The Story I Told Myself Was That I Was in Control

For years, Amy tried to explain something to me that I understood intellectually but did not really understand.

She would talk about the unconscious.

The subconscious.

The emotional body.

The somatic body.

The ways our bodies and emotions can respond before the analytical mind catches up.

I understood the words.

I understood the concepts.

They made sense to me.

And they did not make sense to me.

Because I had another source of evidence.

Me.

I have always been analytical.

Cognitive.

The guy who thinks.

Even when I got angry, I never felt as though I completely lost myself.

I could be furious and still know I was furious.

I could feel the emotion and still hear the part of me saying:

That is enough.

Do not cross that line.

This is not who you want to be.

So I built a model of myself.

I am under control.

Not perfectly calm.

Not emotionless.

But still driving.

I did not realize how much of that belief rested on never having encountered a situation powerful enough to prove the model incomplete.

Then someone turned left in front of my motorcycle.

I Thought I Was Doing Everything Right

Amy and I were living in Westchester at the time.

We were riding home together on my motorcycle on Lincoln Bl.​

She was seated behind me.

I was driving.

I had spent years riding motorcycles and thinking about risk.

Motorcycles do not give you much room for stupidity.

Especially someone else’s.

So I practiced defensive riding.

• Visibility.
• Awareness.
• High beam.
• Watching intersections.
• Watching drivers.
• Trying to make myself impossible not to see.

And then a driver turned left in front of us anyway.

This is where one of the uncomfortable parts of the story begins.

For a fraction of a second, I did not respond to the reality in front of me.

I responded to the injustice and stupidity of it.

My thought was something like:

Are you fucking kidding me?

I am right here.

My high beam is on.

How can you possibly turn in front of me?

It was indignation.

Anger.

Disbelief.

And afterward, I blamed myself for that fraction of a second.

I cannot prove that quarter-second caused what happened next.

I am not reconstructing the accident like an investigator.

But I know how I experienced it.

Instead of immediately adapting to what reality had just become, some part of me was arguing with reality about what it should have been.

Then I reacted.

I accelerated.

I maneuvered.

I got mostly out of the way.

The car still clipped my left saddlebag.

The motorcycle started to fishtail.

I got it back under control.

And then I reached behind me with my right hand.

Amy was gone.

And Then I Was Gone Too

Amy later told me what she saw.

From where she ended up on the street, wearing all of her riding gear, she watched me lay the motorcycle down and walk away from it.

She described it almost like something out of a James Bond movie.

I do not remember that.

What I remember is rage.

Not ordinary anger.

Not:

“That asshole almost killed us.”

Something else.

Someone had hurt my wife.

And I was going to kill him.

The driver was a long way down the street by then, getting out of his car.

I was screaming.

Hateful things.

Vile things.

Things I could barely believe were coming out of me.

And here is what changed the way I understand myself:

My values were still there.

I could hear them.

Some part of me was screaming internally:

What are you saying?

What are you doing?

You have worked your entire life not to become this.

Stop.

This is not you.

But hearing my values was not the same as being able to make my behavior obey them.

The lights were on. My ethics were talking. But they were not holding the steering wheel.

The Elephant Was Not Listening to the Rider

There is a story that I read in the book, Switch by Chip and Dan Heath:

​The elephant and the rider.​

The rider is the part of us that explains.

Plans.

Reasons.

Chooses.

The elephant is much larger.

Older.

Emotional.

Automatic.

For most of my life, I thought the rider was driving.

Maybe the elephant occasionally pulled to one side.

Maybe it got excited.

Maybe it became afraid.

But the rider had the reins.

That day I discovered something else.

The rider could be completely awake. Completely aware. Completely opposed to what was happening. And the elephant could still be moving.

That scared me more than I expected.

Because I had spent years believing that if I knew what was right, I could choose what was right.

That day I discovered that knowing and choosing may be farther apart than I understood.

My model of myself had been cracked open.

Then I Saw Amy

I do not know how long that state lasted.

Probably not very long.

It did not need to.

Then I saw Amy.

She was sitting up.

She was okay.

And something changed.

The threat was gone.

My wife was alive.

My wife was safe.

And the person I recognized as myself started coming back online.

Later, I apologized to the driver for how I reacted.

It had been an accident.

A terrible mistake.

The kind of mistake riders spend their lives trying to anticipate because human beings make them.

Amy was okay.

And I was left with a very different question about how well I actually understood myself.

Amy Had Been Trying to Tell Me

For years, Amy had been studying and talking about things that did not fit neatly into the cognitive model I trusted.

The body.

Emotion.

Somatic responses.

The unconscious.

The parts of us that do not wait politely for the analytical mind to hold a meeting.

Before the accident, I could understand those things as concepts.

Afterward, I had evidence.

Personal evidence.

I had experienced the bizarre situation of hearing my ethics clearly while another part of me was ignoring them.

That is very different from reading about it.

It took the legs out from under one of my assumptions.

The assumption was not:

“I never get emotional.”

I knew I did.

The assumption was subtler:

No matter how emotional I become, some rational part of me remains in control.

That was the part reality challenged.

What Else About Me Is Outside the Model?

I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about what we do not know that we do not know.

Usually we imagine those unknowns somewhere outside us.

Something about:

• the market;
• a candidate;
• a customer;
• another culture;
• another person;
• a business problem.

But what about the unknowns inside?

What if the mental model I carry of myself also leaves things out?

I know what kind of person I believe I am.

• Analytical.
• Disciplined.
• Ethical.
• Responsible.
• Controlled.

Those things may all be true.

But they are still a model.

And the map is not the territory — even when the map is me.

The unsettling lesson from that motorcycle accident was not:

“I am secretly a violent person.”

I do not believe that.

It was:

There are conditions under which parts of me can behave in ways the conscious person I identify as “me” does not immediately control.

That was new information.

I did not know that I did not know it.

This Does Not Remove Responsibility

There is a dangerous way to interpret a story like this.

“My emotions took over, therefore I am not responsible.”

I do not believe that.

If anything, the experience increased my sense of responsibility.

If I know there are conditions under which my cognition becomes less powerful than I would like to believe, then:

• preparation matters more;
• training matters more;
• habits matter more;
• environment matters more;
• what I practice when things are calm matters;
• apologizing when I fail matters;
• understanding my triggers matters.

And humility matters.

The lesson is not:

“I cannot control myself.”

The lesson is:

I should not build my life around the assumption that conscious intention is the only force I need to account for.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Think about one identity statement you carry about yourself.

Maybe:

• I am rational.
• I am calm under pressure.
• I am generous.
• I am independent.
• I am not an angry person.
• I do not care what people think.
• I always tell the truth.
• I am good in a crisis.

Do not assume it is false.

Ask something harder.

What evidence supports it?

When has it been tested?

Under what conditions might it stop being true?

What part of yourself does that identity statement leave outside the frame?

What have people who know you well tried to tell you that you understood intellectually but never fully accepted?

What would reality have to show you for you to update your model?

The goal is not to distrust yourself.

The goal is to remember:

Your model of yourself is still a model.

I Thought I Knew Who Was Driving

I still value cognition.

Probably more than most people.

Thinking has served me well.

Analysis has served me well.

Discipline has served me well.

My values matter enormously to me.

But I no longer confuse hearing those values with always having complete control over everything happening inside me.

That motorcycle accident gave me something Amy had been trying to give me for years.

Humility.

Not humiliation.

Humility.

The recognition that the person I call me is more complicated than the conscious narrator sitting in my head.

There are parts of me I understand.

Parts I am learning.

And almost certainly parts I do not yet know that I do not know.

Maybe that is why this week’s question keeps following me around.

What am I assuming?

What am I not seeing?

What part of reality sits outside my model?

I had always imagined those questions pointed outward.

That day on Lincoln Bl., one of them pointed back at me.

The most unsettling unknown I discovered was not the driver. It was me.

📚 Leader’s Library

​A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens​

Why?

Dickens begins by describing a world filled with contradictions:

• Wisdom and foolishness
• Belief and disbelief
• Light and darkness
• Hope and despair

He was writing about the turmoil surrounding the French Revolution, but that opening survives because human beings keep discovering the same truth:

An age can contain extraordinary progress and extraordinary danger simultaneously.

That is worth remembering whenever somebody tells you that everything is getting worse.

Or everything is getting better.

Usually, reality is more complicated.

It is often both.

And leadership begins with learning to see both clearly.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck