Turn Insight Into Action: ProactiveChange.com/habits

Breeding good and bad habits

An experiment was started 40-some years ago by a Russian scientist. From a sample of rats, he separated the tamer ones from the more aggressive ones, and he bred them selectively in order to accentuate the differences.

Has this worked? A New York Times article quotes a researcher: “Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that’s what these two strains of rat are like.” The mild ones are cuddly and want to be petted. The wild ones are ferocious and scream when they see visitors.

The goal of the experiment was to recreate, over a relatively short period of time, the process through which wild animals were tamed by humans.

You may wonder what this has to do with "breeding good and bad habits".

Think of this story as two “before – after” pictures. In the “before” picture, is a homogeneous population of rats. In the “after” picture, we see two vastly different populations, as different from each other as day is from night. All of this happened within a relatively small time span.

If you just see the “before” and “after” pictures, you may be puzzled as to why rats from the same initial stock ended up so different.

The explanation: This difference is the result of a series of decisions. For each successive generation, when it came time to breeding, the researchers adopted a consistent strategy: wilder with wilder, milder with milder.

Now, I’d like to use this story as a metaphor for how we reinforce habits. Time after time, when confronted with a choice, we make the same decision. We’re often not conscious that we are making a decision; not conscious that there even are options available. We automatically opt for the “default” mode. And, the more we do so, the more strongly entrenched the “default” mode.

When I work on this with clients, I think of what I’m doing as using a slow motion replay. This way, it becomes easier to see where there are forks in the roads, where it is possible to proceed other than in “default” mode.

You can be more proactive once you become aware of choices, and of the consequences of these choices.

Self-Leadership: a proactive alternative to self-discipline