How Metacognition Enables Clear Thinking & Speaking

Our mind and thoughts drive our speaking. Is there a way to think clearly and thus speak clearly? This guide will give you insights into 8 thinking processes that enhance clarity of thought. Metacognition is the process of thinking about your thinking. Awareness of your own cognitive processes eases cognitive clarity and serves to guide the flow of your ideas when communicating.

Metacognition is a particularly useful approach to gaining conscious control of idea recall, logical flow and topic relevance when speaking under pressure.

Content

• What is Metacognition?
• How Metacognition assist Cognitive Clarity when Speaking
• Introduction to 8 Thinking Mechanisms that Lead to Thought Clarity
• Inferencing
  • Risks to your inferencing skills
  • Benefits of inferencing capacity
• Recalling
  • Salience
  • Synaptic Plasticity
  • Use it or Lose it- Hebbian Theory
  • Fuzzy Trace Theory
  • Strategies
• Reflective Pondering over Brooding
• Hypothesising, Speculating & Forecasting
• Imagining
• Visualising
• Ideation & Diverging
• Audiating
• More resources for Cognitive Clarity

Metacognition: awareness of one's own cognitive processes, often involving a conscious attempt to control them. The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, in which one struggles to retrieve something that one knows one knows, provides an interesting and common example of metacognition.

Key Benefits of Using Metacognition to Enhance Your Logical Flow When Speaking

After a decade plus, consulting as a speech and language pathologist and executive communication coach I swiftly notice how each person:

• varies in thinking speeds
• needs different amounts of time to come up with something to say
• focuses on vastly different elements of an idea, and,
• worries when put on the spot

Since I frequently work with clients who report cloudy thoughts, mind blanks, and high stress when composing their ideas, I will also outline ways to protect and strengthen your clear thinking, using validated approaches and communication strategies.

8 Thinking Mechanisms that Lead to Thought and Thus Communication Clarity

Well-spoken communicators have a certain eloquence that allows them to convey desired ideas that serve both their own objectives and those of the listener. They can say what they intend, even when under pressure. It's no small act to receive an unexpected question, retrieve the vital information and position our response without racing thoughts, blocked ideas, word-finding concerns or momentary delays. It's uncomfortable, thinking and speaking, on time. Our years of education taught us that the right answer must also be a fast answer. We were rewarded for finishing on time, getting work right and pleasing the receiver with our cleverness. 

It's the pressure to perform that is making most professionals outsource their thinking and planning to AI tools.

At CADENZA, we take a sharp right turn in the opposite direction because we believe in recruiting the most sophisticated large language model to improve your presence, reputation and eloquence on the job.

Let’s uncover the top 8 skills it takes to process and produce thought clarity and consider how metacognition drives your presence and credibility as an executive, expert or industry leader.

We all interface with the world through our unique brains. No neurotype is superior to another. With this in mind, there is an advisable way to harness increased skill when accessing your mind and thoughts while communicating, reducing speaking stress, and it starts with learning more about how your thoughts spark before you speak.

CADENZA

How Eileen Gu Handled a Tough Question with Eloquence [CASE SCENARIO]

Inferencing

Our brain is constantly assimilating information to organise our thoughts and impressions. One key process we rely on to gain cognitive clarity is the ability to infer. 

It’s highly plausible that our brain uses Bayesian inference to understand and organise our insights, especially in the heat of the moment.

Bayesian inference skills rely on the notion that “our brains possess an internal (generative) model of our environment that we use to predict sensory data and to explain that data in terms of its causes (Parr and Friston, 2018).”

In short, we use Bayesian inference to consider the chance of a hypothesis in light of prior evidence and update it to the current moment.

Bayesian Inference: a method of drawing conclusions about a characteristic using sample data and previously knowing information about that characteristic.

The greatest current risk for your inferencing skills

When you second-guess or even bypass your brain’s involvement in this process by asking Gemini or ChatGPT what it thinks of a problem, you strip your agility in this skill and render it sluggish.

Offshoring your inferencing skills by relying on AI tools will deplete your interior agility to synthesise your thoughts when inferencing is required.

How inferencing benefits clear thinking and speaking

Solving complex questions through inference fires neural pathways, strengthens our brain architecture, and enables us to do it more quickly the next time.

Inferencing helps us compose our thoughts in the heat of the moment, based on the information we've received from our conversation partners. I typically advise my clients to be cautious with generative models outside their brains! 

Here are three examples where you rely on speed in inferencing:

1. Identifying solutions to a complex problem
2. Describing and predicting risks to a client
3. Answering challenging questions when it is hard to identify exactly what your conversation partner needs from you.

There are concrete tools you can incorporate to improve your inferencing skills; mental models, in particular, are incredibly useful, especially if you’re required to report on complex information to a layperson. At Cadenza, when I notice that a client is struggling to infer in high-pressure conversations, we integrate a practical tool that allows them to refine complex data, synthesise it and identify the key components to incorporate ready for their listener. Importantly, it’s practical, memorable & fast and gets your speaking ready in an instant.

Recalling

Digital reliance raises the imminent risk of reduced memory and retrieval skills. Our open access to retrieve information on demand from a device reduces the need to remember. With time, active reliance on external sources to retrieve information reduces our capacity to remember. Cognitive scientists speculate that the brain operates using the principle of salience.

Saliance Hypothesis: a theory of perception according to which motivationally significant stimuli (objects, people, meanings, etc.) are perceived more readily than are stimuli with little motivational importance. 

If we apply the salience hypothesis to your recall skills, we can infer that you won't retain the important information as strongly when you know you can look it up. If you can't look it up when you receive it, you'll give more importance to storing it when you first receive it, so you can recall it independently at a later point when you need it.

As such, we may encounter deficits in our retrieval capacity, especially for information that we wish we stored. The way we do things in this century has led to drastic changes in typical brain processing. Where phone numbers from the 1980s were carefully written by hand in address books, memorised by heart, and can still be recalled some 40 years later, do we even remember the numbers of those close to us if we met them after we got a cell phone?

Many university disciplines allow open-book exams; a forgotten event or thing is but a Google away, and our capacity to store encyclopedic knowledge and draw on it is waning. 

While we don’t need to recall everything, the constant interruption of our thoughts, common restless sleep levels of modern life, and the dopamine gluttony of doom scrolling are all impairing our capacity to not only recall, but to retrieve as well. 

Although the ability to recall and remember is vital to our intellect, researchers are still striving to define exactly how the brain remembers through molecular and neurological mechanisms. What they do know is that the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex play a key role. So what’s the solution? How can we preserve and protect our recall skills? Ideally, we need to maintain Synaptic Plasticity.

How synaptic plasticity benefits our recall skills

Recall skills rely on your ability to wire and fire memory loops in accordance with Hebbian theory. I want you to remember that

“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

The more you access the pathways to recall independently, the higher the chance you will keep the synapse strong.

Hebbian Theory: a theory of neurophysical memory processing that suggests that stronger neural connections form when repetition leads to neurons firing persistently in relation such that they gain increased efficiency in their communication. 

💻Related Read: Stop Forgetting Words: How to Face Word Finding Difficulty Confidently

One of the main stressors for the professionals I’m working with is being caught in a conversation and feeling they cannot access the specifics. Foggy thinking descends on the brain, and word-finding eludes us. Whether it’s finding a precise word or recalling process-based information in the right order, we all know that feeling of feeling like you’ve been thrown overboard, fighting for the next sentence while adrift in the open sea.

At this moment, the brain faces more of a problem of what to start with, rather than what to recall. At an instant stimulus, we open our thought processes. We have many options for what to start speaking about. We can't always organise or find them due to thinking pressure and time constraints. Effective recall in your professional conversations involves retrieving something and composing it so that it gains topic relevance.

When we present information under pressure, it’s helpful to know about Fuzzy Trace Theory.

Fuzzy Trace Theory: holds that, during recall, we notice both general and precise impressions of information. The theory proposes that when we think, we use the parallel process of:

• Verbatim representation on one hand and,

• Fuzzy impressions on the other

Verbatim representations rise in your mind when you have access to the precise information. 

• The direct word, date, or name of a thing is an example of accessing the verbatim representation.

We count on verbatim representations to produce critical analytical thinking, factual statements and precise responses.

Next, our brain also produces Fuzzy impressions.

Fuzzy impressions are vague, somewhat impressionistic representations of gist. We count on fuzzy impressions to engage in impressionistic or intuitive thinking.

Interestingly, the most complex answers we need to give usually require synthesis of both!

How to integrate Verbatim Representations & Fuzzy Thinking to Gain clarity

You will notice that the hardest topics to compose thoughts on may involve needing to do all of the following within your answer:

• Identify the problem
• Outline risks
• Propose solutions
• Forecast gains or benefits
• Anticipate objections and reactions

So hopefully I’ve proven to you that the feeling of fogginess in the moment of thinking pressure before speaking is not all about finding the response with precision, but more about synthesising your response. Be reassured that there are tools that will strengthen the connection between your receptive and expressive language skills, so you can present concise and impactful responses that better serve the questions you receive.

And if you notice that your short and long-term memory are slipping, strive to practice and engage with all 8 of these techniques outlined today, maintain a healthy diet, exercise, and eat brain-boosting foods and also, 

Avoid:

• Constantly relying on your device to retrieve details you can’t recall in the moment
• Sleep deprivation, since insufficient sleep, drastically impairs your synaptic plasticity.

Strive to:

• Allow for moments in the day when you avoid fast-moving digital information (digital junk food); do activities that support slower thinking and musing, as this is suspected to boost memory pathways. Gaze out the tram window on your next trip, read your book instead of watching 50 reels, minimise overstimulation, learn to dance, sing, play an instrument and challenge your mind and body to develop new skills and neural connections.

At Cadenza, I will provide you with tools to bypass the awkward rabbit-in-the-headlights scenario so that you can move swiftly from thought-finding precise articulate responses. Even if verbatim retrieval is challenging, the brain can identify gist, which may ease the process if you've got tools to expand on it rapidly.

💻Related Read: The 5-Step Process to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence in Leadership or at Work

Reflective Pondering Instead of Brooding

When we face a problem that has negative risks, our brain can engage in rumination and brooding.

Rumination: a maladaptive behaviour that involves indulgence in "passive and repetitive thinking on symptoms of distress and the possible causes and consequences of those symptoms (Sin et al, 2018).”

Brooding and rumination tend to correlate more closely with depression than anxiety (Sin et al, 2018). When we brood, we fixate on the possible negative impact of our situation without devising a solution for it. Brooding tends to unravel our emotional regulation further. The better alternative when faced with a problem is to engage in reflective pondering.

Reflective Pondering: the thinking behaviour that occurs when we contemplate the situation we’re facing with the focus of coming up with a constructive solution.

Brooding will create a negative thought flow loop and reduce our access to the novel, expansive thinking required to get ourselves out of problems. It also tends to align with a negative proclivity and reduced growth mindset. Furthermore, research speculates that brooding could relate to “functional inefficiency and overloading (Wang cited in Sin et al, 2018). 

In contrast, reflective pondering appears most advantageous, with one study finding that during reflective pondering, subjects think less about the negative impact on the self (which insulates them from negative attention biases) and more about problem-focused cognitive processing. Brooding is a maladaptive behaviour that is likely to sap your energy and reduce your ability to devise solutions. Reflective pondering, however, is likely to increase your brain’s efficiency to redirect after a negative experience, gain attentional benefits and better process negative emotions and better self-regulate when faced with a negative experience. 

Hypothesising, Speculating & Forecasting

In our daily life, we often entertain possibilities that arise from a certain action or choice. Hypothetical thinking engages our cognitive system in a process of thinking and reasoning.

When we face a consideration, our brain moves into explicit thinking processes (System 2) that require us to access verbal reasoning and our working memory, but we also draw on our innate, instinctive processing (System 1), which helps us draw on surface impressions, biases, and rapid reactions.

Engaging in hypothetical thinking is a useful way to consider alternate scenarios, incorporate a fresh perspective, and remain cognitively flexible, as it involves the activation of highly detailed neural pathways.

While it can be time- and effort-intensive, allowing time to speculate and hypothesise is beneficial for your critical thinking and cognitive flexibility. When you engage in speculative thinking, you equip your mind to be more responsive to plausible scenarios, which can be useful for creating the agile, on-the-spot thinking you need to sort through thoughts in high-pressure discussions, respond to complex questions, or navigate intricately challenging social relationships.

It’s advisable to engage actively with thinking processes that require you to hypothesise, speculate and forecast. Don’t outsource it too heavily, if at all, to AI tools, or you bypass the opportunity to engage in conscious, intentional thoughts about topics and scenarios that matter to you.

Imagining

It’s no coincidence that the word for the concept of imagination alludes to a visual image.

When we imagine something that has no tangible presence in our immediate external environment, it’s palpable; we almost perceive it with our senses. Imagination enables us to create bridges between our knowledge and insights in the very moment of imagining a potential future. It allows us to incubate our ideas and speculate, almost having a liberating quality on the scope of our existence. 

Engaging in the process of imagining is likely to have positive benefits to the ability to think clearly since it opens our access to the creative speculation needed to develop good solutions. Activating imaginative thinking may also benefit your ability to communicate clearly, especially in settings where you wish to convey visionary messages that rely on strategically charismatic language to tantalise and appeal to your listener’s senses, emotions, and memory, thereby increasing the likelihood of influence.

💻Related Read: Impactful Storytelling: What the Top 3 Ted Talk Speakers did Differently

Visualising

The digital era bombards us with constant visual stimulation. Each person has unique visual processing abilities. The ease with which we perceive, experience and formulate visual concepts is truly variable. Let’s investigate key cognitive skills related to visualising information. 

Here we can summarise capacity under the following functional skills:

• Perceptual speed: how fast you can perform visually based perceptual tasks
• Visual working memory: how well you store and retrieve visual information

We each have different skill levels for the previous, but interestingly, many of us split into one of 2 preferences:

1. Those who store and engage with visual information through verbal thinking (thinking in words and concepts)
2. Those who store and engage with visual information through mental pictures (imagers)

Consider your preference and use it to guide your response when caught off guard. 

Here’s how,

If you’re typically an imager, use visual stimuli that come to mind when under pressure to commence your spoken responses. You might like to use flow charts, sequences, and the visuals that flash into your mind to inflect and plan your responses, enabling you to find thoughts with less resistance when they seem unclear.

In contrast, if you’re typically a verbal thinker, use the verbal concept that comes to mind under pressure to commence your spoken responses. You might like to use themes, definitions, rhetorical arguments or summaries to inflect and plan your responses, enabling you to find thoughts with less resistance when they seem unclear.

Ideation & Diverging

Ideation is the production of an idea. To form our thoughts under pressure, we need to engage in ideation to form an idea. In many cases, we also need to produce divergent thinking. 

Divergent thinking involves generating multiple, varied ideas. It might seem a luxury to be good at coming up with many ideas, and disadvantageous to produce only one idea, but both skills create risk when speaking under pressure!

When we lose clarity of thought under pressure, it often is the result of:

• Too many thoughts, which makes the selection of the first entry point confusing, haphazard and overwhelming.
• One singular thought, which can make the expansion of the first entry point limited and brief.

Next time you feel like the thoughts don't come to mind when speaking, consider what's causing the thinking pressure.

• Do you have too many thoughts?
• Or do you have only a singular thought?

Neither brain response is hard; they are simply cues that your mind is engaging in one thinking style at that moment.

You're either

• ideating or,
• diverging

and how you manage your message needs to be structured accordingly.

If you find yourself stuck in ideation, your message will benefit from models that help you expand your response. If you instead experience divergent thinking, a model that helps you select, focus and structure the volume of information behind your response to prevent tangents, excess information and too much detail will be advisable. When communicating, our minds move into many different thinking behaviours. Most don't need to learn to think better; they need to learn to manage their thinking.

In the words of the great writer John Steinbeck:

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

Audiating

Just like you think in words, did you know your brain is also capable of thinking in music? Audiation is the ability to process and imagine sound, a skill that sets elite musicians apart. Engaging in active music-making leaves neural pathways that enhance your ability to process music, especially by increasing the grey matter volume in your auditory cortex and strengthening subcortical connectivity.

Current research is establishing that audiation skills among musicians, especially singers, increase their capacity to evoke intricate and vibrant inflections of vocal emotion with control and precision, giving rise to an immediate unity between their intended and actual expression. 

Audiation is a viable skill in itself, since it allows you to imagine, plan, and execute your intended speech melody, which will directly impact your ability to maintain listener attention, be charismatic onstage, and more. Latest research also indicates that audiation benefits memory, attention and overall cognitive function.

At Cadenza, we typically encounter speakers who never audiated music let alone speech. Although frustrated by their ability to grasp and secure the voice tone they're aiming for, the main barrier is a lack of exposure to consciously handling sound and to acquiring new ways to perform, express, and inflect with it. Without the conscious scope to think about expressive sound devices before speaking (using audiation), all speakers risk vocal monotony, haphazard inflections, and trial-and-error voice registration.

Thinking Clearly- Key Takeaways & More Resources

Thinking clearly is achieved when we strategically approach our thoughts and execute a message pathway that supports a clean transition from our internal thoughts to how we express and verbalise them in the room. 

Today we’ve investigated the first potent communication dimension that we train at Cadenza to build Executive Equilibrium: Mind & Thoughts. It takes skill in 4 dimensions to engage our body, mind and thoughts in unison, all at once. But today we;re looking at how to gain that feeling of Cognitive Clarity under pressure. Thoughts flow when speaking. You feel calm & calibrated. You've secured self-governance. This sensation is part of aligning equilibrium to secure presence. 

You can learn more about what it takes to achieve Executive equilibrium, the calm feeling that one sentence leads to another by checking the process. Review the Cadenza protocol on our website: ​it's the mechanism for speech success.

Opportunity Arises in Difficulty

When working with conscientious, motivated clients I usually meet many exemplary individuals who possess a strong sense of self-awareness. They know their mind and they're alert to each passing thought, especially when speaking in environments that require high skill and competence and frequently they report concerns like this:

• I feel like I bumble when I have the information in my head. 
• I struggle with word finding ability and filler fluff words, I just want to deliver impactful, well structured sentences
• I often fumble my words, I struggle to find the right words, I use fill in words a lot, I lack the professional touch to my sentences 

It will be my honour to work with you, so if you’re looking for public speaking solutions that work for your stage presence, charisma and industry leadership, you should consider our most popular service, The Executive Communication Profile Appointment.

You can only learn to speak confidently with anyone anywhere if you have the tools to transform your speaking logic & habits. And your Executive Communication Profile Appointment shows you how. This science-based communication service helps you speak with clarity, charisma & confidence.

Discover The Communication Tactics that build Reputation & Authority among Industry Leaders, that you can use to fast-track your presence, charisma & eloquence.

Learn more about this personalised and strategic solution for your professional communication now.

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Conclusions

At Cadenza we're dedicated to  building communication skills that you’re proud of so that you can make the most of your time on earth by accomplishing more interpersonal depth and self-assurance when interacting professionally and personally. 

We have many resources and science-backed tactics that can assist you and work worldwide, although based in Melbourne Australia. It all begins with a conversation to define the right approach, solution and recommendations for you. Get in touch for more info.

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