Episode #42 Critical Thinking

Transcript:

Welcome to Soulish Femme. Soulish Femme is a channel solely dedicated for you where I help focus in prospering body, spirit and soul. Remember that life is not going to wait around for you. Therefore, live a life with intentionality and curate the life you’ve always dreamed of. As much as I love to share about my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, I also would like to showcase my passions in life such as food, travel, fashion, beauty, and many more. To truly be free from the shackles of the systems limitation, you must decide once and for all to live unapologetically and live a life that makes you feel alive and rejuvenated every single day. Perhaps I am a hopelessly romantic person, but I truly believe we are meant to enjoy the wonders in the magnificent beauty the world has to offer. If you’re ready to embark on your healing journey from traumatic experiences, feel free to check the link below to enroll in this course through Udemy. I will see you there. Thank you. [Music].

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another podcast! Hi everybody, welcome back to another podcast. If you’re here for the very first time, I would like to welcome you. My name is Glennavelle Manarang. To those of you who are tuning in and you do not know my name and to those my returning to those of you who are returning listeners, Thursdays, Mondays and Thursdays rather. Welcome back on this podcast. Today’s topic is a coincide with the TED talk that I’ve listened a few days ago that I did not finish because of the disagreement that I have with this man, but it’s titled, Critical thinking. I know we don’t really like to talk about critical thinking. Do you think that by thinking critically, it helps us regulate our nervous system and also our emotions? What is critical anyway? How do we define critical? To critically think is to analytically thinking with reasoning. This is why I always like to talk to my channel about your thoughts, your soul, your body, your spirit because they are all interconnected. You cannot separate those three components which is very important when it comes to healing.

Your Environment Matters

So how can we use our critical thinking in our healing journey? The first part is you have to understand that when you have become so broken, you’re going to have dysfunctional and dysregulation in your nervous system. You are going to automatically responds based on your triggers. These are subconscious psyche. These are habits that were formed. If you are living in the environment that has been so abusive, you are going to most likely react into survival mode. Hopefully that you’re able to escape from that. But I’m just going to tell you a story. When I was in that environment that was very toxic, I learned to compartmentalize my being at home and outside of the home. When I was in the home, because of the dysfunction, I was always in this heightened awareness. I was hyper vigilant because that’s where the place of not safe.

Isn’t it sad that for some of us instead of being safe at home is not really a safe place to be? And I’m pretty sure that if you have grown up in a dysfunctional family members who have hurt you, that’s exactly what Jesus said. Your enemy doesn’t come outside. Sometimes our enemy are the very people that we live with. You know these could be your parents, your sisters, your cousins, your friends that actually would sometimes betray you. Like Jesus was betrayed by Judas’s Scariot, a friend who gave him a kiss and later on betrayed him for a 30 denarii. And that’s exactly why for many of us struggled finding peace in our own home. And this is why when we go into the world, we’re always hypervigilant. We are not really sure who we should trust and who is our friend and who is the foe. However, when I was trying to survive outside, I was able to put on a mask like everybody else. We have this other persona that we embodied so that the people outside are not going to look at us that as if we are broken or there’s something’s wrong inside our home.

Just a preface, I really think that violence starts at home. Education starts at home. Hate, bigotry, prejudice always starts at home. It doesn’t start outside. I really think that parents are our first teachers in life. And if you have a parent or a mom or a dad that was dysfunctional, that was also still a childish in their head, have not matured and you are going to embody that later on. This is why it’s important to study your own self and not take with you whatever your parents did and not linger on or follow through that. You have to be able to break and shatter the generational curses and be aware of the toxic of the kind of characteristics that they brought upon us. And this is why it’s important that you when you you have thinking critically, you can reason with yourself. You can have the time to decipher between the cons and the pros. You are the students of your own self. That’s why I always like to emphasize you cannot just take something as a grain of salt just like everybody else you see on television just because everybody gives you this certain lessons or education. You always have to have an analytical thinking.

Let Your Child/Children Make Mistakes

You ask yourself the question, is this even real? Does it even have validity into it? Does it even resonate? Do I believe of what they’re selling? Many people sell you with a lot of things, but apparently there’s no substance. And especially nowadays that the rise of deception, we are competing against what’s truth versus falsehood. We are now competing versus reality and AI propaganda. And this is why we as a society is more important now more than ever to have thinking logically. How can you develop thinking logically? So I think that when you teach a child to think logically, you have to stop rescuing them. For instance, when I was showing my son how to tie his shoes before we try to teach him, you you showed him once, twice, three times, and later on, hopefully by that time when he knows exactly how to do it and he’s going to say, “I don’t know how to do it, Mom.” You let him do it. You cannot always rescue kids.

If you know that they can do it themselves, then let them do it. do not be a helicopter parent trying to fix everything even though a smallest things like for instance I would tell my son a little bit of story when he would tell me I can’t open this pack of juice it was something that it was very simple but I would tell him and direct him that this is exactly how you put it and I expect you that this next time you would know how to do it because children who have been enabled or spoiled as a child and everything was given to them for some reason we are not really doing service for our kids. We are stunting their growth of expansion and that’s why they don’t use their analytical reason or their reason of how they can solve a small problem.

Play Card Games

And secondly, I really think that playing a game, another reason why we’re going to teach kids and reason of thinking, critical thinking is when we play games. When my family plays Uno, for instance, and you play with your kids, it will challenge them that in the game strategy, how can they win against you? How can they use their critical thinking to beat you at your game? How can I beat my mom and my dad? It is also developing and enhancing them to become competitive in a healthy way that sometimes you lose and sometimes you win. And that’s also will help them develop in their critical thinking. Because if you are only going to just tell them without showing how do you develop critical thinking. I think it’s important that we do have a healthy competition. We have to be able to understand that when we are in the game, our aim is to win the game because who does who doesn’t want to win? Everybody likes to win.

However, at the same time, you also have to teach kids that you also have to be a sportsmanship. you have a sportsmanship that when you lose the game, it is okay to lose the game because that’s just what life is. Life is not always going to give you what you want. There are days that you’re going to succeed and feels as though life is going the way that you planned and other times life is going to have surprises and you’re going to be disappointed with by people and the circumstances that you’re going to face in this life. And that’s why I think that when we are developing with emotional intelligence, with critical thinking and how to regulate your emotions, it is important and essentially valuable to teach our own kids that we too are going to look at ourselves of our triggers. I have been triggered so many times. My son probably have seen me, you know, sometimes overreact and overly emotional because at that time I was going through so much in my life.

And you have to be able to at least not justify your bad behavior and be able to take accountability of your bad behavior and looking within you. Looking within of why am I triggered? What caused me to react this way? And that is part of critical thinking by asking yourself the question by evaluating yourself. Remember critical is to be eval evaluative. It’s you have to evaluate your own self to assess why you do the things that you do. Why you react the the way that you are reacting right now. Where did this stem from? What is the root cause of this? I would like to talk about the root cause. You did not just wake up one day. As children, we copy the behavior of our parents. the people that have took care of us because as a child you have no idea of what the world looks like. You just mirror everybody around you. You just copied the behavior. But hopefully when you become an adult, I hope that you are able now to use your brain and to really assess whether this attitude, this behavior is healthy or not.

Break Generational Curses

If it’s not helpful, if it’s not healthy, if it brings dysfunction or chaos in your family, you got to be able to just get rid of it and hopefully stop doing the same thing what your parents did. I grew up in a family where very emotionally erratic. I’ve seen some of the people in my life were not learning how to regulate their emotions, lacking of self discipline with their emotions. They don’t have the ability to communicate effectively without yelling, without getting into this belligerent mode. And it takes a long time to unlearn those patterns because you are exposed to that kind of environment. And now that you’re an adult, you are aware that these practices or these behavior actually immature. These are not adultlike behavior. That’s why in 1 Corinthians 13 it says that when you were a child you spoke like a child. You thought like a child. You reason like a child. Because a child’s brain is not fully developed. A child’s brain is not yet have the capacity to decipher between what is emotionally stable and what is emotionally unstable.

And when I lose my temper sometimes because we as a human being we tend where our tendency is we lose our temper when we’re tired when we’re hungry when we’re actually stress and we apologize to our kids when we do so. And this is why it’s important that when we think critically we have to really ask ourselves the question whether or not is an adult being acts or thinks or behave or speak this way. How does an adult uh react? And I know it takes a lot of practice and self-awareness to become an adult. And that’s why in Proverbs 17:14, it says that the beginning of strife is like releasing water. Therefore, stop contention before a quarrel starts. I think part of growing up and critical thinking is that are you able to stop drama or quarreling? Are you able to remove yourself respectfully before a strife starts? Do you naturally snap at people or become overly reactive? When of course I was still growing and I’m still growing. I’m not going to tell you that I have have this down to the tea or perhaps become an expert on this area, but I used to be overly reactive.

Silence is Golden

I used to become so easily triggered by people’s behavior or the words that they say against me because I did not know any better. I did not read the Bible. I thought that I was just temporal temperament. It was just my personality. But when I read this verse, it actually says that when you are a person who has wisdom and critical mind, you’re able to stop yourself from engaging further from foolishness. That’s why when you read the Bible, there’s so many advices that God tells us to control our tongue, to control our temper, to hold ourselves as a high regard, to guard your heart with all diligence. For out of it comes the issues of life. Because when you are growing, hopefully you’re able to maintain a sense of calm and poise that it takes a long time to develop. It is really about being mindful of how you feel inside. And also it talks in Proverbs 17:27-28, he who has knowledge spare his words and a man of understanding is of a come spirit.

And for the longest time, I’ve been meditating on this word because when I was always snappy at little things, God revealed to me that you must meditate on this word because a person who really wants to know whether you are knowledgeable or wise, are you able to remain calm under pressure? Are you able to not get triggered easily? And I just had an incident a few days ago that I could have just blown up inside the car because of what this person did, you know, disrespected me in public and raised the voice that I was just I had two choices to make. Either retaliate or say something that is very disrespectful inside the car that’s going to lead to road rage. But with the grace of God, I was able to wait for a moment and says there is a time and there’s a place to tell this person how I felt. And it’s exactly what part of growing up is to know when the time to broach a subject. Is this the right time? Is it the right place to present and to tell the person how I feel?

And of course, I waited hoping that the person would probably would become more astute or open-minded of how I felt. Apparently, a fool doesn’t matter the time or the place of when you say it, a fool doesn’t understand you. That’s exactly what the Bible tells you that no matter what you say to a fool, if he’s close-minded, unable, and unwilling to listen or understand to what you say. I just learned that God is always real when he told me when you deal with a fool, you only have to sometimes do not correct a fool because a cool a fool doesn’t like correction. A fool hates correction. There’s a difference between a fool who loves to be corrected and a fool who likes to be criticized. The difference between correction is that you try to teach the person so that he’s not going to do it again in public or he’s not going to do the same issues or the same habits or behavior in front of you. You have to nip it in the bud. The moment the person did that that was very uncalled for or disrespectful, you call it out. But for a fool though, the fool hates correction and he thinks it’s a criticism.

Criticism vs Correction

A criticism is actually attacking on a person’s personality. You’re attacking the person’s character, saying you’re stupid. You’re never going to mount up to anything. You are dumb. That is what you call criticism. You’re such, you know, a stupid lazy person. A correction is because you want to point the person at the right direction. You are correcting the behavior. The action is what you’re correcting when you are an adult. And hopefully that by saying this that you can think critically that when a person is correcting you, you’re not going to take it personally. You’re going to say to yourself, “What is she trying to teach me? What can I learn from this? I know it’s easier said than done because nobody likes to be corrected because our first thought is that you’re correcting me because I am a, you know, I am screwed up. I’m never perfect.” Because of our pride, majority of us, our problem is our ego. We don’t like to be corrected because we are getting hurt because of our ego.

Because when somebody tells us that you’re doing something wrong and this actually is not doing you any service, you’re heading to the wrong direction and your behavior isn’t acceptable, we think is an attack. But when you really stop for a second and understand what the person is saying, now you understand that you do have your opinion. you have the right to tell me and make me aware that my actions or my behavior has actually caused you pain. That’s part of maturity. When you can think critically, you can stop for a second and really understand what the person is saying. And you cannot just take it personally and wallow in saying this person is is getting at me and she’s trying or he’s trying to hurt my feelings. when in fact when you try to stop and listen and evaluate what the person is saying is actually for your own good. People usually do not grow up because we enable their bad behavior and nobody in their lifetime taught them that that kind of behavior is unacceptable. That you shouldn’t do that way or talk that way in public or make a scene because it is not the place to be.

This is why for some adults who are enabled as a child when somebody like me who correct them they look at you like why is it that you’re the only one who have you know told me about this and in my life nobody really corrected me because people usually just tolerate you and that’s why you never grow up that’s why you do the same thing over and over again and you are enabled enabling a bad behavior does not showcase love when You love someone, you are going to correct them. And the Bible, the word of God tells so much about correct your child. You have to discipline your child in the way that he should go so that when he becomes an adult, he will not depart from it. I’m not saying that I have learned this from my parents because I didn’t really have a also a healthy kind of upbringing or a role model. I’ve learned this by reading books. I have learned this by studying the word of God.

Reparent Yourself

I have learned this by educating myself and being a parent to myself, being a mother to myself, being a parent to my broken child. That’s when I learned that sometimes what we see from people just because they are our parents, it doesn’t mean that they’re doing the right thing. It doesn’t mean that they’re showcasing a healthy kind of parenting. Sometimes our parents also have been broken from the past and they don’t know how to navigate it. They don’t know how to deal with their issues or their traumas and they’re just passing it on to us. And this is why the cycle of generational curses is never been broken. And this is where we come in as a person who is now self-aware and have opened your eyes to reality that this kind of immaturity and childishness, fragile ego, these are childish behavior. when you cannot take correction because you still are incapable of thinking critically.

So that’s another one to tell or teach a child is that you’ll be able to take correction. You need to be able to accept correction hopefully that you’re going to learn from those corrections and you’re not going to take it as an attack on your personality. And another thing that we can teach ourselves and other people about thinking critically is by reading a book. I mean, I really always like to advocate about reading a book and learn from people, especially the self-help book or philosophy or science of there’s so many studies now that our brain is a rubber band. It can stretch beyond imagination that our brain is not stagnant. It is not static. It is a neuroplasticity. It will stretch you out. And when you re when you realize that your brain like a sponge, you can feed it and keep on feeding it with good books and audios and podcasts like this one. There is a way that you are creating a neural pathway into your brain. I am not a new neuroscientist whatsoever, but based on what I have learned that our brain has the capacity to expand and to grow.

Reprogram Your Brain

Just because you were brought up in a such environment and they were taught you with some kind of education that out it’s outdated, it doesn’t mean that you cannot reprogram your brain. Think of your brain as a laptop where you can always reboot it, reprogram it and you can just feed it whatever you want. Junk in, of course, whatever junk you put into your brain, you’re going to wallow in it, meditate on it. And this is why I always like to say be careful what you entertain. Be careful what you watch. Be careful what you listen to. Be careful the kind of things that you absorb because it becomes who you are. And also with the brain that you want to expand. I always like to say education is important when you want to think critically.

To educate is an educco. It’s a Latin word is to induce something out of you. It is to invoke something out of. It’s drawing in from your personality. It’s drawing in of what you have inside of there and learning about your weaknesses. Maybe you’re good in math. Maybe you’re good in English. Maybe you’re good in science. Maybe you love history and memorizing facts. This is why education is also part of analytical thinking because to educate yourself is to think critically. When you read a book, you ask questions. What is the book about? What is the moral of the story? Who is the protagonist? How was how how where? What? Where? I always like to ask my son when you read a book, remember the questions. Where did it happen? Who is it for? Who is the main character? What lessons do you have to learn from this? Uh how does it apply to me? How can I relate to the story? Especially when you read about biography, especially when you read something to do with self-development.

And lately I have rereading you know Mere Christianity and C.S. Lewis. I love to reread some old books because sometimes reading it one time it doesn’t really absorb the first time. We don’t understand it. That’s why sometimes I would carry the same books over and over again. This is how we absorbed. And to think critically is also being able to just understand that challenges in life when you are being challenged at school or with people. It will also allow you to have different solutions when you are uh against the wall and you don’t know where to go and what kind of best solutions that you have to do it. Some people there are problems in life but the per the people that are wise they know how to solve the problem. They don’t say okay I have a problem and what am I going to do? I’m just going to be stuck and I’m just not going to move because I have this big mountain that is facing in front of me. The wise people and the smart ones they actually say I can go under the problem go over the problem or go around it. So you do have other options.

The problem is not the end of the road. It’s actually asking you what do you do with a problem? What are the solutions you can come up with? Are there any thing that you can probably learn from the problem of how can I fix this problem? If you have problem with your marriages, maybe you should evaluate your communication style. Maybe you should evaluate your time or your your where you’re spending your time with. Maybe you don’t have enough time for your spouse. Maybe you’re squandering your time on too much screen and yet you’re you are taking for granted the people that is in front of you with your finances with the same thing. You have to ask yourself the question, if I’m not happy of where I’m at right now, I am broke. I don’t have enough savings, where can I cut back on my expenses? How can I actually earn more income?

Embrace Challenges

And this is how you can think critically by also not avoiding challenges and not avoiding problems but actually facing it head on and ask yourself the question what is in my control? What can I do with a problem and how can I solve this issue? And this is why when I go back to my college years, I was broke. I could barely afford to eat. Nothing was in my pantry sometimes and there was nothing to eat in my fridge other times. And I was just living in prayer and that was part of my strengthening my faith and also believing that God is going to provide and I was just not just hoping for the best that God is going to save you all the time. I had to be proactively available to God’s guidance when he told me if you’re not going to stop overspending on makeup on your shoes and over-shopping and cutting your hair every week then you are going to just blindly hoping for the best which is not really the best approach.

So, God would have to ask me to go to the library and I probably would have said this on my podcast before I have to learn how to budget. I have to read a book about finances 101 and how to differentiate between the expenses, the fix and the variables and how much money was coming in and how much can I spend on food. And I had to really stick to my budget and pay off my bills. And that is what you say proactively participating with God’s plan in your life. If he wants you to become financially free and savvy, that’s the first thing that God would tell you to be wise with your money, where your money is going. And another thing that God had to show me was giving something that belongs to him as what Jesus said, give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God and tithing. I’m not saying that you should do this, but I believe that when you give a portion to God, he made a promise that I will never leave you nor forsake you. And he also said that if you are going to give me a portion of your blessing then I’m going to overflow you with milk and honey. And that actually has helped me a lot before.

Master Yourself

So, especially with critical thinking is that you’ll be able to understand your own self mastery of your own self of why you are the way that you are. And I always like to say that without aligning with God’s principle and really learning who you are in Christ and vertically aligning your identity with the one who created you. How can you think critically? The Bible is clear. The beginning of wisdom is to fear the Lord. You cannot have critical mind or a wise person if you don’t have the idea of who God is. The only reason for people to know whether they have the wisdom of God of this world is that you are actually attached with the vine.

That’s why Jesus said, “Apart from me, you cannot do anything. You can study, you can learn about life, but you’re never going to come to the truth.” And that’s exactly what critical thinking is about. You think critically, you reason hopefully with wisdom because you have one purpose to come to the truth and that is all that matters. The rest are just full of noise. If it’s not based on truth, if it’s not based on facts, if it doesn’t stand throughout the test of time, you have nothing but it’s just bogus. It’s not really come to the truth. That’s why Paul said, “This people love to learn, but they never come to the truth.” And that is why when you think critically, your purpose is to come to the full knowledge of the truth. [Music]