Confidence for Racers

Overview

Writing this article was a long, difficult, and perhaps pointless undertaking, but I was motivated to write it for three reasons:

1. Even though all racers will agree that having a high level of confidence is one of the requirements for being fast, I have not seen the subject covered in the type of detail that I think could be helpful. (I have three ‘mental side of driving’ books and for all three books combined there are only about 5 pages on the subject.)
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2. I enjoy trying to figure out the pieces and processes in my head that have allowed me to have a very high degree of confidence when driving, along with the techniques I have used that gave me the ability to exert influence over my confidence processes.
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3. I’m coaching a driver who was struggling with low confidence and self doubt. That was actually my main motivation for writing down my thoughts on the subject. After reading this information, the driver’s confidence level and on-track performance improved significantly at the next race he attended.

I DO NOT claim any of what follows to be ‘right’ or ‘scientific’… actually it does not even qualify as pseudo-science. It is simply how I perceive, understand, and influence my own confidence process, so it’s about, 80% my experience, 10% my observations of, and communication with, other drivers, and 10% my research, all laid bare for your education, amusement, or ridicule.

I also acknowledge that I perhaps go into too much detail, and that my observations and beliefs are a bit ‘out there’, but my objective is just to provide one perspective from which to look at the subject. Once you’ve seen my perspective, perhaps you will be inspired to construct one of your own that suits you better.

This article is long, because it’s a very complex subject, and because I believe that having the full picture (what confidence is, its purpose, how it impacts performance, where it comes from, and how the elements of confidence interact) will give you the best possible chance of exerting real influence over your confidence process. However, everyone thinks differently, so if you want to just cut to the chase, then I at least recommend you take at look at the interactions and process diagrams before jumping here How Can YOU Influence the Confidence Process?.

Anyway, here we go: Everyone knows that taking your car up to ‘the limit’ requires an extraordinarily high level of confidence; especially in the high pucker-factor turns. Also, the ability to incrementally increase your confidence is a requirement for continually improving your driving skill set and performance. But what exactly is this confidence thing; how do you define it, where does it come from, and how can you control it?

What is Confidence?

The easy way out would be to say something like: “Confidence is comprised of four essential elements:

1. You can produce predictable results
   (That is, you can consistently put your car where you want it, oriented the way you need it to be, going the speed that puts you at ‘the limit’ but still under control.)
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2. You can produce those results at the exact moment when you need them to happen
   (That is, you can produce the desired results timed to maintain synchronization between your mental model of the track – the plan – and the sensory information coming in from the reality of driving around the track).
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3. You have the ability/bandwidth to deal with (recover from) reasonable deviations from ‘the plan.’
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4. Nothing profoundly unexpected happens”

I actually shared this ‘insight’ (and some other related info.) 15 years ago on a racing mailing list, with the best intentions of helping a driver who had asked about how to regain confidence after an unnerving off course excursion. I dusted this off, thinking I would just clean it up and add it to Speed Craft, but cringed when I read it with older, and hopefully wiser, eyes.

I still believe that what I said is fundamentally correct, but I don’t think there is enough there to really make it useful. So what follows is my attempt to peel the shiny bodywork off of my original definition of confidence and show you the dirty ‘working bits’ underneath.

Types of Confidence

People typically talk about confidence as though it’s a single thing, but for racers I believe there are at least four main types of confidence that make up your overall confidence level at any given moment:

1. Confidence in yourself – This represents the level of belief you have that you can/will predictably and correctly perform the tasks of driving (position the car properly, recognize, interpret and respond to sensory information, etc.), and that if things don’t go exactly as planned, for whatever reason, that you have the capacity to regain control.This type of confidence has, by far, the largest impact on your overall confidence level, and therefore has the largest impact on your performance, so you can think of it as the CORE of confidence. Most drivers don’t understand this type of confidence because it seemingly elevates or declines of its own will. However, when you understand how self confidence works, and that it is made up of, and can be influenced by, multiple elements (just like overall confidence is made up of the four elements in this list), then you will see that you can exert direct influence over your self confidence to either help move it into alignment with reality (your skill set), or to recover confidence if something has caused your confidence level to drop.
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2. Confidence in your equipment – This represents your level of belief that when you give an input to your car it will respond in a predictable way, (hopefully producing the desired results), and of course that nothing will break or fail to function as it should.If you’re not getting the desired results from your inputs, that can be corrected with tuning of the car and/or your technique, but unpredictable behavior will destroy your confidence in the car and therefore your performance. Generally, when something ‘bad’ happens with your equipment that causes an incident resulting in a reduction in confidence, it’s possible to identify the root cause of the failure. If you know what happened, you can implement strategies to prevent it from happening again, and that is often enough to allow you to quickly regain the confidence that you may have lost in your equipment. However, if you cannot positively identify the root cause of the problem, then the lingering question about ‘what went wrong’ can have a negative effect on your level of confidence in your equipment, which reduces your overall confidence, which can profoundly impact your performance potential.Another big factor related to how completely or quickly you can regain confidence after an equipment failure is the consequences you suffered because of the failure. That is, if a wheel brakes and sends you spinning off into the dirt, your confidence will be somewhat shaken but it will be fairly easy to justify that “it was a fluke.” On the other hand, if the same thing happens and you go tumbling over the guardrail and through the woods, then even though the justification would be the same, it would likely be much harder to hop back in and go fast.
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   NOTE: Most drivers below the Expert level can’t use their car’s full potential, so this type of confidence has little impact on their driving performance unless something serious has gone wrong, or the car is way out of whack. However for expert drivers, who can use everything the car can offer, this type of confidence becomes a much larger portion of their overall confidence. That is, if they can use all of the car’s capabilities, but the car does not have sufficient capabilities to be competitive, then that can have a big impact on an expert drivers confidence.
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3. Confidence in the track surface – This represents your level of belief that the track will provide predictable traction.Other than unusual circumstances; the track surface tends to be reasonably consistent and predictable. That is, typically changes in the track surface’s traction level, caused by changes in environmental conditions (extreme heat/cold), or other factors such as ‘marble’ buildup offline or dirt on the track where people typically cut a corner is easily understood and compensated for, so it has little if any impact on track surface confidence.If something unusual does happen, such as an oil spill or the like (which hopefully you’ll be alerted to by the workers — #4 below), and you get caught out by it, the cause of the ‘problem’ is clear, and is typically a rare enough occurrence, that recovering confidence in the track is relatively easier than recovering confidence from situations that erode other types of confidence. Of course, the ease with which you recover confidence in the track will be hugely influenced by the physical and/or financial consequences you paid in the mishap.
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   However, in the case of a wet track surface, then the level of available traction become much less predictable, so many drivers take a big hit to their confidence when racing on a wet track. The reduction in traction predictability is caused, because of the effect that water has on available traction is influence by many other things (surface polish, embedded oils, rubber accumulation, etc.). The better you understand the effect of these variable influences, where you are likely to encounter them, and how best to avoid them or mitigate their impact on your ability to maintain control, the higher your wet driving confidence will be.When you’re racing on a transitioning track (dry to wet, or wet to dry) or when the amount of rain is varying during a race, then the unpredictability level of available traction gets ratcheted up a few more notches because corner-by-corner, lap-by-lap, the available traction is changing, which makes confidence in the track surface drop significantly. Only drivers who have supreme self confidence (confidence in their ability to sense/predict traction and control their car) can excel in these conditions by essentially replacing the majority of the confidence lost due to unpredictable traction with their ability to compensate/adapt via car control skills.
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4. Confidence in other external elements – This represents your level of belief that that the people you are racing with are in reasonable control of their cars (OK stop laughing), the corner workers are alert, the weather is not crazy (gusting winds changing direction quickly), etc.You have no real control over any of these things, so all you can really do to raise your confidence is be as aware as possible. Perhaps you see a worker up ahead duck down with urgency to pick up a flag, you know they hold the yellow and blue flags, so the only other flags that might require urgency is the oil or white (slow moving vehicle flag), so you know to be ready. Being able to pick this type of subtle but critical information up will boost your confidence. Likewise, knowing your competition (the clowns who pull late, out of control banzai passes, and the guys who race with skill and respect for the sport and each other), will boost your confidence because you’ll know how to protect yourself in dodgy situations.

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What is the Purpose/Function of Confidence?

The purpose of your confidence level is to delineate the threshold between your performance comfort zone and your discomfort zone (the unknown, uncharted, and therefore scary waters that lie beyond your comfort zone). In the case of racing, which always entails some level of risk, you can think of your comfort zone as representing the level of risk that your self-preservation system deems acceptable for you. You can think of your discomfort zone as the unexplored, gap between your confidence level and the maximum capabilities of the car you’re driving. You’re self-preservation system considers the levels of performance that exist outside of your comfort zone to be excessively risky, dangerous, or downright foolhardy.

So ultimately, the function of your confidence level is to keep you safe by:

1. Setting a performance level ceiling that it considers safe (that resides within your comfort zone)
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2. Preventing you from venturing into your discomfort zone; this has the undesirable side effect of limiting your performance and learning potential.

All that said, it’s important to note that while confidence delineates the comfort zone / discomfort zone transition, that transition is not a simple line (or on/off switch); instead it represents a range where the driver’s comfort level is changing significantly. For example:

You can also look at the confidence transition zone in terms of how it impacts the driver’s feelings instead of just a as a ‘thing’ or a portion of some theoretical continuum, which is probably more productive. For example:

When looking at the confidence transition this way, you can see that things are pretty clear the farther away a driver is performing from the confidence threshold (either below it or above it). However things start getting ‘fuzzy’ right around the confidence threshold. For example being Anxious Vs. being Exhilarated; both can be produced by driving at essentially the same performance level, so the same ‘cause’ can produce a different effect (feeling) based on the driver’s perception of where they are performing relative to their personal limit (confidence threshold).

Also notice how the transition zone beneath the confidence threshold (the pleasure/reward zone) is much broader when compared to the pain/risk zone. That means the it does not take much of an accidental performance overshoot (driving beyond your confidence threshold) to blast through the feelings of Anxiety, Intimidation, Distress and end up completely Debilitated with fear (mental overload, target fixation, etc.). That’s one reason it is so difficult to keep pushing up your own limits (your confidence threshold).[/glossary_exclude]

How Does Confidence Impact Performance?

Everyone will agree that having a high level of confidence is crucial if you want to be really fast. However, to be most beneficial for performance (and especially for performance improvement if you’re not already an expert or master), then your confidence level must be in alignment with your skill level.

Realistic Confidence

When your confidence level is reasonably well aligned with your actual driving skills, then that’s a good thing for two main reasons:

1. You are allowed to use all (or at least almost all) of your driving skills.
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2. With the right attitude/approach, you can use the fuzzy area around your confidence threshold to expand your driving skills by exploring the performance area that is just above your confidence threshold.

Unrealistically Low Confidence

If for some reason (fear, mistrusting your skills, misguided beliefs, not understanding the task, etc.) your confidence level is set to an arbitrarily low level that is below your actual skill level, then this is a huge problem for two reasons:

1. Your performance suffers because you are not allowed to use all of your driving skills.
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2. Your ability to improve your performance is severely limited because even the upper reaches of the confidence transition [glossary_exclude]zone[/glossary_exclude] is still well within your actual driving skill capabilities, so even venturing into the fuzzy area above your confidence threshold will not expand your driving skills because you already poses those skills.

Unrealistically High Confidence

There is a much less common manifestation of confidence, where your confidence level is artificially and excessively high; you think you’re better (are more capable/skillful) than you are.

Son, your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash!
– Top Gun

In this situation confidence can embolden you to try and perform beyond (often far beyond) your skill level. This can be a very dangerous situation indeed for a driver, and for the other drivers around him, with the level of danger increasing the farther his confidence level is from reality. Often a ‘lesson’ in the form of a big crash is required before the confidence of drivers like this self-adjusts to a level closer to reality, but that only can happen if the driver takes responsibility for the crash. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee they will take responsibility because often the confidence/ego is so overblown that crashes are always perceived or justified as someone, or something, else’s fault.
[glossary_exclude]

Expert/Master Level Confidence

Confidence for an expert driver is a little bit different from other drivers because experts have the skills to use everything the car can give. That said, they still have a small discomfort zone with a correspondingly small transition zone. When an expert pushes into their discomfort zone (like on a banzai qualifying run, or in a desperate effort to come back from some earlier adversity) they are pushing not only their limit, but THE LIMIT as well.[/glossary_exclude]

Experts can redefine the limit because they wield confidence like a sward; using it to cut a path through the unknown, which can allow them to blaze a trail into previously unexplored levels of speed, consistency, and race craft.

However, since experts are able to use everything the car can give, then, going back to the four types of confidence, confidence in their equipment takes on a much more significance role, because it is typically the equipment that can produce the biggest limiting factor for their performance

What are the Building Blocks of Confidence?

As mentioned in the Types of Confidence section above, I believe there are several types of confidence, but that self confidence is the CORE of your overall confidence. However, I also believe that self confidence is not one ‘thing’ but instead is actually made up of multiple elements:

1. Your Identity (Self Image)
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2. Your Self Preservation System (Risk Vs Reward evaluation)
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3. Your Intellect
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4. Your Intuition
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5. Your Recent Performance History
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6. Your Long-Term Performance History

These elements all interact and influence each other, and together they:

• Define your CORE confidence level
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• Control how closely to your CORE confidence level you are allowed to perform

You can think of the first four elements as the primary confidence policy makers, with their order in the list representing their potential influence over your confidence level. While the policy makers consider many external factors when making confidence level decisions, items 5 and 6 represent the most important information they evaluate.

You can think of elements 2, 3, & 4 as the primary confidence policy implementers; the elements that have the most influence when it comes to actually allowing you to perform at, or near, your confidence limit.

Identity (Self Image)

Like pealing an onion, the more layers you peel away from the confidence process the more layers you find, so Identity is also made up of multiple elements:

1. Values
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2. Beliefs
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3. Expectations
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4. Goals
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5. Capabilities (driving skill set)

Values

Near the core of your identity are your values, which are quite simply the ranked priority you place on the different things in your life (e.g. family, career, racing, faith, etc.). It’s very important in racing (and in life) to know what your values are because it’s almost impossible to perform in a way that conflicts with your values.

For example, if you are 18 years old, have been lusting for speed your whole life, and want to be World Champion, then racing is clearly going to be at the top of your priority list, perhaps even higher than life itself. However, if you’re 45 years old, have a successful company, a wife, 2.5 kids, a comfortable life style, and racing is simply a personal challenge you have always wanted to try and now have the time and funds to pursue, then racing may only be in the upper-mid pack of your priority list.

So, if you have never taken the time to list your values, you might want to do so… it can be quite enlightening.

Beliefs

A little farther from the core of your identity are your beliefs. For racing confidence, you should be most concerned with your beliefs about things like:

• How much risk is involved in racing
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• What is an acceptable level of risk
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• Your potential for becoming a competitive/winning racer (and how long you believe that will take)
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• Your ability to continuously learn from your experience and improve your driving performance
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• Your care control skills
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• Your ability to recover from unexpected/dangerous events
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• How the car should feel when you’re driving
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• And so on…

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Your beliefs have a huge influence on both your confidence level and your learning/performance potential because beliefs affect how you perceive both the external world and your internal world. This is the case because beliefs influence how you filter, label, categorize, and interpret the raw information from your senses (your experience). This means that beliefs have the potential to be a powerful ally if they are managed well, but they can also be a powerful hindrance to improving your driving performance if outdated or unrealistically negative beliefs are not corrected. For example, if, during the heat of battle in a race, you start performing at a level that is higher than you believe you’re capable of, when you realize how well you’re doing, it’s likely that you will ‘self-adjust’ your performance level to conform with your beliefs. Hopefully the adjustment will be of the benign variety (you back your pace down to match your beliefs) instead of a more unpleasant ‘adjustment’ (like you lose control for no apparent reason). If you accept that performing ‘beyond belief’ was a fluke and decide to settle back into your belief comfort zone instead of reexamining your beliefs and realigning them with reality, then you will have squandered a huge opportunity to make a lasting improvement to your confidence and performance levels.

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Expectations

Just slightly farther from the core of your identity are your expectations about how you will perform (internal expectations) and about what will happen in any given situation on track (external expectations). Beliefs and expectations are so closely related that you could easily argue that they are two terms for the same thing. However, I think of beliefs as ideas that you hold internally, while expectations are the ‘proof’ that your beliefs are correct in various situations.

I think that expectations are created when situations in ‘reality’ consistently and closely conform to your beliefs. So I think of expectations as kind of an information processing shortcut. That is, instead of taking in sensory input, determining the context and then filtering, labeling, categorizing, and interpreting that information based on your beliefs, you recognize a ‘situation’ you have seen multiple times before and based on that experience, your expectations automatically skips the ‘processing’ of the sensory information and instead identifies it by pattern-matching it to an expectation you hold.

Expectations and beliefs have similar potential for improving or harming your confidence and performance depending on how you manage them. They also have the power to influence each other.

Goals

Goals have a profound influence on confidence because setting goals is how your Identity establishes and communicates your overall intentions and priorities to the other main components in the confidence system (your self-preservation system, Intellect and Intuition). If you do not set goals, then you are inadvertently creating an environment that lacks leadership and direction. In this type of environment, the leadership void will likely be filled by the most self-important and overbearing element of your personality/confidence system (your intellect). When intellect wields this much power, it is quite possible for it to start acting like the ‘Safety Police;’ keeping you from taking any risks to improve your performance, or even worse, setting your confidence level below your skill level.

So setting goals is a requirement. However, your goals can only rally all the parts of your psyche and get them focused on the intended objective if:

1. They are not in conflict with your values and beliefs
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2. They are realistic/achievable
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3. You make the goal a top priority
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4. You commit to work with determination, and discipline to accomplish the goal

You, can’t lie to yourself (at least not at the core level), so if you don’t have the four requirements listed above, then all or part of your psyche well not take the goal seriously, and the leadership void (or unsuitable leader will remain).

NOTE: The goal setting requirements listed above are just to have your goal taken seriously. You can Google, ‘setting SMART goals’, to find information about techniques for setting effective goals.

Capabilities

Your capabilities represent the level of skill and control that you have over the car, along with how well you are able to cope with the situation when things go wrong. So, you can think of this as your current learning stage and/or where you are on the spiral to speed.

The interesting thing is that drivers often don’t hold a realistic view of their driving ‘capabilities’. Often, a driver’s ‘skill’ is held up as the cause (scapegoat) for a lack of performance, when the real problem is mental instead of skill related. That is, let’s say a driver has skill level (‘60’ – just picking a random number) but their Intellect keeps interfering with (and screwing up) the mental driving process, so they can only perform at skill level ‘50‘. So then Intellect points at ‘skill’ and tells the self preservation system “look he can only drive at skill level ‘50’. Therefore, self preservation, not knowing any better, says, OK then we better set our confidence level for a skill level of 50. Hey, I know this sounds silly, or childish, but I just recently helped a driver overcome this type of scenario.

Any successful battle on the track starts between your ears.

Intellect

Depending on the circumstances, your intellect can perform multiple roles in the confidence process. When your Identity takes a leadership role by setting clear goals and demanding, through force of will, that the goals be committed to and worked towards, then your intellect can be a powerful, collaborative ally. For example, in this environment Intellect can:

• Work with your intuition to add logical arguments in favor of the changes to your performance and/or confidence level that intuition feels are warranted; almost like a lawyer making well reasoned arguments to the Judge (your self-preservation system).
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• Present theoretical ideas for performance and/or confidence improvement to your intuition to check if intuition feels they are feasible, and if so, intellect can present them to your self-preservation system.

However, if a power void exists due to a lack of leadership from your Identity, then intellect may feel it’s his duty to protect you by filling that power void. This can result in your intellect ‘running the show’; perhaps with an iron fist. For example, in this type of internal environment, intellect may decide:

• Your current performance level is just fine, so for any attempt to improve your performance (intellect may provide skewed ‘facts’ to your self-preservation system). Or, intellect may simply refuse to even entertain any idea of pushing outside of your [glossary_exclude]comfort zone.

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• In an extreme case, your intellect may override the rest of your confidence level setting system and just set your confidence to an arbitrarily low (safe) level that is well below your actual skill level.

So a major factor influencing your ability to improve your performance level really comes down to whether or not you create an internal environment that takes control of your intellect and use its strengths to benefit your driving. If you don’t, intellect may well take control of you.

Intuition

Since Intuition does the actual driving, and has the most direct connection with the car, tires, and track, it knows the truth about your skill set and what you are capable of. However, when it comes to influencing your self-preservation system and risk/reward decision making process, Intuition does not seem to have as much influence as Intellect when your confidence level is being established, or when considering pushing yourself to perform outside of your [glossary_exclude]comfort zone.[/glossary_exclude]

Therefore, the environment created by your Identity will also have a large impact on your intuition’s ability to perform (drive to its skill limit), and to influence your confidence level. For example:

• In an environment where your Identity has set clear goals and is leading you in the quest to achieve them, then input from Intuition regarding the validity of your current confidence level and/or regarding ways that you might be able to expand both your performance level and your confidence will be valued, fairly evaluated, and acted upon if appropriate.
• In an environment where your Identity has left a leadership void that Intellect has stepped in to filled, then your Intuition (and therefore your actual driving skill) will essentially work for your Intellect, and since Intellect is most concerned with safety and predictability, then your intuition will have very little influence over your confidence level and what skill level you will be allowed to perform to on track.

Self Preservation System

Your self-preservation system does what it says; it keeps you safe by not allowing you to do excessively ‘risky’, ‘dangerous’, or just plain stupid stuff. It seems to act like a legislative or judicial process in your head. It has a huge impact on your confidence level; well really, I guess you could say it takes input from the other building blocks of confidence and then uses them to set your confidence level, and therefore your performance level.

When your self-preservation system is evaluating a proposed ‘exploration’ beyond your current confidence level that is geared towards pushing your limits and improving your performance, then in theory it should take all of the available information from the various building blocks of confidence, and then render a decision. That is, it should declare the proposed change either does or does not represent an acceptable level of risk for the potential reward.

Since the self preservation system’s job is to evaluate the risk/reward balance, then one of the most critical requirements for having the process work properly/accurately is to have clear definitions of what is ‘safe’, ‘challenging’, ‘risky’ and ‘dangerous’. Therefore it is critical to remove as much subjective evaluation from the process as possible by using knowledge, and experience to carefully define what is risky, what is dangerous, and what is mealy challenging or new.

Risk Vs Reward Evaluation & Safety Margins

I think of the risk Vs reward evaluation process as having two levels or cycles. The first sets the risk/reward threshold for your maximum confidence level (baseline confidence), which is based on the relatively stable confidence-related elements of your psyche (Values, Beliefs, Long & Short term history, Skill Set, etc.). However, I think there is another ‘evaluation’ that takes place, which defines situation-specific ‘safety margins’ that get applied to your baseline confidence and therefore ultimately defines your effective (or usable) confidence level.

You can think of safety margins as safety nets; placed there to protect you ‘just in case.’ They are there for almost all drivers, including expert/pro drivers. Don’t believe it; just watch qualifying when the top pro drivers roll up their admittedly very small safety nets and tuck them into the corner for one or more banzai laps.

The crowds loved him because he, of all the men out there, was so clearly working without a net.
– F1 journalist Nigel Roebuck’s comment about Gilles Villeneuve

Financial Safety Margin

A financial safety margin is an additional limitation imposed upon your baseline confidence level due to a perceived ‘unacceptable’ potential financial risk. All racers know and accept the fact that every time they go on track, their beautiful car may not come back in one piece.

If you don’t come walking back to the pits every once in a while holding a steering wheel in your hands, you’re not trying hard enough
—  Mario Andretti

However the reality for most amateur racers is that they can’t really afford to prang their car (at least not very often), and therefore they have to find a balance between ‘the ragged edge’ and an ‘edge’ that allows them to be as competitive as possible, but also provides a high likelihood they’ll bring the car back in one piece. That ‘safe’ edge is created by reducing their baseline confidence by a risk/reward system defined financial safety margin.

Environmental Safety Margin

An environmental safety margin may be created when your risk/reward system takes into account the context/environment and the possible consequences for each turn on the track. That is, it’s easy to run right up to the edge of your baseline confidence level in slow turns, but for high-speed and/or high-consequence turns your self-preservation system may impose an environmental safety margin set somewhere below your baseline confidence/performance limit.

Interestingly, your self-preservation system’s perceived need for a safety margin may be caused by a self fulfilling prophesy. That is, if you focus on the potential danger (to you and/or your car) that a particular turn presents instead of driving through the turn the way you know you can, then your mind and body tense. When you drive with tension/fear, then your ability to manage the sensations and perform the actions that you need to in order to make it through the turn at your baseline confidence limit is inhibited. So, in fact, you do need the environmental safety margin to keep you safe because your maximum potential has actually has been diminished by driving with incorrect focus.

Think of it this way:

You take a 4” x 4” x 10’ long beam, lay it on the floor and walk across it… no problem; right?

You take the same beam and suspend it 5’ above the ground and walk across. Any problems; any tension or balance issues?

Now suspend it 20’ above the floor. Things different yet; are you beginning to think a safety net might not be a bad idea?

How about with the beam 50’ above the floor? Would you even attempt it without a safety net? If so, how relaxed do you think you would feel?

Potential consequences change things in a VERY real way unless you can control (or better yet filter out) the fear of something that could happen, which is adversely impacting your driving potential in the here and now. Fortunately, imagery is an excellent tool for training yourself to ignore attention grabbing and tension/fear inducing experiences and environments, which is explained in the Actively Managing Your Level of Acceptable Risk section below.

Situational Safety Margin

There are also other situations that may arise that could cause other safety margins to be applied to your baseline confidence level. Some examples of other situations that could result in a safety margin adjustment:

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• Changing surface conditions
  (starting to rain, drying track but wet off line, drivers intermittently dropping wheels on the inside of a turn and scattering dirt across the line, etc.)
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• Entering a waving yellow flag zone;
  (if not for your own self preservation, then at least out of respect for the sport, the poor guy(s) who wadded up their cars, and especially for the volunteers who rely on your respect and common decency to keep them safe as you battle for the all mighty plastic trophy or wood plaque.
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• A new guy joins your class, who is fast enough to run with you usual group, but is a bit of a squid (unpredictable braking points, over-driving turns, randomly getting sideways, banzai passes)… you know the type.
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• You got hit during the race; you know there is some damage, but you’re not sure how bad it is.
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• Your car has been exhibiting some unusual and unpredictable handling (or other) issues
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• And so on…

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While the types of safety margin adjustments described above are applied to most drivers’ baseline confidence, the amount of adjustment may be reduced, or perhaps even eliminated in some circumstances, if a driver has a long history of safe, consistent, and reliable performance, and no recent history to contradict that.

Also, when safety margins are applied it seem likely that they are not additive; instead it seems more likely that only the most restrictive safety margin for an given time/environment/situation would be applied.

Recent Performance History

Recent performance history, both for your driving, and for the other elements of confidence (your car, the track surface, and the other external elements), has a huge impact on confidence because it is the most timely and relevant information available, and therefore is generally given the most credence when setting/adjusting your confidence level and/or when determining the risk/reward of a proposed change in your performance level. As with most factors influencing confidence the ‘impact’ or consequence of the experiences (positive or negative) determines how much influence the experiences will have on your confidence and performance level.

Long-Term Performance History

You’re long term performance is like your confidence/performance credit score. Since it represents your history, it has a strong influence on your beliefs and expectations. It also is the ‘body of work’ your self-preservation system considers when it’s setting your confidence level, or when it’s evaluating a proposed change to your driving that  will push your limits to improve your performance.

If things go wrong on track (you make a driving or race craft mistake, or something out of your control happens), then your recent performance history can be tarnished. However, if you have established a long history of reliable performance, then it’s much easier for your self-preservation system to view the ‘issue’ as a fluke, and therefore you many not experience as profound an impact to your confidence/performance level as you might if you were a new driver who had not amassed a long history of competent/safe driving.

Confidence Building Block Interactions

The building blocks of confidence listed above are integrated with your base drive to avoid pain (by avoiding the risk/danger that can bring it) and seek pleasure/rewards. This is a two way relationship where, your base drive exerts an influence on the building blocks of confidence when it comes to taking risks, however, the building blocks of confidence can also exert an influence on your base instinct’s assessment of danger/risk.

The interactions between each of the building blocks of confidence and between the pleasure/pain base drive are a humongously complex and convoluted process, which I certainly don’t claim to understand. However, we do need a perspective from which to try and imagine some of the interactions, so I’ve created the following illustration that represents my guess at how things might work:

(Click the image – or open it in another tab – so you can zoom in to see the details.)

Confidence Evaluation Process for Driving Changes

While the illustration above represents how I imagine the building blocks of confidence interacting, I imagine a more streamlined process for evaluating proposed changes to your driving process. In this case, I believe that your self-preservation system is the focal point, and that Intellect and Intuition (the authors of the proposed change) then either separately or collaboratively present the change for review/approval. Your self-preservation system would then gather any required information from the other elements of confidence, and then would render a decision regarding whether or not the proposed change represents an acceptable risk/reward proposition. The illustration below represents my guess at how this process might work:

(Click the image – or open it in another tab – so you can zoom in to see the details.)

Note: If your proposed change is rejected, you can always use the information below to prepare better and try again with a stronger argument.

How Can YOU Influence the Confidence Process?

Hopefully all the elements of your psyche work together (each contributing its strengths) to find a balance so they can set a confidence level that ensures self preservation, but is not so risk averse that it inhibits performance by quashing creativity, experimentation, and learning/skill advancement. If that is not the case, then to progress, you’ll have to step in and exert some influence over the elements and processes that define your confidence and performance level.

To that end, what follows are several techniques that I have used to successfully tune-up my confidence when it was not at the level I felt it should be.

Monitor and Manage Your Self-Talk

I’m not sure where ‘self-talk’ comes from, but for the purposed of this technique, let’s say it comes from ‘intellect’… just because intellect seems to manage the language capability.

I’ve talked about intellect’s role in confidence before, but I saved mentioning one critical way that it can mess with your confidence for this section. Sometimes, even if your values, goals, and maybe even capabilities are where they need to be to progress, an insidious force (negative self-talk) can be sabotaging you; holding/pushing you back. I don’t know why this happens, but it’s easy to detect; just listen to your self-talk. Your intellect is working against you if you hear yourself constantly thinking and/or saying things that undermine your driving instead of support it, such as:

• “Who am I kidding; I’m never going to be one of the ‘fast’ guys.”
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• “I just can’t <anything you know you need to do to improve>.”
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• “They (whoever ‘they’ may be) probably think I suck, or I don’t belong on the track.”
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• “Why do I ALWAYS <something bad or negative about your driving>.”
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  NOTE: Superlatives like Always and Never are big propaganda flags, as are the imagined thoughts of other people and/or ‘imagined consequences’. These are all very effective methods of drawing your attention away from your goals by tormenting your ego.

Another problem with negative self-talk is that language can be a powerful weapon which, when repeated enough, becomes propaganda. Once the propaganda is accepted as fact, then important core elements of your psyche (like your beliefs and expectations) may start filtering your experience so that only the information that supports the propaganda is recognized and/or your interpretations of your experiences may be twisted to support the propaganda, while anything contrary is rejected. Unless you step in and stop it, this is a downward spiral that will continue, and will gain strength, until your reality (your driving performance) matches the propaganda.

How can you possibly have progress or success (or even enjoy your racing) if you have a mental environment like that? To progress, your whole psyche needs to be on-board. Your intellect should use (or should be trained to use) its considerable powers of influence for good; not evil. For example, your intellect should be saying things like:

• “Over the past three races, we’ve dropped our best time by 0.5 seconds. We’ll do what it takes to keep that going, which will put us in the lead pack by the middle of next season.”
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• “Step-by-step we can improve any part of our driving, we just need to: identify the change, visualize doing it, and make it happen on the track.”
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• And so on…

Fortunately you can fight this situation by paying close attention to your self-talk, and mentally correcting every erroneous or unnecessarily negative statement. You just mentally stand up for yourself and speak up; for example:

Self-Talk: “Who am I kidding; I’m never going to be competing for wins.”

Correction Talk: “That’s WRONG! Look at how far we’ve come since the first time we stepped in a car; look at <insert all the positive things you can think of about your driving and progress>; we can and will get better if we understand what to work on, and commit to putting the effort in to keep making incremental progress.”

Self-Talk: “I bet those people are talking about how slow I am and how they could do better than me with my equipment”.

Correction Talk: “KNOCK THAT OFF! We have no idea what those people are thinking or saying, and really; who cares. No one starts out fast; being fast is earned and takes time and commitment.”

Also, when talking to other people. If you make self deprecating ‘jokes’ or negative comments about your driving, pay attention to that and remember it; then as soon as you can, mentally correct it.

Reevaluate and Adjust Your Beliefs and Expectations

Your beliefs and expectations about your driving are influenced by many things such as your self-talk, values, recent performance, historical performance, etc. However, for improving confidence and driving performance, the most important way they can be influenced is through intention (mental will). Your beliefs and expectations are constantly at work labeling and evaluating experiences. For frequent experiences, the labeling/evaluating process becomes habitual. You can interrupt this habitual process by using mental will power to question the way experiences are labeled and interpreted. And you can further influence the process by supplying your own labels and interpretations for an experience you have. For example:

• You get into a turn ‘too hot,’ or get a big slide in a high-speed turn; you scare yourself, but you make it through OK… is that a warning, a lesson, or an avenue for growth to be explored? It may be all three (or something else), but if you automatically label any experience that scares you as a warning, without even exploring other ways of interpreting it, then you are limiting your ability to grow as a driver.
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• How do you label the back end ‘stepping out’; is it scary, fun, annoying because it’s scrubbing speed? How does your answer change when you consider it in context (turn-by-turn on a particular track)?
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• Do you view mistakes as valuable lessons to be used to advance your craft, or do you view mistakes as screw-ups; all of which must be avoided at all costs… including speed?

Actively Managing Your Level of Acceptable Risk

Managing your level of acceptable risk, is similar to adjusting your beliefs; you interrupt the status–quo (the automated risk assessment routine) and ask questions, reevaluate assumptions, and correct inaccuracies. This can be very effective for influencing confidence because it gives you some control over defining what is risky or dangerous, and also what lies inside and outside of your comfort [glossary_exclude]zone.[/glossary_exclude] Exerting control over this can be critical for performance advancement because this is one of the most important types of information that your self-preservation system assesses during the confidence level setting process, or when evaluating whether or not a change in your driving technique/performance should be allowed.
There are two techniques (or approaches) that I have used to influence my risk tolerance, and they can be used individually or together to correct risk assessment problems.

Redefine what’s threatening

Redefining threats is basically altering your response to what you experience/feel by either changing your actions or by stepping in and mentally correcting erroneous interpretations of sensory input. For example, maybe your risk/reward system has labeled the sensation of the car moving around as a threatening/dangerous situation. However after some more driving experience you realize that if you want to be fast, your car will move around, then you need to reprogram yourself to recognize the car moving around as a good thing that indicates you are near or on the limit.

Filter ‘alarming’ sensory input

Filtering sensory input is essentially programming yourself to ignore certain distracting sensory signals. This often goes hand-in-hand with redefining what is threatening. For example, you change the interpretation of an experience, and then you train yourself to mentally filter out any related sensations that you feel don’t require monitoring. Filtering unneeded sensory signals provides additional sensory bandwidth for things like sensing traction or anticipating when you’ll reach the traction limit. The less ‘stuff’ you have to attend to, and the more resolution of feel you have for important things like traction, the more competent and in control you will appear to your self-preservation system, which can only have a positive effect on your confidence and performance level.

What follows is also on the Imagery Training for Racers page, but I’m including it here because it’s a good real world example of using these techniques:

In my second race ever, my car was very twitchy in Ontario’s high-speed esses. The car skittering about drew all of my attention and sapped my confidence from a good showing the day before; I just couldn’t get myself to ‘hold the button down’ and got my worst finish of the year. During the month between race weekends, I used imagery every night; programming myself to ignore ‘small’ bits of oversteer/ instability. I basically replayed driving through the high speed turns in the skittish car while telling myself, “I don’t want to know about ‘the noise’; unless the car is ‘x’ sideways, or it is trending like it’s going to get ‘x’ sideways don’t bother me!” About half way through the month I changed things up and created /rehearsed a virtual-realization of driving through the turns flat out in the skittish car while ignoring the ‘noise’, which is what I intended to do at the next race. At that next race, and from then on, a skittish car never bothered me, and I was easily able to do the high-speed esses flat out. Imagery allowed me to take a significant weakness and turn it into a major strength in a month, with zero track time.

Set Specific, Challenging, but Believable Goals

I think that by nature, we are driven to accomplish clearly defined goals. Without goals, we may see anything new as pointless change/ danger /insurmountable problems, etc., so we tend to hold ourselves back; to resist change. Goals bring clarity, focus, drive and commitment; they re-label impossible problems as challenges to be overcome, and they enlist all of the best of us: Intellect, intuition, instinct, along with the various types of knowledge and combine them with our creativity to come up with solutions or workarounds.

For example, if your main goal is to drive your car at its limit, but driving as hard as you can, you’re four seconds off the pace. That’s quite a bit of time, so bridging that gap may seem impossible. However, you can always break your main goal down into smaller, more approachable/achievable goals.

Setting reasonable goals is critical because your confidence/self preservation systems have finely tuned BS detectors. For example, if you’ve been at ‘your pace’ for a year, and without doing any preparatory work, you set an arbitrary goal of knocking two seconds off of your best time during your next track session, well those BS alarms are going to go off. If you’re goal trips the BS alarms, then not only is it ignored, but you lose credibility with the parts of your psyche that are related to confidence.

What follows is what I would consider a reasonable (perhaps even a bit conservative) approach for accomplishing what may seem like an overwhelming goal of reducing your times by four seconds per lap:

You could approach the objective by setting an interim goal of reducing your lap times by 1% in each turn, each session. Surely you can go a mere 1% quicker… that’s nothing right? You just break an almost imperceptible instant later, or roll .1 MPH more through the apex, or accelerate a millisecond sooner or harder. If you are racing on a track with 10 “improvable” turns, (flat-out turns are probably not improvable to any great degree) that would be a 10% reduction in your time deficit per session. Of course, the closer you get to being competitive, the harder it is to find speed, but since you are shooting for a 1% improvement in your lap-time deficit, it’s a self adjusting goal because as your driving improves, and your lap-time deficit decreases, you are effectively decreasing the amount you are trying to improve in each turn as illustrated in the following table:

I realize that, 25 sessions may seem like a lot, but there are no quick fixes in racing; steady progress toward your goal is what you need.

Also the 1% is not a ‘hard’ number. Perhaps with a data logger you could see your actual improvement per turn, but really the key is just to have that goal of getting a minute improvement in each turn.

Having said all that, I must also say that your mileage may vary. This type of continual progress is dependent on several things including your:

• Attitude/motivation (goals, beliefs, values, etc.)
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• Knowledge (ability to understand how you can continue to find that 1% improvement in each turn, each session)
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• Willingness to try new things
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• Etc…

Build Credibility

Generally, when you lose confidence in yourself it’s because you made a mistake: you didn’t interpret information correctly, or you didn’t respond appropriately/predictably, or both. Either way, your action or inaction put you directly in harm’s way. After an experience like that, you may be left questioning your ability to produce appropriate and predictable results. In response, your self-preservation system backs your confidence/performance level down a notch so that if something similar happens again, you’ll have more time & mental bandwidth available to deal with it.

To rebuild your confidence, you can use one of more of the following techniques to rebuild your credibility with your self-preservation system and the other parts of your psyche that are involved in setting your confidence/performance level.

Address All Confidence Damaging Issues Quickly and Thoroughly

Often, when drivers make a mistake, they try to brush it off with a cliché like “I over cooked it,” “I got in too hot,”, “I got behind in my steering” etc. If you try to dish up a weak, incomplete excuse for why a mistake happened to your self-preservation system, then you have no ammunition for trying to justify to yourself that it is OK to go back to driving as fast as you had been. That is, you can’t tell yourself that it is “unlikely to happen again” because you don’t know (or haven’t explained) why it happened in the first place. In this case, your self-preservation system now sees the pace you had been driving as dangerous, so it will reduce your confidence level so that you cannot go as fast as you had been.

To regain your lost confidence/performance you must figure out HOW/WHY the problem happened. You must dissect the incident in the most minute detail… imagery is great for this. Replay the incident repeatedly moving back a little farther each time until you find the root cause. For example, if you had ‘an off’ in a high speed turn, you might first replay the incident from being in the dirt to coming back on the track, then from leaving the track to coming back on the track, then from when you knew you were in trouble to coming back on the track, and so on.

HOW Example

Try to determine the EXACT moment and way that things went wrong. “I overcooked a 90-degree left-hander” does not give you much info to go on. But, I got on the gas too early and oversteered wide out of the preceding turn. That made the car too unstable to get on the brakes as hard as I needed too at the braking point, so I carried too much speed to the turn in point. I tried to initiate the turn, but the excess speed overloaded the front tire and I pushed out into the gray (marbles). The reduced traction of the gray caused me to continue understeering off of the track. Knowing I was going off, I reduced the steering input so I would exit the track in a relatively shallow arc… etc. That gives you a lot of info about how it happened.

WHY Example

Now, you need to determine why. Do the same imagery thing but this time what you are looking for is subtle FEELINGS or intentions that will give you a clue about why you did what you did (or didn’t do what you should have). For example…

• Was it early or late in the session… were you not fully focused yet or getting tired?
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• Had you told yourself that it was time to start pushing it?
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• Had you identified that turn as a place you could/should go faster?
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• Were you trying hard to catch a competitor?
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• Was a competitor bearing down on you?
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• Did you lose concentration or were you distracted by something?
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• Did something that happened in a prior turn put you out of sync?
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• Etc…

Finally, use imagery training to run many different variations for how the incident could have been avoided or minimized. For example in the incident I described, I would run variations for:

• Not causing oversteer in the previous turn
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• Trying to brake a little harder if I did cause the oversteer
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• Braking further (not turning at the regular turn in point) to try and reduce speed enough that I could make the turn
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• Pitching the car into the turn to try and scrub speed and to put the car in an orientation that would give me a better chance of staying on the track.
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• Etc…

Once you know the HOW and WHY, and you have a series of alternate plans mapped out, then you will have a much better chance of convincing your self-preservation system that you understand what happened, that you will be able to identify when something similar might be about to happen, and worst case, you will be able to better handle a similar problem. With all that info., it will be hard for your self-preservation system to keep you slowed down for long… but do give yourself a little time to get back up to speed, and you may find that where you had been is no longer your limit.

You can also take it a step further and use imagery on the turn that preceded the incident to figure out what you might be able to change that would allow you to accelerate where you did without causing the oversteer issue that ended up cascading into going off track.

Expand Your Knowledge and Driving Skill Set

Anything that you do to understand your driving performance, to expand your vehicle control skill set, or to expand your knowledge about racing can both build your credibility in the eyes of your self-preservation system, and provide opportunities to reevaluate your past experiences to help improve your performance.

For example:

• When I first started racing, it was in Formula Fords running on hard Dunlop rubber. Later I drove a Formula Ford in SCCA races on soft Goodyear tires. That transition was a complete non-issue for me. However, when I went back to race the Dunlop tired cars again; it felt so easy I couldn’t belief it. Taking a step up in speed and/or traction, (even an incremental step; I couldn’t afford new Goodyear tires) made what I used to think was the ragged edge on the Dunlops feel like a walk in the park.
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• After destroying my car, I was looking at saving for a year to put it back together, so I got a motorcycle for transportation to save money and get my speed fix. I eventually did a Keith Code’s California Superbike Schools at Laguna Seca. Since you go bouncing down the road if you can’t sense traction well on a bike, when I got back in a race car, I found I’d made a quantum leap forward in terms of my resolution of feel for traction.
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• After I’d been racing for about four years (with reasonable speed and success), I read Piero Tarrufi’s book The Technique of Motor Racing. I had an epiphany when reading his explanation about how the car must rotate around its center of mass in a turn (paraphrased). I realized that without understanding it, I had been actively controlling when and how quickly that rotation happened. That understanding became the basis for my CORE Skills 4 & 5 (Controlling Polar Rotation & Driving a Trajectory on a Line).

[glossary_exclude]

Sell Changes to Yourself

Advancing your driving performance level requires that you take small steps outside of your comfort zone. However, at the same time your self-preservation system is constantly trying to maintain your current (safe) confidence level by keeping you from trying new (and in its opinion de facto dangerous) things. Therefore, you will often need to become a very convincing salesman if you want to make a change to your driving that will take you above your current confidence level; you’ll need to convince your self-preservation system that the change is an acceptable risk before you can get the change approved.[/glossary_exclude]

The process of selling changes to your self-preservation system is described in detail on the Imagery for Racers page (in the Defining, programming, rehearsing, and selling a high-risk, but high-reward change in your driving section).