2012-12 – December 2012 Coaching Hour – Turning Fear Into a Motivator

…….December – Turning Fear Into a Motivator…….

– Introduction

 – New Animations

 – Taking Some Time Off

 – The Timing Drill Works

 – Book Review: Extreme Fear

 – Performance Pressure Shrinks Working Memory, Which Eliminates Habitual Methods

 – Practice Helps Reduce Fear, but Only Tournament Experience Overcomes It

Today I took two animations, took them out of the computer, put them in Coach’s Eye, brought them up, did voiceovers on them, backed them back out of Coach’s Eye and put them in Dropbox and shipped them to the webmaster, and he got them up on the new website. So it’s an amazing thing what we’re learning, and we are really excited about the new website.

Do any of you have any comments about the new website?

 Bob S: Interesting time of the year, Gil, exploring the new website.

 Gil: Well, you know, I guess it could be. We’ve gotten a lot of good positive feedback from it. The search engine is working great. We found a few glitches in the beginning, but things are progressing.

So the animations are up on the Knowledge Vault website. As I said before, Vicki and I have done 22 new animations, and we will be doing hunting kill shots on different games, and there’s one up there right now. We also have a virtual shooter that’s, shall we say, ready to go and do different shots, both in sporting clays and in hunting. And so his name is Brian. So hopefully we’ll be able to do a new animation every month and probably end up doing several more.

Taking Some Time Off

Gil: One of the first things I wanted to talk to you about tonight was taking some time off. I’ve talked to Shane a little bit. I’ve talked to Brian Brewton. I’ve talked to several other people about actually taking some time off. We talk about that this time of year, and it seems as though even though we tell you to do it, some of you do it; some of you don’t do it, and some of you cheat, take three weeks off and then shoot for a couple of weeks, then take three or four more weeks off; but it’s important that you take the time off, get it behind you. Try it. How does it do? Talk on it.

 Vicki: Definitely take some time off. Jeff, are you going to take some time off?

 Jeff: I’ve already taken time off. I haven’t shot for a while.

 Gil: Okay. Well, I’m going to tell you this from personal experience. If you don’t take at least eight weeks off and don’t touch that gun, you  will have a slump of all slumps sometime between the first of June to the middle of August. It’s going to happen. So it’s important that you take some time off and get away from shooting. Now, you can  go hunting. Just don’t pick up your gun and go out there and start training. Just take some time off, put a specific date on the calendar when you’re going to start and don’t cheat.

The Timing Drill Works

Gil: I was talking with Brian Brewton yesterday about some things, and he had read a copy of our new book that will be coming out in another couple of months, which you will all get on the new website. All the coaching hour people are grandfathered into the new website.

He was telling me that one of the things that made the biggest difference for him was a drill we call the timing drill. You do it on a skeet field, stand about four steps inside Station 8, facing Station 8, and shoot the low house over by the high house. Start the gun almost to the breakpoint and point your nose at the low house and watch the bird all the way across the field with your nose. You got to start mounting the gun when you see the bird and kill the bird over by the high house. As you mount the gun, trust the shot and pull the trigger.

He said that this one drill seemed to improve his timing dramatically. He had taken that one drill and used it on  several  students, mostly beginners and intermediate, and a couple of advanced shooters and had gotten surprising results. So I would encourage you when you start to work the timing drill into your beginning regiment because it stretches the timing circuit that you use to mount and move the gun. And from what Brian said, and I concur, you will get your timing back much quicker.

I was talking to Shane awhile ago, and he was talking something about how he had changed what he did when he practiced, and he said he would go out and he would go to a five stand, and he would say I’m going to shoot five pair from that trap and that trap, and he’s got five pairs; and if he had trouble with one bird, he’d shoot that one bird five times, work it out, put the gun down, and it seemed to him that it helped him with his timing.

That just happened to coincide with Tip Number 14 in The Little Book of Talent. Take Off Your Watch is the title of the chapter. Deep practice is not measured in minutes or hours but in enough high-quality reaches and repetitions you make, basically how many new connections you form in your brain. Instead of counting minutes or hours, count reaches and reps.

Instead of saying I’m going to practice piano for 20 minutes, tell yourself I’m going to do five intensive reps to that new song. Instead of planning to hit golf balls for an hour, plan to make 25 solid swings at each stroke. Instead of reading over that textbook for an hour, make a quiz and grade yourself on your effort. Ignore the clock. Get to the sweet spot even if it’s only for a few minutes and measure  your progress by what counts, reaches and reps. Interesting how that dovetails right into what Shane ended up doing.

Book Review: Extreme Fear

Gil: I mentioned last month that I had stolen a book from Jeff at Nationals, and it was a book on fear, and he gave me the book with   a couple of marked passages. I talked about it briefly last time, but I wanted to go over in depth some of the things that I gleaned from it.

I looked at him and I said: You know, I got that book on my desk and I got about of 65 pages in to it, and I just couldn’t make it happen. It just wasn’t going to work, and he said: Well, I’ve got some passages marked in there. I want you to look at them and tell me what you think about them.

Tonight I want to go over some of the high points of what I gleaned from that book. It’s a book called Extreme Fear, The Science of Your Mind in Danger. Don’t know why I bought it, but I did. Now I know why. It just took somebody like Jeff to straighten things out for me to get me to read it or at least read the right phrases.

Now I’ve read it probably two times. It really has some great input in it. Fear, all stress ultimately comes from within. We may face challenges in our lives, but it is not until our minds assess a situation and identify a threat that our defense mechanisms swing into action.

Well-learned motor patterns are nearly as fast and reliable  as  inborn reflexes, and they’re very resilient to stress. For instance, if you practice drawing and shooting your pistol a thousand times on the shooting range, the chances are pretty good that you’ll also be able to draw and shoot flawlessly when an attacker is running at you with a raised hatchet. This goes out the door, though, when the stress is social in nature. In an attack of acute self-consciousness, even exceptionally well-learned motor patterns go haywire.

Self-consciousness, that would be worrying about what others think. When expert performers start paying attention to what they’re doing, they undermine the automatically that underlies their expertise. There was an experiment that I read about in here where golfers were putting. They asked them to think about three words when they were putting, arm, head, leg, words that had to do with what they were doing; and then in a different set of putts asked them to concentrate on three words that had nothing to do with what they’re doing, colors, for example. Add to the exercise a cash prize.

Thinking about the irrelevant words in the high anxiety setting, their performance didn’t suffer. When they were paying attention to their swings by thinking of the words that had to do with what they were doing, their putting declined. Self-consciousness plus pressure equals bad news.

Have any of you stopped and gone back to your log and gone   over your last year? I think you need to be doing that. You need to be looking for the times when things didn’t go well. We’re all afraid of choking, and it’s easy to go down that little rabbit trail, but typically what happens when we choke, I was talking to Jeff about this, about how he came to me and he said: When am I going to quit making all of these stupid mistakes? And you can think of that as choking.

But I told him that you’ve just got to be in the game enough times and fail at that for you to understand how your body reacts to that stressful situation, and ultimately, eventually you’re going to learn how you deal with that best; but you’re not going to get to the point to where you’re a battle hardened competitor without failing and flailing in certain things. Typically, if choking means thinking too much and the answer is to think less, well, that’s impossible because you cannot stop thinking; and more often than not trying to not think about it will likely only make the problem worse.

Ron Bacari, we both have a mutual friend that’s caught in this trap.

 Ron: Yes.

 Gil: I mean, if someone tells you not to think of a white bear, for instance, you can try for a while; but it’s bound to pop up into your consciousness sooner or later, and probably sooner. And when we try to perform a mental task, another part of our brain, which has been described as the automatic process, whereby we monitor control failures, is meanwhile checking in from time to time to see how we’re doing; and we’re trying not to think of the white bear. Then the monitoring process pops its head through the door and asks, so how is that not thinking of a white bear coming along? And it’s happened to every one of you, right?

 Bob S: Yep.

Gil: I mean, you can’t not think about this, and it sounds cliche when you guys come to us after you’ve struggled with something and we keep telling you, well, you got to go through that. It’s all part of it. But regardless of how cliche it sounds, you’ve got to go through every level that you’re going through. I was talking via email to a fellow, I was doing a thread on eye dominance on Shotgun World General Forums, and we were talking about this whole situation of what you have to go through.

He said: I read that George Digweed said one time that in order to be a champion, you’ve got to give up worrying about missing. And I’ve never heard that, but it is true and that’s a big deal. If you can give up worrying about missing, then you’re certainly not going to be thinking about that little white bear because it’s coming back, and you cannot think about it. I think we’ve talked about a green dog humping your leg in the Out of Your Mind book, but it’s the same thing, whether it’s a white bear or a green dog.

It’s going to come back, and the more you try to ignore what we’re doing with our body the more our attention lingers over it, just as a person suffering from a panic attack feels his heart racing and wonders if he’s about to have another attack. The choker notices his body doing the wrong things and thereby sets up an unwanted feedback loop amplifying the symptoms until his expertise is tied up in knots.

It’s the fear of missing. It’s the, goddam, I’ve just missed five targets on the last stand. The last time I did this I had a horrible day. I wonder what’s going to happen. It’s that fear, and that entails understanding that — and you’ve got to go through it. You have to be at a point like that emotionally, and you have to do it enough times to where you can back up from it and say that one is over. We got to let those go, and now we’ve got to go concentrate and do our routine and trust what we know how to do on the next shot. I guess it’s Jeff and Shane that I’ve had most of these conversations with in the recent past and of the ones that are on tonight that I know of.

And it seems like, Jeff, every time you bring me a situation like that I’m just like your grandfather that says, Okay, I know. I know it hurts. I know it’s tough, but you’ve got to go through it. And I think you have passed through the door on some of the these things.

And you, too, Shane. I think y’all are seeing some things come together. It’s just that I wish I had a different way to say it, but you just have to pass through them and get past them.

Does that make sense to you, Jeff?

Jeff: Yeah. And I’ll say that this was since you talked about this and after thinking about what I did this year. There’s a knowledge now that I can get through those sorts of issues and it’s easier for me to accept the fact that I have to go through something to understand it and to be able to deal with it when it comes up. Like you said, dropping five targets at a station. When you said that, I thought, yeah, I tanked three or four scores when I did that, but one time I ran the rest of the course.

So don’t worry about it. Move on. And that kind of stuff starts to happen a little more to me now where I can just kind of address those issues in my head and let them go, where in the past I would obsess over them for some percentage of the rest of the event.

 Gil: That’s a huge step in the right direction. It’s bigger than most peo- ple realize, and I’ll tell you something else, something that our teaching careers taught us. There are people that get into this game and get out. There are people that live their whole lives and they’re not able to say those words. They accept what happens to them overwhelmingly in a negative way, and as a result, they never have anything positive to hold on to when they’ve gone through a difficult situation.

And I think that’s really what you’re saying, Jeff, and we hear this a lot. I’m shooting better than I’m scoring. That has a lot to do with what we’re talking about right now, and we’re seeing a lot of you guys mature into competitive shooters; but it’s going to take time, and how well you handle the adversity as it comes through your game, how well you turn that adversity into a lesson to be learned, how well you can turn your back on missing five out of eight and, like Jeff said, run the rest of the course, how well you can do that will determine how long that problem is going linger for you, and we’ll get into that in just a minute.

I just think it’s really important that you’re able to look at the adversities that you have to encounter in becoming a better shot and eventually in becoming a better competitor as opportunities to learn. I mean, hell, not everybody in the world was fortunate enough or privileged enough to have Gil Ash take a belt sander to their gunstock right after lunch at a shooting clinic, like Ken was. I mean I made the poor guy hold the gun in a blanket while I did it, but he did it and he got through it. He’s a better shooter for it today.

 Ken: Oh, by the way, that gun is being refinished as we speak, Gil.

 Gil: Well, I’m happy for you, and you’re glad you did it, aren’t you?

Ken: Oh, absolutely.

 Gil: You know? But when it was going on, there was a little doubt, I’m sure. The people under that shed thought I was absolutely crazy.

 Ken: And, you know, there was no alcohol involved, either.

 Gil: Well, at least not while we were doing that. Vicki and I put back a couple of drinks that night talking about all the flashbulbs going   off with people taking pictures. You know, of all the people that took pictures of that, we don’t have one picture of that.

 Ken: I don’t have a picture of it, either.

 Gil: God, I would give anything to have a picture of that. Somebody at that gun club has got a picture of that. I sure would like to have   it. But, anyway, it’s like we presented some of the animations to the hunter education specialist at Texas Parks & Wildlife. It blew her away, especially when we got to talking about how the video games have changed kids’ perspective on life, and we’ve been trying to get them away from the video games and teach them about the outdoors when we should have been creating a video game that teaches them how to shoot and those kind of things, and they’re really excited about it; and she looked at me and said, Will you produce a paper and show us your research at the International Hunter Education symposium that we’re going to have here in San Antonio in April?

And without hesitation I said: Yes, I will. After I said that, I said: But Heidi, I don’t really know what it is you want me to tell them. You know what’s unique about this. We live this every day, and I’m going to need you to just kind of point me in the right direction as to what you think the crowd would be interested in.

And she said: Gil, you don’t understand. I said: What do you mean?

And she said, You can show them one of these and it’ll blow them away.

Okay, whatever. I’m still going to come to you and ask you to look at the outline and make sure that I’m speaking in the right way. And that was fear. That was the fear of getting in front getting up in front of all those eyes. What am I going to say? How will they react to it?

She knows. She knows all the people, all the players. She knows how much they’re going to be blown away. She knows how much all the DNRs all across this country, in Canada and South America and several of the other continents that are coming — they’re all going to want to be part of it, and we’re already working with her to figure out a way so that we can get those people to use our products and all the hunter education courses around the world; but there was a time when I would have been afraid to get up in front of a group like that.

Everybody is afraid of that every now and then, but I got to tell you, just like starting this Coaching Hour ten years ago, it was kind of scary; but now it’s like having a conversation with some of our best friends because every time I do something, I realize that, regardless of the outcome, that I’m giving myself a chance to get better, whether I succeed or fail, whether it’s a huge success or a huge failure, whether it’s a mediocre success or a slight failure. Regardless of what it is, it’s another door that I walk through and another door that I’ve shut in the face of fear.

 Bob S: How did Shoemaker put that? Staying excited and engaged.

 Gil: It’s true. You understand what I’m talking about.

 Bob S: Oh, yeah.

 Gil: And I want to get some more of this material out, and we’ll talk about turning fear into a motivator here in just a minute. Another approach that I found interesting was instead of turning your focus inward, consciously fill your mind with productive thoughts.

Back to the golfing study. Golfers who perform best were experts who repeated to themselves a single word that represented a successful putting action such as smooth. The best self-talk used the fewest number of words possible, and was solution oriented. What you really want is called holistic process goals. You want to focus on the whole feeling of the performance rather than a specific element. Listen to this. If I’m golfing, I don’t want to focus on the angle of my wrist or how square my shoulders are. I want to focus on whatever feeling it is that you have when you hit a sweet shot. Stop trying to fix it.

This really hit home to me. Being watched triggers a powerful emotional response, one that’s threaded deeply into our evolutionary and cultural history. We are particularly dependent on vision for learning about the world and for inferring the emotional state of our social group. We have a deep-seated discomfort at being looked at. If the direct gaze of one set of eyes can be arousing, being watched by many can be horrific. Think about this, guys. The dread of public speaking is all but universal. Even seasoned actors and performers feel gut-wrenching terror at the prospect of stepping out into a sea of eyes.

 Bob S: Gil?

 Gil: Yeah?

 Bob S: That’s why they’re teaching MBA people to do improvisation in their schools.

 Gil: Really?

 Bob S: Yep.

 Gil: I’ll be damned.

Bob S: No opportunity to prepare, stand up, here’s your topic, do it.

 Gil: Holy cow, what a deal. And, you know, you stop and think about it, Bob. That’s what we do every day.

 Bob S: I know.

Performance Pressure Shrinks Working Memory, Which Eliminates Habitual  Methods

Gil: Back to the piece. It’s not uncommon to hear of singers and actors who vomit before each performance. The experienced actor relies on a suite of subtle techniques learned over the course of many years, honed to the point of reflex. These can be called upon effortlessly amid the flow of their performance. It’s as if you don’t have to know what is next. Your body knows. This would be the anticipation circuit that we talked about last month and the month before.

This was very interesting to me. People with more working memory or the ability to manipulate more complex pieces of information in their conscious thoughts actually did worse when asked to take a math test under a high-pressure situation. The theory from this became that people with large working memories become accustomed to relying on complex mental techniques, and listen to this: When their working memories shrink under the effects of pressure, they are no longer able to use their habitual methods and thus are left helpless.

That’s like being in the lead for the first time. When you’re in the lead, you’re not going to check lead less. Is that amazing or what? I thought it was very unique when they said when their working memories shrink under the effect of pressure, excess movement increases risk. You’ve got to be good to choke. That’s something else that I learned. Because if you’re not good you don’t know enough to choke. You don’t know enough to fear. Okay? And the more complex your technique is or the more thinking you must do to get the lead right, the more susceptible you become to brain freeze. The more technical your weapons, the more susceptible they are to fear. This is why we spend so much time pounding into your brains breakpoint, trust it, rhythm, flow, tempo. Because when you’re performing, you can’t be thinking.

Some audiences may never notice that an actor has been siezed by an intensive attack of stage fright. After all, they make a living hiding their feelings and being someone other than who they are. Stage fright itself might stop someone from doing what they do in front of people, but some performers are so afraid it might happen again that they stop performing altogether. I think I mentioned this last month.

Carly Simon gave up public performance for eight years due to her intense recurring experience of stage fright. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz left the stage for 15 years for the same reason. This one I’ll never forget. Barbara Streisand left the stage for 27 years for the same reason, and many performers never come back, and 30 percent of them eventually stop performing and leave their professions. It is real, and when we, in shooting, experience it — and we, in shooting, experience it on a daily basis. It’s comforting to know that others have to deal with fear in their performance.

Our system of not chasing the birds and learning to access the subconscious mind to take care of the lead helps dramatically reduce fear by keeping things simple. Although a little harder to learn in the beginning, it’s so much easier to build on in the end. Say, Jeff or Shane, would you guys agree with that statement? Although in the beginning it’s a little harder to learn to trust the subconscious to take care of lead, in the end it’s so much easier to build on. Would you agree with that?

 Shane: Yes.

 Jeff: Absolutely.

Gil: Yeah. It’s harder in the beginning to trust it, but if you can begin to use the brain you want to eventually use in performance and train it from the beginning, it’s so much easier when you get into master class to start winning punches in master class. Everybody else that’s chasing lead, they get into master class and they hang it up. They don’t have a chance of competing because they have so many mechanical things in their approach to shooting under pressure.

What was it the book said? When their working memories shrink under the effects of pressure, they are no longer able to use the methods that they learned, and that’s the dead end that the guys have to face when they get into master class shooting consciously because eventually there becomes not enough hours in the day to practice enough to compete with guys shooting consciously.

This fear and performance thing is why so many young performers end up on drugs. They take drugs in the beginning to deal with the anxiety and eventually become addicted to them, all because of fear and the anxiety that performing in front of people creates. Anxiety   is not bad. There’s nothing wrong that you’re getting anxious before you go on stage because the fear is gearing you up to rise to the occa- sion. That’s the butterflies. That’s the butterflies in your stomach on the first station.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, you need to be looking forward to that. That’s a signal that you’re getting ready to learn something, and usually you calm down after the first couple of minutes and you’re just right in the moment, and that’s where you need to be. Identifying the thought patterns that lead to anxiety is huge.

Listen to this. Avoid the kind of nitpicky self-analysis that we hear all over the course. Stop letting how you shoot determine how you act or how you feel about yourself or whether or not you’ve had a good time. Stop whining. You could be one of those people who doesn’t have the means to shoot a 25-cent bullet at a 40-cent target just to see if you can break it before it hits the ground and breaks anyway.

The next time somebody asks you how you’re doing at a tournament, don’t talk about your score. Talk about yourself and what you’ve been doing and what you’re looking forward to do. Having a goal for the event and sticking to it helps with this.

I’m going to repeat myself. Don’t nitpick yourself, fix this, change that. This complicates your ability to perform. Don’t fix it at the tournament. Score ugly. Work on it during practice. It goes like I  want to hit. No. I want to nail all of my breakpoints. I want all of my beginnings to be smooth and away. All of my moves will be smooth at the end because I will be early in the breakpoint and let it come. The overall goal is to enjoy what you’re doing. It’s hard for anyone to get into trouble having fun. Well, except for Shane.

So shooting is what you love to do. Fear does not always make itself known. The voice of conscious doubt will take many faces. Listen. To be able to put yourself in the game, to allow yourself to be watched, to experience the anxiety, knowing that every time you have an encounter it will make you better, then you are on your way. Let me read that again. Knowing that every time you have an encounter it will make you better, then you’re on your way.

Repetition eliminates fear. Identifying fear and what it does to you is critical. We’ve talked about that. We’ve spent six or eight coaching hours on fear. You will each react to fear a different way, and once you’ve conquered it in one arena, guess what? It’s going to take another phase, but once the problem is given its correct name, the battle is half won. When you can look at a situation and you know fear is there, if you can look at it as fear, that’s huge. Instead of being afraid, look at it for what it is. Don’t look at it for what it makes you do. Take control over it. Recognize it for what it is.

As I mentioned before, Jeff looked at me and said, When will I quit making so many mistakes that I know better than to do? Well, in time, Jeff, in time. What’s the missing part of the equation? Expertise. If you’ll notice back in the golfing analogy, they said they had three experts. After thousands of hours behind the gun, not on the practice field but on the tournament course with a number on your back, you will begin to exhibit mastery.

Practice Helps Reduce Fear,

but Only Tournament Experience Overcomes It

Gil: I never will forget back when Craig Hill was shooting a lot. He was coming to us quite frequently, and he was starting to beat everybody around here. He said, What do I got to do next? I said, You’ve got to get your gun and get your bag and get on the road, and you’ve got to shoot at least one out-of-town tournament every month. I’d rather you shoot 15 out-of-town tournaments within eight months. You’ve got to put that number on your back and you’ve got to get in that game in a place that you’ve never seen before. You’ve got to overcome the jitters. You’ve got to put yourself in front of people with a number on your back. You’ve got to put yourself in front of people with a number on your back, and he did and that was huge for him, absolutely huge. He started traveling.

He came back and he’d say, man, Gil, what you said was exactly right. I never realized how comfortable I was in Houston and how uncomfortable I was on the road, and that took two-and-a-half years of traveling before he started beating people on the road; but you’ve just got to mature out of your comfort zone, not on the practice field but on the tournament course with a number on your back. Eventually you will begin to exhibit mastery.

 Bob S: Gil, you can’t do it the other way around, can you?

 Gil: Not that I know of.

 Bob S: You can’t get comfortable and go back and get out of your comfort zone on the practice field?

 Gil: No. Ultimately what you do in the practice field is repetition and fixing things.

 Bob S: Right.

 Gil: Now, you’re talking about mechanical performance. What I’m talking about is learning to be a competitor. You’ll never learn to be a competitor on the practice field. It’s what you do under the pressure situation. When their working memories shrink under the effects of pressure, because if you have too much excess in your game, pressure is going to make your working memory shrink, and your brain is going to freeze up.

And, Bob, I can have this conversation with you and I can have this conversation with the 50 guys that are on the coaching   hour and I can have this conversation with 500 people in a room and I would be willing to stand up and have this conversation with 10,000 people in a room because I want to put myself in a position where I can face fear. I want to put myself in a position where I know fear is going to be there. Because when I start putting myself in a position to where I  know

I’m going to have to face it, I also know that regardless of outcome, if I blow them away or if I suck, either way, I’m going to be a better speaker and a better person for it because I’ve faced the fear.

In fact, I had this conversation with Craig three months ago, two months ago, and I said, Man, your getting careful is being afraid.   We talked about this on the coaching hour, and he never really looked at it like that, but it is. But you can turn that fear into a motivator, which is what I’m telling you about. That’s what I’m trying to do. Every time I come to an impasse and I know fear is there, I know it’s there, I can feel it, I know that there’s something good getting ready to happen. There’s something good on the other side of that fear if I will let myself go on through that waterfall.

I don’t think you can overcome that fear without facing it or without doing it. I mean, you can rehearse the speech as many times as you want to, but until you look out into that field of eyes that are all looking directly at you, until you do that and overcome that and start feeding on that because it gives you that tingle of fear in your stomach and you want to get out there and you’re able to tell them a joke and relax and just become yourself and the material that flows off of your tongue, until you’ve done that enough times, you can’t rehearse your way out of the fear.

Now, rehearsing a lot and having a good practice ethic can make it easier for you to depend on what you’ve practiced when you have to face fear. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying, but ultimately when you move into master class, you’ve learned how to shoot. Now you’ve got to learn how to compete, and to me the only way you’re ever going to learn to compete is through competition.

People that say that you can reprogram the brain, but I don’t believe it. You can reprogram it to a certain extent. You can be congruent. You can put yourself in the right situation, but the 10,000- hour rule is going to win out. It’s time on target. It’s time behind the gun. Now, if you’ve got a crazy person like Gil or Vicki Ash that you can bounce your experiences off of and they can keep you grounded and going in the right direction, then you’re all the better for that; but you’re not going to practice your way into being a U.S. Open champion. You’ve got to compete your way into doing it.

Do you agree with that, Bob?

 Bob S: Yeah. I think it’s a combination of learning how to use that chemical surge not to suppress your brain’s function but to increase its creativity, and yeah, you’re right. You’ve got to be there. You’ve got to do it, and the practice helps because it makes you think about things; but until you’re there when somebody asked the question that you never thought anybody was ever going to ask and you couldn’t figure out what to do with it before, you throw the creativity in.