How to Stop Hesitating and Take Your Moves

This article boils down to one question:

Are you going to go in?

That means will you go all in when the moment calls for courage and confidence.

That could be a very fast and treacherous corner, making an overtaking move or getting a great start.

If the answer to that is a verbal yes, but in the actual moment a ‘hold on a sec’ followed by a hesitation or a half move then this article is for you.

And for sure, I was backing out of situations, giving extra margin at starts and generally trying to survive.

Obviously you don’t want to hesitate, you want to be a driver who takes every opportunity and maximises every corner. You want to make the big moves, execute them with ruthlessness and poise, and glory in your own magnificence.

So what’s stopping you?

In my experience it will be down to one or a mix of the following:

1. Practical: You just don't know what to do. You don’t have simple practical procedures to follow and therefore have had no chance to develop the muscle memory to make those moves on autopilot.

2. Pure animal fear: The amygdala type flight or fight response kicks in with an unequivocal flight response. Basically you bottle it.

3. Monday morning racer syndrome: You like the idea of racing and identifying as a racing driver, but you aren’t quite so keen on the realities of the racing itself.

4. A deep psychological refusal: Motivation and reality don’t align. Something in your soul says yes I’ll die for racing, but not done this way. This will feel like an inexplicable drop in drive where your mojo disappears, one day you can be an unstoppable monster, another a lamb.

1. Get the Simple Practical Knowledge

That’s the easy one. You just need to acquire the knowledge and execute.

Here’s the knowledge….

Overtaking

Steps to overtaking are in chapter 14 of my book. Maybe even the contents page tells you enough without reading it!

Race Starts

For starts, here it is spelled out in an article - whether you start front, mid, or back:

Getting Proper Race Starts: Front, Mid-Pack, and Back

Driving Technique

The biggest unlock with technique is braking. I go on about it all the time, the answers are here:

Free chapter on kart braking from my book. This covers everything in high detail

How to get super refined on the brakes

Brake by Instinct or Use Markers?

Become a Freak on the Brakes

For just about any other technique I can think of hit this link on all the kart techniques

2. Dealing With Pure Animal Fear

The way to deal with fear is to feed your primitive animal mind with reasons to feel confidence.

When you face a racing challenge like a chaotic start, your adrenaline is already up. You are primed to go into an extreme operational mode to deal with the craziness around you.

Primed to Pounce - Confident- Fight

If you are confident you can drop into a super focussed and aggressive state, seeking opportunities to exploit whilst everything kicks off, or even creating the opportunities.

During a race start you can instinctively track the movements and intentions of the karts around you, and successfully predict where the gaps will open up. That’s opportunity seeking, and you can strike, seeing where a gap will be and directing yourself into that gap the moment it appears.

Primed to Retreat - Low Confidence - Flight

Without the confidence the exact same extreme operational mode can focus on escape routes, seek problems before they happen and have your senses at peak performance levels searching for crashes to avoid before they happen.

The answer that a primed driver finds in that state of mind is almost always to lift and fight another day.

Confidence Level Informs the Decision to Attack or Retreat

Clearly the answer is confidence. But they don’t sell it in bottles, you have to earn it by proving to yourself that you

a) Know the procedure, in this case starts which you covered above

b) Know for sure that you really understand, and can execute the procedures

Point (b) seems obvious, but most people neglect how you need to really know you know, with confidence, that you can do it not just remember the details.

With starts, practice is in extremely short supply, unless you have 30 mates with karts willing to spend all day practising starts!

So all you really have is imagination. Daydreaming about how you will apply the rules to making amazing starts and getting yourself keyed up whilst thinking it over is really valuable.

Play some super powerful music that gets you going, and imagine starts that go wild and how you will dominate the inside line, and train your primeval mind that you know how everything will work.

Once you are confident that you really know what you want to do, you will stop sabotaging yourself at starts.

3. Monday Morning Racer Syndrome