Here’s a question for you: Would you rather take the bad road or the good road? The answer is rhetorical and self-evident. Here’s another question: How frequently do you take the bad road? If you’re the least bit human, your answer is probably “With more regularity than I would like.”

“Fork in the road” is a metaphor I use with clients to illustrate that they can choose how they think, the emotions they experience, how they behave, and how they act on and react to their world. Too often, people take the bad road without awareness. They don’t even realize they took the bad road, nor do they see the option to take the good road.

The bad road is bad because it causes us to react in ways that don’t serve us well. The good road is good because we respond in ways that nourish our souls and enrich our lives. The 10 most common bad roads many of us take are as follows:

Assuming you know that the good road is good and the bad road is bad, why would you continually take the bad road? It is a simple, but not easy, choice. It’s simple because, of course, we all want to take the good road. But it’s not easy because there are three forces, all of which are unconscious, that propel us down the bad road before we even have time to make a choice.

Our primitive instincts, emotions, and reactions have been perfected over 250,000,000 years since living creatures first crawled out of the primordial muck. These instincts, rooted in our primitive brain, served all living beings well for eons. But over the last several thousand years, these instincts can now do more harm than good.

Second, most of us acquire psychological “baggage” that may have protected us from some perceived threat when were young yet leads to dysfunction in adulthood. Psychological baggage involves ways of reacting that are unhealthy and potentially destructive. Examples of psychological........

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