“Thinking About Thinking” – Metacognition Is At The Heart of Resilience
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Focus
The foundations of intellectual and emotional resilience aren’t just about experience. Building strategies of thinking, improving our reactions and reflexes and learning to direct our emotions are all part of successful behaviour.
Summary
Metacognition, or the ability to reflect on our thought processes, is key to building resilience, guiding personal growth, and achieving success.
- Metacognition enhances decision-making, mental health, and resilience through self-reflection.
- Recognising biases in thoughts and feelings builds objectivity and clarity.
- Metacognitive Knowledge aids learning and problem-solving, while Regulation involves goal-setting and adjustments.
- Reflecting on responses to discomfort fosters resilient, adaptable problem-solving strategies.
- Risky Kids Clubs encourage metacognitive growth through tailored feedback and universal resilience strategies.
Metacognition Is Thinking About Thinking
Metacognition, or understanding your own thought processes, enhances decision-making and mental wellbeing.
- Recognise biases in your feelings and attitudes to think objectively.
- Reflecting on thoughts strengthens metacognition for better, healthier choices.
- Developing metacognition positively impacts success and mental health.
Our ability to analyse and reflect on our own thinking processes, to know what we do and don’t know and where our limitations and biases in thinking are is called metacognition. When you’re at work and you’re doing your job, beneath it are layers of thinking.
Your self esteem, your attitude about your workplace, and even beneath them are layers. Why do you feel the way you do about either? Are you being biased or objective?
The ability to unpick all of this, to question, shape and refine it will help you to develop your metacognition to make better decisions throughout your life. The stronger your metacognition, the more successful you’ll be and the healthier your mind will be.
What Are Some Metacognition Examples?
Metacognition involves understanding and guiding our own thought processes to make informed decisions.
- Metacognitive Knowledge helps us learn, problem-solve, and understand our thinking patterns.
- Metacognitive Regulation involves setting goals, tracking understanding, and adjusting thoughts.
- Mental hygiene includes questioning our reasoning and recognising underlying emotions.
There’s two primary forms of metacognition: Knowledge and Regulation. Each plays a role in shaping how you think.
Metacognitive Knowledge includes strategies for learning and problem solving, as well as our knowledge of ourselves as a learner. For example, we might know that when we have to make a decision, we benefit from a pro and con list to speed up the process. We also know that we are commonly biased towards the pros! So we always run the list past someone else as well.
Metacognitive Regulation is our ability to set goals, track our understanding and make adjustments. For example, questioning our own thinking and our justifications and reasoning is known as “mental hygiene”. When we decide we don’t want to visit a family member, we might question that and realise we’re feeling guilty because we haven’t seen them in so long!
Learn More About Learning
The Stages of Becoming: Learning As JourneyThe Stages of Becoming: The First Step, NoveltyHow Does Metacognition Impact Resilience?
Metacognition strengthens resilience by helping us reflect, adjust, and grow through challenges.
- Resilience involves embracing discomfort for growth and mental fortitude.
- Reflecting on reactions to discomfort builds lasting, adaptable problem-solving strategies.
- Success reinforces effective thinking, expanding tools for overcoming future obstacles.
The connection between metacognition and resilience is powerful. Resilience is about growth, about facing discomfort and challenging ourselves both physically and mentally. In order to do this, we need to change the way we think, which is where metacognition comes in.
As we experience discomfort, we might want to avoid it, lessen it, justify any failure or take other mitigating measures. When we reflect on this and confront it, to double down and work harder to overcome the challenge, we’re not only using metacognition, but building a strategy we can use later.
Just the same, when we succeed and triumph over an obstacle, our thinking and approach is reinforced. We can place those approaches into our metacognitive arsenal of how to solve problems, speeding up our thinking and approaches, able to face more challenges more often.
A Fear Of Risk
Building Metacognition At Risky Play
One of our Risky Play parents, Kerry, joined with the full acknowledgement that they were afraid of their kid taking risk! They joined to try and build their tolerance to it, because they knew it was healthy, and wanted to be a part of it.
During their weekly sessions, their Risky Play Coach would teach them new language and tools, and ways to better understand risk taking. They explained that when a kid said “watch me” they were actually saying “trust me”. This was a lightbulb moment for Kerry.
Kerry started to practise thinking of this every time that her Risky Kid would start taking risks, that they wanted to be trusted. This let Kerry invest more value in those moments, and also help shape what she wanted her responses to be.
Mindsets, Perspectives and Guidance
Improving metacognition involves personalised reflection strategies to help build resilience and success.
- Reflection is crucial to metacognitive growth and “mental hygiene” practices.
- Risky Kids Clubs use tailored feedback to strengthen young people’s reflective skills.
- Universal resilience strategies empower youth to apply metacognition to real-life challenges.
Improving metacognition isn’t a straightforward activity. For each person it’s going to be different, as all of our thinking is different. However just as much as we’re different, there are also similarities. Reflection is one of the key tools to build metacognitive hygiene. Thinking about how our actions and thoughts have impacted us and our goals.
At Risky Kids Clubs processes for improving metacognition are tied into the program. Coaches are given tools to help young people reflect on their efforts, with specialised training in different forms of feedback to promote this. They’re also guided through reflective and analytic thinking, using “Mindsets” for younger participants and “Perspectives” for older.
These aren’t about telling young people what to think, but giving them powerful, universal strategies around resilience that they can learn to apply to their own lives, which will help them be strong and successful in whatever they choose.
Richard Williams
Risky Kids Founder, Director of Programming
Richard Williams is a fitness industry consultant, gym owner, business coach and professional stunt actor with more than a decade of experience in the health and fitness industry. With an education in psychology and criminology, Richard blended life experience as a fitness industry consultant with Spartan Race, gym owner, elite-obstacle racer, ultra-runner and professional stunt actor to create the Risky Kids program.
Richard has a passion for enacting meaningful social change through all avenues of health and wellbeing and believes that obstacles are the way. Some of Richard’s key achievements include:
- Key consultant/coordinator Spartan Race/Tough Mudder/Extreme Endurance
(Australia/NZ/Global) - OCR World Championship Finalist – Team & Solo (2015)
- OCR World Championship Silver Medallist – Team Endurance (2018)
- Professional film and television stunt performer for 15 years
Considered one of Australia’s foremost experts in the fields of fitness, wellbeing and behavioural science, Richard is frequently in demand as a guest speaker for relevant government and non-
government bodies and organisations. Speaking engagements centred on the success of the Risky Kids program, philosophy and approach have included:
- Expert speaker/panellist Sports & Camp; Recreation Victoria and Outdoors Victoria forums
- Closing expert speaker at the Australian Camps Association National Conference
- Expert speaker at the National Fitness Expo, FILEX