Brush up your cognitive abilities

Imagine yourself ten years back. What were your aspirations vis-à-vis your career then? Have you perceived any change in them as also what is estimated of you? Today, the dividing line between your job and personal life has indeed become clouded. Workload has become intense as a result of which, people find it difficult to justice to their work in the period that they spend at workplace. With burn-out being a common workplace phenomenon, employees struggle hard to survive their job and strike a work-life balance. The workplace of today has transformed drastically, necessitating requirement of new skills to live on and flourish.

Nobody wants to waste time and do things that achieve nothing. Everybody seeks to have a more stable and fruitful life. To be able to do so, you need to gain supremacy over certain skills to preclude any existence behind times and becoming exhausted. You need to be proficient at your cognitive skills. But what are cognitive skills?

Cognitive abilities are brain-based skills that are required by us to execute any task. The task could well range from the easiest at one end of the spectrum to the most difficult at the other. They have more to do with the mechanisms of how we learn, recollect things, resolve dilemmas and remain focussed. If you have poor cognitive skills, the information processing can be rather slow and very problematic. This is precisely why brain training is significant as it allows you to train your cognitive skills. The following cognitive skills are very vital to be successful in your career

· Altering your outlooks: If you can bring about alterations to your standpoints and attitude, you are liable to be more imaginative and inventive. Workplace is all about flexibility and shedding rigidity. You can readily bring about altered attitudes and a changed mind-set by training your brain to use your hitherto fore latent capabilities.

· Regulating your own learning: Men and women who can superintend their own learning and development become specialists. With so much information available, your task is rendered simple. Since no institution teaches the art of superintending one’s own learning and development, the initiative to do so has to come from you and you alone. The truth is that this possible. 

· Sieving information from different sources: The era of today is one of information overload. But locating one that is useful, accurate and relevant from amongst the mine of facts and figures is a Herculean task if you want to keep disturbances and interruptions away. However, you can always train your brain to do that.

· Leafing through documents as fast as you can think: Your reading prowess has to be fast. If you take time to peruse anything, you are likely to be branded as slow and eventually behind times. You have to be rapid reader and learner. Your speed of comprehension speed has to be fast. Today, there are several courses available to develop this expertise and you can always subscribe to one.

· Cogitating & dealing with facts and figures speedily: The human brain has enormous analysing capability; you can thus ruminate over a plethora of information commendably. However, you need to keep your mind open to do so. Fortunately, you can train yourself in this aspect too.

· Systematising & preserving vital concepts & minutiae: Your capacity to be organised is better put to practice by using it concurrently with other skills. This capacity can be improved and invariably paves the way for acquiring correct know-how in any sphere of activity. You can always learn to do all this.

· Understanding the larger mosaic: If you understand what the larger picture is all about, you will be able to understand how details of any activity correspond to each other and fit in sync. You will be better poised to learn new things, analyse matters and resolve problems. And the best of this that you can train yourself for it.

· Focussing on issues at hand: Notwithstanding that we have our hands full with a plethora of tasks, the fact remains that you have to focus on crucial ones to accomplish better results. This is not only applicable to the work that we do, but also to other issues as well. You need to create an appropriate environment for the purpose. 

Work pressures and workplace tensions; and fatigue and exhaustion that are so common today are caused by an absence of all the skills highlighted above. Therefore, it is no wonder that they are indeed qualitative requirements of every job that entails evaluations and decision making. Now, getting back to the question that was posed at the beginning. Don’t you think that if you had the above skills in greater measure, you would have been galvanised to rediscover yourself as things changed? Your answer will say it all.