Road Rage or Road Peace: Which Side Are You On?

We hear way too much about road rage and drivers with bad attitudes. Almost everyone spends some time – from minutes to hours on the roads or freeways every day. The majority of the people on the road are basically friendly folks just trying to get somewhere. Do we need to change our neutral or bad driving experiences into good ones?

The law of attraction says that we attract to us whatever we think about. So, if we expect tension and impolite people to come our way, they most likely will. Why? Because we are acting tense and impolite ourselves, and that is what we attract.

Ever noticed how you keep seeing the same kind of car whenever you focus on, say, a Corvette? All of a sudden there are Corvettes everywhere. It’s the law of attraction.

Maybe you want to feel great when you are driving. Why not? Doesn’t everyone like to feel great – all the time? If we want to attract feeling great we need to expect to see polite, courteous, and friendly people on the road.

Study after study tells us that when we say or think something repeatedly, we actually make it happen. If we talk about how bad it is, we just get more negative things, says Jack Canfield, author of Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Whatever we concentrate on is what fills up our lives. By being critical and picky we set ourselves up for being unhappy. Negative thoughts make us negative people.

Rhonda Byrne, author of the blockbuster book and video, The Secret, tells us that a negative thought is the beginning of stress, and stress causes illness. It also causes bad things to happen to us. Changing to positive thoughts of love and gratitude removes stress and brings good health.

A friend of ours in her 20’s, Joyce Jones, decided to try an experiment to test this out on the road. She bought a lighted sign to mount in her car’s back window that she programmed to say “THANK YOU.” Whenever someone did something nice for her, like let her in, or give her the right-of-way, all she did was press a button on her remote to make the sign flash in big bright red letters, THANK YOU.

She said it not only changed her day, but, when she looked in her rear view mirror, she noticed that most of the time the drivers who let her in were smiling. She had changed her own thinking and she had also changed someone else’s thoughts.

One day someone at the car wash asked her what the sign was all about. (She had turned it on for fun to say thanks to her car wash guy.) “I just want to make the road a friendlier place,” she said. “What a great idea,” was the response.

“Let me show you another phrase I use too,” Joyce said, and flashed “OOPS – I’M SORRY.” “Everyone got a chuckle out of that one,” she said. “Which one do I use more? It’s a toss-up some days,” she added.

Joyce knows now that what she thinks about on the road is a significant thing. She knows, along with the sages, that our thoughts and words actually create our lives and influence the lives and circumstances around us.

We can consciously create our daily lives by staying aware of our thoughts and words and choosing them with an eye to how we want to feel.

Here are some choices for ways to think about our driving experiences. These words will change your emotions and experiences from negative to positive. When we drive we feel we are:

Enjoying the drive
Marvelous
Great
Better than ever
Friendly
Courteous
At ease
Relaxed
Feeling good

In contrast, these are some of the words and phrases that you don’t want to use any more. If you recognize them as being familiar, just be happy you are eliminating them from your conversation.

Traffic makes me nuts
It’s worse than ever
No one knows how to drive
Don’t even think about getting there on time
No one ever gives me a break
It’s a rat race out there
I hate to drive

The little known dynamic of life is that we are the creators of our own lives. All of the great thinkers and inventors of life have understood this. Now the word is out to all of us. We create our own lives, and our own happiness. We do it through our thoughts and our words. It starts with a simple,

“Driving is fun. There are a lot of friendly people in cars. I like the idea of Road Peace. I am making myself a part of it.”

Let your thoughts and words soar out ahead of you. Pick yourself up out of that funk and start a new driving life today. Tell yourself that you are in charge now and things are GREAT on the road.