Noticing what you’re thinking, before you act on it, is becoming one of the most valuable skills a leader can develop. Right now, it’s also one of the most endangered.
A manager came to our recent coaching session frustrated with a member of their team. The performance issue had been dragging on for weeks. They were ready to read them the riot act.
I asked a few questions. What else might be going on for this person? When did they last have a genuinely clear conversation about what was expected of them? Is there anything happening at home?
The manager paused. Then, said more quietly “I haven’t checked in with them properly for quite a while. I’m not actually sure they do know what I want from them.”
Nothing about the team member had changed in the previous sixty seconds. What had changed was the manager’s relationship to their own thinking. Half a minute earlier, the riot act had felt like the obvious response. Now it didn’t.
Most of the time, we’re inside our thinking, not observing it. Thoughts arrive, feel true, and lead to action. The whole process happens fast and largely below conscious awareness. By the time we notice what we’ve done, we’ve already done it.
Thinking about thinking, sometimes referred to as metacognition, is the act of stepping briefly outside the thought stream to ask what’s actually happening. Why am I assuming this? What am I missing? Is this a fact or an interpretation? Where did this conclusion come from?
It’s not analysis, which really is just more thinking. Metacognition is the moment of noticing: quieter, smaller, and faster than analysis. The manager in the coaching session didn’t analyse their way to a better response, they noticed something. That act of noticing changed what came next.
The brain isn’t designed to think about itself. Most of what it does is automatic, predictive, and based on prior experience. It’s constantly predicting what’s about to happen and adjusting behaviour to match. That’s efficient, and most of the time it works. But it also means we usually experience our predictions as if they were the present moment.
When we are tired, stressed, or under pressure, this gets worse because the brain always wants to conserve energy. This means your brain makes faster, less accurate connections and presents them as certainty. We respond to colleagues based on memories of similar past situations. We read emails through the filter of whatever mood we were in five minutes ago. We frequently make decisions we’re sure are rational, and only later realise something else was driving them.
Developing the skill of thinking about your thinking is actually not difficult. The key is remembering to do it, that’s the real challenge that many leaders fail at.
This skill has become so much more important than it was a decade ago, and it’s because of AI.
AI now arrives at confident conclusions faster than you can form your own. Ask a Large Language Model a difficult question and you receive a polished, well-reasoned, persuasive answer in seconds. The answer feels authoritative and the architecture beneath it, the assumptions, the data it was trained on and the framing of the question itself, is invisible. If you absorb the answer without thinking about what kind of thinking produced it, you’ve outsourced not just the work, but the awareness underneath it.
This is where metacognition becomes a leadership skill rather than a personal one. A leader who can’t think about their own thinking will struggle to think about an AI’s ‘thinking’. Because the outputs sound confident, they mistake fluency for accuracy. They’ll adopt conclusions that fit a pattern their own brain was already running, and then experience the agreement as confirmation rather than coincidence.
Leaders who develop this skill compound an advantage. They’ll notice when an AI-generated answer is well-structured but built on a flawed premise. They’ll catch the moments when their own first reaction to a problem is the lazy one, not the right one. Or they’ll pause before reacting to a team member, an email, or an output, and ask the small question that changes everything: What’s the thinking behind this thinking?
The leaders who don’t develop it will increasingly find themselves moving fast in the wrong direction, with more polished outputs than ever to justify it.
The key to adopting this approach is learning how to consciously step away from the noise of everyday life.
Start by becoming aware of your breathing. Is it deep and even, or rapid and shallow? Are you breathing at a steady pace, or holding your breath while thinking? Slow, deep breathing has a calming effect on the body and helps metabolise the neurochemicals that put us in a tizzy. As few as three calm deep breaths can help us think more clearly. It also creates a small pause where you can ask what is actually going on.
In his excellent book Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock refers to the part of us that does this noticing as the Inner Director. I like this term because it sits well with business and is easier to accept than meditation and more practical than mindfulness. The Inner Director is the part of you that can step back and watch the rest of you in action.
Notice your reactions before you act on them. The strong opinion, the irritation, the eagerness to agree. Each one is an opportunity to ask where it came from before you commit to it.
Question the answer that arrives too quickly. Whether it comes from your own brain or from a model, an answer that arrives with no friction is worth a second look. Ease is not the same as accuracy.
Pay attention to your body. Tension in the shoulders, tightness in the chest, a sudden flatness in your mood. These are signals that your thinking has shifted into a different gear, the body often knows before the mind does.
Treat your first read of any situation as a hypothesis, not a conclusion. Even when it feels obviously right – that is when you need to be even more alert.
What were you thinking just before you reacted to the last person who frustrated you? Not what they did, but what you were thinking, and where did that thinking come from?
When the next AI-generated answer arrives in front of you, will you be able to think about the thinking behind it, or will you simply absorb the conclusion and move on?
Remember when it comes to thinking . . . Stay curious.
If you would like to learn more about how AI affects the brain and get our Guide for Business Leaders click here
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