How can I learn to think like a UX designer?

To think like a UX designer you need.

Empathy. 
You need to be able to understand not only users but the people you work with. Being a UX designer is NOT about being in creative control. You must want what the team is creating to work for the users and not just want want your ideas to be listened to and implemented. 

Intelligence.

To solve the complex problems you'll come across you'll need to be able think in different ways and look at the world from different angles. You can lean a few UX tricks and expect it to work. There is no one process in UX and no two projects are the same. 

System thinking.

This is vital in my view. You need to be able to see the whole world you are dealing with and not be a surface person who only does interface design. UX is not UI. I am currently writing a talk on 'the messy middle' which I am giving at the Euro IA event in September in Brussels (EuroIA 2014) that goes into depth about this. Real UX thinks about how users interact with a system, not an interface.


Freedom from technology and implementation.

If you come from an engineering background then there are many things you'll need to unlearn or learn to ignore. The engineering mindset runs counter to UX as it tries to find the most elegant technical solution to a given problem. Often this is far from the most elegant user focused solution. The aim of UX is mostly to simplify the experience for the user and that often means that the backend technology has to a lot of work to provide that experience. For example to look up a post code or to answer question spoken or typed in takes a lot of work. There is also a tendency to over sodutionise the problem and thing too literally in the engineering mindset and over state functionality vs the flow of the user.  What is useful to know is enough about the technology so you know if the engineers are being open about the limitations or are attempting to stamp an engineering mindset over the UX.  It's also worth noting that visual designers also suffer form an engineering / implementation mindset and many people who claim to be UX fail to identify when they are thinking in terms of cool technical solutions rather than the right solution for the user. A person who spends time wondering how they can use the cool parallax scrolling trick they learnt on a new project is not being a UX designer.

from : quora