Report 4
Definition of a Driving Personality Makeover


A driving personality make over, is a process in which we try to modify our driving behavior through self witnessing and behavior modification. The first step in a driving personality make over is realizing that there is a problem, as Sharla Supnet explains. The problem is that we all have different problems as drivers rangeing from, not signaling for turns to speeding, tailgating, and driving drunk. The secret to finding you what your problem is through self witnessing and finding out your driving personality.

before this class I as well as Letitia Lujan didn't know that there was such a thing as a driving personality. But what I found was we all have many personalities. I don't mean to say that we all have multiple or split personalities but rather that we act differently in different situations. Like how you can always tell when a guy is talking on the phone with a girl (he talks softer and his voice is higher) or like you would act more professional at work than when you are out with your friends. It's like how its O.K. to ask someone out if you're at a club but not if you're at funeral. Get the picture? So now the first step is to realize that we act a certain way when we step into a car, or when we are put in certain situations when we are driving.

After we recognize that we have driving personalities, we must go on to the next step, which is to find out what our own driving personality is. Every one has different problems and thus different driving personalities. There is only one person who is capable of finding out what areas we need improvement in, and that is ourselves. Many times we dont know or realize what our problems are, as Jayson Nakasato explains, Driving for us has become second nature and we have already been programmed to react a certain way to a particular situation. The only thing that fluctuates is the degree to which we react, and this depends solely upon the way we feel at the moment. So to find out what our problems are, we must use what is called self witnessing, in which we monitor our thoughts and feelings while we are driving.

After we have done our self witnessing, we try to analyze and separate our thoughts and feelings into affective (feelings and motivations), cognitive (thoughts, feelings and judgments), and sensorimotor (sensory input and motor output) domain. What we have to realize is that we are the only ones who can make ourselves angry. We can no longer say that other people make us mad, but rather we get mad when we are put in certain situations. Then when we realize what situations we get angry in, we can go back and modify our thoughts and therefore ending the vicious cycle.

Some common problems behind the wheel

On todays highways and byways there are many problems with speeding, tailgating, being impatient, and rude. But, we may not always know the reasons why we do them. One example is speeding, every one does it, even if we don't intend to. This may be due to what we call conformity, many times we just do what everyone else is doing. In this case since everyone is driving over the speed limit so we don't realize or we don't care that we are too.

Another thing that makes us bad drivers is what we call displacement, this is when our feelings and emotions spill over to other aspects of our lives. For example if you just got chewed out by your boss at work and go home and start yelling at your husband, wife, kids, or parents. Our emotions can be very powerful and can be very dangerous when they are negative in nature and not properly redirected. If emotions like this spill over in to our driving, we could do some permanent damage if we take our frustrations out on the road by speeding or tailgating.
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