Thinking Styles and Decision Making Essay Example for Free

Thinking Styles and Decision Making Essay Levels of thinking differed from one person to another. Each thinking style is influenced by our mainstream society, how we think and develop perception on the material things happening in the surroundings. There are a lot of thinking styles that came into being since the time of old ancestors to the recent modern developers of our age. There are twenty six thinking styles that was developed but we will concentrate our discussion on the three sub-divided types namely the Sensory focus, People focus, and Task focus. Other thinking styles are used in psychological workshops and research such as analyst thinking style, realist thinking style, idealist, synthesist, pragmatist and spiritually-guided thinking style (An Introduction to Thinking Styles,).   In 1995, original concept for the thinking styles was formulated by Fiona Beddoes-Jones to enhance professional and personal development (Thinking Styles,).   Thinking styles can help in dealing with different types of problems in the workplace, academe, family and relationships. The Three Different Thinking Styles   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Before we proceed it is necessary to define the three levels of thinking styles. Sensory Focus examines things by receiving information through the senses and used the senses to perceive actual events. It is manifested in the visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and digital thinking. Watching, observing and looking pictures, diagrams, and visual imagery are the simple ways of expressing visual thinking while auditory requires the use of words and language, listening and conversing things. Kinaesthetic thinking is expressed through feelings, intuition, emotions, and physical movement and exercise as digital thinking entails the use of data, facts and statistics and the degree of data rationality. On the other hand, People Focus is how people perceived to relate with other people on their direct environment. It is focused on different levels of thinking such as internal and external thinking, self-referenced, altruistic, conforming, challenging, collaborative and competitive thinking. Internal thinking depends on own judgments and decisions and only consider self-knowledge as right and disregards feedback from other people. Some other people tend to dislike their own ideas and are not confident to explore many possible views and usually rely on other people or groups of people to give feedback on certain issues and problems. These people are external thinkers. Moreover, self referenced thinking is an approach of putting their own needs first and disregards the needs of others. In contrast, altruistic thinking involves responding to the needs of others and is willing to extend their help to other people. Conforming thinkers tends to keep away from confrontations and will certainly take a non-challenging methods, in contrast to challenging thinkers who definitely wanted to take confrontations, debates and experiments. Competitive thinkers would like to aspire for competitions and wants to gain victory from their own performance. Persons who wanted duties defined and detailed-oriented are Task Focus thinkers. They are conscious of the details especially in workplace where information is being transmitted through detailed facts and information. The Task Focus thinkers are strategic, creative, logical, options, procedural, towards, troubleshooting, proactive, reactive, simplicity, complexity, sameness, and different thinkers (Ltd., 2005). These thinking styles are distinct from each other but may sometimes closely connected together. Different patterns of these styles are being used as understanding and communicating with other people in surviving the daily response to work and life system. The amount of understanding different types of problems requires thinking styles that may influence critical thinking process. Such mentioned types of styles are good considerations in problem solving and decision making process. Sensory thinking style can help improve relationship with other people in the workplace, school, organizations, friends, and even families. Non-verbal communication somehow helps in understanding different personalities and the way you can approach them when facing a contradiction. Senses can transmit information and analyze things just by looking, observing, listening, feeling, intuitions, and physical movements. By looking at a critical situation using this kind of style, one can already define and identify the drawbacks. Most persons who don’t want confrontations tends to choose sensory focus in delivering and receiving information towards a given situation or crisis within a workplace. While others opted to choose interaction and personal touch to listen and confront problems this is somehow difficult in relating to contradictions with other people. However, it is very effective in most groups of people who are open-minded and problems can be solved instantaneously. Alternatively, task focus is a better way of coping up things since it is focused on goals and targets, detailed information, possibilities and alternatives in solving problems. These type of styles are distinct to each other and generally have an effect on critical thinking process and can possibly help the outcome of the decision making process. The positive upshot makes life more constructive by knowing which style you are most confident and at ease or difficult to cope up with in acknowledging, appreciating, expressing or solving things and difficulties. It brings people together and means more efficiency in duties, constancy in having good health, development of self-being, and gaining more friends and social groups. Reference An Introduction to Thinking Styles [Electronic Version]. Retrieved June 2, 2007 from http://www.earthtym.net/s-general.html. Ltd., T. C. F. C. (2005). Thnking Styles [Electronic Version]. Retrieved June 2, 2007 from http://www.consultingtools.com/media/thinkingstyles.pdf. Thinking Styles [Electronic Version]. Retrieved June 2, 2007 from http://www.cognitivefitness.co.uk/.