Why Your Thinking Failed Today - Critical Thinking Under Pressure

We unpack how a teacher-led school vision collapsed not because the idea was bad but because the room wasn’t ready for clear thinking. We map three forces that sabotage judgment and lay out practical steps to create conditions where logic can land.

• staff meeting case study showing emotional threat responses
• attention fragmentation and working memory limits
• emotional hijacking and system one versus system two
• information overload, clickbait, and AI plausibility traps
• three-step method to pause, create space, and adapt
• one-on-one conversations before group decisions
• signal versus noise and deep work boundaries
• frameworks, templates, and practice for better calls

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Link is in the show notes
The link is in the show notes also

Chapters

• 0:00 The Staff Meeting Blowup
• 2:37 Owning The Misstep In Approach
• 3:20 Why Thinking Fails: Context First
• 4:36 Force One: Attention Fragmentation
• 7:10 Force Two: Emotional Hijacking
• 9:16 Force Three: Info Overload And AI
• 11:10 Three Steps To Clearer Thinking
• 13:01 Tools, Community, And What’s Next

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

I'm sitting in a staff meeting at the charter school where I work. I'm an assistant director at the time. The teachers want to shift to a teacher-led school model, shared leadership, distributed decision making, all that. And I'm actually excited about it because my master thesis was on exactly this. I know the research. I know what it takes to make it work. So when they ask me what I think, I tell them the truth. I say, I can help you facilitate this process, but based on what I've observed working with you for years, because before that, I was their call, their colleague, their cowork. I was a teacher. I got promoted from within. But I told them the truth. And I said, I can help facilitate. But what I've observed working with you for years, here are the skills we need to develop first. And here are some of my concerns. You know, it was evidence-based, professional. And honestly, I try to be sincere. I wanted it to be successful. And immediately, and I mean immediately, they straw man me. They they they turned on each other. The meaning falls completely apart. And I'm sitting there thinking, you just proved my point. You want to lead a school together, but you can't even have a hard conversation without attacking each other. The irony was not lost on me. My predecessor later told me I need to apologize to the staff for what for being honest. Um, and I and I questions like, you know, was it that? Was because of my brutal honesty or for bringing evidence? Because again, it was evidence-based. I was not trying to uh hurt their feelings. I wanted to work with them, like, let's develop this together. And here's the thing: I wasn't wrong about the model, I was wrong about the approach. I walked into a room full of emotionally driven people with a logical argument. I should have had one-on-one conversations first. I should have adapted to their drivers, not assumed they adapt to mine. I left at the end of that school year. I left at the end of that school year, and the teacher-led model, it completely derailed, exactly as I predicted. Later I came back as the executive director. That's another story. I'm also learning about the thinking. And today we're talking about why your thinking failed. Maybe not catastrophicly, because you would be probably not listening to this podcast. But why it failed. Thinking doesn't fail because people are stupid. It fails because the conditions for clear thinking don't exist. Those teachers weren't incapable of logic. They were overwhelmed, defensive, and operating from a place of emotional threat. When I came in with data and frameworks, their brains didn't hear evidence. They heard, you're not good enough. That's not a thinking problem. That's a context problem. And that happens quite a lot. The more intellectual many people are, I've noticed through my years working with many uh doctorate uh and um highly educated individuals, is that it's a context problem. And here's the bigger issue: we live in a world that systematically destroys the conditions for clear thinking. If you try to design an environment that makes people think worse, you design exactly what we have uh last year and currently the way it looks like this year. And let me break down the three focuses that sabotage thinking every single day. So pay close attention, because this involves you. So here's I want to call them forces. Force number one, attention fragmentation. Your brain has a limited amount of working memory. Think of it like RAM on a computer. You've got about four or seven slots for active thoughts at any given moment. Now think about how you live: phone buzzing, email notifications, Slack messages, news alerts, someone walking into your office, a text from your kid's school, a reminder about the meeting in 10 minutes. Every interruption doesn't just steal your attention for a second. It fractures your working memory. You lose the thread. And when you come back to the original task, you're not picking up where you left off. You're rebuilding the entire mental model from scratch. Research shows it takes about an average of 23 minutes to fully recover deep focus after an interruption. 23 minutes. This is why many, many high-achieving, successful people that you can name some off the top of your head that are probably multi-millionaires and billionaires, value time. And if you try to waste it when they're in the middle of something, they look at you as if you just destroyed something that was precious to them, which it is, it's time. And how many interruptions do you get in a day? 10, 20, 50? You're never thinking clearly, you're always in recovery mode. And this is why people, successful people, shut their doors and they take value in the time. That's the signal and noise that I've mentioned. If you follow me, I've mentioned this, you know, pretty often. Is signal and noise. What is noise? What is signal? Signal is the focus, what is going to achieve the success. Noise is everything else. Force number two, emotional hijacking. Your brain has two systems. Daniel Kenneman, which I hope I said his last name correctly, calls them system one and system two. System one is a fast, automatic, emotional. It's the system that keeps our ancestors alive when a rustling bush, which might be a lion in the back. System two is slow, deliberate, logical. It's the system that solves math problems and evaluates evidence. Here's the problem. And when you're stressed, scared, or threatened, system one takes over completely because it has to survive. The body wants to survive. That staff meeting, pure system one, fight or flight, defend the ego, attack the threat. And I triggered it by walking in with system two language, evidence, frameworks, caution, into a system one environment. If I had understood that, I would have approached it differently. I would have de-escalated the emotional state first, then introduced the logic. But it didn't, excuse me, but I didn't. Because I wasn't thinking about how people think. I was only thinking about what I thought. Force number three. Information, overload, and AI misinformation. We're drowning in information, and most of it is designed to manipulate you. Every headline is optimized for clicks, not truths. Every social media algorithm is optimized for engagement, not accuracy. Every AI-generated answer is optimized for plausibility, not correctedness. Excuse me, not correctness. You see a headline, new study shows coffee causes cancer, but you don't read the study, you don't check the sample size, you don't see that it was funded by a tea company, you just absorb the headline and move on. And now that belief is in your brain, competing with every other belief, making it harder to think clearly about everything related to health, risk, or decision making. Multiply that by a thousand headlines a day. Your brain isn't equipped for this. Evolution didn't prepare you to filter this much noise. And if you don't believe me, probably want to look at the follower count between me and someone that, you know, on video does a game or does a bet on smacking another person in the face or something funny in those matters. A lot more views. That's because of emotion. Laughter. Not a lot of people want to talk about these things. Unless, of course, it's you guys who are listening now. Because clearly this is a priority to you. So I mentioned all these forces that are against you. So what do you do about it? Well, here's what I've learned, both from research and from screwing up at that staff meeting. Step one, recognize when you're in system one. If you feel defensive, if you feel the urge to respond immediately, if you feel like you need to win the argument, you're in system one. That's not the time to make decisions. That's the time to pause. I didn't pause in that meeting. I should have said, let me think about this, and we'll continue the conversation tomorrow. That's all it would have taken to shift from emotional reaction to clear thinking. Step two create conditions for system two. Clear thinking requires space. It requires time. It requires freedom from interruption. That means turning off notifications when you need to think, blocking time on your calendar for deep work, having hard conversations one-on-one, not in group settings where ego is on the line. If I had to talk to those teachers individually, that outcome would have been completely different. But I tried to think clearly in a context designed for chaos. Step three, adapt to the drivers of the people you're communicating with. This is the lesson I learned the hard way. If someone is emotionally driven, you can't lead with logic. You have to acknowledge the emotion first, validate it, then introduce the evidence. If someone is status driven, you can't threaten their position. You have to frame your idea as something that elevates them. If someone is security driven, you can't lead with risk. You have to show them how your idea protects what they care about. I knew those teachers were emotionally driven, but I ignored it. I thought truth would be enough. Truth is never enough if you don't understand the context it's entering. So here's the reality: thinking is a skill, and like any skill, it requires practice, feedback, in the right environment. If you want to go deeper on this, if you want the frameworks I use every day to manage my own thinking, avoid emotional hijacking, and make better decisions under pressure, I write about this every week in my new Substack newsletter. You get a breakdown of my hardest decisions I made that week, downloadable decision templates and frameworks you can use immediately at work, at home, or in leadership. Link is in the show notes. And if you're serious about upgrading your thinking, if you want to actually practice this with other leaders and educators, I run a community called the Thinking Lab at school. We work through real scenarios together. Every month I do a live call where we workshop actual decisions members are facing. And I also do a weekly uh Socratic question to kind of practice your critical thinking and logical mind. The link is in the show notes also. Next episode, we're going to be talking about how your brain actually works, the architecture of thought, working memory, cognitive load, and why smart people still make dumb decisions. Please like, subscribe so you can get notified on when this episode airs. Thanks for thinking with me. I'm Mike Aponte, also known as M.A. Aponte, and this is Thinking to Think. Have an amazing day.