Column: Dangerous Complacency and a Beginner’s Mind

 
 

When I first started trucking, I was terrified.

The fear I felt when I first began trucking wasn’t a deterrent, though.  It was felt along with feelings of excitement, wanderlust, adventure, and a boyhood dream of becoming a trucker now fulfilled.  When working in yards, practicing maneuvers, and riding with trainers, I was always eager to get going and couldn’t wait to get out on my own.

But during my first year of solo trips pulling super-b flatbed trailers throughout the wild weather of Western Canada and the USA, I had many moments defined by a simple fear: the fear that I was going to fail and fail spectacularly.  While Elon Musk might champion a “fail fast” approach to self-improvement, what failure can look like to a truck driver on wintery roads in British Columbia makes it an unpalatable option.

This isn’t to say I was not prepared; nor am I trying to say I didn’t operate safely. By following procedures and policies designed to keep myself and the public safe, as well as following all traffic laws and my common sense, my trips were collision-free.  But I remember many nights in the sleeper full of anxiety, thinking about what lay ahead of me the next day and what the weather might bring.  As a consequence of this fear, I was always very paranoid about performing my vehicle inspections, securing my loads, keeping safe following distances, driving for the conditions, and doing my best to be in compliance with the many laws that govern the occupation.

Complacency Creeping In

As with anything, time and experience brought me a greater sense of confidence.  As I saw myself successfully handling the machine, I became proud of my abilities as an operator.  The runs and loads I had hauled in the past became easy and routine, and I no longer had to spend much time thinking about what went into the job.  This is where complacency began to creep into my life.

Due to my efforts to run safely and compliantly (plus a little luck), I’ve always been collision-free on the road.  However, I’ve had my share of ‘oh-s**t’ moments.

Moments where complacency allowed me to follow too closely and then have to brake harder than I should have when traffic slowed.

Moments where I’ve been tempted to hook to the trailer and go because, ‘hey, normally I do my inspection and don’t find anything wrong and I’m short on time’.

Moments where I didn’t check my weights with the yard scale because I trusted the paperwork –  I always came through fine, but these are all moments where overconfidence and complacency could have given me problems.

I think it’s normal for complacency to creep into any routine task.  After all, the more we perform a task the more comfortable with the task we become.  However, practice doesn’t make perfect: it makes permanent.

It was time for a decision: what kind of trucker was I going to be?  I felt the pressure from customers, other drivers, and myself to hurry up and get the job done, to ignore safety procedures I once struggled to learn, to cut corners.  I knew continuing down this path would lead me away from that professional image I once aspired to, so I decided that I could only be a trucker if I was going to be a professional.

It wasn’t an easy transition.  I had to relearn things I had forgotten and set time aside for learning about the equipment I was driving, different laws, and industry best practices.  The once-feared commercial vehicle enforcement officers became my friends, and I found myself calling these individuals frequently with questions.

The most important part of this change was developing a clear image in my mind of a professional trucker: my mental role model.  I have had the privilege of meeting some true professionals in this industry: truck drivers with lengthy careers without accidents and incidents.  Through the warm presence of their lessons, good mentors never leave your side.

I asked myself if I was, at any given moment in time, acting like a professional.  If I sensed disapproval in the weathered face of my mental role model, I re-evaluated what I was doing and asked myself if I was doing the best I could to be professional – both in my eyes and the eyes of the general public.

I believe my decision to operate like a professional and use role models to help me attain this goal was a sign of maturity, and it certainly marked a turning point in my driving career.  When I get to the root of this mental shift, though, what I find is that I was actually returning to a beginner’s mindset.

Thinking Like a Beginner

Every task we do is different from the last time we did it.  Every drive home is slightly different from the last.  Every person you see today who you also saw yesterday, is different from when you saw them last: depending on how their night went, the differences may be minute or shockingly significant.

A beginner’s mind, according to mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn, is “a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time” [1].  In the context of my story as a truck driver, a beginner’s mind is what I developed because I saw it as an essential ingredient in my development as a professional.

If a driver decides to think like a beginner and treat a regular task as new each time, they prepare themselves to see the task as it truly is: something that is subject to change without their permission.  Despite their experience, they can’t see what’s around the next corner and they can’t know for sure, without checking, the condition of their brakes.

This is why I think that sometimes a newer driver has an advantage over a driver that has slipped into complacency.  Of course, measurably-safe experience is a sign of a safe and competent operator; but, a trouble-free past doesn’t guarantee a trouble-free future.

When I decided to start operating like a professional and get a handle on my complacency I was adopting a beginner’s attitude to the tasks that made up my job.  Instead of assuming, I would challenge myself to see the newness present in daily activities in an effort to remain focused.  Such an attitude did not cause me to live in fear or doubt my own abilities, but it helped keep me in a space of respect and reverence for the hazards around me.

I believe that no matter how experienced we get on the road or in any task, we should always ask ourselves “what do I have to do to make the job ahead of me a success?”  A beginner who is nervous about failure and worries about making mistakes may have a long way to go before they are a truly competent professional, but when in this beginner’s state of mind, they don’t allow complacency to take hold because everything is new.

New is exciting.  New is interesting.  In every routine task, there is an element of new if you know where to look.  And when something has become routine, the routineness of it implies we have acquired a degree of expertise.  By thinking like a beginner when going about an activity, complacency can be mitigated by focusing on what could be new about the activity today; our past experience with the activity can then provide confidence that will prevent us from returning to a state of fear we may have felt when we were true beginners.

References

1 – “The 9 Attitudes of Mindfulness according to Jon Kabat-Zinn”, Olivier Devroede, Mindfulness Based Happiness, quoting a passage on “A Beginner’s Mind” from Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn, accessed October 14th, 2021, https://mindfulnessbasedhappiness.com/the-9-attitudes-of-mindfulness-according-to-jon-kabat-zinn/

 
My most recent example is my colleague and friend Derek who I consider to be an inspirational leader. Recently, during one of our manager meetings, Derek completed a safety moment. Derek spoke on the real purpose of a leader and shared the photo included in this article, which explains the difference of what people think leadership is compared to what leadership really is. I believe we need more people to realize the power of real leadership, especially in our current climate because leadership can be in different forms and levels. 
 
Last year was tough, but you know what? We are tougher. As we navigate 2021, I believe it is necessary for us to lead with optimism, and to encourage positive growth in our industry regardless of the position we are in. This year, we have already experienced unique challenges, and depending on which news channel you tune into, the foreseeable future will bring more. As a result, we have the opportunity to implement creative solutions – solutions that overcome how things have always been done. 
 
Now, you may be asking, how on earth will we create these solutions? Although I will not claim to know all the answers, I do have a couple of beliefs that I am confident will work along the way. First and foremost, it starts with us. We, as people, need to operate with integrity and commit to doing the right thing, regardless of how “hard” that may be. 
 
Secondly, and equally as important, we need to remove the self-identification of “just”. What I mean by this, is eliminating the outlook that we are “just” our jobs. In my experience, those who approach their day knowing what and whom they are working for, such as their families, their friends, or loved ones, operate in a much safer way, than those who just identify as a “job title”. 
 
Finally, we need to celebrate our wins and provide empathy when losses occur. One thing that I constantly communicate to my 10-year-old son when he experiences a loss is when you fall down, you need to get back up. 
 
This year, I believe our greatest success stories will occur when we simply get out of our own way, and rise to the occasion to lead the way. 
 
Thank you, 
Josh Hannaberry 

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