How to Avoid the Rock on the Road

Staring is a mistake.

Perhaps the most critical thing you can learn to save your life if riding a motorcycle is how to avoid the rock in the road. Hit it, and you are dead.

Every instructor will tell you to look where you want to go, not where you are afraid you will go. Look around the rock, the path to miss it. Ironically, there is usually far more safe space on either side than the rock itself, yet what do amateurs do? They stare at the rock… a mistake.

The same is true for corners. Corners get more riders than rocks. The thing about a corner is you don’t want to ride into the apex but through the apex to the exit. Amateur riders tend to start at the apex and blow right through the turn. Ouch.

Ever jumped a horse over a fence? Those who do know they must look at the other side, not the fence. I am not sure what the horse looks at, but my guess is that if they are a jumper, they, too, are looking at the landing area, not the obstacle.

How does this play out in life? Focus on what you want. One of the brilliant pieces of neuroscience that allows humans to achieve is that we are given the ability to focus. The human mind cannot hold two opposing thoughts at the same time. We cannot see the rock and the way around it simultaneously. It is either one or the other. And we can train ourselves to focus on the outcome, not the obstacle.

It starts with attitude. Most humans, due to a lack of formal training and the dominance of the media to promote negativity, tend to have a negative attitude. We tend to focus more on our fears than on our fantastic future. We are in the habit of obsessing over the what-ifs. What if I fail? What if I look bad? What if they reject me? What if I hit the rock? We tend to be glass-half-empty versus glass-half-full.

“Our altitude is determined by our attitude.” – Zig Ziglar

We believe that focusing on the negative prevents us from making mistakes. Actually, all it does is paralyze us. We are deer in headlights, frozen by fear. No action is action, action that results in no growth, no change, no success. When we combine this with the natural ambition we are born with, we get locked up in frustration, our foot nailed to the floor.  

“Too often our Wanter works, but our Getter is broken”. -Again, Zig Ziglar.

How do we get our Getter to work so we can move off “dead” center and make progress towards our goals? Train your brain to believe in your fantastic future. Train it through spaced repetition of that future, spaced repetition of the way around, the exit of the turn, and the other side of the fence.

Another huge gift we have been given is the gift of learning. We can train our brain to believe in anything…literally anything. Even as an adult. Look at all the crazy things that grown, educated adults have learned to believe in, from fake moon landings to the earth is flat. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

When you and I were six days old, we didn’t believe in anything but our Mommy, which is innate. We learned to believe in everything we have come to know as true today. Learning is who we are.  Let’s just focus on learning to align beliefs with our goals.

We learn in two ways: 

1. Based on experience, actual, undeniable results. 
2. Affirmations, which are statements, true or not, that have been consistently and enthusiastically voiced initially by others and then repeated to ourselves by us.
   
   

You can probably see the chicken and the egg dilemma here. Which comes first, the results or the affirmations?Affirmations always come first. We learn to believe something, and we then act in accordance, producing results which verify our beliefs, over and over and over again.

We can move from allowing everyone else in the world, our parents, clergy, teachers, influencers, and the media creating our beliefs, to doing it ourselves based on what we need to believe. We do so by hijacking the process and taking control of creating the affirmations ourselves based on what we need to believe in order to do the work to achieve what we want.

The affirmations that work the best are drafted in first person, present tense, or I AM statements. Let’s say you want to learn to believe in yourself to increase your confidence and optimism. You could create  affirmations like “I AM smart and powerful. I AM confident and optimistic. I AM focused and productive. I AM worthy of success. I AM making progress every day.”

The second stage of building beliefs is to build them around what you need to be doing every day to slay the dragons. These are action affirmations like:

“I AM working out every day. I AM eating clean and fresh every meal. I AM drinking eight full glasses or more of filtered water every day. I AM connecting with new people every day to network my way to progress. I AM offering my product or service to qualified buyers every day. I AM following up with people every day.  I AM knocking out my To-Do list every day.”

If you would like a shortcut to crafting brilliant affirmations in an instant, just tell ChatGPT AI what it is you want to Be or Do or Have, and ask it for first-person, present-tense affirmations, and you can have hundreds in seconds.

Of course, having affirmations and hearing them are sometimes worlds apart. The most important affirmations you can have are those that have you reading, hearing, and visualizing them many times each day. That is where 99% fall down, for the simple reason that we are asking someone who is NOT an action-oriented person to be one before the affirmations take hold.

“The Catch-22 of Self Motivation is one has to get motivated to… get motivated.” -Richard Bliss Brooke

I used to be a $3.05-an-hour chicken chopper with a 1.9 GPA in high school. My beliefs sucked. I changed…one affirmation at a time. You can too. Start now. “I AM motivated to get motivated.”

If we can learn to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy and then learn to believe they are not, we can learn to believe in ourselves and our dreams.