ex-webby

Well this will be my first Scooblog. Nothing serious just thought you might like to know what the purpose of life was.

For me the purpose of life is helping as many people as possible drive as safely as possible. Corny and true, sorry.

It all came about because I was nearly killed in a road accident that was not of my making. It involved some IT person (nothing personal) making a wrong turn and doing a u-ie. The first three people in the convoy going the other way went past happily and the fourth didn’t. They obviously didn’t see me coming and did the u-ie anyway. That was a long time ago back in 1990.

That event changed my life.

It nearly ended it.

I spent the next 8 years in road driver training; developing strategies that transformed fleet risk profiles. The product was fantastic, my motivation was fantastic and the client base was dreadful. Trust me, convincing company owners that their drivers needed training during the 1990’s was like pulling teeth out of hens. The marketing and sales effort almost bored the brains out of me. Well it did actually!

We had, indeed still have a product that was proved to reduce road risk by a factor of eight and I couldn’t sell it at a sensible price.

When BT took up the gauntlet and went into driver training after we had convinced them to do so. And then didn’t get the job of training them. I quit.

Actually I got a job training chassis engineers in the USA for a couple of summers. This was the making of me as a limit handling coach.

ex-webby

I had been studying applied psychology fairly seriously for some time and developed a fascination for the subject. It was one of the keys to creating successful coaching interventions that made the difference.

I thought I might share a few of these with you and hope we don’t get too blogged down by the process. – for goodness sake shout if we do!

Anyone who knows much about what I do knows that I have some little sayings that some people consider odd and that others just pass by easily. I call them slight of mouth patterns.

There is often a slight of mouth that makes a big difference to the meaning of a spoken sentence.

These slight of mouth patterns are generally spoken, they are not easily read, they are often un-grammatical (which suits me fine) and they are usually highly context specific.

I used to say things like,

“don’t hit the cones”,

and everyone did what they were told to do – to “hit the cones”, virtually to a man they ignored the “don’t”.

It’s like saying, “don’t think of blue elephants,”

Everyone can’t get the bloody things out of their heads when you say that.

It’s not that there’s not much room in your head because its full of blue elephants, rather that very few people don’t ever notice the word “don’t”.

In fact the human kind does not do negatives in the sense that they understand them. – You can’t go to Sainsbury’s with a shopping list outlining the things you don’t want!

How do you do, “not turn left”?

See what I mean?

Or do you hear what I mean?

In practice the success rate in avoiding cones goes up out of all proportion when I say things like, “Drive round the cones Brian, there’s a good thing”

How many of you have heard expressions like “Don’t Drop that tray”

Or “don’t Do such and such.” And your kids, spouse or whatever drops the tray, or does the such and such? It’s all because they don’t hear the negative bit in the sentence. The “Negative bits” are often the death sentence to something!

One of my favourite expressions is “Who you are is how you drive”.

And that’s another story all of it’s own…

What am I up to next then? A Whole week of limit handling training with a break in the middle for making some movies for a secret-weapon tyre that I can’t talk about yet. Then off to Sweden for a couple of weeks filming and teaching on frozen lakes and ice tracks in conjunction with Volvo Cars. – always a chortle never a chore.

Until next time..

Don