Learning Lessons from Your Charlotte Car Accident
You were recently involved in a car accident in Charlotte – or someone you love was. In the days or perhaps weeks that have followed, you’ve been scrambling around “doing damage control” — trying to get your car fixed, get your medical situation under control, and resolve the many frustrating logistical issues that have cropped up for you.
For instance, maybe the auto accident forced you to miss work for a week, and you got really behind on a killer project. So now you’re spending double time at the office trying to make your deadline. Simultaneously, you’re trying to recover from some serious bruising and perhaps a broken bone. In other words, you are operating in a mode that’s very reactive. And when crazy “stuff” happens in our lives, we often must default to reactive mode – emergency response – just to keep ourselves together, stay healthy, and prevent further damage.
There is a danger here though. It’s not necessarily bad to enter this reactive mode, but it can be bad to stay in it exclusively for too long. And here’s why. Accident victims might fail to extract some very potentially useful information from what happened and then use that information to plan strategically for the future.
That’s all a bit abstract, so let’s illustrate with an example.
Let’s say that you got into an accident on I-95 late Friday night while heading back from a club. If you really thought about the circumstance of the accident, you’d remember that the freeway was pretty “crazy” during late Friday and Saturday nights. Maybe there’s a higher proportion of kids out drinking and driving or whatever. Point is, if you have the self-awareness to understand what’s going on, you might change your behavior in the future to avoid that stretch of the highway — and/or to avoid driving late on Friday or Saturday nights.
Thus, when you escape from reaction mode, your accident can teach you useful lessons!
Here’s another type of lesson learned. Say you got rear ended by a large SUV at a stop light and suffered whiplash and other damages. Your car had only a so-so safety rating, but you got it because it was cheap. In light of what happened, if you take time to reflect and not just react, you might realize that, for future car purchases, you want to focus more on safety.
Another example: say you were pretty sleepy when you got hit. Maybe it wasn’t your fault — i.e. a careless driver yapping on a cell phone swerved into your lane and hit you — but you still had a pretty sluggish reaction time. You might want to pay more attention to your level of fatigue the next time you drive!
For help understanding what you need to do at the strategic and tactical level after an accident, connect immediately with the team at the Law Offices of Michael A. DeMayo for a free and confidential consultation.
