Conscious Choices: A Guide to Self-Directed Learning

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Conscious ChoicesA Guide to Self-Directed
Learning

• Chapter Two
• Choices
• Critical Thinking

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The Moment of Choice

• The moment of choice is always NOW.
• It is the instance where we consciously
  participate in the outcome of some event.
• You can choose how you respond.
• Respond with awareness instead of habitual
  reactions.

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• Internal Situation
• How thoughts and emotions interpret an event

• External Situation
• Actions, interactions, and behaviors in an event

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Can you choose your thoughts and feelings?
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Choice is Opportunity

• Choices are made for you by default unless you
  take the opportunity to choose for yourself
• Unconscious choices are decisions you make
  without an awareness of consequences
• You can create different results by making
  different choices

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Choice is Opportunity

• Most choices are habitual or automatic responses
• To create learning or change, you move against
  the grain of repetitive thoughts and reactions
• Every opportunity to choose is a chance to change

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The Process of Self-Change
Awareness of the need to change
Plan to Change
GOAL
Effort to change
Choice to Change
Errors relapses
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Choice Makes You Responsible
The sense of personal responsibility connected
to making choices can be overwhelming or
empowering.
Clarity about your goals and values will be a
source of inner guidance to your decision-making
process.
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Influenced Choices

• Unexamined assumptions
• Beliefs based on hearsay or unsubstantiated
  opinions
• Decisions based on the credibility of other
  peoples opinions or beliefs
• Accepting unwarranted assertions as factual

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Informed Choices

• Assumptions based on reliable and proven
  authorities
• Being aware of the source of your beliefs and
  opinions
• Decisions made by questioning, analyzing, and
  evaluating to distinguish between fact and
  opinion

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Choices and Democracy
Researching the credibility of authorities is an
ongoing personal responsibility and a necessary
task to support a democracy.
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What is Intuition?

• A way of knowing without thought
• Physiological or emotional cues in a
  decision-making process (gut feeling)
• Insight without information
• Inner guidance
• A wordless sense of something being correct or
  incorrect

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• Ambiguity
• Uncertainty
• Realizing that you cannot know what is true or
  correct

• Clarity
• Seeing the big picture
• Understanding the inter-relationship of many
  perspectives all at once

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Integrated Choices

• Combines critical thinking (informed choices)
  with intuition
• Balances the head with the heart
• Choices made with self-awareness and
  self-responsibility
• Considers how the choice will impact others as
  well as yourself