1. Conscious Choices: A Guide to Self-Directed Learning
Chapter Two
Choices:
Critical Thinking

2. 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.

3. Internal Situation
How thoughts and emotions interpret an event
External Situation
Actions, interactions, and behaviors in an event

4. Can you choose your thoughts and feelings?

5. 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

6. 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

7. The Process of Self-Change
Choice to Change
Awareness of the need to change
Plan to Change
Choice to Change
Choice to Change
GOAL
Effort to change
Errors & relapses
Choice to Change

8. 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.

9. Influenced Choices Unexamined assumptions
Beliefs based on hearsay or unsubstantiated opinions
Decisions based on the credibility of other people’s opinions or beliefs
Accepting unwarranted assertions as factual

10. 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

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

12. 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

13. Ambiguity Clarity 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

14. 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