What could I have been thinking?

I’ve been thinking. And while I’ve been thinking I’ve been wondering if I’m thinking the right way, you know, the way I’m supposed to be thinking. Am I using critical thinking skills? Am I thinking outside the box? When you think about it, it gets a little confusing.

There are business consultants who try to teach managers how to utilize critical thinking and they also promote thinking outside the box. I’ve known some companies to spend large sums of money trying to teach their managers how to think, which makes me wonder how those people ever got to be managers in the first place if they didn’t already know how to think.

There are educators who want students at all levels of our educational system to learn critical thinking skills as well as how to think outside the box. Come to think of it, if these thinking skills are taught and mastered in the classroom, I think those consultants may have to find another line of work.

Now, I think I understand that it’s critical that I should think, especially before I speak, and in most cases before I take action. But I’m not sure if I should be using critical thinking skills before speaking or acting, or if I can just use average, everyday kind of thinking to protect me from making foolish statements or taking irrational action. How do you know when critical thinking skills are called for? What the heck are critical thinking skills anyway? When can you be certain that just regular thinking will be satisfactory for whatever it is that you need to think about? Think about it! How do you know when you need to flip your thinking switch from thinking to Critical Thinking?

And what about thinking outside the box? What box? Am I in a box?? How big is it, how long have I been in this box, and how the heck do I get outside the box to think? Guess I’ll have to think about that. Which takes me right back to wondering, should I engage critical thinking before I can think outside the box? Do I have to find my way outside the box before I start thinking? Is it critical to think outside the box? If I’m not thinking outside the box, does that mean I’m thinking inside the box? Is thinking inside the box a bad thing? Is that noncritical thinking? Is noncritical thinking nothing more than daydreaming?

As you can tell, when I start thinking about all this stuff I get confused. Guess I should have thought about that before I started thinking. If I had thought about that before I started thinking, would that have involved critical thinking or thinking outside the box? Let me think about that for a while. I’ll get back to you.