a plan. It helps you to think logically and identify potential problems.
- Pattern Recognition: This skill helps you identify patterns and allows you to manage complicated or repetitive information.
How Will Cognitive Training Help?
Now, what can you do to develop those problem-solving skills and improve your on-the-job performance?
At Critical Thinking for Success, we start out by administering proficiency tests that identify which skills have the most room for growth. This lets us hone in on the skills that will benefit you the most. Once we’ve determined where to focus our efforts, we develop an individualized training regimen just for you. Furthermore, this training regimen involves daily exercises as well as in-person sessions.
Additionally, for each cognitive skill there are a variety of games, puzzles, and other exercises to help your development. For example, we use games and puzzles where moving one piece changes the rest of the board, forcing you to visualize a plan before you execute it rather jumping right into blind experimentation. This way, you train your brain to take an analytical approach and assess the inner logic and relationships behind a problem before you try to tackle it.
At our in-person sessions, we’ll review your progress with those exercises, as well as how you’ve been doing in your personal and professional life. We’ll discuss ways you can apply your cognitive training and suggest strategies for using them to face upcoming real-life challenges.
As you progress, you’ll see yourself having an easier time coming up with effective and creative solutions to the problems you face, and getting more done with less stress. That’ll make you more resourceful, more capable of handling whatever comes your way, and all-around a better business professional.
Ready to boost your problem-solving skills and take the next step toward accomplishing your dreams?
Call Critical Thinking for Success at 847-845-0422. Let’s set up a consultation, and discuss how we can train your brain to be a problem-solving machine!
