Hello, Creative One!
One of my favorite things to do for personal development is metacognitive drawing, doodling, and journaling.
- Drawing means creating a scenery of people, places, or things.
- Doodling is creating scribbles, patterns, designs, and shapes. Doodles don’t contain people, places, or recognizable things, although they could cause us or someone else to see something in our designs like we see faces and objects in cloud formations.
- Journaling is precisely what we expect; it is writing – focusing on noticing our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Metacognition: n. awareness and understanding of one’s thought processes. Aka, thinking about our thoughts.
Psychologists introduced self-awareness and consciousness into the scientific domain through metacognition. Metacognition is a higher-order thinking skill that means thinking about thinking and being aware of our awareness.
Many of us think, yet how often do we think about our thinking?
Do we actively notice and observe the quality of our thoughts?
Have you ever caught yourself drifting away from a book, movie, or podcast because something written or said has challenged your beliefs, values, or sense of self? (An AH HA moment). Then, when you snap back into ACTIVE LISTENING, you’ve lost the context of the dialog and must rewind or ask somebody what you missed. The more important step is not to catch up with what you missed but to write down or voice your thoughts. It will likely reveal something important about the true you!
Why practice metacognition with drawing, doodling, and journaling?
The opportunities for personal development via the tools of metacognition paired with drawing, doodling, and journaling are endless, but I will share THE ONE I am most passionate about!
It is Self-Awareness
Most of us lack a sense of self-awareness is not just a philosophical guess, it’s a proven fact. Psychologists from Cornell University in 2003 published a paper giving us insights into why we fail to recognize our shortcomings. They asked 141 students to tell them how well they had done on an exam just before leaving the classroom. They also asked the respondents to estimate their performance and mastery of the course material relative to the other exam students. They also asked them to calculate their raw score on the test. The Results? Most students overestimated their performance in their respective tests and subject knowledge, especially the ones who scored the least. They concluded that “people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence,” lacking “insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills.”
Once we master metacognition paired with a powerful inquiry process, we can self-coach ourselves through many of those “stuck” situations that EVERYONE experiences. But this doesn’t address the creativity piece.
First, for those who follow me regularly, this may feel like I am rehashing, but it needs to be shared repeatedly. It is activating automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice. Examples of automaticity are common activities such as walking, speaking, bicycle-riding, assembly-line work, and driving a car (aka “highway hypnosis”). After an activity is sufficiently practiced, it is possible to focus the mind on other activities or thoughts while undertaking an automatized activity (for example, holding a conversation or planning a speech while driving a car). John A. Bargh, a social psychologist, has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory. Bargh’s work suggested that four characteristics usually accompany automatic behavior:
- Awareness – A person may be unaware of the mental process.
- Intentionality – A person may not intentionally initiate a mental process.
- Efficiency – Automatic mental processes tend to have a low cognitive load, requiring relatively low mental resources.
- Controllability – A person may be unable to stop or alter a process after initiation.
This is where Intentional Creativity enters the picture. Drawing, Doodling, and Painting are ways to intentionally evoke automaticity to connect to the deeper subconscious awareness of any topic. Still, our Intentional Creativity work is about discovering who we are and how we unintentionally sabotage ourselves from getting the most out of life. There are more ways to access subconscious hypnosis, which is another effective approach.
Book a discovery call with me to learn this highly effective life creative skill.
As always, I am sending you Love and Light – Kami.
