Driving Development Driver's Handbook: Index
The whole of the Driver's Handbook is about effective driving. So what is effective driving? And, for that matter, what is it not? Some sort of definition would be useful as a starting point.
Put simply, effective driving is driving that is safe, efficient and enjoyable - whatever the road, traffic or weather conditions, or the vehicle being driven.
So let's define safety, efficiency and enjoyment...
Driving is very probably the most risky thing you do.
Road collisions are the major cause of accidental death in Britain, claiming around 3,500 lives every year. A further 300,000 people - the population of a city - are injured, 45,000 of them seriously. And for every road injury there are about thirteen other incidents involving motor insurance claims - one every eight seconds. Plus all the minor bumps and scrapes that insurance companies never hear about.
Even in industries regarded as high risk, such as those that use explosives and dangerous chemicals, employees are at greatest risk when driving on the road. A recent analysis of occupational risk concluded that a business driver who covers more than 30,000 miles per year stands a greater chance of dying in an accident at work than a coal miner does.
Being involved in road crashes is not the only risk that drivers run. Driving stress can have serious health implications over the long term. There is mounting evidence that more people die or become disabled as a result of driving stress than from being hurt in crashes.
Chapter 2.4 Stress management presents the magnitude and nature of the risks in driving stress.
It is impossible to eliminate all risk from driving. You could be involved in a freak accident such as the road collapsing under your car (it happens!). Or you could be the victim of some maniac who decides to use his car as a weapon. But the proportion of risk on the road over which you have no control is very small.
The vast majority of risk on the road arises from human error. In fact, human error is a significant factor in 95% of all "accidents". In other words, they are not really accidents at all but the results of unsafe human behaviour. This is risk that you can manage, not only by minimising human error in your own driving but also by making allowance for error in other people's driving.
It could be said that there are three types of drivers:
Effective drivers are found in the third group.
Numerous strategies for managing risk are set out in this Driver's Handbook. However, strategies and techniques are not enough in themselves to guarantee safe driving. A certain attitude is also essential - the attitude that safety is important.
Considering that the motor car is supposed to be a mechanical labour-saving device it's amazing how much energy some drivers expend when driving. They thrash around with the gear lever, jump about on the pedals, and constantly saw at the steering wheel. Then there's all the nervous and emotional energy they pour into their "communications" with other drivers.
Effective drivers are efficient - with efficiency defined as maximum output for minimum input. Everything they do has a purpose or a reason; there are no redundant actions. And their actions are carried out with maximum economy of effort. Their movements appear smooth and elegant.
This efficiency extends to the vehicle. Effective drivers have mechanical sympathy. They handle the controls delicately, with feel and co-ordination that keeps wear and tear to a minimum. And they often complete journeys at higher average speeds while using less fuel than other drivers in identical cars.
Apart from making sense and being comfortable, driving efficiently contributes to safety, as inefficient driving is tiring... which leads to fatigue... which leads to loss of concentration, misjudgement or falling asleep at the wheel.
The dangers of fatigue and how to avoid them are covered in chapter 2.3 Energy management.
Driving is efficient when it happens naturally, with the minimum of conscious effort. Driving is not efficient when it feels artificial and forced.
That means that efficient - and effective - driving is tailored to your individual needs and preferences, rather than conforming to some standardised idea of what is "correct". But don't get the idea that effective driving is "doing your own thing" at other road users' expense. Far from it; effective drivers have a highly developed sense of the part they play in the traffic system, and often adapt their behaviour to accommodate other road users, including those who are far less competent or aware than themselves.
Considering how much time you spend driving, you might as well enjoy it. Effective drivers do. Fortunately, driving has the capacity to be an enjoyable activity.
Extensive studies have been done in order to understand the nature of enjoyment. It's been found that, unlike the experience of pleasure which is often passive, enjoyment is always tied to some sort of activity. We experience enjoyment through activities that:
When we become absorbed in such activities our sense of time often changes and we forget about our concerns and worries. All sorts of different activities can generate enjoyment; driving is one of the most often quoted and easily accessible.
You don't have to be in an exotic car on quiet roads in beautiful surroundings to enjoy driving. Driving an ordinary car in everyday traffic conditions can be challenging, absorbing and enjoyable. It's what you make of it. The more you put in, the more you get out. There's a great deal of satisfaction to be gained from performing as well as you are able. And even more enjoyment in doing it better.
In effective driving, the enjoyment extends beyond the driver to others. Being a passenger in a car that's being driven effectively is an enjoyable experience. And other road users can enjoy the consideration and courtesies extended by the effective driver.
It doesn't follow that drivers who claim they've never had an accident have mastered effective driving. They may have caused other people's accidents. They may have been storing up stress and damaging their own health. They may have subjected the vehicles they drive to unnecessary wear and tear. They may have been miserable most of the time. And their passengers may not feel entirely relaxed and confident in the drivers' abilities.
Similarly, effective driving is more than the ability to produce a "correct" performance in order to pass various driving tests. There are many "advanced drivers" who hardly ever have a really nice drive. They might, for example, have nagging, critical voices in their heads that never give them a moment's peace. Or they might exhibit a self-righteousness that affects their relationships with other road users.
Effective driving is a habit. As Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Being more effective in your driving is largely a matter of developing appropriate habits.
By the same token, ineffective driving is a habit. Crashing is a habit. Statistics reveal that any driver who crashed last year is three times more likely to crash this year than a driver who didn't crash last year. If the driver crashed as a result of excess speed he is nine times more likely to crash again. And drivers tend to repeat the same kinds of crashes - for example, running into the back of other vehicles.
The power of habits lies in the fact that they're what you naturally do when you don't consciously try to do something else. If you attempt to change your driving superficially, by applying a few new techniques but without changing your basic driving habits, the change won't last long.
And how do you change basic habits? By viewing driving through fresh eyes and developing new ways of seeing and thinking about the familiar. New behaviours and habits will follow your new thinking.
Changes you make in your driving will influence other activities and areas of your life: work, play, your relationships with others and so on. For example:
Perhaps you'd like to take a moment or two to think of some other connections between your driving and other areas of your life. Be aware of the wider benefits that will flow from developing your driving performance.
The study of effective drivers reveals that they perform competently on three distinct levels:
These three levels or layers form the structure of effective driving (and the structure of the Driver's Handbook).
At the core level you manage your personal state - that is, your physical, mental and emotional state. Being in a fit state to drive is fundamental to effective driving. No amount of knowledge or skill will allow you to drive safely if, for example, you're on the verge of falling asleep or distracted by being in a highly charged emotional state.
The strategies of effective personal state management are presented in Part 2.
At the next level you manage your vehicle. In order to perform effectively, driver and vehicle must function together as an efficient system.
Vehicle management consists of:
The strategies of effective vehicle management are presented in Part 3.
At the outer level you manage your behaviour in the road and traffic environment.
Road and traffic management encompasses the skills and strategies that you use in order to:
The strategies of effective road and traffic management are presented in Part 4.
Looking separately at each of the levels of effective driving is a convenient way of presenting the levels in theory. However, you can't attend separately to the different levels in practice. When you're driving, you're functioning on all levels simultaneously. And your performance at each level affects your performance at the other two levels.
Let's consider some examples of these interrelationships between the levels:
Traditionally, driver training tends to focus on vehicle control and road procedures (the middle and outer levels), as though they are all that matters. The core level of managing your personal state tends to be ignored or taken for granted. Yet it is the core level!
Driving Development plugs the hole left by traditional driver training and enables you to develop your driving performance on all levels.
Consider the structure of effective driving.
On which level is your performance strongest? On which is it weakest?
What does your instinct tell you?
What does your driving record indicate?
What sort of risk might arise from any imbalance that you detect?
The key elements of effective driving are general principles that are part of, or influence, your entire driving performance, rather than specific skills that you apply in particular situations. They are presented in this chapter under the main headings of:
Their treatment here is necessarily very brief. The purpose of the chapter is to underline the fundamental importance and the essential contribution to effective driving of these key elements.
Responsibility is the answer to a riddle - What can be taken but never given? Responsibility can only be taken or accepted; it can never be given or imposed by someone else.
Responsibility is inextricably linked with control.
When you're driving, you're in sole charge. You make the decisions on your own. The buck stops with you. Effective drivers accept that and take responsibility for everything they think, feel and do. Only then can they be fully in control of their own performance.
Of course, you're not in control of - and thus directly responsible for - everything that happens; other people and circumstances play their part too. But that doesn't prevent you from taking responsibility.
There's a great deal that you can be sure you are directly in control of. And responsible for.
Where it's difficult or impossible to determine to what degree you have control, you might as well act as though you're responsible for the lot. After all, you have to live with the outcomes and consequences.
Regardless of who's in control of what happens, you're in control of your response to every event. So you can take responsibility for that.
Responsibility is response-ability: your ability to choose your response. How you respond to any event is up to you. You can decide how it is going to affect you.
If a car pulls out of a side road just in front of you and you have to slow down to avoid colliding with it, you choose whether to get angry, to be frightened, to deal with it calmly or to respond in any other way. You choose - to the degree that you take responsibility. Taking full responsibility gives you the freedom to choose your response.
And what sort of responses do effective drivers choose? Whatever is most useful in helping them to get what they want. If they want a nice relaxed drive, they know that choosing to get wound up is a stupid response because it prevents them from getting what they want.
The Driving Stressbuster technique in chapter 2.4 Stress management provides a way of recognising how you might be preventing yourself from getting what you want, and of choosing a useful response to any event.
Avoiding responsibility is usually accompanied by blame. When they perform inadequately, many drivers blame other people, the circumstances or their vehicle for their own shortcomings. The other driver should have signalled, the road was icy, what a stupid place to put a bollard, or that old favourite, the car just skidded.
When you blame someone or something, you're effectively saying: "I'm not responsible, the responsibility is over there." In denying responsibility you give control to other people or the circumstances. And because the responsibility and control lies elsewhere, there's no reason for you to improve anything. So avoiding responsibility tends to go hand in hand with poor performance. It also inevitably brings with it feelings of powerlessness. And stress.
As chapter 2.4 Stress management shows, the essence of stress management is to take responsibility for, and control of, your actions and responses.
In contrast, effective drivers are too busy taking responsibility to bother with blame. For them, blame is pointless and counterproductive. When they come across an inadequacy in their own performance, they recognise it as such, turn the spotlight on themselves and set about fixing it.
An effective driving performance requires a high level of awareness. Awareness of what? Awareness of the information collected by your senses. This might be information about the outside world - how it looks, sounds and feels. Or it might be information about the inside world of your own mind and body - tension in your muscles, the position of your limbs, how you're moving, what you're thinking, what emotions you're experiencing, and so on.
There is a limit to how much information a human being can take in and process. Studies show that we can handle a maximum of only seven different bits of information at any single moment. Therefore, in the interests of maximising awareness, it's important to make the best use of this limited amount of information.
If the number of bits of information is limited, it's vital that you make the best use of each bit. You do this by having senses that are sensitive and "open", and that provide you with high quality information.
This is not the norm. Most drivers operate at a low level of sensory awareness, with low quality information. For example, a typical driver's awareness of his car's steering feel may extend no further than noticing that the steering wheel wriggles and vibrates a little - if he even notices that much. For the effective driver, with more finely tuned awareness, the information is of far higher quality. From the subtle variations in the vibrations, movements and resistance that he feels, this driver obtains a great deal of information about the grip between the tyres and the road, the cornering forces, the nature of the road surface, the behaviour of the car's suspension and so forth. He is then able to use this information to perform at a far higher level of competence and precision.
Effective performers "fine tune" their senses through appropriate exercises and by attending to finer and finer details of the sensations within their performance. They also use whatever aids may increase sensitivity. For example, effective drivers with less than perfect eyesight maximise their awareness by using spectacles or contact lenses which perfectly match their current corrective needs.
Chapter 2.1 The senses and sensitivity describes some ways in which sensory awareness can be enhanced.
Another way of making the best use of limited information is by choosing the best bits to be aware of. The ability to select the information most relevant to the task tends to develop with experience. Drivers are less likely to have accidents as they become more experienced largely because they learn to be more aware of what matters. Inexperienced drivers, on the other hand, might be trying to attend to lots of information but they are less discriminating and more haphazard in their selection.
Experience can't be relied on, however, to come up with an intelligent selection system. There are plenty of drivers with years of practice in selecting loads of irrelevant information. With all that practice they've become very good at it. Effective drivers don't leave it to chance. They make use of strategies that help them to select appropriate information in an organised manner.
There are many such strategies described in Part 4: Road and traffic management. See, for example, chapters 4.1 Observation and 4.6 Bends.
Concentration is precisely what it says - the ability to concentrate attention. To focus awareness. To pinpoint it. On what matters. And to hold it there. The opposite of concentration is diffusion, in which awareness is scattered randomly, and flits and wanders.
It's often said that concentration is the key to high quality performance. It is. Many driver trainers are fond of saying that concentration is essential for safe driving. It is. Yet there seems to be little understanding (by either trainers or their clients) of what concentration really is, or how it is achieved. Consequently, many drivers have acquired the notion that concentration is something that only happens when you try to do it, when you force it. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Concentration happens naturally when you become fascinated by something in your awareness. You don't have to try. In fact, trying spoils concentration because it prevents it from being natural and spontaneous.
The enemies of concentration are anxiety and boredom. When you become anxious, your awareness is drawn inwards by the tension you experience; it gets pulled away from whatever you want to concentrate on. Once you're bored, no matter how hard you try it's virtually impossible to concentrate. Your awareness naturally wanders about, in an effort to seek out something more interesting.
Notice how your own ability to concentrate varies, both according to the object of your attention and the effort you put into it.
How much difficulty do you have in concentrating on watching a brilliant film? How hard do you have to try to concentrate?
And how well do you concentrate when you try to concentrate on something that you have little interest in?
Effective drivers maintain concentration in three ways.
Firstly, they have chosen to have the most useful attitude that leads naturally to raised awareness and relaxed concentration - curiosity. They're curious about everything going on around and within them.
Secondly, they continually explore ever finer distinctions and details in their awareness. They do this by means of self-coaching techniques, such as are used extensively in Driving Development.
What happens when you focus your attention on your right foot? What do you notice about the fit of your shoe or the texture of your sock? Where, exactly, is there pressure against your skin, and how does it vary? Is your foot warmer or cooler than other parts of your body? What temperature variation do you notice across your foot? What else do you notice?
Your experience has just demonstrated that even your own foot can hold your concentrated attention when you become curious about it. And for as long as you ask questions that require focused and detailed awareness to produce answers.
Thirdly, effective drivers maintain an optimum level of stimulation by balancing challenge and skills. If an activity is too challenging for your skills, you experience anxiety which creates tension and interferes with your ability to concentrate. And if the activity provides too little challenge for your level of skill, it won't hold your attention; you get bored and lose concentration.
When drivers find themselves out of the concentration zone and experiencing anxiety they can restore balance by reducing the level of challenge, increasing their level of skill or both. However, when the level of challenge lies in the conditions or circumstances (as it often does) you have no way to reduce it other than choosing to avoid those conditions. This may not be practical. On the other hand, you have complete personal control over your level of skill. You can choose to increase your level of skill to meet the level of challenge. For example, if you feel anxious when driving on ice, it may not be practical to stay at home through much of the winter but you could learn to drive effectively on ice. How do you think Scandinavians manage?
In what sort of driving conditions or circumstances do you experience anxiety? The anxiety that you feel is very probably giving you clear feedback that the level of challenge is too high for your level of skill.
What can you do, if anything, to reduce the level of challenge? How practical is that? What problems might you create by doing that?
What can you do to increase the level of your skill? Notice that you have much more personal control over correcting the imbalance at this end.
As your driving skills develop, you need a higher level of challenge to maintain optimum concentration. The more skilled you are, the more likely you are to get bored. You need to create challenges to stay in the optimum concentration zone. One way you can do that is by demanding from yourself ever greater precision in your car control. You might, for example, set yourself the challenge of exactly matching your speed to lower speed limits without touching the brakes, or of changing lanes on a motorway without touching any cats-eyes. Anything will do as long as you have to concentrate to meet the challenge.
Sometimes, drivers maintain their interest and concentration by deliberately taking risks. It doesn't necessarily mean they're reckless by nature; their motivation is to stay in the concentration zone. They've simply chosen inappropriate challenges to stay there.
Do you ever find yourself creating challenges that involve taking risks? If so, what sort of challenges are they? What sort of risks do they generate?
What else could you do that is equally challenging for your skills and that requires as much concentration but doesn't generate risk?
Humans have a natural - and primitive - tendency to concern themselves with their immediate surroundings and very short time spans. In driving, this can easily lead to frustrations or misinterpretations and misjudgements, which may be dangerous. Effective driving requires expanded awareness of space and time. Taking a big picture or long term view of a situation often raises awareness of its real nature and the part the driver plays in that. It allows you to appreciate the system you're in.
Consider an analogy:
Suppose you filled a funnel with ball bearings. The spout of the funnel allows a stream of ball bearings to emerge in single file. You can see that it's the size of the spout that determines the rate at which ball bearings exit, not the number of ball bearings stacked in the top. And you know that they will all drop through eventually. You might even guess how long it will take by comparing the exit rate with the estimated number of ball bearings piled in the top. You know all this because you can easily hold the whole system - of space and time - in your awareness.
Now move in really close. Put your eye to the rim of the funnel and look inside. Pick one ball bearing and watch it very closely, perhaps with a magnifying glass. Imagine that you are that ball bearing, just sitting there in the stack. From this perspective you don't seem to be moving. Nothing's moving around you. You're stuck. No, wait a moment. We shifted a bit. Damn, now we're stuck again. You can't see what's holding us up. You're beginning to get frustrated out of your tiny little ball bearing mind.
Does this sound familiar? When you were last in a motorway traffic jam where the road was narrowed to one lane, how far did your awareness extend?
Did you get the big picture in order to be aware of the whole system? Even if you couldn't see the "spout", you probably could see signs that would allow you to construct an image of where it was. Having been through these things before, you'd know the likely rate of flow in the constriction: single file at 50mph or so. And you'd know that it would take as long as it takes to get through, regardless of what you chose to think.
Or were you sitting there, "stuck", looking at all the ball bearings around you?
So how effective was your awareness in that situation?
Getting the big picture makes an enormous difference to the experience of stress. See chapter 2.4 Stress management.
For an example of being aware of time within a long-term context, see The "fill the gap" myth in chapter 4.2 Space and speed.
Effective driving often involves using awareness of the future to act intelligently in the present. Effective drivers do this mostly by thinking visually, continuously running "mental movies" of possible or likely future events. They project their awareness into the future. In contrast, many drivers seem to concern themselves only with what's happening to them right now. Consequently, they often don't appreciate hazards until they're in real danger - by which time it may be too late.
Recent research on the human brain suggests that the difference has much to do with which parts of their brains drivers use. People who are better able to think in the future actually make much more use of regions at the front of the brain. Foresight literally uses the forebrain. It's also been found that anyone can increase their use of certain areas of the brain simply by choosing to engage in those activities that use those parts of the brain, just like exercising certain muscle groups in the gym.
For more on visual thinking see Visualisation and Anticipation in chapter 4.1 Observation.
Various barriers to awareness arise from one's personal state. Hence the importance of personal state management at the core of effective driving.
For example, your level of awareness is in proportion to your level of physical energy. As you become fatigued your level of awareness diminishes, like a torch getting dimmer as the battery runs down.
For advice on maintaining a high level of awareness by managing your energy level see chapter 2.3 Energy management.
Emotions are another major barrier to awareness. The more emotional your state, the more your awareness turns inward and the less awareness you have of your surroundings - as depicted in the phrase "blind rage". Effective driving requires emotional detachment - the ability to get on with the job without being sucked into emotional responses such as anger or fear.
For advice on detaching from emotional responses see chapter 2.4 Stress management.
The commonest barriers of all to full and clear awareness are mental ones. Which brings us to the third key element of effective driving...
Mental models are the images, assumptions and meanings that we carry in our minds about ourselves, other people and the world in general. They are absolutely vital to our ability to function in the world. Without them we would have no way of coding what we have learned, and everything we encounter would seem completely new and strange to us. Our mental models enable us to make sense of the world.
Without mental models it would be utterly impossible to drive. A car would make no sense to you. You wouldn't know what it was or what it did. This doesn't happen because you have mental models of cars, how they work, what you do to drive them and so on, all stored in your mind and available to you at any time. When you see a road sign it means something to you because you compare it with a mental model of the sign with a meaning attached.
The key point to grasp about mental models is that they are our constructions of the world, not the way the world really is. We never experience the world directly. We experience it through our awareness, which is filtered through our mental models. Differences between mental models explain how two people can witness the same event and describe it differently - they pay attention to different details and give them different meaning.
Effective drivers continually reflect upon, clarify and improve their mental models, and observe how these models shape their decisions and actions on the road. What counts is what works. If changing their mind works more effectively, effective drivers will change their mind.
As Shakespeare said: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
It's not what happens to you but how you respond to what happens that determines the nature of your experience and the effectiveness of your performance. How you respond - what you think, feel and do - is determined by the meaning you assign to an event. Good and bad are meanings - not events. You create meanings. The meanings you create may serve you well. Or they may get you into all sorts of trouble.
The major influences on the meaning you make of the world are:
If you see a pint glass with half a pint of beer in it, is it half full or half empty? The first part of that question gives the situation, the second part gives two alternative ways in which you might interpret the situation. Which you choose depends on your point of view (at the time).
In order to look at anything you have to look from somewhere - from a point of view. Your point of view might be literally where you stand to look at something. It's also a kind of mental model: a basic filter on your awareness. When you look at the beer glass your awareness of it is influenced by the "emptiness" or "fullness" filter of your point of view.
So which way round do you see your world?
You choose your point of view. You're always free to choose an alternative point of view. Why might you want to? Because it might be more useful. When you change your point of view your experience of the world changes; you see things in a new light. This in turn changes your thinking and your performance.
Simply changing your point of view can make big differences to the effectiveness of your driving performance. Consider how your point of view affects how you negotiate a congested street full of obstructions. Many drivers concentrate on avoiding the obstructions; they focus on what they want to miss. Effective drivers tend to concentrate on driving through the spaces; they focus on what they want to hit. Two alternative points of view. You could choose either. In this case it just happens to be more useful to pay attention to the "emptiness" - because that's where you can go.
Notice the points of view you adopt when driving. What happens when you change them? For example:
Beliefs are whatever you hold to be true. Values are those special beliefs that you consider not only to be true but also important.
Beliefs and values are enormously powerful. All the wars in human history have been fought over beliefs and values. Similarly, the conflicts that arise between drivers and many of the stresses that drivers experience have their roots in drivers' beliefs and values.
You have all manner of beliefs about the nature of the world. For example, if you describe the weather as "good" or "bad" you're not talking about the weather, you're talking about your belief about the weather.
You have beliefs about other people - "He doesn't know what he's talking about", "She's a kind person", etc.
And you have beliefs about your own behaviour. All those statements like "I can...", "I can't...", "I should...", I shouldn't...", "I must..." and so on describe what you believe about what you think, feel and do.
Effective drivers question the usefulness of their beliefs. Beliefs are useful when they assist you to perform competently, and motivate you to develop your performance. They are not useful when they lead to incompetent performance, and prevent you from developing your performance.
In any activity, including driving, probably as much as 80% of the limitation on your performance is self-imposed. Not by physical ability. Not by intelligence. Not by talent. Those factors contribute to the other 20%. You impose the majority of the limitation on your performance through the limiting beliefs you hold. There's a sobering thought.
And what's the most limiting belief of all? That your beliefs are fixed and permanent. That you can't change your beliefs for more useful ones. If you believe that your beliefs represent the everlasting, unchanging, absolute TRUTH, you're stuck with them. You're stuck with the level of performance that those beliefs allow.
You only have to think about it for a moment to realise that you can and do change your beliefs.
What did you believe in the past - about the world, other people or yourself - that you don't believe now? Did truth change, or did you change your ideas about what is true?
What did you once believe you couldn't do, but now know (and believe) that you can do?
So beliefs can be changed. You've just remembered changing some.
What beliefs do you have that are worth changing? Which beliefs that you have now are limiting the effectiveness of your performance as a driver?
So what sort of useful, empowering beliefs about driving would you like to have instead?
Another exceedingly common - and limiting - belief is: "It's best to do what everybody else is doing." Or: "If everyone else is doing this, it must be OK." This is not a belief that effective performers hold. This is a belief held by sheep. It's an excuse to let someone else do the thinking - and not even question whether they are thinking.
When groups of people operate from this belief their collective performance tends to range from completely ineffective at worst to mediocre at best. You see it happening all the time on the road. For example, whole strings of vehicles follow each other too closely to allow safe stopping. The drivers are probably not even thinking about what they're doing but if they were, they'd be thinking: "If everyone else is doing this, it must be OK." Then one driver is caught napping by some unexpected event and there's a ten vehicle pile-up.
If you dare to be different by doing what you think is sensible and effective instead of just copying the flock of sheep, you can break the chain.
Next time you find yourself driving in a closely spaced line of cars, notice what happens when you leave a much bigger gap than everyone in front of you. Watch the car behind in your mirror. See how you influence its driver. Even if the gap behind is not as big as the gap you've left in front, you'll probably notice that it's considerably larger than the other gaps in the queue further ahead.
Similarly, when motorway traffic is congested you'll often see drivers braking one after another, as a "slow spot" travels backwards through the queue like a shock wave. Each driver watches only the vehicle ahead and copies its driver's behaviour. When one brakes, the one behind does the same a moment later. Notice what happens to the shock wave if you look well ahead and decelerate very gently without braking when you see brake lights well ahead. The shock wave will probably fizzle out in front of you and no drivers behind you will have to brake.
Your identity - that is, your sense of who you are - is a mental model, just like your points of view, your beliefs and your values are mental models. Your identity may be vitally important and very precious to you but it's still a model all the same. It's a construction of your mind. When you make identity statements like: "I'm a parent," "I'm an optimist," "I'm one of the lads" or whatever, you're describing some model in your mind that tells you who you are.
Just like other types of mental models, your identity is not fixed. Who you think you are at one time, in one place and in one set of circumstances is not necessarily who you think you are at another time, in another place and in another set of circumstances.
There are a couple of interesting and rather strange things about driving and identity.
Firstly, people tend to convert the activity of driving into an identity. People hardly ever say things like: "I can drive quite well," or "My driving is better than average." When you use terms like "can drive" or "my driving", you're describing a capability or an activity. You're talking about what you do. People might talk about their ability to speak a language or their cooking like that, but not usually their driving. Instead, most people say things like: "I'm a good driver." I AM a good DRIVER. This is who I am, described in terms of a person who does something.
The second interesting and strange thing is that many people undergo a marked personality change when they get behind the wheel. They take on a special identity when driving. They're different people when they're driving. In 1950 Walt Disney made a Goofy cartoon called Motor Mania. Goofy plays a Jekyll and Hyde character. When he's walking around on his hind legs he has the identity of Mr Walker, a courteous, gentle, person who wouldn't hurt a fly. As soon as he gets into his car he becomes Mr Wheeler, a fiendish beast. It's as funny today as it was in 1950 because audiences still see bits of themselves in Mr Walker and Mr Wheeler.
Of course, Mr Wheeler and Mr Walker are outrageously exaggerated. Even so, how much of these characters do you see in yourself, when you're driving and not driving?
To what extent do you have a special "driver" identity? What sort of person is he or she?
Do you know people who change their identity when they drive? What happens to them?
Many people are not comfortable with their identity as a driver. They don't like the person they become. It's a common cause of stress. For example, someone might regard himself (when not driving) as a very calm person who is always in control of his emotions. Yet he might find himself gnashing his teeth and pulling his hair out when stuck in a traffic jam. It's not the traffic jam that generates the stress that this person experiences. It the realisation that he is being this hopelessly out of control person who is so unlike the person he wants to be - and usually is. He quite literally has an identity crisis.
So what do effective drivers do about their identity as a driver? The same as they do with all their other mental models. They choose what works best, what's most useful. Now that presupposes that you can change your identity. You can and do. Changing yourself is something you do all the time. We have many selves, many different personalities that we play out like actors' roles. Don't you have a different identity in different roles, such as parent, child, sibling, spouse, employee, boss, team-mate, loner, etc.?
Are you choosing the most useful or appropriate identity when driving?
Have you simply got into the habit of being a particular driver, even though that driver is not who you really want to be?
Do you have another identity, another you who performs another role, who could take over and be better suited to the role of driver? Or would it be useful to create a new identity to do the driving?
Who do you really want to be when you're driving?
Whole sets of beliefs and values combine with particular identities to form attitudes. Drivers' attitudes shape their whole approach to driving, their whole experience of driving and the overall effectiveness of their driving performance.
For example, drivers with a timid and fearful attitude might:
Clearly, such an attitude is unlikely to produce an effective driving performance.
At the opposite end of the scale, drivers with an arrogant and aggressive attitude might:
This attitude is equally unlikely to produce an effective driving performance.
By choosing appropriate beliefs, values and identity, you can take on the attitudes of effective driving. So what sort of attitudes do produce an effective driving performance?
Flexibility, tolerance, patience, consideration and confidence, to name a few.
What sort of attitudes do you think produce effective driving? List as many as you can.
In order to hold each of these attitudes, what sort of beliefs, values and identity would you need to have?
To get new or changed mental models to stick, you need to link imagination with behaviour. You ask yourself: "If I did believe that about my driving or if I were that kind of driver, how would I behave?" Then simply adopt the behaviour, and over time notice how the behaviour and its underlying belief or identity feel closer to how you would like your driving to be.
Your mental models offer the highest leverage for change. So if you want to become a more effective driver, you can achieve much, much more in one fell swoop by, say, adopting a new sense of who you are when you drive, or by changing some fundamental belief that has been limiting your performance, than you can by adding a new skill to your repertoire.
Humans have an amazing capacity for stupidity. Stupidity is the inability of the brain to accept useful information, learn from it and act intelligently on it. Stupidity is not the exception; it's the general rule. It's as common in driving as in any other human activity.
Stupidity is like a form of self-hypnosis. We convince ourselves that this is the way it is, and the way it has to be. Even when we're faced with overwhelming evidence that what we're doing isn't working very well, we respond by doing more of the same even harder than before. We typically put enormous energy into resisting new, useful solutions - into avoiding the obvious.
The antidote to stupidity is flexibility and creativity. If what you're doing isn't working, do something different.
If some drivers are particularly effective in their performance, the question that now concerns us is: What do they do to achieve that level of performance? How do they develop their performance?
People who are effective in developing their performance may use all sorts of outwardly different methods - appropriate to the nature of their performance. Yet they all tend to use a similar underlying process. You can make rapid and substantial improvements in your own driving performance (or your performance in any other area) by adopting the same process.
The process of performance development has three parts or steps. Here we'll outline them briefly and then explore each step in some detail.
This process is deceptively simple but very powerful. The key is to hold in your mind both where you are now and where you want to be. Then you feel naturally compelled to move from one to the other.
If you indulge in dreaming about your desired outcome but never take stock of where you actually are, you won't feel inclined to do anything. That's just wishful thinking.
On the other hand, if you become obsessed with your current reality and never look at the possibilities beyond it, you remain stuck where you are. Nothing changes.
It's awareness of the gap that drives the action that develops your performance.
There's nothing unusual or amazing about this. Exactly the same awareness of the gap between what you want and what you've got drives everyday actions. As an example, consider the action of filling a glass with water. You hold a mental vision of the glass containing the amount of water you want (your desired outcome) and, simultaneously, you see the actual contents of the glass (the current reality). The gap between the two drives your action of pouring water into the glass. You keep on taking action to fill the glass until what you have matches what you want.
This three-part process forms the basis of the self-coaching that helps you to develop each aspect of your driving. Many of the self-coaching exercises in the Driver's Handbook are intended to raise your awareness of:
The process as it is presented on the following pages deals with your whole driving performance. The big picture. You might think that it would be easier to focus on just one small aspect of your driving at a time, as happens in the self-coaching exercises scattered throughout the Driver's Handbook. The purpose of getting the big picture first is that you'll then know where to focus your efforts - on which small aspects - to get maximum results.
The first step consists of giving the fullest, most clearly defined answer you can to the question: What do you want? Or in this case, more specifically: What do you want driving to be like?
What do you want? is a question that's rarely asked. Many people - especially trainers and teachers - are very keen to tell you how you should be doing something but never bother to find out whether you actually want the end result.
In fact, this question is so unusual, most people don't know how to answer it. They often put self-imposed limitations on their answers or even answer a different question altogether. So, in order to get full benefit from step 1, here are some simple but important guidelines:
Focus on what you want, not what you don't want. Focusing on what you don't want is like driving with your eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror - you know what you're moving away from but you don't know where you're going.
In practice - because of the way the mind works - when you try to imagine what you don't want, your thinking is automatically drawn to the very thing you want to avoid.
Try it for yourself. Don't think of blue. What comes to mind immediately? Even if you subsequently think of another colour, you think of blue first so that you know what you're not supposed to think of. On the other hand, suppose you want to think of red. What happens then? Without difficulty, you focus directly on what you do want.
Consider what you want, not the process of getting it. The how comes later. In getting any outcome you may have to do what you don't yet know or haven't yet done.
Very often people limit their desired outcomes to those that are achievable within their current abilities. That's plain daft. If you really wanted it and you were capable of doing it, you would have already done it by now. The whole point of the exercise is to set up an outcome that compels you to expand your abilities or create new ones in order to get it.
It's important to answer the question: What do you want? Focus on your performance. External circumstances and conditions are just there. You can only control what you do. Wanting every day to be sunny and all roads to be clear of traffic is just wishful thinking. The question is: What do you want your driving performance to be like in any conditions you encounter?
Bearing the above guidelines in mind, let your imagination have free rein in forming a compelling vision of effective driving. Everyone has their own idea of what effective driving is; make sure that your vision reflects what you want, not some standardised concept.
How clear does your vision of your desired outcome need to be? Clear enough that you want to have it, and to recognise it when you get it?
You'll need a pen and paper, your imagination and a few minutes for quiet contemplation.
Imagine that a miracle has occurred and your driving performance has now become exactly as you want it to be. Your driving performance now perfectly matches your idea of totally effective driving. There are absolutely no restrictions on your performance. You can have any skills, feelings or attitudes you want. So what would that be like?
Take your time and immerse yourself in your ideal driving performance. Take a drive in your imagination. Make sure you're completely inside the experience. See everything around you in full depth, clarity and colour. Hear the sounds in rich surround stereo. Feel the movement of the car. Notice how your hands and feet move on the controls. And as you feel the controls, notice how the car responds to your actions.
Be aware of your emotions as you drive - the emotions that you want to experience. Notice how you feel as you negotiate hazards on the road. See other road users around you and notice how you respond to them.
Imagine driving effectively in a wide range of driving conditions. Be sure to include and experience fully those conditions in which you most want to drive effectively. Perhaps in winter weather, at night or in heavy traffic. Take the time to experience a number of different driving situations.
What would it be like to ride as a passenger in this car - the car that you're driving? Imagine that you're in the passenger seat, watching yourself driving. Notice your posture as you drive, and how you're holding the wheel. Notice how relaxed and in control you, the driver, appear to be. As a passenger, feel how smooth the drive is and how relaxed and confident in the driver's abilities you feel.
How does your driving appear to other road users? Take a driver's eye-view from another vehicle or watch through the eyes of a pedestrian at the roadside.
As you continue to enjoy imagining your ideal effective driving performance, record whatever you notice about it by writing a list of key words or phrases - such as patient, relaxed, total awareness, delicate touch, lots of space, or whatever best describes it. List the qualities you possess as this effective driver, the skills you're using, the nature of the experience (for yourself and others) and the attitudes you hold. Be sure to include mental, emotional and physical states as well as abilities. Revisit any conditions or situations to note any special characteristics (such as how relaxed you are when driving on ice). The longer your list, the richer your description of your desired outcome.
Now you might like to think of some people whose driving you admire. They might be known to you personally or be types of drivers like, say, expert chauffeurs or top racing drivers. Imagine how they would perform in similar situations. What qualities can you take from their performance that add to yours? Add them to your list.
If you have any difficulty in forming a vision of your desired outcome in your imagination, you could build up both the vision and your list in stages, coming back to it again and again, experimenting with different options and discovering more about what you want. The fuller and richer you make your vision of what you want effective driving to be like, the more you will naturally be drawn towards it.
Often the consequential benefits of developing your performance are more compelling than the enhanced performance itself. The purpose of the next activity is to bring into your awareness the ways in which your life will be enhanced by becoming a more effective driver, and an understanding of what you really want. It puts effective driving into perspective: not as an end in itself, but a means to an end.
Imagine that you now have your ideal, effective driving performance. Having got that, what would that do for you? What more would you gain by being a really effective driver?
You probably find that many direct benefits come to mind. For example, it may occur to you that you would arrive at business meetings in a more relaxed state; that your family would be safer on the road; that your enhanced concentration and co-ordination would benefit your performance in your favourite sport; or that the reduction in stress would help you to be healthier and to live longer.
Take just one of the benefits that comes to mind and write it down.
Now ask yourself: And if I had (insert the benefit you've written) what would that bring me? Write down your answer.
Again ask: And if I had (insert the last answer you wrote) what would that bring me? Write down this answer.
Keep asking what having each answer would bring you until you seem to have reached the level at which there's no further answer, or you keep coming up with answers already on your list.
When you've worked through the sequence for one immediate benefit, repeat the process for other benefits. You may find that a number of apparently dissimilar benefits ultimately lead you to the same final answer.
As you ask yourself these questions, you may realise that what you really want from driving is better served by a different approach to driving. For example, if you really want to be very calm and peaceful, could your vision of driving be calmer? If you want to feel in control of your life, will the approach to driving that you've envisioned allow you to experience a sense of being in complete control during every single second that you're driving. If an adjustment in your approach to driving seems appropriate, return to your vision of effective driving, imagine it in its more appropriate form and change your list of key words to match.
The best way to get a clear picture of the current reality is to compare your present driving performance, point for point, with your vision of your ideal effective driving performance.
The following activity is best carried out while you are actually driving. You might want to enlist the help of a passenger to read your list and to write down your ratings. Make sure they're your ratings, though, not your passenger's.
Consider each item on your written list of effective driving qualities in turn and rate on a scale from 1 to 10 (with 10 being exactly as it is in your ideal performance) how much of that quality you currently possess or demonstrate. Write (or have your passenger write) your rating next to each quality on the list.
Where possible do a practical assessment there and then. So, if the list has "ultra smooth gear changes," change gear a few times, up and down, and give yourself a rating. Say it's 7. Or you might be a bit more specific and put "8 changing up; 6 changing down".
You may not be able to do a practical comparison of some of the items on the list. Something like "totally relaxed on snow and ice" can't be checked practically in the summer. With these items cast your mind back to how you have performed in the past and rate your remembered performance against the ideal, desired performance.
When you've started to develop your driving performance and you're moving closer to your vision of your desired outcome, your current reality will change. So check your progress by returning periodically to your list of qualities and rate your current reality afresh. Ideally make each rating without reference to your previous rating. It's quite possible that some ratings may go down, either because you neglect some aspects of your driving while you pay attention to others, or because you become more objective and honest about your own driving.
Awareness of the gap between where you want to be and where you are now provides motivation to change. But change won't happen unless you do something! So step 3 is taking effective action to move you towards where you want to be.
There are various types of action that you might take. Some of the more effective types are:
Something that all these types of action have in common is that they give you choice and responsibility. Instruction is not on the list because it gives you neither of these.
The effectiveness of a performance is linked to the performer's level of awareness. Therefore it follows that raising your awareness is likely to make a substantial contribution to developing your driving performance.
The vital importance of awareness in driving is covered in chapter 1.3 Key elements of effective driving.
In fact it goes much further than that... Raising your awareness brings about automatic improvement in your performance.
The quality of your output - your behaviour - depends on the quality of your input - your awareness. As you bring more information and finer distinctions into your awareness, you automatically use this higher quality information to refine and expand your performance.
And how do you seek out higher quality information? By being guided to look for it. By directing and focusing your attention. This guidance may come from another person, from yourself or from an aid such as this book.
Your Driving Development Coach will ask questions specifically with the intention of focusing your attention and raising your awareness. You'll soon get into the habit of asking similar questions of yourself, and coach yourself to an ever higher level of awareness. And as you scan through the exercises in shaded boxes in the Driver's Handbook, you'll find a preponderance of words like: notice, be aware of, pay attention to, focus on, watch, see, listen, feel, and so on. They all have one purpose: to raise your awareness.
It's particularly valuable to raise your awareness of inner obstacles to your outer performance. Noticing things like muscular tension, negative emotions, limiting beliefs, inappropriate attitudes, irrational responses and so on, is the first step to changing them for something more useful.
For an example of using the awareness of self-generated blockages to change your behaviour and your experience of a situation, see The Driving Stressbuster in chapter 2.4 Stress management.
Common sense wisdom tells you that if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. You can't expect a different result by doing the same old thing. So, if you want to move towards a desired outcome that's different from what you're doing now, you'll need to do at least a few things differently. But you may not know which things, or how to do them differently. One way to find out what works for you is to experiment.
Some people are wary of experimenting; they prefer to stick with the "safety" of what they know. The irony is that the patterns of behaviour they have become locked into may be anything but safe.
To experiment doesn't mean to try anything that comes to mind, with reckless abandon. Think of the way a scientist conducts an experiment: he takes sensible safety precautions and changes just one item or condition at a time. Proper experimenting is a controlled process.
Another feature of genuine experimenting is a lack of attachment to the results. When you make changes in your driving, sometimes you'll be aware that they move you towards your desired outcome, sometimes they seem to make no difference, and sometimes you'll see that you're moving away from what you want. Whatever result you get, it's all valuable feedback. You get maximum value from experimenting if you simply notice what results you get from each action. If you get attached to results, you may want to "stick" with the first thing that moves you in the direction you want (and thus fail to find even more effective actions) or you might get disheartened the first time you move away from your desired end result and give up experimenting.
Many experiments are suggested in this Driver's Handbook. Try them and find out what happens for you. Similarly, your Driving Development Coach may suggest some experiments. Being encouraged to experiment is very different from being told what you must or should do.
We all make mistakes. That's simply a fact of life. Yet many people delude themselves when it comes to mistakes in driving. They believe that only other people make mistakes on the road. It's never their fault. They're always doing the right thing. Big mistake. Drivers who adopt such a blinkered attitude towards mistakes never learn from them.
Sweeping mistakes under the carpet and trying to forget about them only hinders the development of your driving performance. Your mistakes contain within them the potential to provide you with extremely valuable feedback and learning. So pull them out into the full light of day, examine them carefully and discover what there is to learn.
Many of the exercises in the Driver's Handbook are of this nature. They may ask you to remember a near miss or a situation that you believe you handled poorly. Only by re-experiencing the event can you then ask yourself valuable questions such as: "What danger signs did you ignore?" "How could you have predicted the other driver's actions?" and, most importantly, "Given the same set of circumstances, what would you now do differently in order to bring about a better outcome?"
In developing your driving performance, or any other kind of performance, there's no point in reinventing the wheel. If you observe effective performers in action, you can model your own performance on theirs (at least as a starting point). This process usually produces better and quicker results than trying to follow a set of instructions, or trial and error.
A sequence of verbal or written instructions is precisely that - a sequence, one thing at a time. Very few performances work like that. They usually involve doing a number of things at the same time. The advantage of observing a human model is that you can absorb the model in total through your awareness, and then imitate it without a load of (interfering) intellectual thinking. For example, before you first rode a bicycle you watched other people riding bikes; you knew that it was possible and you had a fair idea of what was involved. You had an image in your mind. If you hadn't had the starting point of being able to imitate a cyclist, learning to ride would have taken much longer than it did.
When you travel in a car with an effective driver you not only see a visual image of the performance but also hear and feel it. By soaking up that performance in all your senses, you'll be surprised at how much your own performance improves without conscious effort.
The other side of the coin is that riding frequently with poor drivers can have a detrimental effect on your own performance. Even though you're aware of the shortcomings in their performance, you may nevertheless start to adopt some of the same behaviours without noticing.
Pareto's well-known law - or 80/20 rule - tells us that 20% of what we do produces 80% of the results, while 80% of what we do produces only 20% of the results. It seems to apply to most things in life - including any sort of performance. 80% of your effectiveness comes from 20% of your performance.
It follows, then, that the most efficient way to develop your driving performance is to find the 20% that really matters and to focus on improving that, leaving the other 80% to sort itself out at your convenience.
So how do you know where to focus your efforts in improving your driving performance?
You can start by looking at your list of your desired effective driving qualities and your current performance ratings. The biggest gaps between what you want and what you've got contain within them the greatest potential for improvement.
Your Driving Development Coach can help you to identify the (often very simple) changes that will make the biggest difference to the effectiveness of your driving performance.
And as you read this Driver's Handbook, you'll increase your understanding of those aspects of your driving that really matter.
The function of your Driving Development Coach is to assist and accelerate the process of performance development described in this chapter, by helping you to raise your awareness, to discover new choices and by encouraging you to take responsibility for your own development. The coach's job is definitely not to teach you how to drive.
In his best-selling book Coaching for Performance, John Whitmore defines coaching like this:
Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.