Critical Thinking with Emotional Intelligence

Before we start the course, here is a practical activity that encourages you to think about why you are taking the course and what you want to get from it.

This lecture dissects critical thinking and criticism showing how they are not the same and how criticism can be utilised in positive ways as a critical thinker.

This video covers how decision making styles are influenced by various forms of thinking.

This interactive questionnaire will help you to determine your decision making thinking style and to give you an indication of your balance of working with of ideas / action / task and people.

This video explores the directive decision making style that is useful in resolving issues of low cognitive complexity and requiring a logical approach.

This video explores the behavioural decision making style that is useful in resolving issues of low cognitive complexity and requiring a creative approach.

This video explores the conceptual decision making style that is useful in resolving issues of high cognitive complexity and requiring a creative approach.

This video explores the analytical decision making style that is useful in resolving issues of high cognitive complexity and requiring a logical approach.

This video covers the impact that personality has in influencing decision making and how emotional intelligence is involved.

This lecture explores the concept of critical thinking, providing a clear definition highlighting its importance in analysing, evaluating, and forming reasoned judgments. 

Critical thinking is critical in emotional intelligence.  This lecture explains why.

This lesson covers how thinking can help and how it can hinder you.

There's a lot of support for the idea around left-brain thinking / right brain thinking.  This is inherently wrong.  It's a myth that has become very popular as being based in science.  This video investigates the truth about how both hemispheres work together to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of human cognition.  It's time to put this age-old misconception to rest and embrace a more accurate view of our brain's incredible capabilities.

This lecture investigates some of the flaws that the brain has around thinking.

This lecture covers the two thinking systems as defined by psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

This video explores how we process information using the two thinking systems.

A look at some ways to improve critical thinking skills.

This video covers in detail the neuroscience behind the role of emotions in the learning process and how they impact our thinking and physiology.

This video investigates how our conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds work and how this has an impact on the way that we and our biases.

This lecture explores important values and how to develop habits and attitudes that overcome bias.

The lecture also covers critical questions that will help.

This lecture looks at biases that are unconscious and so are those biases that you have no awareness of.

This lecture explores some of the ways that unconscious bias can be assessed and measured.  It gives an overview of how the Implicit Association Test works.  This is a scientific test to measure unconscious biases.

This video explores unconscious bias in more depth through some examples that you may not even have considered. It also explores ways that you can work with and modify unconscious behaviour.

If you are unaware of your unconscious biases, how can you work with them?

This practical activity gets you to make a choice in a social situation.  From this choice, you can to explore the reasons behind the choice underpinned by your unconscious biases reflecting upon how these impact upon other decisions that you make.

This short video introduces this section that explores some cognitive biases and thinking distortions that impact upon us.  Many of these are unconscious.

This lecture looks at the thinking distortions of Always Being Right and Jumping to Conclusions.

This lecture looks at some common fallacies or mistaken beliefs.  It looks at Control Fallacies, Fallacy of Fairness, Fallacy of Change and Heaven's Reward Fallacy.

This lecture looks at some common generalisations.  It looks at Overgeneralisation, Global Labelling and Mislabelling,

This lecture covers some expectation biases.  It looks at Personalisation, Self-Serving Bias and "Should" Statements.

This lecture covers some of the biases that we have that are driven by emotion.  These include Emotional Reasoning, Catastrophising and Dismissing the Positive.

This lecture covers some thinking biases about how you are thinking.  They include All-or-Nothing Thinking, Conformation Bias, and Blaming.

Here are some ways in which you can deal with cognitive biases.

This video introduces the quiz that is focused around active listening and gives you some important information regarding the quiz.

Reviewing the quiz results, we can consider what influenced and had an impact on your results and the some of the assumptions that you may have made.

We all make assumptions.  It is difficult not to.  The skill in critical thinking is to recognise your assumptions and to check them through active listening.  This lecture explores why assumptions are made and how to overcome issues caused with active listening.

This is a practical activity to test your critical thinking skills through a series of fun questions.

The questions are designed to illustrate the concept behind the two thinking systems as well - Thinking System 1 (fast) and Thinking System 2 (slow).

This lecture explores why critical thinking is essential in the age of AI, highlighting how human judgement, creativity, and emotional intelligence complement machine efficiency.  It emphasises the leader’s role in ensuring decisions remain ethical, contextual, and aligned with real-world impact.

Here is a series of open questions that are useful to use as a critical thinker.  They are all open questions.  The video also explains how you can generate and use open questions to best effect.

Here is a downloadable cheat sheet that will help you to exercise your critical thinking skills.

This video introduces a technique that is very powerful when you are facing an extremely challenging question or someone is bein deliberately provocative.

Further thoughts about thinking and some final thoughts about critical thinking.

Critical thinking is an active process - thinking about thinking and evaluating thoughts objectively.  This lecture takes you through an 8 step process to  build your critical thinking skills.