2003-12 December 2003 Coaching Hour – Practicing Mental Performance

Doesn’t it make sense that the mental game becomes more important as you improve as a shooter? Then shouldn’t it follow that you should practice the mental game just as much as your mechanics? We think it does, and that’s why it’s the main theme of this session.

Here are a few methods of thought management that we’ve had great success with, as well as specific examples of the voice and ways to create strong mental habits.

The Topic Rundown

 Gil: I’ve got one topic that I want to talk about tonight. I’ve entitled it, the Importance of Practicing Other Things. In order to set this up, I’m going to talk about some things, a few of them that I’ve already talked about, and before I forget it, Merry Christmas to everybody. I hope you had a good Thanksgiving and I hope you’re taking some time off and doing some other things.

I was talking to Brian Brewton earlier this afternoon and he said he won a fishing reel in a silent auction or something and he was going to take up fishing to go out and meditate and get a hold of himself. I wish you well in your fishing, Brian. If you have any trouble with that, come on over here and we’ll go fishing together.

We talk about practice sessions and we talk about training and most everybody equates that with working on feel or working on the move. Last month, we talked about thought management or mental management or whatever you want to call it: managing your thoughts and being aware of your thoughts. I don’t think that we practice that enough. We talk about staying in the present: one shot at a time, and you can intuitively understand that. You can understand the mechanics of that just like you understand the mechanics of the mental game.

I was talking to Virgil Menshew last weekend in Florida. I went over there and worked with him and it was a great time that I spent with him and some other people over there.

He was saying, “You know, I’ve read all the mental books. I’ve read all the stuff you told me to read.”

And I said, “Well Virgil, it’s one thing to intuitively understand the aspects of mental performance. It’s an entirely different thing to understand how to apply those things in a game that has as many variables as this game.”

If I have some time, I’ll share with you some of the things that we did. But staying in the present is a big deal. And we’ve talked about it a lot. It’s an easy thing to understand why you should do it, but in a lot of instances it’s tough to do and we don’t practice enough how to do that.

Practicing Mental Focus

 Gil: Something that I think we’re going to stress more this year is: we’ve got to practice becoming more focused. When you say focus most people equate that with seeing the edges on the target, but focus is really not just focus on the target, it’s the ability to narrow your concentration in order to eliminate any thought or any action that can be unproductive or destructive.

You all know how your minds wander. They wander constantly, and what you need to gain is the ability to focus in a way that suits you so that you’re only focused on the things that you’re doing at that point in time. And we’ve said many times that you’re going to focus on something. You can’t not think, and what you focus on is your choice. You can focus on destructive things like outcome-oriented thoughts or you can focus on good things. Things like: “It’s like me to break these targets,” “I’m better than that,” “I love shooting a shotgun,” these kinds of phrases and we talked about that.

We’ve also talked about how many things need to come together in order for you to have a peak performance. I think I spent 25 minutes on it one night, you know, the weather, the time of day, your nutrition, not having gun problems, not having a wreck on the way. In fact, I’ve got to share something with you guys. I started taking vitamins. I’m taking  some  vitamin  C  and  some  vitamin  E  and  a  vitamin called Centrum. And Jeff Kruger has been after me to do this for years, and I want you all to know, I forgot to take them two days when I was in Florida and I noticed a drastic difference in my energy level at the end of the day. So if you’re not taking vitamins, shame on you.

 Jack: What were they called again?

 Gil: I think it’s called Centrum, that’s the multi-vitamin I was taking and I was taking 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 400 units of vitamin E. And my doctor said that’s what he does and I’m sure there’s some other things that you can take, but I will tell you from personal experience, since I’ve been taking these vitamins I feel much better at the end of a long, hard day. I’m more alert. You know Jack how if you concentrate and work really hard for six hours, for the last two hours you kind of get lethargic and you’re just, you’re 80 percent. And these vitamins have helped. So you might want to do what I did, go to your GP and ask him. But there are a lot of good ones on the market. Nutrition is something that’s really important, especially after you passed that golden age of 40 that I passed a few years ago.

But anyway, back to what we were talking about, there are so many things that have to come together for you to have a good performance, but those are things that are out of your control. You’ve got to begin raising the quality level of your practice by concentrating on the thing you have control of, and that’s your performance. And typically, again, when we say stuff like that, everybody goes to mechanics and form and feel, that kind of stuff. But we’re talking more about when you’re actually practicing with a gun you need to practice your thoughts and your thought management. Because when you get wrapped up in the pressure, it ceases to be fun anymore.

You need to practice developing the power to devote full attention to what you’re doing. It’s not only valuable and necessary for a peak performance, it’s also extremely valuable when you’re learning a skill, like when you’re learning a new move or when you’re practicing a target that’s been giving you trouble. The ability to eliminate the breaking of the target and learn to feel your swing and trying to find out what’s wrong with your swing is a great asset.

I had a lady in a clinic in Florida this week and she was so hell-bent on breaking the target, it was two o’clock in the afternoon before I got her to slow down. She kept telling herself to slow down, slow down, slow down, but she wanted to break the target so bad that she got the gun up and started chasing the target. I kept telling her, “Don’t worry about breaking the target, just slow down and feel the swing and let the target be the motivator for the swing,” but she could not. She didn’t have the power to devote her full attention to how the swing felt. She was more concerned with breaking the target. Developing the power to devote your full attention to what you’re doing is critical, and that has to be practiced.

Because people who are doing their best at anything are just totally engaged with the moment, and their whole thought process is engaged with what they’re doing. I went home earlier today. I had a lesson at three this afternoon, and I left at one thirty to run home and change clothes because the weather had gotten cold. I say cold. It had dropped about 15 degrees and the wind was blowing, so I ran home. I was focused on what I was writing down here and I was focused on changing my clothes and I went out of the house and I forgot to close the garage door and that’s something that’s not like me.

I always leave the lights on in the garage ’cause Vicki gets mad at me, but I just completely forgot to close the garage door and the house is open. So I was just so focused on something else that I forgot what I was doing. It’s that kind of focus that you’ve got to have when you’re in the box. It’s something that you’ve got to practice. I don’t think we practice our thought process nearly as much as the mechanical swing.

When you’re in the present and when you’re in the zone, you do less but you accomplish ten times as much. I’m sure you all understand this, and we have sliced this pie up 15 different ways, but there’s a big difference in intuitive understanding and being able to do it as far as organizing and maintaining the thought process. I don’t think I have ever stressed as much as I’ve stressed tonight the importance of practicing your thought process when you practice.

Getting in Touch with Your Thought Process

 Gil: We’ve talked about how to raise the quality level of your practice. But your routine, your thoughts are yours. You have to get in touch with the kind of thoughts that make you feel good and the kind of thoughts that motivate you to a good performance, and they’re going to be difference for each one of you. You’ve got to practice it enough when you’re practicing, and when you’re not practicing, when you’re visualizing, but you’ve got to practice it enough so that your thought process becomes as much a habit as your pre-shot routine or your basic move and mount.

When I say your thought process, I mean learning to control the thoughts  that  you  have  between  stations  and  in  the station. We intuitively understand that you’ve got to control your doubt, you’ve got to control your thoughts, but the voice of conscious doubt takes many faces. Rarely do we practice the thought process of maintaining the focus that we need and staying in a positive state of mind. It’s a state of mind that you have to have. And you’ve all experienced it, and you call it the zone but there are different levels of that zone. The eastern philosophers call it being centered or being single minded, but it involves you being so absorbed in what you’re doing that you block out everything around you. Now you don’t really block it out. What happens is you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing that everything else becomes blocked out. That’s what it is. You know, like a kid watching cartoons on a TV. A kid will stay there for hours watching cartoons on a TV as long as he’s interested in it. The news comes on, and the trance is broken immediately. It’s not like when I have selective hearing with Vicki.

 Brian: That’s a male thing anyway.

 Gil: (laughs) Well, she swears I have that, and I swear I don’t, but it just happens when you become so enthralled with what you’re doing that you’re just not even aware of the passing of time.

Virgil and I were talking, I had him shooting on a right-to-left crosser down there and he was saying, “Man, I just got so much time.” And I said, “Well, yes you do, but if you’ll just get connected with that target from the beginning to the end, then it won’t seem like an eternity.” Because you’re only aware of the time when you’re not doing anything. I can go out and sit down in a deer stand and as long as there are deer running around and bobcats, coyotes, things that I can look at in my binoculars, time goes by instantaneously. But let that deer feeder go off, or let me get up into a ground blind where I’m expecting deer to come by and nothing happens, and it goes by a minute at a time.

You’re not aware of time unless you’re not doing something. It’s important that when you’re between stations at a tournament that you’re thinking about the right things. And it’s really easy for you to get sidetracked by other people’s emotional thoughts and actions and that just pulls you further out of your zone.

The Body-Mind Connection to Relaxed Concentration

 I wrote these things down this weekend, and I hope they mean something to you. Your mind can only be as quiet as your body. Your mind cannot be more relaxed than your body and your body cannot be more relaxed than your mind because they’re connected. Willy, do you agree with that?

 Willy: I totally agree, I mean if you’re brain is going 90 miles an hour there’s a level of activity going in the brain that just brings up everything in your body to get ready to act, to get ready to do something. When you’re calm and relaxed the impulses going to your muscles are quiet and there’s no extra activity your brain’s just ready to go.

 Gil: And the muscles are more relaxed and ready to go. There’s not as much interference between the body and the brain.

 Willy: Right.

 Gil: I don’t know why I wrote those down. It just occurred to me that when your body is nervous, your mind is racing. And when you’re tense, your mind is full of doubt. And I would think, Willy, that we could probably learn to control our body tension by controlling the amount of thought process that’s going on in our mind.

 Willy: And vice versa. I think sometimes it’s almost easier to just focus on a muscle or your breathing and let that be one of your keys to let your brain turn off.

 Gil: Would it be a fair statement that relaxed concentration can only be achieved when the mind and the body are in an equal state?

 Willy: I’d agree with that.

 Gil: Yeah. They must be in harmony. And each one of you has to figure out how each one of you can get yourself into that state, because it’s going to be different for everybody. We’re all made up differently psychologically and physiologically.

 Jack: Gil? Does this kind of come back to last month or the month before where the guy said that he drank an iced tea and ate a donut and he shot better during the week?

 Gil: Yes. That has something to do with it. I’m not sure about the physiology of that, but I will tell you, Jack, that when you go on the road, it’s more important to do the normal quantities and the normal things at the normal times that you do, as when you’re not on the road. Because your body is accustomed to getting the food intake, the amount and the timing of that food intake, and when you go on the road, if you don’t try to stay as level as you can with that and then you ask your body to perform these superhuman feats, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s just like carrying your pillow with you. We’ve said over and over again that rest is so important when you’re out there. You’ve got to recharge the batteries, and I’d never thought about it, but when Danny said that, it made sense, and I think Brian Brewton said the same thing.

It’s just a matter of letting your body recover and relax and get ready for the next day. It’s important, and I’m going to say this several times. It’s really important that your thought management is practiced. You can practice your swing mechanics all you want. But until you begin to practice the things you think and why you think them, and how you need to use thoughts to dispel negativity, and how you need to use your own thoughts to improve positive thinking, until you begin to practice that, it’s like knowing the lead but not having a good gun mount. Or having a good mount but not having a gun that fits right.

Learn to Focus on Other Things

 Gil: You can’t block distractions out. You can’t block them out, but what you can do is learn what’s right for you as far as focusing on other things, and they will go away. When you let something become a distraction, you let it in. You can’t try to block something out, because the mere fact that you’re trying to block it out means that you’ve let it in, and you’re resisting it. What you’ve got to do is know from previous practice and experience that when a certain thought comes in, that it’s not performance enhancing. Think about what you have done in the past to overcome that thought or overcome that situation. And you only do that through practice.

When we talk about having a higher level of practice, that’s what we’re talking about. Be more aware of what it takes for you to perform mentally as well as just mechanically. Everybody practices mechanics. I would tell you that because everybody practices more mechanics than they do thought management, more often than not, when they get in the hole and get overwhelmed with negative thoughts, they go mechanical. That’s why when Dean was talking to us three months ago, I asked him to define what he meant by going crazy. And to him, going crazy is going mechanical. And we’ve all experienced that.

And I’ll digress here for just a minute, this happened to me last weekend when I was talking to some people in Florida too. There is a reason that you go mechanical. There is a logical reason that you want   to go mechanical when you miss. And that is because you learned mechanics first and then you learned feel. And because the last step of the learning process before learning to feel and going three dimensional, was learning two dimensional mechanics. You had to go through the conscious competence phase of  learning  and  then  you  have to move into the subconscious competence phase. So when the subconscious competence phase doesn’t work for  you  automatically, you want to go back to the conscious mechanical thinking or  mechanical fixes. And that just means that you haven’t  practiced  enough being in the third dimension. You  haven’t  practiced  enough with feel. It’s like Brian said with the trinity. What was the trinity, Brian? Focus, feel and trust?

 Brian: Correct.

 Gil: Yeah. Your practice routine hasn’t spent enough time with focus,  feel and trust, therefore you go mechanical with your correction, which means you lose your feel, which means you lose your trust and lose your focus. You see what I’m saying? It’s not that you’re defective, it’s a very normal thing for you to be mechanical because that’s where you came from in the beginning. Everything that you learn has to be learned through those three phases of learning. Unconscious incompetence, conscious competence, and subconscious competence.

That’s why, when you’re training your mechanics, you’re nitpicking your mechanics, and every practice session ought to have some mechanical training in it. But the better you get, and the closer to a tournament you get, you need to probably practice more focus, feel and trust. Learning to trust, learning how it feels. But when you’re doing that, develop catch phrases that you say to yourself, “It feels so good when I can feel it that well.”

Those little things are the things that you will learn, and they’ll be different for each one of you, and I’ve admonished you in the past to start writing some things down. But you need to find out what’s good for you and you’ll come up with eight or ten things that you can say in different situations, that you’ve used before successfully. Therefore using those phrases improves the probability that when you use them this time you will be successful because you’ve had experience with them. And the more you use those things, the more they become a habit and the easier it is for you to stay in a relaxed state of concentration, which ultimately becomes different levels of zone experiences.

And when you practice, you need to practice eliminating anything that creates doubt. You need to be really aware of the things that are unique to you that create doubt that will eventually make you go mechanical. And they’re unique to everybody out there. This is not a game of perfection. There’s so much built-in failure in this game that sooner or later you’re going to have to face the devil and deal with the things in your game, the things in your thought process game that are a one-way ticket to mechanical thinking and doubt and sub- performances.

It’s just something that you have to practice, and if you don’t practice them, you’re not going to get as far as you can quickly. Because, ultimately once your ground strokes get to a certain level, it gets to be the thought process then. And you can’t intuitively understand the thought process and invoke it, because technical expertise is always preceded by experience. You have to begin using that thought process when you’re practicing.

When you’re practicing by yourself, say it out loud. When you’re practicing with your buddies keep it to yourself. Use the thought process that you’re going to have to use on game day. I guarantee you, when you get in the shoot off arena, those guys ain’t gonna want you to shoot well. They’re not going to want to help you. And I’m not saying that they’ll try to screw you around, but I’m just telling you that it’s just something that you have to practice. And Vicki and I don’t feel like we’ve mentioned it enough, and that’s why I’m saying it so many times tonight.

What the Voice Says

 Gil: You get into the game and your voice says to you: “I see the lead,” or, “Boy, you were really behind that one,” or “We’ve only got two stations to go,” or “These are easy.” There’s so many things that the voice says to you, and each one of you has certain things that the voice says to you more frequently than others. And he likes saying it to you because it gets you out of center. You lose your thought process, you lose your feel, you lose your rhythm and you go mechanical.

I won’t embarrass you guys and ask you what the voice says to you unless any of you have any unique things you want to share with us.

 John: I just can’t repeat ’em.

Gil: What?

 John: I can’t repeat ’em.

 Gil: (laughs) You can’t repeat the things the voice says to you?

 John: No.

 Gil: And we’re talking about the voice and not your wife?

 John: Well sometimes they’re one and the same. I mean, I would, but I know there are ladies present.

 Gil: Well, I will tell you something that Virgil discovered last weekend. We were talking about some of the things that the voice says last weekend and I asked him, “Do you ever say that’s a tough pair or that’s an easy pair?”

And he said, “Sure.”

I said, “Well, that’s the voice.” He said, “What do you    mean?”

I said: “Well, when you say something’s a tough pair, that’s the doubt voice talking. There’s doubt as to whether or not you can hit it. There’s doubt as to which way you should shoot it. That’s doubt. Especially if you think it’s a tough bird, the chances of you going mechanical are better than not. Everything that’s been tough for you, you had to learn mechanically and then you went to feel.

“If you say it’s an easy pair, it’s the same thing. You become overconfident. You lose your laser focus and you take it for granted.” And Virgil was just shocked that that would be the voice.

And he said: “That’s what happens to me, I run the tough birds and I come to an easy station, call “pull,” “boom boom,” and I miss one.” And he doesn’t miss a lot, but he misses one out of eight, seven times. And that’s seven. And that’s what he’s looking for.

There are no easy pairs and there are no tough pairs. They’re all just pairs. You make them easy and you make them tough by the way you react to them. And that’s the kind of thing that I’m talking about. You need to watch your thought process when you view a pair. There are no easy ones. They all get the same amount of respect. It’s all just an opportunity for you to make and execute a plan. It’s an opportunity for you to be consumed with the shot of the moment.

Some other things that the voice might say include: “I wonder what someone else has shot? I wonder what the weather’s going to be this afternoon? I wonder which course is going to be easy or hard? I wonder what they will say about what I shot? I wonder what I’m going to do on the next station? I wonder what the backup is? I wonder who’s going to be on my squad this week? Where was I?” That will start mechanical thinking right there. “Where the hell was I? I wonder if sun’s going to be a problem? Boy, I hope the wind isn’t blowing this afternoon.”

There are a lot of things that the voice will say to you. And when you’re practicing, you need to begin to be aware of all the things that are in your computer that you don’t know are there, that are unique to you. And they are unique to you. I’m not saying that they’re only unique to you, but each one of you will have two or three, maybe not that many, maybe one or two that always come in when you face adversity or doubt.

And the more you learn to deal with those in your practice session, the easier they are to deal with on game day. Here’s one that I learned a couple years ago, big time. It’s a mistake to focus on how many stations are left. It’s irrelevant. In preparing this stuff tonight I was reading a book and there was something in there about a guy who was in a pentathlon, or one of those things where they do a bunch of events. The point they were making was, if you focus on the whole event you’re overwhelmed. But he tied his continuing success to the fact that he was able to focus on each event individually as it came along. This is a big deal, one station at a time.

And again, it’s easy to say. It’s easy to intuitively understand, but it’s the ability to control your thoughts during the game that enables you to stay centered and focused during each shot. We talk about making the plan, shooting the plan. Make the plan, shoot the plan. And you can understand it, but until you begin to devote time to developing your thought process so that it becomes easy for you to face anything on game day with no distractions, you ain’t gonna be there. You just ain’t gonna be there.

When practicing your mental focus, you’ll find that you have different degrees of mental focus on different days. Some in practice, and some at tournaments. That’s a normal process. Now, if you haven’t been practicing your mental thought process, the varying degrees will be great. And they’ll be inconsistent. But the more you practice thought management when you’re actually practicing, I’m not talking about training, I’m talking about practicing, when you’re out there shooting pairs getting ready for a tournament the better off you will be. The more you can be aware of the little thoughts that can creep in and how you deal with them and turn them into positives, the more you practice that, the higher the degree of concentration you will have and the lesser the degree of differences in concentration you will have. Your focus will begin to be higher and the days where you don’t have that peak focus will be so much closer to peak focus than they are right now, simply because you’ve practiced them.

Making Mental Habits

 Gil: You also have to understand that you can’t maintain an intense level of concentration for an extended period of time. Physiologically you can’t do it. It’s just not going to happen, but that’s okay. By including your thought process in your practice routine, you will begin to develop a rhythm with your thoughts, just like you have a rhythm with the targets. When you have a thought that comes in that’s a negative thought, when you’ve dealt with it hundreds of times in practice, then your thought process to deal with it will become a habit. You won’t have to think to yourself, “Oh shit, I’m getting down on myself.” It’ll be an automatic reaction mentally to a mental interruption. We preach and we preach and we preach. Like I said a while ago, we preach mechanics. But I feel like, based on what I’m reading now and what I’m understanding now, that each one of you needs to program your own personal phrases and personal thoughts, and be aware of the thoughts that take you out of the present. It’s a very important thing to do.

We’ve always stressed focus on the front edge and commitment to the breakpoint. We are focusing on that more and more. We’re finding that focus on the breakpoint and focus on the front edge is the best way to make that voice go absolutely mute. And they’re very important to our game, especially, because they give you something to concentrate on. And they’re good things. They’re performance- enhancing things.

You can be consumed with this thought, “Where’s the front? The front’s right at 2:30 on that bird, and the breakpoint is right there.” Those are the things you need to be consumed with when things are going good. But when things aren’t going good and you’re having a rough day, you need to catalog the thoughts that come into your mind because you’re going to see them again. You’re going to hear them again. And the more you catalog those, when you’re not performing or training you can come up with the things that make you feel good about controlling those and you can try to control those when you’re out there practicing. You have to have done it in practice in order for you to do it on game day. That’s really important. You’re never gonna play better than you practice. It’s just practicing the mental thought process that I think you all need to work on.

When you combine training and practicing mechanically and mentally with your routine, you can consistently develop the environment to perform well. And although you’re producing the environment to perform well, all your performances are not going to be stellar, as Jeff Kruger would say. Because this game has so much built-in failure. It’s okay. But I will tell you that your performances will begin to take on a higher level. Your scores will go up and your score differential will go down. We’ve seen it. You’ve experienced it. Learning to focus your mind requires just as much effort and practice as learning to shoot. It’s a lot like pre-shot routine and we’ve worked on pre-shot routine with lots of you and that routine has got to become a habit.

I was working with Virgil this weekend on it, and he was going awfully fast. I got him to slow down, and I got a rhythm in his routine, and he began to realize how important it was to have that routine, to have a rhythm. So he could feel it. And you have to practice all facets of it. I’m sorry I keep harping on it, but I cannot tell you how much Vicki and I both believe in the fact that you need to begin to practice your thought management during your practice sessions.

Controlling Thoughts for Three to Five Seconds

 Learning to focus your mind requires just as much time as learning to shoot. Your mind will always wander regardless of how mentally strong you are and how much you’ve practiced. It’s gonna wander. And you can’t stop it from wandering. But what you can do is develop those phrases we were talking about to get it back on track. You gotta learn to focus on the station and turn the focus off between the stations. You can’t control it all the time, but you can certainly control it three to five seconds at a time. I remember in listening to the CDs that quite a few people have stressed to us the fact that they have tied their great performances this year, or their better performances this year, to the fact that they had a higher level of quality in their practice. And I’ve outlined some things that I think you ought to be aware of. At least I think you ought to think about them from a standpoint of mental practice.

It’s important that you understand the practice routine is something that you should start thinking about now, because you’re reflecting on your year. You’ve probably already gone back through your log and I challenge you to go back through your logs and see how much time you spent on mental preparation as far as finding phrases to help you. You’ve got to have specific training goals, specific goals. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working on a crosser, a quartering bird, or a dropper. It doesn’t matter what it is: be sure that you have a specific reason that you’re training on that move. And train on it until it’s there.

We were talking to Dean a few months ago, and when he had a bird that gave him a problem, he was totally consumed. His next training session would be about solving that problem. He would shoot it until he felt like the problem was solved. I’m sure you’re all doing that, but I wanted to reiterate it. And the other unique thing that Dean said that I want to mention right now is: he never had the whole game mastered. There’s always going to be a part of this game that’s gonna jump up and bite you. I guess that’s probably one of the fascinations of the game. Unlike skeet or trap, there’s just always something out there that shows that you’re deficient in a certain area of this game. And the variables are so great that it just requires a large amount of intense practice and intense thought to bring it all together on game day.

When you’re doing your practice, practice is nothing more than rehearsal for game day. I think we’ve said that on this Hour before.

An Example of Rehearsal

 Gil: I had to give a speech last Friday and somebody called and wanted to talk to me and Vicki said, “No, he’s back there practicing a speech.” And they said, “You mean he has to practice a speech?” And, yes, I had to rehearse a speech because I had a given amount of time to produce four topics.

The people wanted me to make sure I brought up certain specific topics. And because there was a given amount of time, I rehearsed. And I rehearsed and rehearsed for two days and I want you to know something, I had my note cards but I didn’t need them and it came my time to go on and the other guy wasn’t through. I had a 30-minute slot. They wanted me to talk for 22 and then have eight minutes for question and answer. Well when I finally got to the podium I had 20 minutes left, and I want you to know that it was just like walking into the zone.

I got up there and I just started talking, I referred to my notes three times just to make sure that I’d covered all my notes, and the time flew by like it was nothing. And I got to the end and I looked at my watch and I had one minute left. And the same people I spoke to, came out to the shooting center that afternoon and experienced shooting and they all came up to Vicki and said it was the best presentation at the conference. And I firmly believe that it’s because I rehearsed it so much. If I’d had a cavalier attitude about it and said, “Well, I can get that done in 22 minutes, that’s no problem.” Then having to produce the same material in less than 20 minutes, I got to tell you that I feel like the voices would have been screaming. And because of the rehearsal, I was able to flow right into the program and do it. And that’s how important I feel like rehearsing all aspects of your shooting performance is, in order to have a higher level of consistency in your performance.

Facing the Last Pair

 When you’re practicing, you’re practicing pairs. Set up a specific number of pairs to shoot at each station. If you’re going to shoot the course and you want to shoot eight pairs a station, shoot eight pairs a station, but go through it just like you would in a tournament. I mean, if you have trouble on a bird don’t stop and shoot it some more ’cause you can’t do that in a tournament. Go on through and actually shoot it just like it was a competition. If you’re shooting with other people that’s even better because now you’ve got plenty of distractions to begin to work on your mental thought process. And you don’t have to look at practice as something that you have to do in solitude. Because shooting a round with the guys and being able to turn it off and turn it on and practice doing that can be a great asset for you. But you’ve got to have specific goals, and you’ve got to be aware of how you can use your thought processes to develop better thought management and better mental management. Get to the last pair. Say: “It’s the last pair.” Don’t be afraid of it. I think Brian, you were telling us awhile ago that you got to the point in your practice routine where you were saying last pair every time.

 Brian: That’s correct. Still do.

 Gil: Still do. And you also said you didn’t miss a last pair at Nationals.

 Brian: That’s correct.

Gil: That’s the power of rehearsal. You can’t keep running away from score. Like I told Virgil last weekend, I said: “Dude, you cannot be on the last station and be down four and not know you’re down four. You’re gonna know. Now you might not know that you’re down 24, but if you’re on a good card and you’re coming up to the last station, you’re going to know what your score is. You’re going to have to eventually deal with that.”

And the best place to deal with it is on the practice field. Take notes when you’re out there practicing. Take notes about what the voice says to you. I promise you are going to have unique things that your voice tells you based on the parts of your game that you don’t have the greatest amount of confidence in. And take notes on those, when you’re not on the station obviously. With it turned off you can write those mistakes down and begin to address those when you’re not at the range as to how you’re going to deal with focusing on something else in order to eliminate it. You can’t charge at it and eliminate it and try to not think it. You’ve got to replace it with another thought so that it goes away. And those replacement thoughts are critical. Critical.

 Brian: Like they say, the only way to change a bad habit is to replace it with a good  habit?

 Gil: That’s basically what I’m talking about, Brian. Does this make sense to any of you guys out there? Are you all practicing thought management as much as you are mechanics? Jack, are you doing that?

 Jack: Well, I have been because I haven’t been shooting for quite a while so it’s been all mental. And I think it’s actually helped me. I feel that when I pick up the gun and step on the course and call pull, I’m going to be in a better position than the last time I called pull. After missing quite a few pheasants in South Dakota I started trying to call pull as they flushed. (laughter) It didn’t work.

I really think that the layoff I’ve had since the beginning of September is going to help me. It’s been more mental, I’ve thought about it more, I’ve got a lot more ideas of what I did wrong and what I did right. And I feel positive when I pick up the gun and start shooting again on the first of the year that it’s going to be good.

 Gil: Okay, I want you and everybody else out there … I’m going to reiterate this one more time. Go through your thought process and begin to develop certain phrases that you use that give you confidence. When you get to practice and you’re practicing your mental management, be sure that you take notes on certain things the voice says to you. They’re going to be unique to you. You can’t imagine how unique they’re going to be. They’re going to be as unique to you as the weaknesses are in your game. Begin to develop little catch phrases, little phrases that you use to replace those thoughts with another thought. Like Brian said, it’s got to become a habit. The more you do it in practice, the easier it’s gonna be to do on game day. Martin, have you been practicing at all?

 John Martin: “No, I’ve been playing.”

 Gil: You’ve been playing?

 John: Yeah. “I haven’t been practicing like we’ve been talking about practicing.

 Gil: Does it make sense to you?

 John: Oh absolutely. We talked a lot about visualization and it really related more to the visualization of our mechanics but I can’t imagine why visualization of doing your routine and developing these habits wouldn’t work just as well.

 Gil: Oh yeah, and that’s what I’m talking about. In the off-season, the visualization process will do that, and I think that’s what Jack was talking about. He’s been mentally visualizing what he needs to do and he’s been thinking about it, and just to visualize yourself being in control is a tremendous thing. The thoughts that you need to perform well, you can’t have to think about them when you’re competing. You understand what I mean?

 John: Absolutely.

 Gil: You can’t think about lead. It’s gotta happen.

 John: A while back, you were talking about how the better shooters are always complaining that the targets are too easy, and we just finished a shoot in Reno, the U.S. Winter Championships, and it’s always a fairly soft course. I can see why because you can take a D and C class shooter, and like you say, they’re all excited. There’s no mechanics in their game. There’s no nothing, and they’re just out there having a ball and they end up shooting scores that are as good as some of the top shooters because those guys are over-thinking the game. So I can see why some of the better shooters get frustrated and say the targets are too easy, because when they get harder, then the mechanics make the difference in a lot of cases in being able to break a target or not break a target. But when they’re fairly easy, you know, you can be as sloppy as anything and just smack the hell out of them. I just sort of get a kick out of it. And again, it’s all the mental. That’s all mental. That has nothing to do with anything else but the mental aspect.

 Gil: My comment precisely. It’s the easy ones you gotta have, and yes, as a competitor I can understand what they say. I can understand their side of the coin. But to me as a coach, that tells me that they need to quit relying on their technique and focus more on their mental game.

 John: Exactly. No, I think it’s up to whoever’s putting on a tournament to decide what kind of targets they are, and if you’re a really good shooter, if you’re a master class or AA or A or whatever, you should be able to deal with how hard they are or how easy they are. It’s all mental. You’ve got the mechanics probably, it’s just, like you say, I don’t think you get focused as hard. And like you say, Virgil, you miss one here and you miss one there and pretty soon it doesn’t look like much. But at the end of the day, if you’re shooting 14 stations and if you’ve missed one target on half of them, you’re down seven birds.

 Gil: Yeah. And on a course like that, you can’t be. Which goes back to how you’ve got to give every target the respect it   deserves.

An Example of Shooting Without Pressure

 John: I think it was kind of funny. You know Zack,  right?

 Gil: Yeah.

John: Well I haven’t seen him shoot a tournament for two years. I mean I haven’t seen him anywhere, and he showed up there out of the blue and he says, “Oh, I haven’t been shooting, I just decided I’d come to this thing.” And he shot a 99 on the first day, I think it was. And it was just incredible to me, but I can see how he could do it. He was a hell of a shot when he was a junior and just because he hasn’t shot in a while, on targets that are fairly soft like that, I can see exactly.