No Matter What Happens in Your Life, You Have to Keep “Driving the Car”
The following is adapted from Pancakes for Roger by Susan Combs.
If you’re a kid growing up in the Midwest, you get to drive, whether it’s going down to turn the water on for the horses or using the tractor to put up hay. Kids drive the tractor or the car with a trailer on it. My dad taught me how to parallel park between a horse trailer and a feed truck on the farm, which is a skill you can’t put a price tag on, especially living in New York City today.
When it came time to learn formal highway driving, my dad would always say, “Drive the car.” He said you can be the best driver in the world, but you have to worry about the people around you. That meant that no matter what happened, whether you got cut off in traffic or hit an animal or had any number of issues, your priority was always simple: drive the car.
Stop Freaking Out and Just Drive the Car
Whenever I was behind the wheel, he’d talk about how I needed to anticipate what other people might do, and just drive the car. He’d also jerk the steering wheel, and I had to avoid freaking out. If something happened and I needed to pull over, I’d take my foot off the gas, gather myself, and then reenter traffic.
Later in life, after he was diagnosed with throat cancer and treated at the Mayo Clinic, I traveled to Minnesota to help with his care post-surgery and to drive him back to Missouri with my mom. It wasn’t a minor surgery; in fact, he looked like an attempted Mob hit. They’d cut him from ear to ear, and he had a trach.
As we were leaving and he slid in the passenger seat, he said, “Now, Suz, I know you are an excellent driver, and we are going to make it just fine, but I just want you to know that if we are in even a minor accident, I’m probably dead.”
Talk about white-knuckling the 350-mile drive that lay ahead! Good thing my training took over, and I remembered to “drive the car.” We made it safely home that day.
Keep Things in Perspective
“Drive the car” is a good metaphor for life and keeping things in perspective. If you get derailed in life, sometimes you need to assess the situation and then get back to driving. Go back to the basics. What do you need to focus on to get going again?
When my dad was on hospice, I kept that advice in mind. The stress associated with hospice was so much. If you know any caregivers, you need to check on them, because I can attest to the fact that it’s draining.
My “drive the car” during that time was setting my intentions in the morning and going to the gym first thing every day. That way, I had something for myself, and the rest of the day, I could give to others.
If my dad’s oxygen got low, or he got into his meds because he was confused, I’d go back to “drive the car” to come up with a solution. We assessed the situation and put away all his meds to keep him safe, or did what we needed to do.
Keep Going, Even When Things Get Overwhelming
Sometimes, I think about how my dad learned many of the lessons he ended up teaching my brothers and me. I often wonder if many of them came from his time as a combat helicopter pilot. When you have people’s lives in your hands, you have to keep the mission always in the forefront, shut out the noise, and not let distractions derail you.
It’s important to keep going even in the face of overwhelming circumstances. Fly the helicopter. Drive the car.
My dad and I both considered the worst-case scenarios. In my job in insurance today, I look at the worst-case scenario for living. If you know what that scenario is and realize there’s a 90 percent chance it won’t happen, then you can better deal with the little bumps along the way. And you know how to keep driving when you hit them.
Gut Check and Move Forward
Many people second-guess themselves, but sometimes we just have to do a gut check and move forward. You might make the wrong decision, but you can learn from it, and those mishaps build your character and make you who you are today.
The fear of failure can be paralyzing, so it’s important to cultivate confidence in ourselves, our decisions, and our ability to recover. Mistakes — the bumps in the road — are going to happen. What you do after you hit those bumps is up to you.
My advice? No matter what, keep driving the car.
For more advice on how to overcome the inevitable bumps in the road of life, you can find Pancakes for Roger on Amazon.
Susan L. Combs is President of Combs & Company, a full-service insurance brokerage firm based in New York City. Susan started the company at twenty-six years old with a drive to “Do more, better.” This internal mantra has resulted in numerous successes and firsts, like being named the youngest National President in the over eighty-five-year history of Women in Insurance & Financial Services (WIFS) and the first female Broker of the Year winner for BenefitsPro. Susan is “a Missouri girl in a New York world,” and it’s the lessons she learned during her Midwestern upbringing and two-plus decades in New York City that are the basis of this book. The insights contained in these pages come from family, friends, colleagues, and life in general. But the most important teachings are from her late father. It was his steady guidance in life that set Susan’s foundation and it was his passing that inspired her new movement, Pancakes for Roger (www.PancakesForRoger.com). When Susan’s not running her business or trying to help others through their own challenges, you can find her flipping tires at her beloved CrossFit gym, supporting the Missouri Tigers, KC Chiefs, and Royals, or slaying the dragons that have come her way.
