 Maintaining situational awareness while driving is easier said than done. It's very easy to let your minds get diverted from the true task at hand. As the article suggests, we need to train ourselves to switch our minds into a more aware state. Let's go back to Joe Darden and listen to him talk about driving distractions. One of the key things that a lot of people talk about, and we talk about a lot during the program, is distractions that happen to the driver while they're behind the wheel. And that's huge. There are a lot of distractions that are out there, whether they're in the vehicle or outside of the vehicle, that can pull the driver's attention away from the task at hand, which is driving. Earlier we talked about you want to get from point A to point B safely. Well, in between those points, everything else is going on in the car. And what we'll do a lot of times is I'll actually have people write down ten distractions on a piece of paper, give them five minutes to do that. Then we'll come back and I'll write on the board what the people have put down on their paper. And what we'll end up with is somewhere between 30 and 40 distractions that we've written up on the board. And it's everything from, you know, everybody always says the cell phone's a distraction. Everybody says the radio's a distraction. Well, there's a lot of newer things that come out that people don't think about. GPS receivers that are in cars and mounted in the dash now are a distraction a lot of times because people are looking at that rather than looking at the road. Or the DVD player that's in the back that the kids are looking at now or the ones that they even have in the dash of some cars are distractions. So we'll go through all these distractions. We've got 35 to 40 of them on the board typically. And we'll say, okay, let's go through now and put a check mark by the distractions that we can eliminate completely. And what we'll find is at the end of that, there's only two or three maybe at the most that are not 100% controllable by the driver. There's nothing ever that forces me to answer my cell phone when it rings when I'm driving the car. There's nothing ever, I'm never so thirsty that I've got to drink it while I'm driving a cup of water or whatever. I can pull over, I can do whatever. It's my choice to do that stuff. I can choose to mess with my radio. I can choose to look at my GPS. I can choose to have that conversation. I can choose to look at the person sitting next to me while I'm talking to them instead of looking at the road when I'm driving. All those things are choice. And when it comes down to it, all of these decisions we've talked about all the way up to this point have been all about choice. You choose whether or not you're going to drive defensively when you're behind the wheel. You choose whether or not you're going to have a safe following distance. You're going to talk on your cell phone and be distracted while you're behind the wheel. So all those distractions, if you can eliminate those, every one of those distractions you get rid of, you've just given yourself one more chance to not be involved in a crash. When I talk to people that are driving for a living, I focus, yeah, it's your job. If you don't drive safely, you could end up having crashes and now you don't have a job anymore. But also, you try to focus on, well, if you get involved in a crash and you have an injury, what does that mean to you personally? If you're injured to the point where now you can't do your job anymore. So now you can't make the livelihood that you're accustomed to and now you've got to find a new career, something else to do. And if that doesn't impact them, when you think about, okay, what do you like to do when you're not at work? I like to go fishing when I'm not at work. So if I can't walk down a stream bed because my back so sore because my leg's been broken or whatever, or if I like to play golf and my back so sore that I can't follow through on my golf swing or whatever the case may be, now all of a sudden I found a reason for that person to think of it a little bit more. It comes right down to it. All the defensive driver training in the world is great, but it comes back down to when that person's behind the wheel of the vehicle, whether they choose to apply the stuff that they've learned or whether they choose to follow in old habits and just drive through that automatic driving where they just start, when they get there, they're there, haven't really put that much thought into it. And when you're a driver that's driving a commercial vehicle, if you're driving a fire engine, you're driving a delivery vehicle, whatever the case may be, usually a lot of times you're the only person driving that vehicle. You're in the vehicle, you're getting from point A to point B. There's not going to be someone sitting in the seat next to you, like the instructor telling you, well, you're not moving your eyes as often as you should. You're not checking your mirrors every five to eight seconds. You're not moving your point of concentration every two to three seconds to actively search for the threats that are out there on the roadway with you. The threats are there. It's your job to find them. When I talk about you want to train constantly, you always want to be in that mode of, there's a threat out here, I need to find it. I need to make sure that when that person steps off the curb or when that vehicle comes through the intersection or when that edge of the shoulder gets soft, I know that's going to happen before I get there and I'm going to have my vehicle set up in the right place before I get to that point. Because once this stuff unfolds and it gets to the point where that's happening, by then you're just in that reactionary mode and there's really nothing you can do but sit along and go for the ride and hope everything works out okay. Whereas if you're more proactive about it and you're planning ahead and actively searching for those threats, you can prevent so many of the crashes that you read about in the paper and so many of the crashes that you see on TV, they would just never even occur because you saw that had the potential to happen well in advance and just removed yourself from that situation by using defensive driving practices.