Although Gil is normally very shy and reserved, he does some talking this time about two recent experiences that shed light on expectation and performance pressure, one as a speaker and one as a shooter.
We also hear from our student and friend Dr. Dan Fisher, who is a vascular surgeon, in a discussion about the chemical effects of the adrenal glands in pressure filled or anxious situations.
Gil: Welcome to the November 2013 coaching hour. We have some guests tonight. We’re being visited by some of the board members of the SCTP (Scholastic Clay Target Program) and some of the people that we’re working with at the DNR (Department of Natural Resources) around the country to implement the OSP system into the hunter education program.
And so, guys, if you have any comments or anything, just say your first name and I’ll call on you.
Tonight we’re going to talk to Dr. Dan Fisher, our great friend in Chattanooga who wrote me an email the other day about the epinephrine release in the brain and how that affects your motor skills. After we talk a little bit about that with him and with Dr. Bob Shannon, we’re going to go to Ben Leonard on shooting without expec- tation. Ben emailed me and called me on the phone several times about how exactly do I implement shooting without expectation, and what does expectation really do to my ability to concentrate and perform well.
And after I’ve talked to Ben a little bit about that, then I’m going to relay to him two personal episodes that had happened in my life, one last night when I was giving a speech to a hundred of the most influential people in Houston at the Coronado Club in downtown Houston, and also I want to relate to you what I went through at Nationals.
Both performances had no expectations, and I think in relating those two things to everybody out there, maybe getting some questions, I think, Ben, it will help you and everybody else that ends up listening to this, all thousand of them out there that are on the Knowledge Vault now will be able to relate to shooting without expectation and exactly what expectation can do and does do to your ability to perform. So that’s it.
Gil: Dan-o?
Dan F: Yeah?
Gil: Let me read your email to me, and then I’d like to talk to you a little bit about some of the conclusions you drew. “Dear Gil, for a long time you had interest in the brain and how it sees the target. Here’s another thing to consider. The adrenal glands put out a bunch of hormones, one of which is epinephrine. This is released rapidly and in different quantities for fight or flight. It’s good if you want extraordinary strength or endurance. Think about a football lineman is trying to hit a guy across the line as hard as he can; however, epinephrine is not good for fine motor control because it makes you too nervous, jumpy, unsmooth, et cetera. It’s bad for shooters and for surgeons.”
Dan is a vascular surgeon, quite accomplished in what he does and sought after in his area for his expertise.
“One of the reasons I’ll never be a good tournament shooter is because I release too much epinephrine when I get into a high pres- sure shooting situation. This happens when I enter a tournament; but it rarely happens in the operating room. Good trial lawyers don’t get nervous at a big trial; but rookie lawyers do. So what’s the difference? Practice and repetition, leading to competence so that the brain is more comfortable with the event at hand. Anyone can panic with inex- perience. The old pros have seen it all, and they’ve managed to train their brain not to signal the adrenal glands to release the EPI or the epinephrine. For a shooter in a tournament, you don’t want a lot of epinephrine release. That’s one of the reasons why the McGuires and the Carlyles and the Kruegers win so many different tournaments.”
Now, I agree with that, Dan-o. The ability to compete, in my per- spective, is a neuro circuit that must be myelinated just like any other skill circuit, like mounting your gun, like doing sutures like you talked to me about, you know, when you have to use that really thin string or whatever you use to do it with. If you tie it too fast or if you tie it too tight, it’s going to break. And those kinds of skills have to be done enough times, and you referred to it as practice and repetition. Not only does practice and repetition lead to confidence; but it also allows for the brain to myelinate that circuit so that it becomes a skill circuit. Would you agree with that?
Dan F: I agree with that.
Gil: Okay.
Dan F: For instance, when we were in Argentina, shooting those doves and pigeons two months ago, there was no pressure on me. I wasn’t competing against anybody. I was just out there, and I was waxing the birds right and left; but if you put me in a tournament situation where I’ve got to win, it just puts additional pressure, and my particular body releases epinephrine, and it’s easy for me to just fall apart whereas I would really do that in a field shooting birds; but it’s pretty easy for me to do that shooting clay birds in a tournament.
Gil: Well, as much as you would like to think of yourself as special, you’re normal just like the rest of us.
Dan F: Right.
Gil: One of the reasons that people do sports is to put themselves in a situation where there’s risk, there’s risk of losing; but if they lose they don’t lose their life or their bank account. That’s why people do sports.
Dan F: Right
Gil: And that’s another reason that doing sports can help you grow as an individual, and I’ve seen you shoot. I feel like one of the reasons you’re in the situation you’re in, and I think Ben is going through this situation, too, and several of the other callers that have come in tonight are going through the same situation. One of the reasons that you’re in the situation you are in is that you don’t have the time to go out or the luxury of time to go out and shoot enough competitions to develop a skill circuit that allows you to not release epinephrine when you’re in a pressure situation or a perceived pressure situation when you shoot a tournament.
Dan F: Yeah, I agree.
Gil: You have other responsibilities; but if you were to retire tomorrow and call in rich, which I know you’re not going to do; but if you were to do that and you had nothing to do but whatever you wanted to do and you wanted to go shoot tournaments, you could shoot tournaments for three years in a row, and I’ve got to believe at the end of the third year of shooting tournaments you’re going to be able to control your physiology much better than you’re able to control it right now because you just don’t have the time to go out and do that. What do you think?
Dan F: I think you’re exactly right.
Gil: And I’ll tell you this, something that we have worked with shooters on worldwide, and that is the thing that increases the epinephrine release or the adrenaline release and you go shoot a tournament is expectation. You’re concerned about the outcome when you sign up.
Dan F: Right.
Gil: And the outcome is something you can’t control. It’s just like when you go into the OR you have to face a real possibility that the person you’re working on might die.
Dan F: Right.
Gil: And that’s a real thing for you, isn’t it?
Dan F: Oh, yeah, every day.
Gil: So you’re used to working with that pressure every day, and you’re able to cope with that pressure which enables you to keep the adrenaline curves, fear and excitement, to keep those two things in a parallel state and at a very low release state which allows you to stay in the present and do your job.
Dan F: Right.
Gil: When most people go to tournaments, the first time they go to a tournament they go into the tournament and their mind goes wild with expectation. I wonder what’s going to happen. I wonder if I’m going to win. I’ve missed seven targets on the first two stations. I’m already down seven. What’s going to happen? Expectation or the fear of what could happen or might happen takes you out of the present and either puts you in the past or in the future, and it signals a release of that fight or flight mechanism deep within the center part of your brain which makes you go out of control as far as being able to perform small, difficult motor skills.
Dan F: Right.
Gil: Am I on the right track, Dan-o?
Dan F: Yeah, I would say you’re right on it.
Gil: So, Bob Shannon, what do you think about that?
Bob S: I’m going to give you a slightly different version. I think there’s a lot of that going on; but there is some interesting research that shows that the vast majority of people when you photograph them or videotape them and their movements compared to what they think is happening under those circumstances there is a great divergence.
In highly expert people, they are actually aware of the difference, and they manipulate it to their advantage, and that makes them different than the rest of us. So they are aware accurately of how their movement changes under stress, and they work the equation in their favor. The rest of us don’t do that. We go back to beginning learner type movement behavior, and then your error rate goes up substantially because you become mechanical.
Gil: That’s right.
Bob S: And I do agree that stress is anxiety, and performance outcome and all those other things really have a huge effect, and they are improved if you can focus on something external to your movement pattern that you’ve become focused on, and the research shows that, as well.
So if you can get your mind really on, as you said, the ants and the cigarette butts and things like that on the ground, you do much better.
Gil: It’s focusing on small things; but to me in my journey it’s been controlling what I can control and being willing to put myself in situations where I could fail in front of other people and facing that situation over and over and over again, time and time again that’s allowed me to develop a system of focus concentration on certain things that I can control, which in turn allows me to keep my adrenaline levels in check. Both the fear and the excitement level in my brain stay together. One doesn’t supersede the other, and they stay at a very low rate which is exactly what happens to Dan when he’s in the operating room.
Bob S: I agree; but it wasn’t what happened to him when he started out.
Gil: No.
Dan F: Right. It was different back then.
Bob S: Yeah. And as Gil pointed out, if you were able to put yourself in the tournament game to the same degree of frequency that you were putting yourself in the operating room, that would change, I would bet, even faster than three years because there is a translatable part to that experience.
Dan F: Right.
Gil: And, Snowflake, I do agree that it would change more rapidly in three years simply because of his experience in working in life and death situations under pressure. It wouldn’t take long for that circuit to convert over to the tournament circuit.
Bob S: Yep. That’s my point.
Gil: He would probably have to pay someone some money to get some very good coaching regarding how to make that transfer.
Bob S: I wonder who that might be.
Gil: And I know who that would be. It would be Vicki Ash. It certainly wouldn’t be Gil Ash.
Bob S: No. Actually, Vicki would turn them over to you when she really wanted to increase the stress. That’s clear.
Gil: And this goes back to what we’ve talked about so many times on this coaching hour, and that is that the mental gurus, the guys who write the articles in the magazines, the guys who write the books, they say, well, you know, you can train your brain. You can reprogram your brain to think like a champion.
Well, I’m here to tell you in my experience, you don’t think your way to the right action. You have to act your way to the right way of thinking, and that’s the journey, the trilogy, if you will, that Ben Leonard has been on and that Shane has been on, and we’ve been working with them about being honest with themselves.
Gil: So, Ben, are you out there?
Ben: Yeah, I’m here.
Gil: And you and I have talked about how shooting without expectation is not as easy as it is said. Have you thought any more about shooting without expectation and what you might be able to do to accomplish that since we’ve talked?
Ben: Yeah. I actually have spent a lot of time thinking about that over the last few days, and whenever I spoke with you on Saturday, I actually started a tournament Sunday morning with some good results.
Just to give you a little bit of my history, since I’ve been playing this game, I punched out of the classes fairly quickly and so I’ve come to expect myself to shoot well. And about three or four months ago I punched into master class, and I carried that expectation through. And until recently, I realized that this is a journey, and I am not in a position yet to expect myself to win at the master class level. I’m not there. I haven’t put myself in the situation enough times for that calmness just to get myelinated.
But one of the things, when I was talking to Shane, we went out and practiced Thursday or Friday of last week, and we were talking about the upcoming tournament, and he said: What are your goals for Sunday? I said: you know, one of my top goals is to go into the tournament with no expectations other than to run my routine on every shot and have a good preload on every shot. I thought about that Thursday night and Friday night and Saturday night, and I had a game plan in my head of where I wanted to be mentally walking into the first station Sunday morning.
And that being said, what I found was that I was calm where historically whenever I’ve shot in the past I get nervous. I get the jitters. I don’t know. It’s excitement. It’s fear. It’s pressure on myself to exceed at that level; but Sunday I guess just due to a little bit of mental preparation and the several days prior to the shot I was calm. I ran my routines. I had a good preload routine and I shot well. I didn’t win; but at the same time, I shot well and better than what I had actually expected myself to do, and a lot of that ties back into just knowing where you are. Like you said, whenever you first started shooting, you don’t know that you’re down 18, 20 birds; but Sunday, I was doing really well until we come into the eight or ninth station, and it dawned on me that I’m down five or six birds, and that’s it.
And so I had a little bit of a lapse, and I do know that there were a couple of times that I did go mechanical. I went back to thinking about score and what are my squadmates going to think and things like that. It disrupted my flow; but I was able to kind of put that in check a little bit and I ended up finishing, shooting relatively well.
Bob S: The point is well taken, though; but the flow is the key element, was getting back into the flow.
Ben: Yeah. To me it was just finding that calm state of mind and telling myself score doesn’t matter. You’re not here to win. You’re shooting against some really good shooters, you’re shooting against master class shooters who have been there for 15, 20 years that have built these circuits. You’ve been here for three or four months. You don’t need to worry about trying to win. You need to worry about getting your mental game right, and the winning will eventually come, and it helped me get back into my routine and have that calm state of mind.
Gil: Isn’t it amazing how expectation prior to the shoot and judgment and expectation during the shoot will take you out of the present and put you everywhere but the present and increase the epinephrine release like Dan-o was talking about? Can you look back at what you’ve been struggling with and understand how expectation comes from judgment? Judgment is the conscious mind, not the subconscious mind. Can you understand how that gets your adrenaline curves all out of whack?
Ben: Oh, a hundred percent. It’s blatantly obvious. Like I said, you don’t know what you don’t know until you figure it out, and even Sunday after I ran the shoot, I was coming to Houston on Sunday afternoon. I was running late to the airport, and I knew I was going to be late because I was out shooting that morning, and I had a hundred other things on my mind besides trying to win. I was just trying to run my routines, and there was a big difference not having expectations in my performance.
Gil: It’s like when Rick Carter won his first high overall. I think we talked to him two months ago, and he had done everything wrong. He had a big breakfast with his kids. He had his two boys with him, and he was so concentrated on not letting his two boys get in anybody else’s way and keeping them kind of on a leash, you know, while he was shooting his tournament he didn’t even realize what he was shooting and how he had shot until he had gotten through and said goodbye to the people there, and the range owner came out and said, You might need to stick around a little bit. And he said, What for? And he said, Because you’ve got the high score in the clubhouse, and I don’t think there’s anybody out there that can beat you. And Rick was dumbfounded.
I don’t know whether Rick is with us tonight; but I never will forget that he said: Gil, I did everything wrong and I still won. But there’s a testimony right there to keeping your mind occupied on something that keeps your adrenaline curves level and at a low point.
Gil: I want to share an experience that I had last night. And, Ben, at intervals through this story, I’m going to ask you to be creative and think about some of the things that expectation could have done to me in my experience last night.
I was asked to give a speech at the Coronado Club at a dinner benefiting the Alley Theatre in downtown Houston. I agreed to do so, and immediately upon agreeing to do so I called Butch Mach who’s the chairman of that committee that puts that on, and I asked him what I had gotten myself into, and he said: Gil, you’re going to be surrounded with a hundred or so guys that are just the finest people in Houston. They’re very influential, and they can’t hit shit with a shotgun, and your animations are going to be a big hit. So all you’ve got to do is just go down there and be yourself.
So I was very relieved. I selected 23 different animations and kill shots to talk about, and Monday I put them into a PowerPoint format just to please the people at the Coronado Club because they wanted it in a PowerPoint format.
I went down Wednesday morning to test drive the PowerPoint, and it worked perfectly with all of their equipment. So I came back and rehearsed it three times, and it got better each time. Each time I got into my zone and each time I finished on time. Everything was perfect. I left my computer on charge. I went home to put on a tux.
Shane: A tux. Are you kidding me?
Gil: No. I had a tux on and my wife even has a picture. I’m sure she’d be glad to send it to you tomorrow.
Shane: Yeah. I need a picture of that for history.
Bob S: But it does have a shooting pad on the right, right?
Gil: Right. No, no, no. All right. So I picked my computer up on the way, and I set out to the Coronado Club. Traffic was an absolute mess. All of a sudden I found myself behind schedule. I was supposed to be there at about five minutes until 7:00, ten minutes until 7:00, and I knew I wasn’t going to make that deadline. Dinner was going to be served at 7:30, and I had to get there in enough time to set the computer up and get everything ready. About 7:05 I arrived. I immediately went into the meeting room and set up the computer with the help of Stacy and Veronica, my point person at the event. Turned the computer on, and it didn’t work on their equipment, the same equipment we tested only seven hours before. They called a staffer who knows more than me about this stuff, and he couldn’t figure it out, and you could feel the tension rise. Veronica, my contact, looked at me and was worried.
So, Ben, at this point in time, what kind of expectations could I have had?
Ben: Well, being that you had already rehearsed everything, you had it in mind that it was going to go flawless, and you’d already kind of psyched yourself up to talk to a hundred of the most influential people in Houston. And you think you just want to go out there and do it, and then all of a sudden somebody loosened up your lug nuts.
Gil: Loosened up my lug nuts?
Ben: Take them off.
Gil: Only in Midland, Texas, would I find that comment.
Bob S: No way for the wheel to come off down the road aways.
Gil: All right. And I have to tell you now, okay, Veronica looked at me and I knew she was worried. I looked right in her eyes and told her I could do it without the computer; but she said the animations were so great we’ve got to find a way to get this solved.
So I took a deep breath, and I realized at that point that if I got worried and started blaming people that my epinephrine would have been released and I would have gone crazy; but I didn’t do that. Now, I could have gone to the fact that I was getting ready to face a hundred of the most well to do movers and shakers in Houston and what a great opportunity this was and how it would be pivotal for our future in business in Houston and what a horrible thing it would be if I failed in front of all those guys, and you can imagine all of the other things that could have gone through my mind. And guess what they would have done to my adrenal glands?
I breathed deeply, and I just calmly looked at Veronica and said, Look, whatever happens I’m going to handle it and go on. Well, then I was supposed to be served at 7:30. At 7:30 they had to make a decision. They couldn’t use my computer to do this stuff. So they had to bring in a PC, and then their computer guru figured out how to download my PowerPoint onto a zip drive and put it into this other computer, which I knew absolutely nothing about how to run; but it seemed to work. It seemed to work. I knew nothing about the equipment; but their computer person gave me a quick lesson on what to do to get through the PowerPoint, space bar to go forward, delete to go backwards, double click to make the animation play.
While I was sitting at the table having dinner, I said: Oh, shit, I’m supposed to make the animations stop and back up so that I can make points throughout this presentations. I don’t know how to do that. At that point I could have been worried, trying to figure out how to do something that I had no control over or I could continue on with dinner, talk with the people at the table, relax and know that whatever happened I was going to be able to get through this.
So as I was introduced, I thought, you know, I bet I could single click that animation to stop it. If you have to double click it to make it go, I bet I can single click it to stop it. I didn’t know for sure. I got up there and they introduced me, and I started talking to the people and I pulled the first animation up and I clicked it one time and it stopped and I breathed a sigh of relief; but I couldn’t scrub them back and forth. Half of the points that I wanted to make I couldn’t make, and rather than lamenting that I couldn’t make half the points that I wanted to make, I stuck with what I knew I could do. Some of the animations wouldn’t play. I explained to them the computer glitch, went on to the next one just like it was something that happened to me every day.
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