CHOICE INSIGHTS

Written By Duane Nelson

2 IDEAS FROM ME

  • Understanding and aligning your daily life choices with the following insights is essential to living your best life in a way that matters most.

    • Uncertainty, imperfection, and impermanence are universal characteristics of the human experience. The practical reality is that you control the inputs, not the outcomes. Choosing to align your signature strengths with your highest values consistently over time increases the likelihood of peace, freedom, and joy.

    • Avoiding a difficult choice is a decision that reinforces hesitation as a habit through Hebbian Learning. Delaying the choice to regularly examine your beliefs, highest values, or key relationships can lead to decades of regret.

    • Your environment can override the willpower to choose wisely. Engineer your environment and relationships to make the “wise” choice the easy one.

    • Small choices regarding sleep, diet, exercise, focus, and conversations shape your life daily and establish the health and well-being required to make the best big choices.

    • Feelings, thoughts, and emotions are not choices. Your awareness and actions are. Pay attention to patterns over time and adjust your sails to align with your highest values.

    • Identity is built through repeated choices. Every action is a vote for the person you are becoming. Understanding impermanence leads to an understanding of suffering and your true nature.

    • Prioritizing “great” over “good” choices leads to an extraordinary life.

    • Choosing to discover your signature strengths, clarify your highest values, build an experimental mindset, and implement an atomic habit framework that aligns them all is the most important choice you will ever make.

    • Choose to focus your energy on what you can influence in the present moment, not the past or future. The present is the path to peace.

  • The choice you resist most is often the one with the highest payoff. In Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the choice you are avoiding “journey through the unknown cave of trials” generates internal resistance of fear through doubt, risk, and discomfort. The highest payoff is truth, growth, and a shot at the best version of yourself.

2 QUOTES FROM SAGES

  • “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”— Viktor E. Frankl

  • “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”— Gautama Buddha

1 QUESTION FOR YOU TO EXPLORE

  • What choice can you make today that would accelerate your progress toward your best life?

Namaste,

Duane Nelson

Duane Nelson

Ultrajourney Insight is an Anacortes Washington-based non-profit organization providing mindfulness & well-being services designed to ignite the adventure of a lifetime. The founder, Duane Nelson, is a writer, speaker, and teacher with four decades of parenting, wilderness, & international technology leadership. His professional insights come from chemical engineering and automation leadership at Philips, Intel, and Amazon. His adventure insights flow from ultramarathons, mountaineering, canyoneering, and adventure racing in Nepal, Alaska, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Mexico, British Columbia and Alberta.

https://ultrajourneyinsight.org
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EMOTIONAL WELLBEING