I’m Dr. Hassan, a Board-Certified Physiatrist and Independent Practice Owner. I help physiatrists start and grow their own profitable practices so they can achieve financial independence and live without limits.

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When building a profitable practice, it’s essential that you think critically. Critical thinking is essential to using your overall experience, background, common sense, and other attributes to become more aware of how your efforts for success are being spent. According to the book, An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity, “Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Someone with critical thinking skills is able to do the following :

  • understand the logical connections between ideas
  • identify, construct and evaluate arguments
  • detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning
  • solve problems systematically
  • identify the relevance and importance of ideas
  • reflect on the justification of one’s own beliefs and values”

When you have barriers to the critical thinking process, it can seriously harm your ability to move forward. When you’re aware of these barriers, you can better overcome them and focus your thinking on what’s going to move you forward rather than getting stuck behind the barrier, unable to move forward.

Here are five barriers that can impede the critical thinking process:

  1. Thinking in black or white. Some people ignore situations’ complexities by assuming that there is only one way to solve a problem. The problem is placed in a category, given a label, and that’s the only way that matters. Thinking in black and white comes from our need to have certainty in our lives. But it’s false logic to assume that everything is totally one way.
  1. Thinking with the ego. Egocentrically thinking is thinking with the lack of understanding others’ wants and needs. It limits your thinking to only your point of view and doesn’t have room for others’ ideas. This thinking process is deeply embedded in our psyches, and it sometimes takes deliberate effort to overcome it.
  1. Social thinking. The drone mentality of social thinking only lets us see things in the way of the popular point of view, or the way that our spouse, companions, parents, and friends think. Thinking outside the box is almost impossible when you have a barrier of social thinking, and it can significantly impede the critical thinking process.
  1. Authoritative thinking. Just because someone in authority says it’s true, doesn’t mean it is. You’ve likely been swayed at one time or another by political leaders who say one thing is true, only to find out later that it was a lie or a misleading way of thinking. The authority could be a person, peer group, institution, or anything that makes you think that they’re right because they’re in an authoritative position.
  1. Judgmental thinking. When you judge something or someone based on moral evaluation, it’s usually done in haste and based on our past in some type of way, such as the way we were raised, educated, or other values in more ways. Judgmental thinking is usually non-rational thinking. It can block understanding and insight about a person or an issue.

Facts and evidence are important. Don’t get me wrong. However, you also have to be able to understand the source of the evidence and the relationship between facts. Critical thinking allows you to point out biases (and even manipulation), and produce your own informed opinions. This is why it’s so important that we recognize personal barriers to the critical thinking process and replace those barriers with rational and reasonable thinking, and then make a concentrated effort to avoid them.

I am Dr. Hassan, Board- Certified Physiatrist and Independent Practice Owner. I help physiatrists start and grow their own independent practice so that they can achieve financial independence and live without limits. Please go to businessofrehab.com/guide to pick up the free guide to help you determine the best business entity for your new practice.

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Critical thinking requires us to ask questions to gain a better understanding. Ask yourself these four questions in order to thrive and not merely survive.

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Attention, Physiatrists! Stop leaving money on the table. Sign up for the free video series: How To Build A Profitable Practice in 90 Days or Less: http://www.sixtytosuccess.com

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