Willpower, determination and persistence are important, but research shows that strategic thinking may be even more important!
According to the the study from 2020, published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academic of Sciences, your level of strategic thinking can "uniquely" predict how effective you will be in achieving your goals. Strategic thinking is not just a skill, but a regular practice of questioning and improving your current processes, routines and habits in order to overcome setbacks and further improve the likelihood of success.
"This means that strategic thinking does not simply reflect people's general knowledge of strategies or how much people use any particular strategy," the researchers write. "Instead, it is a general tendency to self-sufficiently use a metacognitive strategy in a broader sense."
Or in layman's terms: consistently asking the right questions so that we can find an even better way to the goal.
Strategic thinking
Let's say you're in sales. You are good at it. You gain more customers than you lose. But you are not satisfied with these results. After all, sometimes you get instant "no". Sometimes you even get to the signing stage, and then the client backs out. If you're like most people, you move on. Maybe it wasn't the right customer, maybe the customer was just looking for information and never really intended to buy anything. Besides, you can't convince everyone.
But if you have a strategic mindset, you know that you may never really convince everyone - but you'll never stop trying! Evaluate what was right and what was wrong. Refine your lead scoring tools. Think about how you could read them better next time.
You have the skills to improve your abilities and want to constantly use them to improve your results. You also have enough self-discipline to keep going and enough self-discipline to keep working to optimize your approach.
It's a strategic mindset.
How to develop a strategic mindset
The researchers asked the students the following questions and asked them to rate themselves on a scale of 1 (never) to 5 (always).
- How I get stuck somewhere, how often I ask myself "What can I do to help myself?"
- When I feel like I'm not making progress, how often do I ask myself: "Is there a better way to do this?"
- When I feel frustrated about something, how often do I ask myself: "How can I do it better?"
- How often, in moments when I feel challenged, I ask myself: “What can I do to improve on this?”
- When I'm struggling with something, how often do I ask myself: "How can I help myself?"
- When something seems difficult to me, how often do I ask myself: "What can I do to be better at this?"
As you can probably guess, higher scores predicted higher grades—and in subsequent studies, higher scores predicted greater success in both career challenges and health and fitness goals.
Whatever the goal, adopting a strategic mindset—asking the six questions—increases the likelihood of success.
This is also true if you remind yourself of the importance of a strategic mindset right before you start. In another study, participants who read an overview of the concept of strategic thinking and were thus reminded of the importance of efforts to overcome obstacles and failure significantly outperformed participants who did not read this overview.
They didn't just take a problem-solving approach that seemed to work. They also experimented, researched, adapted and tried to optimize their approach much faster.
The opinion of researchers
In the midst of challenges, many people simply accept and stick with suboptimal strategies that may seem good enough.
The researchers, however, found that strategic thinking indirectly predicted progress in challenging long-term, important, and unknown goals. These are goals that may require repeated access to or the invention of new strategies—the kind of goals that are increasingly emphasized in many modern jobs.
The next time you tackle a new goal, take a moment to prepare your strategic mindset. Then, consistently ask yourself six questions as you work toward your goal.
