Q: “What’s your favorite way to stop over-analyzing and just drive? I’ve heard you talk about this on your podcast and webinars, but please tell me again how I can drive faster by not thinking so much.”

A: “Drive stupid.”

Yup, use the trigger phrase, “Drive stupid” whenever you feel yourself getting overly-analytical. But before you do that, do mental imagery of that scenario – being too analytical, saying “Drive stupid” to yourself, and then letting go and trusting yourself to just drive. Program your mind to let go and trust all the prep and analysis you’ve done before getting in the car. It takes practice, but a lot of that practice can happen in your mind, using mental imagery. And that trigger of “Drive stupid” is critical.

Remember, you do what you do because you’re programmed to do so; you sometimes don’t do what you want because you either don’t have the right programming, or you accessed the wrong mental program. How do we get these mental programs? Repetition. The good news is we can either do that repetition physically, or mentally. In other words, if you mentally imagine controlling your “analytical-ness” (a new word I just invented!!), and you do it over and over again while saying your trigger phrase (“Drive stupid”), when on the track you just have to trigger it. Of course, you do have to be self-aware enough to recognize when you’re being overly-analytical, but that’s usually easier.

The best thing is, the more you do this with mental imagery, and then again on the track, the more it becomes your new mental program – and you’ll more “naturally” perform with just the right balance of analyzing and letting go.