We start this session with a recap of a previous topic, how the subconscious works for happiness, and then we dive into the main topic: how and why breakthrough moments are achieved.
We talk to several shooters who have recently experienced significant breakthrough moments to help us dial in on the common ingredients. We finish with a summary of Daniel Coyle’s most recent book, The Little Book of Talent.
Gil: Before I get into that breakthrough moment, I want to reference something that we talked about back in May when we talked about how the conscious process is future and past, and it remembers the past and dreams about the future. But the subconscious process is the present. The only way you can be in the present is to be subconscious. If you think about anything, you’re not in the present.
I went over several other things that I felt were relevant regarding a short movie that I saw on an airplane, as a matter of fact, about the brain and how it works and how it processes. Touch and balance are our two most powerful senses. The greater the emotional investment, the more easily you’re fooled. That’s how magicians fool your eye. The greater the emotional investment, the more easily you’re fooled. You need to control your emotions.
Toward the end I kind of went through it real fast, so there was one thing I wanted to reemphasize. I called Doug Mellen the day after that I did this; and he said, Man, I can’t believe how much information was in that one segment. And I said, Yeah, and I need to reemphasize a few other things. So I’m going to reemphasize a couple of things.
When you visualize what the shot will look like, not necessarily the lead but what the end picture is going to look like, when you know it’s coming from the right, if you’re right handed, you know you’re going to be looking at that bird across the gun. If it’s coming from the left and you’re right handed, you know you’re going to be looking at that bird away from that gun. To be able to visualize exactly what that shot is going to look like according to the techniques you’re using makes the emotional part of the post-shot routine more effective. The better the visualization in the pre-shot routine, the easier the emotional reaction to the success, which in turn, imprints more quickly and more deeply in the post-shot routine. The post-shot routine is where the happiness should occur to give the subconscious a clear picture of exactly what makes you happy.
I thought one of the things that came out of that little short clip that I watched over and over again once I found it on the computer, was the fact that the post-shot routine is where the happiness should occur because it gives the subconscious a clear picture of exactly what makes you happy. But what we see when people shoot is we don’t see strong, positive post-shot routines. What we typically see are negative emotional reactions to a failure, and I’ve got to tell you, nothing is more confusing to your subconscious. The guy who you want to play for you in the game is confused by that.
The clearer your goals are and the more consistent your emotional reactions are to what occurs, the better your conscious will get the picture of exactly what you want. This game is riddled with people who go to the tournament and hope to shoot a good score. They’re never in the present; therefore, they are continually disappointed, and their subconscious is so confused because it’s getting mixed signals at best.
Be very clear with your goals and your emotions when you’re shooting, and invest in the correct reactions in your post-shot routine. I think the post-shot routine is probably the most forgotten routine out there, and in many ways, to get into that zone deeper and deeper, it’s probably one of the most important ones because it really defines for your subconscious brain what it is that makes you happy; and if you don’t ever pat your subconscious brain on the back, it’s eventually going to shut down. So be aware of that.
Gil: I was talking to Chris Schwarzer the other day, and he called me and he was doing good. He’s been working on being congruent, and he asked me just a point blank question, Why do I check the lead? Why do I keep checking the lead when I know it’s not going to work? Why do I keep checking?
Well, I think that it has a lot to do with what we’re going to talk about tonight. Jeff Wolfe emailed me a month or so ago after he finished a tournament. He emailed me Monday morning and said, I want patience and I want it now.
He emailed me that, and I immediately picked up the phone and called him. He had shot a tournament with some pretty good shooters, and the first day he didn’t shoot very well and the second day he shot a 93, and he knew he wasn’t shooting well the first day. And it wasn’t until he shot well the second day that he realized what he did on the first day. He was trying to impress the people he was shooting with as opposed to playing his own game.
One of the reasons he wanted patience and wanted it now was patience with himself for making such stupid mistakes, and I had a little chat with him, and explained to him that becoming skillful at anything requires a lot of hours of actually doing the thing.
You can talk to Clyde McAfee about that. He does a lot of demos in the Academy stores for Shimano’s, and he’d put a teacup out there and he would pitch a jig into that teacup from how far away, Clyde?
Clyde: Usually about 20 feet.
Gil: About 20 feet. The tiles were 12-inch squares. So he’d back up 20 tiles and he’d toss that thing in that teacup; and if you’ve never tried that, that’s not as easy as it sounds. You can understand how to do it and you can have done it a few times and you can be pretty good at pitching out of a boat at 10 or 12 feet; but when it goes out there at 20 feet and your target is three-and-a-half-inches wide, it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to become skillful at that because there are a lot of variables in everything that happens.
I think you told me at one point in time that you did that every night, didn’t you?
Clyde: Yeah. You put 50 of them in a cup every night before you quit..
Gil: Fifty times every night?
Clyde: No. You had to put it in the cup 50 times.
Gil: You had to get it in the cup 50 times?
Clyde: Right.
Gil: Not just 50 throws, but 50 successful throws?
Clyde: Correct.
Gil: Okay. Yeah. And did your mind ever wander when you were doing that? I mean, was that boring to you or was it a challenge?
Clyde: It was a challenge.
Gil: Listen to what he just said, and I hadn’t talked to him about this, either. I didn’t set this up. Tell me what the challenge was. What made it a challenge to you?
Clyde: Well, everything is a challenge, and the challenge was making it land the way that you wanted it to land.
Gil: Not just getting it in the cup?
Clyde: Yeah, not just to get it in the cup, but to make it land the way you want it to land.
Gil: And how many days would you tell me that it took you to get fairly proficient at that, proficient enough to where you were comfortable doing it in front of people?
Clyde: It took about 30 days of doing it every day.
Gil: Okay. And so many times we equate understanding a process with proficiency, and there’s nothing that replaces the time on target, and it seems to us we go over this constantly, but it is obvious to us that regardless of how many times we go over it people are still going to stumble into it and they’re going to ask the question why.
I’ve talked to Rick Carter about this, and the plan we gave him at the advanced school this last year was to make it all an experiment, not a test. I talked about Rick having great success at the Zone shoot earlier this year, and I’m going to finish this little part of this segment with an email that he wrote to me after he had another great success.
I explained to Rick that if he used small shoots to experiment with sleep, nutrition, pretournament practice, and to be anal about what you do, to be anal about the percentage of pairs versus the percentage of singles after and prior to a tournament. How does practice change the closer you get to a tournament? What kind of practice do you need to do the closer you get to a tournament? Try different things. See what works for you. Practice in the rain and the wind. Practice when you’re sick. I can remember talking to Kim Rhode when we went out to Red Oak to teach one year, and I was fortunate enough to get Vicki to give me the day off, and I shot with her for a day. I set her down and I said, tell me how you trained and what you do.
She said, my dad would pay guys to shoot with me to make sudden movements and speak loud and try to get me off my game, and I just had to shoot with them, and that’s one of the ways I got mentally tough. She said, and one year I had the flu. I had a horrible case of the flu, and my dad came home and said, Come on, we’re going to go shoot. And I said, but dad I got the flu. I feel horrible. He said, You may have to shoot this way one day. Let’s go shoot.
He took her out there. He made her shoot when she was sick. She shot in the rain. She shot in the wind. This would be the person who is the only Olympian to have won a medal in five consecutive Olympics, but she pushed herself. Her dad helped her push herself. I remember talking to Vernardo Canales about how her dad would give him and Curtis Lesul and one other fellow at Triple B $50 and pay for all their targets if they would just try to mess her up while she was shooting.
I remember Dean Olson going to the Seminole Cup one year. He got just deathly ill with the flu or a cold or a virus. He said when he got up the next morning his bed was completely wet with sweat. He got up, went out and shot, had one of the best tournaments to that date that he had ever had simply because I think his conscious mind was all hung up in getting sick, and he went out there and didn’t think about what he was doing. He just stuck to his routine and breakpoints and ended up shooting really well.
I also covered some things with Rick that we have discovered or that I’ve discovered about me anyway; and, that is, sleep is really important when you’re on the road. Clyde, I’m sure you can relate to this with as much international travel as you’re doing. It’s got to be tough when you have to go through five, six, seven time zones. How long does it take you to acclimate when get to where you’re going?
Clyde: Oh, the longest is about 36 hours, and most of it is around 25 hours by the time you get on the plane until you get to where you’re going.
Gil: I find it easier to acclimate going East than going West. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s just me. I know that a lot of times if I need to stay up and get some deep sleep I’ll take a Tylenol PM or some sort of a little over-the-counter sleep aid, but I did discover something; and, that is, if I take a Tylenol PM in the evening regardless of what time it is, I can’t hit nothing until about noon. It just lingers in my body longer than I want it to, and it affects my hand/eye coordination. I didn’t discover that until I did some tests with it.
You need to determine how far you’re comfortable traveling to a shoot the morning of the shoot. Experiment. Look for patterns. You know, some people might be comfortable traveling two-and-a-half hours and taking an hour break before you shoot and then shooting that day. I encouraged Rick to drive to a shoot for 30 minutes and drive to a shoot for three hours and shoot and see how he did. Then the next one go the night before, do what he’s supposed to do.
You need to know when you need to go the night before, and the only way you’re going to know this is for you to try it. How many events can you shoot and do well at a big shoot? Are you a morning shooter or an evening shooter? What breakfast food do you start best with? That’s huge the older you get. How does your preparation for small shoots differ from a large shoot?
You’ve got to pace yourself at a big shoot. You can run out of gas at the end. So you want fewer events the last couple of days. What do you eat at midday? Do you eat light? Do you eat heavy? How does heat affect you?
What time do you need to go to bed the night before to shoot well the next morning? Here’s a big one. What time and what do you need to eat the night before for you to have a good performance the next day? These are things that you can control, and you must through experimentation find out what makes you tick the best.
Hell, I will tell you this, and Vicki can collaborate on this if she wants to. Dean Olson, the year that he was shooting the best and the year that he was planning to do the best he could at Nationals and he finished runner-up at Nationals, he paid Vicki four different mornings to come out and shoot a hundred targets with him on our field at eight o’clock in the morning because he knew he was going to have an eight o’clock start time.
He had Vicki come out there and shoot with him, to have somebody to pace him; but he wanted to get there at seven o’clock, walk around the parking lot, get his stuff together just like he was at the tournament, and he was experimenting with what he ate the night before, what time he got to bed, all the things that I just was talking about. He was experimenting each time he came out there and shot at eight o’clock. He wanted to see how he reacted to an eight o’clock start time, because nobody wants to get up and shoot at 8:00 o’clock, but you have to if you go to the Nationals.
So he went to the trouble of setting himself up and testing some things, his meal intake at a certain time, how much sleep he needed, what time he had to get up to actually get his body functioning, where he didn’t feel like he was in a hurry; and, as a result, he shot one of his best scores of the day at his 8:00 a.m. shoot time.
Be aware, as you’re going through all of this, every performance will be an experiment; and this is one of the big things that we’ve helped a lot of people with. Everything leading up to it will be specific and recorded in your log. All preparation can be perfect and recorded as such; but if the performance is not 100-percent, let-it-rip subconscious performance, your evaluation and your experiment will have been flawed, therefore, all conclusions drawn will be flawed.
Let me say that again. You can do all the testing you want to do, leading up to stepping into the cage on the first station, you can do all of it; but unless your performance is 100 percent let it rip, trust the breakpoints, trust your routine, and let’s see what’s out there for you in the cards today, unless every shot is treated as an entity of its own, unless everything you do is 100-percent trust, let it happen, then your evaluation and your experiment will have been flawed; therefore, all conclusions will be flawed.
This is why there’s so few really good consistent tournament shooters. The mystery is in the history because you can know all of this stuff about you; but if you check it, it doesn’t matter what you know. Like Chris was talking about, when will I quit checking it? Just be patient. You’ve got to check it enough times to where you know that doesn’t work, and
I told him, really what needs to happen is this: you need to work your butt off to be in contention on the second day of a big shoot, and then on the last two stations when you know you’ve got it in the bag and all you’ve got to do is run six targets on two stations in a row, and there are targets that you run every day in practice, but then you get careful and check the lead and you lose it after you’ve worked your butt off to get there and you lose it in front of a lot of people because a lot of people are watching. A lot of times when that happens it just happens to be a breakthrough moment for you.
And you guys are going to have to help me. Rory McIlroy was in the lead at a big golf tournament, I think, beginning of this year, and he lost it on the last day. He just went absolutely into the tank. And I remember this. In the interview, he said, well, this is something that I learned from. I hit some great shots. I just need to learn to close, and this is a great experience for me, and I’ll learn from it and move on.
As hard as the commentator tried to get him to go down that woe-is-me trail, he wouldn’t go down it. And I was reading some of his comments from the most recent tournament that he won last weekend, and he said, you know, it’s getting to the point now to where I’ve won enough events. I know what it takes for me to win, and when I look at that trophy, I feel like I belong up there with that trophy.
To me, it sounds a lot like you don’t think your way to the right action. You’ve got to act your way to the right way of thinking. He had to get enough wins under his belt before he began to really think like a champion, and everybody has a breakthrough moment. The question is: Are you going to be ready to take advantage of it?
If you can look at your performance as an experiment, not a test, if you shoot not to miss, you’ll have wasted your prep time because any results will be skewed. You can go into competition without fear if you look at your tournament performance like an experiment because that’s the only way to see what makes you shoot your best.
I talked to another Doug, not Doug Mellen, but he just asked me not to use his name. I had a lesson with him last month. It’s a two-hour lesson. He had been to four other instructors. Thirty minutes into the lesson, he just said out of the clear blue, I’ve found what I’ve been looking for. He clicked in. He commented to me that he was dropping one here and there, mostly lots of pairs. My answer was, don’t make it more than it is. You’re normal. He laughed. I told him nothing was wrong with him, it’s just something he’ll push through because it happens to everybody.
All of the disappointments that shooters go through are just spots on the learning curve, and you know the ones I’m talking about: The first station jitters, the last station jitters, the station running jitters, the long crosser jitters, the window shot jitters, being in the lead jitters, I don’t want to shoot like shit jitters, I hope I will not shoot like shit jitters, not to be confused with the I shot like shit yesterday and I hope I don’t shoot like shit today jitters, dropping the last target jitters, I’m only down a few with two to go jitters, I just had zero jitters, oh, shit, I’m squadded with so and so jitters. We all have to work our own way through all those. We all have to work our own way through that.
You can understand intellectually how that doesn’t help you, but until you’ve faced each one of them head-on, you haven’t seen them the last time. All of these things are caused by fear and will lock up subconscious computer in a heartbeat.
They are all just one more opportunity to learn, however. The unique thing is that you begin to knock them off one by one via pur- poseful practice, watching your routine, watching your rest and your nutrition like we’ve talked about. Then they begin to fade away. As they fade away because your tournament performance has begun to be more in the zone because you’re committed to the experiments you’ve been conducting on yourself about your performance versus your prep- aration and physiology, you become more comfortable when shooting in the zone. You become more congruent and begin to use this as a new tool. Listen because you can. Tournaments are no longer a test but an opportunity to excel based on your specific preparation and total trust in trained subconscious mechanics. This is when it’s all good. You begin to realize when you’re in your zone you’ll be able to give it your best shot today because you know how and have done it many times.
Here’s the email from Rick Carter. (Reading). Dear Gil, I need to share this with you. Damn it. It works. I raced up I-80 going a hundred miles an hour to get home. Do I take a pee first? Grab a cold beer? No. Got to tell you how I did today. I won my class in a tournament. My score doesn’t matter. A couple of things that got me there is what got me excited to share. I applied my pretournament practice routine again leading up to this event. I followed your guideline like you taught me at the advanced school. I stuck close to the ratios of pairs to singles and easy versus hard birds. I kept my volume at each session to a reasonable 150 rounds. One day I shot nothing but singles. Then only right to left. I allowed myself a couple of fun sessions to take a break. Fun to me is some five stand or shooting report pairs, true pairs or reverse from what the setter intended. Finally I shot my final session with tournament intensity. Then I put the gun down. I referred to my log to see what I did in other tournaments of experimentation.
So I drove down the night before, got a good night’s sleep, had a healthy breakfast and headed to the club. My goal was get under the line and see it. That’s it. Damn, if you two don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. It all came together for a win. I was extremely pleased with one moment in particular. The game changer. On the final station, every shooter on my squad shot a pair the same way, a left- hand crow with a little curler and a right-hand incoming soft bird like a quail coming in or flaring for a landing.
Before everyone shot I was making my plan. I said crow first, flopper second. Much to my surprise the squad took it the other way. I was set to go last. My plan was being seriously second-guessed. Shooter after shooter took it the other way, but I just couldn’t feel it that way. It instinctively felt more natural being a lefty to go for the crow. Then eyes first. Keep a nice, smooth, slow to the incomer. I ran it. Because I ran it, I won by one target, one. I went with my gut and it paid off. I’m so elated with that one decision, that game changing moment, 100 targets, 12 sessions; but all I can remember of any of it was the final station. It’s like I just shot a four-pair tournament. Do you know what I mean? Okay. Got to go pee and have a cold MGD. Damn it. I learned it. OSP rocks. (Reading ends).
I would say there was some positive emotion in that little email right there, and Rick was one of the few people at the advanced school that came and said , all right, how do I practice? What do I do? We changed his tournaments from being tests of emotional self-worth to experiments, and he has clicked in to at least what works for him.
There will be many breakthroughs for each of you. The first one is the most difficult because you must set it up and learn from it. You’ve got to experiment. It’s POE. It’s a lot like what Clyde does when he goes to a fishing tournament. It’s a process of elimination. Based on his experience he knows about what the fish are going to be doing. He knows what colors. He knows what he’s going to do first light. He knows where he’s going but he does things in such a specific way. If he gets a bite or doesn’t get a bite doing a certain thing, he marks that either on his list or off his list. If he gets an unexpected bite, once he gets rid of the fish, he’s going to go back and say, okay, what was I doing? Because each one of those little things is a clue for him to crack the code on what the fish want to eat so that he can catch more fish or bigger fish than anybody else. Is that right, Clyde?
Clyde: You’re correct.
Gil: Okay.
Clyde: You’re correct.
Gil: A lot of people don’t realize that fishing is a science, and I believe you were the one that shared this with me, that fisherman are great athletes because they do almost everything in the blind. They can’t see what’s going on. They’ve got to feel it.
Clyde: You’re correct.
Gil: And just a little-bitty, subtle difference in your presentation a lot of times is the difference between a hit and no hit at all, and you have to really be on cue and you have to visualize what that lure is doing when it’s underneath the water. The only one you can really see would be a frog or some kind of topwater, but most of the time you’re throwing stuff that’s underneath the water over stuff and around stuff that you can’t see. It’s all got to be done by feel, right?
Clyde: You’re correct.
Gil: And it is a process
of elimination. Well, you guys are going to have to
do the same thing, and this is a very simple process
of being able to
do it. I can throw this in here right now because Doug Mellen gave it to me. Fear, F-E-A-R,
is failure to effectively accept
results. As you learn
about yourself, you realize what works for you. This is huge.
What works for everybody else doesn’t necessarily work for you. I go back to the lesson I had with the other Doug. Sooner or later you’ve got to have tried being careful enough times to know it doesn’t work, and then summon the courage through determination to do something different 100 percent and see what happens. Learn from it and move on.
It’s like going into business for yourself. Everyone is not cut out for being in business for themselves. You’ve got to get to the point to where you say, look, I don’t care about what the possible outcome is; but I’m going to do this. I don’t care if I fail, but I’m going to do this to see if I can do it. Now, I wouldn’t tell you to go tie a towel around your neck and jump out of a hayloft like my cousin Buddy Chambliss did the first time he saw a Superman episode on his black-and-white TV. I wouldn’t tell you to do something that crazy, but you’ve just got to do it to see if you can.
Repetition eliminates fear. I had a lesson with the same Doug that I was talking about earlier last Thursday. His hold point had drifted back to the 35- to 40-yard line. He was moving up first, blocking birds. He was hitting them, but he had a lot of risk. He was interested in doing it right. So I moved him back out to the 70-yard line, not that any of you have ever had that problem. I moved him out to the 70-yard line and showed him his vertical move and told him away from the action, not up to the action, move the gun away. In fact, I think I did that with Clyde and I think I did that with several other guys that are out there tonight. We’ve had that talk about moving away from the action. We did that on the coaching hour, I believe, and it helped Max and Shane.
So I encouraged Doug to start moving away from the action. I used an app on my iPhone called Coach’s Eye. If you’re interested in doing anything with your kids or grandkids, it’s a great app. It’s a $5 app. It’s on your iPhone, and you can take a video and you can put it into analyzation mode and you can turn it full dial on your iPhone and you can slow it down. You can reverse it. You can do slow motion. You can go back and forth. It’s just like having a video edit studio in your iPhone. I recommend you get it.
In fact, we’ve had several people send us videos from these, and we’ve been able to critique and help them get better just from looking at that, which is something we’ll be doing on our website next year. Showed him his vertical moves. Told him, away from the action. Really emphasized away from the action. Three days later he shot a 96 and beat everybody in his group. He was very happy. He ran nine stations. He told me that he got jammed on two of them, and one of them he just missed from a senior moment, and the other one he was checking the gap; and he said, it’s amazing how quickly the corrections come when you have a committed plan and when you know what you’re doing and when you’ve been paying attention to your history.
He does have a unique problem, though. He has a very close shooting friend who’s in master class who has been taking lessons from somebody who talks about pull-away a lot. He’s afraid to come to us. He helped Doug get into the game, and they shoot together a lot; and when he told me about it the first time, I said, Is he flinching yet? And he stopped in his tracks.
He said, How did you know?
I said, he’s old, and old people will begin to flinch if they shoot pull- away.
We laughed at it, but he’s really close to this guy. I told him that you’re going to blow right by this guy, and you just be ready for it because it’s going to happen. You have enough coordination and timing in your brain to where all we’re going to do is just change some of the circuitry, and you’re going to blow right by this guy. You’re going to be in master class in no time flat. You’re going to be in master class in no time flat and you’re going to blow right by him.
And I said, I want you to get ready because it’s going to happen. He told me that he had gotten to the point now that the last few times he’s had to say, look, I appreciate the suggestions, but today let’s just do it on our own.
He said, I’m going to quit telling other people what I’m learning because they say it won’t work, and you guys can’t teach them anything because y’all don’t shoot tournaments. I said, Well, I can’t wait to hear what they say now.
So, anyway, I called him and I said, Well, what did it feel like? What did it feel like when you’re shooting a 96?
He said, I wasn’t aware of anything. I was just having fun, looking at the target and shooting it. When I missed, it was okay. It happened and I let it go. He’s very aware of his breakpoints. He was relaxed, confident, focused and really having fun. He mentioned learning and fun many times. And he said he’d just find a breakpoint, get relaxed, confident, focus, close his fingertips around the gun, start his left hand when he sees the target.
And closing his fingertips around the gun was something I wanted to bring up to you guys tonight. A lot times we see people with the gun just laying in their front hand because they’re trying not to overgrip the gun. It occurred to me, once I started doing some videos of a kid in Port Lavaca, that it was actually increasing his gun speed because his fingertips were off the side of the gun; but as he would grip the gun with his fingers, his fingers had to go such a long way they had to start earlier than the gun actually going off, and it was actually making him move the gun faster at the end of the shot which is making him miss in front.
Once I got him to put his fingertips on the gun, not only did I eliminate his really quick move at the end, but the gun recoiled measurably less because he was able in the recoil cycle to grab the gun at the precise same time every time.
He said, I just had to relax and know what it takes to get there. And what he meant by that was he was able to relax, and he used the word relax and learn and fun in almost everything that he talked to me about. Let’s see. Learning and enjoyment increase performance. That would be Tim Galloway’s performance triangle.
Here’s another thing that he said. He said, I used to notice people looking at me when I shot. There were always people standing around, and I just couldn’t get over the feeling that people were looking at me. He said, For the first time that day, that went away. He said, my breakpoints are different than others. But they’re personal to him. He said when he would get into the cage, he would find a comfortable position to shoot each target. It’s got to be comfortable. When it’s comfortable I don’t think about it anymore. He said, sometimes it seems like it takes me an eternity, but I know it’s not taking me more than 20 or 30 seconds. He said, I finally just had to make my mind up, and the people behind me are just going to have to wait because I’m not going to get ready and I’m not going to go into my routine until I’m comfortable with the way I feel in each breakpoint.
He said, shooting good feels like practice to me now. If I miss it’s okay. Learn from it and move on, to learn from it and move on. So we’re all looking for that breakthrough moment. I know that I had one in Beaumont, Texas. I’ve taken Doug over to the place that it happened for me. I’ll never forget that as long as I live, and it was a huge breakthrough moment for me. I didn’t go there trying to have a breakthrough moment, but when I went there I had made my mind up. I had read about shooting without looking at lead. I had read about focusing on the front of the target. I was tampering with gun fit.
Arnie Townley went with us over to Beaumont, with me and Vicki, and I told them, I said, I’m going to do something different today. I said, Don’t ask me about it. Don’t tell me what I’m doing. Don’t tell me where I’m missing. I’m just going to do this on every shot. I’m going to pick my breakpoint. I’m going to look at the bird. When I mount the gun, I’m going to pull the trigger. And I did that.
I was down four going into the last station, and there’s a little wooden hut. If you’re looking at the lake over across from the clubhouse at 1-In-100 Gun Club, there’s a little wooden hut back off to the left where two old Winchester skeet machines used to be, and they were throwing a true pair across that pond. It couldn’t have been more than 25, 28 yards away.
Well, word got back to the clubhouse that I was only down four going into the last station, that I was shooting like nobody had ever seen me shoot before, and there were 30 or 40 people that came out to witness my last four pair. I got up in my rotation. I didn’t ask to be last or first. I was wherever I was. I got up there and my trusty little wife was behind me, and I called for the first pair and mounted the gun and checked the lead and promptly missed two, and I called for the second pair and checked the lead and promptly missed two; and my lovely wife came up behind me and pulled my earmuff off my ear and said several little words amounting to, just shoot the target. Don’t think.
Just shoot the target. I snapped out of my trance and I ran the last two pair, and I was in the clubhouse with a 92, and the highest score that day was a 78. That was my breakthrough moment. It came together for me. I was able to turn my back on worrying about what’s going on.
I could not explain my performance. I just know that when I can see the target as clear as I saw it, if I would just move with the target, I knew my gun was fitting me perfectly and I knew I had shot so many patterns with it. There was no excuse, and I got to the point to where I had to actually say to myself and to Arnie and to Vicki, Okay, guys. I don’t care what happens today. I actually don’t care what happens, but when I get there, I’m going to do my deal, but you’re going to see me shoot unlike I’ve ever shot before. I’ll never be able to look myself in the mirror if I don’t try to do this. And I did it.
I don’t know what it is about that breakthrough moment. You have to get to the point to where you’ve tried as hard as you can try as many times as you have, and you’ve double checked it and you become conscious and left the present, and you’ve got to try it enough times to where it doesn’t work; and once it doesn’t work enough times, you’ll finally adopt the attitude one way or another to turn your back on it and let it happen.
It sounds really easy to do, the way I’m talking about it, but it’s not. I’ve had to really change the way that we talk about learning to shoot a shotgun because I have to tell you, it ain’t easy. I used to say it’s easy. Vicki said it’s easy, but it can be one of the most miserable weeks you spend in one afternoon trying to figure out what you’re not supposed to see and what you’re supposed to see and what you’re not supposed to do and what you’re supposed to do.
It’s a very difficult thing, and to do it at a high level is equally as tough. I mean, I’d be lying to you if I told you it wasn’t; but you have to get to the point within yourself to where, you know, you just go out there and do it. Once you’ve done it once, it becomes easier to access again. You can be as congruent as you want to be. You can be in your little zone, but it’s kind of like McElroy when he dunked at that big tournament on national TV now. Okay? He went from the top down to tenth, I think, or twentieth or something like that. Just went crazy. That’s what Dean Olson would call it, going crazy, and yet he’s won three out of the last four big tournaments that he’s played in; and, of course, a lot of that has to do with his age, his ability to myelinate those circuits.
And I’ve talked about it on this coaching hour when they’ve interviewed athletes that have had a disappointing performance. They try to get the athlete to talk about oh, well, it’s me, but the smart ones don’t do that. I stuck to my game plan. You know, so and so did really well and so and so did really well and so and so is really doing great today and I’m really happy for them and I learned a lot today and more importantly, I learned something that was going to make me better.
Gil: So, anyway, I want to talk a little bit about Coyle’s new book. I’m amazed at how much I have learned. I’ve been through it three times. I wasn’t very impressed with it the first time I read it, but I had read the Talent Code every night so I was already exposed to a lot of it. But it’s amazing how he has changed the way Vicki and I teach and how we look at developing skill in shooters.
It’s just an absolutely amazing thing, and this book is destined to be another great book. One of the tips is being willing to be stupid. He tells a story of the hockey star Wayne Gretsky, how he would occasionally witness strange things about Gretsky, how he would sometimes fall while he was skating through solitary drills on the ice.
Gretsky knew, as skilled as he was, to improve he had to push beyond the boundaries of the possible. The only way that happens is to build new connections in the brain which means reaching, failing, and, yes, looking stupid. Remember, mistakes are not really mistakes. They’re the guideposts you use to get better.
One way some places encourage productive mistakes is to establish rules that encourage people to make reaches that might otherwise feel strange and risky, in effect, nudging them into the sweet spot at the edge of their ability. Just like the Meadowmount School of Music. If a passerby can recognize the song, it’s being played too fast. The point of that super-exaggerated slowness which produces songs that resemble those of humpback whales is to reveal small mistakes that might have gone undetected and, thus, create more high-quality reaches.
Living Social, the Washington, D.C. E-commerce company, has a rule of thumb for employees. Once a week you should make a decision at work that scares you. Whatever the strategy the goal is always the same, to encourage reaching and reinterpret mistakes so that they’re not verdicts but the information you use to navigate to the correct move. That’s important to me, to reinterpret mistakes, in other words, get the emotion out of the mistakes. And if it’s a mistake and it’s subconscious, if it’s a mistake in the shot and the shot was subconscious, then you can learn from it; but if the conscious mind was doing the shooting, it’s not a true revelation of your skill.
I don’t know how many other ways to say that. Now, you can have a great performance; but if you’re checking the lead on every one of them, you just got lucky that day. You’ve got to get to the point to where you say, I don’t care what happens, but I’m doing this. If it harelips the governor, I’m still going to do this. If I shoot a 50, I’m still going to do this because I would never know unless I tried it, and you have to get to a point like that in your life about a lot of things, and that’s a life lesson in itself.
I was reading an email from Nick Dewees as a bet. Nick and Helen come to us to learn to shoot because they like to be outdoors and do dogs and stuff; and he wrote me an email that made me feel really good. He said, I want to congratulate you on the recent session that you had with my wife, Helen. She has turned a real corner. She’s congruent every morning. She’s upbeat. It’s just really changed her life the talk that you had with her.
I wrote him back that one of the real silver linings in our cloud, in our life is being able to share things in the shooting arena that affect people’s lives personally, and that’s one of the biggest ones right there, is you get people to begin to learn from their own mistakes. That’s a huge huge huge life lesson, I’ve got to tell you.
Anyway, I want to encourage you all to read Daniel Coyle’s new book. In the beginning he talks about hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills are the skills that you have to have a hundred percent correct all the time. It would be Clyde’s ability to drop that jig not only in the cup but have the jig go on a flight pattern so that it just barely touches the water as opposed to come from 4-feet straight down, stopping the spool and just do a big kerplunk. I mean, it’s just the little finesse things that he would want to do.
To me, the biggest hard skill we’ve got, other than focus on the target, is to move and mount the gun. This is why we always tell people, I don’t care if you shoot with a mounted gun, but I want to shoot with a mounted gun because you’re decreasing risk. I don’t want you to shoot with a mounted gun because you can’t mount the gun. Learn to move and mount the gun. Learn to move and mount the gun. That’s the basic fundamental, hard skill that you have to have. After that, we can talk about focusing away from the gun.
It sounds like I’m picking on Clyde tonight, but I hadn’t talked to him in such a long time. He came out and I had a lesson with him. He got his eyes fixed, and I talked to him about looking across the gun and looking away from the gun, and it made a huge difference for him And I know that everybody that we’ve talked to about that has come back to us and has said it’s made an absolutely huge difference in their ability to perform with a shotgun and their ability to not let the gun invade their perception or their visual circle.
So, anyway, this is a wonderful, little book, and I would encourage all of you to get a copy as soon as you possibly can and read it because it’s broken up so neat. There’s three groups of tips, and each tip is put in a section. The first one is building skills. The second one is improving skills. The third one is something else, but I would recommend you buy this book. I really would. It’s sustaining the progress.
So, anyway, I find myself out of time again. I wanted to get everything out there that I got out there tonight, and I’ve got a couple of things that I’ll talk to y’all about next week or next month. I would like for you to email me and let me know what you think about the book and which tips affected you the most and which tips influenced you the most because it’s going to be another big winner.
So, having said that, I will sign off, and I wish you all a good rest of the month. Good night, everybody.
