Are you a parent giving driving lessons to a household member? If so then you may find advice from driving training experts helpful preparation. With driving instructors only able to offer driving lessons to keyworkers for a few weeks yet, and social distancing measures still in place, it makes sense to supervise driving practice ready for official driving lessons to resume.
Driving tests have been cancelled for the coming months and with social distancing advice many driving instructors are no longer able to offer driving lessons and during lockdown only essential key workers will be allowed driving lessons and tests. This means your driving goals are likely to need to be more flexible this year. So how can you keep learning and feel prepared for your driving test when your driving instructor can't give your driving lessons? Here are our top tips on how to keep learning.
Are you in the best state of mind to learn how to drive? Do you love your driving lessons or does just the thought of them make you feel nervous? Your emotions have a big role to play in how well you are able to learn during your lessons. We have different zones that we move between when are learning something new.
Do you need help with driving test nerves? Then our guide can help!
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Discover the most effective techniques for banishing driving test nerves forever to become a calm and confident driver
When you are driving or are on a driving lesson how do you feel? What emotions do you experience? Do they stay the same or do they change?
We have three emotional systems that govern our actions and how we feel. We should experience all three systems throughout the day, with different systems being more prominent depending on the situations that we find ourselves in. Understanding more about how we all experience these emotional systems can help you learn how to manage them and use them to your advantage.
Most learner drivers experience nerves on the day of their driving test so here is our advice on how driving instructors can help their pupils calm nerves to keep them at a manageable level. Experiencing nerves before a test or assessment is a conditioned automatic response based on our past experiences of similar situations. This is why we all experience different levels of nerves because we have all had different past experiences.
Are you struggling with driving lesson nerves?
According to Jack Handey "A belief is just a thought that you think over and over again"
Have you ever stopped to take notice of what your beliefs about your driving or passing your driving test are?
Are your beliefs holding you back and stopping you from achieving your goal of being a safe, calm and confident driver? If so then you may be experiencing what is known as limiting beliefs.
If you struggle with driving anxiety or driving test nerves you may well have wondered if hypnotherapy can help. Joline Saunders is the hypnotherapist we approached about this issue and Joline has created two hypnosis tracks especially for users of Confident Drivers which are available with a Confident Drivers subscription.
Try the driving confidence self-hypnosis audio if you feel nervous in your driving lessons or if you are a nervous driver who has already passed their test. Or if you have your driving test booked and the nerves are beginning to kick in start to listen regularly to the driving test nerves hypnosis audio in the run up to your test. Many of our subscribers listen to our audios the night before a driving test to calm nerves and get a good nights sleep.
Go to our help for learner driver nerves page to learn more about what else is included in a subscription alongside our driving self-hypnosis audios. We asked Joline for her top tips for driving test nerves to use alongside hypnotherapy and here is her blog:
Have you ever been in a lesson at school, college or university or a work training course, fitness class, driving lesson or even accessing this website and secretly decided you can not be bothered? You go through the motions, do just enough - or maybe you don't, and as a result, you don't achieve anything and feel that you've wasted your time. If you want to guarantee driving test success then you may want to change this negative habit.
The way you think makes driving test nerves worse. If our last few social media posts have resonated with you then it's possible that your driving stress, nerves and anxiety is made worse by unhelpful thinking styles.
If that’s the case don’t worry! Being aware that the way you are thinking is half of the way to solving the problem, you can then begin to learn ways of developing more helpful thinking styles which will help you reduce the signs and symptoms of your nerves and begin to feel more confident.
The word stress has become part of our everyday language with people using it to describe themselves, work or modern life. It is not unusual to hear learner drivers describe learning to drive as stressful. Even many qualified drivers describe driving as stressful, especially if driving somewhere new. A Lloyds car insurance survey suggests that 70% of motorists experience anxiety in difficult driving situations after they've passed their test. So what is it that makes driving stressful for some?
You are probably already being mindful while driving without even realising it! It is a skill we all have and use everyday without realising. Choosing to use mindfulness to reduce driving anxiety and mentally prepare for your driving test means that you are strengthening skills you already have and using them to your advantage.
Mindfulness is simply noticing what is happening around you, right now, on purpose and with curiosity
Habits are developed over weeks, months and years and are a great time-saving solution. Once we have learnt and mastered an action we can daisy chain it with others until we have our daily routines organised on autopilot.
This daisy-chaining of actions and developing habits is the same process we undergo when learning to drive but that is a subject for a future blog!
How about thinking? Do you have any thinking styles, patterns or thoughts that have become a habit? Negative thinking can become a habit that is so automatic that it can be hard to break - or more concerning you may not even have realised that you are doing it!
One of the key theories cited in psychology for improving self-confidence and performance is Bandura’s (1977, 1986, 1997) self-efficacy theory. I know it sounds a bit of a mouthful but its good to know there is some scientific basis behind why we are recommending specific stress management techniques to increase driving confidence in our subscriptions! Self-efficacy is simply self-confidence in a specific situation and whether you have belief in your own capability to do something.
Learning some simple breathing exercises will help you to calm driving nerves, stress and anxiety quickly whenever you need to, as well as improving your memory and concentration. Several breathing exercises ask you to focus on the out-breath which may seem counter-intuitive but there is a reason.
In other articles we have covered stress, the three emotional systems and learning zones. So how does all this theory about stress, emotions and learning influence a learners driving during lessons? We can take a learner driver at a roundabout as an example.
Did you know relaxation helps reduce driving nerves? Practising relaxation exercises before driving lessons and before your driving test will help to reduce long term stress and minimise the impact that stressful situations have on you.
Every time we find ourselves in a stressful situation and we feel under threat we tense our muscles ready to fight, run, freeze or hide. Even when the stressful situation is resolved and the time for action has passed our muscles will often remain tense for a long period of time.