A couple of years ago I was skiing with my son. Skiing is something I have taken up late in life. (My college attempts each ended with me getting a face full of wet snow at the bottom of a slope after careening out of control at high speed down that slope.) More recently, I took ski lessons and I tried to ski within my limits. On this occasion, we were going down a somewhat narrow, slightly challenging slope. I could see the ski patrol ahead of me, attempting to get a fallen child into a stretcher. There was adequate space on my left, but as I headed down the slope, watching the ski patrol and trying every maneuver that I could think of to change course, I skied right into them. I won't go into the details, because I am still shocked. No one was hurt, fortunately. In replaying the incident in my mind hundreds of times since, I still don't understand how I could have been so out of control-I should have been able to prevent the accident. I haven't skied since.
Something similar happened one summer when I was riding my bike to work. I took a right turn a bit too wide and could see myself heading into the opposite curb. I kept watching that curb and trying to avoid it. The resulting bruised ribs painfully reminded me of that biking episode every day for months. As a lifelong cyclist, I could not understand how I misjudged that turn and failed to avoid the curb. I chalked it up to aging and haven't ridden my bike very much since, afraid to repeat my mistake.
Recently, Jeanne and I got motor scooters, and we have been having a lot of fun traveling around Topeka on them. We have done a lot of reading and we both got our motorcycle endorsements to our drivers licenses (I got mine, first, by about 10 minutes; on the other hand, Jeanne only had to take the written test once). I had two incidents, driving the scooter, where I was looking right at what I was trying to avoid and nearly headed into it.
In all of these situations, I was trying like mad to avoid an obstacle and, instead, nearly ran into it. In all cases, I lost or nearly lost control of my direction and winded up going toward the exact thing that I was trying to avoid.
As I was reading the
Idiot's Guide to Scooters I came across the following advice: Don't look at what you are trying to avoid, look at where you want to go, instead.
Idiot's called the mistake of looking at what you are trying to avoid
target fixation.
Target fixation is the tendency to go where your head is pointed, not where your brain (and best intentions) may be telling you to go. Now, in re-thinking many of these earlier situations, I see that the reason that I was out of control may have had less to do with lack of motor skill (except for biking, my motor skill level is marginal) and, perhaps, more to do with higher-level problem-solving and decision skills that directed me to look at what I was trying to avoid! I was choosing to fixate on the fallen skier while working overtime to get my body to do something unusual-to move away from the direction my head was pointed, all of this while moving at high speed.
Let me be clear that this doesn't mean I was
not out of control, it just means that fixing the problem means fixing something that is within my control. This may be something I can remedy by changing the way I approach situations like these. I've already started to change the way I ride a scooter, by looking in the direction I want to travel rather than at what I want to avoid. But, at least once a ride I, literally, have to tell myself to
look where you want to go.
Maybe
target fixation applies to other realms, as well. There was a fad, recently, about a
secret-essentially, the secret was that focusing on your troubles will keep you embroiled in them (a form of
target fixation?); instead, focus on what you want to achieve or where you want to end up in a situation. This is also a basic tenet of Albert Ellis' Rational Emotive Therapy (also known as
cognitive behavioral therapy).
I don't know whether I'll go back to skiing. I do know that I am constantly on the lookout now to focus on where I want to go rather than what I want to avoid.
by
Greg Monaco, Ph.D.Copyright, Monaco & Associates Incorporated. All rights reserved.
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