Earlier this week, one of my clients in our second session together realized that she was innocently lying to herself about her future.

This brilliant woman, in the second stretch of her career after a break, was paralyzed by her fears of what could go wrong with her life.

To her, all those fears seemed valid and real. Her holding those fears made sense, given that she really wanted to avoid that future. Except, a fixation of attention on what we don’t want cannot get us closer to what we want.

I found this to be true quite literally in a ‘rubber meets the road’ way, when I learnt to ride a motorcycle over a decade ago.

Riding a motorcycle is a high-contact experience, just like living a life. The stakes are high and you feel every tiny variable – from the road conditions to the throttle response – in your body.

The roads in India are sometimes (a lot of times), laced with potholes and unexpected bumps. I would notice a pothole from afar, and try with all my might to evade it. But no matter how much I wanted to steer my motorcycle away from the pothole, I would ride straight into it. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening, and eventually I just learnt to slow down and bear the brunt of discomfort.

This was sustainable for a little bit, until a new kind of challenge came up. The potholes were still manageable because I could ride through them. But sharp curves brought me to a complete standstill. My attention would lock onto the bend in the road, and though I knew I needed to turn, my fixation made steering impossible. I would put more effort into turning the handlebars, and my arms would fatigue, without getting me the desired result.

I eventually learned the only way to move forward was to shift my gaze onto the direction I wanted to go, not the place I was currently headed. This required a mental shift: recognizing the obstacle, like a pothole, but immediately choosing to look for a path around it rather than staring at the hazard itself. Especially when I’m getting closer and closer to the hazard at a fatal speed.

Many years later, I found out that there is a word for this: target fixation. I find this term rather ironic because the pothole was never the target, but I behaved as if it was.

We engage in target fixation in life at large, without realizing this. If you find yourself resonating with this, there is an article I wrote in the past called Attention and Reality as a Curated Feed. That will give you a more technical understanding, and some actionable steps that you can implement.