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 in my work with clients to illustrate to them that, in the face of frequently feeling helpless to change, they actually have choices in what they think, the emotions they experience, how they behave, and how they act on and react to their world. Too often, in my professional and personal experience, people take the bad road without awareness in two ways. First, they aren’t even aware that they turned down the bad road. Second, they aren’t aware that they had the option to take the good road because they didn’t even realize it was there.
The Bad Road
The bad road is bad because it darkens our thinking and emotions and causes us to act in ways that are ineffective, unproductive, impede the pursuit of our life goals, sabotage our relationships, and just plain make us unhappy. The good road is good because we think, feel, behave, and interact in ways that nourish our souls and enrich our lives. Though life can sometimes have multiple forks in the road, some good, some bad, some meh, for the sake of simplicity, let’s limit this discussion to just two forks. The ten most common forks in the road many of us face are:
- Unmotivated or determined
- Negative or positive
- Stressed or relaxed
- Distracted or focused
- Critical or supportive (of self or others)
- Cold or compassionate (of self or others)
- Destructive or healthy
- Unhappy or happy
- Alone or connected
- Worrying about the past/future or focusing on the present
- The list goes on
The next question that is begging to be asked is: Assuming you know that the good road is good, and the bad road is bad, why would you continually take the bad road? I see it as 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 forces, most of which are unconscious, that propel us down the road before we even have time to make a choice.
There are three unconscious forces that often drive us down a bad road. First, our primitive instincts, emotions, and reactions have been perfected through evolution that began more than 250,000,000 years ago when living creatures first crawled out of the primordial muck and walked on land. These instincts, rooted in our primitive brain, served all living beings well for eons. But because of the rapid advancements by humankind over the last several thousand years, these instincts can now do more harm than good.
Second, it seems that an unavoidable aspect of the human condition is that we all acquire “baggage” that may have protected us from some perceived threat when were young yet lead to dysfunction in adulthood. Psychological baggage involves ways of thinking, experiencing emotions, behaving, and interacting that are unhealthy and potentially destructive. Examples of psychological baggage include low self-esteem, perfectionism, fear of failure, need for control, need to please, and lack of assertiveness.
Third, our primitive instincts and psychological baggage can cause us to think, feel, and act the same with such frequency that they become ingrained in us as habits. These habits become so deeply wired into our brain circuitry that, when faced with situations that are similar to the ones in which they developed, we react impulsively with no conscious regard as to whether our reactions serve our best interests.
Additionally, we can’t take the good road if we simply don’t see the fork in the road and recognize the benefits of taking the good road. With no other options that we are aware of, we will always fall back on these three unconscious forces to guide us, usually down the bad road.
The Good Road
Though we may not see the fork in the road or be able to recognize the good road, the reality is that life is full of forks in the road offering better options than the bad road we often find ourselves on. Thankfully, our evolved brain, specifically, our pre-frontal cortex, has given us the capacity to recognize the bad road, see the fork in the road, and, ultimately, to choose to take the good road. This brain structure, which separates us from animals, is involved in “executive functioning” which enables us to weigh benefits and costs, consider short-term and long-term consequences, identify options, and, in the end, make deliberate choices on how we want to think, feel, behave, perform, and interact with others. Taking the good road requires that you engage your pre-frontal cortex and make thoughtful choices about which road is in your best interests.
Awareness. Awareness involves recognizing when you’ve veered onto a bad road. Red flags that can alert you to when you take a bad turn include:
- Negative and unhelpful thinking
- Unpleasant emotions
- Unhealthy behavior
- Poor effort
- Conflict with others
Awareness also includes your understanding why the road you are on is bad. Some basic criteria to follow include any road that makes you unhappy, unhealthy, unproductive, and disconnected from others. By having clarity on why the bad road is bad, you fuel your determination to get off the bad road as quickly as possible.
Another essential component of awareness is seeing the fork in the road and, in turn, the good road. There is no way you will leave the bad road until you see that you have an option.
You can also gird your motivation to get off the bad road by detailing why the good road is good. I encourage you to specify in great detail what makes the good road good. This level of analysis acts as a powerful rationale to halt your journey down the bad road and drive you to take the fork onto the good road. In a way, the more clear and compelling the rationale for taking the good road, the more power the pre-frontal cortex has to override the primitive brain.
Commitment. Once you clearly see the bad road for what it is and you see the benefits of taking the good road, you must marshal all of your psychological and emotional resources to propel you off the bad road and onto the good road. This is no small feat for several reasons. First, as noted above, our primitive instincts, emotions, and reactions have been guiding us for almost a quarter of a billion years. So, taking the good road requires a Herculean effort to override the strength of our primitive instincts. Second, our emotional baggage hasn’t been around quite as long, but our memory of said baggage is substantially closer and more acute. As a result, its proximity exerts considerable force over our psychology, emotions, and behavior. Third, our mental habits add fuel that takes you down the bad road through simple repetition. The more you go down the bad road, the easier it is to go down the bad road out of sheer habit.
This is when making a “consistent conscious commitment” at every opportunity is essential for you to get off the bad road. A consistent conscious commitment means being deliberate in choosing the good road, being fully committed to that choice, and making that committed choice at every opportunity.
Making this consistent conscious commitment has several essential benefits that will help you to take the good road. First, at a psychological level, it enhances your sense of control over a situation that had previously felt out of control. Second, it bolsters your determination to get off the bad road. Third, at a neuroanatomical level, you are activating your pre-frontal cortex which fuels this shift and, in doing so, you reduce the power of the unconscious forces I described above to continue to drag you down the bad road.
Persistence
Admittedly, even with this consistent conscious commitment, you may still not be able to get off the bad road immediately because the unconscious forces are strong and have been dominant for so long. At the same time, with each effort your conscious forces will gain strength and those unconscious forces will steadily lose their influence.
At some point as you persist in your effort, you will find that you, at some point, you will move from the bad road to the good road. This new experience will be self-reinforcing, in other words, taking the good road is, well, good. You will feel good, your thinking, emotions, behaviors, and interactions will be better, and, quite simply, you will be happier. Without realizing it you are slowly rewiring your brain to avoid the bad road all together. And with each fork in the road you take, the bad road will become less used and more overgrown until it is no longer navigable.
Gotta Have a Plan
You can’t wait till you next go down the bad road to decide what to do. In this situation, you can’t just stop and spend several minutes trying to engage your pre-frontal cortex and figuring out how you can take the good road. Often, life just doesn’t allow for such deliberations. Plus, your primitive brain will resist without all of its power.
To facilitate your getting off the bad road and taking the good road, I encourage you to make a plan for the next time you are faced with such a challenge. First, identify the common situations in which you take the bad road? Ask yourself questions such as when, where, with whom, and why you are pulled down the bad road. It’s easier to recognize and respond to a situation if you have already identified when it is likely to occur.
Next, make a plan that you can immediately implement to take the good road. It involves specifying what you want to think, say, and do when that situation arises next. This plan must be clearly defined and well practiced because it has to be faster off the line than primitive instincts, emotional baggage, and habits, all of which are well-trained sprinters who react instantaneously when the starting gun goes off.
I would also encourage you to visualize yourself taking the good road as often as you can. Visualization is a way to get more repetitions of seeing and feeling yourself in those “fork in the road” situations and taking the good road. When you then have your first encounter with the situation, you’ll have already begun to retrain your brain to see and take the fork in the road, so taking the good road in real life will be that much easier.
Lastly, when you experience that situation and are, in fact, able to leave the bad road and take the good road review how you did it to further ingrain what worked and then reward yourself for having done so. If you still weren’t able to take the good road, see if you can figure out why, make changes to your plan, and continue to be determined and resolved to take the good road the next time the opportunity arises. I’m confident that awareness, commitment, and persistence will ultimately prevail, and you will soon find the good road a joy to travel on.
