2004-05 May 2004 Coaching Hour -Defining Mechanical and Mental Problems-

Introduction

The majority of our time for the May 2004 Coaching Hour is spent on overall performance and diagnosing performance issues as mental or mechanical, including four key questions you can ask yourself to determine the exact nature of an issue. We also expound on a recent mental performance tool that shooter Don Yost brought to us: the correction routine. Driscoll, a relatively new shooter to the hour, starts us off with his experience at a recent tournament where he let go of expectation.

Performing Without Pressure

Gil: Driscoll, tell us about your tournament  experience.

Driscoll: Three weeks ago after the last Coaching Hour, there was a local tournament at Backwoods, and my wife and I decided we’d go shoot. There wasn’t any pressure; I was just going to go shoot and have fun. I’d gotten rid of all the expectations. When I got up Sunday morning, the wind was blowing thirty or forty miles an hour, and that definitely got rid of all the expectations.

I just said, “Hey, I’m going to go shoot and enjoy myself, work on my routine and just kind of work on everything we’ve talked about.”

I’ve been doing a lot of mental work. I’ve shot a lot of targets in my mind, and worked a lot on my positive reinforcement, not only while shooting but during work, leaving work, at home. And when I go shoot, I shoot and enjoy myself. So when we got out there it was pretty much like I expected.

It was windy, so I just shot. I never looked at my card. I went with my plan. I got into a station where I think they threw four or five minis and four or five midis. They just threw ten stations, and I think they threw one report pair. Everything else was true pair. We were following people, so I did get a chance to look at some birds and make a plan, and I just went with the plan and didn’t worry about it.

When I got through, I had no idea what my score was. I figured I shot probably in the high 60s to low 70s. I counted it up and I had an 80, which is excellent for me right now. And that won B class for me. I think high overall was a 90 or a 92, and it fell off real quick from there, so it was a really good experience. I really enjoyed it. I tried to use everything that I’d learned, and like I said, I didn’t worry about score, didn’t look at my card, I just shot the targets.

Gil: Not having any expectations really helps doesn’t  it?

Driscoll: Definitely.

Gil: It allows you to have confidence in the plan, and it allows you to focus 100 percent on the targets that are in the air, as opposed to focusing on all 100 of them at one time.

Driscoll: There was no voice; I was able to quiet the voice. It wasn’t talking to me. It was one of those things where I was able to step in the box and execute. Like I said, I’ve shot a lot in my mind, and I’ve got a real positive attitude, and I really feel like I can just go out and really improve.

Gil: When you say you shoot a lot in your mind, what do you picture when you shoot?

Driscoll: I picture a lot of the targets that I’ve shot. Easy targets and hard targets, just breaking those targets. Reshooting  targets.

Gil: It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Driscoll: Yeah, it is.

Gil: Well, that is great. I’m happy for you. That’s something we’ve worked at down on the ranch. We set down at the poker table at the ranch and you said, “Give me a realistic evaluation.”

And I said, “You’ve got it; you just have to make the commitment to train it.” It sounds like you’re well on your way.

Driscoll: Exactly. It’s coming, for me. You were right, it really is all mental.

Gil: Yeah. And developing certain self-talk phrases is important. Little key words that you use: soft hands, lateral move, edges, that kind of stuff. It’s all personal for you. If it wasn’t personal for each person, we could just print a syllabus and everybody could do it and it’d be a lot easier. But since the mental part of this stuff is so personal, it’s unique to each individual. It’s just something that you have to experiment with and be willing to be right and be willing to be wrong to find out what’s right for you. But that is good. It sounds like you’re visualizing a lot too.

Driscoll: Yeah. Lots of visualization.

Mental or Mechanical?

Gil: I’ve been reading a book with a little section called determining the difference in mental and mechanical problems, and the guy had four questions that I thought were unique. I’m going to read the questions, and then I’m going to revisit the questions with a little more detail. When you listen to them again, you might want to write them down because these are really good.

I found in reading this book that some of the things this guy uses, Vicki and I have learned through the college of hard knocks. I think you’ll find them unique and enlightening.

Here are the four questions he had:

Number one: Are you satisfied with the skill level that you have when you’re shooting well?

Number two: Do mistakes tend to occur under pressure?

Number three: Do you find yourself having a lot of negative thoughts or feelings during a shoot?

Number four: Does a breakdown in other areas lead to other problems as well?

Now let me go through each one of these. Skill level. Are you satisfied? Well, it’s awfully hard to be satisfied with any skill level until you’ve really made it up to the high 80s or low 90s consistently. But no amount of mental rehearsal will help if you don’t have good technical and mechanical skills. It’s kind of like when we were talking out there at the ranch, Driscoll. I said, “We can’t work on the mental game until you get your mechanical game to a certain level.” And it’s to a certain level now, but it still needs to improve.

You never really master the mechanical part of this game. It gets better and it evolves, but you must constantly work on it because the tough part of this game is the endless variety of variables. Different targets, different trajectories, different speeds, different backgrounds, weather, winds, that kind of stuff. It’s not like you’re playing basketball on a basketball court that you’ve been practicing on all your life. Everything is different in this game. And you’ve got to be patient enough with yourself when you’re developing your skill so that you let it evolve.

Always, always, always practice basic fundamentals. But the first question was: Are you pleased with your mechanical skill? If you’re not really going to try to be a master class shooter and try and win in master class, if you feel like your time and commitment is only to get you up into B class and you are enjoying that, then you could be pleased with your skill. Even though it isn’t perfection, you could be pleased with it based on your commitment and your expectation. But I think that most people really want to evolve and push their potential    to see what they can be.

The second question: Do mistakes occur randomly or do they increase in pressure situations? A technical problem will manifest itself in a wide variety of targets. It could be gun speed, too much or lack of it. It could be no lateral move. Up instead of lateral. It could be moving prior to focus. It could be increased grip pressure. It could be that your eyes aren’t still. And if they occur randomly, a mechanical correction most of the time is necessary. When you randomly miss targets, most of it is mechanical. But when the problem turns psychological, the mistakes will occur frequently under pressure and they will produce a predictable pattern.

Remember when I was talking about your shooting logs, how you always look for patterns? That is why we keep pounding on you to keep a log. They could happen like the first station jitters. You have a hard time settling down until station four. It could be last station jitters. You have a hard time closing on a good card. It could be misses on the last pair, or it could be misses on a middle pair. It could be missing an easy target. It could be fear of a certain target trajectory or presentation. Those types of things are typically psychological problems.

The third question: When the problem arises, how do you feel?

Simple technical issues are the problem when you feel confident and in control of thoughts, emotions, and feelings. You have a miss contin- gency plan. You miss a target and you’re confident about correcting it and you know what the correction is. That’s a technical problem. But it’s a psychological problem if you feel a sense of panic, if you’re pressured or you feel rushed. Or maybe you’re confused or overloaded by all kinds of different thoughts and you’re not sure what to do.

Question four: Is the problem affecting one or more aspects of your performance? Are several things going wrong at the same time? That’s definitely a psychological problem. I typically don’t like to use the word mental because mental problems typically point to mental insanity. And in some instances, it gets to that.

Stress creates muscle tension and interferes with vision and concentration. When you have several things going wrong at the same time, you’re unable to control your thoughts and your emotions. Stress occurs, and when you give in to stress, everything goes wrong. You lose your breakpoints. You make choppy moves. You lose your feel. You check the lead. You go mechanical and conscious and you listen to everyone but yourself. And even if you listen to yourself, it’s the voice of doubt.

So those four questions were interesting to me because they talk about four specific, different things. The unique one to me, the one we are constantly faced with and that we have to constantly tell people about, is you can’t work on the mechanical game and the mental game at the same time. Sure, you can work on positive affirmation, you can work on not beating yourself up, but you have to have good skill levels before you can really begin to nitpick the mental and mechanical problems in your game. If a problem is mechanical, regardless of the elevation of your performance, it’s always back to basic fundamentals. It doesn’t matter what you’re working on, it’s basic fundamentals that you have to go back to. Any number of times, we’ve had lessons with you guys and you come to us and you have a problem with something. We look at it and it’s just a simple mechanical technique that you’ve overlooked or gotten out of the habit of using: lateral move, relaxing, and each one of you has one or two things that will continue to crop up as your game evolves. We’ve talked about this too. For instance, we’ve had swing-through shooters who come to us and we teach them how to start in front, stay in front, come up in front, whenever stress hits them, what are they going to do? They’re going to increase their gun speed.

People who come to us from skeet or the insane asylum of checking lead, as their move evolves and their game evolves, that one problem is going to revisit them at almost every level. And each one of you is going to have one or two unique things to yourselves that you will see over and over again. That is the benefit of a log. They’re unique to you and you need to become very aware of what they are. And as we’ve told you before, and we’ll tell you again, when you’re having a problem, if you know what that weakness is, it always comes back and gets in your game when you’re under pressure: that is the first place you’ve got to look to solve a problem. We’re talking about mechanical problems now.

You’ve got to train and practice your way through mechanical problems. In order to develop a sound mental game you must be satisfied with your mechanical game. You have to always have soft hands, because you typically feel stress in your hands. You can control stress in your hands. Here’s something you need to remember: When you begin to feel stress in your hands, when you begin to grip that gun with a grip of iron, just be aware that every other muscle in your body is tighter than it normally is. That’s why it’s good to do breathing exercises. By taking several deep diaphragm breaths, exhaling through your mouth loosens all those muscles up in your diaphragm. Then you’ll relax and you’ll get your muscle tension in your body back down to where it’s controllable.

Just remember, if you feel it in your hands, it’s in your body and you don’t know it. And that will affect your balance, and it will also affect your ability to move smoothly, and it will affect your feel. You’ve got to have a really soft initial move. Remember the move the muzzles to the breakpoint, and it’s the softness of the initial move that gives you consistency in the breakpoints. Working on a soft initial move is critical. Always moving the gun from the muzzle back, not the butt out.

You’ve got to constantly work on your gun mount. You  want the gun to finish softly in your face. Not hard. We had a guy this last weekend in California, he mounted the gun like a jackhammer in a lemon meringue pie. And he couldn’t hold focus on the target. It took me a day and a half just to get him to relax and let the gun softly touch his face.

You’ve also got to be aware in your game that you are able to merge at the speed of the target in the breakpoint. Tempo. Your front hand is your tempo hand, and it creates the soft lateral move to the breakpoint. The back hand is the timing hand. It’s connected to the breakpoint. It finishes its job when the target hits the breakpoint and you take the shot. We’ve said before that the back hand is the last stronghold of the voice. When you develop your skill level to the point where you can feel the target in both hands, you are there.

You have to develop feel. It’s got to feel good. And you’re going to feel connected more on some targets than others. But you’ve got to develop feel. It is critical in the mental game. You can’t trust what you can’t feel. When you’re working on mechanical problems, when you’re practicing your mechanics, these are the things you really need to practice and be aware of when you’re practicing. You need to program pictures. Not just lead pictures. You need to program pictures on maybe a chandelle or a bateau, or quartering birds or crossing birds or a teal going up. A teal going up is one where you constantly have to reprogram that picture because if you see the target on the way up, you aren’t going to hit it, you’re going to be under it.

You need to adjust your percentage of practice based on your tournament schedule. The US Open is coming up. If you’re going to be training and practicing, I would suggest you increase your percentage of practice over training and start training on pairs. It’s three weeks away. You’ve got time. Make it easy pairs, five pairs in a row. Training means working on mechanics and practice means working on pairs. You need to work on your plan. You need to work on your transition from the first target to the next target.

Always work on your self-talk, on your personal self-talk phrases and your routine and your miss contingency plan. I never realized the value of having a miss contingency plan for when you have to change something in a shot. It’s something I always did instinctively from the years I’ve been doing it, and it’s something that Vicki does. Hers is not quite as instinctive as mine, and a lot of times, if she misses two pair you can see her just stop. And she’ll replay it in her mind; she’ll close her eyes, she’ll replay it in her mind and she’ll make specific corrections and she’ll go back and break the next pairs. You have to do that mechanically, don’t you Vicki?

Vicki: Yes. I have to go through the whole thing. I’ve got to go back through my routine and make sure that I was seeing it in the right place and that I was trusting the breakpoint. And yeah, it becomes very mechanical. But here’s what I’ve been able to develop over the years: When I close the gun I can stop thinking about all that and just go automatic.

Gil: Something else you might want to think about doing: When you’re practicing your pairs and you’re shooting five in a row, tell yourself each one is the last pair. It’s okay to face the devil. Face the demon. Say, “This is my last pair.” That is going to happen to you in a tournament. Quality practice corrects mechanical problems. You must understand the fact that your mechanics will continue to evolve.

Please don’t forget to practice your gun mount relentlessly. You’ve got to play with that gun every night.

The Correction Routine

Gil: I was talking to Dean earlier today on the phone, and he said he actually wrote his routine down. He wrote his miss contingency plan down and he’s practicing his routine with his gun mount practice. He’s going from an open gun to a closed gun so that he gets that habit ingrained.

In fact I’ll tell you about the lesson I had with him. He called me and said, “I’m convinced I’ve got a mental problem.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked him.

He said, “I’m not correcting after the first miss, it’s the second or third pair before I ever correct it.”

And you have to understand, one of the reasons I think this slipped in his game was because he doesn’t miss much. So he doesn’t have to correct a miss that often. And he brought his cards with him to the lesson and he was just convinced that he had a mental problem, and I looked at the cards and I said, “Well what do you do when you miss?” And I got the deer in the headlights look. So I said, “You know, we’ve  talked  about  this  correction  routine on  the  Coaching Hour.

Surely you’ve been listening to your CDs.”

He said, “Yeah, but I just never gave it any thought.”

And so I worked with him for about an hour on his correction routine. We worked on certain things that he needed to do and he developed a routine. Although he was having trouble correcting from the miss, he remarked to me how basically simple and fundamental a correction routine is. He said it continues to amaze him that regardless of how good he gets, every correction that I ever make on him is always going back to simple fundamentals. Basic fundamentals. It doesn’t matter whether it’s mechanical or mental; it’s still about basic fundamentals. If you don’t have a miss-contingency plan, get one. If you need to call us and work through it, we’ll do so. But it’s something that you do every time you pull the trigger and it doesn’t break. A correction routine. Or a miss contingency plan. You need one.

Remember, we’re developing habits. Like Wayne Gretzky said, “The better your habits are, the better they hold up under pressure. The more the things you do become routine, the less thought that’s required to do them, and the more subconscious you operate.”

So you’ve got to have a pre-shot routine, and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. But it’s also good to have a correction routine so that you approach it the same way every time.

You’ve got to use it enough so that the voice doesn’t get in. The voice is going to get in when you miss. He’s going to try to get in when you’re hitting, but it’s a lot easier to control the voice when you’re inkballing them, and when you’re running the stands. He takes a differ- ent face when you’re doing that. And for most of us, he pops in when the miss occurs.

If you have a good subconscious habit of correcting the miss the same way every time, he’ll have less of a chance to get in. Practice and training is the place you try new things, where you develop new tech- niques and imbed the mechanics that you have so that they become automatic and subconscious. I worked with Lou Malani this last weekend. He was having a little trouble with the blind spot. I fooled him three or  four times on the blind spot and he was a lot more aware of that.

But I asked him, “What do you do when you miss?” And it was that deer in the headlights look again. I said, “You don’t have a plan for what you do? How you rate what you do? And how you figure out what the problem is when you miss?” And he said no. So his correction routine ended up being: rate the focus, rate the feel, rate the commitment to the breakpoint and if all those things are there, then and only then do you change the picture.

That is just one example. Don’s is different. Yours is going to be different, but it’s always going to come back to focus, tempo, feel, trust, gun mount. Those things have to be in your correction routine, and if you’re having trouble with your gun mount, that needs to be in there. If you’re not having trouble with your gun mount, then put something in there ahead of it. It needs to be sweet and simple and practiced. And it’s yours personally. All your practice and all your training must be done with your routine. Your routine must become a habit. You guys are working on your routine.

Driscoll, you said you were working on your routine and it was getting better. But you just, you have to remember that it’s not the guy that doesn’t miss any, because everybody’s going to miss some. It’s the guy that only misses one and runs them out that is going to win. So you’ve got to work on how you’re going to correct a miss when you’re training and practicing. Use your miss-contingency plan. Those are some of the places you might want to go to in your practice and your training when you are looking for a mechanical problem.

If you determine that your problems are mental, here are some of the places that you might want to look. First, I think it’s important that you understand that mental problems are a result of negative emotion in the thought process. We’ve all talked about positive self-talk on this Coaching Hour. I mean, we’ve talked about the mental process until we’re blue in the face and you are all starting to come around. But just remember that it’s your emotions and how you control your emotions and your thoughts that makes something a problem or not mentally.

Negative emotions are all doubt-based. They induce stress, tension, expectation, wanting to do well as a form of expectation. You end up over-trying, shooting a score. Negative emotions obviously induce negative self-talk and make you focus on results, most of all the misses. They leave you in the past or they take you into the future. When I was talking to Dean about this, he said that the thing about this is we create them. We’re doing this to ourselves. The mental game is about understanding how not to create those thoughts. The mental side of our game is about breakpoints. Not just picking them, but committing to them and believing in them. So when you’re practicing you are always committing to the breakpoint, and even if you smoke the last pair but they’re not in the breakpoint, that is not good enough.

In a game that’s as full of failure as this game, how you react and handle the failure determines the level of your success. Your belief in yourself is what will make you achieve your goals. It’s having the feel- ing, knowing the feeling, and trusting the feeling that leads to  success.

Being Decisive With a Plan

Gil: If you correct the same way each time, the corrections become more obvious to you after you have a plan. I was shooting at the Browning/Briley, and there was a target that was coming out, a long incomer coming out over a tree. The first time I tried to shoot it right out of the roll, I missed it. The second time, I tried to come from inside out, like on a dropping teal. I killed the second bird each time. The third time, I tried to shoot it falling. I still killed the second bird but I missed it all three times. And I said, “Okay, this time I’m going to shoot it like a rising teal. I’m going to just softly go through it and just let it hap- pen.” So I went right looked right over the gun, tilted my shoulders over and tilted the gun and it just went splat, splat, and I killed the pair. It was my determination; it was my decisiveness of the change that kept the voice from getting in.

Rather than saying, “Well, I’m going to see if this works,” I said, “This is what I’m going to do.” I had a decisive change that I was going to commit to each time. And even though I missed it on the first three pairs, I broke it on the last one. And I guarantee you, if I ever see another bird like that I’m going to know exactly what works for me. Or I’m going to go set that bird up and figure out why my first plan wasn’t working. If it was a mechanical problem fine, that didn’t matter, I just want to be able to solve that problem in my mind. Right now if I don’t have time to go practice it, I know how I’m going to approach that bird the next time I see it.

A problem is not a problem unless you attach negative emotion to it. Another way to control the voice is through feel. We’ve all talked about that. And you can’t have feel without a consistent move. Therefore, I’ll say this again; you can’t work on mental performance until you’re satisfied with your mechanical skills. That is something I was talking about with Dean today. He’s not complacent, but he’s satisfied that he can break any target out there. So now we’re working on a correction routine and a mental practice routine for him.

When you’re learning, most mental problems are caused by poor mechanics. When you’re in the learning phase of your move, if you beat yourself up, that is a mental problem. And that mental problem is caused by poor mechanics. But when you develop a move, most mechanical problems become mental. If you’ve developed a good move, typically the reason the move doesn’t come out is you don’t have the right mental attitude or the right mental thought process or you don’t believe in the plan.

There’s some doubt in there, and that makes the mechanical move fall apart. You must have a move to play and develop the mental side of performance. I was working with another one of our students named Homer Saye. He’s a live pigeon shooter and he came to me. He said, “I’m shaky, I’m thinking, I’m not focused, I don’t know what to do. I’ve got a mental problem.”

I said, “Okay, meet me out at Westside.” I watched him shoot and he just didn’t have any feel. I said, “Homer, come over here and work with me on the quartering push move.” All his shots are push moves.

And about an hour and a half of working on the push move he said, “You know, my swing had gone to shit.”

“Really?” I said.

He said, “Yeah, I can feel this now.” Just from working on his mechanical technique and smoothing his hands out, that changed his attitude.

He didn’t have a mental problem. I couldn’t work with his mental problem, which is negativity, until I got his mechanical problem fixed. So they’re really hard to separate. They’re the same but different, and you can’t treat one without the other.

I had another lesson with him this morning and he’s been to three pigeon shoots and won two of them and only missed winning in the other one by one bird. And he didn’t have a mental problem. He said that this morning. I didn’t have a mental problem; I had a mechanical problem. Fixing that mechanical problem solved his attitude problem. It’s important to feel a connection to the target. When you feel a connection, the voice is totally tied up in the breakpoint. Strive to feel the connection in both hands.

Remember that the backhand is the last stronghold of the voice. Without feel, the voice is imminent. It improves visualization and can be used on and off the field. You’ve got to learn to visualize and we’ve talked about that on this program. If you’re not doing it, shame on you. You can understand mental performance without a good move, but without feel you cannot play the mental game. Visualization is nothing but rehearsal. Just going over what you do well. It ingrains that habit.

Take ten minutes a day and visualize yourself breaking target. Do it. Schedule it. Find yourself a time at the office. Maybe get to the office 10 to 15 minutes early to just sit there with the lights off and the door locked, just visualizing yourself breaking targets.

Driscoll was saying he’s been visualizing himself breaking targets everywhere, and that is a very strong process, but if you don’t do it every day, it isn’t going to become a habit. And if you don’t do it off the field, the easier it is for you to visualize on the field.

Make your self-talk a habit. Your idle thought process is controlled by your goals. Read them frequently. You should be thinking about and mentally practicing your performance almost every waking minute that you have, if you’re not tied up doing something else. I mean, do it driving down the freeway, waiting for your meal to be delivered at the restaurant. When you’re on the phone you can move your finger over to the deer head on the wall and shoot the eye out. I mean you’ve got to be consumed with breaking targets, and the more consumed you are with it, the more your idle thought process will be consumed with it, the easier it will be for you to visualize, and the easier it will be for you to perform when it comes to game day.

As you can probably begin to see now, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the mental game from the mechanical game. They’re sepa- rate, but they evolve together. And even though they’re separate, they’re tied to each other when you really understand mental perform- ance in sporting clays.

We’ve read hundreds of books. We’ve studied with probably 15 psychologists. We have talked to people from all over the globe about mental performance and the system that we have. In our opinion and in the opinion of several of the people that we have shared it with, is the best system for this game because of the variables in it. But you’ve got to train not only on your mechanics; you’ve got to train your men- tal process. And you train that by using it in practice and by changing your attitude at work. They’ve got to work together, and when they work together, they control doubt. In fact they actually allow you to think  without emotion.

I go back to what I said earlier. Most mental problems are caused by negative emotion entering into your thought process. And, boy, does the voice of doubt take many faces. It will take many different faces on your road to the top. They’re different, but they’re the same because they’re both about focus. One is mental focus, controlling your thoughts, and one is physical focus, focusing on the target. They each have their own pitfalls that are disguised as the other. It’s easy for you to think you have a mental problem when you have a physical problem. And when you have a physical problem, it’s easy for you to self-talk yourself into thinking that you have a mental problem.

There was a guy we had when we were at Elk Creek two weeks ago. The guy was convinced he had an intermittent eye dominance problem. He came to me and I talked to him, and I told him that one of two problems exist. Either you’re holding the muzzle too close to the flight line, or the bird’s getting inside the lead.

And he said, “No that can’t be it. I’ve got an eye problem. Fix my eye problem.”

I could tell at that point in time he wasn’t going to listen to me. He wasn’t interested in what I wanted; he was only interested in me confirming his own personal diagnosis. So we went over to the target he was having trouble with. It was a midi off of a tower. And I made him watch me shoot it and I made him watch the bird come to the gun several times. And I knew when he told me what the problem was, that he was letting the bird get inside the lead.

I showed him that and he wanted to shoot it. I said, “You’re not going to get to try to shoot this until you take the tape off your glasses.” And he wasn’t too sure about that. He was still holding onto his previous self-diagnosis of intermittent cross dominance. I said, “Take the tape off. Now do what I did.”

I made him do it without the bullet a couple times and he was there, and I want you to know he broke 18 straight targets. But he was convinced that he had a physical problem. It wasn’t. It was mental. He was over diagnosing everything and he didn’t know enough about what he was trying to diagnose to come up with a correct diagnosis.

But even though they’re different, they’re the same. Self-talk is the mental game. Training self-talk is like training your gun mount. It must be intellectually understood, but then it must be practiced. It has to become a habit. It must become a habit. It’s not self-deception; it’s self- direction. Practice thinking consistently, on and off the course.

Visualize yourself doing well, and one last thing, you can’t talk about performance, mechanical or mental, without talking about the pre-shot routine. The pre-shot routine is what links your mechanical game to your mental game. It has to be subconscious. You’re all working on your pre-shot routine and I’m proud of you for doing that. And it’s something that is very personal. It’s something that most people put way too many steps in.

Brian, I know that in your coaching you probably see way too many people with no routine or a routine that is fraught with so many extra thoughts that they can’t even hope to get through it consistently. Would you agree with that?

Brian: That’s correct.

Gil: How many steps do you have in your routine? Three, maybe four?

Brian: Three.

Gil: Yeah. That’s a magic number. That is the thing that you always return to when you’re under pressure. That’s what puts you in your bubble.

Brian: That’s your anchor.

Gil: That’s a good way to put it. It’s your anchor. It’s what you go back to. But it can only be your anchor if it has become a habit and you’ve broken targets successfully in practice and in training as a result of it. Would you agree with that?

Brian: Correct.

Gil: And so often when we go to practice, none of us have extra time, so you want to shoot and get done with it. We might load two and do our routine on the first bird but not on the second bird. I would tell you, if you’re training, load one shell. Work on your routine. Work on your mental thought process as much if not more than your mechanics because for you guys on this Coaching Hour, you all know about the mental game. And you can’t expect to be able to play the mental game without a sound, consistent, simple pre-shot routine. It’s just got to be there.

Brian: Gil, what you’re saying is, don’t slop through it.

Gil: Yeah. And last week we talked about looking at the rest of your year. And it’s easy if you’re on a roll. Like Driscoll, you’re on a roll right now. It’s easy for you to slack off and say, “Oh hell I don’t have to practice that routine shit, I just want to shoot this 50-yard crosser and see what the picture is like.”

Don’t do that because you can know the picture, but if you don’t know your routine or you can’t trust your routine or if you’re having to think about doing your routine, then you can have the perfect picture but it isn’t going to happen every time. It’s the routine that builds in the consistency of what you have trained on your mechanical game and it allows your mental game to be right at the top.

Because the routine is designed to let you go into your bubble where there is no extraneous thought process. There’s no extraneous thought. The voice can’t get in once the routine begins because if you begin your routine and the voice gets in, you stop and start all over. When you start your routine, you’re on autopilot. The same thing needs to happen with your post-shot routine or your miss-contingency plan. If you miss a target, open that gun, but don’t go to load it until you’ve visualized in the breakpoint what you actually saw. You’ve made a definite, decisive correction. You believe in that correction. Then and only then do you load the gun and start your next sequence. The time to use the correction routine is after the miss and before you go to load the gun. Don’t even reach in your pocket to get the shells. Visualize what happened. Until you go through your correction routine, you know what you’re going to change, until you believe the change and you’re committed to the change. Doesn’t matter what the change is. Doesn’t matter how obvious it is, you go through your correction routine. Go through each step.

You’ve got to make correcting the miss as much of a habit as your pre-shot routine; practicing your gun mount should be as routine as loading the gun. Make it a habit that is as strong in your mind as making sure the gun is safe and open when you turn around out of that cage. The only way it’s going to be that strong of a habit is if you make it a habit by doing it over and over and over.

Jack: If you have your routine that you are so trusting of and you don’t think about it, do you need to go back every once in a while and train that like you train a move?

Gil: Well, I would tell you this, Jack. If you’ve got a routine that you’re confident in and that you trust, I would think that you would be using it in every one of your training sessions. It would probably evolve, but I think you’ll find it would help if you would actually write down your routine in your log. Write it down. That way, each time you go back and reread your log, you reread your routine. I would put your routine down on your goals page. Your pre-shot routine and your correction routine.

The correction routine was so new to Dean that he went home and wrote it down. And when he wrote that down, he said, “What the hell? I’m going to write my pre-shot routine down.” While practicing his gun mounts, he’s been going over each step in his routine to make sure it’s there and make sure it’s correct. He’s doing it consciously, and he’s got plenty of time to get it down and out of the way before the U.S. Open, but he wanted to go back and reaffirm his pre-shot routine when he was ingraining his post-shot routine. Did I answer your question?

Jack: Yessir.

Gil: Good. I would admonish all of you to write your pre-shot routine down. That would be a great place for you to go at the beginning of the year when you’re doing your gun mount practice, when there is snow on the ground Jack. Just go back and reread your routine, and every time you do your gun mount practice and it’ll be kind of hard to do with a flashlight in the barrel, but if you can train your gun mount with your flashlight in the barrel, then you can take the flashlight out and practice your gun mount working with your routine and re- embedding your routine. Does that make sense?

Jack: Yes. Thanks.

Gil:  Good. Just  remember  that  your  pre-shot  routine links your mechanical game to your mental game. And you can’t expect to perform well mechanically or mentally without a consistent, sound, simple, habitual pre-shot routine. And finally, in summary, your ability to focus mentally and physically is tied to your belief in the plan. Your ability to maintain that focus is tied to your ability to feel. Your ability to feel is tied to the quality of your move. And the quality of your move is tied to the quality of your practice sessions. After all, you are just creating new habits.