Along with the right mindset, the best cognitive skills and their foundational practices are ones you should cultivate to reach the top.
Whether it’s about winning gold medals, getting venture-backing or reaching some new success milestone, both groups not only adopt similar mindset traits, they both possess a critical cognitive skillset.
If you want to accelerate your performance and progress, aim to prioritize these practices daily.
Before we discuss the 3 Best cognitive skills, let’s touch on a few attributes of a winning mindset.
1- People at the top take the time for clarity. You must know what you want to achieve. It’s important to take the time to understand your goals whether that task is big or small. This way you have a clear objective to work towards.
2- Once you’ve done that, act without a fear of failure. The idea of failure is a fallacy. The only time you really fail is if you don’t bounce back.
When something goes wrong, you don’t need to stagnate or obsess. You can learn, adapt quickly, and move forward. This mental agility is seen again and again at the height of success, no matter what the game or venue.
3- Healthy competition or pressure can be helpful when approached without self-criticism. Don’t berate yourself or unduly compare yourself to others. Look at the leaders in your field and learn from them. In a gentle way, allow their success to fuel your own growth, feed your passion, and foster your drive.
Keep these mindset traits at the forefront and you’ll have the drive to go forward and the stamina to reach your goal. Now let’s focus on the cognitive skills that elite athletes and entrepreneurs share, and that you too can develop to flourish.
What are the Best Cognitive skills?
First, let’s start by understanding cognition simply to then digest why the following are the best cognitive skills. Your cognitive abilities can be defined as your mental capacities to: remember, reason, hold attention, solve problems, think, process, learn, assimilate new ideas, and make decisions. Amazingly, because of the brains remarkable neuroplasticity — your abilities are never in a state of stagnation. In fact, to keep your brain healthy, it’s essential to practice these skills and evolve.
This is why cognitive ‘skill’ is a more apropos term than ‘ability.’ They are flexible, and no matter your baseline — very much in your control.
In sum, cognitive skills are core skills that your brain uses to process information, learn, think, evaluate, decide, and act. But these skills don’t exist alone in their own silos. Rather, they are cultivated by developing habits that nurture them.
In that sense, the following three must-haves may be better understood as foundational practices that will help you exponentially enhance all your other best cognitive skills across the board.
Let’s talk about the three must-haves cognitive practices:
#1 – Supreme Focus
Supreme focus or sustained attention is one of the most important skills that you’ll find common in both high performing athletes and successful entrepreneurs. This is so critical that without it, you’ll deplete other essential (and finite) resources like energy, time, and stamina — often without even realizing it.
To illustrate the point — consider for a moment how often you’re working on something important, and the next thing you know an hour is lost because you followed the trail of a random thought down an internet rabbit hole? Or perhaps you gave priority to a silly interruption? Maybe you answered an email or texted someone to the same end. Perhaps afterwards, you even rationalized your lost time as well-spent because you managed to tick off some admin task or other back burner item.
But when you’re honest with yourself, you know the original, high-value objective got neglected and all because you seeded your focus to something much less important.
Further, engaging in distractions actually fractures cognition and thrusts the brain into ADD-like states. These neural pathways cement themselves the more you engage in distractions while working.
On the flip side, when you learn to channel focus like a laser beam, everything becomes much easier. In a practical day-to-day way, you find yourself excelling at meaningful work. This kind of laser-like focus also gives you an endorphin rush, boosts happiness, and helps you feel fulfilled. Think about how much easier life would be if you could just keep your eye on the prize — the task at hand in front of you. No one but you is usually stopping you.
I refer to athletes because they’re a great source of inspiration when it comes to practice, dedication, and focus. Their visual and conscious attention is always on what’s happening now. Not what took place five minutes ago or the anticipated challenges that might show up later.
Why? Because they realize the game is being played each moment. There is no room to jump timelines into the past or future. Similarly, you must stay present and concentrate on each play as it happens, not mindlessly multitask or prioritize interruptions.
Supreme focus is not an easy skill, but it is the most rewarding. Use a pomodoro timer, ignore all distractions (even the tempting ones like viral videos or funny memes) and concentrate fully for each interval. This is the only way to use your talent effectively. This is how to get to the top with ease.
#2 – Consistent Reflection
Another vital skill both entrepreneurs and athletes share is regular reflection. This takes self-awareness, a desire to improve, and devoting regular time.
Top athletes are often known to watch video footage of their past games. Rather than being harsh, they look at their abilities and actions with a growth-minded approach. This is key.
Similarly, entrepreneurs often create MVPs (minimal viable products) or prototypes when they first develop a new product or service. When they do this, they know they’re not going to get it right on that first shot. In fact, they don’t even aim to because they know that to create the best version of their idea in the end requires a bit of ‘failing’ at first, reconfiguring and optimization.
We too can adopt this practice of regular reflection. It’s as simple as bullet point journaling for five minutes each evening. Think back on your day. Jot down two or three learning lessons and make a point to highlight what you did well. Be kind, honest, and balanced in your assessment.
Doing this will enhance your understanding of self. It will also give you parameters for what to improve, elevate your confidence because you took the time for well-deserved acknowledgement where you excelled, and boost your cognitive abilities across the board.
#3 – Daily Training
For athletes, intense daily training is a must. They know, you know, and I know that practice is a part of their jobs. The G.O.A.T.s (Greatest of All Time) athletes like Michael Jordan are upfront about the number of free throws or layups he practiced before he was able to score his average 65 points a game.
But many of us working professionals forget that daily training is just as imperative to our own success. The first step is to break down our skills into the key micro-habits we need to excel. Here are the ones that I help clients and students work on no matter their field or area of expertise. You can cultivate these too.
Train yourself on: (1) how to learn; (2) how to remember effectively (short-term and long-term); (3) how to process new information without bias; (4) how to challenge your own ideas; (5) how to be creative in your problem-solving; (6) how to work in flow; (7) and how to make quick rational and intuitive decisions without constantly second-guessing yourself.
Of course there are others as well as ones that will be specific to you, but this is a great place to start. When you take the time to train daily, you not only keep your brain healthy as you age, but you’ll also maximize your performance from a micro-level to the big-picture just like an athlete improves the elements of her game. Put in the daily training and you’ll redefine your own limits.
The benefits of developing cognitive skills
Cognitive skills are both active and constructive. They can help improve every type of workplace situation. Some of the key benefits of having cognitive skills are:
Recognize and address patterns — You are able to recognize patterns by blending logic and reasoning skills. The brain loves patterns. When you work in patterns, every thing else becomes quicker and easier.
Consistent goal achievement — Cognitive skills help you become highly productive and enact the goals you want to realize.
Confidence — By developing cognitive skills like that of an athlete or an entrepreneur, you are able to improve your confidence in your own abilities. You know no matter what challenge presents — you will find effective solutions.
Of course, the benefits of heightened cognition are virtually unlimited. This is the space of genius, flow, and creativity.
CREATING MOMENTUM WITH PRACTICE
From our assessment, you can see that the underlying framework here is practice. Cognitive skills in both elite athletes and entrepreneurs don’t magic their way onto a court, field, or boardroom. They take dedication and blossom with time.
Keep your three essentials in mind to get started: develop present-moment heightened focus, be consistently reflective, and build in time to train daily.
This right here is the key to making it all work. Your implementation — your action. Once you get going, you’ll feel no desire to turn back.
ACTION Steps to Cultivate
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