The longer I’ve been involved in rider training, the more I have come to realise that a focus on the purely mechanical side of riding (the use of the brakes, the throttle, the gears, balance and steering etc) is more or less useless without a full understanding of how, where, when and why those skills should be used. In short, mechanical skills determine what a rider can do but mental skills determine what a rider will do — and whether they do it at the right time, for the right reason, in the right place. This thinking aligns with the use of outcome, performance and process goals from sports psychology and contemporary thinking on workload management, stress and attentional control. We just need to make it mainstream in riding and driving.
Using goals to defeat anxiety
Some time ago, a rider came online and posted a tale of woe about his regular commute. It was, it seemed, all going horribly wrong. After a couple of years of relatively trouble-free riding, he been badly scared by some near misses in the past few weeks and was seriously thinking of giving up biking altogether as “too dangerous”.
OK, so let’s ask a question. Is riding really dangerous? Well, if we simply look at the comparative figures for different modes of transport then riding a motorcycle is around 30 to 40 times more likely to end in a fatal crash than if we drive a car over the same distance.
However, in terms of how likely we are on an individual basis to be killed, then the risk is actually pretty low. For the last few years, the annual number of fatalities has hovered between 300 and 350. Still too many but given there are anything between one and two million active powered two-wheeler riders, the risk’s not that extreme. A bit of perspective always helps when it comes to risk.
But even so, it’s a good idea to tilt the odds somewhat to our side, and we can do that in a number of ways. Once more, I’m going to dip into Sports Psychology by talking about outcome goals, performance goals and process goals.
Our overall ‘outcome goal’ represents the big picture and in this case it’s to get to work and to return home again. Our ‘performance goal’ is how we’re going to achieve that and we might say it’s to maintain situational awareness and an effective risk management strategy over the whole of the ride. But how do we reach our performance goal? How do we break our journey down into manageable, bite-sized chunks?
Think about a batsman in cricket. His outcome goal is probably to help his team post a big score, and his performance goal might be to make one hundred runs. But stood at the crease when the bowling is good and it’s hard to stay in, let alone score runs, that goal’s a long way off. It’s easy for it to see impossibly far off, rather like getting home safely seemed to the worried rider.
How would the batsman cope with the pressure. One way is to set PROCESS GOALS. These are the small steps via interim goals we take to move step-by-step towards our performance and outcome goals. The batsman might decide first of all to survive until the first bowling change which brings on a weaker bowler. Having achieved that, he might decide that he will aim to stay put for the first ten overs. And having made it that far he might start to aim to score ten runs as his next goal. Then another ten. Then ten more. (If I’d known about this technique myself, my-best ever batting score in quite a few years of playing cricket might have exceeded 19!)
So how can we transfer that to riding? Well, if we’re on a regular ride which is getting on top of us, we can break it down into sections. Reaching the first major junction. Getting out of the 30 limit. Reaching the motorway. Getting off the motorway again. Negotiating the rural roads to get home. Whatever represents your own journey.
The important points are that process goals are entirely under our control and they break down a task that might appear overwhelming when view in toto, into smaller and much more achievable chunks where we can focus on specific aspects of each task – maybe negotiating a busy cross roads, dealing with a known slippery corner, finding our way around a complex roundabout. At each stage, we mentally reboot for the next section of the journey.
Viewed one at a time as individual tasks, an overwhelming outcome goal suddenly seem much more achievable.