Are you crashing because you’re trying not to?

If you fixate on where you don’t want to go, you’ll end up there.

Once upon a time I set out on a misty morning for a ride in the Marin Headlands of San Francisco. I cycled across Golden Gate Bridge up to Hawk Hill and began a descent down steep roads. I sped up, got scared I’d not make the turn ahead, stared at the barrier and the steep drop behind it. The more I feared hitting it, the more I stared. The more I stared, the more I aimed where I did not want to go.

And so I got there.

I lost just blood and skin that day — it could have been much worse.

I realized later that by fixating on not hitting the barrier, I caused myself to hit the barrier.

In cycling and in life, your body follows where you look. Nothing wrong with seeing the barrier. Nothing wrong with seeing what can go wrong. But fixating on what can go wrong will make it so.

Fixation is resistance — it’s saying “no I must not think that” to whatever it is that you fear. But if we resist something, we just hold onto it more tightly. Think about what happens when you wake up in the middle of the night and resist being awake — that’s holding onto being awake. How easy is it to get back to sleep when you resist being awake?

The way out of this is to stop resisting. Put another way, you accept the possibility things can go wrong. When you allow for the possibility that things can go wrong, you release your mind to allow for the possibility that things can go right, and you have more agency.

If I had stopped resisting the thought that I might crash — instead of fighting it with stiff arms and a desperate gaze at the barrier — I could have released my attention to look at the road coming out of the turn. I could have released my white knuckled grip on the brakes, the same grip that sent me into a skid.

You can be fixated on how you might flub your presentation, or how bad the conversation will go when you have to fire someone, or how you might not perform well in bed. The list is limited only by your imagination.

The problem is never the fear, it’s the way we react to it by focusing on what can go wrong. How about next time you allow for the possibility that things can go wrong and they can also go right. When you release your resistance you get to choose what to do.

Here’s a fun take on fixation on a bike from one of my favorite Frasier episodes.

To less resistance and better turns,

Tom