2011-05 – May 2011 Coaching Hour – Redefining Competition

You’ve got to say not only “no” but “hell no!” I’m not going to do that because the last seven times I’ve done that in this position on the second day I haven’t finished. I’m just going to let it all go. It’s hard to summon the courage to turn your back on that voice that says: Hey, you know, we need to win this thing. I want to make sure that the gun is in front. I want to make sure that the gun gets to our face. I want to make sure that you have soft hands. I want to make your sure their eyes are still. I want to make sure that we don’t miss anything in front. That little voice that talks to you about swing mechanics and lead is hard to turn him off until you’ve at least listened to him two or three times and failed. And then even after you’ve listened to him two or three times and failed, you have to get to the point to where you’ve been there enough times and tried it and it doesn’t work.

Yes, you can be taught how to think; but even if somebody taught you how to think and you went and won the U.S. Open, the chances of you winning three more big shoots right behind it would be slim and none simply because you haven’t failed. And like it or not it’s the failures that enable you to have the courage to not listen to that doubt voice. It’s having failed with expectation, not that any of you on this coaching hour have ever had expectation.

 Ron: Yeah.

 Brian B: I know what the word means.

 Gil: Ron, do you hear this?

 Ron: I do.

 Gil: Not that any of you on the coaching hour have ever been guilty of having expectation going to a tournament, but you have to have done it enough times and failed to where you make your mind up and you go do that. You really don’t care what you shoot, but what you’re not going to do is be careful. You really don’t care what the score is going to be, but what you’re not going to do is get hesitant, and you’re not going to shoot not to miss.

What you’re going to do is you’re just going to go out there and you’re going to pick your breakpoints. You’re going to focus on the target and react to the target. When the bird gets to the breakpoint, you’re going to pull the trigger. Go to the next one, pull the trigger. Accept the result. If it was good, replicate it. If it was not so good, change it, go to the next one and move on. You’re going to learn to be in the present.

And I know I’ve talked to quite a few of you that are on tonight specifically about several different things and things that you’re finding in your game. You’re in the middle of the tournament year and there’s tournaments happening around everywhere and you say: Damn it; when I get three-fourths of the way, I start tightening up. Well, that’s a good thing. How in the hell do you figure that? Well, all we got to do is get you to not tighten up and you’re going to win. Oh, I hadn’t thought about it like that.

You know? And, boy, I’ve been practicing so good; and, man, I’ve shot two or three small tournaments well, and I went to this big shoot and, boy, I couldn’t hit anything. Yeah, that’s expectation. You expect it because you had done so well in the past that the results that you’ve gotten in the past would ensure that you would do well in the future. I want to read you a little something, and then we’ll get on with talking about competition tonight. Success is measured by the goals you achieve, not the score you shoot today. If you don’t take the time to set goals, you will always fail because you let others, or what oth- ers might say or think, control whether or not you are a success. You cannot control what others think, say or do. You can control what you think, say, and do. You are only one thought, word or action away from winning or losing.

Success is more than hitting the target. Success is measured by how well you handle missing. Potential is determined by what is learned from the misses. A true champion looks at failure as the first step to the learning curve.

I don’t know about you-guys, but I need to make some new goals. We’re talking about some new things that we’re planning for the  next 18 months, and it’s invigorated me. We’re planning to do some things that nobody has ever done in this industry worldwide, and it’s an exciting thing.

Y’all are all going to be a part of it. There will be no discounts or dividends paid, but you’re going to be a part of it.

Tonight I want to do this little piece on competition. Vicki and I were talking about this coming back on the plane yesterday, we were talking about expectation and the struggles that everybody was having when you’re close to closing on a good score and blah blah blah blah; and she said, but they need to hear me talk about that year that I tried so hard to do well at Nationals and fell on my butt, and the year that I won I didn’t try at all.

So I’m going to let Vicki go through that, and I probably will have a little bit to add with that.

 Vicki: Imagine that.

 Gil: And then I want to tell you about a year where I lost to the same guy 12 or 13 times by one bird and finally beat him. And I’m sure that we’ll find enough to talk about in those instances that you can all identify with.

I had in mind to ask you at the beginning of this hour to tell me what you want to get out of competition, and I didn’t do it. My zone put me in another place, that the reflections that I’m about to share with you are coming from a book called Extraordinary Golf, The Art of the Possible by Fred Shoemaker; and if you have not ever taken the time to get this book, you’re stupid. That’s all I can tell you.

I measure how much I value a book by how much red ink is in it, and I never mark in a book until the third time through. This book weighs another pound because of the red ink that’s in it. Reading this book changed the way we both look at coaching. It enabled us to understand how to coach the whole person, and it gives some very unique insights into not just the mechanical approach to a game but competition, how to think. I recommend the book highly.

Competition: A New Way to Look at It

 Gil: When we shoot competition we’re looking for something, some benefit. And I’m not sure any of you have ever defined why you shoot competition, and maybe when I get to the end of this piece, it’ll help you if you haven’t because if you haven’t, you need to give it some serious thought or go back to what I just read: A person that has no goals cannot measure success.

And I believe I was talking to Ron about how, when you go into a competition your goals need to be process goals, not outcome goals, and we’re going to talk about those, what’s a process goal, and we talked about that last time; but I want to ask you all to go back when you were fledgling B-class shooters and what were your goals when you went into a tournament. I would like to know how they have changed now that some of you have become A and AA and master class shooters.

People who compete well don’t get in their own way, and they understand the true benefits of competition happen only during the event. These people play very close to their potential. I’m going to read that again. It’s really important. I know that I’ve said to several of you in talking to you that you cannot duplicate in practice what you feel in competition. You can’t do that. You can play-like all you want to, but it ain’t the same.

I had a fella Sunday out in California. The guy got into the cage, he was a gifted shooter. The guy shot a 30-inch side-by-side, double- choked, extra full and I mean that son of a gun could shoot it. The unfortunate thing was his length of pull was about the same as mine. So I demonstrated a lot of shots with that gun that day. And you ain’t lived until you use an extra full choke and shoot a 70- or 80-yard teal that was a ridiculous bird they had set out there. I mean, it didn’t chip it. It hurt it bad.

But, anyway, he would get into the box, and it was like he turned into a different person. Everything was hurried. His eyes were never  still. His hands were never still. He loaded the gun, closed the gun, was looking around when he called pull; and he was good enough with a full and full side-by-side to hit the first two pair almost every time, and then he just fell apart on the third and fourth pair.

And he said: Damn it. I just can’t seem to get that third and fourth pair.

I said: That’s not your problem. And he looked at me and I said: Anybody that can hit two pair in a row doing what you’re doing is a hell of a shot. And he looked at me and he stopped for a minute and I said: You know, what you need to do is just stop and quit being afraid.

He said: What are you talking about?

And I said: The fidgeting that you’re doing, that the lack of a con- scious good stream of thought is fear. You’re afraid of the outcome. And I just met the guy. When I said that he just stopped, went on, shot some more. And it was about the 3 o’clock hour when he finally just stopped fidgeting, and he just got in the stand and he just starting shooting.

I’ve been telling him the same things. As you all well know, Vicki and I get to say the same things over and over again and get paid for it, you understand. I had been telling him the same thing over and over again, but it finally sunk in on the 14th time. He ran five straight in that stand and came out and he said: You know, I never really realized how much fear I had. Ran the next three stations and we ended the day.

I got an email from him yesterday, and he said: I showed up at my office today, a place that I was afraid to go to with no fear. That’s the first time in a long time, he said, that I’ve been able to come to my office without fear. I never realized what having a breakpoint could do to somebody.

Competition does different things to different people. People who compete well don’t get in their own way, and they understand the true benefits of competition happen only during the event. People who can look at events that way will play very close to their potential. People who think benefits only come when the event is over will tighten up often.

I don’t think there’s a person on the line tonight or who will get this disc in a week that cannot relate to that, but listen to why you tighten up.

People who think the benefits of competition only come when the event is over will tighten up often. If you think the real satisfaction of competition can happen only when the game is over in the form of praise and the status of winning, you will always feel a lot of pressure, and you will never play up to your ability.

At the end of the day, you can’t control winning or losing, and by making success or failure dependent upon something out of your control you put yourself in a very vulnerable, pressure filled situation. Your success, status, self-esteem now hinge on a clay target, hitting the ground unbroken, a foot to the left a hero, a foot to the right a zero. How do you think you would perform under this kind of  pressure?

You would probably become hesitant and confused and think mechanically.

I go back to Tim Galloway’s performance triangle. Performance is at the top of the pyramid. Learning and enjoyment are the two legs of the pyramid. And when learning and enjoyment are in balance, performance always excels; but when one of the three get out of balance, each one suffers.

During a tournament, a competition, most people focus on perfor- mance, and they ignore enjoyment and learning. When performance suffers, they try harder, making things worse. Learning and enjoyment come about during the event are not dependent upon what happens after and are much more under your control than performance.

The secret to great performance is to have a great goal, and when the goal is to be there to learn and enjoy the learning process, they’re under your control, and winning those games yield the best chance of winning the scoring game. Stick with your goals, but for God’s sake make a goal before you get there, and the goal is not to win.

You can have a goal to win the tournament when you’re driving there, but when you shut the door on the truck, it needs to be process goals. What do I have to do to win? Most of us begin with very noble goals, but the stress of competition can easily change our initial goals, which are broad, into very narrow performance-based goals, like winning or beating somebody or not to look  bad.

 Vicki: Yeah.

 Gil: For instance, in a class once I asked a group of shooters: Hey, would you rather shoot easy targets or challenging ones? Pay attention here. Unanimously all five in the group said: we want to shoot challenging targets. So we all got in the golf cars down at the 74 Ranch and went over to the towers, and I backed them up to about 60 yards. And I took somebody out of the group, and I said: Now you shoot it.

And that poor guy said: Man, you really meant challenging when you said that, didn’t you? Every one of them you could tell by looking at them they were shifting their balance. Their body language shuts down. I don’t want to have to shoot this. I can’t hit this. Their goals switched immediately. When they had to face the challenge, their goal went from shooting challenging shots and learning from the misses that invariably come with the exercise, to the default goal of not look- ing bad. They suffered from performance anxiety, which I define as a self-induced coma brought about by the fear of what could happen and more especially what others might say about the result.

Wanting to look good is what creates almost all of the chatter in your brain. Learning to stay within your original goal regardless of result is crucial for good competition, and it requires commitment. Shooters go to shooting coaches because they think there is a secret to becoming a winner or a champion, and I don’t know how many times in the last four or five weeks for some reason I’ve had this conversation with quite a few people all over the world on the Internet and on the phone.

The reason people go to a champion shooter to take a lesson is because they think that champion is  here  because  he’s  a  champion and can give the right formula. And once they know the formula they think they can become a champion too without all the targets that the champion shot, without all the near-wins that they had, without all the hard work and sacrifice and perseverance. They think that if they go to   a champion shooter they’ll get a magic formula and they can win the

U.S. Open or the Nationals.

They think they can do that, but there’s no shortcut. I was talking to one of you on the line. In fact, I’ve talked to several of you on the line about this very same thing. I was talking to somebody earlier. Don’t know who it was. The people who are selling the mental management stuff, they will tell you that if you just learn to think right that you’re going to become a champion. That might be true. If you’re talking to someone who’s been shooting for ten years and who’s at the top of the game already and they just can’t close, then changing their thought process will enable them to become a champion; but when you’re talking to somebody that’s been shooting for a year and a half or two years or who just punched into master class, it ain’t just thinking it’s going to get them from just punching into master class to winning HOA (High Over All) at a major shoot. It ain’t just thinking. Because if it was that easy, there would be a whole lot more champions. There would be a shoot-off at every shoot with 25 people out there. They’d all be tied. Sooner or later you’re going to have to admit to yourself that the value of competition is what you learned while you’re competing, and at the end of the day, it is repetition. And it’s not necessarily how many bullets you fired on the practice range, but it’s repetition in competition. How many times have you put the number on your back and gone out there and shot with everybody else and not worried about the result? Because, remember, it’s not the results you’re there for. When you shoot competition, you need to shoot competition so that that competition can be a reflection of what you do well and what you don’t do so well so you can get better.

It’s not about the score, but more often than not it becomes about the default commitment, which is looking for others’ approval. Winning the scoring game is the ultimate way to look good, but you have to ask yourself is winning worth all of that? You ain’t going to win money at it. Trust me. Vicki and Jimmy and I traveled for three or four years, won everywhere we went, took every gun we won and sold it for cash, put the cash back in the envelope, gave it to Vicki; and at the end of each year, we had enough money to pay for a $300 membership to Greater Houston Gun Club and paid for our trip and our bullets and our interest fees. You ain’t going to make money doing this. So why would you do it? For praise? For status? Nah. Maybe for a while but not for long.

Winning the scoring game has very little lasting value. The real values are the qualities you can develop and the type of person you can become because you competed and the type of person you can become during the competition.

I wrote this after winning the New England championships. It matters less the difficulty of the targets. It matters more how you play them. It matters less who wins or loses. It matters more who you become. It’s who you become on the competitive field that you need to look at. If you are competing just to win, it’s a lonely road. You’re going to feel a lot of pressure because you’re keeping score before you get there.

If you’re competing to have a very open look at who you are and your abilities, then you have to admit to yourself that when you go to a competition you have to let go of caring about how you shoot. You’ve got to let go of caring about what you score is. You got to do the best you can on every shot regardless of results; and at the end of it, the people you’ve been paying to keep score, let them keep the score; and, if you win, fine. If you don’t, fine. But the important thing is not who won or lost. The important thing is what did you learn?

So ultimately what you’ve got to do is look at what it is you’re try- ing to get out of competition. Why do you want to compete? Why are you there? Are you there to be the best you can be? That’s a cliché, I know. Maybe you’re starting to understand a little bit more about it now. But are you there to be the best you can be; or are you there to beat somebody? Are you there to  win?