In today's episode, we want to talk about swapping

out the word confidence for the word trust.

And I've been trying this in my lessons

or with my coaching that I've been doing with people. What I've been

doing is asking some questions. So

rather than asking how confident they feel with their driving

or what scale are they can put their

confidence on, what I've done is I've

asked three questions and the first question

that I asked was, how much do you trust your

driving? And people look at me

totally different to how they normally would because it's like, oh, never

been asked that before. Yeah. This is a new question, Kev, what does that

mean? So, first off, it's getting people to think.

And actually, everybody picked up on

trust, which I think was really interesting because it's like

I've changed one word and it's like trust. What does that mean to

you? So that's the first question I've asked people,

and nearly all of them have said, yeah,

I do trust myself with my driving. Which is

interesting, which follows up the question with, what do

you trust yourself to do? Oh, I like that one.

And again, we're talking about driving

here. It's like, what do you trust yourself to do? And again,

it gets them to think differently, it gets them to think

of, well, I would trust myself to stop at a red

light, or if the gap wasn't big enough, I trust

myself to be able to make a decision to stop and let someone come

through first. So, yeah, we're really making some progress

on this, I think, with the way I'm teaching people, because

it's getting them to think slightly differently. So the

third question is, again, getting them to think about

their driving, but what situations do they have

less trust? Yes. So looking at where

the trust is and perhaps where they need to build

more trust yeah. And it gets them to

think, this is about them being self aware, isn't it? And

what I like about it is the answers are not

always what you expect. Yeah. Because it's like,

Well, I don't trust myself in this situation.

I say, well, tell me more about that situation. What is it that you

don't trust? It just gives you so much

information, doesn't it? Yeah. Or it gives you

less information, but more specific.

Yes. That sort of doing the detective work that

we're always talking about, it helps you unearth

some of the reasons behind the way you feel. Exactly.

And people now, or should I say my students, my

clients, are asking themselves those questions,

how much do I trust my driving? Yeah. Now, there's a

few reasons why I think this works really well.

One is, I mean, it's bizarre because, of course, we're the Driving

Confidence podcast and our business name is Confident

Drivers. So it is a bit of a leap for us

to leave the word confident behind and we're not leaving it

behind at all, but we're just switching things up a little

bit. I think when you ask somebody how confident

they are, admitting to being confident

has slightly negative connotations.

It's a bit like being a show off or a

big head. And so you don't necessarily

want to be uber confident, you don't

necessarily want to talk about having ten out of

ten in confidence, because then you feel that

maybe you're going to set yourself up for failure if something goes wrong

or somebody's going to think you're a show off. But when you ask

about trust, that's a completely different word, it

has a completely different feeling. Yeah. And I think you

can use both. Oh, absolutely. I think it's an add

on, shall we say? I quite like that

I'm using an add on question here because it's

different perspectives. Yeah, definitely. And you can't get

away from the fact that once somebody does have trust

in their driving ability or in their driving

decisions, that's going to have a knock on

positive effect on their confidence. If they have

trust, if they trust their driving, they will be more

confident, whether they want to admit it or not. And we

relate this, I suppose I relate this

a lot, to independent driving. And

this is about not the independent driving

following a satnav or signs on a test. This is

about people being able to drive on their own

without help from someone sitting next to them.

How much do they trust they're driving when they're going to be driving

on their own? Yeah, this is the most important

thing. You need to learn the skills, but then you need to

be able to trust that you can do it and. You need to trust

those skills. You need to know those skills, like you said. But you

need to know the trust has come from the practice where

you've put all those ideas and

knowledge to the test and you can say, I

now trust my driving in that situation. Yeah. And it comes from

experience, doesn't it? Yeah. And this is, if you've got no experience,

how well do you trust yourself to do

a multi story car park and park your car?

Yeah. Well, if you've had no experience watching somebody

else doing it yourself, then your trust levels are

likely to be fairly low. And again,

exactly where you are going, because how can you

trust something you've never done? Yes. And again, you might well have all

the skills to do it, but you just have never thought of it.

So I think trust is a great word to use

for people to analyze their driving. Yeah,

definitely. The other thing is that

before somebody gets in a car with someone else,

this is a question they might already be asking themselves

about somebody else's driving. So when

a friend passes their driving test, or when a certain

relative offers to give them a lift, do I

trust their driving? Is that somebody that I'm happy to get

in the car with? And I think people tend not to

say, how confident am I in that person? But what they do

say is, do I trust this person's driving before I get

in the car with them? So to use that exactly that

same mirror, it back to yourself, you're already.

Familiar with it, and you could take it one step further when

you're thinking about your driving is how much do

you trust yourself to keep people safe in your

car? Yeah. And again, it's getting people to think on a different

level. We tend to just go, could you drive from

here to here with your friends in the car? Yeah, I could do that. How

much do you trust yourself to keep them safe? Is a

much better, deeper seated question.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It's a deeper

question. It takes on more

meaning. Yeah. And you have to

then think about what the word safe means and

what does the word trust mean to you? And what do I need to do

to keep both of my skills in place to keep everyone safe?

How confident are you at driving from here to here? Yes.

Great. How much trust do you have

in your friend driving from here to here with two of

your other friends in the car? And you you might be judging,

but again, it's thinking. Yeah. So what we would like

you to do is to ask yourself that question,

how much do you trust your driving? And let us know what

you think. Yeah. And are there any areas that you

need to build more trust in your driving? So

look at it from both points of view. Yes. But

also, what friends do you trust to drive you? Yes,

I say friends, but it could be relatives as well.

So I hope that resonates with you in the same way that

it has with Kev's students over the last couple of weeks and

also with a couple of driving instructors that we've been talking to about

it recently and they've really taken it on board as well.

Yeah. I mean, it's about just notice what you notice when you

ask that question, compared to asking yourself how confident you feel.

Yeah. And see if it brings up any new pieces of information

that you can then use and work on to help

you move forward in your driving journey. So

let us know how you get on. If you found this episode

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