Critical Thinking

To think or not to think, that should be the question. Individuals are faced with many decisions in their lives and it is all dependent upon how they respond them they can experience pain or pleasure. One of the most important parts of our decision making is making the decision of thinking about the choices we have available and the pros and cons of the choices that are made. Critical thinking and the decision making process helps individuals to make those sound choices.

Critical thinking can be broken down into many different definitions based on who you ask and the topic of which the critical thinking is done on. According to Richard Paul, and Linda Elder in the book "Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life, 2e", critical thinking is described as Critical thinking is the art of thinking about thinking while thinking in order to make thinking better. It involves three interwoven phases. The first phase is it analyzes thinking by focusing on the parts of thinking in any situation--its purpose, question, information, inferences, assumptions, concepts, implications, and point of view. The second phase is it evaluates thinking by figuring out its strengths and weaknesses: the extent to which it is clear, accurate, precise, relevant, deep, broad, logical, significant, and fair. The third phase was it improves thinking, by building on its strengths while reducing its weaknesses.

Critical thinking applies to so many areas in our everyday lives.What is your stance on abortion? What is your stance on the sick policy at your employer? What is your stance on life support? If you can answer these questions without critically thinking them through, then you maynot be giving a sound answer.

I can think of so many situations where I have had to make some really critical decisions. Even today, I am being faced with a tough decision and I must really take all bias out of the equation, and make the best decision or else I can be viewed as a weak thinker. Weak thinkers can only think of themselves when making decisions which leads to others being impacted, most often negatively. I currently work as a accounts receivable coordinator for a fortune 500 company. I am the team lead for our departments Customer Satistifaction Survey team. On this team the other members are co-workers, supervisors, and interns. We have to review the feed back from both our internal and external customers and make all the things that we score low on, better. During this process of reviewing the responses we have to take each issue and apply the decision making steps to it.

One of the issues was that our internal customesr felt like we contacted the external customers to early for payment. They felt that it was disruptive to their relationship with customers. We do not want to upset any of the customers so we identified how we could make the customers happy while continuing to push for cash and maintain our

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