Who, What, And How?

                                                Who, What, And How?

 

 

 

                             

                                   

                                    “It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.”

                                                                                          Shakespeare

One of the many aspects of human life that is rapidly being lost in my view is the ability to think well. The subject of critical thinking is not paid much attention in our educational systems (although there have been more attempts lately to nurture this essential life skill in children). We are a culture that is rapidly dumbing down, even though we have more and more information and exchanges via our cell phones, computers, social media, etc., we are coming to know more and more about less and less. Wisdom in particular, is almost something that is nostalgically “cute,” but useless as far as knowing the latest sound bite.

Let's take a quick and dirty intro to an approach to how to think better and be wiser in our transactions and apperceptions of human life. If we approach thinking with a Who, What, How big three lenses, it will get the ball rolling.

I intentionally leave out the question Why, Why you may ask? Because why is a question that leads to endless speculation, inferrence, debate, and pretense of rationalization and explanation. This is where I differ from a lot of therapists that are endlessly interested in a person's history which they use to explain and understand the client, I'm much more interested in Who, What, and How.

To look at who is to look at a source that begins with bias, whether it is yourself or anyone else, whomever is speaking, writing, researching, teaching, etc., they have a particular agenda they are promoting. I am promoting one right now, and you are promoting one by reading this. To assess the who part of the equation is to ascertain a degree of reliability of credibility of what's coming out of the horses mouth so to speak.

In science, we want to know who did the experiments, where did the funding come from, who published the results, and who is reading and promoting the outcomes. The What is about the content of speech, the context of experiments, the results, the essential nature of what is written. It's always deeper than face value, or the cover of a book, or someone's image or status, we always have to look deeper than the surface to find out what's really going on, it takes time, multiple perspectives, and feedback from different sources about what's working/not working.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, is the How, which is about the process. Are we having fun yet? is a process (How) question, and a very important one. How we are doing an experiment or intervention is very important, the tools, the models, the ways of measuring are very important. There are fundamental bias in every How methodology. If we're using Newtonian physics, we are believing there is some force acting at a distance to create gravity, if we're using Quantum thinking or Relativity, we're thinking it's the curvature of space that explains gravity. Either view doesn't really give us a description of gravity, they're just useful ways (How's) of doing business. One can put a man on the moon, the other can use GPS to get us home. How we're going about something is crucial to success, if we don't stop from time to time and reflect, we get locked into our How and think it's the only game in town.

So the Who, What, And How are very abstract here with some intention. This is because one of the main goals of critical thinking is to help people to think for themselves. Whenever I'm working with clients or writing, or being silly with a group of friends, there's always an impish agenda to cheer people on to think for themselves. This is because we live in a culture of sheep, that are raised to follow the leaders and authority, the one's whose job it is to know and take care of us, and we spend little time really reflecting and looking deeper. This is why a person like Trump can be the #1 news item, getting away with all his shenanigans, and be soaring in the polls, it's quite a reflection on the times we're living in and our culture!

So pay attention to the Who, What, And How of your everyday living, ask yourself pertinent questions like; “Who am I really?” “What is my purpose?” and “How am I going to live my purpose?” Listen and watch, for the answers will come!