Focus On What You Want. Not What You Fear.

If you ever take a race track driving course one of the key things you absolutely must learn to survive a high speed run is how to come out of a corner spin.

The racing instructor actually has a special button that forces you to lose control of the car in order to learn how to deal with it. Trainees are instructed to absolutely not look at the wall when they start losing control because it will steer them right into it. Instead they must focus on where they need the car to go to come out of the spin safely.

You start doing a few laps, and out of no where they hit the button. The driver panics, the car start sliding and what everyone does invariably is stare square at the wall that they don’t want to crash into. The instructor will often have to grab the driver’s helmet and physically force him to look at the track because the urge is so strong to look at that wall.

This is the reason that every year on flat, deserted highways motorists find ways to wrap their car around the one tree in a hundred miles.

The same is true of everything in our lives. When we focus on what we fear we tend to “steer” into it. Many of us navigate our life’s challenges in constant fear, stress and anxiety. This makes it much more difficult to get the best out of ourselves and actually accomplish the things we want. We rob ourselves of motivation and resourcefulness and replace it with crippling emotions. There is an old saying that says “The coward dies a thousands deaths, while the brave man only dies once.” It means when we focus on what we fear we actually experience all the negative emotions attached with that over and over again instead of only if it actually did happen.

Just like the car spinning out in a slide we cannot control all of our circumstances, but we can choose what to focus on in order to maximize our chances of success.