I paid a police motorcycle veteran to yell at me in a parking lot the other day.
The class is called lock and lean. He built it over twenty-plus years of coaching motor officers, then sanded it down for civilians like me who will never chase anyone through an alley. You ride a big, heavy bike at walking speed through cone patterns tight enough to make you sweat, bars cranked to full lock, clutch slipping, engine chugging under you like an impatient percolator. Everything my track bike ever taught me is a lie down here. On my R7 at Blackhawk, I hang off the side and let speed hold the whole arrangement together. On this bike you do the opposite. You push the machine down and keep your body tall, like dipping a dance partner you just met and very much do not want to drop.
In his opening speech he told the group, “Direct communication is absolutely critical for advancement.” I nodded the way you nod at a safety briefing.
Then it was my turn in the cones, and the man lived his slogan.
I was riding tight. Shoulders up around my ears, arms welded straight, eyes bolted to each cone like it owed me money. He watched two passes and delivered the whole diagnosis in one breath: “Stop looking at the fucking cones. Relax. You’re not taking this bike onto the track.”
Riders call it target fixation. The bike goes where your eyes go, which is a lovely piece of engineering when you’re looking through the corner and a cruel one when you’re staring at the exact thing you’re afraid of hitting.
Next run, my shoulders dropped. My arms found room to move. I looked up at where the pattern was going instead of down at what could go wrong, and the bike simply went where I was looking, obedient as a compass needle. One sentence. That’s what it cost to fix me.
The polite version of that sentence exists. (And no, it’s not just dropping the profanity…) It sounds like “I’d encourage you to broaden your visual focus and release a little tension.” It would have fixed nothing. I would have nodded, tightened up, and hit another cone while composing a thank you. The blunt version worked because it was blunt. It cost him a little social smoothness and it bought me the rest of the day.
His world builds communicators like that because vague coaching on a motorcycle has a feedback loop of about two seconds and ends with 900 pounds of Harley on the asphalt. Offices don’t crash that fast. Vague survives in conference rooms because nothing falls over the same afternoon. We sand feedback down until it’s decorative, then wonder why nobody’s riding improves.
And companies target-fixate just like riders do. Stare hard enough at the competitor and you steer straight into becoming their tribute act. Stare at the scary number all quarter and the whole team organizes itself around the obstacle instead of the destination. Positioning is deciding where to look. The bike follows the eyes. So does the roadmap.
What I keep coming back to is that his directness was a gift with my name on it. He absorbed the awkwardness of saying it so I didn’t have to keep paying for it in dropped runs. That’s the team-first math I believe in, done at parking lot speed.
The one thing I’m carrying out of that class… besides sore forearms, is a resolution to collect more people like him. People who will tell me the true thing in one sentence, while there’s still time to drop my shoulders.
Stay Positive & And In Case You Needed To Hear It Stop Looking At The Fucking [Insert Your Version Of Cones Here]
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