2007-09 – September 2007 Coaching Hour – 10,000 Hours

…….September – 10,000 Hours…….

 – What Makes an Expert?

 – Review of the Gag Factor Exercise

 – Leaving the Comfort Zone

 – Stretching Peripheral Awareness

 – Do Unto Yourself

If you’ll remember, we talked about how talent is not a gift; it’s  a job. But at the end of that Fortune article I quoted, it said it takes 5,000 hours to get good at something. It takes 7,500 hours of actual practice and hands-on to get really good at something, but it takes 10,000 hours of hands-on practice and activity in a specific thing to become world class.

Well, this is another reflection on those same numbers. Matt goes on, “In study after study of composers, basketball players, fiction writ- ers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number continues to come up again and again and again.”

And this is something that I wanted to do when I read this for   the first time, but I never found time to do it. He divides this out into what it really means to you per day, per month, and how many years or per day, per week and years. 10,000 hours is equal to roughly three hours a day or 20 hours a week of practice over ten years. And, Vicki, do you remember when we first started shooting sporting clays how much time we actually spent doing this stuff? I got to thinking about this when I was going through this article, and it’s amazing. It’s not amazing to me now. This pretty much justifies how we were able to achieve the level of expertise we were able to achieve the first ten years that we shot the game.

 Vicki: Right. We just thought we were having fun. (Laughter)

 Gil: The mundane practice and stuff was disguised behind the excitement of learning and having fun. When we started in ‘94 in our teaching careers, I would probably venture a guess that 20 hours a week would be a small average for us as professional teachers. Would you agree with that, babe?

 Vicki: I would, yeah.

 Gil: And we’ve been doing that for well beyond ten years, but as I think back at the things that I’ve done well in my life and I began to try to put together how long did I actually practice it? How long was   I passionate about it? It doesn’t matter whether it’s fishing, hunting, using a camera. It really doesn’t matter what it is. You go back and you look at the things that you’re good at, the things that you’re a little better at, and the things that you’re really good at. This comes back to how much have you done it.

It seems as though the research is beginning to show more and more, simply because there’s more research being done on it, that this 10,000-hour thing is the real deal. They go on to say: “No one has yet found a case in which true world class expertise was accomplished in less time.” There’s nothing wishy-washy with the way they say it, “10,000 hours is the great divide between want to be and mastery.”

He also goes on and compares, “The 10,000-hour theory is consistent with what we know about how the brain learns. Learning requires the assimilation and consolidation of information in neurotissue. The more experiences we have with something the stronger the memory learning trace for that experience becomes. Increase practice leads to a greater number of neurotraces which can combine to create a stronger memory representation.”

In my words: How many times you’ve done it determines how easy it is to remember how to do it. This goes back to getting it all into the subconscious. You’ve got to do it enough consciously so that it becomes subconscious, and we have tapped into that thing called feel, which allows us to be in that subconscious confidence mode, which allows that recall from the number of hours that we’ve done something to be so great and so specific and so spontaneous.

Listen to this. “We tend to code as important things that carry with them a lot of emotion, either positive or negative. How much one cares about something, in part, accounts for some of the early differences we see in how quickly people acquire new skills.”

Our words: Emotion imprints. Use it in your favor. We have neurochemical tags in our brain that effectively prioritize memory access based on their emotional importance to us. That which has great emotional importance to us, or that which we have given great emotion to—the key words here are positive or negative—has an elevated priority in our memory. The more emotion you give something, the higher priority it has in the memory database, the more easily it comes up subconsciously. I don’t know how long ago we said this. Emotion controls the speed of development and depth of development in the ability curve.

I wanted to share that with you, not to pat ourselves on the back, but just to let you know that a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about on the Coaching Hour some several years ago are beginning to be proven again and again in current research, which certainly gives us an exciting view of what we’re doing and some of the ground that we’re breaking. It’s amazing to us.

It’s kind of like, when we were talking to Stevie Ray not long ago, it doesn’t matter what road we go down; we always end up on the same cul-de-sac.

 Bob P: Gil? How excited do you get when you teach?

 Gil: I am on cloud nine.

 Bob P: Well, how excited do your pupils get when they’re with you?

 Gil: They are on cloud nine. And if they’re not, we get them there

 Bob P: And so do you think when they’re on cloud nine they’re exceptional learners?

 Gil: Oh, there’s no doubt.

 Bob P: Okay.

 Gil: There’s no doubt. I mean, it’s just an amazing thing. I have no doubt that this is one of the reasons we have people who come back to us over and over again and make an even greater commitment in their game. Or if they can’t make a greater commitment, they’re more at peace with themselves.

I have to tell you that although the people on this line and the people that we’ve contacted all over the world personally or talked to on email or phone calls or whatnot, they have to bare their innermost feelings to you, just like your customers do Bob, and they’re willing to do that and they have a great confidence in you, and they realize that if they do that that there is something you can say or do that will help them to become more confident and it really is fun exciting and motivating people, isn’t it?

 Bob P: Uh-huh.

 Gil: I have to tell you this. I listened to the Coaching Hour again today. Last month’s Coaching Hour was a phenomenal Coaching Hour. We had a lot of good interaction, and I hope you-all have tried some of the things we talked about. I know that the second and third time I listened to it I gleaned a lot more from  it.

Review of the Gag Factor Exercise

 Gil: I want to review a segment that I did in April, ‘06. It came from authors Pia Nelson and Lynn Marriott in their book Every Shot Must Have A Purpose. If you haven’t read it, you’re crazy. I’ll just tell you that. I’ll be real blunt with you. Get the book. It’s an incredible book. I stole this from them. I said this when we talked about it in April of ‘06, and I’m going to say it again. It’s a great exercise, and they categorize it as an exercise for building your confidence in golf.

You start out with a bucket of golf balls, and you stand over the bucket and you drop a few in the bucket. And while you’re doing this exercise, you need to be aware of your confidence and your trust and what it feels like to actually do this exercise each time. Then they tell you to take a step back and toss a few in the bucket, and there’s no problem tossing a few in the bucket from one step away. And then they tell you to keep stepping back and do the same thing.

And as you get further and further away it becomes more difficult to hit the bucket with the ball. And then they begin to direct you to be aware of your mind. Is it quiet; or are you talking to yourself? How do your thoughts change as you move further away? Do you see the target clearly? And, if so, how clearly? Is your move to toss the ball fluid or jerky? Do your legs tighten up? Do your arms tense up? Do you see the ball in flight? Keep moving back until your trust level changes. Does the ball sometimes go in, but in your heart you know it was luck?

This is important to be aware of because it is essential not to confuse trust with outcome. It’s easy to trust the positive outcome. Just because you got lucky doesn’t mean you trusted it. That could be a positive soundalike. What do you see, hear, feel, and think that is different when you leave your area of trust or your comfort zone?

This exercise is to help you understand how your body reacts under stress. You can’t make fear go completely away, but you can expand your comfort zone by knowing your tendencies when faced with fear or stress. But understanding the patterns of your behavior you will better be able to control undesirable behavior and train your weakness both mentally and physically. That’s a summarization of their exercise. This is the exercise that I suggested. Try this to identify and broaden your comfort zone. Take a crossing target, or any other target for that matter, and shoot it at 20, 30, 40, and 50, and 60 yards if it’s a crossing bird. Stop at 40 if it’s quartering bird. And as you go back at each distance, notice the changes that occur in your body. What does the voice say? Does it say, “oh shit” or “watch this”?

It’s important to know what you felt like in the beginning so you can compare what you feel like at the different distances. How does the feeling change as you move back? Where do the changes occur? At what distance? At what point do you become less confident?

This is where your true comfort zone is on that particular target. If you’re not pleased with how far back you are as far as your comfort, it’s a sign that you need to train it. What feelings do you specifically have when you’re out of your comfort zone? Butterflies? Do you mount too fast? Do you start rushing? Do you lose your tempo? Does your   grip pressure tighten? Does your backhand move first or fast? Do your eyes wonder? Do they tend not to be still when you call pull? Do you become short of breath? What specific thoughts do you have when you get well out of your comfort zone? Ask yourself are they true. When you do that, you’ll laugh at them.

Do you trust the focus and the breakpoint; or do you think about lead? How do you think about lead? Do you think of it in feet? Do you play too close to the target? How comfortable are you sliding your eyes to the front? And like we talked about last week, how comfortable are you being early and letting it go?

Be aware of the physiological changes and the mental changes when you leave your comfort zone. And I must confess that many times we will do this with a new student to us that can shoot just to see what his or her real problems are. Rather than keeping them on close, simple targets, we’ll take them to a target; we’ll look at the target with them. We’ll pull it and say: Hum, that’s not far enough. We’ll keep walking; and we’ll kind of watch them and see what they say. We’ll pull it again and watch them, and we can tell when they’re getting out of their comfort zone because our goal is to get them out of their comfort zone to see what their real reactions are.

What we have found in teaching, as much as we have, is that a person’s reaction when they’re out of their comfort zone, those are the reactions that they have learned to overcome when they’re in their comfort zone, but they’re still present. They’re the things that they typically have given greatest emotion to. We watch and listen when that happens. And, as I said, whatever is deeply embedded in their computer will always come out when they’re out of their comfort zone.

To gain a greater knowledge of how you react under stress you can learn how to get it back when you begin to lose it. Now, this is not contrary to being congruent and using what we’ve learned with Bob in NLP. Using NLP we’re able to stay congruent under stress, but  this is more a way for you to find your comfort zone with the mechanical difficulty of targets and find an area in your game where you need   to train on some targets that are a little bit further away, that are a little bit more difficult, maybe a little lower, maybe a little more edgy, maybe a little more quartering, maybe it’s a tweener between quartering and crossing.

It’s a way for you to shoot a variety of different kinds of targets, and just be aware of your body’s physiology, your thought process, your confidence as you get back away from the target and make the target more difficult. It’s important for you to know what that is. It’s also important for you to know what you do when you hit that because we all don’t have perfect mechanical games. But to know what you do when you hit that mechanical uneasiness because you haven’t trained it, it helps you. Number one, it helps you know what you have to overcome through being congruent and doing your walk and whatever it is you do. More importantly, it tells you what to practice and how to overcome the real shortcomings in your mechanical game.

Leaving the Comfort Zone

 Gil: I had a lesson with Tony Morrow the day after I talked about this. And he was on the Coaching Hour in May, and I talked a little bit with him about that. But I want to share with you what I did with him and some of the things that he understood, and it was an actual problem he had in his game.

A day after the Coaching Hour I had a lesson with Tony Morrow. All year Tony had been anxious about long crossers. Interesting that we talked about long crossers last week. He tried practicing them and he got a little better, and we had a lesson on them a month before, but he’s still anxious about them.

At the beginning of the lesson, we shot a little bit. He had his muzzles too high on a right-to-left target, the right-to-left curling bird. He was arriving late, especially when he had to shoot in the last 10 percent. But when he got there early, he was okay, but he couldn’t stop talking about this problem that he was having with long crossers. I looked at him and I said: Why are you so concerned?

He just didn’t feel confident.

So I said: Okay. What the hell. You weren’t able to listen to the

Coaching Hour last night.

So I decided to do the backup drill on him. And so I found a comfortable target for him, and it was a left-to-right, belly-on curling target on our field; and it was easy for me to back him up to 50 or  60 yards, however far we need to get back for him to become less confident, shall we say.

So here we went. I told him: tell me how you feel as far as confidence at each station. And we set it up to shoot it at 20, 30, 40, and 50 yards. At 20 yards, no problem. He blew the heck out of two or three of them. No big deal. His body language was up.

He was confident. Went back to 30 yards. No problem. Blew everything up there. No problem. He was early. Just really blew the targets to smithereens.

Went back to 40 yards, and I could tell by his body language he was a little uneasy with 40 yards. He hit the first target, and he got relaxed after that and ran four or five more.

Then we got to 50 yards. He hit the first target and then he lost it.

He couldn’t hit another one and we stopped.

And I said: What are you doing now? What’s different now as compared to 20 yards? What’s different?

He said: I’m looking for lead.

I said: Okay. How is your congruency?

He said: I’m very congruent. I’m looking for lead.

Okay. All right. So we talked about how he felt. We went back   to each station. We talked about how he felt at each station, and    he realized that the instant that he got out of his comfort zone mechanically it manifested for him to immediately check the lead. He goes conscious with mechanical thoughts, and checks the lead.

Now, when he realized that his default to fear was to check the lead, we then went to 20 yards and he was really early and he got comfortable again. He got more congruent. Tony came to the conclusion, with a little help from me, that if it works at 20 it should work at 50, and checking the lead doesn’t work consistently anywhere. So why would you think it would work at 50  yards?

Well, Tony didn’t know what he did when he  got  out  of  his  comfort zone mechanically. He could control his emotions through his congruency and through his walk; but when he got out of his comfort zone, he realized that he was checking lead and thinking mechanics.   And he accepted the fact that he did that after realizing it, and he realized and accepted the futility of it and it went away.

So having shot a few at 20 yards, we went back to 50 yards determined to be early and let it happen, and I have to tell you it did every single time.

But let me back up for just a second. Now, if he hadn’t known what he went to mechanically, which is checking lead, if he hadn’t known that’s what he did, I don’t believe he would ever gotten to the point to where he could have just trusted it. There was a subconscious, mechanical glitch in his brain that kept him, once he past 40 yards, from being able to trust it.

And knowing that when he got uneasy he always went mechanical and checked lead, we were able to isolate that, go back to 20 yards, get his congruency, get him to feel it, talk about the futility of trying to check lead at any distance, at how inconsistent it was; and he was able to punch through to a new level. He actually became giddy breaking the targets from 50 yards.

He returned home anxious to try it on the crosser he had been inconsistent on. He called me that afternoon at 6 o’clock and said that he had shot a 56-yard crosser and hit it over and over and over. And he did want me to let you know that it’s okay to be early on everything, especially on long crossers.

So to know where the breakdown occurs and what specifically  you do when the breakdown occurs is very helpful. It tells you what to practice and where to practice it. Knowing what it does to your congruency and going back to where you’re in your comfort zone and becoming congruent and going back and training where you want to become more congruent and where you want to expand your comfort zone to, it makes it easier for you to push through because when those thoughts that are so deeply embedded in your subconscious, you’re not aware of them. When they start coming in, you can identify them and get right back to the business at hand, which is becoming more comfortable in your new comfort zone.

You must face the dragon with the tools you want to use, not your default tools. You’re not aware of your default tools. You’re not aware of what you default to when you get out of your comfort zone mechanically with the target. And to know what you default to is a tremendous advantage.

Would you agree with that, Brian

 Brian: Oh, you bet. Most definitely.

 Gil: We worked on long crossers. And I guess it’s kind of apropos that  I never did this until after the show on long crossers because you’re going to find yourself, as we talked about last month, becoming enamored with the picture when you first get back there out of  your comfort zone. And when you do, you’re going to start missing, so quit. Go back to something closer.

It’s easier to punch through plateaus once you clearly know what is creating that plateau. As you go through your long-crosser practice, just be aware of how it feels when you go place to place to place to place to place. You’re going to find that you’re going to become enamored with the picture, much like Tony was.

The poor guy. I say “poor guy”. I used him as a guinea pig and it worked. And if you haven’t tried that, shame on you because that’s something that is used in public speaking. It’s used in whatever you do. You’ve got to put yourself in the position to know and keep increasing the difficulty of what you’re doing to know where your comfort zone is and to know how you react emotionally and physically to being out of your comfort zone.

Once you know that, it’s up to you to train yourself through it.  If you can’t get through it on your own, call us. We’ll help you get through it.

I don’t know, Brian. I would think that training on long crossers is one of the toughest things anybody can do simply because they’re just not that easy until you’ve shot enough of them. Would you agree with that?

 Brian: Agreed. And that is the target that will take people out of their comfort zone. They’ll be uneasy about it. Unless you’ve done it enough and been successful enough, then you are going to have a lot of anxiety every time you approach some of these; but that will dissipate if you’ll use a playing method of working on those targets each time and you don’t have to eat the elephant all at once, just a bite at a time.

 Gil: Yeah. It’s really important to know what you do when you get there emotionally and mechanically. And once you know, then you know where your zone is. And it should be everybody’s goal to not be afraid of that. Don’t be afraid of finding where your comfort zone is. Look for it. Look for an opportunity to fail. Look for what happens to you emotionally and mechanically. In our game and, Vicki, you feel free to jump right in here, I feel that when people get out of their comfort zone here’s what happens. I’m just going to start listing some things.

And if you think of some things, Vicki or Brian, add them. I feel that their eyes don’t remain still.

What do you think, Brian? What do you think, Vicki?

How do people react when they get out of their comfort zone mechanically with a target?

 Brian: Well, let me say this. I’m dealing with a lot of the young shoot- ers, and they’re up shooting 25 straight. And all of a sudden, they’re on their last rotation, and they wake up.

 Gil: When you say “wake up,” what does that mean?

 Brian: I mean that they realize, hell, I got a 75 straight. (Laughter) And you can start seeing it waffle then. You can start seeing them dropping here and there and some of them can come back, but some of them, before it’s over with, they couldn’t shoot their toe off of their foot.

And that’s just with any shooters. I know all of us have experienced it. All of a sudden the next thing is we look up and think: I’ve run seven stations. And that’s when you start thinking about it. That’s when all of the problems start happening. That’s when you realize that you haven’t done this before. And you’ve enjoyed it and you don’t want any more misses. So guess what you do?

 Gil: Hum.

 Brian: But once you’ve experienced it enough you can say: hell, I’ve done this before, just keep on plugging, keep on hammering and don’t think anything else about it.

 Vicki: I think that most people, when they realize that, then they just go into that mode of “please don’t let me miss,” and then they go faster and faster because they don’t want to lose it before they have to get out of the stand.

 Brian: I agree with that. They do pick up the pace and they definitely do that.

 Gil: Well, it’s an interesting thing. The observation that we’re able to give and working with people out of their comfort zone because that’s what we do as instructors. We embed good fundamentals in their comfort zone, and then we’ll push them a little bit. Sometimes we push them a lot. It just kind of depends on what the outcome is that we’re looking for, but it’s important that you know what you do when you get out of your comfort zone: how you react emotionally, how you react physiologically. It’s important that you know where that comfort zone is so that you can go back and work on it and expand your comfort zone. And you can look at it from the standpoint of playing away from the target.

Stretching Peripheral Awareness

 Gil: We have said, I think, in our second book that most people’s peripheral awareness or peripheral acceptance is about two to four feet, somewhere around three feet. They can accept the gun in their picture without looking at it as long as it’s not pointed further than three feet away from the front of the target.

Well, until you get to the point to where that’s 30 to 50 feet, you’re never going to be able to dominate anything outside of 25 to 30 yards. Just the ability to see the target with your nose in one area as it comes out of the trap and have the gun pointed 30 to 50 yards in front of it closer to the breakpoint and watch the bird come so that you can be aware of that breakpoint and let it come to you, that’s a big leap of faith for a lot of people.

As I was talking before the hour, Nick came up. He’s been coming ever since we’ve been going to Milford Hills up in Wisconsin, and I’ve been trying to get him to be early and pushing him out there, pushing him; and he’s got one of the most impeccable gun mounts, one of the most smooth moves with his gun. His muzzle never comes off line. He is so soft in his hands. He’s looking at the bird.

And I just finally told him again: Now, look. I want you to keep your nose on the bird over here, but point the gun over there. When the bird comes out, go to the breakpoint, watch the bird come, pull the trigger. Pull the trigger when it’s coming to you. Know it’s coming to you and pull the trigger.

And he hit it the first time, and he did it again and he did it again and he did it again. And he had that look in his eyes of why didn’t you tell me this earlier? (Laughter)

 Gil: Do you know what I mean?

 Brian: You did.

 Gil: He needed a hearing lesson then. Okay?

 Brian: He had other stuff going off in his head.

Gil: Yeah. It was just amazing to me. Once he got it, once it clicked in his brain, he just took off like a rocket ship.

And I said: Well, you can go home because that’s all you’re going to learn.

And he said: No. I want to do this some more. I want to do this some more. His ability to do it reflected on three other shooters in the group. I had four people that day. And the other shooters were with us for the first time.

But watching him and watching his excitement, his eyes and his face lit up like a six-year old at a birthday party when he got his first bike. I guess that’s kind of outdated, when he got his first Xbox, or whatever you want to call it that they give them nowadays.

But his face lit up, and the other guys were, like: Well, I want to  try it.

I said: No, you’re not ready. You just need to keep moving with it. They said: No, no. We want to try that.

I said: Okay. Well, fine. And one of the fellows that came back the next day, a fellow named Paul, he got it at 11 o’clock that morning; and I’ll bet you he didn’t miss ten targets the rest of the day, and I bet you he didn’t miss probably eight to ten targets the whole next day until he got tired at 3 o’clock. It was just an amazing thing.

He was just shaking his head. He says: This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.

And, boy, when you can get somebody like that, they really become inspired and they shoot inspired.

Do Unto Yourself

 Gil: Bob Palmer, I’ve asked you to talk about a couple of things tonight.

And Brian, you probably want to pay particular attention, since you’re working with a lot of kids and some of them are going to the Junior Olympics. Listen to what Bob has to say about the second thing, slumps can be caused by peripheral things. And he’s also going to just briefly share with us another way of looking at what happens when you beat yourself up.

 Bob P: Okay. Well, I was just down in South Georgia experiencing some of that South Georgian hospitality. I was working with Mike Simpson. He’s been coaching for years. He’s one of those old style coaches who the kids just love. And they set him up for things like the volunteer coach of the year with the Georgia legislature and all of that kind of stuff. And you hear him talk about his kids. They’re like his kids. Right? His children. He also is the coach of a world class athlete, Emma, who’s won several World Cups.

But he told me a story when we were there. We were exchanging stories about coaching and the types of coaching. And he told me a story about a kid who was at a competition and did exceptionally well. And they finished the match, got back to the hotel room and they’re all talking. The kids are talking about calling their parents and the parents calling them, and this kid, he’s saying: Don’t let my dad call me. Don’t let my dad call me. I just hope he doesn’t call. I hope he doesn’t call. He was panicky. And sure enough, the dad called and asked how he did and congratulated him and said: Well, you know, you’ll fall off tomorrow. You’ll blow it, won’t you?

So sure enough the kid just totally fell apart. Now, that’s external talk. We’re talking about self-talk here. But, you know, we are our own parents in a sense.

 Gil: We’re our own coaches, too.

 Bob P: Our own coaches, yeah, our own parents, our own coaches. And how we speak to ourselves is personal, empowering, or disempowering. And then the unconscious is very literal. I mean, are you ever clumsy or stupid or incompetent? When you talk to yourself like that, it goes right in. It goes right in. And it’s cruel to the unconscious.

We sometimes can, like I said, be literal and be somewhat childlike. If you spend any time on any sporting field or any sporting clay course, you’ll hear people cursing at themselves, complaining and whining to themselves, threatening themselves with body injury and sometimes with death threats. (Laughter)

 Gil: That’s putting it mildly.

 Bob P: That’s putting it mildly. But, man, it is the belittling comments and self-mockery. I mean, it’s beyond  humor.

 Gil: I’ll tell you, Bob. The thought just occurs to me, if you don’t mind me just adding this. I don’t think the thoughts that are ludicrous, like killing themselves or whatever, these big things. I don’t think those are nearly as destructive as the little, subtle  things.

Bob P: Yeah. Sometimes. I mean, it’s just a pattern. And it’s not just one  thing.  It’s ongoing.

 Brian: Right.

 Bob P: And because you can just see some people start into it and then slowly you see how their body responds to it. Right? Their posture starts to go into hangdog, which makes it virtually impossible for them to breathe, nevertheless perform.

And it affects everybody else around them, but it’s hard to take sometimes. All you have to do is ask: Would you treat another person like that, a child learning to walk, for example, or a friend learning to shoot or maybe a spouse learning to play guitar?  Right?

I mean, I’ve heard it done and it’s pretty  cruel.

 Gil: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons Vicki went to somebody else to learn to shoot a shotgun. (Laughter)

 Vicki: By all means.

 Gil: And we’re still married.

 Bob P: Or a friend who I was playing golf with. He was cruel to himself. And finally I had had enough, and I said: Stan, would you talk to your son like that? And he turned on me then. (Laughter)

Which is okay because I can handle it. It was pretty funny. But, I’ve caught myself doing it. When I catch myself doing it to myself, I do something about it.

I was editing a brief for a client and had it all done. It was perfect and I did one final proof on it, and I found another mistake and I swore. I called myself some names and it wasn’t pretty, but then I caught myself.

I said: whoa.

It’s like talking to my childlike unconscious. Do you think it’ll be helpful after me giving it a reaming out when I find another mistake? Probably not. It probably felt better to shut up and avoid conflict.

Sometimes unconscious minds are like that. When I caught it this time, I thanked my unconscious. It sounds dumb. I found it almost a little bit silly, but I thanked my unconscious. And guess what? Bonus. It showed me two more mistakes, one that was a little more blatant than the typo.

Gil: Okay. Now were you looking for a typo or did it just find it?

 Bob P: Well, I initially was looking.

 Gil: You were looking, and then the unconscious found the typo. And then you started beating yourself up about it.

 Bob P: Exactly.

 Gil: The thing that stopped me in mid-sentence when you talked about that was the fact that beating yourself up about it would make your unconscious not want to find any more mistakes.

 Bob P: Exactly. It probably just ducked out of sight and said, oh, well screw yourself. (Laughter)

But when I was reeducating myself, I would get excited by finding that mistake. I found two more very quickly, which is what you want your unconscious to do. You want it to do that work for you. It’s too hard to read a whole text letter by letter. It’s much easier if you just scan it, and your unconscious has mistakes pop up at you.

 Gil: Interesting.

 Bob P: So the good news is that you can change this around very quickly. If you treat yourself as a coach would a child, hopefully the way a coach that I trained would treat an athlete – right?—with leadership and mentorship and empowerment, then it’s amazing what will come out of your unconscious in terms of a performance situation.

And you keep reinforcing that and reward yourself and set outcomes when you practice and say you’re going to work on this type of target for so many shots and reward yourself with something afterwards. Your unconscious gets into a pattern of enjoying those rewards and it will produce for you.

 Gil: And it’s not important what the reward is as much as it is it’s important to reward.

 Bob P: Exactly. When you get into the self-talk and you’re finding that you’re doing negative self-talk, I have some suggestions for the way you might change things around. So you say things like: “I can do it” instead of: “don’t screw up, idiot.”

You just remove those things that are demeaning. You add things like: “I love these targets,” instead of: “These kill me every time.”

How many times do you hear that?

So you can say things like: “Oh, interesting target presentation,” instead of copping out and blaming the target setters.

It’s your responsibility to hit them. It’s the target setter’s responsibility to be a little conniving and tricky.

And when you say things like: “I learned a lot today” or, “What do I still have to learn?” or “How could I be different, rather than going away tail between your legs saying: “I suck.”

You need to figure how to rise above that negativity of the squad, rather than blaming the squad. How can you set the leadership tone? I’m working with a business executive right now who has to learn to take incredible leadership of any squad he’s with.

Sometimes the squad has some of his clients on it along with him. And it’s a really interesting example of just changing negativity around into something absolutely positive.

It’s a simple process. Once you know your outcome, you can stay in the zone. You can listen to yourself, and any negativity that comes in is just feedback. You catch yourself. You can replay it in your mind just like you would a correction routine as Gil would teach you. Correct what you just said in your mind. You don’t have to say it to the people.

That might sound a little bit silly. But the next time you get into that situation you’ll give yourself some choices as to what you might say. And if you feel bad about something you’ve, you catch the negativity. Go home and rehearse it and find some lines to say instead of that.

As a peak performance coach, the number one thing that causes kids to come to me and causes them to quit a sport is how the coach talks to them.

Going back to that same Georgia kid I talked about earlier, he’s got two choices now. He could quit the sport. Is he going to keep on beating himself up as his dad would; or is he now talking to himself as Mike Simpson would have talked to him as a coach. That is where we get our role models.

And that is the kind of thing that we need to challenge and start talking to ourselves in a very positive way. The question is: How do you want to be coached?

I have a little line that says: Do unto yourself as you would have others do unto you.

Keep yourself in the game by being the best coach to yourself that you can be. And if you feel good and you’re positively reinforcing yourself, it’s contagious.

 Gil: Yeah. We talk to a lot of people about being process oriented.    Focus on the process. Focus on what you’re doing. The score will take care of itself.

I was working with a fellow who’s a skeet shooter, and I shot skeet with him 35 years ago. And I’ve been coaching him on the mental side of things and working with him on some stuff.

I told him: You know, you need to focus on the process. Focus on your breakpoint. Focus on your routine. And the big thing is you want your outcome from this tournament to be what am I going to  learn?

Do your routine and let it go. And when the tournament is about you looking for what you’re going to learn and how it’s going to make you better and how well what your learning makes you better, the tournament becomes a happening of interest, not a test.

 Bob P: And get very excited in what you’re learning.

 Gil: There’s no longer a fear of going or a fear of missing because,   as you’ve beaten into our brains, it’s all feedback. But how you set yourself up going into that tournament is critical, in my opinion; and we find that it’s about focusing on the process. Not the mechanical process, but the process of making the plan, doing your routine and shooting the plan.

React, correct or duplicate, set a plan; but stay focused on that and let the score take care of itself. Always constantly look for something new about yourself to learn. For example, “That was an interesting reaction.” And be acutely aware of how you react to different situations. I’m convinced that there are a lot of subconscious reactions that we have to certain situations that we’re not aware of, and that’s where the Tony Morrow Gag Factor comes in. You put yourself in those positions, but always be aware of how you react to things vocally, thought-wise, and physiologically, because they’re there.

The patterns are there. Wouldn’t you agree, Bob, that we all fall into certain patterns where we do things like that?

 Bob P: Yes. I don’t know how many years my pattern was to beat myself up finding one last mistake, and I finally caught it. (Laughter) It may be 40 years.