Critical Thinking Judgment

The final element of the discovery is learning how to have good judgment. When you are in the process of sorting through facts, ideas and concepts, it’s important to be able to see what is true and tell what is false. In essence, you rely on your ability to judge in just about any situation where you have to decide between more than one outcome.

What are the things that make up good judgment? Let’s take a look:

-Big Picture Thinking: When you have to make a decision, it is extremely beneficial to consider the long term effects of such a choice. Oftentimes we can get bogged down in the minutia of details and only see the trees instead of the whole forest. Good judgment allows for us to focus on the whole of the problem instead of just one detail.

-Thinking Realistically: If something seems too good to be true, it most likely is. A person with good judgment skills often looks for the drawback in a solution, knowing that most everything is some kind of trade off.

-Gut Decisions: Sometimes something might feel off. This is our natural sense of intuition. It is our brain’s ability to subconsciously put together information and signal to us that something is wrong without us explicitly knowing what is wrong. Sometimes it can be extremely beneficial to trust your gut instinct and remain cautious. You shouldn’t make a serious decision just off of a feeling, but you can let those feelings give you some extra level of discernment.

-Skepticism: Being overly skeptical isn’t good, but having a healthy dose of skepticism in your daily thinking can assist you with making the right choices. Just because someone says something is true doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.

-Look for Proof: A good judge is someone who looks for proof. If a man claiming that he has a revolutionary system to get out of debt has no proof, is poor himself and those who use his system are also poor, chances are the system doesn’t work so great. Trust but verify is a great policy to have in place when it comes to taking in independent information on a potential problem solver.