Sometimes when big performance breakthroughs happen, they can seem very normal or even underwhelming because the entire journey to the breakthrough has required you to integrate skills and information that is now just second-nature.
That is the case with one of our students in this hour, who reached an elite performance goal in what he describes as “a subdued state.” We discuss the patterns of consistency that led him there, as well as the theme of being as honest with yourself as possible, both on and off the competitive field.
Gil: We’re going to get rolling. Patrick, tell me about how your daughter is coming with the chunking of her move and how it’s affecting her ability to play the piano and do other things.
Patrick: It’s been remarkable. She’s really slowed down. Actually, I had her listening to the audio book several times. I have it in the car all the time. I got the little short condensed version of the book, which kind of has the summary of the book. And I’ve kind of bribed them. Every day they bring me one of the new 50 steps. Every day they bring me one of the steps, and we discuss it. And I pay them a dollar just to discuss it and tell me what they think about it, and they respond well to money.
But she has slowed down her moves. Her piano teacher said she noticed the improvement, and, I mean, she is just really really getting much quicker by going slower. So, I mean, it’s just been really incredible, watching her respond to that.
Gil: Does that not really embed in your mind why we spent so much time working with you on slowing down in your shooting?
Patrick: Yes, very much, and I’ve changed completely the way I practice. I’ve kind of gone out on my own a little bit just because, when you’re around the guys, you want to have fun. It’s hard to practice. So I’ve just gone out with my own trap on my own, and I’ve got a lower move port, and that way I wouldn’t be embarrassed about missing targets and stuff like that and just tried to go slower and really think about it. Separating the eyes from the gun, and I’ve noticed the difference. It’s coming. I’m feeling it more. I’m getting that feel. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s just a feeling I’m getting now with the shots.
Gil: You’re starting to feel it. You know, they used to burn people at the stake for saying stuff like that years ago. So don’t say that out loud in mixed company. You never know what might happen.
Patrick: I know. And I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t even think about leading more. Now it’s just timing, and I ask myself all the time: Did I really see the bird clearly? And that seems to fix any problem I had and just slowing it down with my eyes.
Gil: We are going to have a gathering of several shooters here in the not too distant future that have been through our system for quite some time, and we are beginning to develop a series of packages, beginner, intermediate, and advanced packages that people can follow to a tee in a number of shots, kind of shots, things that you have to learn. Shane is a master class shooter now, and when I told him or Vicki told him to work on his gun mount and learn to shoot low gun as a beginner he didn’t do it, and he stuck with high gun. And then as an intermediate shooter, he had to take a series of steps back just to learn how to mount the gun because eventually he realized that being able to shoot with an unmounted gun was a great advantage on certain targets and to have a series of packages like that that somebody like you that’s just starting with us can follow and hear actual shooters say: When Gil and Vicki tell you to learn to mount the gun, they mean learn to mount the gun. Don’t put that off.
You’ll learn it as a beginner. You can hone it as an intermediate, and it will become a real sharp sword in your toolbox as an advanced shooter.
So we’re pretty excited about this project, and I want you to look at it as a person who is just starting with us and tell us what you think about it. So that’s good. I’m happy for you and your daughters, man. That’s just outstanding. Isn’t that book an incredible book to read?
Patrick: Yes. It’s been life changing. Life changing.
Gil: And we are talking about, of course, the Daniel Coyle book, The Talent Code. And his second book, The Little Red Book of Talent, is a summary of little tips that are really good also.
And if any of you have not read the book, you’re stupid. Go read the book and get The Little Red Book of Talent. It’s got a lot of great practice tips in it, and I can’t tell you enough about it. Daniel Coyle will be quoted in an interview in our next book that’ll be coming out hopefully in the electronic version form on the Knowledge Vault in the future. It’ll be a two volume hardback set. They’ll be out probably by March. It’s just taking a long time to get this out. We’re over 300 pages right now with no photographs and no videos. The electronic version will have videos and photographs embedded in it, and you can look at the videos in the copy and go back to the book on the Knowledge Vault. So we’re really excited about this. This is a pivotal thing for us. So, anyway, moving right along, thank you Patrick.
I want to talk to Jeff. Jeff, if you wouldn’t mind just briefly going through what we talked about today.
Jeff: Sure. They have an event at Nemacolin in the fall called the Benelli 454 sponsored by the Benelli folks, and it’s a two day event, and they have a grand total of 454 targets across each event. So there’s a 50 bird prelim, some subgauges, a three bird shoot which is kind of unique. That part isn’t registered, of course. And then they throw five stand, FITASC, and a Main event. And aside from the individual event, they also do a high overall across all events, kind of an ironman challenge of shoot everything. They count up everybody’s score and give off a plaque to whoever meets the highest score.
So I had a pretty good weekend and ended up winning the overall. Didn’t do so hot in a couple of events; but across the whole aggregate of everything I ended up with a 404 out of 454. So a pretty decent weekend.
Gil: And you had expressed to me that, I think you ended up second in the Main with a 94, and you shot a 44 out of 50 in FITASC, and you ran your first registered 50 straight in a sporting event in the 28 gauge, and you shot a 46 with a 410.
Jeff: Yep.
Gil: That 50 straight must have been really something.
Jeff: It was interesting. This is what we talked about a little bit this morning. By about halfway through the first day I had sort of fallen into, I hate to say zone because it’s so cliche; but falling into the zone where everything was kind of slow. I wasn’t really thinking about any- thing when I was shooting, and I got about halfway through the 28 gauge event, which was eight stations. I got about half of the fourth or fifth station and before I realized that I was straight. Up until that point they’ve just been targets.
They started to get a little monotonous, I guess, at some level. But I realized I was straight; but it didn’t really change my outlook. It didn’t really change my mental energy. It didn’t really change anything. I just finished the next couple of stations, and on the last station, just before I stepped in the box, the trapper looked at me and I knew he wanted to say something, that my card was still straight; but he kept his mouth shut, which I was thankful for, and I just looked at the two targets and shot the first pair and said: Okay, four left. Shot the second pair: Okay, two left. Shot the third pair, broke both of them and said: Holy crap, I just shot a 50. And then I celebrated a little bit, and the trapper looked at me and said: I think I was more worried than you were.
But, you know, the interesting part about it was that at the end of it, it didn’t really feel like anything. It was very flat and very normal, I actually almost felt a little bit subdued, I guess, for lack of a better term, a little bit calm, maybe more so than I would have thought. I guess in the past I would have thought to myself: Do you know what? I need to be a little more tense about this. I need to be more focused. I need to be a little more on edge; but really I was perhaps too calm or at least what I would have thought was too calm. But it just reeled off.
And it was interesting, because one of the guys that I was shooting with ended with a 45, and the next highest score below that was a 43, and when we walked back in the clubhouse, I was just biting my tongue because I kept wanting to say I didn’t think the targets were that hard. They were just all breakable, and they were all right there in front of me and I was able to shoot them all and it was no big deal. And I just tried to keep my mouth shut because everyone else was complaining about, boy, those targets are stiff. I don’t believe that someone would throw targets like that on a subgauge course. And so it was an interesting experience across the board.
Gil: We talked a little bit today about the fact that you weren’t thinking process, and I think you said: When I think process I was inconsistent. Is that what you said?
Jeff: Yes. You’re right. This is something I’ve kind of figured out over the last couple of months, that when I practice I’m very process oriented. I’m very much: Okay, this is where I need to pick a break point for this target. This is the move I have to make. You talked about it when we shoot that you don’t care if we break the target. You care about making the right move, making the right mount, picking the right spot, and that’s how I think when I practice.
And what happens is when I get into a tournament and I get the targets that I’m not comfortable with, I start doing that same thing, and it kind of binds me up a little bit. I start thinking too much about the process. I don’t know. Consciously, I don’t care if I hit the target or not; but I’m way more focused on the mechanics of the shot than I should be, and if you can track that thought process and that behavior with what happened to me over the weekend and for probably for 80-percent of the weekend, I never once thought about a hold point, never once thought about a break point. I walked up. I looked at what the targets were doing, and everything else happened out of flow, you know, just out of, okay, this is the right spot to hold the gun so do it, and I never really was thinking about the mechanics of breaking the targets.
Gil: Now, when Jeff explained that feeling to me today, I brought to the forefront the thought that he had been so diligent in the last two years in his training and in his practice and even in his tournament play being process oriented because we talk a lot about being process oriented to keep us from becoming outcome oriented while we’re performing. To keep our expectation in check and to keep from thinking about score, to keep from getting out of the present and going into the future. You know, when you’re only down three going into the last two stands where you’re sitting on a 97 or when you’re going to shoot an 83 and if you drop five on the first two stands, hell, you’re already down five and you got 10 stands to go and you already imagine yourself shooting a 75. In both of those scenarios, it’s easy for you to think outcome oriented things when you’re performing.
And my thought to Jeff was the fact that he’d spent his last 18 months to two years diligently focused on process every time he practices, and he and I have talked to each other many times about working on process, always improve your process, always hone your skills, always be honing something even if you smoked the target. If it wasn’t smooth, go back and hone your skills. And I felt like that his diligence in the last two years not only when he’d been practicing but when he’s been performing, working on process goals, created the eventual scenario that he experienced this weekend which was a peak performance.
And, like you said, there was nothing there. You just went in. He had looked at the targets. Everything was breakable. And I think, Jeff, it was maybe three months ago when you sent me an email, and you had an aha moment when you said it’s not the targets that are hard; it’s focus that’s hard.
Jeff: Yes. That was about right, about three months ago.
Gil: Yeah. And I think that might have been your turning point when you finally can step back and look at all of the things that you had learned in your practice and all of the things that had come to pass with you. I think that might have been that little thing that just kind of allowed you to move into automaticity in your game and allowed things like this to happen for you. I go back to what we’ve been studying and what we’ve been realizing in the last 12 months is that performance is a circuit also. How you perform in a tournament is a circuit in your brain and you’re not going to have that circuit be complete and be myelinated just because you want to perform well.
Just because you put your time in, you have to go into your training sessions and be very clear to your brain what it is you’re asking it to do in the process part of your setup, and when you can carry that process thinking into the tournament, even at the risk of not performing as well as you might, but you are stubborn with preparing that circuit in your brain that we’ll call the performance circuit, when you are so clear to your brain what it is you’re asking it to do, the brain will begin to respond, and all of a sudden when the preload is equal to the reality what you experienced can occur. Does that makes sense to you?
Jeff: Yeah. I think it does. Having gone through it a couple of times, I think I had mentioned to you that I’ve had a couple of 49s at various events, and the first one, you know, I got about halfway through and the wheel started grinding about: Well, jeez, you know, you’re only down one target, and it was real tense the whole way through.
And the second time it was still a problem and I was still sweaty. I still had to wipe the gun a couple of times because it was getting all slimy from my sweat. And the third time it was a little easier, and the fourth one was a couple of weeks ago in New Jersey at M&M and happened to be with the 410 and it was just level. I didn’t feel anything. The target I missed was the second target on the course. You know, there was this big teal that went up, and it was all belly and it was probably 40 yards away, and I took the top off the first one, and I thought to myself: Crap, I did something wrong.
Rather than manage it, I tried to fix it and I missed the second target, and the trapper, who is someone that I know, she said: Don’t do that. Relax. Just shoot the target.
And so I did, and I went the rest of the way through the whole course and never thought about it again, and when I got to the end, I had a 49. I thought that was pretty good, and I was never tense. It never really bothered me, and it’s definitely something we’ll call experience. Game experience, play off experience, whatever; but I definitely think once you’ve gone through it a couple of times it does burn that path, and it puts you in a position where when you go through it a second time and you’re a little more familiar with it and it gets easier perhaps. Easier is a bad word maybe. It gets more consistent and more predictable every time you go through it.
Gil: Yeah. You can’t think your way to the right action. You’ve got to act your way to the right thinking, and the mental gurus out there will tell you that you can reprogram your brain, and if you think the right thoughts, everything will come to pass, and you’re going to be a U.S. Open champion in no time flat; but that’s a bunch of bunk. There’s no shortcut to creating that myelin sheath on that circuit we call the performance circuit, and what you’re describing is developing a performance circuit, and it’s just something that has to be done through perseverance and through patience.
Jeff: Just to tack on something, I’ll also say that for me when I was fighting through that and when I’m managing my fear in a station, the thing that’s most effective for me, absolutely by far the most effective thing for me when I’m managing a station is looking at a presentation and say: Do you know what? I practiced this on Gil’s field six months ago when I was down there or last week I had my trap set up and it was almost the same shot. I’ve practiced this a hundred times. There’s no difference between this shot and the one that I did in practice.
That’s becoming more effective; but that usually helps me deal with the uncertainty and the doubt because you’ll look at certain target presentations, true pairs, whatever, and there’s two ways to shoot it, the risky way, a less risky way, a hard way, an easy way, whatever. And how do you pick? What do you do? If you’ve never shot it before or if it’s your killer presentation, if it’s a rabbit or if it’s a quartering shot or whatever, how do you manage the fear of seeing that target and saying: Oh my God, I’m only down two targets, I’m about four stations left and here’s a freaking rabbit that I can’t hit from the left, you know? And I can just say to myself: Do you know what? You’ve practiced this a hundred times so just do it, and that helps me a lot. Of all the things that I’ve done being able to think about that and know that I practiced it and know that I’ve been able to do it really helps.
Gil: Which goes back to what I was talking about a minute ago, which is for the last two years you have been relentless on working on process. When you had time to practice, you didn’t go out and practice stupid shots like 50 yard curling chandelles. You practiced good fundamentals, and every time you practiced you were honing your fundamentals, and you didn’t get hung up in score. You made the commitment several years ago when you and I talked about this to hone your fundamentals so that they were not only subconscious but they were at a level that you can depend on in situations like this.
And the work you’ve done over the last two years I think is resulting in where you find yourself now. And you’re saying the right things. I mean, the right things are coming out of your mouth. When there’s fear, you counteract that fear with saying: I’ve done this before and this is no different than the other one. I’m just going to go do this. Then the fear goes away because of experience, and that’s actually honing that performance circuit in your brain, and it is a circuit in your brain.
Just like I talked to you today about how it doesn’t matter whether it’s golf, pole vaulting, public speaking or tuning a car. It doesn’t mat- ter what it is. Everything is a performance circuit in your brain. You can understand how to speak; but if you can’t organize your thoughts and let it go when you’re talking on a microphone to a thousand people, you can’t do it. It’s just one of those things. It’s like Shane said. Shane, when was it that you and I talked about what your goals for this year need to be, to always be looking for a target you can’t break and always be putting yourself in a situation in front of people where you can fail in front of them so that you can get used to performing in front of people? Was that this year or last year?
Shane: That was this year. What had set that up was me and Ben had gone down to Caney Creek and I shot a 47 or a 48. I got my 28 gauge barrels, and then we went back, I think it was the very next month, and I want to say maybe we shot either between there or the World English or something. But, regardless, we had gone back the next month and the exact same thing happened; but I had realized after I had closed it the time before, it dawned on me that that was the only thing that was going to make me better, was to certainly seek out situations that pushed me outside of my comfort zone, because that’s the only way you pull those into your comfort zone and that’s the only way that you accomplish the task at hand is to hone those skills and develop them.
So the same deal happened. And we got all the way around to the last station, and I was down two targets. And what set that up was when we had to go back and shoot station one last because they had a trap malfunction, and it was a true pair. And we get up there. I started the rotation on station one. We got up there and somebody had been messing with the Promatic machine, the wireless or whatever; but only one bird was coming out. They pulled it the first time, and one of the birds was this real tall chandelle, and the first pair I called pull, and I just whipped that chandelle but it was a no bird because the second bird didn’t come out. Oh, okay. No problem. I got this. The second pair, pull, no bird, and I just whipped the chandelle with both barrels.
So at this point they’re like, you know, the trap is broken. Let’s go shoot the rest of the course and come back. So we shoot all of the rest of them, and somewhere in the middle I distinctly remember me and Ben and this other guy. I was shooting, and we just got to messing around and I dropped the second bird. It was a pretty respectable pair, and I dropped the second bird of the pair, and then I shot again and dropped the second bird of the pair, and I distinctly remember Ben telling me: Hey. And I looked at him and he goes: Quit screwing around and shoot the targets, and I was like, okay.
So I run the station out, like station three. Station 4, no problem. We get to Station 6. Run it out. We’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning, all the way back around to Station 1, and my card is on top and I’m only down two, and now I’m standing at Station 1 with the crowd watching the target; and I’m only down two targets. I remember them telling me, you know, we can lead if you want us to, and the other guy looked like, no, it’s all right. You know, let me go first and you can go last, and I said no. Not only do I want these people, they want me. I want to go first. I need to go first. Watch this.
Then I just ground them out and I smashed every one of them, and it was no big deal and that cemented it for me because I just felt like a huge boost in confidence from being able to do that and being able to step in, and what really pushed that home for me was that realization that that’s the only way I’m going to get better in a performance mode is to put myself in those situations. Just like Jeff was saying. You know, the first time I shot a 49 I was just shaking. And then the second time I shot a 49, it was kind of, ooh, it’s happening. The third time it was just another 49, and that’s the only way that I’m going to get better is to seek that stuff out and that was about May or June, somewhere along in there, that we were having that conversation this year.
Gil: And another big thing for you this year was being honest with yourself. Was that this year or last year?
Shane: It was really last year. There’s been a lot of stuff going on, and you’re kind of privy to some of that. It kind of started to quiet down, and it was then I really began to understand what being honest with yourself really means. As we’ve talked about, you can’t BS the BS’er. You can smell it. You know it. You stepped in it. You’re just not sure but it’s your own BS. You know it’s there. It doesn’t matter what you tell yourself or whatever. It ain’t going to work, and that was one of the big deals for me, is being able to be honest with myself, and we had that conversation about that recently about talking about pressure, to being able it.
Gil: Yeah.
Shane: I think that ties back into that being honest with yourself thing because until you can get honest with yourself, it’s going to be real hard to control the pressure.
Gil: Well, I think, going back to Jeff’s experience, the way you described it, Jeff, as you were more relaxed than normal, you were more calm, and you felt like that not thinking process was helping you; is that correct?
Jeff: Yeah. I agree with that.
Gil: All right. So what was really happening is your fear and excitement adrenaline curves were parallel. One was not overriding the other. You were accepting the fact that you were ready and you were accepting the fact that you were there and things didn’t look difficult or easy. They just were. And you really became something that’s happened to me many many times. You really just became an observer of your performance.
Jeff: Yeah.
Gil: And those times will continue to happen for you. And they will happen to the rest of you on the phone. In some instances, it’s after the sugar at breakfast with two boys and you’re having to control your boys while you’re trying to shoot a score on a sporting clays course like Rick Carter; but there are certain times that it’s just going to happen for you, and during those times process thinking becomes a distraction. You need to stick with where you are and enjoy the moment and let it happen; but on those times or on those days where that zone or that state of mind eludes you, that’s when coming back to process thinking will either help you get back into that state of mind or help you maintain a state of mind where your adrenaline curves are closer than they would be if you began to think about results. So understand it.
Bob Shannon sent me a series of articles today on putting it together, skills for pressure performance, and part of it was there was a little excerpt in there on focusing on process, and it covered the use of self talk. There’s two sides of it and we’ve covered both sides. There’s one side of it that says self talk is good because the athlete can control self talk. The downside of self talk is when the self talk gets to a mechanical part of the process that’s already automatic in the athlete’s mind, and because of nerves or whatever the self talk degrades to very specific parts or elements of the movement, and it takes them out of that automaticity state and does not help them with their performance.
The other part of it that’s a good thing: when we talk about process thoughts, if you can find key things from this performance that you can maybe use as very small self talk phrases that don’t have to do with the mechanics of things but they have more to do with how it felt when you were having this experience, then those I think would be great self talk phrases that you can use as, quote, process points to help you maintain a state that will help you perform better.
We may go through this article next week or next month when we get together after Nationals; but I just wanted to throw that in there.
Gil: Last night, I talked with Jennifer Shelly who’s been on several times. She was very frustrated about losing 15 or 20 targets due to fear, making her get excited and moving her hands too fast and costing her some targets, and the reason I’m bringing this up is that you are all going to find yourself in a position that she found herself in and, that is, she’s going crazy at business. She barely has an hour and a half to two hours a week max to practice if she even has that.
Living in Montana, she might be able to get to shoot a competition once a month. There’s just no competitions up there unlike in Houston. In Houston you can shoot a competition every Saturday and Sunday within two hours of your house of every month. It doesn’t matter what month it is. There’s a tournament somewhere. And I had a long talk with her along the same lines that Jeff and I talked about, and that is that learning to shoot tournaments is a neuro circuit in itself, and the only way you develop that neuro circuit is through shooting tournaments and actually thinking about process and not outcome.
Jennifer said to me that in her school athletics she was always a peak performer. It didn’t matter what it was. She was always a peak performer, and being a peak performer came relatively easy for her, and she was frustrated that this wasn’t coming as easy, and I explained to her that this is probably one of the most difficult things you could ever take on to do, number one, and, number two, it takes a certain amount of time, not just developing the fundamentals, which Jeff put in and Rick has put in and all of you have put in; but it takes a certain number of competitions going into them knowing that you’re not there to win but you’re there to evaluate your game and evaluate what you need to hone and make better so that when you go into a tournament, eventually your game will be equal to your goal, which is to win. And it took awhile; but we put that in perspective, and she began to understand a little bit more about how you can put your time in, but it isn’t going to make a big difference until you put your time in as Craig Hill described several years ago on this coaching hour. He said, Gil Ash told me I had to travel, and until you put that number on your back
in a strange town and a strange place, sleeping in a strange bed, not knowing where to go, what to do, and until you’ve done that enough times, you ain’t going to be able to close at a big tournament that’s out of town or even in your town.
At the end of the day, the myelin model teaches us that you can visualize it all you want to. You can will it. You can think about it. You can do all you want to to get it; but at the end of the day, it’s how many times have you done it and how many times have you done it with the right attitude and how many times have you done it and failed but taken away from the failure something that you were able to use to make you better. That’s the myelin model, fail, fail better, fail again, fail better until one day how you’ve handled the failures when you’ve been performing and when you’ve been training eventually turn into an experience like Jeff had.
And, Jeff, over the last two years, you had a time in there where you couldn’t train much, right?
Jeff: Yeah.
Gil: But when you’ve been training and when you’ve been competing, you’ve been really been focused on process and you’ve really been learning a lot about your game and improving your game, right?
Jeff: Yes.
Gil: And I think this is an ultimate reward for that. I mean, it’s just one of those things, and this is not going to be the last time you’re going to experience it. It’s just like you were explaining, you’d shot several 49s, and the first time you shot a 49 your hands were sweating like Vicki Ash’s feet, which is a lot. Okay? And I know too because I felt that way in a lot of situations myself. But eventually, having faced a 49 enough times, when it came time to face the 50, facing the 49 and becoming better each time allowed you to face the possibility of a 50 and succeed. Would you agree with that?
Jeff: Yes.
Gil: I mean, it’s just the way it is. You’ve been on good scores in the past, and it hadn’t come to pass; but each time that it didn’t come to pass, you learned from it and it’s that attitude that we try to inspire people to bring to a competition. The competition isn’t a win or lose thing. The competition is an opportunity for you to lay it all out there on the line and keep giving it a hundred percent, and at the end of the competition, go back and evaluate what happened, what targets were you comfortable on, what targets were you not comfortable on, what were they, right to left, left to right, long, short, curling, quartering. It doesn’t matter what they were; but you began to evaluate your overall game and not worry about finding a weak point. That’s where being honest with yourself is huge, like I talked to Shane about.
Like you said, you can’t lie to yourself, and in learning to be honest with yourself, you begin to quit wishing and hoping and you begin to start planning and plotting. And I think Shane would agree with me on this: when you’re really honest with yourself, life becomes much easier.
Would you agree with that, Shane?
Shane: Absolutely. And I didn’t realize previously it’s some kind of cli- che; but I think there’s a tremendous amount of people that play the game and they live their lives and they’re playing the short game, and I’m not playing the short game. I’m playing the long game and once I sat down and digested that, that applied to a lot more than just what I do with a shotgun, and for me it makes it all a whole lot easier.
One of the things that it makes easier is the fact that you can accept things that are completely beyond your control. That makes accepting certain things a lot easier, and not reacting to things in a negative way is easier because when you take a step back, a lot of times you can’t see the forest for the trees, and once you begin to be honest with yourself, I think I moved from playing a short game into realizing that I’m playing the long game. I’m in this for the long haul, and if something happens and you have a bad station, it’s a whole lot easier to put that down and walk away because it was just a station. It was just a station. Big deal. You know, you go into the last station straight and you hit one target out of the last ten, whatever, big deal, you know. So you put up a 91 instead of a hundred today.
Every time that happens, you’re one step closer to not dropping them next time. That’s not any different than the dude backing into your car in the parking lot or whatever it happens to be. It’s just not that big of a deal. There’s nothing you can do about it. It happened. It’s over with, that all of that was completely out of your control. You can only control what you’re doing now; but you have to be able to accept the fact that all of that is out of your control and accept your emotions for what they are.
Gil: Yeah.
Shane: You can change what you do with that, but there’s a lot of things I had to learn about myself, and there’s the things I had to accept to be able to be that honest with myself, and it carried over into everything. It wasn’t just with the shotgun. I would dare say it was a lot of things in my life. I had to change the way I thought, and the changes in the rest of my life ultimately changed how I can perform.
Gil: I could not agree with you more. And I will convince you and everybody else out there and everybody that listens to this on the Knowledge Vault that when we first started doing this, we thought we were going to be teaching people how to break targets, and it has evolved into teaching people how to become better people vis a vis breaking targets, and you can’t lie to yourself and that’s a big deal, and that’s a huge lesson for you to learn.
And you’re right. You can’t be one person on the sporting clays range and be another person somewhere else. You can; but you’re not going to have a good life, and as soon as you get ahold of what’s going on and get ahold of yourself and realize that events don’t cause suffering, our reaction to them is what causes suffering, and it is what it is. It becomes what you make of it. Then you can become a lot more honest with yourself, and things in all parts of your life begin to become a little easier to accept, and, more importantly, whatever happens to you you can learn from it because if you get mad at what happens to you, you don’t learn from it. So, I mean, that’s just a huge thing. That’s a big thing.
Patrick: Hey, Gil?
Gil: Yes, sir?
Patrick: This is Patrick again.
Gil: Yes, sir, Patrick.
Patrick: I can speak to that a little bit. Ever since our lesson, everything I do now I think about, do I want to myelinate better? And I had a little scare with my last little doctor’s visit. I had some high cholesterol and high blood sugar and I just turned 45. So I’m getting to that age where what I eat is very important. And so I’ve been applying the same things to that. I’ve really dropped some weight, and I said, you know, if I want to be a good shooter, I’ve got to have good health because if I keep down this road of eating bad foods or not doing the right thing, then it’s part of being honest with yourself. Hey, you know, I’m not doing the best that I can do for my body; therefore, I’m not going to be able to do the best I can shooting because of something that I want.
So this whole thing is way past shooting. It’s just about thinking about myelinating everything you do in your life. I mean, it really is, and it’s affected me. It’s a big deal in everything that I do, you know, since that lesson.
Gil: That’s tremendous, and we look forward to seeing you again and continuing to talk about this on the coaching hour. I’ve asked several people to call in tonight that have never called in, and they just said they were going to listen; but this is why I asked you to call in. There’s some things being said tonight that are huge. If you want to boost your performance, you need to take to heart a lot of the things that have been said tonight.
Gil: I want to talk briefly to Rick. We’ve got 11 minutes to go, and Rick had sent me an email with the question: what is the difference between a preload and a preshot routine?
Rick, in some instances, they can be the same. The preshot routine to me is just something that you do before each shot that allows you to turn off conscious planning and turn on subconscious reaction to the target, and you have to do it over and over again so that it becomes a circuit in your brain and it happens without thought. You can’t think, okay, I’ve got to close, I’ve got to do this, blah blah blah. You can’t be thinking while you’re performing.
Now, it has become overwhelmingly obvious to us this year that the more clear you can be to your brain exactly what it is you’re asking it to do, the more the brain will respond in kind. And I think one of the reasons that Jeff ended up having a pretty good year this year and ended up where he was when he was at Nemacolin was the fact that he was more clear to his brain in his training especially exactly what it is he wanted to do and even to a fault of not performing as well as he could have. When he was shooting tournaments for the last couple of years, he maintained a process oriented thought, and that really opened up to his brain what it is he was asking his brain to do.
Now, I tried this this last weekend. I had a group of rookies, barrel checkers and barrel draggers, looking down the barrel, and once I had a breakthrough with them and they began to see the bird behind the barrel, I began to put targets out in front of them and said: okay, look at the left target and mount the gun with the right target and preload that picture. That’s what it’s going to look like. You’re going to be seeing the bird to the left of the barrel, and every time that I preloaded that shot in their brain and said now shoot the shot, they’d break the target instantly and they’d smoke it. With horrible gun mounts they’d still smoke it. But after about three or four shots, they’d go to looking down the barrel again and start missing.
And we have been working with shooters all over the world now this year about a preload, and to me a preload has everything to do with what Shane would describe as, I’m either going to stabilize the shot or I’m going to cut it off like a quartering bird; but to vividly imagine when you see those targets exactly what that shot is going to look like as you pull the trigger to me is a preload. I was discussing with Jeff today, when he was talking about it’s just quiet and when he was looking at the targets, not only did the targets not look intimidating or difficult the plan was immediately obvious to him, and there was no indecision about the plan, and I said: Welcome to the way I see things.
When I see a pair of targets, I not only see them broken in two or three different places, I see the pictures that it takes to break those targets. I see what it’s going to look like in the future. Vicki, on the other hand, is just the opposite. She has to analytically go through everything, and then she can execute the shot.
So my preload is more automatic, and to me the preload is: what’s the shot going to look like as I pull the trigger, not how far in front will I be; but if it’s a quartering bird, you’re going to insert in front of that bird. You might see it come to the gun a little bit; but you’re going to insert and take the shot. If it’s a big looper or a tower bird or a crosser, that shot is going to be stable at the end, and to me it’s that end product that I want to be very clear with my brain what it is I want it to do. I want it to know what I want it to look like. Either cut it off or stabilize it. I want it to know because any number of times I’ve taken a customer’s gun and gotten up, and I’ve seen that bird and the last thing I do before I close the gun and call pull is I visualize what I want that shot to look like. I know I’ve tried to be as clear to my brain as I can what I want it to produce after that target is in the air as the target and the gun come together.
Now, the routine, on the other hand, is something that you will do every time. It could involve a preload. What I do with the preload is when I’m looking at the break points. When I say I’m going to break it right there, it’s going to look like this and it’s going to be stable or it’s going to look like this and I’m going to see it come as I cut it off as a quartering bird or I’m going to have the gun mounted. As it comes out I’m going to go up and I’m going to touch that bird because it’s a straightaway. I’m going to preload that when I’m looking at the break points, and then when I come back and use my preshot routine, it’s not as much of a preload; it’s just where it’s going to happen, close, address, pull. Have I made myself clear?
Rick: You preload on the first pair?
Gil: Yeah, I preload. I’m going to preload when I’m looking at the break point and I’m making my plan.
Rick: That’s clear. It’s very clear to me now.
Gil: Okay. Now, let’s say that I chip a bird or for some reason I get the break or I don’t get the break and I’ve got to change something. In my correction routine I’m going to preload the correction.
Rick: That’s good.
Gil: Then I’m going to load the gun, which is my cue to begin, break point one, break point two, back to break point one, close, address, pull, boom boom. The routine is designed to separate conscious planning and thought from subconscious reaction. You’re going to find a greater advantage to using the preload when you are practicing than any other place because when you’re competing, the preload should be automatic because of the thousands of times you’ve done it in practice, and I think you’ll find that the more intricate and the more detailed your preload is in practice the higher the level of practice you will experience because that’s where you’re really being clear to the brain what you want.
I was talking to Steve Brown and he was talking to Bill McGuire. He was talking to him about his practice and the difference in what he saw in the practice and in a tournament, and he said: The gun gets in in practice. It does. It gets in. I still hit the bird; but the gun gets in. And he said: I don’t think that’s all bad. He didn’t understand it at the time; but I understand that comment. It gets into your practice; but it doesn’t get in during the tournament. When he’s practicing, that gun can get in sometimes because he’s trying to be clear to his brain exactly what it is he wants. He’s honing that circuit. He’s honing that picture. He’s honing that move, and it’s okay for that gun to sneak in during practice; but on tournament day he preloads it and it happens. The gun is not there, which is what Jeff experienced.
So I would tell you that based on what I know now, and you know as well as I do that our opinion shift and change with our experience and with science, but the more in your practice you can use a preload so that your reality and your preload are the same, the quicker the brain will understand exactly what it is you’re trying to do and the sooner neuro suspension can begin to occur, meaning once the brain is really clear what you’re asking it to do, it will begin to suspend from your consciousness anything that is irrelevant to success or the action or con- fusing to the input. It begins to say: well, I need that; but I don’t need that. That’s in the way. Put that out of there. I don’t need that and I don’t need that. Let’s get those out of the way. Now let’s do it again.
And what ends up happening, because you have preloaded this stuff in your practice so diligently and so specifically, is the brain begins to get rid of the crap that’s not necessary or that’s confusing to consistency, and all of a sudden your focus ascends to a higher level, not that you see better; but the picture is less confusing. And if you’ll remember what Jeff said, it wasn’t different. It was just calm. There was just nothing there. It was obvious. The plans were obvious. He didn’t have to process. It just happened.
So in your practice, I think the preload will be a great advantage to you if in your practice when you’re working on your mechanics if you will preload vividly what you want the brain to give you at the end of this shot, preload it, and when your preload is equal to the reality of the shot, the brain begins to have the aha moment and says now I know what you’ve been asking me to do. Now get out of my way and let me make this better for you. Does that make sense?
Rick: Perfect sense.
Gil: Well, once again, just like my wife says, I’m perfect. So, guys, we’re out of time.
Rick, thanks for asking that question. I think there are a lot of people out there that are going to enjoy that answer, and it will help them a lot. I know that Jeff has been preloading a lot of his stuff and is very process oriented when he was practicing and when he was performing, and I know that’s why he’s been shooting better, and Shane has been doing the same thing and Ben, too.
So, Shane, thank you, for talking a little bit tonight. I guess we will see you all on the other side of Nationals. Just remember your potential is like your weight. You never really lose it. You just push it in different directions based on your attitude. We’ll see y’all next month. Goodnight and thanks for participating.
