Are You Focusing on the Obstacles?

Anyone who has ever taken a motorcycle safety class has been admonished not to focus on obstacles in the road. Why? Because wherever you look, that’s where the motorcycle will go. If you want to avoid the obstacles that lay in your path, the better course of action is to focus on where you want to go instead. This adage applies equally to business and life.

My Motorcycling Lesson

About 10 years ago, I decided to try something new and learn how to ride a motorcycle. Having never ridden one on the road before, I signed up for a multi-week motorcycle safety class to learn in detail how to prevent becoming a safety anecdote for future generations of motorcyclists. My instructor was a woman in her mid-forties and an avid rider for over 20 years. Over the term of the course, we learned all of the standard lessons — how to start the bike, what to wear, where to ride in the lane, etc. But, one lesson in particular stuck with me and has withstood the test of time. That lesson was on how to avoid obstacles.

The lesson started off with a slow cone weave, consisting of a series of orange safety cones lined up about 10 feet apart. We were told that navigating the course without touching any of the cones or missing any of the turns would simulate obstacle avoidance and teach us where our focus needed to be, which was on the very last cone in the line. Almost every one of us started off by focusing on the next cone in our path, and every rider ended up hitting at least one cone over the length of the obstacle course.

After each of us failed miserably at making it through the entire cone weave without hitting an obstacle, our instructor stood at the end of the course and told each of us to focus on her eyes and not to look down at the cones. While riding through the cone weave, every glance away from the instructor was met with a stern reminder on where our focus was supposed to be set. I distinctly remember thinking that it was crazy to have us look away from the obstacles in our path, thinking that I would surely end up on top of the cones if I didn’t concentrate on them.

Boy, was I ever wrong. All of us quickly learned that if we focused on the instructor, we could navigate the obstacle course with ease. It was a real eye-opening experience, and I will never forget her final words of the lesson: “Be careful of what you concentrate on. Don’t focus on the obstacles; focus on a where you want to go.”

You Go Where You Focus

In challenging times, it’s easy to focus on the obstacles. The traditional news outlets constantly inundate us with sensational stories of economic and personal disaster. We all have co-workers or acquaintances that never seem to get tired of complaining about how bad life is now that the “good ‘ole days” are over.

That is a crock. Opportunities exist in abundance today, as they did yesterday, last year and 10 years ago. The key is to focus on where to go and developing creative solutions for getting there.

If you’re out riding a motorcycle and fixate on the pot hole that suddenly appears in front of you, prepare to become intimately familiar with the pavement. If you’re sitting in your cubicle at work and constantly focus on the incessant recession news or stories of job losses, stand-by to become a layoff statistic. You go where you focus.

If, instead you focus on where you want the bike to go or what your next creative business move will be, you’ll make it around those obstacles and will be zooming down the road of success.