On Taking a Foreign Driving Test at 41 Years Old, Panicking, Failing and Overcoming

Five steps to recover from extreme anxiety when faced with a new leadership or life challenge.

We've lived in the UK for just over a year now and by far, the most DIFFICULT challenge in this whole life-changing experience has been taking and passing the UK driving test. More difficult than uprooting the children and my business. More difficult than missing my friends and family. More difficult than giving birth to our fourth child just weeks after arriving here.

And by difficult, I mean that the anxiety I felt around passing this test was full-on heart-racing, palms sweating, sleepless nightmare-filled nights, negative-self-talk - - just horrendous. After driving here for almost a year on my US license (you only get on year to drive on a foreign license), I took a test without having taken any UK driving lessons. ("Jen," I encouraged myself, "You've been driving since you were sixteen. You KNOW how to drive!")
I booked a test. I showed up. My anxiety -- all of it -- from the entire past year, showed up during the test. It wasn't a panic attack, but it wasn't far off. I failed.

And then the depression hit. After a year of only minor setbacks, feeling largely confident in our transition and successful in most areas of life, I suddenly questioned everything. Was I making real friends? Was our family OK here? Would my business be viable? Would this move harm all of my relationships back home and cut us off for good? The weight of it all descended upon me and I was crushed.

I had one more month to pass the driving test and, if I didn't, POOF. Like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight, all the progress we had made to settle in would unravel.

As a life and leadership coach, I have practiced all sorts of ways of releasing this anxiety and being present, bold and living into my new chapter of life and career. So, I gave myself a few days to feel crushed before getting back into action. I'm sharing the steps I took here because every leader, every human being, has moments in which the weight we put on ourselves can potentially crush us. The people you know to be the strongest leaders and the most calm and collected have all had these intense moment of fear. What follows are the steps I followed that brought me back from the darkness in an effort to reach those of you who might be in the thick of it.

Step 1: Be Compassionate With Self
​When my kids or clients or friends are struggling, I hold a space for them to be with their feelings, feel their sadness, shame, worry, and to first and foremost figure out what will restore them. For me, I knew I needed to take the pressure valve off. I accepted that I would have a few unproductive work days and lazy-mothering days. There would be frozen pizza and videos. There were a few hours of stillness - literally - staring out the window or at a wall - I don't really know what I was doing but I wasn't trying to push through and maintain the hyper-active pace that had been required of me to move our family from the US to the UK, have a baby, settle kids in, settle into a new community, keep serving my US clients whilst figuring out the UK business - I needed to pause. My capacity to handle stress and the weight of it all was beyond overloaded. I allowed myself to do as little as possible and unload the weight. I threw up temporary boundaries. I made some space. And when I was out from under the rock a few days later, I connected with new and old friends because conversation and authentic friendship never fail to re-energize me.

Step 2: Uncover What The Hell Was Going On
What did passing the UK driving test mean to me? Why was I allowing it to crush me so fiercely? What fears were lurking?

• What if I couldn't drive my kids to where they need to go, even to the doctor or to a birthday party?
• What if I was wholly dependent on others to transport me/us?
• What if others would see me as weak, small, not good enough, pathetic?
• What if I WAS weak, insecure, small, pathetic, not good enough?
• What if I couldn't be successful here, period? (full stop?)

And - here's the big one:

• What if moving to the UK would destroy me and our family?

Woah.

Step 3: Accept the Fears That Were Surfaced.
I could write a lot more about this step, but for now, what matters is that once I meditated, wrote and processed all the meaning and pressure I had been putting on the driving test, I was able to have conversations with my husband and friends about these fears and deal with them separately from the driving test. This released the pressure that I was placing on the test itself. And, I gained a new awareness that I had subconsciously ignored all my fears by neatly packaging them up in the concrete form of a driving test. I accepted that with all the transition, packaging them up this way had served me well up to a point. I handled A LOT this year. But, these feelings were telling me that it was time to untie the tidy package and accept that it was time to deal with what was in it. I sought out help to deal with these fears and put a few other conversations and actions in place to begin this process. Accepting these fears, and acknowledging that they were separate from the driving test itself provided a road-map for action.

Step 4: Acknowledge Vulnerability and Get Help Rebuilding Confidence. 
I had hoped to avoid shelling out for driving lessons, but after the first failed test, decided that driving while someone was watching and scrutinizing me, and correcting bad habits, was important.

Opening myself up to critique was a reckoning that although driving was an area of competence in the US, it was an area of vulnerability in the UK. I realized that by moving I had given up a sense of adult competence and was defensive and annoyed about people wanting to "teach" me how to drive. Especially if my husband wanted to teach me as HE was the one who wanted to move. (Note: ah, so I'm NOT really super-supportive and positive. I WAS feeling resentment after all! Another blog for another day.)

I signed up for some driving lessons.

There were nuances to driving in the UK that I simply couldn't have learned without an instructor. The way I held the steering wheel had to be changed, the ways they wanted me to perform driving maneuvers was mysterious and surprisingly specific; knowing how to know what the speed limit was in the absence of signs was not in the driving manual. I could go on. In short, I didn't know what I didn't know. These things were corrected.
I booked another driving test, with only a few day to spare before my 1-year clock hit the stroke of midnight.

Step 5. I applied what I've Learned About Stress and Confidence
The night before the test I put things in place to ensure I would have a good night's sleep. I arranged for help with the kids so I could be free of the life-sapping morning routine of getting kids out the door and to school, and the stress of having to then rush to the driving test center.

I cut myself from any more cramming in driving videos and reading the manual. I had the confidence from my lessons that I was indeed a good, safe, experienced driver and I had been armed with the information that I hadn't known that I hadn't known.

I fell asleep to a lovely relaxation visualization. I arrived very early to the test center. I did some power poses and listened to a five minute mindfulness meditation before entering the center. I did not allow myself to look down at my iPhone while waiting (this raises cortisone levels) and instead maintained a friendly open posture and took in the people and the room. I was nervous, but putting energy into maintaining my connection with my surroundings and a global awareness would translate into being able to just be with the tester in the car and set me up to demonstrate that I could drive with good awareness, safety, judgement and confidence.
----
I'm a 41 year old woman with four children. I run a global coaching practice to build the capacity of women leaders to transform their lives, careers and society. As an adult I have lived in Maryland, New York, London, Alexandria, VA and now Leeds. I've become practiced at significant transitions. Along the way I have built deep relationships, done meaningful work and mostly thrived. I've had setbacks, and mostly, I'm not very phased. Most of the time I am calm and confident. But life caught up with me, and I was terrified and in a panic. I applied what I have learned on my journey so far. I got some help.


And I passed.
​