The first thing to realize is that you must keep your eyes moving. The natural tendency, and the thing that most drivers do, is to stare straight ahead. You can’t do that if you want to drive defensively. At first, you will have to work hard to keep your eyes moving, from ahead, to mirrors, ahead again, speedometer, left, right, wherever you need to point your eyes, to know everything that is going on around you, in all directions. Put work into ending your "lazy eyes" period, and you will have gained a very important tool in defensive riding. Once you do it for a while, it becomes second nature, and won’t seem like work at all.

After training yourself to keep your eyes moving, the next step is to use your eyes efficiently. What I mean is looking in just the right spot at the right time. When you first pull up to a stop sign, the first place to look is in your mirror, to make sure a motorist behind you will stop. The very next place to look is to your right, to make sure a motorist turning left onto your street is not going to cut that corner, and collide with you. This is just one example.

Another is when you encounter a queue of cars lined up to turn left. Instead of ramming and jamming past them in the adjacent lane, you know that a car could pop through that queue, invited by a well-meaning motorist letting that person through a gap in the queue. Some of those well-meaning gestures can result in nasty wrecks, something you already are aware of, so you slow and carefully scan the queue for any gaps, and any cars that might shoot through a gap, right into your path. It’s hard to see gaps, and cars coming through, so you slow. You have to slow, because you can’t see well enough to go fast in that situation. If you can’t know, you must slow.

The general idea is to realize that when your vision is blocked, either by a queue of stopped cars, or possibly just one car or truck, or any object, you must compensate by using your eyes to figure the situation out. Knowing your vision is blocked, you use your eyes and your mind to aggressively seek out hidden threats that may be behind whatever it is that is blocking your vision. Many times, you will know that you just can’t tell what might be hidden from view, and you must slow down.

The principle is, if you can’t see, you can’t go. If your vision is blocked, then you must slow down. If the light turns green and there is a big truck on your left, you can’t go until you are sure that there isn’t a red-light-runner who is screened from your view by that truck. He may be waiting there because of a red-light-runner! You have to peek around him, instead of blindly proceeding. Blindly reefing the throttle may be the last thing you ever do!

The rule is NO SURPRISES! On a motorcycle, you can’t afford to be surprised by someone shooting through a queue of stopped cars, or turning left into your path from behind a UPS truck. You absolutely, positively have to use your eyes and your mind to rule out any surprises! Keep your eyes moving, and know where to look. Seeing often isn’t enough, and you also know that when your vision is blocked, you have to slow down, or even stop.

Keeping your eyes moving and your mind working will keep you more alert, and will help you be the safest rider possible. This will take effort, but it is well worth it.