It’s frost heave season again in northern New England, that time of year when the freezing of snow-saturated soil causes the earth and and cracked sections of pavement on top of it to thrust upward. Cars bounce along old stretches of roadway as though on an amusement park ride and potholes appear in significant, axel-breaking numbers.

If you’ve ever driven in the north country, you know that you can navigate the heaves and potholes better if you watch the road instead of focusing at the potholes. I remember learning that the hard way when I first started mountain biking – when I focused on the rock I wanted to avoid in the path, my bicycle wheel seemed inevitably to roll right into it.

Apparently someone’s even coined a term for the failure to watch the wider road: Potholism.

Potholism can present a problem in workplace and interpersonal conflict as well, as MJ Ryan reminds us in Watch the Road, Not the Potholes:

Still, when change scares me, I find my mind going straight to all that I don’t want to happen, rather than what I do.

I was reminded once again about the danger of this behavior while reading The Unthinkable. In it, Ripley describes a phenomenon called “potholism”: “the more drivers stare at potholes, the more likely they are to drive into them.” Rather than concentrating on avoiding a pothole, says Ronn Langford of driving school MasterDrive, you should focus on the whole road so you can see where to drive.

What a message for us all! Focusing on the problems or anticipated problems of change will cause us to drive right toward them. Rather, we should expand our vision so that we are seeing the whole situation and focus on what we want out of the new situation, not what we don’t. One of the reasons this lesson is so important is that under fear, our senses narrow—we get tunnel vision, hearing, and feeling. It’s part of that old fight or flight mechanism. Our perceptions narrow so that we focus only on the danger. But as Langford’s driving research shows, this can be dangerous in and of itself, causing us to head toward the problem rather than away from it. When we widen our focus and expand our periphery, we tell that primitive part of our brains there’s no danger and it turns off, leaving us more able to think fully about the situation.

Potholes are an appealing metaphor for the challenges in workplace and interpersonal conflict, as well as in negotiation. I sometimes tell clients that my job as a conflict coach and mediator is to help people stay on the road to their future and get the damn potholes patched once and for all.

I like the pothole metaphor so much I’ve used it in other posts. If you missed them, here they are: Behavior Change and the Holes in Your Sidewalk and Negotiation Potholes of the Mind.

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.