Everyone knows what cognitive thinking is, but what about metacognitive thinking? Dan Sullivan uses this term to describe the kind of thinking The Strategic Coach® Program develops in entrepreneurs. In this episode, Dan and fellow business coach Shannon Waller explore metacognitive thinking and how it helps the right kind of entrepreneurs achieve their biggest dreams with greater clarity and confidence.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn in this episode:

The three levels of thinking most people rely on in daily life.
The fourth level of thinking that unlocks your best entrepreneurial ideas.
Dan’s first childhood experience of thinking about his thinking.
The question that set Dan on a completely different life path from his peers.
Why entrepreneurs gain an unfair advantage when they learn to think about their thinking.

Show Notes:

One level of thinking is thinking about things. People like things, and they often use shared things as common ground for conversation.

The second level of thinking is thinking about people, which is why social media has become such a powerful phenomenon.

For most people, thinking about things and thinking about people uses up almost all of their available mental time.

The third level of thinking is thinking about thoughts, which is the focus of higher education and high-level media.

In higher education, professors typically teach other people’s thinking rather than developing and teaching their own.

The fourth level of thinking, which very creative people—and especially entrepreneurs—can access, is thinking about your thinking.

Thinking about your thinking gives you the ability to deliberately change how you’re thinking about a situation or problem.

Strategic Coach® provides hundreds of thinking tools to help entrepreneurs think about their thinking in structured, practical ways.

Your emotions are not a direct response to what happens outside of you; they’re a response to how you’re thinking about what happens.

Resources:

My Plan For Living To 156 by Dan Sullivan

Unique Ability®