Metacognition Archives - Nancy Morris

I Have A Confession

I’m always a bit intrigued when I meet people who think that, because of the work I do in personal and professional development, my life must be totally sorted.

Zen-like.

Balanced.

As much as I’d like to say it is, of course it is not.

I become stuck, feel envious, get bogged down in noise, get angry ‘unnecessarily’, let things overwhelm me, and just about everything else.

I argue with my husband, worry about money from time to time, have little patience with the stepkids sometimes (who are now in their 20s), want to hibernate away from everyone and just cannot be bothered with doing “today’s” work.

However …

And it is a big “however” …

I possess a deep sense of confidence and calm, knowing where these things are coming from and exactly how to get back on track. I do not berate myself (as much) anymore nor do I judge myself as a failure in some way.

Every day, I know some squirrel is probably going to tempt me or throw a curve ball in my direction. And that’s okay. In fact, it is part of the fun.

Action – What magic pill did I swallow? None (though a glass of wine or G&T can certainly be helpful).

It is a matter of the choices I make on a frequent basis. These are the same choices you can make too:

• Practice some degree of mindfulness throughout the day
• Pause in gratitude frequently
• Praise myself for the things that I do that are a stretch
• Notice and acknowledge others for who they are
• Purposefully shut off (or at least tone down) the inner critic
• Stop listening to all the “secrets” – I know me best
• Believe in something bigger than me
• Raise my self-awareness constantly
• Be a lifelong learner.

In other words, many little decisions made throughout the day, every day. No magic pill. No “30 days to a million dollars”. Just daily consistent, persistent attitude and actions.

Your turn.

Take A Look Inside: The Benefits Of Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to remain in touch with yourself. It is an understanding of how you think and feel about yourself in different situations. This acquired knowledge about self shapes your decisions and determines your actions and behaviors. Most workers want to understand their motives, conflicts, behaviors, issues, and relationships while at work. Church (1997) maintains that high-performing workers are also highly self-aware and are able to accurately assess and determine their workplace behaviors.

So, take time to do a little introspection and reflect on the following:

True understanding of yourself requires effortful introspection (Showry & Manasa, 2014). This process of self-assessment can be cognitively complex, and typically occurs at the unconscious and subconscious levels. Yet, it takes the simple conscious decision to do it to get the ball rolling.
Self-aware workers can express both their strengths and their weaknesses. In so doing, self-aware workers know that they can convert weaknesses into strengths by working on self (Showry & Manasa, 2014).
Self-aware workers are open to objective feedback (Duval and Lalwani , 1999). When you reject the validity of negative feedback or overlook your faults and failures or take more credit for your group’s work than you give to other members, you are protecting your ego from injury. In turn, this negatively impacts the organization. And while your ego may have been saved from harm, your self-esteem drops.
The more you understand yourself, your communication at work (and at home) improves. Improved communication at the workplace will ultimately increase your work performance (Wegner and Giuliano 1982).
Finally, the depth of your self-awareness equals your breath of success (Morris, 2016)

Self-aware workers understand who they are and what they want to achieve. Instead of becoming defensive when confronted with hard times, they accept the situation, transform themselves and thrive.

Selected References:

Church, A. (1997). Managerial Self-Awareness in High-Performing Individuals in Organizations, Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(2), 281-292.

Duval, T. & Lalwani, N. (1999). Objective Self-Awareness and Causal Attributions for Self-Standard Discrepancies: Changing Self or Changing Standards of Correctness, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, (25), 1220-1229.

Ickes, W. J., & Knowles, E. S. (1982). Personality, roles, and social behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Morris, N. (2016, February). Metacognitive Skills Training as a Positive Psychology Intervention for Within-Person Fluctuations of Wellbeing at Work presented to University of East London, London, England.

Showry, K., Mendemu, V. & Manasa, L. (2014). Self-Awareness-Key to Effective Leadership. IUP Journal of Soft Skills, 8 (1), 15+.

Wegner, D. & Giuliano, T. (1982). The Forms of Social Awareness. In Personality, roles, and social behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.

The Good Side of Your Bad Side

All these how-to books, articles, webinars and interviews telling us to “think positive” and “always be happy” have simply made it that much more difficult to do it!

In fact, researchers continue to find that the more we try to be happy, the less likely we will be.

“Pursuit” of anything (whether that’s happiness or money or a certain job or whatever) is a reflection of lack and fear. But “accepting” what it is you are after – because you know it already exists somewhere – comes from a place of self-acceptance and love.

Of course, being positive has its benefits. But so does being negative. In fact, without negativity, you would not be unable to discern the positive things in life. You wouldn’t know what brings you joy, meaning, pleasure and excitement. You wouldn’t have insight into the range of emotions and moods that make you uniquely human.

Half of who you are would be missing.

So the focus on positive has, to me, become dangerously commercialized. There are far too many books, podcasts and ‘gurus’ raving about ‘happiology’. What’s more, when most of the academics are also rolling out self-help books every few months, good and valid research gets lost (again) in the plethora of paper being propped up in retail book outlets.

Yes, let’s keep looking at the positive. And the negative. In fact, let’s look at all the elements that create ‘whole-ology’.

(In my Masters program, I wrote a review paper on this subject. Yup, it’s ‘academic’ – full of citations and wherewithalls and 20+ pages. Grab a coffee, or a beer, and have a read – The Good Side of Your Bad Side_Nancy Morris)

Facilitating Employee Work Performance

As a manager, have you ever wondered why you or your employees may be inconsistent regarding work performance?

You may be scratching your head…you have hired people who have the expertise necessary to perform the job; you have given your employees on-going feedback; and you have provided your employees with acceptable working conditions. What more is required?

Consider the following:

Effective managers are aware of their responsibility to challenge and develop their employees to think and act for themselves. As well, good managers are interested in developing their employees’ strengths. Managers who care about their employees and want their employees to succeed will find that their employees are happier and more engaged.

Here are 10 strategies that can help elevate how you are viewed by your employees, impacting their level of consistent work performance:

Share your personal knowledge and experience. Employees want to hear about your successes as well as your failures. Your employees want to know how you mastered the necessary skills to do your job.

Encourage employees to learn from one another. Managers who encourage and create mechanisms for employees to exchange knowledge among each other foster a trusting environment. As well, peer mentoring can be an effective way for employees to motivate each other.

Provide time for one-on-one, two-way discussions. Giving feedback in meaningful, one-on-one, two-way discussions provides the opportunity for you and your employee to share observations regarding the work environment. These informal discussions demonstrate to your employees that they are important.

Conduct formal performance appraisals. During a formal performance appraisal, don’t just assess your employees’ performance. Take this time to ask your employees about their career goals. While these discussions can occur at any time, the formal appraisal ensures that they do happen.

Facilitate learning. Employees learn by doing and managers must find the time and techniques to facilitate learning. Not only can employees be encouraged to learn new skills, but they could expand their general business knowledge and embrace the organizational culture.

Consider self-awareness training. Self-awareness is important for your employees’ personal development. It is my fundamental tenet that your employees’ depth of self-awareness equals your employees’ breadth of success. Science backs this up.

Respect the need for daily recovery. When employees are able to ‘unplug’ from work, they return to work feeling more refreshed. Finding the daily balance between engagement at work and detachment while at home benefits all.

Monitor the number of daily negative events. Daily work events and daily turmoil can drive the emotional states of your employees. It is important to keep the number of negative events down, in order to minimize negative emotional states.

Go with the flow. Like you, employees experience concentration fluctuation and find that some days are better than others. These concentration fluctuations have been shown to increase creativity and performance. Unless it becomes a problem, go with the flow.

Relinquish some job control. When employees feel that they have control over their job, they will optimize their work environment. Managers must encourage employees to keep stretching and learning; and allowing them to make some decisions. Empowered employees become self-sufficient and confident workers.

Metacognition – An important skill for the workplace

What is metacognition?

John Flavell (1976) coined the term metacognition. Metacognition refers to higher-order thinking that enables understanding, analysis, and control of one’s cognitive processes, especially when engaged in learning. The more popular definitions of metacogition are: the process of ‘knowing about knowing’; the process of ‘thinking about thinking’; the process of developing self-awareness and the ability to self-assess.

What are metacognitive skills?

Metacognitive skills include the ability to assess one’s current and previous knowledge, recognize flaws or gaps in one’s thinking, articulate one’s thought processes, plan gap-filling strategies, and determine the relevance of new information. Highly developed metacognitive skills can help compensate for deficits in general intelligence and/or prior knowledge and are important throughout life. Employers need to foster in their employees, the development of metacognitive skills.

Why is this important?

Research has shown that unproductive employees typically have poorly developed metacognitive skills. Interestingly, this may manifest itself in an employee’s overconfidence in his or her abilities. These employees may use inaccurate information to solve problems and stop working on projects before fully understanding what is needed for success. Poor metacognition is a big part of incompetence. Employees with good metacognitive skills are able to monitor and direct their own performance and learning processes. They can think through a problem or approach a project with confidence. They can select appropriate strategies and make decisions about a course of action to successfully perform the task. They often think about their own thinking processes and take time to think about and learn from their mistakes.

How can employers assist employees in developing good metacognitive skills?

Metacognitive skills can be taught (Halpern, 1996). Here are a few ideas to consider:

Encourage your employees to engage in ‘metacognitive conversations’ with themselves. Have them ‘talk’ with themselves about their learning, the challenges they encounter, and the ways in which they can self-correct and continue learning.
To help employees examine and develop their metacognitive processes, encourage them to discuss their thought processes with other employees.
Use ‘formative assessments’ during the working day. Formative assessments are brief, low-stakes activities that employees do in order to give themselves knowledge about their performance. For example, encourage employees to think about the following questions:
- At the beginning of a project:
  - What prior knowledge will help me with this task? What should I do first?
  - How much time do I have to complete this project?
  - In what direction do I want my thinking to take me?
- In the middle of a project:
  - How am I doing? Am I on the right track?
  - How should I proceed? Should I move in a different direction?
- At the end of a project:
  - How well did I do? What did I learn?
  - Did I get the results I expected? What could I have done differently?
  - Can I apply this way of thinking to other problems or situations?
  - Are there any gaps in my knowledge? Do I need to go back through the task to fill in these gaps?
Offer trainings that teach and support the development of metacognitive skills; an approach to learning with emphases on investigating the internal mental processes.
Provide trainings that are based on microlearning, a form of learning that consists of brief, inter-connected learning activities composed of microcontent.
Present trainings that can be delivered using microcontent audio files. Research has shown that computer-based interactive programs using audio files can influence a learner’s cognition by adding clarity, meaning, and motivation.

The goal of helping employees develop metacognitive skills is to help them become comfortable with these skills so that these skills can be employed automatically. If asked what they are doing, employees with good metacognitive skills can accurately describe their metacognitive processes.

Focusing attention, deriving meaning, and making adjustments if something goes wrong becomes second nature.

I Have A Confession

Take A Look Inside: The Benefits Of Self-Awareness

The Good Side of Your Bad Side

Facilitating Employee Work Performance

Metacognition – An important skill for the workplace

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