Motorcycles have a lot of unexpected lessons to teach us about leadership.

I first learned how to ride a motorcycle about 10 years ago. Riding always appealed to me – I was that kid who chopped up a plastic milk jug and taped it to the forks of my bicycle to simulate an “engine” riding down the street. So after my wife and I returned from Italy one year and she suggested we take riding lessons together, I jumped at the opportunity. I got licensed. I bought a bike that I owned right up until my daughter was born.

I love riding for two big reasons. First, riders are incomparably vulnerable. There’s no steel cage to protect you if something goes wrong. But the lack of a cage also grants you a whole new perspective on the world around you. The lack of a cage requires that your attention is always on the road and your environment. There’s no drifting off into a fog, drowning out your thoughts with NPR or Spotify.

If I’m being honest, at times riding scares the shit out of me. My experiences riding are no different that anyone else’s, and I’ve had close calls with people turning left in front of me, changing lanes without looking over their shoulder (or assuming I don’t mind their bumper 4 feet from my face) and backing out of driveways. But that fear rewires your brain. It forces you to constantly scan for threats to your safety, to make quick decisions, and to be unflappable, brave and make compromises.

The second reason I love riding is that you do it alone. (In all transparency, this isn’t my original idea. I heard someone give a wedding speech about this once and the idea stuck with me.) Even if you’re riding with other people, you’re on your own machine – your dome hopefully safely tucked inside a helmet. So as you ride, you notice things. You experience the world independently. And when you finally pull off the road to rest or grab a bite to eat, you share your experiences with the people you are traveling with. What you discover is that you noticed things that your companions did not. You experienced something in a totally different way than the people riding alongside you. And its sharing those thoughts and experiences that makes the ride fun and interesting. (Transpose those ideas onto a marriage, and it was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.)

What I didn’t anticipate about riding a motorcycle is that it would teach me about myself and leading through change. Similar to the domain expertise in your particular profession, there are certain mechanics your body needs to internalize when learning to ride a motorcycle: how to move smoothly through the gears with your foot, how to balance the clutch and the accelerator, when and how to apply the brakes. But once you have the mechanics down, you’re taught three basic things that apply to so much more than just riding a bike:

Look where you want to go

When you ride a motorcycle, you need to keep your head up and constantly look in the direction that you intend to travel. If you’re constantly looking at your gauges, you’re going to crash. If you’re staring at the road directly in front of your tires, you’re going to crash. It’s amazing how well this law of physics and physiology holds up. You and your bike are naturally going to end up where you’re looking.

Do you have a clear vision for where you want to go? How do you keep that picture fresh in your mind? And as a business leader, how do you keep the organization focused on the direction they’re going?

If you are constantly distracted by things happening in the world around you, it’s safe to assume that at some point you will crash. If you are constantly worried about everything that could happen to you, you are inadvertently painting a picture in your mind’s eye of where you’re going to end up. In his podcast The Mindset Mentor, Rob Dial recently talked about the Reticular Activation System (RAS) – the bundle of nerves at our brainstem that filters out unnecessary information so the important stuff gets through. It’s the reason that you might never have had an interest in fishing, but you read an article or talk to you friend about fishing, and now you’re seeing bait shops, fishing poles and Nissan Frontiers towing little fishing boats everywhere.

Especially as our organizations face pivotal points in their evolution – such as the recent explosion of digital in the wake of a global pandemic – maintaining focus on the outcome is critically important. Wherever your head is at? That’s where you’re going to end up.

Crucially, the same is true for your team. That’s why you hear really great leaders continuously reminding their teams of the vision – the end result you’re working to achieve.

Accelerate through the turns

Entering a turn on a motorbike is really a shitty time to hit the brakes. If you brake as you’re turning on two wheels, you literally lose the bike out from under you. It feels counterintuitive if you’ve driven a car all your life, but the safest thing a motorcycle rider can do is accelerate through the turn.

So many of us have been faced with massive changes to our lives recently. At the very least we’ve been stuck inside, trying to balance a demanding career while juggling childcare for a three year-old back and forth with our spouse. At most we’ve lost jobs. Some of us have even lost loved ones.

From a business perspective, the global pandemic caused many of our businesses to go sideways. Or it caused our industry to speed up exponentially, straining the organization in every way. And through those changes, we have been forced to keep our eyes focused on exiting the turn and accelerate. Push harder than you might otherwise have needed to had the road been straight and predictable.

As long as we’re on the topic, it’s also not a bad practice to anticipate the turns, bleed off a little speed and downshift.

Be confident

Fear doesn’t serve a rider well. The unique alchemy of vulnerability and self-reliance attracts a certain personality and feeds various characteristics in riders. And once you understand that you go in search of other people (often other riders) who also understand what that means. Bikers make quick decisions, they need people to pay attention to them (for their own safety), and they need to communicate boldly and often.

Business leaders are wired similarly. Their efficacy depends in large part on the vision and confidence with which they approach their role. I’ve heard people describe a CEO’s job as easy because they believe that people will listen and react to the things they say simply because they’re the CEO. And sure, that’s true to a certain extent. But their ability to keep their job relies on their ability to be heard, and to act with intention.

Leaders communicate clearly, boldly and often. And yet, leaders are people. They suffer from the same moments of self-doubt, insecurities and alienation that any of us do. But for others to have confidence in their leadership, they must exude confidence and constancy. To retain others trust they need to continuously demonstrate grit and equanimity.