One of my 15-year old daughters just passed her “knowledge test” (a.k.a. driver’s permit test). Now comes the hard work of teaching her to do the thing I do nearly every day without really considering how I do it.
The first time I took her to a church parking lot to practice driving, she spent the first half of the 30-minute session just coasting. She didn’t use the accelerator much at all. When she did finally give the gas pedal a gentle tap to get the minivan up a slight incline, we reached the minimum speed to make the automatic locks click, giving her a bit of a surprise.
While she was behind the wheel, most everything had the ability to surprise her—a leaf falling from a tree or a low flying bird. All her senses were on high alert. Code orange! There’s a lawnmower! Watch out! Don’t hit that curb that’s coming at you at 5 MPH!
After a few more parking lot only lessons, she took a short drive on a real road. I don’t know who was more nervous, me or her. It consisted of driving from one church parking lot, down a back road, into a different church parking lot, and back the same way to the first place. (Thank goodness for so many church parking lots!)
There are many skills we have to learn slowly, step-by-step: you have to walk before you can run, learn your ABC’s before you can read, tie your shoelaces with “bunny ears” before you can do it the grown-up way.
We often want to skip all of those first steps. We’d like to think we can get where we want to go without learning the lessons along the way. We want to make the perfect pancake from that first pour of batter. Maybe that does work sometimes, but mostly we have to make several ugly, misshapen pancakes before we get a good one. We need someone to teach us which pedal is the brake and which is the gas. We need a teacher to sit next to us and tell us how to use the blinker (and how to turn off the windshield wipers when we move that lever accidentally instead).
Research shows that it can take as little as 2 months and as much as 8 months for a new behavior to become a habit so don’t get discouraged if it takes a while for a new habit to stick. That’s a lot of little steps to complete a journey. That’s a lot of choosing carrot sticks over candy bars. That’s a lot of driving lessons before we hit the interstate. That’s a lot of weird-looking pancakes.
