AMA with AMA: Answering YOUR questions!
A question about driving + reflections from a former driving instructor.
Dear Kula Diaries folks,
I hope you are having a beautiful week — thank you for joining me for our 35th (!!) ‘Ask Me Anything’ column. WOW! I can’t believe that I’ve been writing the Kula Diaries for well over half of a year now — I have loved all of it, so thank you all for being here… and for actively submitting your questions to The Kula Diaries Vault.
As a reminder, I do have coaching training, but I’m not a therapist — so please remember to seek professional help if needed, and always approach my answers from a place of curiosity. The words that I write in this column are my own feelings, advice and opinions. Feel free to take anything that works for you… and ditch anything that doesn’t. More than anything, trust yourself.
This week took on a life of its own… I started by answering a question about driving… and then I went into an impromptu piece about my (very) strong feelings about my responsibility as a safe driver. As somebody whose life was radically altered by an incident in a vehicle, I come from a place of great care and love for all of you who are reading this message today — and also for the other humans that sometimes occupy your vehicles.
So, without further adieu, let’s get started on our driving-themed AMA!
Dear AMA,
I’ve been having trouble getting motivated to study for a theory test and take driving lessons. It’s not just about motivation: there have also been some barriers outside of my control. I am wondering if you can help me think about how to use your “phone breakup protocol” but maybe in reverse… so rather than doing less of something, I’d be doing more of something. I’ve tried to think about the opportunities that having a license will afford but this still isn’t enough to get me motivated to study (I’ve been half-heartedly reviewing the material for over a year now, and I get bored easily). Is there something I haven’t considered that can help me?
I love driving. I love driving my car… and I adore driving my motorcycle. But beyond that, I have a pretty extensive driving history. I don’t think I’ve shared this before… but during my time as a BNSF Railroad Police Officer, I became a certified defensive driving instructor. I attended a very long and relatively intense course to become a certified instructor in the Smith System Driving Method — which is a driving course for experienced drivers. In my job as a BNSF Police officer, my shifts were around 10 hours long — and most of those hours were spent driving, sometimes in very heavy traffic… and other times, along rocky access roads to railroad tracks. During my Police Academy training, prior to working in Law Enforcement, I had to pass an EVOC course (Emergency Vehicle Operator Course) — which included a high-speed course, as well as a backing course. In my police academy class, I actually received the ‘Top Gun’ Award — the prize given to the cadet with the fastest time through the EVOC course with no flaws (i.e. hitting a cone).
I’m sharing all of this information to say that you have, oddly enough, come to the right place to ask a question about driving — because I have some pretty strong thoughts about driving (particularly safe driving)… and I really hope I can boost your confidence and provide some meaningful insight.
Your question reveals that you have a keen awareness of your lack of desire to start driving — particularly your mention of the word ‘motivation’. I’ve pondered the concept of motivation a lot — and I believe that I know why ‘motivation’ (by itself) often isn’t enough to inspire action. Motivation must be paired with the embodiment of a desired vision, or it is not effective. Currently, you likely see yourself as a non-driver… somebody who doesn’t drive and has very little interest in it (other than the instances when you’ve tried to argue for the benefits of driving). Sadly, no amount of ‘motivation’ is going to be able to circumvent your own internal vision of who you are when it concerns your relationship with driving. This is not bad news… in fact, this is fantastic news … because the only thing that you really need to do to get started… is change your vision.
I think you are right on track with focusing on the benefits of driving, but I’d recommend taking it a bit further: You need to begin to embody the NEW YOU… who drives. And, you don’t need to wait until you drive to embody this version of you… you need to start right now. I’d recommend that you take a few minutes out of each day and close your eyes so that you can visualize yourself as a driver. When I say ‘visualize’ — I want you to really see it. Envision yourself walking to your car — and even see all the details of the car you are driving (feel free to make it your dream automobile!). See the entire experience in 3D in your mind: open the door, sit down in the driver’s seat, buckle your seat belt, turn the key (or press the button — depending on how new the car is!), turn on your favorite music… and then watch yourself drive somewhere that you feel excited to go. Are you driving to a trailhead? To your favorite restaurant? To visit a friend? To go on a road trip that you’ve always imagined? See if you can really envision your perfect, ideal driving situation. If it’s available to you — you could even do this in a real car (minus the driving without a license part). Walk out to the car like you are about to head out on an adventure and sit in the front seat as if you are about to drive — then close your eyes and envision your perfect day of driving.
Next, take the time to write down your ideal scenario for taking and passing your driving test… either in the present tense or in the past tense. I very specifically recommend to avoid using future tense — because you are ‘pushing off’ the driving test into the future. So, if I were going to do this exercise for myself, it might look something like this (this one is written in past tense):
I remember when I passed my driving test! I felt inspired to study for the test, and I found a way to learn the material that worked for me. In fact, I actually ended up enjoying it — which surprised me. On the day that I took the driving test, I felt confident and excited — I showed up for the test, and passed it with flying colors. On the first day that I had my driver’s license I felt so proud and excited… and it felt really exhilarating to get behind the wheel for the first time as a licensed driver — I felt like the whole world had opened up for me, so I started planning my first road trip and started looking at maps to find new places that I could go and explore.
Once you’ve written this — feel free to add visuals (i.e. a photo of yourself and a car… anything that feels fun to you!), and then hang it in a place where you can see it and read it every day. You can even add photos of places you want to visit or things that you want to do with your new driver’s license. Mine might look like this:
After you’ve finished these exercises and focused on your ideal driving scenario — see if you can pinpoint the feelings you experienced while doing both of them. Did you feel a sense of freedom? A feeling of the infinite possibilities? A feeling of exploration and adventure? Pay attention to anything that arises — without judgement. If you notice any challenging emotions, see if you can observe those — and determine where they might be coming from. It’s completely normal to have fears or worries about driving. Is there anything you can say to yourself that would help soothe some of those fears? For me, if I find myself worrying or anxious, I will often bring myself back to my breath — and remind myself to be present… that my fears and worries are focused on imaginary things that haven’t happened and that, in this moment, I am OK. This is similar to the practice of meditation — the practice of coming back to the present.
As you notice the feelings that are in alignment with the experience of driving — I’d encourage you to focus most of your attention on those. What can you do right now in your life experience that will give you a feeling of freedom? Or a feeling of adventure and exploration? Or a feeling of infinite possibilities? Some things that come to mind for me are — going on a walk outside… trying something new… lying on the ground and looking at the stars… planning a trip… riding my bicycle or rollerblading. Without trying to force yourself to pick up your Driving Textbook… see if you can spend a few days focused on doing things that match the feeling of having the ability to drive.
While it’s easy to convince yourself that doing these simple steps has nothing to do with driving (because you haven’t even gotten behind the wheel of a car yet), I can assure you: you are doing a lot. You are shifting your energy from the energy of the version of you who does not drive… to the energy of the version of you who does drive. By combining a pleasant vision of yourself driving a car… and then allowing yourself to experience the feelings of it right now — you are sending a very powerful signal out into the universe that says, “I AM A DRIVER.” I can’t say what will happen next — but my best (educated) guess on what will happen (based on my own experience with this process) is that you will be inspired to a new way of approaching your study material… you will feel a desire to learn how to drive… and the way in which this happens will feel easy and effortless to you. You won’t have to force yourself into anything… and this will no longer be a matter of motivation. In short, you will become the version of you who drives … before you even drive. Shifting our energy is often the most challenging part of doing anything new — and my prediction is that the driving portion of your goal will actually be easy and enjoyable — because it will be in perfect alignment with this new version of you who has the world at their fingertips (or, at least, wherever four rubber tires can take you!).
Most importantly, I really hope that this is a beautiful experience for you! If you find yourself drifting into negative self-talk about driving … see if you can notice it, and redirect it. Instead of saying, “I’m not a person who drives”, see if you can say, “I drive safely and smoothly and I love the places I can go”, (or find a similar mantra that suits your needs). It is an amazing world that we live in where we can drive a vehicle to see new places… or to visit the people we care about. Some of my best experiences have been on road trips with my husband. I remember driving through Utah a few years ago… my husband was sound asleep in the passenger seat, and I was looking out over this remarkably beautiful desert with towers and rock formations in every direction — the colors in the sky were beautiful, and the light seemed to be hitting everything in a way that made the moment feel really magical. I was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape — and the chance to drive to such a unique place — that I started to cry. I felt so unbelievably lucky and grateful that I had the opportunity to travel in my own vehicle. I really believe that driving can be a wonderful, stress-free experience (more on that shortly) — and I hope that everybody gets to experience the joy and freedom that comes with driving on our beautiful planet.
The part in the AMA where I talk about safe driving because I really care about you and the people you love
Now, I’m going to go into the driver confessional for a moment. I was not always a safe driver. In fact, I was the type of driver that was very stressed out — I got mad at other drivers and thought that they were all terrible and, remarkably, every single one of them was always in my way. I had horrible driving habits: tailgating, speeding, and being aggressive. I never had road rage, but I often found myself feeling very stressed in complicated traffic situations, and I’d easily get angry… and then come home feeling angry after my commute. When I was given a gigantic police Tahoe as a Railroad Police Officer, my situation only got worse: now I was a bad driver with a superiority complex. As a police officer, I incorrectly believed that I was somehow, ‘better’ than other drivers on the road — and that everybody needed to get out of my way. I tailgated like it was a religion, and found myself feeling very stressed out, because I was always needing to hit my brakes or make evasive maneuvers to avoid collisions. “All of these other drivers SUCK!!”, would be my mantra, as I would speed off into the distance after swerving around them. I couldn’t believe that literally everybody except for me was such a horrible driver.
It never occurred to me that maybe my driving was the problem.
In 2014, I had the opportunity to become a certified instructor for The Smith System — which, as a previously mentioned, is a defensive driving course for advanced drivers. I went into this course with a bit of a chip on my shoulder — did I really need to learn how to do this, since I was already such a good driver? Maybe other people should be the ones taking the course. I could not have been more wrong.
I’m going to now give you the bitter pill that I had to swallow as I started to immerse myself in this relatively intense instructor certification:
How you drive determines whether or not the other drivers on the road can impact you with their actions.
That’s right folks. If you find yourself stressed out in traffic… annoyed at people who ‘cut you off’… needing to brake often… getting angry at people on the road… constantly complaining about other drivers…. I hate to be the bearer of this news, but: you are the problem.
When I initially heard this, I didn’t believe it. In fact, I got defensive and I was triggered … and wanted to argue my point. None of that helped me become a safer driver for myself or for other humans. The quicker you can let go of your driving ego, the better. If you need help, you can watch this story about my near death experience pre-Kula and remind yourself that your driving ego is not worth it:
If it stings a little bit to hear those words - it’s OK. I know how you feel… because I was the problem, too. And I had to look, very uncomfortably, at the fact that since I was 16 years old, I had taken no additional driver’s training (other than my high speed EVOC course) to help me become a safe driver. And, considering that I spent most of my driver’s ed course trying to throw pieces of chalk at a ceiling fan to see where it would shoot across the room… it’s safe to say that I didn’t remember much about things like maintaining a proper following distance. As my eyes began to open — I started to watch and see how my driving was placing me in situations where other drivers had the ability to anger me… and to put me at risk.
And so, I had to lay down my ‘I’m a good driver and everybody else sucks’ ego (which was hard to do)… and admit the truth: I was a terrible, unsafe and stressed out driver, and I was putting not only myself… but also people I cared about… and total strangers… at risk. I knew that something needed to change, and so I embraced the Smith System instructor course with an open mind and heart. I was ready for a new way of existing in my vehicle.
The Smith System Teaches 5 Keys, and the purpose of these 5 Keys is to give you three specific things: space, visibility and time. No longer would the goal of my driving be focused on getting around the ‘dumb drivers’ more quickly and preventing people from ‘cutting me off’. My entire focus would be centered on tactically driving in traffic so that my only goal was to maintain a space bubble around my vehicle. This means that I started driving with a 4 second following distance — even in heavy traffic. At first, I thought this would slow me down, but it actually made the drive smoother and more enjoyable. Initially, it was hard to resist the urge of ‘preventing’ other people from getting in front of me, but gradually, I let that go — and realized that my only goal was to place myself at a safety advantage. If somebody pulls in front of me? I just back off a little and get my space bubble back.
Suddenly, I was able to drive through dense traffic with no stress… no anger… no frustration. And, oddly enough, the drive was smooth and easy. I’d be in chaotic traffic situations, and I’d feel happy and peaceful. And, most surprisingly, all of those ‘horrible drivers’ that I used to be so angry about … they vanished. Why? Because I was focused on maintaining my own space cushion — so even if somebody did something a bit unpredictable or wonky, it never affected me because I had so much time to react. It was weird. I’d get home from work feeling happy and stress-free, because I was no longer experiencing a cortisol spike on my way home. My personal life improved, because I wasn’t always agitated or frustrated after going for a short drive. As I watched the other drivers around me, who were very clearly in the battle of their lives on the road, I felt like I was driving in a different reality than they were — and I was.
As I started teaching other co-workers the Smith System, I was deeply gratified by the experience of watching their own habits improve. A few years into my role as an instructor, somebody in another department reached out to me because a few of his employees were about to lose their jobs due to poor driving incidents at work. BNSF had installed ‘DriveCams’ in company vehicles to monitor employee driving habits — and several employees from another department were on probation due to aggressive and dangerous driving. Now, imagine if you will, a young, 5’3 BNSF Police woman showing up to teach five ‘Old Heads’ (a railroad term for the folks who had been around for awhile) how to drive better? Needless to say, they were not thrilled to be voluntold to take my class. When I walked into the classroom for the first portion of the course, one of them said, “You’re going to teach us how to drive? This is embarrassing.” Clearly, these men were expert drivers — just like I had been a few years earlier.
In the first drive portion of the day, my job was simply to observe these men and their driving habits: they were reckless, erratic, and aggressive … with a penchant for tailgating. I knew that I had my work cut out for me, and I was pretty excited to watch what happened. After distributing some of my now famous chocolate chip cookies as a peace offering… we got started. Over the course of the day, I watched these men open up to new ideas, as they began to accept the realization that they were the problem with their driving incidents. By the end of the day, all of the men were driving smoothly and effortlessly through heavy traffic with ease. A few weeks later, I received a card and gift in the mail from their supervisor: every single employee had been spared from losing their job, because all of their DriveCam incidents had stopped happening. They had changed their driving, and miraculously, they stopped having near collisions.
Why am I sharing all of this? Well, I often tell people that there are two very important things that happened to me while working as a Special Agent for BNSF Railway:
I met my husband, Aaron.
I learned how to drive safely, and it changed the course of my life forever.
I am not Mario Andretti — if you were to test me on precise car handling skills, I’d probably fail. Very few people on the road today have advanced or specialized driver training — and yet, when you ask people to rate themselves on a scale of 1-10… most people will rate themselves as a 9 or 10 on that scale. People are very defensive about the one thing that they have very little training in, save for some mediocre training when they were 16 years old. I had to admit to myself that I was not a good driver back in 2014. Sure, I had a lot of experience driving, but I was not good. I was not safe. I was stressed, angry and frustrated — and it was not healthy for me or the people I cared about.
I write a lot in The Kula Diaries about cultivating the energy of the life that you want to live — and this is exactly why changing my driving changed my life. When I was a stressed out driver… guess what the rest of my life felt like? It felt stressed… and busy… and a bit chaotic… and things never seemed to go my way. It felt like I was getting ‘cut off’ in life by a million different things, and the only thing that I could do was blame everybody else for my problems. The moment that I changed my driving, my entire life started to shift. Suddenly, I was peaceful behind the wheel — and do you know what? That peace started to ripple into other areas of my life too. I started doing things that I had never even considered before — I started meditating, I started a gratitude and appreciation practice… and, if you’ve read any of my earlier posts, you will know that my meditation and gratitude practice are what directly led me to the idea for Kula Cloth… and the courage to actually start the company.
So, as I discovered, driving is about being safe on the road — but it’s also about a lot more than that. If you could feel comfortable, confident, at ease and peaceful about driving — what could that attract into your life? It takes a lot of self-awareness to be able to look at something honestly and admit that it needs to change. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that letting go of my traffic frustrations was a critical piece of creating and cultivating the lifestyle that I wanted to live. Nobody says, “I want to feel stressed and hectic all the time!”, and yet, instead of looking within ourselves — it’s so much easier to blame those feelings on the things that we can’t control — the ‘other people’ out there who are ‘doing things’ to ruin our inner peace. I’ve discovered that giving that control to others is not something that I want to do — I don’t want to give anybody else the key to my own happiness and sense of stillness. That is something that I can maintain, whether I’m driving through the desert at sunset… or through downtown Seattle after a Seahawks game.
I learned to drive when I was 17 years old, which means that I’ve been driving for 26 years now. Oddly enough, I never wanted to drive, and my parents had to encourage me to get my learner’s permit. My first car was a 1980 Mercedes Benz 300D, which sounds a lot fancier than it was. The car was, essentially, a giant tank. I used to tell people jokingly, “Zero to 60 miles per hour? Yes.” As in, “Yes, it will do that… but not in a specified time frame.” On the first day that I got my driver’s license, I called my best friend Chrissie and told her to meet me the next day at 5am before she had to get ready to leave for school. Giddy, we hopped in the car and I drove both of us to a WaWa gas station to purchase a cheap, powered cappuccino from a machine. There was something so exhilarating and exciting about being able to go somewhere on my own — a sense of freedom that I had never experienced. I felt safe, happy and excited that day about driving — and sadly, I lost that connection to driving over the next few decades as my ego created a hardened crust around the experience of being in my car. Once I became an instructor, and chipped away at those old habits — I discovered that the joy was back again. The joy of driving to a new trailhead… or riding my motorcycle over the Cascade mountains… or taking my husband to our favorite restaurant… or watching the sunset on a road trip… or even driving through traffic and feeling a deep sense of peace. These are the moments when I understand what Lewis Carroll meant when he said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
Friends — I hope that my unsolicited driving advice has, at the very minimum, inspired you to explore your own relationship with driving. I’ve also been the passenger in a vehicle where the driver did have a problem with road rage, and it was horrifying. Please do what you need to do to keep yourself safe. If you do find driving to be a stressful activity, and you are able to take a defensive driving course — I highly recommend it. I’m not paid by Smith System to talk about any of this — in fact, my instructor certification expired after I left the railroad, so I am speaking from a place of genuinely practicing the system for over 10 years now. It changed my life, and other people deserve the same opportunity to see what happens when you can smooth out the stressful and jagged edges of your day. If you have any questions about driving, I’m happy to answer any of them — I know that it can be difficult to talk to folks about this, because people get very defensive. Ultimately, when we let go of the things that we often cling to most tightly — we experience the greatest opportunities for growth and abundance to flow into our lives.
Wishing you all safe travels and a beautiful ride through all areas of your life.
I’ve been so curious about the Smith Driving System since the first time I heard you mention it. Thanks for the link! Great advice and tips here!
You are an inspiration! You and… of course… PIZZA!