2012-07 – July 2012 Coaching Hour – Effortless Competitions

…….July – Effortless Competitions…….

– Introduction

 – The Coaching Hour Makes Us Better, Too

 – Recalling a Zone Experience

 – Turning Key Priorities into Powerful Levers

 – More About Looking Behind the Barrel

Brian B: The big thing is that you think that you’re putting out too much information; but there’s a bunch of us out here that are thinking a lot of information but we’ve got to learn how to chunk it.

 Vicki: Exactly.

 Gil: You are so right. It never ceases to amaze me how much good information comes out of this, and I think I’ve told y’all this before, but I’ll tell you again. If it’s 10 years, that’s 120 months. I was kind of putting together in my mind how many hours each time I’ve put together in planning these sessions, and it’s somewhere between six and eight hours; and when you start adding up that many hours for a 120 sessions, that gets to be a lot of hours.

One of the benefits, I think, to us and for you is the obligation to come up with some new material and research some new material every month and put ourselves on the spot to present it in a way that it not only makes sense, but it helps you become better shooters and has, in turn, made us much better as leaders and instructors.

It’s been a great journey and we expect to continue it. It’s probably going to take on a different format when the membership website gets up which is going to be probably another 60 days, it looks like right now, but we’re getting close. We’re working some bugs out. So, anyway, it’s coming and we’re excited about it. We’re excited about some of the things we’re going to be able to do, and we’ll talk about that a little later.

Recalling a Zone Experience

Gil: We were going to Canada, and I got an email from Gary, and it said something about look at the results in Austin. You’ll be proud. We played phone tag and finally caught up with him, and he told me that he had kind of a great out-of-body experience in a tournament. I believe it was in Austin, wasn’t it, Gary?

 Gary: Yeah, it was Austin.

 Gil: And he started telling me about it, and I said: Would you mind hanging onto this? Let’s talk about it on the coaching hour. He volunteered. So I’m taking him up. So if I ever ask you that and you don’t want to do it, don’t say yes because I’m going to do it.

So give us a lead-in. Was it a Saturday or a Sunday? Had you prepared to go to the shoot; or did you just kind of go as a last minute thing? Tell me a little bit about what happened.

 Gary: Well, it was a Sunday shoot. I guess I sort of had it in the back of my mind that I would go, I think two or three weekends before that we had the state shoot, and I had planned to take that time off after the state shoot; and, as it turned out, we just got really busy at work, and I had a three-day seminar to go to in Dallas.

So, as it turns out, I was taking that couple of weeks off, whether I wanted to from shooting, whether I wanted to or not. There was lots of work in that seminar, and I got back in town and I, in all candor, I really considered not going because I was pretty much just worn out; but Greg and I talked about going. My son is in town from college for the summer, and he wanted to go. So at the last minute we decided we would go.

 Gil: That was after you checked with Rachel, right?

 Gary: Well, I didn’t have to because Rachel had left town on a little family trip.

 Gil: Ah, okay. Okay. I just wanted to get things in  perspective.

 Gary: But that is on the checklist now. At any rate, I think there was no plan to show up with a “I really don’t care much what happens today attitude,” but there were two things that struck me after the shoot, one of which we talked about a little bit, and that was, I went into that thing with zero expectations. Hadn’t given it a thought, and I think I might have been literally just too worn out for my left brain to get in the way as much as it would normally like to. I don’t know if you can plan to do that or not, but I think that’s kind of how it developed.

The second thing that struck me when I thought about it in  retrospect is how little I actually had to do with the results that I got  that day, and by that I mean I had not been shooting. I hadn’t been thinking about the shoot. I normally try to go into a  shoot  with  a specific process goal. I have to tell you. I didn’t have a goal of any kind, and we just kind of stumbled up to the first cage and Greg said: You’re up first. The very first one was a ten-bird station, and the next thing I knew I had ten X’s on the card and was getting ready to pull birds for somebody else and it just kind of felt that way the whole  day.

Everything was easy. It looked like they were throwing   Frisbees.

I knew I was on a good card, and if I hadn’t known I would have realized it because about halfway through Greg and Russell stopped talking to me.

 Greg: We were talking about him.

 Gil: So, Greg, if you were carrying the conversation, you were talking over his head.

 Greg: Yes. Exactly.

 Gary: Nobody said anything about, you know, gee, you’re almost done. You’ve only dropped three.

 Greg: But we wanted to remind him.

 Gary: But, you know, it just happened. I really would like to say that I had a plan, that I had some sort of plan that I can recreate. You know, I’ve been looking for those things, what did I do that caused that experience to happen, and I’ve won before but not like that. I wouldn’t call it a real difficult course. It certainly wasn’t easy. I shot a 95. I was the only one out of about 80 people, I think, that had a score in the 90s, and it just happened.

So, like I said, going into it with no expectations was no doubt part  of it; but then it does kind of strike me that things lined up for me that day. It was a high sky, clear blue sky, and my record is real clear with my eyes in the clear blue sky. I’m going to do a handful of birds better than  I would with a milky sky. I haven’t had a back issue in a year and a half. That’s really the first time that I can remember since I’ve started shoot- ing that I’ve gone that long without any pain, and I just didn’t have any expectations. So it all just kind of lined up, and before I realized really kind of what was happening, it was about over. It was fun.

 Gil: Greg, what did it look like to you?

 Greg: Gary, he shot well. I mean, everything he did, he had very consistent breakpoints, he didn’t really talk much. We didn’t talk much about shooting. I mean, we just shot one station and went to the next station and shot it. You know, I had a good day, too; but it was one of those deals that he just went one station to the next and knocked them dead. It was really pretty fun to watch.

Gil: No expectation.

 Gary: A big deal.

 Gil: Hey, Jeff Wolfe, are you hearing this?

 Jeff: Yes.

 Gil: It’s a big deal for you. This is something that you and I have been talking about and something I’ve had those, quite a few of them, as a matter of fact, and what Gary is describing is just the way it happens. But it’s almost, Gary, like you’re a spectator to your own performance.

 Gary: I will say this. I realized on the way home there was something about the experience that created a better mental picture or a better recall, a better memory of the deal. Because on the way home, and I can’t normally do this, in my mind I waltzed back through every station on that course, and I could remember every presentation. The ones that I had the hardest time recalling is I had two out of the five birds that I dropped that at first when I started thinking about it I couldn’t remember. I remembered all the other stations.

I just walked through it in my mind and could remember every station, and I finally remembered the two that were missing where I dropped a bird that I couldn’t recall earlier, but it was strange the way I was able to recall that whole course. Don’t ask me to do that today; but I could sure do it for a few days, and I thought about it a lot, trying to look for that key of what did I do that was different and what do I take away from this, and I do realize having no expectations is a big deal.

I do struggle with the concept of how  do  you  avoid  having  those expectations. I think sometimes it just happens to us and the circumstances in which we went over there to shoot and what had been going on for me outside of shooting for the few weeks before then kind of set it up; but the other thing that it did was it just, more or less, clarified that if we can get better at getting out of our own way and letting the subconscious do what it knows how to do is stout. It’s powerful and we get in the way.

 Gil: Tell me about your ability to visualize what it was you were about to do on each station. I would think that in a situation like that your ability to analyze the targets and your ability to visualize what it was you were about to do must have been just second nature. I know it has been for me when I’ve had those experiences. Everything seems obvious. Even in those complex situations when you’re in that state of mind seems very obvious; therefore, there is no fear.

 Gary: There was no doubt at any point about what I was going to do and there was no second guessing, no consideration of another plan. In fact, I can tell you on the very first station that I ran the first sta- tion. I don’t remember if Russell or Greg shot next, but I think Russell shot next, and he walked up there and it was a true pair, and he walked up and shot the birds in exactly the opposite way that I shot them. And when he did that, it was almost stunning because it was like, well, I didn’t even think about that. You know, by then I was done and I had run the station; but when I looked at what he did, it made a lot of sense.

I’m not so sure he didn’t do it the best way, but I looked at the birds and said, that one there and that one there, and I never even gave it another thought. It was obvious what the plan was going to be for every pair; and I don’t remember doing anything really. Except I do remember when I haven’t shot for a while, I tend to do a better job of really looking with still eyes to pick up the bird and not move until I see the bird. I do remember doing that; but I don’t remember having any conscious thought about any of the mechanical stuff, gun hold point or anything like that.

I have changed my routine near the end of last year. I go up   there and I visualized the shot from picking the bird up to the first breakpoint, and then I visualized where I’m going to look for the second bird, and I’ve started stopping at that point because both you and Steve have emphasized to me that at the point where I am now, how that transition to the second bird, eyes first to the second bird and never shorting the focal point on the second bird is a big deal now to pick up some targets on a course.

I really don’t remember that I sat down and thought this out. It just kind of happened, but I’ve found that if I will visualize the shot through the first breakpoint and then feel my gun going to the breakpoint on the second bird and my eyes going somewhere else, my eyes going to the pickup point or finding that target and the gun going someplace away from the target to the breakpoint, that if I’ll just stop right there, that’s the last thing I think about before I call pull, that the actual execution of the shot on the second bird is I don’t have to think about it. It’ll just happen. That transition from the first bird to the second bird has been a big thing for me over the last year or so.

Gil: Uh-huh. I think that was one of the goals that you made the year after you punched into master class when you were struggling with who you were going to become as a shooter. You were looking at being dropped into the shark tank and were struggling with goals,  and you and I talked about that and said if you’re the best one on the course in transition between the first bird and the second bird, then there’s an opportunity to use that goal and to use that ability to gain you some targets and allow you to win some shoots. I don’t know whether you remember that or not.

 Gary: Oh, no, I remember it very well. This will be hard for you to believe, I’m sure, but it was probably a full year after that before I committed to anything and was doing anything in training to help make that happen because there was a point I punched into master class still believing there were some birds I couldn’t hit consistently, and I was still working on a lot of mechanical stuff and a lot of just how do I hit this target consistently things, and I continued to do that for some time.

I think it was during the season last year when I really committed to that transition to the second bird, and that’s what I was going to work on. I even go out occasionally, even when I’m shooting singles, Greg has seen me do this, call pull and take my eyes and gun to some imaginary bird somewhere else and then come back over and shoot the target    that was actually thrown as if it were the second  bird.

I’ve done that quite a bit. I do that a lot when I’m practicing by myself. It’s a little embarrassing when you’re shooting with somebody else, because I’m sure it looks a little bit silly, but I started doing that last year, and then I’ve changed the thought process as I described awhile ago about what I think about before I’m ready to call pull so that it really doesn’t emphasize the transition to the second bird, and I think that’s been worth a lot of targets. I’m up about four birds on my average from last year on an overall basis. I don’t put too much stock in that, but the number of times that I’m in the 90s compared to what it was last year and the year before and consistently in the 80s, even on the days that aren’t stellar, it’s different.

I’m just learning how to live in that arena, and I still have days when it doesn’t work. I had one day, the last day at state which was interestingly enough the last time I shot before I had this really great shoot in Austin, but the last day at state I was just atrocious. I was out of it, but it was 107 and we’ve been shooting for three days and I’m probably not really up to that right now. But I think that transition, that’s the only thing I can tell you in the last year that I’ve been working on that I think has been that big of a deal for me, and transition to the second target is a big deal.

 Gil: That, and not shorting the focal point. We still see that happening.

 Gary: Well, that’s part of it, yeah. That’s part of it. I think that’s a big part of it. What I have to emphasize to myself is that most of the time the eyes and the gun have to go different places. After the first shot, the eyes and the gun have to go in different directions.

 Gil: I’m going to introduce something a little bit later on in the show that is going to bring that back home in a way that you haven’t thought about it, but what we’re talking about is something that I had written down in the process goal segment that I wanted to go over with everybody. I’m not going to go over the whole thing because I want to get to a different section here.

Turning Key Priorities into Powerful Levers

Gil: A few months ago we talked about building a framework of long- term memory to immediately be able to distinguish between what’s important, what’s not important every time; and I think it’s been four or five months, and that was one of those shows where I talk most of the time, and it was like chewing coconut. The more I talked the bigger it got. It’s kind of like the CD on post-shot routines where I talked a lot. You guys need to listen to those because there is a lot of good information on those, but I wasn’t able to go over this. It’s a very short, little piece here.

Like you said, you finally committed to this goal of being the best in transition, and I just want to summarize that by saying success doesn’t depend on getting everything right, but it relies on identifying a few key priorities and making them into powerful levers. As they get better, they, in turn, move every part of your game to a higher and higher level. The patterns that matter most are the ones that when they start to shift dislodge and remake other patterns in your game.

What you’re talking about right now is exactly  what I  just  read. You picked out a couple of things in your game and you made them priorities, and even though it took you two years to really commit to them as being priorities, when you made them a priority, then they shifted one particular part of your game in the right direction; but that

was such that you charted into a powerful level that shifted all parts of your game into a higher level.

Now, you can’t do that if you’re struggling in C-class because there’s way too many variables in your game. You’re just trying to break the damn target. Okay? But when you get into master class, this is part of learning to compete, isolating certain things that you feel like if you do them and commit to them and do them enough and do them well enough so that they become unconscious that they will carry your whole game to another level. That’s how you get better and that’s how you get better at competing.

Committing to breakpoints could be one. Looking at  the  front at the end could be one. Soft, lateral move could be one, being the best in transition. Eyes first in the gun could be one. There are a lot of different cues, different things that you can use or that you could concentrate on doing and make as goals for what you  want to  do and how you’re going to get better; but once you commit to them, and I’ll be honest with you, at the level that some of you guys are at you can concentrate on one or two little things, eyes still when you call pull, lateral move, front edge at the end, the things I just mentioned, and if you commit yourself to all of those things, they’re going to turn into levers that will bring everything in your game up to another level. It’s having the patience, the commitment and the dogged determination to see it through that allows you to have these kinds of performances.

People can say all they want to say  about easy targets. Gary, you said they weren’t the most challenging, but let me tell you. It doesn’t matter the difficulty of the target. It matters how you play them, and you were able to do that that day, and I’m  happy for  you. I think it’s something that is going to happen to you again on     a more frequent basis if you can keep the expectation out of it. To me, and I think Vicki would agree, because we all like to go to big tournaments, the expectation wizard gets in our brain so easily and the expectation usually will take many faces, and he’ll do everything he can to get in there; but you’ve got to learn to recognize him and realize that when you’re out there on game day your job is just to make the plan and work the plan, which sounds to me like kind of what happened to you.

So that’s great. Thank you. You realize that the one thing you can’t do is want to go out there and do that again. You’ve got to go and do what it takes for you to concentrate on one certain thing. It’s just like getting up and wanting to make a really great presentation. We’ve been using the slide show a lot, and we had a session in Kiowa Creek last week. Didn’t have a projector or a screen. Just had a computer. Somebody asked a question, and I was showing the animations to another trainer who is in Afghanistan for 105 days and then back home for 30. His job in Afghanistan is to train all the bodyguards and to be the lead bodyguard whenever the dignitary is above a certain rank, and he’s been coming to see us. I think this is the third or fourth time because he shoots pistols and he’s been enjoying shooting shotguns, but he’s been coming to us to learn how to train other people, and he made no bones about it the second time he saw us.

He said: I want you to know something. I ain’t never going to be a shotgun shooter. I love to bird hunt, but the reason I’m coming is to soak up all of your information. Because this is my second time to be with you and you’ve learned so much between the last time and now, and I expect if I keep coming back once a year you’re going to have learned enough more new stuff so that I can keep coming and to learn how to communicate better; and we thanked him, number one, and said you’re welcome back anytime, and if a firefight breaks out, I want to be on your team.

We were sitting there, and I was explaining something to him and I just began to talk. I know that surprises most of you, but I began to play those animations and people began to come in, and before I knew it the hour was gone, and I’ve got to tell you I hadn’t planned any of that. This is happening to me more and more. I just started talking, and I went into that little zone that I get in. And Vicki has seen me do this hundreds of times, and I just play off of everything.

Rather than worrying about what I’m going to say next, I just    do. The thoughts come and the questions come at the right time,   and it just turns into one of those perfect presentations. Then you realize you’re doing it and you can’t stop it and think, well, here, I’m in my zone, and, man, this is great; but eventually you’ve got to start thinking about how to end it. If you start thinking about how to end it, you’re going to screw it up. I’ve learned just to keep talking, and then all of a sudden when people get overloaded, they just give you that I’m overloaded look, and you can quit talking and everybody      is happy. But you can’t schedule one of those great performances. I mean, right now you can’t.

Once you’ve had 25 of those zone experiences, it becomes a whole lot easier for you to know exactly what it takes for you to have one of those; but between now and then you’ve got to be comfortable with going and having no expectation and seeing what happens, and hope- fully you’ll have some more of those to tell us about. So, anyway, good.

More About Looking Behind the Barrel

Gil: I want to talk about looking behind the barrel. I’ve had some ah-has recently in sharing this with some people. This was back in February, I wrote these few notes. The very act of putting the gun in front of the target without seeing it makes the shooter want to look at it. When the target comes to the gun, the gun is part of the picture and is, therefore, significant because the target is the actuator, not the gun. Focus is enhanced and a fixed focus ratio is more easily achieved.

The more you use this, the more obvious it becomes. If you think of inserting in front and thinking how far in front, if you concentrate on looking at the target behind the gun, it seems that it diminishes the gun. We are actually creating a visual move of focusing intently away from the gun to the target. This enhances 95/5 ratio which is great because it allows for the gun to be there, but de-emphasizes the bird/ barrel relationship. It’s all about the bird.

That was back in February. I had a lesson with John Milek last week and had a lesson with Doss on Sunday, and I want to just kind of bring y’all up to speed with what we’re seeing and how we’re teaching looking behind the gun. I think Vicki would agree with me, this is a very powerful thing. There’s some things that we’re learning about how it works and it’s just a very powerful thing. I’m understanding a lot more about the difficulties that people have trying not to look at the gun.

As we teach looking behind the gun or away from the gun, we   are becoming more and more convinced that we have stumbled into something here that is huge. The subtle move in the beginning is critical. I don’t know whether y’all have all seen the animations; but in the animation when you see the bird come out, the little green dot starts moving really really slow. It’s not lateral. It’s not up and it’s very, very subtle. I said this to John Milek first, I had a lesson with him on Saturday morning. He’s a pediatrician or OB/GYN from Thibodaux, Louisiana, a great guy who’s having trouble moving up; and I said: John, I want you to think of the gun movement in the beginning as     a completely different thing than you’ve been thinking about. We’ve told you lateral. We’ve told you not up. We’ve told you toward the breakpoints, but those don’t seem to click.

He said: Well, what do you want me to do?

I said: When you see that bird, I want you to move the gun away  from the bird. When the target is seen, the very thought of moving away from the bird seems to make the move more consistent. The move becomes not only consistent but easier to grasp and reproduce. Without exception when the shooter understands the subtlety of the first move of the muzzle, success comes quickly. It’s much easier for the merger to take place. Stabilizing the picture is a natural into the shot, and as they come together the eye naturally goes to the front of the target.

I want to go back and reemphasize what I just said. You’ve all heard us talk about lateral movement, move to the breakpoint. In our next book, the writer interviewed Doss for quite a long time, and his life- long nemesis has been moving vertical, not lateral. There is something to looking at it from the standpoint of when you see the bird move slowly, immediately, and subtly away from the bird. What we’re begin- ning to understand is that away from the bird means not up. What we’re finding is when people can embrace the initial move as muzzles away from the bird, the gun takes the line better at the point of merger and the point of insertion. It eliminates vertical movement altogether. And because “away” is a relative term, if the bird is a fast bird, away is still away. If the bird is a slow bird, away is still away from the bird.

I don’t know how many times Vicki and I and Brian and some of the other guys that are coaches out there have talked about don’t go vertical. You’re boxing the bird. Away is away, away from the target. Move the gun away from the target. As we’re teaching people to make sure the gun and the bird are going at the same speed at the end, something we call stabilizing the picture after the point of insertion, it seems that they’re having a lot easier time maintaining 95 percent focus on the bird and trusting that move because they can feel the gun and the bird move in the same place.

But the concept of having people look behind the gun at the point of insertion seems to let the shooters accept the image of the gun in the periphery without giving it any attention. We’ve been using this a lot, and I’ve got to tell you we’ve been getting some phenomenal results. I mean, these guys are coming in and shooting 68s and 72s. Jed went to a little weekend shoot after being with us for Friday and Saturday. Drove back to Nebraska, go back to Omaha that night and went to a shoot the next day just dead tired and shot an 86 when he’d only shot in the 80s a couple of times.

His text back to us is: The stabilize shit works. So there’s something to this, and part of the magic about the coaching hour is we’re able to share things as we learn. So when I had Doss the next day, I said, Doss, move away from the target with the muzzles when you see the bird. The first one is way too fast.

I said: No, no, no. You don’t have to go fast. I just don’t want you to go vertical. I don’t want you to go lateral. I don’t want you to go to the breakpoint. I want you to move away from the target. The first action the barrel makes when you see that bird is away from the target.

Now, remember what was it back in the process goals? Identifying a few key priorities and making them into powerful levers. Okay. Moving away is about to be made into a powerful lever because when you internalize the fact that when you see that bird, the instant you see it, the muzzle begins to move away from that bird, it’s never going to be up, it’s not going to be straight left, it’s not going to be to the breakpoint, it’s going to be away from that target which means you are in 100 percent reaction mode to that target. That’s the way I interpret how people are understanding this different way of talking about the initial move. The more you do it the easier it becomes, and the more you do it, the more it is a very subtle reaction to the actual speed and distance of the target because away is away.

One of the problems that John had was in his routine. When   he’d look at his breakpoint, he’d put his gun right up there in the breakpoint. He kept looking at his gun. He’s always had a flinching problem, and we’ve talked about it several times; but he keeps putting that damn gun in the picture in his routine, and one of the things we discovered is that he keeps going back to that, and that’s one of the reasons he couldn’t keep his eyes focused behind the gun. Once he understood focus behind the gun, he picked it up real fast, but his default is to always want to know too much about where that gun is.

I worked with him on looking behind the gun. He understood the concept and began to pick it up slowly. He was confused, though, when I told him to make sure everything was stable, make sure everything is moving the same speed. He said: What do you mean by stable?

I’ve never used this definition before. I was searching for one  that I hadn’t used. I looked up out on the Westheimer Parkway out there, and there were two white pickups going the same speed, same direction. I said: Look at those pickups. Do you see how they’re going the same speed? Yeah.

Do you see how the distance between them never changes? He said: Yeah.

I said: That’s stable. You know they’re going the same speed, don’t you?

He said: I got it. That makes sense to him. So far, regardless of how many times we’ve worked with him, he was trying to merge with the target and shoot quickly enough so that he wouldn’t have time to   see the barrel. He was trying to get the lead right without seeing  the barrel, and we’ve all done that. I can’t single him out as somebody who’s retarded. Okay?

We’ve all done that, and that causes you to speed up at the end. You can shoot okay on close targets, 25 yards or closer, maybe 28 on a good day; but you can’t use that on long shots because your muzzle speed is always out, you don’t have control of the muzzle speed at the end of the shot. Now, because he had muzzle awareness in the setup, it increased muzzle awareness in the shot; and every time he flinched he realized his eyes were looking toward the gun which confirms for me the importance of learning and practicing looking behind the gun.

Like, Ron Bacari was telling us a couple of months ago, he said: Even when I do my flashlight drill now, when I finish the mount, I’m looking to the left of the light or to the right of light. He’s never looking at the light because he’d be looking right down the gun. When you can build in that habit, because now your eyes have a specific place to be at the point of insertion, there’s so many things good to happen, not the least of which is you’re able to maintain a momentum focus ratio of 95/5 on the target because the eyes, again, have a clear, understood place to be at the point of insertion and at the shot. This accepting the muzzle in the periphery is getting bigger and bigger for us.

We talked to a lot of people in Canada. We taught a lot of people, and people would have a hard time trusting the shot, letting the gun go where it wants to go. I know, Gary, you know what that’s about, and Greg.

We all have a problem letting that gun go, and it’s periphery acceptance. There’s no doubt about that. When you exceed your peripheral acceptance, your focus ratio goes straight down in the hole, but it seems as though looking behind the gun and making and holding onto the shot until you feel like everything is locked up and going the same speed makes it easier for people to maintain their focus ratio and to trust the result.

I don’t know about you, Vicki, but I I know that since we’ve been stressing this this year the guys up in Canada all said this is so much easier than just trusting it. I said: Well, you’re still trusting it.

Yeah, but I’m not trying to trust it without looking at the gun. I know where my eyes are supposed to be. They’re not ever supposed to be there. They’re supposed to be behind the gun over there on the bird, and that’s where I want to have my eyes; and it seems as though once they internalize that, the tendency to want to check the barrel vanishes.

This is also huge in the visual process. When you visualize in your pre-shot routine, with your visual process, what you visualize in your routine and the reality of what you do in the shot are the same, focus on the target is enhanced and the zone occurs. Let me say that again. Because we now have a specific place for our eyes to be, which is not on the barrel, it is to the right of the gun or to the left of gun away from the muzzle, we’re training our eyes to look away from the muzzle because that’s where the gun has got to be. Now that we have a specific place for our eyes to be, it’s easier for you to visualize the shot in a clear visual picture.

So your visualization process becomes your reality, and when that happens the visual process is easier, decision making is easier, shooting is easier, focus is easier. Everything becomes easier. There is a more clear, concise plan to both parts of the brain, just less of chance of a conflict because you can see this happen, guys.

And we’ve seen this happen to shooters. Take somebody like Doss who’s a very accomplished shooter. He was pulling the trigger when he mounted the gun, and that’s all well and good and he’s real good at it; but once I got him to slow down and just be with the bird another 10 or 15 feet to make sure he was going the same speed, after about three boxes in a row without a miss, he looked at me and he said: I’ve ink balled everything. It’s stable.

I said: That might be a trend. You might want to try that more often. I’m convinced that once you can accept the gun in the picture, you know it’s there, it disappears. In my own shooting, we were up   in Canada shooting 55- and 80-yard crossers that they measured, and these guys are having a hard time hitting them because they were moving too fast, and they said: Well, you shoot it. Twelve shots later after not missing one bird they said: I want to try it now.

They all begin to hit them, and they all began to understand     the value of feeling that picture stable at the end because when it’s stable the bird and the gun are going the same speed. You’ve now conquered the biggest variable that pressure creates which is excessive gun speed, which in turn, creates excessive muzzle awareness. The brain understands where the eyes must be focused for the successful shot, and because of that the eyes are less tempted to peek at the lead which is the leading cause of inconsistent and missed targets. Your focus ratio becomes more clear what you had for success.

As your focus ratio becomes more clear and defined, easier to repeat and visualize, as your focus ratio becomes more clear and defined, the PA is more easily expanded. Remember, adjust the gun speed at the point of insertion, not the lead. Don’t care about the lead. What I want you to do is as they come together, emphasize that the gun and the bird are moving the same speed. The instant they’re going the same speed, pull the trigger because the lead is correct. What you’re actually doing is giving the subconscious a specific time to correct whatever lead needs to be corrected while you adjust the gun speed.

Push yourself to play farther and farther in front of the target and look farther and farther behind the gun. This will allow you to have an unlimited PA and a fixed focus ratio of 95/5 or better. When your future and your reality are equal, you are in the zone.

Gary, what was your focus ratio on that day?

 Gary: I haven’t given it any thought relative to whether it was 90 percent or 95 percent, but in a relative sense it was way more than normal. I mean, as I recall the shots on anything that had any speed to it, it was like the gun was nonexistent; and even on the real slow stuff or quartering in where you have more of a tendency to see it, it was still 90 percent plus.

 Gil: Okay. I would encourage you to go back through that day again several times and try to put some sort of a feel to it because I think you’re going to find where you’re at in your game, the biggest thing you need to define is what kind of focus ratio you have to produce the performance like you had, and understand that your focus ratio is an average. Some people have a high focus ratio on some shots and a low focus ratio on the other, and your focus ratio is more or less an average of what you had the whole day. Just think about that because it’s our opinion in talking with the people that we’ve talked to that the really great shooters know what that focus ratio is.

They don’t identify it as a focus ratio, but they know what kind of focus they have to have to have that zone experience, and they more importantly know what it looks like; and when they can’t produce it, they know they’re not going to have one of those good days. I’d like for you to think about that. I want to talk about that between now and the next coaching hour. I really want you to go through that and think about it. I think that is something that you need to be more aware of because I feel like that’s the key to opening up that zone performance on command. When you know what it’s got to be, and you’ve done it enough at that level at practice, it’s easy for you to call that back out because you know what it looks like; and it’s easier to do that if you can accept the fact that when you mount the gun, your eyes have to be looking away from the gun, everything gets better.