1. Abstract / Concrete
This image explores the movement between conceptual thinking and tangible reality: whether we construct meaning through ideas, principles and patterns, or through what can be seen, touched and acted upon.
Cognitive Intentions
Cognitive Intentions Visual Gallery
These images are visual interpretations of Cognitive Intentions: the unconscious patterns through which we construct perception, motivation, meaning, attention, and response. Each image offers a metaphorical entry point into how thinking is built before behaviour appears.
Visual Framework
Cognitive Intentions
The Images
These images are not literal definitions. They are visual metaphors for Cognitive Intentions: the unconscious patterns through which we organise attention, construct meaning, and prepare a response before we realise we have chosen one.
2. Vision / Realisation / QC
This image represents the construction of success: imagining what could be, translating it into action, and evaluating whether the outcome meets the intended standard.
3. Caring for Self or Others
This image reflects where care is directed: toward the self, toward others, or toward the dynamic balance between personal responsibility and relational awareness.
4. Consensus / Polar
This image explores whether thinking seeks agreement, harmony and shared meaning, or contrast, distinction and opposition as a way of making sense.
5. Global / Details
This image represents the difference between seeing the whole pattern and examining the individual parts from which that pattern is constructed.
6. Team Player / Individualist
This image explores whether identity is constructed through collective belonging and collaboration, or through independence, autonomy and personal contribution.
7. Motivation
This image reflects the forces that move us: whether action is constructed through achievement, affiliation, influence, challenge, purpose, or need.
8. Internal / External
This image explores where authority is located: inside one’s own judgement, values and standards, or outside in evidence, feedback, approval and context.
9. Towards / Away From
This image explores directional motivation: whether action is constructed by moving toward desired outcomes or away from problems, risks and unwanted states.
10. Long Term / Short Term
This image explores whether attention is organised around immediate outcomes or longer developmental arcs, consequences and future possibilities.
11. Convincer Channel
This image represents how we become persuaded: through what we see, hear, read, feel, experience, or repeatedly encounter.
12. Options / Procedures
This image represents the tension between possibility and sequence: whether we construct action through open alternatives or through steps, methods and order.
13. Own / Partner / Observer
This image explores perspective construction: seeing from one’s own position, through another’s experience, or from a more detached observing frame.
14. Past / Present / Future
This image represents how time shapes thinking: whether meaning is constructed from memory, immediate experience, or anticipated possibility.
15. Primary Intention
This image explores the dominant intention beneath behaviour: the underlying direction from which attention, choice and response are constructed.
16. Pre-Active Re-Active
This image reflects the difference between moving before events fully unfold and responding after the context has already presented itself.
17. Relationship / Task
This image represents the balance between attending to people, connection and trust, and attending to outcomes, structure and completion.
18. Sameness / Difference
This image explores whether attention is drawn first to continuity, familiarity and pattern, or to contrast, change and distinction.
19. Trustful / Sceptic
This image reflects how belief is constructed: through openness, acceptance and initial trust, or through questioning, doubt and the search for proof.
20. VAK
This image represents the sensory construction of experience: how seeing, hearing and feeling each shape the way reality is internally represented.
The Construction of Bullying
This image shows bullying not as a single behaviour, but as a construction of power, threat, identity, insecurity, status and low awareness interacting in context.
Frameworks
Building Blocks
Cognitive Intentions are not personality traits. They are the building blocks of Thinking Style. In Constructed Development Theory, becoming aware of these patterns allows us to move from automatic reaction to deliberate construction.
Explore your own Cognitive Intentions
An Identity Compass profile will show how your Thinking Style is constructed, where your awareness is currently operating, and how your next stage of development may be supported.