Introduction:
In this hour, we reconnect with coach Brian Brewton to discuss the recent challenges facing his student Caitlin Connors, who is a shooter at the U.S. Olympic Training Center. Brian tells us about how he discovered that Caitlin was completely focused on outcome rather than process and how they worked to change that.
The other main topic here is the unique challenge of competing in Master Class. Several shooters who recently punched into Master Class chime in, as well as a few with more experience.
Even Olympic Hopefuls Lose Sight of Process
Gil: So Brian, you and I had talked on the phone about some of the problems that Caitlin had had, and I sent her a disc that we did two or three months ago on failure, and she got it finally and she listened to it. But it’s a sad thing that our athletes really don’t have good mental coaching at the U.S. training center out there in Colorado Springs, and she’s very lucky to have you.
And do you want to just kind of outline some of the things that had happened briefly, and let’s talk about some of the things that she was having to go through, and there’s just nothing more than fear than what we’ve been talking about.
Brian: Well, she called me, I don’t remember the exact dates. It’s two weeks prior to the fall selection shoot, Caitlin calls me and she said: I’ve got a problem. I don’t know how to solve it. I can’t seem to get anything together. I’ve got a lot of things on my plate I’ve got to do, and if I don’t do it, then I’ll be out of the training center and what- have-you.
And I said: What do you want me to do? And she says: Well, I need some help.
I said: All right. So we talked awhile and I listened to her more about her situation, and I said: Okay, I’ll be there on Monday morning and we’ll go to the range, but we’ll sit down and have a brain session of about a couple of hours and kind of work through all of the head stuff, where you are and where you want to go; and then we’ll come up with a strategy and a plan and get busy. And I said: But there won’t be any guarantees because you’re waiting so late to do this.
So, anyway, making make a long story short, I got back, broke out my books and made sure that I was going to be going into pretty much in the general direction that I needed to go in. What I did spot off was that she was pretty fearful of what was coming down, and she knew she had to have some pretty decent scores to get a placement in order to stay on the national team.
Anyway, she was shooting for the alternate position for the Olympics. And so, when I did go to Kerrville and I saw her Monday morning at breakfast, we started talking about a lot of things. And then I said: You know, I went back and analyzed what you’ve been doing for the last two years. There is no consistency at all in what you’re doing because you go from one thing or another.
And I said: The only saving grace is you are medaling, and you are getting in on the top six, but I said: You’ve only medaled once a year. Your goal was to be the Olympic representative. Am I correct?
She said: Yeah.
I said: Well, where do you think you are? She said: Well, I’m not there.
And I said: Okay. What do you think led you there? She said: Well, I really don’t know.
And I said: Well, let me ask you: When you go practice, what are you practicing?
And she said: Well, I’m shooting rounds and what-have-you.
And I said: Each time you go out there is there anything specific that you’re working on?
She said: No, not really.
I said: Well, you’re not trying to find out what your weaknesses are, or do you know where you’re breaking down mentally or anything like that once you get into pressure?
And she said: No, I really haven’t done anything like that.
I said: All right. That tells me the direction we have to work on. My research in different books is that when an athlete starts thinking about outcome and becomes outcome oriented instead of process oriented that’s where it all falls apart; and, consequently, when she went to a tournament after she had practiced at OTC, she’d go to a tournament, thinking that I’m ready for it; but she gets there, all of a sudden her mind starts walking off with her, and she can’t get it quiet.
And so she starts having a mental breakdown. She didn’t have much of a mechanical problem, but she was a having a mental breakdown, and she couldn’t understand what in the hell was going on. So I told her what our plan was going to be: you’ve got to forget about winning. Throw it out the window. You only do that when you leave the motel room. You can talk about that, but you’ve got to prepare your brain for the job that you’re going to be doing that day, and I said: What is that job?
And she said: Well, I’ve got to shoot a high enough score to get on the team.
I said: Wrong answer. Wrong answer. And she said: What is it?
I said: Your job is to break the target. That’s all. Anything else, if you start thinking about all of the other minutia out there, you’re loading the wagon up; and, consequently, when you step up there, you’ve got all of that crap to deal with instead of shooting the target. I said: You’ve got to go back to what I taught you a long time ago.
The word we use is scopus. It’s a Latin word for focusing on an object exclusively and avoiding everything else around it. And I said: You’re going to have to get back to that type of focus again.
I said: You came to me last year, and I had to get to the point to where you could get on the national team. And what did we work on? And she said: Well, you had me saying before I called pull, see it and kill it.
And I said: What did that do for you?
She said: It allows my mind to get quiet momentarily, and it allowed me to make the move on the target in a relaxed mode.
And I said: Okay, then. Now, have you not been doing that? She said: No.
I said: Okay. Now we got to get back to that. But you gave me the right answer. Why are we going to do this little mantra? Because that’s what it does. It gives us a quiet mind to work within so when you call pull it does its job, and everything starts flowing together. You’re not sitting there fighting it, and that’s just one of the details.
Anyway, we worked on that, and sure enough, things came around, and we did find it. She was not putting her face on the gun, and we finally got that cured. And then we went back and did our little NLP exercise of anchoring, and after that she turned around and we had that first day, we shot two cases of shells; but the last three boxes of shells she did not miss a target, and she said: I haven’t done that in a long long time.
And she had a grin on her face from ear to ear. And I said: You want some more?
She said: Yeah.
I said: Well, you can’t have any. Wait until tomorrow. We’ll come back out tomorrow. When you get the mind quiet like that you don’t have fear interrupting you. You learn to trust your stuff, and that’s basically what we worked on.
Gil: And her having the thoughts that she had created fear?
Brian: Right. She overloaded herself.
Gil: Yeah.
Brian: She had so much to do it all piled up, and then besides that she knew of all the failures she had behind her, and she didn’t know how she was going to overcome it.
Gil: And it finally overcame her?
Brian: Right.
Gil: Yeah.
Brian: She had to get to that point in order to realize that she couldn’t do it by herself anymore.
Gil: Hum. And that comes from trying to win and trying to shoot the score and trying to be more score oriented or winning oriented than you are process oriented.
Brian: Right. You see, that’s all she gets – that’s all she hears. That’s all they talk about. All they talk about. It’s nothing about self-improvement, improving yourself and finding out who you are and why you’re doing this and how you’re doing this. It’s none of that at all. We just wore a medal. Okay.
Gil: Yeah.
Brian: If you don’t do it, then, hell, you’re gone, you know. It’s just how cold it is but, anyway, there’s a lot of steps that were neglected all the way around, and the one thing is the total abandon of what she had when she went there, and that was due to one of the coaches that was there but, anyway, that’s history.
Gil: Yeah. I’ve talked about with several of you on the line, I’ve talked with you about the winning and the overtrying and the trying to shoot a good score and all of those things, and eventually you have to go down that little rabbit trail enough times and find out that it’s a dead end until you get to the point to where you realize that score thoughts in our game are not good motivators.
If it was a team sport or if it was a sport in which score changed the strategy of what you do, then it might be different, but this is about you and the course. Shane and I’ve talked about it, and I know that I’ve talked to Tom about it a lot. I know that I’ve talked to everybody on the line about it. You’ve got to get to the point to where you’re not trying to shoot a score and you’re not worried about the score because then you start over-trying, your in for some struggles.
Thank you, Brian, for sharing that with us, and there was a lot more that we were going to talk about, but I’ve got a couple of other things that I want to talk about, and then we may come back to some of the things that you learned in the Pete Sampras book.
Competing in Master Class with Less Time and More Aggressive Competition
Gil: But right now I’d like to talk to Tom
Murphy since he’s on tonight. His
company has just gone crazy, and his shooting life is changing a little bit to say the least. They’re starting
quite a few projects, and he’s
having to look at how much he shoots and what he shoots in a little
bit different way in the upcoming couple of years.
Is that right, Tom?
Tom: Yeah. It’s definitely ramped up now, and it’s going to be a lot tougher to shoot as probably as many tournaments as I was able to shoot here when we were in kind of a downturn; but I’m going to be having to travel a lot more, too. So I’m going to be practicing and probably shooting in some locations that I’ve never have before which I don’t think it’s going to be a bad thing either.
Gil: No, no, because you’re at the point now where you’ve got to get on that airplane and go somewhere else and shoot in surroundings that you’re not familiar with.
Tom: Well, I’m going to probably be forced in to doing that anyway.
Gil: That’s good. I mean, you’re at that point to where you’ve got to go somewhere you’ve never been and you’ve got to go out and look at those targets and you’ve got to read them and you’ve got to be able to shoot with them.
And I’m going to go to Gary after I get through talking to Tom. So just be aware, Gary. I’m going to come talk to you about your year so far. Tom, you and I have talked about, while you’ve been on the road a couple of times, a couple of the things that, shall we say, the big dogs have done with you or around you or to you to try to intimidate you when you begin to approach beating them. And not to really talk about any names, but Tom Mack (phonetic) was one of them.
Tom: Right.
Gil: And I said that because Gary has a little warmth in his heart for Tom, and we’ll get to that in just a minute. But I think you were shooting five stand with him one time, weren’t you?
Tom: Yeah. It was at the state shoot this year here at American. And we started off, it was where you shot all the hundred birds all four stands in a row. So we shot the first one. And I would say he probably wasn’t at his all time best. He dropped a couple on the first stand, and I think I dropped a couple on the first stand; but I was kind of getting the nerves out of it, which I have to kind of go through.
But we got to the second stand, and before we ever left the first stand, I started kind of catching on fire; and by the time we got to the second stand, I was shooting very good then, and I’m pretty sure that we either tied on that stand or I beat him on the second five stand. And as soon as I got finished shooting my last target, which I think I was the last shooter, I turned around and walked off and he hollers down the line at me and says: Hey, Tom. And I don’t know the guy really, you know. I met him a couple of times. And he walks up to me. He goes: Hey. How long have you been taking lessons from Wendell Cherry?
I said: I’ve never taken a lesson from Wendell Cherry. He goes: Huh.
And SuperDave was right there besides me. He goes: No. He takes from Gil Ash.
Tom goes: Let me ask you a question. Do you visualize each one of your shots before you call for the bird?
I said: Yeah, I sure do.
He goes: Let me ask you another question. Why can’t you do that while the guy before you is doing that instead of waiting for your turn? And I thought the guy was just joking for a second. And he looks at me and goes: You’re holding up the whole freaking five stand.
And, of course, a couple of guys that were there with me and SuperDave goes: Oh, don’t listen to that SOB. Of course I said: Oh, I’m not. I’m not going to listen to him.
But, of course, I let him —
Gil: Get in.
Tom: Get it into my head. Yeah, it was already in. We went to the next five stand, and all I was thinking about is, okay, don’t let this bother you. Don’t let this bother you and see what we’ll do. I said: I’m going to take as much time as I can possibly take. So I get up there and on the first one I just sat there and wait and wait and wait, and I was just going to really drive him crazy. Well, then, when I called pull I missed the bird, and I’m going: Gosh, this ain’t going to work.
So, I think I shoot a 19 or something on that one, and all of the birds I missed were right at the very front end of it on fighting this deal on whether I’m holding up or whether I’m going too fast or whatever. He just definitely got into my head. I don’t know if he actually missed too. He probably did, but he got into my head on the deal. And then I went to the last one and shot 24 out of 25 on it. But he definitely did a number on me.
Gil: Hum.
Tom: And, of course, at this point in time, I was kind of hashing him after that; but the only person I’m upset with at this point in time is myself for even giving it a second thought.
Gil: Yeah.
Tom: But I learned a lesson. That’s for sure.
Gil: Any other times something like that happened before?
Tom: The only other similar deal was at Fossil Pointe.
Gil: Were you in a shoot-off?
Tom: Yeah, I was in a make-or-break shoot-off, a snooker shoot-off.
Gil: With Andy Duncan?
Tom: Yeah, with Andy Duncan. And we were waiting to shoot off, and we were standing at the bottom. I guess they were setting some targets or adjusting the targets or whatever; and we were standing there and he looked over at me and he goes: I sat and watched George Digweed just get his clock cleaned by a lady in a shoot-off one day.
I said: Really?
He goes: Yeah.
He looks at me. He goes: You never can tell what’s going to happen in one of these things.
I said: Oh, well, thanks. But that’s probably some of the funniest ones I’ve had, I guess.
Gil: Well, I wanted to talk about that just a little bit. Eventually when you begin to encroach on these top shooters’ territory and start shooting as well as they do, they’re going to use everything they can to get inside your brain, and it’s something I want you all to expect because quite a few of you are going to start pushing them and you’re going to start beating them, and they’re not going to like it; but they’re going to do everything they can do to break your rhythm and once they’ve break your rhythm and get inside your head, they’re going to try it again, and you’ve got to be ready for that.
You’ve got to be able to let it in and turn it around in your own mind and keep going and not let it break your rhythm in your game, and that’s where your routines come in. It’s just something that’s going to happen, and it’s something that you’re just going to have to face.
But now, you’ve had a pretty good year so far, right?
Tom: Oh, yeah. I think I’ve had a pretty decent year. I’m pretty pleased with my shooting. I’m still going through a lot of the same things just like what Brian was talking about, letting score kind of drive my performance instead of getting some specific things that I’m going to work on and keeping the score out of it. Man, it’s just extremely hard not to let that score get in there, especially when you do start shooting pretty good. I mean, it’s a fatal flaw. As soon as that happens, though, boy, here comes the misses. The misses are going to come right behind it.
Gil: Yeah.
Tom: But I’m still battling some of that.
Gil: Well and you will. I’ve been writing a lot of stuff here recently for our new book, and the term “learning to compete,” I think, is going to be perhaps the title or something in the title. And when I was writing a couple of weeks ago. I wrote down that as you work your way up through the classes you’re actually learning to shoot; but once you punch into master class, you have to really learn how to compete, and I think that’s really what you’re describing going through now.
As you’re learning, and I think Craig and Gary and some of the other guys that have punched into master class would agree with me, as you’re going along doing your best to compete and learning to compete, I think one of the reasons that you’re able to compete in master class like you have been is the fact that you have a system to shoot. You have a system to fall back on.
There are people out there, believe it or not, that make it to master class shooting birds different ways. You know? They might swing through some of them and pull away on some of them and spot shoot some of them and lead some of them and don’t know what they do on some of them, and those are the kind of people that are going to get to a certain level even in master class and they’re going to have a major reconstruct with their game because you’ve got to learn something new or you have to relearn something that’s old in a different way at every level you get to.
Now, that might mean learning a different move in your shooting. It might be learning how to shoot rabbits a different way. For Dean Olson it was learning how to shoot teal a different way; and, you know, it’s just different for everybody and you being able to compete well is a personal thing for you, and that’s something that Brian and I talked about when he was working with Caitlin. It’s a personal thing for you. And this applies to something that Shane and I’ve been bantering back and forth about, and that is that you’ve got to go out and put yourself in the game enough times to where you see how you react when you’re in the game to see what it’s going to take for you to learn to compete, because what it’s going to take for Tom Murphy typically is not going to be what it took for Gary Davidson and it’s not going to be for what it took for Greg Espenhover.
It’s not going to be the same for each one of you because each one of you have a unique blend of pressure points, if you will, that you have to be aware of or instead of pressure points let’s call it reactions to perceived pressure because if you try to explain pressure to a martian, you can’t do it, you know. Pressure is self-induced but each one of you is going to have something that’s a little bit different that allows fear to come into your thought process and into your game.
And the first year or so that you spend in master class you’ve got to put yourself out there in the gauntlet enough times so that you learn. I’ve been shooting really good, and every time I’ve started thinking about my score before I finished shooting I start trying to protect that lead and shoot and not to miss, and I hate to say it, but you’re actually going to have to do that enough times. It’s like checking the lead. You’re going to have to check the lead enough times where you realize that even though that voice tells you to do it and even though you know you’re not supposed to, and even though you know it’s doesn’t work, damn it, you’re going to check that lead one more time just to make sure.
And you’re going to have to do it on a shoot-off somewhere or somewhere where you have worked your butt off to get there and check that lead one more time and become hesitant and let fear get in there and let the voice get a hold of you and you’re going to have to lose until finally you make your mind up. I don’t care. I don’t care what happens. I’m sticking with my goal. I’m going to make the right goal. My goal is going to be see every target with still eyes. My goal is going to be when that target gets to the breakpoint I’m going to pull that trigger. I don’t care about the lead. I’m going to trust it, and regardless of results, I’m sticking with my goal. I’m doing that until I’ve shot all hundred targets today. I don’t care about the results.
And until you get to that point and until you actually do that and stick to your guns the whole way through regardless of what happens and you experience the quiet mind that you have when you are so process oriented to where you don’t care about the result – when you get to that point and you do that once, let me tell you something. From someone who had that experience, it is so much easier to do it again after you’ve done it once.
Tom: Yeah.
Gil: It is. I’m telling you. It is. Repetition eliminates fear, and fear is what makes you check the lead. Fear is what makes you add up the score. We were talking to Shane after he had a win, and I told him if you can con- quer fear and shoot without fear and practice without fear, you will win one of the next five shoots you go to.
And he finally conquered fear and conquering fear for him was not even wanting to know about the score, and he punched through and that was well and good; but I told him that same night we were talking about that on the coaching hour that eventually you’re going to have to face the score. You’re going to have to be able to say, yes, I’m only down four. I know that I’m only down four because if you don’t know, your buddies are going to tell you, you understand.
Tom: Yeah.
Gil: And you’re going to have to face that, but right now what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to get back in my routine, and the next time that guy comes over and starts messing with you back up about five steps and visualize him totally naked without hair. Okay?
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