Preoccupation with failure II

I have done a fair share of night hiking, sometimes under trees where you cannot see the trail and sometimes above timberline where it is difficult to discern the trail in the gravel and rock. For safety, we pay attention closely to the feel of the trail and the ground along side of it. When you feel the ground change you know you are leaving the trail, you do not have to watch. This is particularly important on a mountainside above timberline.

During my ambulance driver drill tower for the fire department we were taught high-speed driving techniques by the police department pursuit driving instructors. One of the maneuvers we learned was to drive sideways on the skid pan so that we knew but I felt like when the car broke loose on a high-speed turn.

Both of these stories explain the importance to me to know what failure feels like as it begins. Then as long as I am within those margins I do not have to pay as close attention. This gives me more brain function to solve problems.

But that is for safety and preoccupation with failure during operations. It was quite a few years before I began to really understand preoccupation with failure to prevent failure. It started to come to me on the fire department when the grumpy old firefighter or ambulance attendant seemed to overreact to minor things. There are a few of these guys I could talk to and I explained to me of some past experience that turned out poorly, very poorly. They did not want to repeat that.

Talking to Tom Mercer, this fit into a story he was giving me about his early days of flying when he would have a bad event. "You do not want to do that again."

It seems that some that event sperm so deeply into the brain that the feeling is triggered in the current day. This and only reawakens that pass ceiling but since off alarm that things are becoming dangerous.



So these are two ways that we develop body memory for preoccupation with failure. One is to learn the feel of early failure so you can become self-aware when it begins. The other is to understand and value that reaction to a trigger. This is more than a gut feeling, because you actually feel throughout your body the failure. One method guides you in one method once you. This is preoccupation with failure to me.