Take Me to Your Leader

Is there anything that you do, with unusual passion or with irresistible habitual regularity, that is bad for you? If so, then I believe we can call this thing a vice. A vice has different definitions, some of them referring to what is moral or legal, but for our purposes, we will define vice as something you do despite the fact that you know it is bad for you. It hurts you in some way, or takes something away from some other priority of yours.

Say you shop for expensive shoes and bags. That is not necessarily a vice. It is a preference, a hobby or even an obsession for some people. But if your shoe/bag/shopping habit makes you late with your rent or forces you to only afford .99 cent meals at the fast food window for a month, well, now it’s a vice. A potentially stylish habit gone ugly.

If this thing you do with unusual passion or irresistible habitual regularity detracts from your life--or your health, your goals and desires, your daily happiness or your relationships--and is so powerful of an attraction that all your other preferences, desires and obsessions pale in comparison, then we can call it your Alpha Vice.

The One Thing you can’t resist. The One Thing, which, if were you to rid yourself of it, would make the biggest difference once it was gone.

Not everyone has one of these, by the way. You could drink wine every day like I do and not experience any (known or suspected) negative effects on the rest of your life. You could smoke cigarettes and gamble away a thousand dollars once a year on New Year’s Eve, which is not great for you, but if it causes you no ongoing harm, it’s just a minor vice. On January 2nd you are tired as you do your new annual savings budget, and then you move on. If that’s really all you’ve got, don’t sweat it, those are small vice potatoes. We all have a few quirky obsessions. And fun treats on occasion should kept in our lives unless our aim is to live in Dullsville.

On the other hand, something like (the ever popular) sugar is a vice that often becomes more intrusive and derailing than the examples above. It feels more serious. It’s different--and you know it. I’ll use sweets as our main example in the section below.

Pick One Thing: Your Alpha Vice

Most of us have heard about the Alpha Male. In the animal kingdom he’s the wolf that leads the pack. He is king. He has earned his spot among his peers, and he is also “elected” in a way, to continue to hold this position. He will be challenged occasionally, and eventually there will be a successor who is stronger, with more stamina, more skills or more savvy. No matter what, though, Alpha Male, like Alpha Vice, rules. Until he is ousted or otherwise gone.

We should note, however, that Alpha Male is generally good for the pack, and Alpha Vice, as we’ve learned, is decidedly not. Your Alpha Vice has earned its spot by appealing to you above and beyond all reason, and then, is continually re-elected by you. But not out of respect: you allow your Alpha Vice into power out of weakness. That’s a rough position, because you’re the very one that has to put forth the challenge to oust your Vice. It’s hard to replace the Alpha. It takes strength, stamina, skills, savvy.

For some people, a prime example of an Alpha Vice is sugar. For example, perhaps there is sugar in your every day, in the form of sweets and colas, and then several times a day, and then in place of other healthier things you would also enjoy eating or drinking. Then it becomes sugar that you actively seek out when you have none available, as in rushing to a gas station get to a candy bar before picking someone up, or spending extra money you didn’t have at the bakery but it looked so good…then weight gain, or dental issues, or the jitters and the crashes, or heartburn…you do sugar in the face of the rising diabetes epidemic or even knowing that you are at higher risk due to your family history….

…until the frustrating realization that you have, indeed, appointed Sugar to be Leader among your eating Habits. If sugar (or convenience food or smoking or gossiping or the internet or porn or booze or an eating disorder or laziness or shopping or yelling at people, or a house filled with 18 cats, etc.) RULES, then you have yourself an Alpha Vice.

Time for a Coup
So, what will it bring you, to oust your Alpha Vice?

Vices can take over some of your better judgment, so you get that back. You get the satisfaction of knowing you are using your better judgment every time you do. Don’t underestimate what you get out of achieving something you set out to accomplish, or of being wise with your own choices. It feels good--and it will be more powerful than your weak choice on the side of the vice, for sure.

Alpha Vices hurt you, and not just once in a while. You get to stop doing things that make you feel worse, or that you know will be a problem when they catch up with you. You get to quit doing something that makes you feel bad about yourself, or that stops you from being your best self.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall and the more space they leave. You get to completely change your perspective and regular way of life just by giving up your Alpha Vice, because by the very nature of an Alpha Vice, you're being led into a certain way of being and a certain set of actions. Now you are in charge of filling in your To-Do and Way-to-Be Lists.

Everything good needs replacing. (That's Dave Matthews Band, in case it sounds familiar.) You get to replace your Alpha Vice with deliberate choices from a world of infinite possibilities! What will you do instead? How will that add to your life instead of take away from it?

Your mission at this point is to imagine the coup. Start some secret plans to oust your Alpha Vice and visualize how cool it’s going to be without it. Whether you’ll be saving calories or sugar grams or chemical additives or money or time or whatever, One Thing for sure is that you’ll be saving yourself the trouble of dealing with your Bad Leader.

Next time we talk, it will be about how to Kick One Thing… until then, prepare to fight!