2007-02 – February 2007 Coaching Hour – Redefining Competition

…….February – Redefining Competition…….

 – Starting Off with Successes

 – Thoughts About Fred Shoemaker’s “Default Goal”

 – Why Competition Pressure Happens

 – Bob Palmer on Outcomes for Competition

 – A List of “Suboutcomes”

 – How You Teach Something Is How the Student Will Practice It

He made the change that I suggested in his routine, and he was determined. His goal was to focus before he moved after his routine and be early in the breakpoint and let it go and stay congruent and focusing on those goals, those outcomes, I guess you’d call those.

Bob, right?

 Bob P: Yes.

 Gil: And focusing on those he was able to remain congruent and win runner-up in the tournament, and he was very pleased, and it was a great way for him to start the year.

He just kept saying: Everybody asked me how hard the course was, and a lot of people said the course was hard.

He said: But, Gil, it was easy.

And I said: Well, you were in the zone. What did it feel like?

And he said: I’ve written down in my log what it felt like, what a zone feels like.

And he’s determined to get that down this year, something else that we worked on last year with Bob and charting his zone DNA, what it feels like to him. He’s working on that, and I was just real happy for him.

Brian, you sent me an email today. And you said that you made Team U.S.A. Super Vet, in FITASC, and will be going to compete in Prague in July; and you also made Second Team All American and did it by shooting nine tournaments and in 22 events, and you placed in the top three in 12 of the 22 events. Anything that was a big ah-ha for you this year as you were going along on your journey to achieve your goals?

 Brian: Well, yes. The first one is making the decision that I was going to just strictly shoot FITASC.

 Gil: Okay.

 Brian: I always felt like I was somewhat competitive there. The other decision is that I began last year, in my practice, I did a lot of my “walk with grace and power,” exercise (learned from Bob Palmer). So I was able to handle a lot of things I haven’t been able to handle in the past. I felt like I was in control. That may be the wrong word. But I was much more at ease with it, and I didn’t necessarily just fall apart the minute a challenge came up, although sometimes I did. There were some presentations that I just realized: these are just targets and I’ve shot stuff like this before.

I just would start building that confidence again to go on. Some days I might have a bad Parcour, but I just didn’t blow up. I didn’t quit and I just persevered and realized that the fat lady hadn’t sung.

I never looked at the scores. I was determined not to do that, so when I got through and went in there, hell, I was there. So the one thing that I say is just don’t quit before the tournament is over.

And, like I said, I was more relaxed; but I was pretty damn determined, too. A lot of the things that we discussed during our coaching hours, you know, I was able to put them into practice. So that’s basically the results of it.

 Gil: So your determination to stick with it and not give up was a big thing for you this past year?

 Brian: Right. And the other thing, too, is I’ve learned to get around   a lot. It’s not so bad with FITASC shooters as it is with sporting clay shooters. You don’t hear too many “ying yangs” who are crying about hard targets and stuff like that because everybody is expecting some tough, very challenging targets. And so they’re pretty well up for that. You don’t have much negativity involved, but occasionally you’ll run into one or two of them, and you either learn how to shut him down or shut him out. And that was a big thing, too. I’ve been able to walk away from that kind of stuff and let them wallow in their own sandpit. (Laughter)

Thoughts About Fred Shoemaker’s “Default Goal”

 Gil: Well, that brings up the first topic that I want to talk about tonight; and, again, these are not my thoughts. These are my interpretations of some of the things that I gleaned when I reread Fred Shoemaker’s book, Extraordinary Golf, The Art of the Possible. If you haven’t ever read it, I think it’s in our most recent book that we listed in the introduction three books that have been pivotal in our teaching career. The first one was Golf Is Not A Game of Perfect by Bob Rotella. The second one was Extraordinary Golf, The Art of the Possible by Fred Shoemaker, and the third was The Inner Game of Golf, revised edition, by Tim Gallwey.

I’m rereading Fred Shoemaker’s book, and it got to a place in there where he talks about competing and how to look at competitions. And four things kind of caught my eye. The first one is sticking to your goal. Brian, you were talking about the whining about the targets and the blaming of subpar performances on something else. It comes from that old adage: If you’ve always got an excuse, you can never be in a slump. (Laughter)

And that is prevalent in our game, but Fred Shoemaker describes it in a little bit different way. Last month we talked about if your goal is learning and enjoyment, performance will be enhanced, and I do believe that. We had gotten that from Tim Gallwey, and I’ll talk about that more in just a minute. But Shoemaker talks about sticking to your goal, and he brings up the point that a lot of people, most people, except people that are evolved and who understand some of the things that we do about competition and the mental game, have what he calls a default goal.

The default goal is to not look back, and he goes to great lengths in talking about how he discovered this. Vicki and I have done this and we’ve seen this, but I don’t think we ever associated it with a default goal. And that is we would take a group of students out to our practice field, and we’d ask them: Do you like challenging targets? Do you like easy targets? Do you like long ones? High ones? Low ones? Fast ones? Slow ones? Curling? What do you   like?

And almost instantaneously everyone says: Oh, I like challenging targets, and the reply is really quick and it’s really confident.

And Shoemaker brings out the point that when people say “I like challenging targets” that it gives the implication that if the target is challenging that there’s an opportunity to learn something. Okay?  And I think that is the beginning point of that. But at that point in time I’ll throw some people some targets and have them shoot them, and the one that was the most boisterous or the most excited about having challenging targets and liking challenging targets I’ll have that person come up to shoot. And when he sees the target, he becomes a little hesitant, and you can see it in their body language. We see the wheels spinning in their heads and his internal voice is saying: I said challenging but not this challenging. Okay? (Laughter)

And now follow this, because it’s humorous; but there’s a big lesson here. Looking at this target, it makes them want to say: Well, this is a testy target or this is definitely not an easy target. Now, they’re already starting to shift to their default goal. When they’re in a group, they might say, looking back at the group looking for sympathy: This shot makes the ones you-guys just shot look easy.

All of that negative emotion and all of that fear is brought on by the fact that they instantly went to their default goal which is  trying not to look bad. We’re not keeping score. They’re there to learn things, but they instantly go from learning and enjoyment to trying not to look bad. They go there because they’re afraid they’re going to miss. They become more focused on performance and results, which they can’t control, than on learning and enjoyment, which is something that they can control.

Remember we talked to Tony last month about his goal for last year was learning and enjoyment and what a great thing that was for him to be able to not only learn more about his ability to shoot but learn about himself. And his enjoying learning enabled him to perform well at many events. You could say this another way when people talk about asking for a challenge. When they’re actually faced with one, they forget their original goal and they revert back to that old standby goal of looking  good.

Now listen to this. That default goal is almost always rooted in the desire for others’ approval, something that you cannot control. You can’t control what other people think. So you’re really not setting yourself up for a success when you go back to that default goal of trying not to miss. We’ve all done it. I’ve done it.

Winning the score game is often regarded as the ultimate way to look good. Is it worth all of that focus? Winning will not get you a significant amount of money. The praise and status you get from winning will be nice for a while, but it won’t last long, probably not past the next tournament. Winning the score game has very little lasting value. What does have lasting value are the qualities you can develop and the type of person you can become through competition. Sticking to your goals allows you to have control over the enjoyment and learning process which, in turn, yields high levels of performance. Be aware of the default goal, trying to look good. Remember, it’s always rooted in the desire for others’ approval, and that’s something you have no control over. When we shoot sporting clays, we all do this for a reason. We do it because it’s a challenge. It doesn’t matter what you do it for, but when you do it you, regardless of why you do it, you

hope to get some benefit out of it.

Why Competition Pressure Happens

 Gil: The secret to competing successfully is this: People who compete well and don’t get in their own way understand that the benefits of competition happen only during the event. These people play very close to their potential and rarely tighten up. People who think that the benefits of an event happen only when it’s over will often tighten up.

Now, listen to this. If you feel that the joy and satisfaction of a competition can happen only when the game is over in the form of the praise and status that you get when you win, you will always feel a tremendous amount of pressure and have a hard time playing up to your potential.

I want to read that again. If you feel that the joy and satisfaction of a competition can only happen when the game is over in the form of praise and the status that you get when you win, you will always feel a tremendous amount of pressure and have a hard time playing up to your potential.

We’ve talked about this on the Coaching Hour. As much as you try, you can’t control whether or not you win or lose. And when you make  the success or failure of the situation dependent upon something you can’t control, you’ve put yourself in a very vulnerable and pressure-filled situation. Your success, your status, your self-esteem are dependent not only how well you shoot, but on the avalanche of things that could happen to you that are not in your control.

And we’ve talked about that, too. In order for you to have a peak performance not only do you have to control what you can control, which is what you’re doing by staying congruent, making your plan, committing to your plan, using your routine to get deeper and deeper into your zone, but a lot of other things that are out of your control have to fall into place for you to win. Your competition experience consists of three things: Performance, learning, and enjoyment.

I’m going to take a page from Tim Gallwey’s book here, The Inner Game of Golf. He talks about the performance triangle. Visualize   an equal lateral triangle in front of you. Performance is at the top. On the bottom left foot is Learning, and on the bottom right foot       is Enjoyment. Whenever learning and enjoyment are the goal, your performance increases. Whenever you start concentrating more on performance or score, learning ceases to become the goal and you stop enjoying it. Whenever you concentrate just on learning and not enjoying, performance suffers. Whenever you concentrate just on enjoying and not learning, performance suffers; but when your goal is learning and enjoyment, performance always accelerates.

During a competition most people focus on the result of their performance and ignore the enjoyment and learning aspects of the competition. When their performance begins  to  diminish,  and  it  will eventually, especially in our game, they intensify their focus on performance or their score, which increases the imbalance and makes conditions even worse.

Learning and enjoyment come about during the event itself. They are not dependent upon what happens after, and they are much   more under your control than performance or winning. The secret to competing successfully is being aware that the games of learning and enjoyment are under your control, and winning them will give you the best chance of winning the scoring game because it will ensure you of your best performances.

I thought that was a unique way to put that. The true value of competition lies in the growth that it inspires in the competitor. The scoring game is not the end but the means by which the end can be achieved. The real contest is not you versus another; but you versus you, or, in another way in our game, you versus the course.

Ultimately, I think we’re all beginning to realize that with the system we’re using, you can take the course out of play if you do your homework, and the ultimate contest really is you versus you.

It could be your old self becoming a new person by changing your attitude about competition and the struggle that this type of change brings. Your opponents are instrumental in inciting this growth. This is very unique, I thought. The better your opponents are the closer the competition.

The more the competition benefits you is when you have great competitors. I think it was the second or third year we did the Coaching Hour, we were talking about competition. And I had read an article on the beginning of the Olympics and how they began, and it was the fact that different countries would meet together in one place and bring their greatest warriors and greatest athletes; and the athletes, rather than competing with each other, were there to seek excellence together and compete together, and that’s the way they looked at it.

The word “compete” comes from a Greek word meaning seeking excellence in competition, or seeking excellence together. And when you make this mental shift in the paradigm of competition, you begin regarding your opponent as your ally rather than your adversary.

Competition is not a test. It’s an opportunity for you to learn about yourself and observe others. And so often we have seen in our students the fact that they want to go compete because they think they enjoy it, and I guess they really do; but there’s a fear of going to a competition of not knowing what might happen, and it’s that fear that gets in their way. And I think in the last two or three years we’ve learned that being congruent and knowing your zone takes a lot of that fear away.

When you’re in that zone and when you’re determined, like you said, Brian, I was determined not to give up. I was determined to stay there and do the best I could until the last shot was fired.

When you’re in a competition, you begin to look at your competitors as your allies as people that will force you to take your game to a higher level. You actually find yourself wanting your opponents to do well because it makes the competition more spirited and as close as possible. And if you can adopt this point of view it completely changes the competitive landscape. It turns what is typically a stressful situation with potentially humiliating consequences for most people into a desirable situation with potentially great benefits. It almost allows you to let your competitors push you, just like I said, to higher and higher levels of performance, understanding that your ultimate goal needs to be learning and enjoying the process of learning. I keep going back to that because it’s an amazing thing.

Regardless of why you compete, it comes back to this over and over again — that when people make score goals, when their last thought going to a tournament is “I’m going to win,” I think you’re going to find, in just a minute when Bob talks, that this is a goal that might be an overall goal. It might be something you want to think about, but you can’t control winning. Your specific goal needs to be enjoying the process and learning what you can, not only about your shooting game but about who you are.

If you could consider looking at a competition as a way to become a person of great character who always has something positive to say. Or if you can look at a competition as a way to become a person of integrity, calling it like it is and saying it like it is, or if you can look at a competition as a way to become a person who enjoys learning not only about shooting but about yourself as a person, you could certainly change the way you look at a competition.

You might want to ask yourself: What kind of person can I become through entering this competition? Instead of: it’s important that I win. You might want to ask yourself who you are, not what you want, and why are you doing this. If you run your life only by what you want, you will always feel a lot of pressure and anxiety. If, however, you run your life by who you are, a person of character that can accept what life gives them, I know you will find great enjoyment in learning in each and every competition that you enter.

It’s possible that you could begin to look forward to each competition because it gives you a great opportunity to learn not only about your shooting ability but about you as a person. And I have to tell you one of the reasons that this last little segment spoke to me is because every day that we teach we’re competing with the student’s expectation of themselves and of us, and this is really the way we look at our job. We look at it as a competition. Not really as a competition, but it’s a challenge. And in the beginning and Vicki will back this up.

In the beginning I personally looked too much at the performance side of the situation which made me fearful and hesitant and ultimately confused and angry. I was more focused on whether or not I was going  to be able to get the student to hit the target. And, to me, when I was teaching, getting the student to hit the target was the main goal. That was how I defined whether or not I was successful. But now I look at it in a completely different way. It’s the learning and enjoyment part of it. I look at each day eagerly awaiting how much fun I’m going to have and what I’m going to learn that day, and it has completely changed my outlook.

I think I’ve probably told you this story about going to the airport and asking Vicki years ago: Well, have you checked out all of the students’ ability levels, and do we have students that are compatible with each other? And all of that was brought about by my own insecurity and my own fear of not being able to be successful, and it led to some, shall I say, lively discussions between me and my wife on the way to the airport. And one particular day I really got pissed because she didn’t know all of the answers to the questions I was asking, and she just pulled the car over, much like the day she left me on the sporting clays course after I had eaten a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts.

And she stopped the car and said: Now, listen. You’re probably the best instructor in the world, and as a team we can’t be beat. There’s nobody out there that you can’t fix. So why are you worried about  all of the junk? And she said: You just need to go out there and trust yourself and have fun. And reluctantly I agreed to that and that really began my journey of learning and enjoyment, and it took away all fears that I had of getting up in front of anybody and being able to help them become a better shooter mechanically or mentally.

And the same thing can happen when you look at competitions. The same thing can happen when you’re practicing or training. If your ultimate goal is the learning process and enjoying the learning process, you will increase your performance. So I just wanted to bring those things out. I thought that they were some different ways of looking at competition. If you haven’t read Extraordinary Golf by Fred Shoemaker, I recommend its reading.

Bob Palmer on Outcomes for  Competition

 Gil: Last month, prior to the show, I was talking to Bob Palmer a little bit about some of the things that I just talked to you about and he said: That was interesting. I just wrote an article for trap and field about some of the very same things you’re talking about.

And I said: Oh, shit. This is getting like Stevie Ray Brown and Gil again. We’re in different countries now. We’re still coming up on the same cul-de-sac.

So I’ve asked Bob, if he wouldn’t mind, to share some of the things that he talked about in his article about outcomes, and let’s listen while he kind of takes us down the road of making outcomes for competitions.

 Bob P: Okay. Thanks, Gil. This whole article came about as a result of a young skeet shooter I’m working with. I’d worked with him for a couple of months; and he was doing fantastic things in his training and making leaps and bounds. And he was heading off to a tournament, and the last thing he said to me was: Oh, now with all of this stuff I’m going off to win. (Laughter)

And I almost stopped him but I didn’t know what to say. We had no time left. He was heading out the next day. So I thought: Well, it might be a good education for him.

Sure enough, next time we got together he was a little bit discouraged, and it hadn’t gone the way he wanted it to go. So he had a couple of questions and I found out that his main reason for wanting to do well at competition was to honor his parents. They had put a lot of money into his training, and really cared for him and were there for him and drove him there and the whole nine yards.

Whenever he started to miss targets, there was a lot of weight  on his shoulders. It was just incredible. He didn’t even realize he was putting it on his shoulders, and his parents certainly didn’t do it. They just wanted him to have fun. So that sparked this article because when you have outcomes to win, some strange things can happen. Our unconscious is so powerful that it can bring about that default that Gil was speaking about in terms of wanting to look good; and that’s very powerful and that sinks a lot of people. It sinks a lot of my first-time karate students.

 Gil: Yeah, very powerful in a negative way.

 Bob P: Absolutely. But other things can happen. I mean, there will be golfers whose sole outcome is to win, and they’ll get caught cheating.

And they’re not cheaters, and they can’t believe that they actually did that. It’s possible that they weren’t even conscious of it, because their outcome was so powerful that their unconscious cheated for them.

I’m in the sport of karate, and in our organization, instructors make up the judges, as well. So quite often instructors will be judging their own students as a group and they will miss scores, and it looks so blatant, so obvious; but if you were to accuse these instructors of cheating, they would be appalled.

 Gil: You know, the thought strikes me, and I know everybody on the line has seen this. You’ll see normal, successful, wonderful business people that go out and they go into a competition and they turn into the Jekyll and Hyde thing.

And I’m convinced, Bob, that the default goal of trying to win makes those people subconsciously do things that they otherwise normally wouldn’t do.

 Bob P: Oh, yeah.

 Gil: That’s exactly what you’re talking about.

 Bob P: Absolutely.

A List of “Suboutcomes”

 Bob P: That just shows the power that our unconscious mind has, and that’s why we want to harness it, and that’s why we want to flush out our outcomes. We want to round them out a little bit, add some creativity to them and some enjoyment to them. Sure you want to have that outcome to eventually win the big prize; it would be nice, but you’re more likely to get that big prize if you set some suboutcomes, as I refer to them in this particular article.

So here they are in terms of what I believe are some really good suboutcomes that will help you ultimately win:

1.   The first one would be to establish and learn to feel your zone signals and get really, really good at that and that alone. When I work with business people, if I just stop right there and teach them to be able to monitor when they’re in the zone and when they’re not, they can’t believe the success they’ve had during a given week. As a competitor, just learning that signal will give you clues to the kinds of things that will pull you out of the zone. And as soon as you can start to identify those things, you can fix them.

 Gil: Define for me the difference in being in the zone and being con- gruent. Is there?

Bob P: I treat them interchangeably.

 Gil: Okay. I just wanted to clarify that because, to me, when I’m congruent I’m there in the zone.

 Bob P: Exactly.

 Gil: I mean, I had a talk with several students in Lafayette last week, last weekend on Sunday morning, and didn’t know what I was going to say; but I knew what the outcome needed to be. I knew where I wanted to go with the 30-minute talk that I was having with them prior to shooting that day, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there. And I just anchored and I was congruent, and in probably five to eight words I was in my zone and it just flowed and it didn’t take 30 minutes.

 Bob P: Exactly.

 Gil: But I was focused on that outcome.

 Bob P: Yes. And the outcome more than likely was installed at the unconscious level.

So that everything you did worked toward that outcome.

 Gil: Boy, that is so true. Now that you say that, the outcome was you’ve got to practice your routine as much as you practice your mechanics. And I didn’t know how I was going to get there, but I just started talking and that was the underlying theme. It ended up being the underlying theme of everything that I said, Bob. Amazing.

 Bob P: Exactly. And could you do that consciously?

 Gil: No.

 Bob P: No?

 Gil: Not without note cards. (Laughter)

 Bob P: And that’s the beauty of setting these kinds of outcomes because then you monitor your congruence and you know you’re heading toward it. And when you lose that congruence, you know you better do something to get back on track. And that’s the  excitement of being able to monitor your congruence, incongruence, and that in itself is a hobby.

Set it as a hobby. Can I go through an entire day and stay congruent not only in shooting but in my business and my relationship with my wife, my kids, my little league baseball team. You know? There’s some tough ones there, but just by practicing that one element, setting that one outcome, you can have an amazing effect on your life and on your game. So that’s outcome number one.

2.  Suboutcome number two: This gets to that learning side of any kind of sport or any kind of life activity. And I refer to it as this: get excited by mistakes, losses, and emotional collapses, the types of things that are basically incongruence. For example, if you can learn to get really curious as to why that happened.

I remember in karate tournaments where I was doing a “kata” or “form”, which is a series of different blocks and punches and kicks; and most of them go on for about two minutes, and you’ve got to be fully on and explosive, and occasionally you do a kiai (a shout). And every once in a while, you lose it. You do it unconsciously, and every once in a while you just lose it. You don’t know where you are, and you stop and you bow and leave the court. And you can either get very angry about that or very excited about that.

You could go: What happened there? How did it happen at that precise moment? And in one case I remembered back to my last practice. And in my last practice before the tournament, I had done a great kata up to that point and I stopped. I don’t know why I stopped, but I just stopped and I thought: Well, I don’t want to mess this up anymore. And I didn’t correct it.

In the tournament I stopped in exactly the same spot and that was exciting for me because I learned some incredible things from that type of thing that could have otherwise been very discouraging.

 Gil: I had to deal with something very similar to this. Last weekend I was coaching some very good shooters, and a couple of them, the instant they would miss a target, the first thing out of their mouth was: I know what I did wrong. I just didn’t say anything and I just let them flounder.

I began to talk to them about staying congruent and try to see why you did it wrong, but instead of giving emotion to telling me or yourself why you did it wrong, why not give emotion to what you’re going to do to do it right next time. I almost had to break one of them down to a baby — (Laughter)

He was so intent on fixing it. It’s what Shoemaker calls “the fix-it mentality”. I’ve got to fix it. I’ve got to fix it. Well, if you would learn why it was happening and fix it permanently, you wouldn’t have to keep fixing it.

 Bob P: Right.

 Gil: You know? But they get angry because they know why they did it wrong; and all of their emotion is tied up in what they did wrong as opposed to thinking about the problem, like you say, getting excited about the mistakes, losses, and emotional collapses and instead using those things as a window to look inside yourself and learn.

 Bob P: Yes. Suboutcome number three is: act on everything that happens to you. It’s all feedback. Each time something happens to you and you get excited by it and you fix it, it’s never going to happen again or the likelihood of it happening again is going to be remote. And so it becomes like you are nibbling away at some of your mental blocks, some of your performance problems in terms of some of the routines that you haven’t got down.

Every time you resolve one of those things, you identify it and resolve it, you move ahead. And sometimes they’re great movements ahead in terms of performance. Other times they’re small, but it just becomes the question of, “How do I know I’m improving?”

Sure, I like the times I won; but the stuff I learned from some of the people who beat me who at the time seemed much better than me until I learned what they’re doing and how to counteract that, it was an amazing process.

 Gil: This goes back to, I think, what Brian was talking about when he was so determined to stay there and fight it out. Right, Brian?

 Brian: Right. Just sheer determination.

 Gil: And let me ask you something: The year before last did you have that determination?

 Brian: No. I was trying too hard, but I let too many negatives get in my way; and I just didn’t have that same emotion that I had developed in ‘06. The year before was a totally different year.

 Gil: I think that’s probably a result of using your NLP techniques more and more to where they become more powerful for you.

Brian: Yeah. That was a real milestone. It really was. It kind of kicked me into gear.

 Bob P: Good. And here is suboutcome number four: Perceive the world as a friendly place where everything works to your advantage. When it’s windy, you love wind. When it’s rainy, you love rain. When you have to shoot against some of the best shooters in the country, you love shooting against that next level up. You even love the attempts to intimidate you. I mean, you take it on. Everything is exciting and new and challenging, and it’s put there for a reason, if you will.

 Gil: I’ve got to add something to that. I’m sorry. (Laughter) It’s amazing to me how many of these things I’ve actually encountered. When you start competing and some of the people who have been beating you but now you’re beating them, some of the people that you’re outscoring will resent that. They will resent it, and they will make attempts to intimidate you. I know that I was working with a skeet shooter who came to see Vicki and I about a month ago, and I didn’t get to shoot but about a hundred skeet targets with her to correct some of the problems she was having mechanically; but I worked that afternoon and all of the next morning on being congruent, maintaining congruency, routine, the things that we’ve talked about here on the Coaching Hour.

And she called me yesterday and said: I have to share this with you. And she said quite a few other things, but we’ll talk about that at another time. But she went and shot a skeet tournament, and she was shooting on the same squad with the lady who had won the Lady Arizona State Championship for the last two years, and this lady I’m talking to had won it the two years previous.

And she had gone into a slump, and that’s why she came to see us. But, anyway, she was shooting with them and she was shooting really well. She noticed that every time she would go up to shoot, when she would close the gun, the lady and her husband would be about four or five steps behind her laughing and cutting up and speaking loud to try to distract her.

And she said: Until I came to see you and learned about congruency and learned about routine and learn how to control my own destiny,   I would have gotten mad at them; but I was able to laugh at it, go back into my routine and stay congruent. And she said: I mashed those targets. I mashed them in front of them.

And the unique thing was she told me that was she was mashing these targets in front of these people. She shot really well that day. The lady’s husband, who’s a AAA skeet shooter, got caught up in the intimidation and the gamesmanship; and he shot an 83 or an 82 and he normally shoots a 98 or 99 in the 28 gauge.

So it really kind of turned around on him. But she was shooting in a horrendous wind, and she said: It doesn’t matter. If I’m focused on the target and break it in the breakpoint, I’ll break the target. And I think that kind of illustrates in another way outcome number four.

You’ve got to be able to control what you’re doing regardless of the circumstances: Hard targets, easy targets, high targets, low targets, sun, wind, rain. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’ve got to like that. And if you go in with that mindset, then the thing that is a stumbling block in everyone else’s way is now an ally for you.

 Bob P: And it really bugs the other people.

 Gil: Oh, my God, does it. (Laughter)

 Brian: I’ll tell you what. I personally experienced that this year after winning high overall in my class at my first tournament. This guy who’s been an All American came up to me and said: Well, you still can’t shoot in our league. Consequently, I turned around and just didn’t let it bother me; and I went on and I beat him four times in a row and got into a shoot-off with him and spanked his butt again. (Laughter)

 Gil: And he took himself out of it by saying that to you.

 Brian: Yeah. And I’ve learned that. I’ve watched that, those types of guys will hurt themselves because they don’t realize what they’re doing to themselves. But as long as they want to run off their mouth like that, I’m willing to give it to them. (Laughter)

 Bob P: And here is suboutcome number five: Enjoy the friends and coaches you meet at competitions. An oasis learning effect takes place here. What you learn from these relationships cannot be taught on the practice range.

You can also enjoy the exotic locations. You can enjoy the scenery, the mementos. You’re going to have so many experiences from these different competitions that will enrich you as a person, and I’ve just got so many friends that I’ve trained with, I’ve competed with. I’ve got other instructors who coached me. And I’ve learned so much from having that diversity of relationships.

How You Teach Something Is How the Student Will Practice It

 Bob P: I discovered something when I had a very tough instructor teach a lot of my katas to me and not always pleasant. And then I had some other instructors teach me katas, and those two are very motivational and very pleasant.

And when it came time to practice some of those katas, I always kind of gravitated to the katas that were taught to me by those people who were motivational. And I shied away from the other ones. It was stressful actually to train those katas, and that was one of my first coaching lessons that just blew me away. How you teach something is how they will practice it.

 Gil: Amazing.

 Bob P: And that I learned something through building relationships and going to tournaments and sometimes staying up much too late the night before the tournament talking about karate, talking about competition and still doing well.

 Gil: So you’re saying we can stay up late and not worry about getting our sleep? (Laughter)

 Vicki: No, he’s not saying that. (Laughter)

 Brian: If you got up late, go fishing.

 Bob P: Let me reframe that.

 Gil: Okay. Reframe that, will you? (Laughter)

 Bob P: If you have happened to stay up late, you can still perform well. It’s not advisable, but if for some reason you can’t get to sleep, I would suggest that you relax because by getting concerned about being up late will make it even more difficult to get to sleep.

 Gil: Interesting.

 Bob P: So those five suboutcomes flush out what you’re actually trying to do, and it makes learning and traveling and competing all so enjoyable and so relaxing that it really triggers the unconscious to help you perform well.

I ask any student: If you can stay in the zone, how will you do? The result is absolutely fantastic. And so you ultimately will have a better chance of getting that overall outcome of winning by having these suboutcomes.

 Gil: And those aren’t the only suboutcomes.

 Bob P: Oh, no. I mean, they are the five that really stand out in my mind; but there are others.

 Gil: And just because you have those suboutcomes doesn’t mean you’re going to win.

 Bob P: No.

 Gil: But it certainly means that you have a greater opportunity to win.

 Bob P: And you can have a great time. (Laughter)

 Gil: Oh, that means like learning and enjoyment? (Laughter)

 Bob P: It could be.

 Gil: And performance increases. (Laughter)

 I’ll tell you it’s amazing. Regardless of who we read, where we go, who we talk to, it’s about setting your goals, your outcomes. And as Bob has said and as I’ve alluded to many times: the goal isn’t to win. The goal is to go and learn and do the best you can and set yourself up with the right outcomes, the right subgoals. Control what you can control. Control your routine. Control your plan. Make your plan and commit to your plan. Be determined to shoot every shot like it was the only shot. And when you set yourself up in these arenas like that and you are congruent and you are in your zone, I’m telling you, like Bob said, the subconscious is a very powerful thing. It will bring about that outcome, but it’s important to have the right ones.

Guys, we’re out of time again. Thank you for patiently listening and contributing a little bit. So until next time, be congruent, stick with your plan and set the right outcomes so that you can achieve the goal that you wish. Good night, everybody.