We have the pleasure of introducing a new shooter, Virgil Menshew, who is on the cusp of breaking through from a conscious phase of learning to a subconscious phase of learning, which we’ll discuss in more detail. We also spend a good deal of time on goals and expectations, the difference between the two, and how you must forgive yourself for unaccomplished goals and be willing to change when circumstances require it.
Points to Cover
Gil: I’m going to talk a little bit tonight about goals and expectations and about believing in yourself, and when I get to the goal and expectation segment, I’m going to ask you guys that are on the line tonight to give me some feedback about what you feel like the difference is between goals and expectations. That segment will follow the next segment.
Virgil Menshew is on tonight and I shot with Virgil at Nationals. Virgil and I also shared some great experiences early on in his shooting career and we’re working together again and I’m just as excited about it as I can be. I think I’ve shared on the Coaching Hour some of the successes that Virgil has had. And if not, I know I’ve shared it with some of you and he’s a great shot, and has won some big events and has probably got the softest pair of hands with a shotgun in them that I’ve ever in my life seen. But he found himself kind of running into a brick wall and hitting a plateau, and after shooting at the Nationals, he talked to me a little about it and he said, “If you wouldn’t mind, I sure would like to work with you again.” I was excited about that. I think I was as excited about that as he was, but I’ve asked him tonight to just let me ask him a few questions so you guys can get to know him a little bit.
I’m planning to go to Orlando the first Friday/Saturday/Sunday of December and work with him in a couple of groups and then work with him by himself on Monday and probably going to report back to you on his progress and some of the things he’s been struggling with and some of the “ah-hahs” that he’s had because he’s had a lot of experience in this game. I think he’s going to be a great asset to the Coaching Hour.
Virgil Menshew on His Plateau
Gil: Virgil, when I met you at Nationals and when you and I shot together, how long had you felt like that you had hit a plateau? Had it just been then or six months or a year?
Virgil: In the last year or so. For quite a while I was changing things and struggling with things.
Gil: What kind of things were you changing?
Virgil: Oh, just going at targets at different speeds and I went back to basic fundamental stuff, ’cause I always thought the basics was what it was about, but I just kept working at thinking that I was having the wrong approach on a lot of targets, not believing what I knew.
Gil: What was your first clue that you were at a plateau?
Virgil: Well, my numbers. I felt like I’m a really good shot at home at my local club at the little shoots, but at all the big shoots I felt that I never could make the mark that I wanted to make in sporting.
Gil: So you’d win a FITASC now and then and a five stand and maybe a small gauge but never a big show?
Virgil: Right.
Gil: And how far out of the top three places would you be?
Virgil: Just eight or ten.
Gil: Eight or ten for a two-day shoot?
Virgil: Two-day shoot, yes.
Gil: But you’d still have some wins at the local shoots?
Virgil: Oh yes, I’d have some real good shoots here at the local club and some of the other clubs around, you know 100 birds for one day. I could tell it was just more fun and just didn’t put so much pressure on myself. I believe that was the difference.
Gil: This last year before we decided to make some changes, as that time period ran on, did you feel like you were putting more pressure on yourself as you would go to the bigger shoots as a result of feeling like you had plateau-ed?
Virgil: Oh yes. I was all wrapped up in the winning and wasn’t happy if I didn’t win no matter how good I shot.
Gil: Hmm, interesting.
Brian: That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Gil: (laughs) Well, Brian Brewton, that’s one of the reasons I want him to talk about it, because this guy is a great shot and he’s also, perhaps one of the greatest gentlemen you’ll find on a sporting clays range. I mean, he is just on an even keel and I mean, his wife Carol would probably say something different about him ’cause she hears him talk to the steering wheel on the way home, but he is one of the most gracious gentlemen you’ll ever meet. And he’s got a wonderful wife named Carol and she believes in him a lot and he believes in himself a lot, but how much courage did it take for you to say, “Hey, I’m having trouble. Do I need to change something? What do you think?”
Virgil: Not much courage. I was grasping at any straw.
Gil: Well, I know there’s a compliment in there somewhere.
Virgil: I had felt like I went every direction that I could and always wished I lived in Texas.
Gil: Well it’s just a plane trip away, Bubba, and we’re going to get together at the 74 Ranch to do a little something before the Seminole. We talked about your routine change, and would it be fair to say that after talking at the Nationals and after you went back and practiced what I told you to practice that probably your biggest enemy was mechanical thinking?
Virgil: Yeah, definitely.
Gil: And you’ve had some very good results thinking mechanically?
Virgil: Oh yes. Especially FITASC when I had two shots at them. I could be more carefree with the first shot and just let it roll. I remember watching my scorecard here at the last four or five shoots even, my first pair even at the Nationals, one of the courses I shot I don’t think I missed a first pair of targets. But I didn’t feel them, and that was the mechanical thinking jumping in there.
Gil: Okay, you mentioned to me there was one shoot where you were able to really let it go the second day and that felt good.
Virgil: Right.
Gil: And guys, I’ve been working with Virgil on letting the target come to the gun, and he’s starting to feel it and see it on some shots, but he’s still having a little trouble with feel. I told him that feel is something that, as quick as he is, probably all he’s going to need to do is watch me shoot two or three times and then get in there and let me coach him a little bit, and I think the feel will just automatically happen simply because of his database of movement on targets. Brian, do you kind of agree with that?
Brian: Yeah, I do. I’ve seen him shoot before. It ain’t gonna take much for him.
Gil: We just got to get Virgil to believe that. But anyway, once I’m done working with him next December, the second weekend we’ll get together on the phone and talk about what we’ve learned. If you guys have some questions then that you’d like to ask Virgil, he’s been more than gracious to say he’d be happy to talk to you about it. But he’s been listening to the CDs, and have they made a big difference for you Virgil?
Virgil: Yeah, there was a lot of information there about pre-shot routine that I had questions about and really got a lot of good information from that.
The Difference Between Goals and Expectations
Gil: Well all right. Tonight I want to talk about two things. If I get to the second one, we’ll see. And thank you Virgil. With respect to goals and expectations, somebody take a stab at defining a goal versus an expectation. Anybody want to try that?
Brian: A goal is a plan. Expectation is what you want.
Gil: Now I know why you’re a level three instructor Brian. (laughs) Can everybody agree with that? Don’t all speak at once now.
Virgil: Yeah I do. With a goal in my mind, a goal could be more of a couple years down the line, where expectation is today. It is more in the present.
Gil: I would tell you that the first difference in a goal and expectation that I wrote down was: A goal is something to strive toward with a plan to work and learn to achieve it. And an expectation is a goal without a full commitment to achieve it.
Like Brian said, it’s something that you want. One of the reasons I want to talk about this tonight is that now is the time of year, with the last year over and the new year starting, you guys are going to eventually look at your goals and either change them or enhance them, by making them more challenging or less challenging for next year. And it’s something that I just want to visit for a little while tonight, so everybody understands that a goal is something that you can’t hold on to.
A goal is something you’ve got to be willing to turn loose of. A goal is something to guide your achievement, to guide your learning process. An expectation almost consistently turns into self-image devastation. Because like Brian said, “It’s something that you want.” And as Virgil said, “It takes you from the present and puts you in the future because there’s no commitment to achieve an expectation.” And I think we talked about that on a Coaching Hour two years ago either November or December where we talked about expectation and commitment.
Brian: It was December.
Gil: Yeah, December. So your goals are going to change. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in shooting or business, when you set goals, don’t get married to the goal. Your goals are going to change based on what happens in the journey to achieve them.
An expectation rarely changes, and when it does change it rarely changes for the better. It typically grows greater or it stays the same. And with expectation, what I’m concerned about, based on some of the comments that I’ve heard not only from you guys but from some of the people that I’ve been around in the last sixty days, is that if they don’t achieve their goal, their goal immediately becomes an expectation. Like Bob said not long ago, they’re not willing to forgive themselves for not achieving the goal.
They become married to the goal and because they won’t give it up, the goal immediately becomes an expectation and it excites disappointment, frustration, blame and judgment. And we’ve talked about where all those emotions go, and they don’t go to a good ending. It’s important that you all understand that if you make your goal and you write it down in your log, it’s okay to change that goal. It’s okay to change it after the first week. It’s okay to change it after the first month, the third month, or the eighth month. It’s okay to change it based on what’s going on in your life. It’s the same thing that’s done in business every day.
You may have a goal for a certain amount of gross figure and something happens in the office: you lose a key person, the company goes bankrupt, or you were depending on Enron to bring in X amount of dollars and now, suddenly that’s out of your control. Now rather than just hanging on to that goal and walking around kicking rocks, you’ve got to be able to let that goal go and change your goals.
I was talking to Phil Bartash about this about three weeks after Nationals, I noticed I didn’t see him at Nationals and he said, “I went on my last flight to Hong Kong before I was going to Nationals and coming back about two or three of my crew had to be hospitalized.” In fact, he was in the hospital for 24 hours. They’d caught some virus, and he was flat on his back for ten days and wasn’t able to go to Nationals and he was all down in the mouth and whining about that.
I said, “So what?”
And he said, “Well, my goal was to really shoot well at Nationals.”
I said, “Well, you really shot well this year. So what if you didn’t get to go to Nationals? So what if you didn’t get to go?”
And he said, “Yeah, but you know I shot really good at this tourn- ament and I guess I didn’t think I was going to do well at Nationals. So I didn’t have a lot of expectations and I probably wouldn’t have done that well at all.”
Okay now, listen to where I’m going with this. And I just baited him, I said, “So you would have gone to Nationals with very low expectations, not expecting to do very well, just going out to shoot the targets, right?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And I said, “Now let me see, when you won high overall in the FITASC at American, you’d gone to the ice cream store, had a big dollop of ice cream and you said: ‘Well you know, I really haven’t shot well, I’m just going to go out and shoot these targets just for the hell of it and see what happens.’ And you ended up winning high overall.”
And he was silent. It really showed him a lot of how he holds on to his goals. He’s a perfectionist. We have a few more perfectionists on the Coaching Hour, I won’t mention any names, but we do have a few more. You’ve got to understand that your goals are important. It’s important to set specific goals, it’s important to set long-term goals like Virgil was talking about.
Forgiving Yourself and Changing Goals
Gil: It’s equally as important to have short-term goals and they need to be specific. Because the more specific the goal, the more direct the path will be to achieve it. But you have to be honest with yourself enough, to look at what’s going on in your life, even what’s going on in your shooting life, and be realistic about being able to let the goals go and change them. When you get married to a goal, nothing good’s going to happen. Because it’s going to turn into an expectation and it will eventually become your boundary.
I think Bob Shannon was the first one to talk about how you’ve got to forgive yourself for not achieving your goal. And I understand that intellectually, but until I’d been working on this little segment, I really didn’t understand what he was trying to get across.
You’ve got to be willing to forgive yourself for not achieving that goal. Learn from the non-achievement. And make the same goal again if you want to, or change the goal. But this is the time of year where you’ve got to change goals. We talked about that last month, putting it in your log, and you have to understand that a goal is just something that helps you make the right decisions and it directs your journey of learning and enjoyment toward something, but the goal is not the goal. The goal is just something that leads you through your journey of enjoyment and enlightenment, and you just have to be very flexible about it.
A goal is just something that you think you can get to. Like Virgil said, “It’s something you think you can do.” And it’s got to be a dream. I mean, it’s okay to dream about your goals. It’s got to be something that you really want to do, but it’s got to be realistic. I could have as a goal to be six feet, six inches tall, but that ain’t gonna happen. I could have as a goal to shoot like somebody who’s six feet six inches tall and that can happen. But your goals have to be flexible. You’ve got to do everything you can to get to your goal but don’t be concerned when Murphy gets in the way and you’re not able to achieve it. I think, even Brian, you talked about how you had really planned on doing a lot more practice this year, but because of some of the things that happened at work you had to back off of that goal and change the goal in mid-year.
Brian: That’s right.
Gil: And it’s okay. You ended up changing your goal and still finishing with a good year.
Brian: That’s right.
Gil: Now, your secondary goal probably wasn’t your primary goal at the beginning of the year, but you had a good year, you finished well and you still learned some things.
Brian: Sure did.
Gil: We were talking the other night — something about your performance wasn’t quite as good as it should have been?
Brian: This past weekend?
Gil: Yeah.
Brian: Yeah.
Gil: Brian had to shoot this course in the afternoon and everybody that shot in the morning shot, what, fifteen birds higher than the scores in the afternoon?
Brian: Almost fifteen birds, that’s correct.
Gil: And Brian wanted to talk to me about it. He told me in the afternoon this big wind came up and the birds just were completely changed.
And I say, “Let me see, if you were to add 15 birds to your score you’d be right back where you normally were, right?” And he said: “Yeah.”
It’s just a matter of keeping things in perspective.
Expectations are typically unforgiven goals. Think about that. Unforgiven goals turn into expectations and ultimately become your boundary. We’ve talked about it on this hour, how large a role that luck plays in goal achieving or in winning a tournament. There are so many things that are out of your control that have to come together in sequence for you to honestly and truly have a good peak performance. There are a lot of things that have to happen. And the same things have to come together for you to achieve a goal.
Now, having a goal helps you to be able to overcome any little bumps in the road because you’re so focused on where you’re going. You begin to make decisions to make a greater commitment if you have to, if you can, to achieve that goal based on what’s going on in your life. But just be aware that having a goal and having a plan to achieve the goal allows you to take full advantage of whatever luck comes your way. Because it does take some luck. I think Virgil you’d probably agree. Whenever you go to a big shoot, you can be on, but there’s some luck of the draw as far as when you have to shoot certain birds on certain stations as far as shooting into the sun or the wind. All those things have to come together for you to make a good score.
Virgil: Right.
Gil: And if you’re not ready to make that good score, if you’re not all there and not ready, all the luck in the world ain’t gonna help you get there. So just be forgiving of yourself, and I know I keep going over that because there are a lot of people that take these goal things very seriously and they should, but they just, they’re just afraid to give up on that goal. You’re gonna succeed and you’re going to fail at achieving goals. But you’ve got to learn to forgive yourself, because that’s why they’re called goals. You’ve got to enjoy the journey, and you just be sure that you’re willing to turn those goals loose. The more you can dream about your goal the better. We’re going to talk about that in just a minute. You’ve got to believe in yourself and believe that you can achieve your goals. You can have a goal, but if in your heart of hearts you don’t believe you can achieve that goal, you might as well not have it. You’ve got to believe in yourself enough to where you know you can achieve it.
The Role of a Goal
Gil: Goals oftentimes are encouragement toward optimum performance. They will encourage you to go on and on, telling yourself “No, I’ve made that commitment.” And when you have a specific, committed goal, it’s a lot easier to make that decision to go out there and practice, like we were talking about when the wind is blowing 50 miles an hour and it’s 28 degrees.
I will share a little of this with you, I was talking to Kim Rhode, oh, three or four months ago at Oak Tree and I was privileged to be with her for the whole day. She came out just to shoot with me and we just discussed some of the things that she’s been through.
I asked her about practice and she said, “My dad takes me to places where I have to practice in rain, in cold weather.” She said, “I’ve even had the flu and he made me get up and go shoot when I was sick with the flu. Just so if something like that happens on game day, I’ve already done it. It won’t be something new.” So just use your goals to push yourself. The key to goal realization is choosing challenging destinations that will enable you to enjoy your journey of learning. Now would be a good time for you to revisit your goals. And also something that we talked about in the first Coaching Hour: this would be a good time for you to revisit why you’re doing this. I know we talked about that early on in the Coaching Hour, and if you’re not doing it for yourself, to have fun and for enjoyment, you’re doing it for the wrong reason.
Remember that it’s the journey and the things you discover along the journey that makes achieving a goal so much fun. In our lives, we often get so caught up in things, that we—and I don’t want to sound too philosophical here—but we pretty much lose the meaning of life. If you don’t have anybody to share something with, you ain’t got nothing. And your goals are simply something that pushes you along the pathway and allows you to learn things. They’ll also allow you to learn things about shotgunning and things about yourself.
So this is the time of year when everybody thinks about goals and when everybody talks about goals. Just be willing to forgive yourself if you didn’t achieve your goal last year. And don’t attack it like Tom Kirchmer wanted to. He said, “Dammit, I’m going to go out there and shoot that bird for two hours every day for 10 days in a row until I get it.” Just relax into the curve and let the curve happen. I assure you that you’ll like yourself a lot more.
If you’ve achieved your goals, go back and look at why you achieved them. Look for turning points in your year. What was it that helped you get to your goal? And if you’re going to have the same amount of time, make your goals accordingly. Brian talked about the trinity: focus, feel and trust. I think that’s something that should be a part of every goal that you have. You should increase your ability to focus and to feel and to trust your move. And that’s all I’ve got to say about goals, so let’s move on to the next segment.
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