Thursday, December 29, 2011

The Way You Drive Determines How You Operate in Life

How do you drive a car?

There are so many questions that I could ask you to see how you drive, such as:

Are you the aggressive driver that high beams people in the fast lane, or are you the oblivious person in that fast lane that blocks traffic?
When you are turning, do you always signal?
Are you always late, and drive faster because of it?
How do you hold your steering wheel?
Can you talk to people in the car without being able to take your eyes off the road?

I could go on and on with all of these questions, yet the one thing I've noticed is that your driving ability directly demonstrates how you operate in life.

Harnessing a 4,000 pound car to your way of being just demonstrates that you have the ability or lack of ability, to multi-task and communicate with others on the road, and your consideration with them in mind.

A person who has very limited ability to communicate in life will not use their indicators to let others know their intention to pass, change lanes or turn. Sometimes people wait until the last second to do so which also tells how they consider others.

Then there are people who hold up traffic trying to make illegal U-turns and put others at risk because of their lack of ability. They seem to feel entitled to do what they want at the expense of others, and justify it in their own way as to why the law doesn't apply to them.

There are people who simply cannot talk to anyone, and they have death grips on the wheel with unparalleled focus on the road so that their dreaded fear of getting into a car accident never happens. For people like this, it is a fear to be on the road at any one given time and their driving patterns are so rigid that even they can't meet them.

Then there are people who can drink a hot coffee, talk on a cell phone, indicate with their leg while changing the radio and shifting into 5th gear, all the while never missing a beat on driving. Driving comes naturally to these people and they are seemingly always unconsciously in control of the wheel, and their car at all times.

What's the difference in these people's driving abilities?

The answer that occurs to me is that this has absolutely nothing to do with driving a vehicle. Instead, it has everything to do with how the world occurs to them.

If you are a selfishly motivated person, you will have little or no value in anyone else on the road. If you are a humanitarian, you will allow people to merge into you easily. The real reason why people are "bad drivers" is that they operate in life with a certain mentality of how they see others in it, and more importantly, how they occur in it.

I'll give you a personal example from my own life.

When I noticed how much road rage I had in my life, I realized it had nothing to do with the people on the road. It had absolutely everything that I had against people who put a different value on how they drive. My standard of driving was that all people should drive 15 kms above the speed limit, stay out of the passing lanes except to pass, signal, and all would be well. Yet, not all people see these things as being important to them, and so it doesn't always happen.

My unresolved ability to communicate with people in life then takes control of my driving ability, and my personality become harnessed to a 4,000 pound weapon called a car. People who get in my way will be dealt with according to what I think that they deserve for how they operate in life as I see them as drivers.

When I thought about all of this, and saw the connection between how you think and how you drive, I realized that it had nothing to do with the person driving the other cars, but how I viewed them in the world. Was it always the world vs. me? Yep, pretty much, and this was translated as to how I drove too. I held the entire world in contempt for the way they drove because it wasn't up to my standard.

Then I realized that I did the same thing in my life too...

Once I put that connection together, I realized that I didn't want to operate that way any longer. -And then my road rage simply disappeared.

And not surprisingly, I started to get along with people a whole lot better.

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