This week on Winning In Life, Angus Pryor the #1 Google-ranked dental marketer in Australia will be sharing with you life lessons from a road rage accident, what you can do to turn things around.
Life lessons from a road rage incident. Now yesterday, believe it or not I was involved in I think the first road rage incident of my life. The irony is it wasn’t even on the road. It was in a car park. It was around dusk, and I backed into a car park next to another car and a guy and his daughter who was probably in a teens, I could see him sort of looking at me and muttering and so on. And I’d you know, put the handbrake on and get out of the car.
And he was still looking at me. And he had the window down. And I said to them, sort of like what’s going on? I could tell he was mad with me. But I had no idea why. And he said are you know, you almost backed into me when you’re backing into the car. The truth is, it was a car park, but it was dark. And I couldn’t see. And I say well, you know, sorry about that. And then he started saying, Well, you know, how long have you been driving for?
You know, and he was really sort of caught him by driving it to question. I don’t know whether I did a great job or not. But what eventuated from there, I’ve made some kind of cynical comment. And he got out of his car and started screaming and hurling abuse at me. And he was holding nothing back. And he was getting closer and closer to my face. Like he was he was this far away from me, telling me how he was gonna beat me up. And, you know, you know, and there was a curve behind me. And I had visions of all sorts of And fortunately, I was able to keep my calm and say.
Well, you know, look, you’ve had your say, basically, and eventually and even said to me, he’s going to go and drop his daughter, and then come back to the car park. So he can beat me up when I come back from the supermarket. Like it was quite an extraordinary situation. And I went into the supermarket and my heart pounding as you might imagine, I was sort of I was actually quite pleased with myself, that I was able to keep things calm and keep that whole lid on the situation. But here’s the life lesson.
Now, fortunately, I went inside, I bought something I came back. And you know, he wasn’t there. And I went on my merry way. And maybe I’ll never see him again. I hope not. But the life lesson that sort of came to me from this, you know, Tony Robbins talks about turning frustration into fascination. And I’ve heard a preacher once say that, you know, if we’ve got something that you know that we can nurse, and rehearse our hurts, so we nursed them, we you know, it’s like we, we play them over and over, like, you got your finger on the rewind button.
And I could imagine myself, you know, rewinding that conversation again, and again, there was no way I was going to fight this guy, I honestly would say, in the middle of that I thought it was 50/50 whether it was going to punch me or not. And I’m no fighter, you know, but it’s that it’s that sort of rewind, you know, play it over and over. And I should have said this, and I should have done that. And I definitely didn’t want to do that.
But as I started to turn my frustration into fascination, that’s where I started to go not, I’m so mad with this guy for swearing at me and me feeling threatened. But to go well, wow. Like, I wonder what’s going on in his life. You know, how is it that this guy would react so strongly to something as you know, minor as and I was backing in very slowly, like, he would have just had to step out of the right I didn’t see him at all. But you know, that that that transition from frustration, like I want to kill this guy, or I want to, you know, get it before courts and really give it to him and you know, charging well assault to what’s going on.
Because at the end of the day, this lesson is about what it is for me, not for him. I mean, you know, I can’t control his reaction. I can’t control what he did, but I can control my reaction. And so I think it’s one that I thought about a lot and I found myself even feeling quite sorry for him in the end.
Whereas I know I could have replied this situation over and over and over again at the end of the day. That doesn’t help me. So that’s that that’s a little life lesson from probably my first road rage incident. Deep breaths and just keep you cool. And yeah, take your finger off the rewind button.
Now for you our little gift for Winning In Life. We’ve got a magazine called Dental Edge and if you visit www.DentalEdgeMagazine.com.au then you can get a free subscription to the magazine. It’s a magazine for the whole team. It’s half clinical, half non clinical, and that would be my gift to you.