Breed out the habits you don't want.

We all have habits that don't serve us. It is the primary reason why our lives do not happen exactly the way we want them to. We say and do things on a regular basis that are contrary to what we "want".  The energy and focus that should go into carefully crafting our lives with laser focus gets shifted to other things. And then many things that should be opportunities for us seem to become impossible obstacles.

But what can you do about it? It is just human nature, right?  I mean, everybody has bad habits. There are things like smoking, overeating, swearing like a sailor, drinking too much, not listening to others, and overspending our budget (if we even have a budget) just to name a few. There are nearly as many different bad habits as there are people to explore them.

Often, our habits and not our desires are what run our lives. Without these things our lives would take a very different course. But, again, what can you do about it? Nearly all of us have struggled and failed to break a habit at some point.  Why? What makes it so hard? Shouldn't it be just as simple as identifying behavior that we don't like and then acting differently?

Perhaps it should, but things don't work that way. It is simple psychology. When we are told we can't have a thing, our minds rebel and decide to want that thing more fervently than ever. This happens even if it was a thing we had only marginal interest in before. Our subconscious minds do not understand or accept the concept of not or don't. When we tell ourselves not to do a thing, as much as we'd like it to be different, we are telling ourselves to do that thing.

Also, nature abhors a vacuum. You can't just take something away and expect things to be fine. Are we doomed then to forever be surrounded by our bad habits? Not hardly. For the answer I turn to a lesson I learned in high school about genetics.

Within a few generations it is possible to completely breed out traits that one finds undesirable. It is a little more complicated than what I am about to present but here are the basics. Let's say that you want all future children from a specific gene pool to have light hair.

You start with person A who has had dark haired children in their family for many generations. Then there is person B whose lineage is all light haired people. In genetics, different traits, such as hair color are called alleles. When creating new life, traits are passed in pairs, sometimes one from the mother and one from the father and sometimes both from one parent. Each parent has a pair of traits passed from their parents before them.

We know that dark hair is a dominant trait and light hair is a recessive trait. So we will say the person with dark hair has their traits represented by the letters TT and the light haired person has their traits represented by the letters tt. From these two parents we have four possible combinations for this particular trait.  TT, Tt, tT and tt. Suppose that the child of these two parents inherits only the dominant  trait. They would be represented by TT. Now suppose they inherited only the recessive. Then their hair color would be represented by tt. The remaining two are what is called dominant recessive since they have the genetic material from both parents. In most cases the dominant recessive trait ends up being expressed as the dominant trait, in this case dark hair.  So our initial parents would have a 75 percent chance of children with dark hair and a 25 percent chance of children with light hair.

Any light haired children from this pairing would be showing the tt or recessive trait. Assuming we were to run this experiment with a large group of people we could pair up the children(once they grew up of course) with the recessive traits with others that had the dominant recessive traits. Then our grouping would look something like this.  Initial pairings. Tt, tt. Possible combinations that their children would have are,  Tt,Tt,tt,tt. With this grouping you end up with a 50 percent chance of either light or dark hair and even any children with dark hair would still be dominant recessives.

At this point it is possible to take those second generation recessives, people who have light hair and had at least one parent with light hair and breed them with other second generation recessives and be nearly one hundred percent likely to end up with light haired offspring. The alleles tt and tt only allow for the recessive trait in future generations.

Now what does this mean for our bad habits? We can't just eliminate them. Our bad habits are dominant traits. When we try to etch them out of our lives we just ingrain them further and further, unless we introduce something new. You really can't just stop smoking. You have to start something, to fill the void left by the lack of the bad habit.

The good habit becomes our "recessive" trait, something that at first we might not do if we don't force ourselves to. But over time that dominant trait begins to give way and then our inclination is towards the dominant recessive. When we focus on it we can make the recessive show through, but left to our own devices the dominant will shine. Eventually, if we work at it long enough, we breed out the dominant trait until all that is left is the recessive and then we have a new habit, a good one.

The best role model

What is a role model? A role model is a person that has a trait or collection of traits that we admire. They have in their life things that we would like to have in our own.

Some of the most obvious examples of role models would be celebrities, and wealthy people. Most of us would like to have enough money to be able to have the freedom to do what we want when we want. Rich people have that so we admire, desire and in some ways pay homage to them. Likewise sports icons are the best at what they do. We want to be like them so we dress like them, style our hair like they do and do what we can to be as much like them as possible, even if we aren't so good at the thing we actually admire them for.

The same thing happens with movie stars. We see traits in either the actor themselves or the characters that they portray that we want and we strive to be just like them in one or more ways. Musicians are the same way. There is something about your favorite musician that you envy. It might be their charismatic personality, an awesome voice, or simply their record sales, but there is something about them that you wish was in your life.

There are more different role models than there are enviable traits to emulate. In fact, in some way, every person is a role model for at least one other person. Whether you are a sibling, parent, teacher, friend, lover,confidante, or co-worker, other people look up to you, maybe in one way, perhaps in many.

This is especially so where children are concerned. They are like little sponges that absorb everything they see and hear. Even if they do not understand what is going on. What they see and hear becomes part of what they believe is normal and right.They often have no frame of reference to compare a person's actions to.

Unless you are completely alone, all the time, other people interact with you and see what kind of person you are by the things that you say and do. We show others by what we say and do and how we go about doing it what we think is right and what we think is wrong. The things that we do and the things that we put up with show others what is right and acceptable to do. And the things that we do not do and that we will not put up with are the things that we are showing others, just by our way of being, is wrong and not acceptable.

We need to be on our best behavior all the time. No that's not quite right. We need to be our best behaviors, all the time. The former statement implies that it is just an act. The latter shows that our behavior is a reflection of who we are.

The reason we need to be the very best role models we can possibly be is two-fold. First, always doing your best, is the only way to make sure that you get the most and the best out of life. And second, it leads all of the people that are going to follow you, whether you want them to or not, down the right path.