Critical thinking is not a set of skills, but rather it is the use of those skills in the process of making reflective, purposeful judgments. Explain what this means by using an example.

Imagine for a moment what it is like looking for an address while driving on a busy and unfamiliar street. To do this, we must simultaneously be coordinating the use of many skills, but fundamentally our focus is on the driving and not on the individual skills. We are concentrating on street signs and address numbers while also interpreting traffic signals such as stoplights, and controlling the car's speed, direction, and location relative to other vehicles. Driving requires coordinating physical skills such as how hard to press the gas or tap the brakes and mental skills such as analyzing the movement of our vehicle relative to those around ours to avoid accidents. In the end, however, we say that we drove the car to the destination. We do not list all the skills, and we certainly do not practice them one by one in a serial order. Rather, we use them all in concert. Critical thinking has certain important features in common with looking for an address while driving on a busy and unfamiliar street. The key similarity to notice here is that critical thinking requires using all the skills in concert, not one at a time or sequentially.
It would be an unfortunate and misleading oversimplification to reduce critical thinking to a list of skills, such as the recipe on the lid of dehydrated soup: first analyze, then infer, then explain, then close the lid, and wait five minutes.