At this point, we are really getting into self-talk—when to begin focusing on it and how to find phrases that are most effective. We address how our emotions act as filters on our perspectives and how attitude affects performance. Some interesting questions come up, including, “Can a happy emotion be damaging while shooting?” Instructor Bob Shannon talks about body tension and effective methods of relaxation, and shooter Cindy Barton tells us about her success in using an aggressive attitude.
We also squeezed in an interesting practice exercise that will help you to imprint different moves into your subconscious.
Impressions of the World Shoot
Gil: I was privileged to watch both teams on the last round of the World Shoot. I’m not saying these things in a critical way, I want to bring these points up to you to let you all know that the things that you’re experiencing, they happen to all competitors regardless of skill level.
I was privileged to do the TV show and just watch the teams compete on the last day, and I was in some ways shocked at what I saw. That was probably due to my expectations. I tried to look for pre-shot routines and plans and breakpoints, and the first team I watched was the British team and I was shocked to see that only two of the shooters really had a pre-shot routine.
I mean, they all had routines, but they weren’t the same every time. Two of the shooters, Paul Simpson and Stewart Clark, had a really good, sound routine and they were the stellar performers on that team. It was very obvious to me that neither of those guys got rattled, and their routine was what kept them in the present.
I also looked at the breakpoints on the British team and Paul Simpson and Stewart’s breakpoints were always the same. There was no doubt in their mind about the plan. But the other three, they were very erratic. I mean, George Digweed wasn’t shooting on the team and Ben Husthwaite wasn’t there, but I was amazed at how people were shooting in a world competition. Their breakpoints were very irregular and the speed with which they addressed the targets was irregular. There was indecision. You could tell by looking at their hands when they called for the bird that they weren’t decided about what they were doing. And thoughts of score kept creeping in throughout the round. And they shot well, but I think they could have shot much better if they had had better routines.
And then I watched Team USA shoot, and this was Kruger and Duffy, Wendell Cherry, Matarese and Danny Carlisle. And they all started great. You could tell they all had fairly good routines and after about four stations, they only dropped two or three birds as a team.
But on the fifth station—it was a long dropping shot—some of them had trouble with it. There was a midi crossing out real fast and a long dropper. There was some indecision as to how to take it and what they were going to do. It was interesting to me just to sit back and watch, because the indecision led them to have trouble with that shot. Those guys could break that target in their sleep, but because they were undecided, they weren’t decisive in their plan and their commitment to the plan. You could tell, you could even tell when they called “pull” that they were undecided.
I guess as a team they probably dropped eight to ten birds on that station. And the other unique thing was on the next station, it was an easy station, but they all dropped a bird or two. So they weren’t able to leave those misses behind. It wasn’t until station 10 out of 15, I think, they all kind of got it back together.
There was one station where there was a backup, and I just kind of got over on the sidelines and just listened to them. And somebody told them what the English team had shot. The instant they heard that, they all divided that team score by five, and John Kruger came to me and said, “we’ve got to average X amount to win.”
And I said, “John, of what relevance is that?”
And he just looked at me and he said, “You’re right.”
They went back over there, and this is how beautiful having a breakpoint is. There was a pair, it was an easy quartering bird and then a floating left-to-right bird coming in, and if you broke the quartering bird fast enough, you had plenty of time to break the incomer before it got behind a tree.
Andy Duffy was the only one. He was the last shooter; he was the only one who stuck the quartering bird quick enough to where he didn’t miss that second bird one or two times because it got behind the tree. It just goes to show you, it doesn’t matter how good you are, what tournament you’re in, it is basic, fundamental routine that counts. It’s being able to shoot the breakpoints and being able to shoot the targets anywhere you have to, that leads to a good consistent performance.
I’ll tell you, they knew their score exactly. Going into station 14 they were 12 birds up, and they knew it, and they dropped six birds at station 14. Station 15 was a really simple, easy pair: two birds to the right, one just a flat crosser and then an easy floating curling bird coming right-to-left about 20 yards in front of you. John Kruger was the first one up and he got up and missed three out of six birds.
No routine, just getting up there and shooting. Now he’s a great shot and in no way am I criticizing him. I just want to point out that I don’t care how good you are, when thoughts of score creep in, your performance is going to suffer. We’ve harped on this routine thing over and over, but it seems as though regardless of how much we harp on things like the flashlight exercise, sometimes it takes some of us longer than others to actually get in there and do those exercises. So, anyway, I just wanted to share that with you. It’s always back to fundamentals.
It’s like Danny was saying with the DVDs, there is so much you remember, but there’s also so much you forget. Isn’t that right, Danny?
Danny: Yes, there is.
Gil: And we get the comment all the time, “I want to do some advanced stuff with you.” Well, the advanced stuff is the same thing as the beginning stuff. It’s just like when we get together with Danny again, we’re going to cover the same fundamental things, but he’s going to be able to apply them at a different level because of his progression. There’s some new stuff out there with emotion, we’re doing some studies with the Brain Institute right now on emotion and how it controls the learning curve, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. There’s some new stuff on vision, but from the aspect of shooting, there’s very little new stuff out there. It’s all just a higher or more extreme application of familiar information based on your own ability to interpret the data and output the data.
Revisiting Self-Talk
Gil: Last month, we stayed on a topic, a form of self-talk, and it was dealing with compliments. I really enjoyed the show. I know it benefited me and people told me it benefited them.
Dick Baker, are you out there? I know that Dick had gone to a tournament and had called us and said, “I’m quitting. Take me off the Coaching Hour. I’m hanging it up. I just don’t want to do this game anymore.”
What had happened was he’d gone over to Pecan Meadows and gotten beaten up pretty severely by a tournament. And let me tell you, he was serious. He was quitting. Absolutely. He said, “I’m tired of getting beat up. I’m tired of getting pissed.”
About a week later, Dick calls up and he said, “Damn you.”
I said, “What are you talking about? You quit, what are you blaming me for?”
He said, “I got that CD in the mail, and I wasn’t going to listen to it, but I figured I’d paid for it, I should go ahead and listen to it. And I’m back in the saddle again.”
He said, “You guys, although you were talking to Phil and Marty and everybody else, you were talking directly to me.”
It just goes to show you how important all this self-talk stuff is.
I want to go over a little segment that I prepared back in May. It has more to do with self-talk while you’re in the stands. I think it’s something that everybody struggles with. I know that we still struggle with it, especially when we’re having a very bad day. It’s something I’m convinced that more people need to work on. Sooner or later you’ve got to admit, the better you get, the more your game depends 100 percent on focus, both mentally and physically, and sooner or later the mechanics have to become more subconscious.
Moving from Conscious to Subconscious
Gil: Danny, wouldn’t you agree with me in saying that your achievement of your new performance level has probably come from your mechanics becoming much more subconscious and of a much higher quality?
Danny: Absolutely, because when I left you guys back in March, I did nothing but practice right-to-left and left-to-right quartering and crossers, probably five thousand of them just to get the mechanics down. From there it just grew. That helped on focus. And then the next step is, you take it to a tournament and you’re more conscious of what your plan is instead of what your move is going to be.
Gil: Interesting comment. So the better your move, the more subconscious your move got, the easier it was for you to focus mentally on the plan and less on mechanics.
Danny: Yeah, and it’s almost gotten to the point where it seems like even though you’ve picked a breakpoint and you know you’re shooting the breakpoint, that’s almost become a subconscious action also. I know I’m shooting it in the breakpoint, but I don’t really see the breakpoint, I just know that I’m doing it. Four or five months ago it was more about mechanics.
Gil: And you shot five thousand.
Danny: Yeah.
Gil: And what distance?
Danny: Probably between 20 and 30 yards. Nothing real long. And nothing really fast either. It’s still the easy ones that are getting me though.
Gil: Bubba, it don’t matter what level you’re at.
Danny: That’s right. The strange thing is, and I don’t know why because I practice so much on those easy ones, but the 45-yard shot now is becoming a lot easier. There’s a lot more confidence in that shot. That shot is strictly focus for me. If I laser in on it, then everything else seems to come together. But I never really practice 45-yard shots.
Gil: So, if you get all the easy ones you’re bound to get your share of the hard ones.
Danny: That’s right.
Gil: Isn’t it amazing how often that comment comes out?
Danny: The thing that I’m really noticing at most of the shoots, is that even the guys who are there that are supposed to be the better shooters, they’re still missing the long ones and the hard ones. So that’s not where I’m losing ground. I’m coming on. I’m getting there.
An Exercise to Imprint a Move
Gil: I will share something with you all. This is an aside from self-talk. Something that we have discovered that I want all of you to be aware of, and Danny, this will help you. When you’re trying to imprint a move, say a crossing move. Instead of just shooting at 20 yards until you shoot 10 in a row, then moving back to 25 yards and shooting until you shoot 10 in a row, and then moving back to 30 until you shoot 10 in a row. It will help if you will establish a gap between two shooting positions.
For instance, let’s say we’re going to work on a slow left-to-right crosser, because a slow repetitive move is the way you build muscle memory. But here is a way where you can program it quicker. Set up a crosser and shoot it from 15 yards and learn to shoot it 10 times in a row. Then move back to 30 yards and break it 10 times in a row. Now, there’s a 15-yard gap in there. What we’re finding from having students do this, even though it’s the same target, when you put the gap in between the practice posts, from 15 to 30 yards, it’s a completely different move.
It’s the same move, but a completely different tempo. So you go from 15 to 30, back to 15, back to 30. When you go from one to the other a couple times, you’ve got the target and you break it in the same spot wherever you want to. Once you can do that, change the shooting pegs, go from 20 to 35, 20 to 35 and keep going back and forth until you can shoot those 10 times in a row. Then go and change the pegs again. From 25 to 40, 25 to 40. What we’re finding, in programming moves this way, when you’re practicing, the move is the same, the picture is a little different, but the big thing is the tempo. It’s different. The feel of the move is slower when you go back 15 yards.
Here’s what ends up happening, when you program a move like this, when you go from 15 to 30 from 20 to 35 and from 25 to 40: Now listen to the numbers, you’ve gotten it down from 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40, but more importantly when you’ve been programming, the tempo is so different with a 15-yard gap in your shooting positions that you’re much more aware of the change in tempo. What we’re finding is that this tends to imprint the move quicker than it would imprint if you were to go from 15 to 20 to 25 to 30 to 35 and so on.
Because when you go from 15 to 20, it’s so close to the same move. You’re using what you learned on the first one to help you on the second one. It’s kind of a crutch. And there’s something magical about 15 to 30, 20 to 35 and 25 to 40. That would be for somebody who is an advanced shooter. If you’re a middle of the road shooter, go from 15 to 25, and then 20 to 30, and then 25 to 35. Something like that. But make sure there’s a difference in distance from each of your shooting positions and you’ll find that the tempo being different will help you imprint the move more quickly.
We’ve tried that on about eight students, and all of them have called and remarked how quickly the move imprints when you do that.
When to Focus on Self-Talk and What to Say
Gil: Anyway, you finally get to a certain level and your whole game depends totally on focus. Your move has got to become more subconscious. The routine gets better. The routine almost becomes subconscious too, when you’re doing this. But you’ve got to do it enough to where it happens subconsciously, naturally, without thought. This is kind of what Danny is describing. Everything’s starting to become more subconscious. And then all of the sudden, and you remember what he said, everything just kind of clicked into place. Because when you start doing this and you get to the point where your move is more about focus, then it begins to be about feel and rhythm and trust and the breakpoints are easier to shoot, and all targets become much easier.
But it’s at that point that you should become more concerned with self-talk. I will tell you that self-talk in the shooting stand is most people’s nemesis, because they say everything but the right thing to themselves.
I know when I started teaching Mark Faggard a year ago, he was one of the worst about hollering and screaming and jumping up and down like a kid that spilled his ice cream. And I made him repeat this phrase after he missed a target, “I can break that target if…” And he had to emote what he had to do to break the target, to keep him from giving emotion to what he did. And I have to give it to him. He did it freely, he didn’t resist it, and he experienced remarkable results inside of two months just by using that one phrase.
Self-talk in the stand is important because we usually see people give more emotion and more attention to what they did wrong, instead of what they need to do to correct the miss. And whenever your self-talk is negative in any way, or judgmental in any way, it makes you rush your move. Your grip pressure increases and you lose your feel. Instantaneously, you lose your feel.
Self-talk in the stand is more effective when it’s spoken in a matter of fact, monotone voice with very, very few words. Self-talk is more effective when the point of view is like you’re outside your body looking in, and coming from an objective perspective, rather than being judgmental.
Key words: objective, perspective and non-judgmental. What we find is that rarely is self-talk objective, and it’s always emotionally involved and judgmental. When you do that, you’re “submarining” your performance.
Phrases like: “Man I stunk that up,” or “I’m on station seven and I’ve already missed fifteen.”
Those aren’t helping you. You’ve got to develop phrases like we talked about in June 2003 that you say in the stand. That’s your own self-talk. We talked about phrases in the June 2003 Coaching Hour on how to handle compliments, and you need to develop the same kind of phrases that you can use when you’re in the stand. You’ve got to admit to yourself that after you’ve missed them, they’re gone. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve got to go on to the next one.
Some of the best rounds I’ve ever shot, not score-wise, but some of the rounds that I did the best on, were rounds where I had missed too many birds in the beginning and I’d made a determination: “Alright I’m going to turn this around. I’m going to see what it takes for Gil Ash to turn a poor performance into a good performance. Right now, I’m starting over, I’m going to focus on the birds. I’m going to let it happen and I’m going to shoot the breakpoints.”
Sooner or later, you’re going to be in a competition where you have a bad stand. And if you’ve never reached down and pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, that stand is going to perpetuate itself. You’re all going to have bad performances. It happens all the time.
But whenever you’re having one, rather than giving in to the emotion of the moment and being judgmental, and beating yourself up, turn it around. Tell yourself, “I’m going to kill the rest of these targets.”
See what it takes for you to turn your performance around. Analyze, don’t evaluate. Analyze the miss in your mind, but don’t evaluate from the standpoint of, “Oh man, I missed that one, I’m out of it now.”
You’re never out of it until after the last shot. Just remember that any time there’s doubt as you start to evaluate your performance before you have finished it, that doubt excites mechanical thinking and makes you rush. Anytime the voice of doubt gets in, it excites mechanical thinking. So you go from trust mode to thinking swing mechanics, and you know what that does.
And the other thing about evaluation: when you evaluate, you’re making judgment not just on your last shot, but you’re judging your last stand. You’re judging your score. You’re judging your self-esteem. You’re judging everything about your performance, but your performance isn’t even over yet. And you’ve got to guard against judgmental thinking.
When you miss a target, you’ve got to use all your thought process just to analyze the problem and emote the solution. And emoting the solution doesn’t begin with “now dammit.”
I was having a lesson with Phil Bartash the other day, and he was having some trouble and was beating himself up. I said this, and I had to write it down.
I said, “I want all of your verbalizations in the stand to be solution- oriented and always in the present.” If it’s not about the solution and it’s not about now, don’t be saying it. All that does is carry you into the past or the future, and it allows the voice to get in. Always analyze from the standpoint of focus, tempo, feel and trust. Like Mick said in the last Coaching Hour, “focus harder.”
A cool, unemotional analysis will make the problem clearer, and help you avoid repeating your mistakes. If it’s not in the present tense, about what you’re going to do now, you’re beating yourself up. You can give all the emotion you want to what happened, but all you’re doing is ensuring it’s going to happen again. Make the correction, make the plan, and shoot the plan.
We were shooting the FITASC at the U.S. Open, we were shooting with a young man, a really good shooter, and his parents were watching. At the end of the second day his mother came up to us and said, “You know, you guys handle missing really well.”
Well, not knowing what she was really talking about I asked her to explain. She said, “I’ve watched you for two days and when you miss one, it’s like it never happened. You just move on.”
And that was a great compliment to me, and to Vicki and to Brian, because we work on that constantly.
It doesn’t matter what level you’re at, you’re going to have to develop little self-talk cues to talk to yourself with. It can be things like: “I can break that target if… I always shoot better when I slow down and wait to see the target.” “I am better than that.” “The move begins with focus.” “If I take that one over there, the second one will be a little easier.”
There are any number of different things you can say to yourself, but if everything you say is solution-oriented and in the present tense, there’s no room for a negative thought.
I just wanted to share those things with you. Also remember that when something happens, regardless of what it is, it just is. It’s neither good nor bad. How you give emotion to it determines what it is. Everything that happens is filtered through your emotion. This is some of the stuff that we’ve been studying about. How emotion controls the speed of the development and depth of development in the ability curve. And we’ve been saying that for 10 or 12 years.
There are some people who are studying brain function now, and they’ve been proving what we’ve been talking about. We’ve talked to some of the research people about this. And it’s amazing how much of “who we are” is based on what emotion we give to things. It was paraphrased this way in a piece of literature they gave to us: “Emotions are the gatekeepers of the learning process and the performance process. Your reality is altered by emotions, yours. It is your choice what to give emotions to, as well as whether the emotion is positive or negative.”
Be careful what you give emotions to guys, because once you give something emotion, it becomes part of you.
Is Happy Okay?
Cindy: Let me ask you a question, Gil.
Gil: Go for it, I’d love you to.
Cindy: I’ve been shooting long enough now, where I feel I can recognize when I’m in the Zone, and I’ve gotten into the Zone more and more. But I’m curious to know when you’re talking about emotion, do you think the emotion of being happy interferes, or do you think you need to be emotionless? Because there have been times when I have been in a really good mood, no stress and usually that’s when I shoot my best. I’m full of emotion at that point, but it’s a happy emotion. Now there have been times where I’ve run a five stand and I felt like I’ve had no emotion. So I don’t understand which emotions are good. Or is it no emotion is good?
Gil: Cindy, I would tell you something else we’re learning is that everybody’s brain is completely different. And the types of emotions that excite the chemistry in your brain that make you perform well are unique for you, and what you’ve got to do is be attuned to what those emotional states are for you. What I’m talking about specifically is giving great emotion to a failure. I don’t think giving some emotion to a success is bad. I think when you give too much emotion to a success, what will end up happening is your adrenaline curve will get way out of line.
Two things create adrenalin, fear and excitement. It’s good to be a little afraid, okay, because that excites the adrenalin curve, and it’s good to be excited, but as long as those are kept in check, such that one doesn’t exceed the other and neither gets too high, then you can control your thought process and you can control the voice. More often than not, what we see is that people’s negative emotions overwhelm them with judgment and beating themselves up, and that’s what kills their performance.
I will share something with you, I was privileged to share a day with Kim Rhode. And during one of our sessions I asked her, “What do you experience when you’re in your Zone?” And let me tell you something, this girl can experience walking into her Zone just like walking into a shower. She said, “I experience three things when I’m in my Zone. One of three things, I either hear my heartbeat, I hear myself breathing or I hear nothing.”
And when I say emotion, you have to understand that all of your senses are filtered by emotion. When you hear something, you either like it or you don’t like it. That’s emotion. It’s either too loud or not loud enough. If you see something, it’s either pretty or it’s not. That’s emotion. If you taste something, you either like it or you don’t. That’s emotion. If you smell something it either smells good or it doesn’t, that’s emotion. If you feel something, it either feels good or it doesn’t. That’s emotion.
What behavioral scientists are beginning to understand is that emotion enhances long- term memory, it enables us to make faster decisions, it helps us make better quality decisions, it binds things together that you are learning more quickly. And by just simply giving the right kind of emotion, non-judgmental, it accelerates the learning process. Does that make sense?
Cindy: Yeah it does. Especially that first part, what you said about excitement. Too much is no good, but a little bit is important.
When to Embrace Emotion
Gil:The time to jump up and click your heels is after the last shot and you’ve won. Then it’s of the utmost importance that you give it emotion.
Cindy: And you know the most interesting thing, Gil? Winners probably control emotions so well, they simply raise their hand a little bit, they don’t jump for joy. Because those types of people are probably too emotional and if they turned their emotions loose they wouldn’t be winning. They’re usually calm because they’ve been that way.
Gil: Well, if you’ll remember, pull out your CD on dominators, and the one common thread that all dominators have in sport is that they’re never satisfied with their performances, even if they win, because they know that they could have done better. And that’s one of the reasons why you’ll never see them giving something great emotion, because even if they win, they can still think of three or four targets that they should have hit. There’s a reason for that lack of emotion.
Tension Check
Bob: Something to check out Cindy, next time you’re in that situation. Three places on your body to check out: your jaw, your neck and your upper back. You can have no emotion on your face and be clenching your jaw. You can have a frown on your face and be so tight it’s ridiculous, but if you smile, you can’t do any of those things. You can even get yourself to smile at your failures and get yourself to slow down.
Gil: Exactly. A smile is a subconscious function. You have to think to frown. Now think about that. Do you agree with that Bob?
Bob: I do.
Gil: You don’t have to think to smile.
Bob: But it does wonders for your attitude.
Gil: Not to mention your good looks. This emotion thing, we’re excited about studying with some of these people because we’re beginning to understand emotion so much more, and emotion is tied directly to attitude. They’re all the same thing. They each have a different flair about what they do in your performances. We see people in this game riddled with negative, vindictive emotion about themselves. It’s about them, but it begins as a judgment about their performance. They get to the point to where they’re just not happy anymore.
I will tell you something else, one of the reasons that when we teach, we use humor and sarcasm and fun and playful things, is it dispels that tension that Bob was talking about. We can tell before a student even gets there, that they’re starting to get negative. They’re uncomfortable. They’re out of their comfort zone. They don’t like it. And interestingly enough, do you know what happens to the brain when that fear emotion or high stress comes into the brain? It goes into survival mode immediately. It ceases to do what you want it to do. You begin to be reclusive, you begin to be vindictive, you begin to pull away from everyone and everybody. Now that’s a known fact. It doesn’t matter how much you want to go on, when you give in to the vindictiveness and when you give your poor performances all this emotion, the stress increases. The tension increases, and you don’t know it.
That’s why, when you feel yourself tensing up, you ought to take a big deep diaphragm breath. Because your diaphragm will begin to tense up before you even know about it. Your brain doesn’t receive as much information from the muscle groups in your diaphragm as it does from the muscle groups in your hands and your arms. And you don’t know you’re tense. And it’s that fear thing that makes all of that happen. Brian Brewton and I were talking about that grip pressure thing.
When you feel that tension coming on, all you have to do is grip that gun really tight. Then relax to just let the gun lay in your hands, and then come back to a neutral grip pressure, and you can feel all the muscles in your shoulders, in your neck, in your arms, you can feel all of them relax. It’s just another way of controlling stress, of controlling body tension. You cannot perform well if the muscles in your body are tense. It’s an amazing thing when you can begin to control your body tension just through grip pressure.
I agree with Bob on those three parts of the body. You do it subconsciously don’t you, Bob?
Bob: Absolutely.
Gil: And why do you do it? Is that attached to emotion?
Bob: I think it is. I think it’s a part of that protective mode that you described. It just tenses up getting ready for a fight.
Gil: The brain’s job is to survive. Its priority is always survival. Threat and high stress throw the brain into survival mode immediately at the expense of developing higher order thinking skills. That’s why when we see someone getting tensed up in a lesson, we’ll go over and we’ll touch them on their back, we’ll squeeze them on their shoulder, we’ll tell them a joke, we’ll make fun of somebody else in the crowd so they begin to laugh. I’m telling you, just like Bob said, the instant that smile appears you can see their whole manner changes, their whole body language changes. Who was that Denver quarterback that used to smile all the time?
Bob: John Elway.
Gil: Yeah. It doesn’t matter how far he’s behind, how far he’s got to go, how many points he’s down and how fast he’s got to get there, he’s always smiling. And I will tell you that the more we study the brain and the more we study emotion, the more it becomes important to us: the subtlety of emotion, the power of emotion. Everything you do is filtered through your own emotion. It’s the willingness to change your emotional reaction to what happens to you, or what you just did, that allows you to change your attitude about failure, which allows you to control the voice. Do you see what I’m saying, Cindy?
Cindy: Oh absolutely.
Gil: So with respect to how happy you get, whenever you’re in a performance, a tournament, or a serious expression, use emotion, but use it in a calm monotone voice. And just give yourself very short commands. Three, five words, no more. No commentary, just a very short command.
Women, Get Aggressive
Cindy: But I find, like in FITASC, I find that because I’m a gun-up person, I have a need to be more aggressive. I get a look in my eyes where I’m aggressive, I can feel it, and I do it purposefully, so I can get the darned gun to my shoulder in time.
Gil: Well, you’ve probably heard me say this before but, as a woman, because of the way your brain is wired, you have what we call multiplicity of focus. You’re able to be aware of eight things at one time. The only way you can have singularity of focus is if you get aggressive. Do you agree with that, Vicki?
Vicki: Oh absolutely. You have to be more assertive to become that focused on it. It keeps the voice out. It’s something we’ve found about a lot of women and a lot of men throughout the country who are used to multitasking. To become that focused is a lot harder on people like that, but more so for women. That’s because we’re used to thinking of eight things at one time. So you do have to become more, I don’t say aggressive, but you do have to become more assertive with it.
Cindy: To me it feels aggressive. Like, oh I’m going to kill you right there. The guys don’t get that?
Gil: Let me explain something to you. When guys get pissed off, we focus like a woman: on eight things at one time. It’s so very true, and another reason why you won’t see most of the top shooters give a lot of emotion to it. They know that when they give it a lot of emotion, they lose it. Because a man has to keep his emotions in check and be very relaxed in order to have singularity of focus.
The next time you’re at a shoot and you see a guy lose it. You watch him. You watch his eyes. He’ll be looking around at everything. He’ll be throwing things. He’ll be doing this and he’ll be saying that. His speech will speed up. He’ll say things three to five times faster, and he’ll use three to five times as many words. It won’t be in the present either. It will always be past tense or future tense and it will not be solution-oriented. And men and women are just different in that way. We’ve studied that. I use the term that “a woman has to be pissed off.” You have to be a little mad at that target. A man has to be calm. Determined, but calm. Women, if you’re not pissed, you’re thinking of seven other things, plus the target. That puts you anywhere but all there. If I’m pissed, I’m thinking like you are. I have to be calm, reserved and relaxed in order for me to have good focus on the target and shoot the breakpoint. And if you’d practice your gun mount more, you wouldn’t have to go so fast at FITASC.
Cindy: I feel like I’m ready to pounce.
Marty: Gil, I was talking to you earlier today about being at the world FITASC. It was the prelim, and it was before I realized that my gun was out of whack. I was shooting so poorly, but I was trying to keep the attitude: “It’s okay. This is all right. I’ll do better on the next station.”
We were shooting with someone I had never shot with before, and thank God she’s not from around here, but she would turn around, and you could be 900 yards away, and if she heard a noise, it was, “shhhhhh.”
Well before long I became aware on that course that you’ve got shooters behind you, stations beside you, there’s a water truck going up and down the road, people running by on their four wheelers. It was just so noisy. I was not aware of that until she made such a point of it, and until I grabbed hold of the fact that I was shooting poorly. I became frustrated and so everything else was in the picture, whereas before it hadn’t been.
Now, the men didn’t seem to be aware of any of the other noises, nor had I been until I focused on it. I thought, “Okay, I’m trying to handle the fact that I’m not shooting well, but now I don’t even want to shoot.” I noticed that the more I got frustrated with my shooting, the more I became aware of any distraction.
Gil: Now, go back to, what happened was, your stress level increased and your brain went into survival mode.
Marty: Exactly.
Gil: It became more aware of everything that was going on around you because of fear. And that is a physiological human response that you cannot change. What you’ve got to do is deal with it.
Marty: Yeah, I tried to look at it as a learning experience. It’s something that I wrote down in my notes. This is a particular circumstance that maybe I have not been in before so learn from that. When I shot well in Austin, when I shot in the eighties in Austin I swear you could have dropped a bomb behind me and I wouldn’t have heard it. But I shot with a squad that was so peaceful, we all smiled and we had a good time. Nobody was hollering out, “Boy, you’re going to have to lead that bird.” Everybody did their own thing. And there were distractions, but if I could recapture that—
Cindy: You will, Marty.
Gil: You will recapture it. The fact that you could get through two- thirds of that course shooting like a dog is gonna enable you to recapture that, because you did it. You’ve already done it. You know how to do it. And your commitment to do a log is going to help you do that, and doing this for yourself not for what others think of you. It’s going to enable you to get through that. It’s just going to happen.
Marty: Yeah, you know I thought when I walked up to that scoreboard, I thought, “You know somebody’s got to be in last place. Somebody’s got to be there it might as well be me, and I might as well enjoy it.”
Gil: Guys we are out of time. Remember, your potential is like your weight, you don’t lose it you just push it around. Have a great month.
