2002-05 May 2002 Coaching Hour – Tournaments 2

And I said: “Okay, it’s pretty obvious to me that your personal life has pretty much overwhelmed you. And I mean it’s not another job, you have to attend to what you need to attend to.”

He said, “Look, I know that I’m not in my peak condition. I know that I’m not where I can be competitively, but I’m going to keep going to tournaments.”

He didn’t go to the Kruger Cup this year because he was tearing part of his house down, he just had too much to do, but he said he’s going to keep competing. He’s leaving Thursday to go somewhere and he’s going to the Homestead Cup. He’s going to stay on his tournament routine, but what he’s done, he’s changed his expectations. Instead of being in the top two or three, he says, “I want to be in the top ten.”

And he told me today that he wanted to go and compete so he can keep seeing different targets and as soon as he gets his house in order, he doesn’t feel like it wouldn’t take him near as long to get back to where he was before and I agree with him. I know that sooner or later you’re going to be in a situation where things are going to be going on at the office, or in your personal life, to where that just keeps you from concentrating 100 percent on shooting. When that happens, you have to take a step back and look at how much quality time you’re spending practicing. And if things are getting in the way, just lower your expectations like Craig has done. Continue to compete, but just lower your expectations a little bit. Back up and realize that if you’re not all there in practice you can’t be all there on game day. When those kinds of distracting thoughts get in you have to learn to control them. But more importantly you have to be non-judgmental in regards to the result.

Craig and I shot a few more stations and he said, “You know, I’m more aware now than ever before what kind of a commitment it’s going to take for me to be at the top of my game and really push my potential every time I go somewhere.” I mean, he knew it two years ago when he was really working on his game. He knew it last year when I told him to travel, and he knew it would take a great commitment, but now that he’s gotten there, now that he’s got the mechanical game, he realizes even more how important practice and preparation is. Practice is not just going and breaking targets, practice is making every shot count like you had to have it to win, and when your practice sessions become that intense, it helps you on game day to keep those judgmental thoughts from coming out.

He also shared with me that he could just not practice a lot and he could finish just like I do, within ten birds of the top shooter just about everywhere he goes, because he can hit all the targets, but that’s not where he wants to be. But he’s had to take a step back and look at it realistically from the standpoint of: “Look I can’t put myself 100 percent into competing now, I’m going to have to do this other stuff, and I’m just gonna have to put it off for a while. And it’s not a bad thing.”

The toughest thing he’s going to have to handle is the comments like, “Hey are you in a slump? Why aren’t you shooting like you used to?” But we talked about that a lot, and it’s just one of those things that you have to cope with. You have to cope with what’s going on in your everyday life and you have to learn to put that in a box somewhere, and tie it up, so when you’re out competing, you can be all there.

 Bob: Two things that came to mind as you were discussing that. One is how long did it take him to realize that was going on? And the second thing, would a shooting log help pick up on  that?

 Gil: It doesn’t take that long for Craig because he’s been working with Vicki and me for the last three years, and yes a shooting log would help tremendously. For you guys, just for your information, this is Bob’s first time and I’m glad he’s here. He’s a level one instructor. To my knowledge he’s the first level one instructor to sign on to the Coaching Hour and I praise him for doing that because all the answers for the test are right here on this Hour.

Craig is a very unique individual. You’ll be privileged to hear him talk next month and several months thereafter. But he’s very aware of what emotion, commitment and expectation have to do with your mental alertness and how they affect performance. In fact, he said the things that he had learned about emotion, commitment and expectation, allow him to go and compete without letting his level of performance, whatever it is, put him into a slump or make him feel down.

He’s very well adjusted and he understands what negative emotion can do and what positive emotion can do. He was right on top of that. We talked about a month and a half ago and we talked about what was going to happen before he even started all this stuff. He knew what to expect and he was prepared for it. In fact, I’ll share this with you, he went to a tournament last weekend out at American and said he had the greatest time he’d ever had a tournament. Because there was no pressure put on him by himself to win. He knew he wasn’t prepared, he knew he hadn’t been practicing, and he went out there and talked to everybody. His expectations were in control and he really had a lot of fun talking to everybody.

In fact, when I told him I was going to share this with everybody tonight, he said, “man I hope it helps somebody. I really hope it helps somebody.” What I would admonish you all to understand about Craig’s predicament, so to speak, is that without the right kind of practice and preparation, you cannot enter into any kind of a relaxed state of concentration. There’s always excess baggage in the deal and you’ve got to understand and learn how to put that in perspective.

Relaxed Concentration

 Gil: I want to talk a little bit about what I would call relaxed concentra- tion, or what Tim Gallwey would call a relaxed state of concentration. All of the mental books that we’ve studied talk about concentration, but he puts it in a way that I think can be easily understood. It’s a com- bination of three things: awareness of what the targets are doing, choice to break the targets in certain spots and trust that the gun will be there. Those things will allow you to be in a relaxed state of aware- ness and in a relaxed state of concentration.

Now, here’s the first one: Awareness of what targets are doing – there are no hard targets. Any time you look at a presentation and think, “oh that’s hard,” you’ve allowed doubt to creep in. You cannot be judgmental. There can be no judgments with respect to hard or easy because those create expectations. If you think it’s gonna be hard, it’s gonna be hard. If you think it’s gonna be easy, it’s gonna be easy. But thinking things are too easy is going to get you complacent. They’re all just targets, you make them hard and you make them easy. Is Steve Mancinelli out there? Steve, low six on the double on the last round when you’re straight is still low six isn’t it?

 Steve: Yes.

 Gil: And you can’t attach any greater judgment to that one target.

 Steve: It’s tough to overcome, but you’re absolutely right.

 Gil: And you’ll never overcome it until you look at it like it’s just another target. They’re all just targets. You make them hard or you make them easy based on how you approach them and based on your attitude.

Steve: I agree absolutely.

 Gil: Okay, now let’s look at choice. The choice to break the targets in a certain spot – Vicki and I have stumbled onto something I want to share with you, and Steve this works for skeet just like sporting clays. In the game of golf, the hole is the target — the cup, where the pin is sitting. The ball is the point of focus. In sporting clays, and in skeet, the breakpoint is the target; the clay is the point of focus. Think about that. Your desire to kill the target in the breakpoint will direct the appropriate mechanical action to kill the target.

That’s a big thing, guys. It blocks out any mechanical thinking. And the strength of your desire, the commitment to the breakpoint, will tie directly to the quality of your concentration, your ability to be in the present and hold concentration on the target. If you’re not committed to the breakpoint, the quality of your concentration and the quality of your focus goes out the window because the voice is tied up in the breakpoint. If your desire is to break the target in a certain spot but you find your plan is weak or confused, focus is gone. If you’re thinking about the guy who cut you off on the freeway, if you’re thinking about how you just ran the singles on the last peg and “now I got to wait on the doubles,” if you’re thinking that game day’s over and it’s really hard to come back once you let the voice enter in, you are confused.

You have to understand that when you’re competing, you’ve got to be all there like Lanny Bassham says. You can’t be fifty percent there and fifty percent wondering whether the pool man returned your phone call. If the desire is strong and sincere it will overcome both external and internal obstacles to achieve the goal which is breaking the target in the breakpoint. The voice is mute when you are committed to the breakpoint. It no longer has a hold on you.

 Steve: Being committed to the breakpoint has everything to do with just blocking everything out and staying in the present. I finished a tournament this past weekend where my final event, the 410 event was probably the most difficult 100 targets I had shot in quite a long time. For the four events leading up to it, I was down three targets, and facing for the very first time being right at the very top of the leader board and all of the baggage that brings into the mix. It was very difficult to block it out, to stay in the present and to work on one station at a time. The targets that I did miss were because of lack of commitment to the breakpoint ’cause I wasn’t completely focused.

Gil: You just answered your own comment. It is difficult to block out all the thoughts and you can’t block them out one hundred percent of the time, but you can block them out two to three seconds at a time when you go into your routine and commit to the breakpoint. You can’t not think. You understand what I  mean?

 Steve: I know, but you’ve got to be able to think and try to put a lot of that stuff out of your head because it can snowball and just overwhelm you.

 Gil: There is no doubt. Just the fact that you knew you were leading going in is really hard to overcome. The shoot is not over whether it’s in skeet or sporting clays until the shoot-off is over. If you look at your performance when you’re actually breaking the targets as a stepping stone to get there, it’s not over. Where I am now is irrelevant. Where I’m going is relevant. I’m going to break the next target right there. It’s all about tying the voice up in that breakpoint. What you’re talking about is somewhat of a confused thought process. It diminishes focus and it becomes very counterproductive. You’re talking about target fear, target panic and I’ll tell you something else that happens to a lot of people. Whenever you’re in this kind of a fearful thought process your thoughts go mechanical and when you’re thinking mechanics you cannot feel. You cannot think mechanics and feel at the same time. It’s impossible to do.

 Steve: That’s the old Self One controlling Self Two.

 Gil: Yes. You just can’t do it. More often than not when you miss a target and you go to make a correction, rather than looking for focus and feel you look for mechanics, and that digs the hole deeper. It’s like there’s a dragline diggin’ that hole deeper and deeper and you just keep jumping down ahead of it. I mean, mechanical thinking will destroy your feel and without feel you can’t have focus. Whenever you lose your feel, doubt enters the picture and doubt is the son of fear. Doubt and fear are bonded at the hip. When you have fear, your big muscles freeze up, your hands speed up and like Willy told us last month, you cannot fixate your eyes. As I’ve said many times on this show, the voice of conscious doubt will take many faces, at every level you’re at, it’s going to take as many faces as it can to try and get in.

The way to shut up the voice is to commit to the breakpoint, tie it up in the breakpoint. Trust that the gun’s going to be there.   Without trust, awareness and choice are irrelevant, when you’re not trusting, you’re checking. That’s all there is to it.

 John: You’ve got two choices.

 Gil: That’s it. And only one of them is good. The problem comes when you get to an easy flop station and you start checking it and you shoot ten out of ten. Then you’re sunk, they’re putting dirt in on top of you at that point. Because when you go to the next station where you can’t check them and still hit them, it’s over. You’ve got to learn to trust that the gun’s going to be there.

Trust enables you to relax enough to achieve your potential given your preparation and your concentration and your focus that day. If you couldn’t trust you wouldn’t go to sleep at night, you wouldn’t go through a green light, you use trust every day but you have to learn to use trust on the field. And Craig Martin you can’t be worried about the score. You gotta just learn to trust it and let it go.

I can accept that. Once you go to the future it’s really tough to come back. It’s ugly.

 Gil: You can’t, you might as well throw your bullets at them.

 Craig: You know I’m at FITASC, and I’m thinking it’s a pretty tough sport and I’m twenty-one straight and I’m thinking, “man, I got a chance to tie Duffy here, if I can break all of these.” It was gone just like that.

 Gil: It was gone. Just like Brian Brewton said last month, you just put the grenade in your mouth and pull the pin. It doesn’t matter how hard or easy the targets are, you ain’t going to hit them.

 Craig: I measured very carefully on the first shot. (laughter)

 Gil:  Well aimed.

 Craig: Yes it was. I got a chance to admire the gun all the way across the space.

 Gil: Well, it’s really important that you understand that your ability to concentrate and focus is tied directly to the amount of trust you have. Because you can’t trust without feel. Trust and feel are bonded at the hip.

If you can feel the connection in the back hand, it’s easy to trust. If you cannot trust, you can’t feel. Period. Dot. The end. That’s why perfecting the move and working on feel in practice is so, so important. I cannot emphasize that too much. Without trust, awareness and choice are pointless.

Non-judgmental awareness coupled with the choice to kill the target at the breakpoint is big. When you couple those with trust you will shoot better and better scores and achieve greater and greater levels of relaxed concentration. I’m talking about the Zone. It allows you to get deeper into your subconscious database. It allows you to trust more. The more you trust the more you can trust, the more you trust the more you feel, the better you feel the more you focus. They’re all coupled. They’re all up there right at the top. You can’t have one without the other. Sounds like I’m making a song.

Even though you’re deep within the Zone in a great state of relaxed concentration that doesn’t guarantee you’re going to hit every target, it doesn’t guarantee that. But what it does guarantee is that regardless of the result you’re not going to be at war with yourself or that little green man inside of you. Your state of relaxed concentration will allow you, regardless of the result, to make a correction if it’s needed and the correction will be the right correction.

 Brian Brewton: I agree.

 Gil: You understand what I’m saying guys? It’s really easy to get sidetracked. I know that Vicki and I talk a lot about this breakpoint thing, but I want you all to think more in the near future about the breakpoint being the actual target of the game and the clay being the point of focus. They are bonded together through trust. That’s how the gun gets to the breakpoint. Feel and trust. If you can’t feel you can’t trust. That’s all there is to it.

Non-Judgmental Thinking

 Gil: Last month, I talked about being non-judgmental and that has a lot to do with what I just went over. The more judgmental you are about anything (a piece of clay target hit your gun and scratched it, big deal; it just happened, go on) the more judgmental you are on game day, the easier it is for the voice to get a hold of you. The more non-judgmental you are, the easier it is for you to stay in a state of relaxed concentration.

I cannot admonish you too much to be very non-judgmental about anything and everything that happens. Whatever happens just hap- pens. There are two things that exist when you’re performing. There’s focus on the target and there’s a connection to the target via feel. Mechanical thinking robs you of feel. If you’re worried about letting the target come to the gun, if you’re worried about putting the gun out and pulling away, if you’re worried about what the insertion pic- ture is (unless there’s a commitment to do all that prior to your routine) you’re thinking about mechanics. If you’re thinking about that during the shot, you ain’t gonna have feel.

You can’t think about mechanics and have feel, I can’t emphasize that enough. And over and over again that comes back to Vicki and me when we’re teaching.

I want to talk about two more things and then we’re going to talk to the guys about the Zone 7. Now listen up. Negative judgments tend to obscure your vision of what you wish wasn’t there. They mask the real problem and emphasize the symptoms. “Damn it, I missed it behind. Damn it, I had a bad gun mount.” That masks the real problem. The reason you missed it behind is you weren’t focused on it, number one, and you didn’t commit to the breakpoint. The reason you had a bad gun mount isn’t because you can’t mount the gun, it’s because you weren’t connected through feel. Here’s the one that back-doors you, too many positive judgments like, “Man, I’m doing great today, I’m in the hunt today, I’m smoking them today, I’m straight going into doubles on the last peg.”

Too many positive judgments will make you feel like it’s unneces- sary to see details and you will become too casual with respect to breakpoint and focus. You must begin to adopt a completely non-judg- mental attitude with result to everything that happens in a tournament. You didn’t get enough lunch, big deal. Too much wind, big deal. Don’t even go there. It’s just something that happened along your way to shooting your best score that day, given your preparation and given your ability to concentrate. Now let’s open it up.

 Craig: Gil? I just want to go back to that. Now that I think about that last peg, I was more in the mode of being in the future, I’m-going-to- run-these-targets kind of thinking. That’s a real good insight. I hadn’t thought about that until you said that.

Gil: I’ll tell you, when that insight hit us it was like a brick to the back of the head, or a bateau in the forehead which I almost got last week-end at the 74 Ranch because the wind was blowing so hard.

But you can be too positive. And when you’re too positive you take focus for granted, you take breakpoint for granted, and you take targets for granted. All of that puts you in the future. You’ve got to stay in the present right here, right now. That’s why I keep going back to this non-judgmental thing. Whatever happens on game day just happens. If you give it emotion, you’re giving emotion to the symptom, not the problem. It clouds the problem. Giving emotion makes it to where it’s one more pair down the line before you can fix the problem. You would never have thought that I would have told you not to be too positive, huh?

 Craig: No, that’s tremendous insight.

 Bob: It’s basically the adverse of the other problem, which is Self One’s negative judgments, which is, it has now lost its meaningful task, as Gallwey says.

 Gil: Tell them the difference between Self One and Self Two, Bob.

 Bob: Self one is the one that tells you why you did something or why you didn’t do something. Self Two knows how to do it.

 Gil: Exactly.

 Bob: What Gallwey points out very aptly in his book on golf, and it’s a very short paragraph. He said, “give Self One a meaningful task, keep him involved in it and he’ll stay out of the way of Self Two. When you get too positive, he’s not on a meaningful task anymore.”

 Gil: Right. You have to give him something to do. You can’t not think. It’s your choice what he thinks.

 John: Is Self One versus Self Two, conscious versus subconscious?

 Gil: That is correct.

 Bob: Well, I think they’re both conscious, but they’re just at different levels. The one that jumps out in front of you and is the boogeyman is the one that really gets your attention.

Lessons Learned at the Zone 7 Shoot

 Gil: John Martin, tell us about the Zone 7, what’d you learn?

 John: Well, first of all, you guys did a great job setting targets.  I thought they were great. I went through everything that you guys have talked about. But this time, more than any other probably, because of the Coaching Hour, I’m more quickly able to recognize what’s happen- ing and change it. Where before, you know you don’t figure it out until three days later and it doesn’t do you much good. So, what you said about Craig Hill has been my experience. I just got through working 90 hours a week, I didn’t get practice time. And then I had some personal things with a daughter having a baby and another daughter having an emergency surgery, and I had all this baggage that I went to the Zone with, therefore I lowered my expectations. I didn’t really have any. I just said, “I’m going to go do my best and I’m just going to work on having     a plan and doing some of the things we talked about.”

And so, of course we shot FITASC, and of course we all squaded together, Willy and Butch and Lee and we’re all shooting together. We did okay. The next day, we shot some five stand and first thing that happened to me, a chandelle rabbit. And I go, “Oh my god.” And like whoever just said this a moment ago, I watched the gun all the way across. I go very quickly from thinking about breaking the target to, “I just don’t want to miss it,” which is completely, positive versus negative.

But I caught it right away, I said, “John, you’re not going there this time. Just get aggressive, pick the breakpoint and do it.”

I shot a twenty out of 25 on the first deal, which was a pretty good score because I think the high score was a 22. So the next one, which I thought was considerably easier, somehow I lost focus and didn’t shoot as well. I put that behind me and the next day came out and shot the next fifty. Well as we’re going out to stand three, I see John Kruger shooting in four. I had a little time so I walk over and I’m looking at John and he’s watching target after target and he looks at me and says, “I just can’t see them.” And I’m going, “I’m having a hard time myself.” So I can’t deal with that either, so I left to go look at a couple targets, we get in there, my squad has gone crazy. Everybody is missing everything, and I’m just in a Zone. I run the first three stands and end up with a 23. And actually the best compliment I’ve ever had, I was shooting with two master class shooters, one of them I knew from Washington and the guy said, “You know for a minute there  I thought I was watching John Kruger shoot.” So that made me feel good and 23 was a good score there. So I think, “Okay I’m back in the hunt.” I go over to field four and I can’t get it out of my mind. John Kruger can’t see these targets, how am I going to? So all that stuff we’ve talked about 100 times, it’s all laying there and if it doesn’t get you one way it’ll get you another. I didn’t shoot a bad score, but in A class I ended up with a 78 and 81 was the high score. But I ended up about five places down and there were a whole bunch of guys stacked up in the middle.

Well, you know, you can look back and think of three or four targets you should have hit and it’s that little voice or not creating the breakpoint. And what I wanted to say was, everybody starts out at different levels but a lot of the guys that I shoot with were all experienced bird hunters and shot gunners and all have some ability. You bring the best game as best you can to the tournament. And when you start out in lower classes like D or C, you’ll have days when you can just overcome through natural abil- ity or shooting experience anything that might happen. But when you start getting up in higher classes like Craig Hill and these guys, and I think it starts pretty much in A and definitely in AA and master, those two or three targets that you miss make a big difference, but in B or C class they might have made no difference. So it’s another level of the game and it makes it interesting. But the biggest thing I got out of it again was being able to recognize what was happening to me. Couldn’t fix it every time, but fixed it more than I ever had before. So it gives you a positive attitude about what you need to do.

 Gil: And that goes back directly to what we talked about in the second show, which is, write down why you do this.

 John: Right. And once you do get your expectations in line with your commitment to practice and so forth, again, it takes a lot of the pressure off. You finally realize, “Hey, accept where you are.” Everybody has their personal life and their business, and you’re not going to be a George Digweed or a John Kruger, so get out there and have some fun. Do your best and then if you want to make a commitment to do a better job then come back and put it into practice.

 Bob: John, you made a comment that I’d like to go back to. You almost alluded to it directly but didn’t quite say it. You can’t be in control of the weather. You can’t be in control of the light. You can only be in control of your reaction to whatever happened. And if you can control your reaction to it, you can let that part of you that did all the practicing just do its job.

John: Yeah, and it’s easy to understand intellectually, but difficult to put into action sometimes. If I go someplace to shoot and the guys say, “I don’t want to play today, it’s too windy.” I’ll say, “You know this is a good opportunity because some day you might be shooting in a tournament where it’s windy so why not shoot? Who cares what the score is?” If you never practice in those kinds of conditions, it’s not going to be easy to overcome mentally. So I’m always up to the challenge of shooting in the rain, shooting in the wind, you know, what difference does it make?

 Gil: And Bob you make a good point. The only thing you can control is your reaction.

 John: And your thoughts, that’s the number one thing.

 Gil: That’s what I mean. You gotta go back to being non-judgmental with respect to result.

 John: And I did that better than I ever have done but there’s always room for improvement. When I missed, I’d catch myself, and then I’d sort of laugh, and use Willy’s deal, you know, when he blows it, he turns around and let’s out that crazy laugh of his. So I’m thinking, you know that’s the best way to deal with it. But I found myself changing things that I don’t normally change. I’d watch the squad shoot a pair on the stand and I’d go, “You know, this just isn’t going to work for me.”

And before, I’d be afraid to go in and do it different. But I’d walk in there and say, “I’m going to shoot these the other way.” And I’d run it, or I’d shoot better than anybody else and again that just gives you the confidence to develop your own plan, make your own decision and follow through with it. And if it doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to change something. And I guess that’s just how you get better.

 Gil: That’s great. That’s the experience. But remember that experience  is worthless unless it’s the successful or unsuccessful attempt at a   plan.

 John: Exactly. Because the worst thing you can do is not have a plan. Because then you have no place to change from. Jeff Kruger was shooting in the squad in front of us in the main event and I was watching him on a station, trying to figure out this target that they were struggling with, and he came off and asked me, and I said, “you look like you’re off the right side of it and I thought you needed to be over there.” And he said, “Boy it just doesn’t look like it,” and I said, “I don’t know either until I shoot it, but that’s the way I’m reading it.”

Butch was the first one to shoot, and poor Butch always asks me everything because it makes him feel better. He said, “What do you think?”

And I said, “Butch I think it’s seven o’clock on that curling target and he runs it.” You know, I got in there and I dropped the first two, but I knew I was in the right place and then I figured out I wasn’t in the gun. I was sort of lifting my head up and looking at it, and the next two, I just crushed them. But I was looking at them at seven o’clock, and the way Jeff was looking at them was at five o’clock or four o’clock on the other side.

That was the thing about those targets, you had to read them. They didn’t beat you on speed and distance, but boy, eye confusion. I don’t know if you remember the ones that were over the pond. Well, the second day, I guess that’s the blue course, everybody in my squad had shot the closest target first and I noticed that by the time they could break it, the other one was damn near in the water.

I looked at the trap again and I said, “You should be able to take the other target here and that other one will be right in your gun.” I’ll be darned, I ended up running that station, just because I made the plan different based on the way I was seeing it. And all the other guys go, “Gosh, why didn’t we do that?”

And I go, “I don’t know,” because I thought when I first looked at it that you guys were shooting the right way. But every time you’d break it, I’d look to see where that other target was and I’m going, “Man, that’s just a bear of a target.”

So I felt good about some of those things and based on my preparation and ability to practice I didn’t shoot great, but I didn’t shoot bad. I changed some things and made some improvements. I know what I need to work on so I was just happy. We had great weather, everything was perfect and we had a lot of good times. I’ve come to understand this game is a little bit social too. I’ve made friends all over the place so it was fun to see them. I just thought it was a good shoot.

 Gil: Good. What about you, Jeff Kruger?

 Jeff Kruger: First of all, a real strong compliment on the club itself, how they laid it out and ran the tournament. And as friendly a staff as I can remember at a tournament. The targets were outstanding; they certainly in retrospect showed me a real weakness in my game that I’ve already started working on. I’m used to working on a lot of birds that are under power. You just pick your breakpoints and you break a bird and move right in.

Most of the time you stay in the gun and you move over and just stick that second bird. There were a lot of birds in this tournament where the second target was in transition, maybe 90 percent of them. It might have been only fifteen feet away, but the sucker was in transition and some of those maybe you had to make a real quick low move to hit. You get in a habit sometimes of shooting and then immediately going to the next bird, and some of these targets you could have easily let that target develop more and just made a real soft move to that second target when it opened up and it wouldn’t have been in the middle of a transition type move. And a few other ones if you would have taken one of the birds a little bit sooner, you would have had a little more honest target on your second bird.

And a lot of those second little flop shots were real close. You know, you don’t have any patterns at 15, 18, 20 yards and if it’s quick and is going to go into the dirt quick, you lose the smoothness sometimes. So sometimes maybe if I’d have taken a target five to ten feet sooner it would have made all the difference in the world.

I would just say it exposed a weakness at a greater degree than I thought was there, and that’s just something I’m going to work real hard on. I’m going to shoot a lot of birds, a lot of second shot birds in transition to where I’m just going to come out of the gun a bit and let that target develop a little more. Just that type of thing. I thought it was an outstanding tournament.

 Bob: Have you guys ever had a discussion about rhythm and tempo?

 Gil: Yeah.

 Bob: That’s what he was just talking about.

 Gil: Yeah, exactly. He’s been practicing a lot of hard strong moves to the second target that put you in tempo with the second target. But a lot of the targets they were shooting as a second bird were slow, Bob. They’d have a driver and then a looper coming in that had just almost lost all of its speed and if they went to that second target with the same tempo, they’d blow by it.

 Jeff: A lot of the problem was that second target was going to go in the dirt. You had to move over to it quick, but you couldn’t move into the kill quick. That’s what we mean. There was no time on a bunch of them.

 Gil: I’ll tell you something else, practicing moving your eyes quickly to the second target after the first target breaks will eliminate ninety percent of the problem that you had. Ultimately it is all about eye movement. You need to see it with a speed of ten and see it with a focus factor of ten, and when you can do that in a tenth of a second, you just go into the station with the mantra, “When I kill that one there, in a tenth of a second I’ll have my eyes on the second bird, the gun’s going to follow.”

A lot of times when you’re shooting driving pairs, because the second target’s got so much tempo or so much speed, you can get by with beginning with the gun moving and you lock onto the target and because the gun needs a lot of speed, you can slop into that picture. But when you’re shooting deceptive targets like we set, you gotta kill that first one, stop and find that second one and you got to stick it. There’s no swing. There’s no nothing, you stick it.

You’re  very right Jeff, one of the reasons you saw about eight to   ten targets going into the ground and one of the reasons I had to do    that is I didn’t have any more spring on the traps, so I couldn’t make them go fast. I had to make them get out of the picture fast, which  made you have to go after it fast. And there again, you don’t have to   set really fast targets, you just have to set them where you really need  to break them very fast. I will confess to you, that some of the things that Vicki and I saw were that a lot of people only have one speed of swing and that of course ate them alive. And when they missed them, they couldn’t blame anybody but   themselves.

 John: That’s what everybody was saying. And one thing that I’d like to say Gil, because we talked about it in an earlier session about controlling the bird in the first one-third of its flight path, the sweet spot and the last third and there were quite a few of those there. And that’s one of the things I recognized right away. I’m getting really good at reading targets I think. And I’d just go: “Look if you can break that target right there,” that second one that was for some people in the dirt, was 10 feet off the ground for me, “if you broke it in the sweet spot, that second target was in the dirt.” I walked in there and said, “Okay, commit to the breakpoint. You’re going to break it right there and the other one right there.” And those guys would go, “Man, when you’re breaking them there, you’ve got all kinds of time.” And I said, “That’s the game.”

Bob: That’s because you practiced changing your tempo. So you can trust that you can change your tempo.

 Gil: Really, what they’re doing Bob is, the system that Vicki and I use teaches you to do what the target does with respect to speed. If it’s a fast target, fast hands; if it’s a slow target, slow hands. Therefore all you have to do is get your eyes on the target and mirror what the target does and you’re automatically in tempo with it. And that’s why moving your eyes to the second breakpoint or the second target in a tenth of a second is so critical. And I’ll tell you something else that Vicki and I saw that is kind of playing on what you just said, John. Nobody was making a plan. They were just trying to go in there and kill them. Just going there and shooting them.

 John: Our squad was really good at that.

 Gil: Well you’ve all had  lessons.

 John: Yeah, and this master class guy from Washington was just fit to be tied. ’Cause it was just like, “Man, these targets are in your face, how can you be missing them?” But again, I never got to see Kruger shoot, but when a guy shoots a 92 in the prelim and a 187 in the main event I think, there’s no doubt he’s making a plan.

 Gil: Oh yeah, he was, I watched him. But what you have to work on doing, he just does it. He’s kind of like me, when I look at a pair of targets I know that one needs to go there and that one needs to go there, and I automatically know the picture. All I do is just say, “That one right there and that one right there, okay let’s go kill them.” Boom boom, and it’s just over. But that’s what happens when you do it for twenty years.

 John: No, I understand.

 Gil: But you guys are taking advantage of a shortcut in that you’re getting our 15 to 18 years of experience doing this, and we’re kind of compressing it down in a nutshell to give you the answers to the test. And I’m telling you, the session we did in November on reading targets, there wasn’t a person there, outside of the people that had had lessons from us and some other real experienced shooters who knew how to read the targets. They were just dumbfounded when they realized that if you broke the first target real quick you had a lot of time on that second target.

Brian, can you do what you want to do in a couple minutes? And then we’ll wind up here.

 Brian: Well, I have to say ditto to a lot of the things we have discussed tonight. But, first off, I shot at the Reuter Open at The Pines Country Club in Lufkin, Texas. And there were 115 shooters and 20-plus master shooters. And high score overall was 94 and I shot an 89. That doesn’t sound like much, but for me it was a lot. Since the Seminole Cup last year, when I became a master I had been on a downhill slide, really struggling, and this year Seminole Cup wasn’t friendly to me.

I had made a commitment to start completely over. Basically I’ve been following everything we’ve discussed since November and then following a lot of things Gil has helped me with over a period of time. But I got a lot out of Browning Briley and last month’s Coaching Hour. I have learned to really focus hard, or revisit the breakpoint in my plan, until I visualized breaking that target. The other thing was not giving in to the emotion of missing a target. Those were the two major points there. At the start of the tournament I made a plan, told myself I wanted to stay in the present and not get caught up in target counting. And after completing each station I would find some type of minutia, Gil Ash’s Minutia, this time I was finding the sweet gum gumballs on the ground and I was kicking them from station to station. Just to do anything to tie up my brain, just to get me out of the game.

 Gil: And it works, doesn’t it?

 Brian: It worked like a charm. The real thing that came out of it was that I felt in control and I was relaxed during the tournament. So, before I shot my first target I explained to the members of my squad what I planned on doing, and they understood what I was  doing.

 Gil: Well good, good. That’s great. Craig Martin, I’ll call you tomorrow night and we’ll talk about some of your problems and talk about those on the Coaching Hour next month. We’re out of time again. I think we’re going to talk about tournament play again if that’s okay with you. Bob, I want to thank you for your contributions, feel free to contribute whenever you feel moved to.

Just remember your potential is like your weight, you never really lose it you just push it in different directions based on your  attitude.