What is metacognitive skills?

Metacognitive skills is a concept in personal epistemology: Metacognition — the ability to monitor, evaluate, and regulate your own thinking — is not an innate gift. It is a trainable skill with measurable components, and the people who treat it as fixed are the ones most trapped by their own blind spots.

Example: You're leading a technical design review. Halfway through, you notice a familiar sensation: you're defending a position not because the evidence supports it, but because you proposed it. You pause, say 'I think I'm anchoring on my own suggestion — let me steelman the alternative.' That pause is metacognition. The engineer next to you, equally smart, doesn't notice they're doing the same thing. The difference isn't intelligence. It's a trained capacity to monitor your own cognitive process while it's running.

This concept is part of Phase 1 (Perception and Externalization) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for perception and externalization.