[adouglas]

Looking it over, I have one other thing to add.

Keith Code's Twist of the Wrist II (both book and video) are very useful resources. While much of what's there is oriented more towards the track, one of the core elements -- Survival Reactions, or SRs -- is a really important set of concepts.

Thinking back to when I was new, knowledge of SRs would have helped me a lot. The mental image as you read the following is to visualize going into a corner too hot. What do you do? What's going through your mind? How do you keep from crashing?

Caveat: This is stuff that warrants deep thought and right now, the OP is trying to get the basic physical skills sorted. I'm including it here for reference. Don't get overwhelmed and tied up in knots over this. Keep things simple and follow the advice above.

Survival Reactions:
1. Rolling off the gas - You go into a corner too hot, you're riding out of your comfort zone, a mattress falls of a truck in front of you, whatever.... your instinct is to chop the throttle. This upsets the bike and also pitches it forward, which might overload the front tire and cause loss of traction if you're near the limit. It also changes your intended line. You see this happen in a lot of those crash videos... people lose confidence halfway through and chop the throttle, which causes the crash.

2. Tightening on the bars - You get scared and tense up. This causes unintended steering inputs and/or prevents you from making proper control inputs.

3. Narrowed and frantically hunting field of view - You're looking everywhere except where you should -- where you want the bike to go. Not knowing what to look at, you try to look at everything. Panic. Information overload.

4. Fixed attention (on something) - Classic target fixation. Go in too hot, you look at that scary edge of the pavement and can't pull your eyes away. You focus on that car that's cut you off. You can see this in crash videos all the time. Riders see the hazard, stare at it and right straight into it.

5. Steering in the direction of the fixed attention - See above. You go where you look!!!

6. No steering (frozen) or ineffective (not quick enough or too early) steering - Decision lock. See SR2 above. See SRs 4 and 5 above. You feel like you can't get the bike turned because you're hyperfocused on what you're trying to avoid instead of focusing on avoiding it in the first place. "Not quick enough" and "too early" mean early apexing, which makes you run wide on exit.

7. Braking errors (both over-and under-braking) - Overbraking is panicing and grabbing too much brake, too fast. This is the reason why they teach you not to cover the front brake in the MSF course... because as a beginner you're more likely to grab that brake too hard. Like a new driver trying to shove the brake pedal through the floorboard. Under-braking is like ineffective steering - decision lock. If anyone ever says "I just had to lay the bike down" this is one of the things they did, along with all the other SRs that make them slide right into the thing they're trying to avoid.