2012-02 – February 2012 Coaching Hour – Top Performers

Our game is about handling the infinite number of different situations under which you’ve got to shoot these targets, and sooner or later you’ve got to realize that there are a number of different situations. Some are man-made. Some of it is just the difficulty of the target, but you have to be prepared to shoot these targets under a variety of conditions, and the targets themselves create many different conditions that have to be overcome. Either of these types of practice will decay if they’re not maintained. If you don’t use them, you’re going to lose them.

Successful athletes spend much of their time working on particular skills that are difficult because they have one or both of these two traits. One, they may require a fast response to an unpredictable or predictable action by an opponent like hitting a baseball, returning a tennis serve or shooting a moving target that you’ve never seen before. Two, the movements must be fluid and dynamic.

Our game requires on-the-spot analysis of targets that you’ve never seen, which is a conscious function followed by fluid, dynamic movements that are reactions to what these targets are doing with a plan that must be subconscious. To improve a specific aspect of your game requires a high number of repetitions and immediate feedback and specific self-regulation. Effective self-regulation is something that you do before, during, and after your practice. It begins with setting goals, not big life direction goals but more immediate goals for what you’ll be working on today.

 Doug, are you on?

 Doug: Yeah, I sure am.

 Gil: When you and Brian were practicing last time y’all got together, what were y’all working on? Anything in specific?

 Doug: Yes. For me it was bringing the gun smooth to my face. No hard pressure on the comb since you had changed my stock up so much. And the same with him, smooth mount, see the birds, stabilize the picture. It wasn’t as important to hit the bird as do what we were working on doing just over and over and over again.

 Gil: Hum. To improve a specific aspect of your game requires a high number of repetitions and immediate feedback and specific self- regulation. Interesting. And, now, it doesn’t matter whether that’s what you’re working on or whether you were working on left to rights, whether you’re working on right to lefts, whether you were working on breakpoints; but it’s the high number of high-quality repetitions that I want to emphasize, high number, high-quality repetitions and immediate feedback and specific self-regulation. The immediate field back is critical. It requires you to look at what you just did and judge it. Is it what I wanted? Could I do it any better?

Doug, I think that’s one of the things that changed you more dramatically and more quickly, was making you slow down after each shot and think about what happened and analyze it and give yourself some specific feedback. Would you agree with that?

 Doug: Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a little easier when you would only hand me one shot at a time, too.

 Gil: Shane, I haven’t put you in that spot. So you’ve got something to look forward to.

 Doug: I mean, I came with a couple of flats and ready to burn some powder, and by the thirtieth minute I was into my seventh shell and I was going to crazy for the first two or three lessons.

 Gil: Well, you’re going to find, as I go through this little dissertation, why you were where you were and why I did that to you.

Great Performers Give Themselves Different Feedback and Set Different Goals

Gil: The instant feedback is critical because the feedback tells your brain whether or not it’s doing what you want it to do, and typically what we see as the only feedback that average performers give to themselves is they beat themselves up for their brain not doing what they hadn’t ever told it what they wanted it to do in the first place. All they do is complain about the misses. When they do something perfectly, they never give themselves an attaboy. They never break down what they just did to remember what it felt like.

They have no post-shot routine. They’re not building anything. It’s just something that’s going to randomly happen, and that’s the way they shoot, and that’s why they’re full of fear. They don’t know why things happen, don’t have a clue.

Poorest performers do not set goals. They just go shoot typically a certain number of targets, a hundred, 200, 50 because targets are sold in hundreds and fifties. Mediocre performers set goals that are too general and focus on achieving a good outcome. I have fewer misses. I shot a good score today. I felt good or I beat somebody.

Best performers set process goals that if achieved will yield top level performances. Like Doug was saying, working on being smooth, working on soft shoot pressure, working on fluid movements, working on being in sync with the bird, working on specific breakpoints, working on visual transitions. That one is huge. Keeping your eyes   still in the focal point when you call pull, working on everything with a routine, pre-shot, post-shot, and correction routines, working on tempo, working on rhythm, working on being early in the breakpoint.

All of those things should be goals that you have. One, two, all of them, some of them should be a goal that you have every time you go out and practice and every time you go shoot a tournament.

I will never forget this as long as I live. I was down at our practice field five or six years ago when Dean Olsen was shooting a lot, and I hadn’t seen him for a while, and he drove up in his blue suburban with a golf cart on the back. And he realized I was teaching and he’d stop and just wave. He went down to the cul-de-sac, turn around and I think he left his motor running. He was just sitting there.

And we took a break, and I went over to the car and I said: I’m going to be another 45 minutes. He said: That’s okay. I don’t have anything to do. I’m doing some stuff right here on my laptop. So, you know, just whenever you get through.

I said: Well, do you need anything? He said: No. I just want to talk to you.

So I finished up with my lesson. My lesson left, and Dean drove up, got out of his truck, had a scorecard with him and he showed me the scorecard. It was a scorecard from the blue course, which is the south course, the corporate course, that I told him to go shoot until he ran a hundred straight on it, and it had a hundred X’s on the card.

And he said: I cannot tell you how many 97s, 98s and 99s that I’ve experienced, but today it was effortless. And he listed two or three  goals that he had, and he said: The only thing I was thinking about is creating and achieving my goals. I was there, but I was a spectator just like you talk about in the book. I was there. It was like I was watching myself do this.

He said: And it was the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever had, and he said: What do I now?

I said: Go do it again.

But he was very proud of himself because his goal was to shoot a hundred straight, and it took him awhile to do it, but you all know what a cool competitor he is. He’s not shooting much anymore; but, man, was he smooth and was he unstoppable and unshakable.

Rather than randomly shooting a course, hoping for a good score, great performers are always focused on how they can get better at some specific elements of their game. “Specific” is capitalized in my notes. They’re always focused on how they can get better at some specific element or elements of their game. Isolating specific parts of your game is huge.

Now, remember, I’m going to come back to this over and over again. Isolating specific parts of your game is huge. Great performers are rarely satisfied even if they win. Even though they won, there’s always something they feel that they could have done better.

You know, we traveled a lot when sporting clays first began. Won lots of tournaments, I mean lots of tournaments; but every time we’d go somewhere, because we were all new to the game, there was one target one of the days of the shoot that just kicked our butts, and we couldn’t stop talking about it on the plane. We couldn’t wait until we got back to the Greater Houston Gun Club to set that target up, to shoot it and shoot it and shoot it and try to figure out what was fooling us about that target because back then there was no Gil or Vicki.

Great performers are rarely satisfied even though they win. That’s what makes them great, self-observation, self-regulating skill used during practice and performance, self-observation. I use this a lot when I’m giving speeches and when we’re doing seminars and a lot of times in clinics, too.

Awareness of the overall pace. Stay in control. Tempo of the shots. Pace between pairs. Tempo between stands. Self-observation when practiced can allow you to actually step outside of yourself and analyze how things are going and allow you to be able to adapt to changing conditions, the weather, not feeling good, getting a headache, trap problems.

God, the first U.S. Open it took us six and a half hours to shoot a hundred birds. There were trap problems right and left. I mean, you should have been there. It was horrible.

But being able to step out of the situation and realize that you can get mad at it or you can accept it. The people that were getting mad at it weren’t doing themselves any good. If you can accept it and move on, life is good. Eventually you’re going to have to face something like that. Referee problems. You-all are going to have to face that. Officiating in our game unfortunately is the last thing that people think about. You’re going to have to learn to deal with that. You’ve got to be able to step outside of who you are competing and look at the situation for what it is, analyze it and move on.

Top performers are able to do this more systematically than others. It becomes an established part of their routine. Being able to turn it off and then back on via your routines is critical. Turning it off is the most critical part. Turning your routine and turning your concentration on what you’re doing off when you get out of the stand is critical. Top performers are really good at this. They don’t have to have music in their earphones and they don’t have to go off by themselves. They can talk to each other during the shoot between stands. They’re not going to go crazy, but, you know, they’re always talking about other things.

I know Nathan Pakish used to say that he would juggle shotgun shells or he’d stand on one foot and juggle a shell to see if he could balance on a rock or something with just one foot. He was always doing something. He wasn’t trying to get away from everybody. He wasn’t worried about having conversations.

Top performers are able to do this more systematic than others. It becomes an established part of their routine, being able to turn it off and then back on via your routines. Turning it off is critical. Any performance or practice is useless without feedback. Top performers judge themselves differently than others. Their judgments are very specific just like their goals. Average performers are content to say I did great, I did poorly, I did okay. Best performers judge themselves against the standard that’s relevant for what they’re trying to achieve.

Sometimes you would compare your performance to your personal best or you could compare your performance to the top score.

I had an e-mail from Doss Bourgeois who went out to Clay Mounds this last weekend, and I think he missed two in the five stand, and I think he came third overall in the Main event.

 Doug: Yeah, he shot 92.

 Gil: Yeah, and 95 was the winner. Okay.

 Doug: Right.

 Gil: And I think you shot pretty well over there, too, didn’t you? Is that where you shot your score, Doug?

 Doug: Yeah. I shot over there. It wasn’t bad.

Gil: But what I want to bring out here is when you go and shoot a tournament like that you need to have specific goals. Know what they are. And we can talk about those specific goals a little later on in the program, but the more specific your goals are, the more specific your analysis and your feedback can be, and it’s all about the feedback; and when everything becomes feedback, it’s all good.

The best performers judge themselves against the standard that’s relevant for what they’re trying to achieve. The key is to choose comparisons that stretch you just beyond your limit. If your standards are too high when you’re judging your competitions or your goals,   the achieving of your goals, if your standards are too high, they’ll be discouraging and certainly not instructive. If they’re too low, there’s no achievement.

Taking Responsibility for Performance

Gil: Deciding what caused the errors is the most critical part of self- evaluation. Now, that’s one of the unique things about our system. Once you start working on being really smooth, once you’re early in the breakpoint, you can better evaluate why you missed.

I had a lesson with my son. In fact, I think I’ve had two lessons with my son. He’s starting to shoot a little bit more; and when I showed him how to be early in the breakpoint, he was blown away, absolutely blown away.

But because we have taken the excess movements out of your game and left you with minimum movement, you all begin to realize that the errors that occur are much more easily focused on, not the fact that you missed but why you missed.

Deciding what caused the errors is the most critical part of self- evaluation. Average performers look at errors and say they were caused by factors outside of their control: Targets are too hard, luck, weather, noise, glasses, chokes, coaches, shooters, squad mates. Top performers take responsibility for their performance, good and bad.

Listen up now. This is not just a difference in personality or attitude. Best performers have set highly-specific process goals and strategies for themselves, much like we talked about last month when I was going through Doug’s plan for his next year. It’s all set up so that there’s something learned from every situation that you put yourself into, therefore, the tournament no longer becomes a test. It’s an opportunity to learn something.

Best performers have thought through exactly how they intend to achieve what they want; therefore, when something doesn’t work, they can pinpoint certain elements that went wrong. By creating specific goals, they have removed the random excesses from their game just like minimum movement because their failures become more obvious. It’s having very specific process goals: I’m going to do this.

Top performers focus relentlessly on their own performance. They don’t care about anyone else’s. They shoot the tournament. It wasn’t perfect. It could have been downright unpleasant. The top performers respond by adapting the way they act to what is going on.

Average performers respond  by  avoiding  those  situations  in the future. They have goals like I want to have fun today. Average performers go into a situation with no clear idea of how they intend to act or how their actions would contribute to reaching their goal; therefore, when things turn to shit, they attribute the problems to vague forces that are outside of their control. They are clueless about how to adapt and perform better next time which is why they had rather just avoid going through anything like that again, which means they have zero chance of getting any better.

Boy, there are a lot of people in sporting clays today that are doing that. You hear them all the time, you know. Oh, I’m just here to have fun. I’m not serious about competition. In fact, Vicki and I were in a res- taurant in Las Vegas at a vision seminar having breakfast with a fellow.

He said: I’m into visual things and blah blah blah, and I’m really not wanting to be competitive at sporting clays. I shoot skeet.

And I looked at him square in the eye, and I said: Now, let me just say one thing to you, and he looked back at me and I said: You can’t tell me that you wouldn’t love to be able to feel like that every time you went to a sporting clay shoot that you could score a minimum score of 82 to 84. You can’t tell me that you wouldn’t love to be able to do that, and he stopped. He grinned. He didn’t have to say I was right. I knew I was. But what he was really telling me is he’s not willing to commit the time and the effort to do that, and that’s okay.

I have no problem with that. I don’t. But he’s going to be an average performer. He’s going to always blame things that happen on something else. He’s not going to take responsibility for the outcome. He’s going to be average or mediocre because he’s not going to take responsibility.

Take responsibility for the outcome. Average performers stop trying to do better because they don’t want to have to face the failure that they fear will come. Let me say that again. Average performers stop trying to do better because they don’t want to have to face the inevitable failure that they know is going to happen again. In my opin- ion one of the reasons is is they don’t know what created the failure.

I had a fellow email our website and say: How do I evaluate or troubleshoot a miss? And I started conversing with him on the e-mail, and I just explained to him that the top shooters rarely correct lead. It’s more going to be focus on the target or tempo with the target, moving their hold point out, changing their breakpoint, making sure that  their vision is good on the target, but they have very few mechanical problems in their game. They have practiced their games to a level so that their move is the same on every single shot. That takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of very specific goals when you practice. It takes a lot of repetitions with immediate feedback, a lot of repetitions with immediate feedback.

Top performers, because of their specific approach, come up with ideas for how to improve the next performance, and they work. The reason they work is because they have such specific goals in the first place. That’s the reason they work. They know why they’re going to work. They know that even if their goal turns out to be the wrong the goal they’re going to learn something from it being the wrong goal. They’re not afraid to be wrong. They’re not afraid to fail.

They are the first ones to come up and accept responsibility for the outcome. They’re not afraid. They’re not afraid to repeat the performance at another tournament, that is, after they’ve not done so well because they’ve developed new strategies that they can believe in because they are based on their specific goals and approaches that have worked in the past. I keep saying the specific goals and approaches thing. Specific goals and approaches, very specific goals and approaches with immediate feedback.

They approach the tournament with more specific goals and strategies since their previous experience was essentially a test of specific goals and strategies. The tournament is not a test anymore. It’s not a pass or fail. It’s an opportunity to try different strategies and see what happens without the worry of failure because everything that happens to you now is feedback.

I think that was one of the things that surprised Doug so much when we were going over his next year in my office here, is we outlined bigger tournaments. Can you do this? Can you do that? Do you want   to do this? Do you want to do that? But now you ought to try to put yourself in as many small weekend tournaments as you can, keeping your family in balance, you understand, personal family life in balance. But you need to put yourself in position to be in a tournament as often as you can and have specific goals when you go into a tournament.

If you want to see if you shoot better in the morning or the afternoon, shoot in the morning one time. Be there at first light. Be the first squad out. Be the last squad out. See what kind of diet you have to have. If you don’t shoot well in the afternoon, see what you’ve got to do, what kind of meals you have to eat. See what makes you tick to have a good performance in the afternoon. That’s what the smaller tournaments are to be used for. That’s why the log is so important. It’s so important. That way you can evaluate what goes on. You have an opportunity to develop new strategies. Well, I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to do this next time. Okay. Good. That’s your next goal for your next tournament or your next practice session.