8 STRATEGIES for thinking more like Sherlock:
1. Examine everything with healthy skepticism. Stop and question your own thoughts. By filtering your thoughts, they can't sneakily influence your behavior outside your awareness.
2. Work to overcome your biases, developed-over-a-lifetime. With practice, we can overcome the automatic wiring of our brains to become more objective in our thinking.
3. Observe all first impressions closely. Something superfluous often influences our judgments.
4. Be inclusive. When Holmes examines a note, he not only reads it and looks at it. He smells it, too, and that gives him additional valuable input.
5. Be more engaged. Studies have shown that those who are motivated by their personal engagement in a situation are more likely to make the effort to counteract their autopilot-like initial judgments. We won't engage that fully in everything, but if we want to be more accurate in our thinking, we can manage our wandering minds.
6. Step back. Imaginative thinking is enhanced when we walk away from a problem. The further away from our own perspective, the wider the picture we can see.
7. Continue educating yourself. Holmes choose his habits mindfully, writes Konnikova, each of them aimed at facilitating thought. He found his companion, Dr. Watson, to be stimulating of his own genius. And he took on cases that were a challenge in order to keep learning.
8. Keep a diary. Overconfidence—believing you already know the cause of some problem—can keep you from observing mindfully. Write everything down and then look for patterns, without jumping to conclusions.
Copyright (c) 2013 by Susan K. Perry
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creating-in-flow/201303/8-strategies-thinking-more-sherlock-holmes
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