Metacognition and witchy little risks 94-100

Metacognition is super witchy. It’s thinking about thinking, or thinking about how we think and how we can change how we think. It’s harnessing the power of our incredible mind and putting it to work for us in a way we choose. I’ll give you an example. When I was in my accelerated PharmD program, there was a massive amount of content to learn. There were multiple exams weekly, each of which required many hours of dedicated study. I had two distinct advantages in this program – I was a little bit older than most of my classmates and was getting this degree to prepare for a second career, which meant I had some skin in the game, a heap of motivation to make it work, and I had the benefit of coming from a career in teaching. I looked at every bit of content I learned with the eye of a teacher – how would I teach this myself? What questions would I ask to assess someone else’s learning? In short, I was practicing metacognition on the regular. I wasn’t just thinking about the content I was trying to learn; I was thinking about how I thought about it and how I would come to learn it. In the end, this metacognition is what led me to get straight “A”s and graduate first in my class. I’m no smarter than anyone else; I have just learned how and why I learn. You can too.

We practice metacognition to varying degrees all the time. The act of setting a goal is metacognitive. In the great big world of possibility for how we might spend our time and energy, a goal is a decision to decide on something. When we set a goal or an intention, we start the process of thinking about not only what it is we want, but also what that goal actually means to us. Maybe we have a goal to feel confident and strong in our body. What does that look like specifically? By what time will be achieve this goal? How will we determine whether we have met the goal? And so on. In setting a goal, we engage our mind in a beautiful tango between the thought of what the goal is and the thought of how to manifest that goal. The most incredible part is, we don’t need to consciously know exactly how we’ll bring the goal to fruition; much of that work can happen in our subconscious. I didn’t need to know how to write a book, but I had the thought to do it, and then I engaged my mind in thinking about thinking about it, and suddenly I was writing an outline and setting deadlines for myself. Now it’s done, and I’m still looking back and scratching my head as to how it all came together.

Determining our own motivation is also metacognitive. Once we’ve decided on a goal, it helps to do some introspection to figure out what’s going to best motivate us to meet it; if we can’t uncover our greatest motivation, we may be banging our head against the wall, wondering why we keep failing to make it happen. In my visits with folks who are trying to quit smoking, I try to suss out their motivation for change. I hear things like “smoking is expensive,” “it smells bad,” and “I’m tired of it.” Any one of these could be the main motivation, but often it’s deeper than this. I once had a patient for whom we had talked through a plan for her quit attempt, and she ended the visit saying how she was so excited about the plan, she was going to have a cigarette to celebrate.  In that moment, she was appalled to discover that the cigarettes had hijacked her sense of joy and enthusiasm, and it was then that she found her motivation for change. She wanted freedom from what she felt was a cognitive parasite feeding on her most positive emotions. Everyone’s highest motivation is different – I am a teacher at my core, and if I can spin something to find a way to teach it to someone else, that is usually enough motivation for me to make a change or learn something new. Some people are artists, and their motivation for doing anything is to create something beautiful. Some people are scientists, and their greatest motivation is solving a problem that they’ve identified. We’re all different, but we all have the capacity to unpack our own motivation and thus get the keys to unlock ourselves. It’s tremendously powerful to know your “why.”

Reflecting is also a metacognitive skill. We can reflect on what we want, why we want what we want, how our chosen course of action is working so far, what we learned from it all at the end, and how we might choose to take a different or similar approach next time. The act of reflection allows us to save an incredible amount of time. Imagine if we didn’t reflect and instead kept trying the same ineffective strategy over and over again? To be fair, reflecting is easier said than done – in the world of constant accountability to others via email, text, Snapchat, etc, time thieves like social media and streaming, and just being a person with a full time job and a family, our reflection time can be eaten up in a flash. If we want, we can be intentional about reflecting – we can choose to spend time on activities that allow us to reflect, like journaling, working with a coach, or talking to ourselves out loud in the car or in the mirror. Even activities that allow us to enter a flow state – maybe it’s knitting or cooking or running – often allow us time for reflection and metacognition and are hugely valuable.

As we engage in metacognition, like goal setting, identifying our motivation, and reflecting, we make our mind stronger and more efficient. We become better able to use the limited energy in our budget to invest in manifesting the life we want. In a world where there are infinite external pulls on our energy, one of our greatest self-preservation strategies is to turn inward, to consider our own thoughts and decide how we engage with them. Practicing metacognition allows us to separate ourselves from the urgency of our thoughts so we can maintain some perspective on them. When I’m stuck in traffic and panicking about being late for a meeting, I can pop out of this unhelpful panic, question why I am panicking, and then make a different choice if I want to, like calling the person I’m meeting. I can also reflect on why I’m late and see if there’s something to learn about how to plan differently next time.

So many of the tools in our toolkit for “minding the mind” are really just metacognition of one flavor or another, ways to think about our thoughts – meditation allows us to acknowledge a thought without judgment, mindfulness allows us to intentionally fill our mind with sensory input of our choice in generating helpful thoughts about the present moment, gratitude allows us separation from our experience by loving it, and in loving it, we gain distance from it in a really powerful way, and journaling allows us to examine our thoughts outside of our minds and thus affords us greater clarity about them. For me, metacognition is freedom – freedom from my mind calling all the shots, freedom from constant panic, fear, and stress, and freedom to manifest what I truly want.

For the last set of witchy little risks, I took to practicing metacognition by coaching myself. There are infinite changes I could make, things to learn, ways to exist in the world, and I figured, why not coach myself to do some of them, and in the process, perhaps show someone else how my metacognitive process works so perhaps they can try their own metacognition? Teaching is always my prime motivator. What’s yours?

Witchy little risks 94-100

#94 – Clear energy blockages to help with writer’s block – for this self-coaching video, I had two initial motivators: 1) to work through my writer’s block and 2) to clean my house. I knew these two things were connected; I was drowning under piles of laundry, a sink full of dishes, and decorations up from a holiday that had long passed, and there was no way my brain was going to let me write until I tidied up my physical space. Any energy I had for writing was being consumed by worrying about the mess I was living in and the guilt I was experiencing for not having it all cleaned. In addition to these two motivators, I also had the motivation to show someone else that these things were connected and then to teach them how they might work through their own blockage with some self-coaching and metacognition. In short, I knew I could turn my mess and writer’s block into a teachable moment for me and for someone else!

#95 – Self-coaching for acne – I have dealt with acne since I was a teenager, and it was pretty well managed on birth control, but since I stopped taking it, the acne has been a regular annoyance. As a pharmacist, I’m well aware of the treatment guidelines for acne, but here’s the thing, I don’t want to take medication for it. This problem isn’t a matter of life or death for me; it’s mildly annoying, and what I want is to get to the root of the problem. For this video, I wanted to share my metacognitive process for how I would get to the root of an issue – the questions I would ask myself, the steps I would take. This video wasn’t so much about acne as it was about figuring out how to set my mind on a challenge. In the end, through my self-reflection and in writing the script for this video, I came to greater clarity myself as to how to move forward. There is always something new I could try, more water to drink, and dietary changes to consider in improving health and wellbeing. Hopefully my intent to take some steps on my own will inspire someone else to reflect on how they could take steps to feel agency over their health and body too. Medication and going to the doctor is important and valuable, but I think we are sometimes too quick to take the power to change out of our own hands and give it to someone (or something) else.

#96 – Self-coaching to make a schedule – Starting my own company has been an adventure full of joy and moments where I say, “I can’t believe I get to live this life!” and also moments where I say, “holy shit, what am I doing and why did I ever think I could do this?!” I’m still working on my metacognition too! I started to find that I was spending a lot of time figuring out what to do each day, and it was exhausting to the point that I had very little energy left over to actually do the things I had figured out I needed to do. I realized I needed a safe container, a schedule with limits and boundaries to protect my brain from constantly wandering and worrying. For this video, I decided I would coach myself into making a schedule. I have been resistant to making a schedule up to this point; I didn’t want to feel like I was trapped in another cage of my own making, but in the end, after some reflection, I found that a schedule could actually be freeing. It could help me organize my time, so I could in turn organize my thoughts. For all the folks out there dictating how they spend their time, whether you’re self-employed or retired, or a full-time parent, consider what a schedule could allow you to do. You too may find freedom and peace for your mind in a container. The best part is, you can always change it if you want to.

#97 – Read snippet of book – It’s one thing to write a book, and it’s another thing completely to share it with the world. I initially felt good about what I wrote, but as soon as it came to trying to sell or share it, I got self-conscious, the doubt crept in, the unworthiness engulfed me. To be a creator, an author, a self-employed person, you don’t get the external validation from a boss or a teacher (something I have come to appreciate and depend on my whole life). Sure, once you’ve made a big enough influence, you start getting feedback from the people patronizing your business or reading your books, but all of that takes time to build. In the beginning, it takes a strong sense that what you are contributing is valuable. Our value starts with us, and only then will others find it valuable too. Reading my snippet of my book is a vote of confidence in myself that what I have to offer may be of use to someone else because it was of use to me; it’s a hope and prayer that my words find the people who will find comfort in them.

#98 – Self-coaching to batch videos – One of my greatest strengths is metacognition, but one of my greatest opportunities for growth is taking feedback from other people. My astrologer says I have past life trauma related to mentor/mentee relationships, and this tracks. I hate being told what I can and can’t or should or shouldn’t do. This is unfortunate, as other people often have great advice. In advance of this video, my friend mentioned that another mutual friend and content creator was batching her videos rather than doing one each day. I brushed the thought off at the time, figuring what I was doing was right for me. This little thought marinated in my subconscious, and then when I was discovering I was spending too much energy on deciding what video to make each day and I decided to coach myself to find a more efficient process, it came back. I was able to hear this thought much more receptively when it was from myself. I realize how silly this sounds; I heard the thought to batch videos from my friend, but I couldn’t act on it until I had delivered the thought to myself as a self-coach. Here is the lesson: I am stubborn and I need something to feel like my idea if I’m going to take action on it. Now I know this about myself (metacognition for the win!), and I can use this to my advantage. I’d also wager to say I’m not the only one who does better with change when it feels like my idea rather than someone else’s… any other stubborn folks out there?

#99 – Self-coaching to meet other witchy and woo-woo people – I’ve spent the last few weeks working on building my video content, organizing my retreat marketing, and building my grimoire pages, and I’ve collaborated with a couple of great folks, but it’s been a lot of solitary work. Meeting other people and hearing about what lights them up is what lights me up. I realized it was time to bust out of my hermit cave and go be inspired by some incredible humans. I don’t exactly need self-coaching to network because I do enjoy it, but I do need self-coaching to feel confident in this witchy space, which is still new for me. I come from the medical field, which I inhabited for several years. Now I need to find home in this more open space – I’m still learning the rules, and also actively rejecting rules at every turn. It’s a tricky balancing act, but I have to have faith that people in this space feel this same tension and perhaps are also hoping for kinship.

#100 – Give away 14 free coaching sessions – for my 100th witchy little risk, I wanted to share the love. We’re also coming up on Galentine’s and Valentine’s Day, and I can think of no better reasons than these to give away some good energy. As I mentioned, I love hearing what lights people up – it’s what most lights me up, and so in service of swimming in a sea of hope and love, I decided to give away 14 free manifestation coaching sessions. I can’t wait to meet the incredible people I will meet, to hear their passions and their dreams, and to shine a pretty mirror back at them so they will know they are worthy of all the good!