Tag: mindset

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83. Using goals to defeat anxiety

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.

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73. Improving our riding – and coping with a block on self-development

The “Ladder of Learning” framework is a classic from teaching, but aligns well with rider development. But modern riders have new tools such as on-bike cameras and performance-tracking apps to allow objective looks at how they cope with the roads and develop skill at braking and leaning. Focused sessions targeting one skill at a time—the Salami Principle—remain highly effective as does deliberately broadening experience. A fresh challenge can reignite development, but remember that skill is never ‘complete’; each plateau is just the level ground before the next climb.

Improving our riding – and coping with a block on self-development

Riders can get stuck in their development. Some years back I took on a trainee who felt that his riding development had reached a plateau. He had several years of riding behind him after passing the bike test, and had starting on a course of advanced training. But after some initial improvement, the feedback being given to him after his observed rides wasn’t showing any further development. He knew there was more to learn – after all, that was what his observer was telling him – but his forward progress had stalled and he didn’t know why, nor how to resume forward development. His observer had been telling him he needed to develop some ‘gloss’ on his riding, but he felt he’d peaked. His enquiry email asked: “Is this kind of normal – learning a bit, levelling off for a while, learning a bit more, levelling off even more etc or am I right in thinking I’ll just never be better than I am now?” So here’s another question. Can we identify the barriers that stop our development in its tracks?

The first thing I’ll say is that ‘advanced’ training does not replace what we learned when we started out as a motorcyclist. The fact is that basic training teaches us 90% of the skills we’ll use 90% of the time. So post-test training supplements, but does not supplant, what would better be termed ‘core skills’. And if that’s the case, there should be a couple of obvious reasons for a levelling-off effect:

  • each new level of learning produces less-dramatic results because we’re increasingly ‘improving’ rather than ‘adding’ skills and knowledge- the improvements are ever more subtle

  • each new level of learning is usually harder work – we’ll only see results if we’re prepared to put in the effort and that may push us outside our comfort zone

Putting in the effort emphasises the need for practice. ‘PRACTICE makes PERMANENT’ (and not perfect). In other words, if we want ANY learning to stick, we need to keep going out and using what we learned. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a new language or riding a motorcycle round bends. It’s often LACK of practice that stalls development. It’s a point I make several times during one of my advanced motorcycle training courses, but I cannot make riders go out and practice.

Practice must also has to be targeted. Simply going out riding isn’t the answer, because it’s “the same day’s experience, experienced one thousand times”. We have to spend time working on what we learned.

So when progress has stalled, it may well be a failure to spend time working with the new skills.

Here’s something else to consider. Learning occurs in a series of sequential steps starting from the point where initially, we don’t even know what we don’t know.

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE: This is ’16er with a CBT on a scoot’ syndrome – not enough experience and not enough knowledge to know what we need to know.

CONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE: after a while, we begin to recognise we have issues and that we don’t know how to deal with it. This is roughly the level the DVSA hazard perception test aims at – the ability to click a button when a car might cause a SMIDSY collision, but no understanding of how or why it happens is needed, nor any strategy to deal with the problem.

CONSCIOUS COMPETENCE: maybe more experience or after training for a DVSA test pass, we’ve learning, but it’s still a ‘work-in-progress’ – we have to constantly remind ourselves to what to do. It’s good developmental stage, but it’s essentially still a ‘reactive’ one where we respond AFTER a hazard develops and prone to lapses where we forget.

UNCONSCIOUS COMPETENCE: ride long enough or take the short-cut of some post-test training and with a bit of luck our ability to read the road, analyse what we see, and respond to hazards has all become ‘proactive’ – we no longer have to think our way through problems, it’s become a smooth, well-practiced drill.

These four sequential steps are sometimes known as the ‘Ladder of Learning’.

The first two stages impose serious limitations on safety which is why basic training aims to push us straight into the third ‘conscious competence’ phase, and post-test training aims to take us beyond. The trouble is that learning is hard work. As we try out the new ideas or techniques, we’re consciously processing what we’re doing and using our real-time thinking brain in this way is exhausting. We simply can’t keep it up for long – it’s a real problem with day-long CBT training – and that can lead to two mistakes:

  1. trying too hard – just as with my own advanced coaching sessions, we’ll achieve far more from short practice sessions than by going out for long rides

  2. trying to do everything at once – tackle one thing at a time, it’s the way I teach riders and it’s the way I advise them to practice. I call it the Salami Principle. Why? Slices of salami eaten over time are delicious and digestible. But if we try to eat the whole thing at once, we’ll be sick. The same applies to skills – sliced up, we can practice and achieve the result we were looking for, attempt everything at once and we’ll be overwhelmed with the task.

And simply mastering any technique isn’t enough either. Longer term, we have to work to embed what we learned into our regular riding. Just ‘knowing’ what we should be doing isn’t enough. The moment I hear – as someone wrote on a forum recently – “I have to concentrate too hard when I’m riding advanced”, it means they haven’t worked at making the techniques so automatic that they have become an unconscious part of everyday riding technique. If we don’t USE it, we LOSE it.

What’s far less obvious is that once we get to the top of one particular ladder, we’ll be at the bottom of the next – there’s always something we don’t know. But of course we don’t know that. Another way our development can stall is if we only ever do the same riding with the same group of people or ride the same kinds of roads. With no new benchmarks, we’ll never discover if we need new skills – we’ll assume we’re good enough. If we want to continue to develop, we need to understand that the learning process doesn’t end.

So if we’re feeling comfortable with our riding, it could be time to push ourselves out of our comfort zone again, to head back to the level of conscious incompetence where we’re ready to learn new ideas and skills. And just possibly, a change of perspective is needed. Perhaps a Survival Skills advanced rider training course may be just the change you need to kick-start development again.

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72. Anger Management – dealing with road rage and red mist

This article explains the important distinction between red mist (self-induced risk-taking) and road rage (reaction to others) and the advice to recognise anger, avoid the victim mindset, and give control back to the reasoning part of the brain is entirely consistent with safety psychology. The core principle remains the same: control your response rather than the road, by anticipating situations that might provoke anger and giving our reasoning brain the opportunity to override instinctive reactions and avoid escalation.

Anger Management – dealing with road rage and red mist

From time to time I get asked if I have any solutions to what the issues known as ‘red mist’ and ‘road rage’. Of all the questions I’ve tried to answer, this one is probably the most difficult. Although my background is in science, I’m not a psychologist. Mostly what I’ve written here is what I know works for me on the occasions I feel myself getting a bit carried away with riding or acting aggressively if someone makes me angry. What I do know is the one thing we simply cannot do is let it take control. In particular, anger needs to be recognised for what it is – we are never far away from behaving like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. We never grow up, we just learn how to behave in public, yet there’s a limit to self-control. If we bottle anger up, it will simply build up until we ‘kick the dog’. Some unsuspecting and innocent party bears the brunt of OUR resentment.

First of all, we need to try to identify the problem. Whilst because ‘red mist’ and ‘road rage’ are both psychological states we might develop whilst riding, they are not the same.

Red mist is a state where we are no longer assessing risk realistically. Perhaps we begin to ride at higher speeds, pull off more overtakes, or corner with bigger lean angles than we would normally. Instead of this increasing our stress levels, as it would normally, we can actually get a ‘buzz’ from this kind of riding when everything seems to be ‘in tune’ and effortless. Maybe we begin to enjoy the thrill, maybe we start to justify our behaviour because we’re out to impress others – perhaps riding in a group, or even on an assessed ride. It’s a state that racers, and even professional drivers such as police or ambulance drivers can get fall into in pursuit of the ‘noble cause’ of responding to an emergency call. It’s something the professionals are warned about, but nobody tells the average rider how to look for the warning signs, we just get castigated when we fall into the trap.

Road Rage is a somewhat different psychological trap, and has been around since Daimler first stuck four wheels round an engine. If you want a classic literary example of a driver with road rage, think of Mr. Toad in “The Wind in the Willows”. Essentially, it’s aggressive behaviour around other road users, particularly when someone does something that irritates us, perhaps by impeding our progress. According to research on what annoys drivers, the main triggers for driver anger are:

  • tailgating

  • being cut up

  • inappropriate overtaking

  • undertaking on motorways

You’ll notice the word inappropriate. It’s nearly always a subjective view, where someone does something someone else doesn’t think they should have. Not too long ago, I was rounding a fairly gentle left-hander positioned around half-a-metre from the centre line when I spotted an oncoming car. I moved inward to the centre of the lane – a completely unhurried manoeuvre that in no way inconvenienced the driver coming the other way. Nevertheless, he found it necessary to swerve aggressively towards me, sound the horn and make rude gestures.

Road rage can be relatively low-level ‘shouty’ behaviour such as unnecessary flashes of headlights or use of the horn, or hand signals that aren’t to be found in the Highway Code so if we find ourselves doing those, it’s important to recognise what’s going on.

The problem is escalation. Hopefully we can shrug it off when others display that kind of behaviour towards us, but if we respond in kind, then the situation can rapidly move into aggressive tailgating, swerving towards other vehicles, or brake-testing the vehicle behind. Bikers have been known to kick cars or knock off mirrors, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the one who will come off worst in any argument of four wheels -vs- two is the rider.

Of course, our own view of what we just did is usually completely different. My position on the bend was – compared with a lot of advanced riders – rather restrained. I always aware that motorcyclists often appear impatient to other road users because of our ability to accelerate and overtake, or by taking up positions which a car driver finds inexplicable. Have a read of this:

“Aggressive drivers are careless drivers who want to get ahead of everyone on the road… [who] put their own convenience before anyone else’s safety. Other drivers may develop road rage, potentially violent anger, in response and retaliation to the violations they feel other drivers commit.”

Anybody here ride a bike because they think it allows them to make ‘better progress’ than “everyone else on the road”? Hmmm. We must never forget that when we share the roads, we are judged by everyone else’s standards of behaviour. What seems perfectly good and sensible riding to us may not appear that way to the driver we just passed or coming the other way. Simply because think we are a ‘better’ rider than they are a driver is not an adequate reason for ignoring what ‘the other fellow’ thinks about our riding.

So who’s right? The biker? Or the driver? If there IS an answer, it’s probably “neither of us”, but what I would say is that a really advanced piece of riding is not one that necessarily gains us ‘advantage’ but one that’s almost imperceptible to other drivers.

What really doesn’t help are smug statements like this next one:

“The truth is that no matter where you go, no matter how safe, careful, and considerate a driver you are, there is going to be someone on the road who is not. They’re going to challenge all the patience you have built up, possibly putting your life at risk… a road rager feels a certain degree of superiority over all other drivers on the road. They feel it is their duty to punish bad drivers and teach them “lessons”… their behaviour is equally selfish, immature, and dangerous.”

It’s positively complacent: “it’s not me that’s the problem, it’s everyone else”. This positively hinder our understanding. The fact is that road rage is not something ‘other people’ suffer from – anyone with a human brain is a potential road rager.

So, how do we keep ourselves under control when provoked? How do we detune ourselves when the buzz starts to get the better of us?

There are plenty of helpful-seeming articles online which usually start by saying something like:

“The best way to keep yourself from flying into an uncontrolled rage on the road is to remain calm and keep perspective. When someone does something you feel is careless or stupid on the road, you have to just let it go.”

Errrrr… but HOW??

I did some reading around the topic and it seems that at the most fundamental level, the issue is at least partly down to how the human brain has developed. The most primitive part of the brain, sometimes called the ‘reptilian brain’ because we share it with crocodiles, is designed for survival rather than reasoned thinking. It’s around 300 million years old and its basic programming is ‘react or die’. The first mammals with more advanced brains only appeared around 100 million years later, and the human brain which gives us our flexible reasoning capabilities is only around 200,000 years old. But even in our human brain, that primitive reptilian brain always on the alert and it cannot distinguish between a real threat demanding instant action and a scary surprise that turns out to be nothing significant when we have had a moment to think about it. Whenever we’re shocked, there’s a conflict as the ancient, hard-wired fight and flight response of our reptilian ancestors is pitted against the flexible reasoning responses of our ‘new’ human brain.

So when we react instinctively and without thinking – and sometimes violently – we’ve let the reptilian brain take control.

Now, if you’ve read any of my other writing on the so-called ‘survival reactions’ – the totally inappropriate reactions that kick in when we suffer SURPRISE! on the road, you may begin to see something of a connection.

Not only do we need to try to defuse our own responses when we feel provoked, but we need to understand how not to provoke road rage in others.

I’ve long stopped looking at the road as a place where everyone should “do the right thing” because I’ve learned the hard way that when a dangerous situation arises because someone does something wrong, that’s guaranteed to make me angry. And no-one using the roads is perfect. Not you and not me, and not even the most highly trained riders. We all make mistakes, and many of the dangerous situations really are the result of a simple error of judgement. There but for the grace of god, etc..

So I’ve learned to try to predict the situations where drivers could put me at risk – the classic SMIDSY near-miss is a good example – and to see it coming before it happens. If we’re expecting something to happen, our reasoning brain deals with the fall-out and won’t give the reptilian brain chance to take over – we’ll simply say to ourselves: “I saw that coming”.

And what if we’re the unlucky rider greeted with an inexplicable display of aggression by another road user, like that driver who didn’t like my cornering line? Maybe we were behaving in a predictable manner. Maybe we’ve just surprised them. Or perhaps we’re on the receiving end of some ‘second-hand anger’ after the previous rider triggered the response we just saw. It doesn’t make the driver’s aggression right, but it does make it a little more understandable. Try not to get riled.

Most importantly we need to get out of the ‘victim mindset’ where we believe that all other drivers on the road are out to get us. They aren’t. Drivers are mostly relatively careful around motorcyclists – it’s just that our reptilian brain is far better at noticing the rare occasions when another road user puts us at risk than our reasoning brain is at spotting the far more common moments that drivers keep well clear of us.

If we do start to slip into red mist or aggression, we need to recognise it for what it is. We MUST acknowledge it. Only then will the reasoning area of the brain re-establish control, and decide what, if anything, we are going to do about it. But don’t ignore red mist or anger. Once we realise we’re not acting like a grown-up, breath deeply, count to ten, think it over and move forward.

And if I had to sum up my advice in one phrase? It would be:

“Start looking for the positive on the roads, tune out the negative.”

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67. SURPRISE! The key to understanding – and avoiding – riding errors

Even if rider training still focuses on ‘perfect performance’ to avoid errors, it’s increasingly recognised in other fields where safety is paramount — such as in airline pilot training — that skill alone won’t prevent in-flight errors, and that the ‘startle effect’ — what I refer to as SURPRISE! — is the key trigger that overwhelms even highly experienced pilots. The same applies to riding. It’s rare we outride the motorcycle. Most crashes result when our instinctive ‘Survival Reactions’ take over. Key points like the rarity of crashes and the influence of optimism bias should become fundamental concepts in rider training. Even with advanced ABS, traction control, or stability aids, anticipating the unexpected and preparing a mental and physical response remains the most effective defence against SURPRISE!

SURPRISE! The key to understanding – and avoiding – riding errors

There are only two things we can do on a bike – change speed or change direction. To do that, we use the same inputs – accelerating, steering or braking – every moment we ride. Accident investigators around the world find the same things when they look at bike accidents. Nearly always, the bike wasn’t at its limits; if the rider had applied the correct inputs into the machine, they’d have got out of trouble. The traditional view has been that riders make errors because they either lack skills or they make the wrong decisions. It’s easy to say “don’t make errors”, and the conventional view of road safety has always been that ‘all’ we have to do is avoid errors, then everyone would be safe on the roads. So training has always proceeded along those lines – years ago, I was told that if I “observed, anticipated and concentrated” I wouldn’t crash. Guess what? I crashed. So the big questions are these: “if the machine inputs necessary are only an extension of what we do as a matter of course, and if the errors are recoverable, why do we continue to crash?” The implication is that crashing is rather more complex than we think, and it’s worth asking “how do we know how to avoid an error, if we don’t understand it in the first place?”. But does anyone teach us about crashing? Read on…

After a crash, it’s easy to ‘walk backwards’ along the sequence of events and to produce a timeline of events. Eventually we appear to come to the precipitating error:

  1. we left the road in a bend…

  2. because we were off-line…

  3. because we turned in too early…

  4. because we ran in too fast…

  5. because we braked too late…

  6. because we had no margin for error…

  7. because we misjudged the bend!.

Such a crash is likely to be explained as ‘too fast for the conditions’.

Is that really correct? Let’s go back to the beginning and start again, this time trying to understand WHY rather than WHAT went wrong. Are we saying the corner was too fast for the bike? Or too fast for the rider? In a serious crash investigation, it nearly always turns out that the bike could have got the rider out of trouble. So it’s not machine limitations, but ‘rider error’. If we stop there, the finger is usually pointed in the direction of the rider’s level of skill and judgement and the assumption is that if the rider had better skills, the crash wouldn’t happen.

Now, let’s take another step backwards beyond where the rider left the road, to consider something nearly always overlooked. How did the rider get to the corner where he or she crashed? They had to ride there. And that means the rider successfully negotiated every PREVIOUS corner, to reach the one that he or she crashed on.

So if the problem really was riding “too fast” or “lacking skill and judgement”, how did they get as far as they did? Wouldn’t they have crashed sooner? We know that statistically a crash is a relatively rare event, even for relative novices. So whilst it IS possible it was blind luck that the rider got this far, it’s far more likely that there were some unique circumstances about this particular corner that caused the crash HERE rather than somewhere else. In short, the corner somehow set a trap that the unsuspecting rider fell into.

Whilst we can point to a lack of skill or a poor attitude to riding as loading the dice towards crashing, it’s not just new or badly-behaved riders who crash. Those groups might be at higher risk, but crashes don’t happen exclusively to the high risk groups. The majority of crashes actually happen to ‘ordinary’ riders doing ‘ordinary’ things. Moreover, even expert riders crash, and they often have the same ‘standard’ crashes that the higher risk groups do – at junctions, when overtaking and on corners.

So if experience, skill and even a controlled approach to riding only reduces risk but doesn’t eliminate it, it should be pretty clear that something rather more complicated is going on. And here’s where we can turn to the work of US rider coach Keith Code. He realised that even good track riders crashed and noticed that in many of these crashes, the rider COULD have got out of trouble. But when things started going wrong, these riders didn’t respond as expected. Instead, Code identified a string of inappropriate reactions including ineffective and frozen steering, over- and under-braking errors, and target fixation. He concluded that it was these errors that caused most track crashes. He called them ‘Survival Reactions’.

You should be able to see the parallel with accident investigations on the road. The bike COULD have got the rider out of trouble, but like the track rider, the road rider also froze, over-reacted and target fixated into the crash.

Next backwards step. If it’s these ‘Survival Reactions’ that dump us on our backside, why DO we react inappropriately in some places and not others? What triggers the ‘Survival Reactions’? Code put it down to the threat of personal harm, because the moment we’re afraid of something we’re likely to revert to instinct. Instinct, being based on the most primitive part of the brain, rarely provides the right response when riding a bike and our trained responses, everything we’ve learned, goes straight out of the window.

So far, so good, but there’s another pace backwards we can take, by asking “what triggers that fear of personal harm?” Factors acting a ‘stressors’ – that is, making us tense and anxious – such as riding on a road that technically trickier than we’re used to or riding with buddies quicker than us – appear to make us more prone to making a mistake, but don’t seem to explictly trigger Code’s ‘Survival Reactions’.

The trigger appears to be SURPRISE! It’s SURPRISE! that overwhelms our learned behaviour and kicks in the in-built instinctual responses to a threat. The bend tightens. We’re suddenly aware we could run off the road. ‘Survival Reactions’ kick in. We freeze and run off the road. We grab a big handful of brake and lock the front wheel. We target-fixate on where we’ll crash rather than look to see where the road goes.

Let’s take one final backward step. What triggers SURPRISE? The answer is remarkably straightforward. By definition, it’s when something happened that we didn’t expect. It’s a straightforward anticipation failure.

Now, I can already hear people saying “but if you’d observed, ANTICIPATED and concentrated…”

But when was the last time you crashed on a corner? As I mentioned earlier, crashes are remarkably rare events.

As I mentioned, a lack of experience and a lack of skill means we’re at higher risk of a crash, but the longer we ride without a crash, the simple truth is it becomes more difficult for us to mentally view a bend as a high risk area. It would be a mistake to call this complacency – it’s a function of the way our brains see the world outside. We’re biased towards looking on the bright side – for more on this, have a read of a book called ‘The Optimism Bias’ by neuroscientist Tali Sharot. The more we do something, and EVEN THOUGH THE RISKS ARE UNCHANGED, the less aware of the risks we become. Ask any builder who’s fallen off a ladder.

If there IS a risk of complacency, paradoxically it’s likely to come after more training. Think about it. The language of riding, driving and road safety generally is about “getting better” and the better we get (in this case, the fewer scares we have mid-corner), the more likely we are to assume everything will go right. The combination of training (which tells us that skilled riders have fewer crashes) AND a crash-free history leads us to believe it’s our training keeping us safe, rather than the laws of chance. Just like tossing dice, each bend comes with a level of risk, and we just haven’t met that unique set of circumstances that could trip us up…

…yet.

Don’t believe me? Roadcraft talks about being prepared for what we can “reasonably expect to happen”. If we don’t get caught out in a corner, that becomes the ‘reasonable’ option. We may not realise it but that’s what our repeated experience is teaching us. But what it doesn’t take away is the risk that the very next corner could be the one that’s laid a trap just for us.

Once we understand this, ‘inexplicable’ crashes start to explain themselves.

Hopefully, now we are aware of how repeated experience and optimism can warp our assessment of risk, we’ll see how to defeat SURPRISE! Instead of planning for “what we can reasonably expect to happen” and thinking that “I’ve done everything I can to ensure the corner goes right”, we MUST reverse our thinking 180 degrees and prepare for UNREASONABLE events. We need to plan for the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ to see a bend might go wrong, rather than planning the ‘right way’ to ride around it. As I explain on my Survival Skills advanced rider training courses, predicting the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ isn’t difficult, but really is a very different mindset to the standard ‘right way’ approach to riding.

Achieving this pragmatic “I’ve taken all the precautions I can but anything could still go wrong ” mindset is known as developing ‘insight’ and has been used successfully in risk management training in other fields. What’s very interesting is that the latest research is suggesting that with just a modest level of machine control ability, developing the insight that engages a “what could go wrong” mindset has significant benefits. I suggest this is because if we’re expecting something to go wrong, when the ‘Worst Case Scenario’ turns up mid-corner, we’re far less likely to suffer SURPRISE! for the simple reason we had predicted it. That would seem to be the way to defeat Code’s inappropriate ‘Survival Reactions’.

So how can we plan for what might go wrong? It’s simple enough – we just need to look at where other riders got it wrong! That’s where we are most likely to caught out ourselves. The three ‘standard’ crashes are at junctions, on corners and during overtakes and they happen to novice and expert riders alike. Once we realise that, it’s easier to be on red alert.

There’s one final step. Even if we correctly anticipate an emergency and avoid freezing, over-reacting or target-fixating, we really need a pre-planned response to beat SURPRISE! If we have to figure out a solution on the fly is about as likely as pulling a rabbit out of our crash hat. We need to know whether we’re going to need to change speed, change position, sound the horn, swerve or hit the anchors BEFORE the emergency starts to develop, or those ‘Survival Reactions’ will still kick in. That’s why even highly trained and highly experienced riders still fall victim to age-old crashes.

So yes, by all means observe, anticipate and concentrate. But learn about crashing, understand ‘Survival Reactions’ and then use that knowledge to anticipate where things will go wrong, rather than how they might go right. That’s the best way to deal with SURPRISE!

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58. Euphoria – when our riding is just too good to be true

Looking back, I think a good subtitle might have been — “when we are having too much fun!” It conveys the psychological angle to the reader and hints at the subtle danger: it’s not anger, panic, or incompetence, but a state of overconfidence. It signals that the article is about a mental state as much as a riding technique and touches on a psychological state that is increasingly recognised in traffic psychology: a subtle form of overconfidence or “flow-induced risk” rather than outright anger or recklessness. Skill and routine mask the creeping erosion of safety margins — a state that can be more dangerous than obvious adrenaline-fuelled risk-taking because the rider believes everything is under control. The danger is that we don’t notice the shrinking safety margin until something jolts us out of the flow. Awareness of this state, deliberate self-checks, and the willingness to slow down or take a break remain crucial safeguards — even for the most experienced riders.

Euphoria – when our riding is just too good to be true

I got thinking after I got an email from one of my regular correspondents:

“Riding home after work, I felt in the mood for ‘pushing on’ a bit. I was congratulating myself on the swift progress I was making through the traffic, some drivers seemed a bit more aggressive than usual, but, what the hell, that was all part of the fun. The prat who pushed in too close to me and got a stare in return was just that, a prat. The close-ish encounters with traffic islands were just good timing, as was the manoeuvre to avoid the cyclist I spotted a bit late as I filtered rather wide and swiftly along the road.

“However, when I went through the red light I realised maybe I wasn’t riding quite as well as I thought. Didn’t realise, in fact, that the light was against me until half way across the junction. Luckily it was clear, because if it hadn’t been I’m not at all sure I’d have realised.”

He went on to say that perhaps after a stressful day at work he was a bit wound up.

Anyone recognise the symptoms? I have to admit to having days like that when I was a courier, and occasionally on other rides too.

It used to hit me towards the end of a long day. Partly tiredness, partly boredom with doing what became as routine as any other job. I’d get into a groove. In town I’d find myself slicing through rush hour traffic, filtering at high speed, overtaking through small gaps, running amber lights. Out of town I’d be zooming through bends, using big lean angles and engaging in heavy braking. It wasn’t as if I was in a rush to get somewhere either, in fact I’d feel more relaxed than normal. As the risky manoeuvre came off, I’d try them again for fun. It felt all so easy.

All TOO easy.

This state of euphoria is a close cousin to, but not the same as, red mist. The problem is that what’s happening to us usually only becomes evident after something scary or an obvious mistake snaps us out of it. Whilst red mist is characterised by obviously irrational behaviour – usually massive risk taking – in this euphoric state, we really believe we’re doing our normal thing, but in reality we are eating much deeper into our safety margin – maybe even exceeding it.

The bad news is that it’s almost addictive. And there’s a massive temptation to push towards the limits and enjoy the buzz as nothing seems to go wrong whilst we ride quicker and quicker, closer and closer to the edge. But sooner or later we WILL push too hard and cross the line. So riding in this way and waiting for the big mistake to tell us that we were actually in over our heads isn’t such a great idea.

Personally, I got to recognise the symptoms on those despatch jobs, and have been able to rein myself in before things get too out of control. I’d make a conscious decision to slow down, take a break or even turn off the radio and go home early!

One of the questions I ask myself as I ride is: “did that look dangerous to other road users?” If I have to say to myself: “yes, it probably did” then it’s time to dial down the fun and head, rather more slowly, for home.

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53. The five most important things I learned as a courier

I might argue that this article has aged better than a few formal training courses from the same era because it is grounded in exposure to risk rather than theory. These lessons were learned in the days before traction control, cornering ABS and driver-assist systems became commonplace, but the fundamentals have not changed. Modern technology may reduce the consequences of mistakes, yet it does nothing to improve anticipation, judgement or decision-making under pressure. I still see my time as a courier as spent in an informal lab testing theory against real-world hazard management. The common thread running through all five points is not speed, but control of space, attention and stress — the same factors that still separate riders who consistently get home safely from those who rely on luck.

The five most important things I learned as a courier

Some years back, I was challenged to put some tips together based on what I’d learned back in my despatching days. It didn’t take much head-scratching to come up with the following short list:

1) Learn to use the brakes hard, then stay in practice… the last emergency stop that most riders make before they find themselves in the middle of a crisis is the one in front of the examiner. That might be ten years ago, and a very bad time to discover we’ve forgotten how is in the middle of an emergency. Practice practice practice. Practice wet and dry. If you change bike, see how it responds on hard braking. If you change tyres, find out how much grip they have. If you change pads, bed them in, test them out and discover whether they respond the same way as the last lot. There can be surprising variation between batchers.

2) Learn when not to use the brakes… we’ll all experience an “OhmigodImgoingtodie” moment. Instinct is screaming at you “STOPSTOPSTOPSTOP”. But hitting the brakes hard stands the bike upright which may take us straight into the very situation we were trying to avoid.Very often our best route out of trouble is not stopping but changing direction – bikes are pretty small, can change direction quickly and fit thru small gaps, and lean much further than most riders can cope with. But to change direction, we need to understand HOW to steer (counter-steering is the answer), then to practice adding more and more steering input to generate a quicker and quicker change of direction. Practice is the only way we’ll learn this technique and just how much we can trust that front tyre (more than you might expect)

3) Learn to search… most road safety literature – the USA’s MSF course excepted – talks about ‘observation’. The problem is observation is passive. It implies we simply swing our gaze around till something interesting catches our attention. A few moments watching most riders and you’ll see they don’t actually look for anything in particular. They’re hoping their attention is drawn to hazards – the danger is that if they don’t see them until they are a real threat, they’ll suffer SURPRISE! and then survival reactions kick in – see the target fixation tip for more on this. So what we need to do is turn passive observation into a focused and active search. We need to know WHERE to look and WHY we’re looking for it. It’s no good knowing that side turnings are a place that must bike collisions happen but hoping we spot them, we have to search for them – we need to actively seek out road signs, gaps between parked cars, breaks in the lines of house roofs, white paint at the side of the road, dropped kerbs and so on. Searching to either side of our path helps us being taken by SURPRISE!

4) Hang back to make better progress… as a courier, I always wanted to get where I was going with the minimum of delay conversant with keeping the risks down. Most riders follow far too close, and then they don’t look any further ahead than the vehicle in front – next time you’re following another rider look to see when his or her brake lights come on – if it’s a moment after the car ahead, they’re watching that vehicle. Opening up a gap not only gives us a safer following distance and opens up a better view of the road ahead, it also frees our attention to start searching beyond the car ahead. And this is how a good courier will make progress. Rather than simply looking to overtake it, the courier’s planned where they’re going next too. When filtering, the courier will know when to hang back as the impatient riders overtake into a dead end or get stuck outside traffic turning right. Hanging back gets you further ahead mentally and physically.

5) Discover that slow is fast… too many riders think that being on a bike means they should be at the head of the queue. Ever heard anyone say “if I sat in the queue I might as well be in a car”? I have, regularly. But it’s not the right approach. Because they’re in a hurry, they’re stressed and prone to mistakes. And mistakes lead to spills. That’s no good to a courier because a bent bike means no earnings. And no earnings meant no food or rent money. There’s nothing wrong with using gaps where it’s sensible to use them but I would also slip back into the queue when it got too tricky or too risky to overtake or filter. My aim as a courier was always to flow unobtrusively through traffic, neither wedging myself into impossible gaps nor forcing drivers to slow down to let me through. It might have cost me a few seconds, even minutes, but being restrained and patient minimised stress and anxiety and helped me to stay relaxed. Being relaxed meant I could ride for long hours. And that meant the tortoise nearly always overtook the hare in the end.

Summing up: None of these lessons require you to ride for a living, or to ride fast. What courier work teaches is not aggression or risk-taking, but economy: economy of effort, economy of stress, and economy of mistakes. The aim is to arrive unruffled, unhurried and upright, time after time. Riders who chase gaps, sit on bumpers and ride with a constant sense of urgency often believe they are making progress, but in reality they are burning attention and increasing risk. The courier mindset is the opposite. Control your speed, create space, stay relaxed and plan ahead, and you will usually find that you arrive sooner — and far more consistently — than riders who mistake haste for skill.

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12. Training for skills, pushing the envelope and margins for error, and over-confidence

The core principles discussed — balancing skills training with risk awareness, avoiding overconfidence, and recognising the limitations of both human ability and bike dynamics — remain absolutely relevant today. In fact, they’re arguably even more pertinent given the continued growth of powerful motorcycles, rider-assist technologies, and the wider availability of advanced track or skills training, which can unintentionally reinforce overconfidence. The key to reducing risk is not just honing our skills—it is understanding hazards, managing risk, and maintaining a margin for error. This article explores why true ‘better’ riding is as much about mindset and awareness as it is about technique.

Training for skills, pushing the envelope and margins for error, and over-confidence

Fundamentally, training in hazard awareness, risk assessment and risk management is the essential counterweight to balance training in riding skills. If we don’t get the balance right – or ignore the risk aspect altogether – then it’s easy to become overly confident, particularly as most of us (at least, right up to our first big crash) have false sense of indestructibility. Skills training, particularly when combined with inexperience, can lead to levels of confidence which take us into situations we cannot handle. It’s vital to recognise that this is a real issue. We should see training as a way to INCREASE our margins for error, and not an excuse to push our skills to the limit.

Let’s explain what I mean by asking a question. Why do we take training? The usual answers will be “to be a better or safer rider” or “to gain confidence”.

Let’s look at the ‘safer rider’ idea first. As I’ve said many times, there is no such thing as ‘safety’ on a motorcycle, and anyone who tells us that training makes us ‘safe’ riders is kidding us and themselves. Instead of safety, we need to think in terms of risk. In very simple terms, risk is:

the chance of something going wrong MULTIPLIED BY the impact on us when it goes wrong

So we really need a good grasp of what can go wrong!

That means understanding WHAT creates a threat to our health; that is, a ‘hazard’, WHERE we’ll find those hazards, and WHY the hazard creates a risk. Once we know that, we can assess the risk, and have a better understand how to manage that risk. It may sound the same but it creates a very different mindset when we start looking at riding in terms of “what can go wrong” rather than “what I’m doing makes me safe”.

And what about the concept of becoming a ‘better’ rider. What does ‘better’ actually mean?

For many training courses, it means that the trainee goes away with better ‘skills’. Skills tend to focus is on vehicle manoeuvring. This might be improved braking technique, better use of the throttle, the ability to swerve around an obstacle or techniques designed to improve cornering. This is particularly evident in track-based training and I often hear it suggested that new or less-confident riders to take a track-training day “to get used to handling the bike at higher speeds / greater lean angles / under harder braking”.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is “what does the trainee come away with?”

The answer is that whilst the trainee may have improved what were previously disfunctional skills, there is a risk they’ll come away from the session being able to use – and FEELING CONFIDENT TO USE – those higher speeds, greater lean angles and harder braking out on the road. It should be fairly obvious that there are potential problems here:

IMPROVING our own level of skill does NOT change bike dynamics. For example, our skill level does not change the level of grip between tyres and road. We may be more capable of braking harder or leaning more, but it also pushes us closer to the edge of the envelope.

EXPLOITING improved skills to ride faster, at greater lean angles or to brake harder DOES significantly changes bike dynamics. For example, we should know that if we double our speed, we QUADRUPLE our stopping distance. So even if we increase our speed by 25%, we increase our braking distance by more than might be obvious. More speed also increases the radius of a turn which means to get round a particular corner requires more lean angle, which makes it harder to brake or change direction, or even to respond to a slippery surface.

There’s a secondary effect. If we’re taught skills that allow us to perform more complex manoeuvres, then because they are more complex they nearly always have a higher risk of going wrong. For example, learning slow handling skills encourages riders try U-turns in confined areas where there’s a greater risk the manoeuvre will go wrong.

And finally, there’s no guarantee that we’ll use any of these added skills in an emergency. That’s something Keith Code noted years ago in his ‘Twist of the Wrist’ books. He realised that even highly-trained riders revert to instinct and panic because their training leads them to expect things to go right. When they go wrong, SURPRISE! kicks in, and they suffer from what he called ‘survival reactions’ – typically, panic reactions, freezing and target fixation.

So what I’m getting at is that there’s another kind of ‘better’ and that’s an improved understanding of what can go wrong, a heightened awareness of risk, and an ability to make better decisions when confronted with a threat.

Here is a very simple example. What’s the most common crash involving a rider in an urban area? You probably guessed, it’s the ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ SMIDSY collision.

So first of all we need an understanding that driver can fail to see a motorcycle even when it seems to the rider that the bike is perfectly visible. (If you want to find out more about that, check out my work on the Science Of Being Seen or SOBS for short at http://scienceofbeingseen.wordpress.com.) ONLY when we have THAT understanding, do we have an awareness that there is a genuine risk that we may not be seen.

Then when we have achieved that, we can put BOTH parts – better skills and better awareness of what goes wrong – together. Stategies can be put in place to manage the risk, including our skills-based training – slowing down, changing position to improve lines of sight, sounding the horn, being prepared to take evasive action by emergency braking and / or swerving.

So here’s the Survival Skills approach to advanced motorcycle training. Rather than push closer to the ‘edge of the envelope’, let’s increase our ‘margin for error’. Instead of using our ability to brake harder to carry more speed, let’s use our awareness of the risks of riding to exploit those skills to stop in shorter distances in emergencies. Instead of using our ability to lean over further to increase our cornering speed, let’s understand what can go wrong in a corner to hold it at the same angle in case the corner tightens – so we have ‘BANK in the BANK’, to quote one of the Nosurprise.org ‘Rhyming Reminders’. Instead of trying to perform a U-turn in a confined space, understand that making life complex increases the risks of things going wrong, so look for somewhere easier or perform a three-point turn instead.

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07. What’s the goal of post-test training?

This article was first written over twenty years ago and lightly updated since, but the central question it poses remains unresolved: what should post-test motorcycle training actually be for? While machines, testing regimes and training organisations have evolved — with ABS, traction control and more formalised “advanced” pathways now the norm — newly qualified riders still emerge with gaps in confidence, control and understanding.

“Do they know what they’re doing, do they know why, and are they managing risk?” is as concise and useful a training lens as any modern coaching framework. It also aligns neatly with contemporary human-factors thinking, even if I did not label it as such at the time.

The tension between rider-centred skill-building and training aimed at meeting an external standard has not gone away. If anything, it has become more important to challenge, as technology increasingly masks weaknesses rather than addressing them.

What’s the goal of post-test training?

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the goal of training after passing the motorcycle test. Obviously we want to improve the skills and knowledge that a rider gained on basic training. But what does that really mean in terms of what we deliver? Are we looking for perfection? Or should we be looking for a pragmatic approach to riding?

When I moderated a riding skills forum, we regularly used to get requests for help with a riding issue. In one instance, the request came from a very newly qualified rider on his new motorcycle:

"I passed my test 2 weeks ago tomorrow and am really a complete novice as I'd never ridden before I started my training which was basically 3 lessons. Anyway I bought a 6 month old Thundercat as my first bike after a lot of worrying that the bike was too powerful for a 1st bike. I want to know what tips you can give to a new rider... I'm really struggling with a few things in particular:

1. setting off I'm not sure what revs to use, and find it hard to keep the throttle steady... I panic that the the front wheel is going to fly up and throw me off

2. turning into a side road I was taught to use 1st but it just doesn't feel right as I'm very jerky on the throttle

3. which brake should I use? For example on country lanes if I want to slow down from a speed above 30 ish, is it the front? I worry that wheels are going to lock and start sliding"

Now, it should be pretty obvious that we have here a rider who has clearly identified some major problems with his ability to control the machine. So I responded with a series of practical suggestions.

I referred the rider back to some of the exercises he would have performed on CBT including some very simple straight line stopping and starting exercises to help get used to the clutch on the new machine. I also advised him to use a slipping clutch when turning into side roads (what would have been taught for the U-turn exercise, so nothing new) and a reminder about basic braking technique (front first, rear second, then a progressive squeeze of the front to slow at the required rate). I also suggested that the rider look for some personalised training to fix the problems sooner rather than later.

Of course, I wasn’t the only one with advice. I generally try not to criticise other people involved in rider training too often but in this case the response of one of our IAM observers made me blow my top. He started by offering some useful – but theoretical – advice, but then qualified it by saying:

“Unless you really do feel that you can’t manage I would delay any extra training until you’ve been riding 5-6 weeks or so. You’ll be amazed at how different it will be then and you’ll get more out of any training you do.”

Of course, there’s a very big assumption there. And that’s that our wobbly novice is still in one piece after that period.

And then he suggested that at the end of this learning period the new rider would then be in a position to benefit from advanced training with the IAM.

As I’ve said many times, there are two ways of approaching rider training:

a pragmatic ‘improve what’s weak’ approach
building standard skills to test against a set riding standard

Either are valid in certain circumstances. But which is more appropriate here?

I think the answer is pretty obvious. A client-centred course, of the sort offered by the Survival Skills Confidence: BUILDER one-day training course, is more likely to address the novice rider’s needs.

The mention of the Thundercat dates the event, and since then I’ve been told “ah, but the IAM has changed a lot”. That is undoubtedly true, there has certainly been a drive to improve standards and consistency but what hasn’t changed is that the organisation still promotes a brand of training style of riding which has passing the test as its goal.

At the risk of provoking a chorus of “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”, if you think you have a problem with your riding, ask yourself where you’ll get the better support; from an independent trainer who’s prepared to focus the training on YOUR needs, or from an organisation that commits you to pursuing their own goal?

 

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05. Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 2

In part one of this mini-series, we took a look at an accident that happened to one of my trainees on her bike test. She had just performed a perfect emergency stop in tricky, damp conditions in front of the examiner when a moment later she locked up the front brake and fell off when a car pulled out in front of her. The question we need to answer is that with all the training we did, why did she revert to instinct and grab the front brake when confronted with a real emergency? My suggestions might surprise you but they have a solid grounding in sports psychology. That’s why the concept has been part of my approach to rider training since 1997.

If you missed Part One, you can find it here.

Training our ‘Inner Rider’ Part 2

My trainee had — in theory — been trained to brake in an emergency. Unfortunately, as the crash demonstrated, she hadn’t. She’d simply been trained to use a hard braking technique. What she hadn’t been trained to cope with was an emergency where hard braking was her ‘get out of trouble’ card. And this is the problem — learning technical skills is only one part of the problem. We have to understand how the brain responds to a threat, and right now, that’s barely covered in rider training at any level.

There’s a simple answer. She had the skill and knowledge to perform a perfectly good emergency stop in a situation she knew and expected, but when the car pulled out it was a novel situation. There was no ‘ritual’ automatic response that involved controlled use of the brakes. The amygdala — sometimes called the brain’s “survival centre” and historically referred to as the “reptilian brain” — detected a threat and took over. It reverted to the most basic collision‑avoidance strategy and triggered the panic grab of the brakes.

In riding terms, a ‘ritual’ is simply a learned motor sequence — like changing gear — that the brain can run automatically without conscious thought when it recognises the right cue. Once learned, the amygdala can trigger these responses instantly when it recognises the right cue — for gear changing, it would be the sound of the engine revving. With just a bit of experience, we don’t need to glance at the rev counter. Quite simply, emergency stop training only teaches the amygdala half the job. It learns how to brake hard, but not when to do it. The ‘cue’ is missing.

So we have to ensure the amygdala learns the essential ‘cue’.

Experience is one possible teacher. After locking the brakes and maybe falling off a few times, we learn to appreciate the risk of personal harm. We learn that staying on the bike hurts less than sliding beside it. Although it isn’t practice in the sense that we consciously know what we were doing, it is still learning by experience. We “burn” an alternative pathway to the instinctive reaction of grabbing the brakes. Even if we’re surprised by the next car that pulls out, the amygdala now has a better ritual pathway than its basic fight‑or‑flight wiring and follows that pathway to make a controlled stop.

Thus we defeat the “brake as hard as possible” instinct by learning to moderate our braking. Been there, done that. It’s still unconscious and unplanned, but it’s no longer instinctive. It shows we do learn by experience and this alternative pathway is what enables us to beat Code’s Survival Reactions that are triggered by the half-trained amygdala.

Let’s think about my test candidate again. The cue for her emergency stop in front of the examiner was the visual “hand up” signal. We’d trained her amygdala to run through the correct ritual response: shut throttle, gently apply the front, gently apply the rear, progressively squeeze the front, clutch in, foot down.

But when the real emergency developed, the cue was missing. We hadn’t taught her to link the emergency stop ritual to the trigger of an emerging car. When the car threatened her space, she was taken by surprise. Her amygdala wasn’t programmed to use the emergency stop ritual in this event, so it fell back on its primitive job — instinctive avoidance of harm via fight‑or‑flight — and she grabbed the front brake.

OK, you’ve probably spotted the problem. How do we train ourselves to deal with emergencies without experiencing them — which implies we have to survive the emergency? As I said, after a few front‑wheel lock‑ups, I personally learned not to grab the brakes as the in-built primitive pathways get overwritten my new learned behaviour. But learning by crashing really isn’t an ideal way to learn. It’s painful, expensive and occasionally termina.

Sports psychology shows the way forward. Sportspeople often have to compete in situations they can’t practise in. Tennis players and golfers spend their lives playing in front of a few dozen people, so appearing at Wimbledon or the Open triggers stress and fear of failure. Their performance collapses — a phenomenon known as choking. Their carefully learned techniques go out the window. So they use visualisation to overcome the problem.

At its most basic, visualisation means sitting back and mentally running through the steps needed to deal with the anticipated situation. The brain can be fooled into believing this is “real” experience and burns new pathways that avoid choking and instinctive reactions. The more vivid the visualisation, the more effective the training.

And that’s how we can learn to deal with situations we’ve not yet experienced and can’t practise realistically. We can use the same technique as golfers and tennis players imagining the winning shot to fool our amygdala into thinking “I’ve been here before and I know what to do” when a car really does pull out. That’s how we avoid survival reactions taking over.

And here’s something else — why wait until the car is pulling out? Why not teach ourselves to react to the tell‑tale signs of a junction — road signs, breaks in hedgerows, white paint at the roadside? Why not get into the habit of covering the brakes and horn when we first see the car? This way, rather than waiting for the car beginning to move, we use the sight of the car as the cue that trigger a proactive response.

The more tasks we routinely leave to the amygdala, the more attention we have left for everything else. Just as a competent rider isn’t consciously changing gear, a really good rider lets the amygdala hunt for hazards too.

If visualisation techniques had been combined with real emergency stop training, my trainee would have had a far better chance of reacting appropriately to the first real emergency she faced. Visualisation would have allowed her mind to connect the practical skills she’d learned through repetition with the real‑world trigger.

Unfortunately, visualisation is still missing from rider training at all levels.