When Intelligence Needs Help
Intelligence is necessary, and it’s only part of the picture
When Intelligence Becomes a Less-Helpful Shortcut
Most leaders take some pride in their intelligence. It feels like a crucial reason they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved. Being able to analyze scenarios, lean on past experience, and describe what should happen are crucial parts of leadership. This kind of pattern recognition is important, but has one critical weakness.
As you develop and learn to trust our thoughts, you also grow the blind spots that come with them. The same patterns that have made you an effective leader can become the most ingrained and difficult to interrupt. The neural pathways become so reinforced that they feel automatic and are very difficult to notice, let alone change.
This is perfectly natural and exactly how the brain is designed to work. If we didn’t rely on pattern recognition, we’d have to face every decision as if it were brand new. Imagine how long a grocery store trip would take if you had to read every food label every time.
The Perfect Complement to Intelligence: Metacognition
Your intelligence and experience are superpowers, but they can be undermined if you don’t develop the complementary skill of metacognition.
Metacognition is the ability to understand and think about your thoughts — it’s the layer of thought on top of thought. It is a particular capacity to remain curious and non-judgmental about your thought patterns so you can maintain mental fitness and agility. This is the key to being adaptable as times change and to circumventing (or quickly course-correcting) when you notice your default patterns will lead you astray.
When you more accurately notice and guide your own thoughts, you build a new layer of self-awareness. With it, you understand not only how others perceive you and what your strengths and weaknesses are, but what circumstances will bring out your best or potentially drain you. As the roadmap of your mind develops and evolves, you can make more conscious choices to keep yourself in
Developing Your Metacognition Capacity
Metacognition is a large part of mental fitness, and like physical fitness, it requires time and practice to build. Also like physical fitness, this is a journey that can be taken on individually, or supercharged with the right supporting partner.
Broadly, mindfulness can be considered the individual side of the journey, and coaching is the support partner. Mindfulness helps to understand the patterns in our brains, and coaches are like an external embodiment of this practice. Great coaches provide a non-judgmental, curious space to explore, challenge, and create behavioral patterns. On top of this, coaches are well-versed in the challenges and biases you may be facing, helping you quickly identify, name, and navigate your mental habits.
Smart leaders will naturally find themselves in the occasional rut, not because they lack insight, but because they are operating on assumptions and patterns that no longer serve them. These habits have been working for so long that they don’t even feel like choices; they simply feel natural and instinctive.
Coaching brings these to light as choices, enabling leaders to consciously alter their destiny for the better.
Ready to break the defaults holding you in place?