2014-06 – June 2014 Coaching Hour – Life as a Competitor

This time, we spend most of the session discussing the recent National Sporting Clays Association U.S. Open Tournament with several of our students who attended, exploring their experiences there and what they can teach us about performance, failure and success.

We finish up with a reading from the book, Make It Stick,

The Science of Successful Learning, paying special attention to the idea of the roles of effort and ease in learning.

Overview of the 2014 U.S. Open Sporting Clays Championship

Gil: Sheep Eagle, tell me a little bit about your Open experience.

John: It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.

Gil: Okay.

John: Well, I mean, it was a lot of fun. It was quite arduous. The schedule this year for accommodating people made things stretch out. And then on Wednesday they had 70 mile an hour winds and several inches of rain in about 40 minutes at eight o’clock in the morning, and then that made everybody scramble because they had to cancel the rotation, and then your schedule got moved and, I mean, all those things that are going to send you screaming into the night, although I think most everybody handled it pretty well.

I would say for older fellows it’s not an excuse; but I think it was very difficult conditions. It was mostly dark and overcast and changing but dark, light, cloudy the whole time, and I think the scores kind of showed that. And you could see that some people shot at certain times when it was worse than others, and to look at the scores and sort of the top shooters that you expect to be grouped together, they really weren’t because there were such varying conditions and targets there.

Gil: Interesting.

John: Unfortunately, you know, I’m beginning to think I cannot put together a target inventory of those kind of targets without being there and suffering through them because you just don’t see them anywhere else.

I had a Vicki Ash moment because after the story of her and some target setter she happens to be related too, I felt the same way. I thought maybe we just needed to take him out and strangle him; but it was still fun.

So I had some success. I did get a trophy and you know how I love trophies; but the only problem is I never do the tie breaker things right.   I was tied for second in 28 gauge FITASC. I wound up third from the tie breakers. I was tied for third in 20 gauge and wound up sixth or seventh after the tie breakers and missed out from the trophy run in real FITASC by one or two birds. I wound up fifth. So, you know, I’m pretty happy. The Main event I had a great time. I got to look at a lot of targets for a long time before they hit the ground.

Had some things from Comanche Hills that were just fabulous. I think Brian (Ash) set the blue course. I ran the first station while people sat there and their knees clattered and their teeth chattered and I got interrupted in the middle of it and still had it going and just broke them. It was all get there early, stabilize the picture and they’re broken. There you go. Life is good. And I ran the last station that we shot on that blue course. Now, if you ask me about the rest of the blue course, I’m going to take the Fifth Amendment.

But there were a very good range of targets, a big range of targets. You have a lot of terrain and one of the things I got to see, I shot FITASC with Kevin DeMichiel and that was hard, and there’s just no way around it and it was difficult conditions both days.

So I got to see a pro get a little cranky with himself and then turn and run a parcour because he was so mad about the one before, even though he was smiling and laughing the whole time. It was a great lesson in attitude. He did say watch this or hold my beer or however you want to say it; but he had a little edge on it, and he was still pleasant while he was doing it. He was still focused, and he just walked away. And they said: Oh, he didn’t miss any. How about that?

And that was kind of fun to watch. I had a pretty good lesson, and I think with you guys I’ve taken so long to try and slow down and be smooth. Now it’s time. There are a few targets, especially in FITASC, where it really is an advantage to be aggressive and early rather than smooth and in the middle and more of a mental recognition program that has to get going here a little bit. I figured a couple of them out; but there were a couple of more I didn’t figure out. When you find  out you’ve really lost the top spot by two or three birds over two days and you think about all of those that you didn’t think well on, that   can be a little depressing when you’re sitting in the Las Vegas airport for four hours.

Gil: Well, I will tell you this and I know it’s not much consolation; but we’ve always said that it’s a five year curve, and it’s gotten a little shorter than that simply because when we did it, it was a five year curve and there was no Gil or Vicki to go through to learn how to stabilize the picture or to learn the shortcuts in training and whatnot that you guys have.

But still it comes back to, you can shoot in one place all you want to; but in order to compete you’ve got to see the same targets delivered with a different background as many different places as you can, and that’s why, to compete on a national level, you’ve got to travel. You’ve got to put your pillow in your suitcase and your gun in your case and get on the airplane and go and sleep in a bed that you’re not used   to and find shells and show up. Eventually it’s just a matter of time. You’ve just got to do it. You’ve got to pay your dues. The only time you wake up at your first U.S. Open and win high overall is in Disney World or in the movies, and it just doesn’t happen that way.

I’ve been doing a lot of studying on laws of learning, and I’m not ready to talk about it completely tonight; but I’m learning a lot about the science of successful learning and how to make it stick, and there’s a lot of mythology out there.

But what you’re doing right now and your ability to look at it objectively is a huge step in your ability to learn and get better. We look at practice as going out and if we have a problem with a right to left crosser, let’s go out and shoot 500 of them and the science says that that just doesn’t work. You’re better off shooting 12 to 15 of them and then going up and changing the angle a little bit and shoot 12   to 15 and go back and change the angle and moving the break point. You’re better off not doing block practice than doing random practice, something that we’ve talked about on the coaching hour, and the more I read about it the more it points out that learning in small bites, same target maybe but a different break point and different distance, different angle certainly imprints it a lot of quicker.

You talk to any top shooter and get them to really tell you the truth, which is a hard thing to do, but get them to really tell you the truth about when they were struggling in the beginning, and they’ll tell you. You’ve got to put yourself in a position to win the second day on the first day enough times and lose it on the second day before you finally close on the second day.

And then on a three day shoot, you’ve got to put yourself in a position to win on the third day by putting yourself in a position on the first and second day enough times and losing it on the third day    to where you’re able to close. Once you can close on a three day shoot, closing on a four day shoot is not that big of a deal. Once you’ve closed on several two day shoots, closing on a three day shoot is not that big of a deal; but just because you win one or two, there’s a big step in experience, going from shooting lights out on one day to putting a lights out performance two days in a row out there when you know you’ve got to do it, and I wish I could tell you that I had the secret; but there’s no secret.

You and I both have talked about this on occasion several times, and it’s just a  matter  of  getting  out  there  and  putting  yourself  in  the game and doing it just like you’re doing it, and you are shooting dramatically better at this U.S. Open than you did two and a half years ago. Would you not agree with that?

John: In a few ways, yeah. Absolutely.

Gil: I mean, how many classes have you gone on?

John: Well, I got 11 double A punches this last weekend.

Gil: All right. So you couldn’t have come close to that two and a half years ago?

John: No.

It’s Easy to Be Overwhelmed By Your Last Failure

Gil: Something else that I’m learning in building a good mental game is that you have to look at things for what they really are. We are predisposed to not give successes near as much thought or emotion as we do failures. We are predisposed to do that. Our brain is predisposed to do that, and that’s one of the things that I’ve been trying to talk about for two months. It’s something I’m going get to because it’s    a real problem. It’s a real thing that you have to face. Once you understand it, once you understand how we’re predisposed to always give more thought and more emotion to the poor performances and the things that we don’t perceive as great than we are to give positive thoughts and positive emotions and things that are really good, when you understand that, you understand how valuable it is to have a positive outlook.

You also understand the  value  of  the  log  and  you  understand the value of going back through that log mid year and at the end of    the year, after you put the gun up. Go through the log then, and it wouldn’t hurt during the wintertime since it’s so frigging cold up there where you live to go through the log from last year and the year before and notice how your thought process has changed. Notice how your results have changed because that’s a really important thing for build- ing confidence into going out and having the right attitude when you   go out to train and practice. It’s really easy to be overwhelmed by the last failure that you had and it’s really easy to give in and then give up.

I think that Vicki would tell you that I have, in my life, always     been the eternal optimist. Most of it has been with her money, you understand; but I’ve always been the eternal optimist. I don’t mind spending her money whenever I think it’s going to come to good. She puts the stopgap on that every now and then; but I must tell you that my optimism and now our optimism has paid off big time for us, and we’ve had some tremendous successes in the last five days that are going to change our life and our future forever, and it’s been a long, arduous trail, a road that  we’ve  been  knocked  off  of  many  times; but we kept getting back up and we kept believing in ourselves and believing in what we were seeing. And I have to tell you, there’s a great reward for people who have perseverance, and I would look to her   and she would look to me for inspiration and courage, and it’s finally turned out really really great for us.

So you’re going to have to just keep going. You got 12 punches   in double A at the U.S. Open. Two years ago you were lucky to get a punch anywhere. Right or wrong?

John: Almost, yep. Almost right.

Gil: Well, what would be right?

John: Well, as long as I picked up a 28 gauge somewhere, I was in the hunt. I can’t tell you why; but that’s just the reality of it.

After the first day of the first Open Main, I definitely went home  and said: Okay. Well, you’re a dope. You just didn’t believe you could do it. That’s just all there is to it. The next day, I said: All right. These things are making people quake and you’re running them, how can  that be that you can’t believe you can do this?

So the next day the FITASC thing was really hard, and the first one of these deals I look and I’m a little disappointed to tell you the truth, and I look at the score and I got one less than this pro shooter from Georgia. And it’s like: Okay. How disappointed do you really want to be, you dumbo? 

Gil: Yeah. I mean, sooner or later you got to quit beating yourself up. It is what it is, and you have to overcome within you that part of you that wants to evaluate before it’s over. I cannot tell you how devastating  it is for any evaluation whatsoever to occur until the last shot fired. It is counterproductive. There’s nothing good that’s going to come out of it. If you’ve shot great and you evaluated: Man, I’m shooting great, that means you’re going to be overconfident and you’re going to shoot like shit tomorrow. If you shot like shit today and you evaluate it and you let that dictate who you become, you’re going to shoot like shit tomorrow. So where is the win in evaluating prior to having it be over? There’s just no sense in it, and there’s nothing good that comes from evaluation until the whole event is over.

Danny Mitchell summed it up like this one time when I was talking to him about it, and we were talking about skeet tournaments that we’d won and how we approach them and how our approach to tournaments has changed, and he said: I shot my best when I looked at a four-gun skeet shoot of 400 targets as a 400 bird shoot. If I missed one bird on the first day, many people will jump to the conclusion of, well, I’m out of it so what the hell; but he said, I always thought if I missed the bird on the first day that a 399 would play because there are very few four by fours and the 399 would play, and I always looked at it as 400 bird events as opposed to if I miss I’m out which is the way a lot of people that shoot skeet look at it, and they never were champions like Danny.

I was never a champion in skeet. I won some big shoots with some big scores; but sporting clays came along and I left it. I won quite a few titles in sporting clays; but without exception, in the beginning when I shot my best as I was walking to turn my scorecard in, I gave my oppo- nents credit for hitting everything I’d missed and hitting everything I’d hit, and it was never the case until I finally realized, dude, you just got to keep plugging away and let the end happen as it does. It’s just an amazing thing when you give up the evaluation during the event. It’s like evaluating how you’re doing in the middle of the speech. You get dry mouth. You lose your rhythm.

I gave a speech somewhere. I don’t know what it was about and real- ly don’t remember it very well; but I had a hard time getting my rhythm going, and I never know what I say in these speeches, and at the end of it everybody was elated and we closed a bunch of deals. And I asked Vicki later on that evening. I said: Well, how did I do? And she said: You had a hard time getting your rhythm; but once you got it you killed them.

Now, at the point in time when I began that speech, something happened and I did something a little different, and to this day I don’t remember what the speech was; but I trusted myself enough to not worry about what happened and to just keep plugging away until I caught my rhythm and I killed them. That’s the point at which most people who didn’t have experience would have lost it. They would have worried about the fact that they weren’t in their rhythm; but rather than worrying about the fact that I wasn’t in my rhythm, I kept doing what I knew to do which is not evaluate. Go forward. Don’t go backwards. Go forward. Don’t go sideways. Go forward. Keep talking about it. Keep putting your best foot forward. Keep saying the right thing. And all of a sudden I clicked into my rhythm and brought the house down.

Now, experiencing that and being able to have succeeded by trusting myself and my ability, the next time that happens I’m going to have the wherewithal to trust myself and not worry about it and get into my zone again. And everybody else that’s out there going to these big shoots, those are the kinds of things you need to take away from those big shoots.

How many punches did you get? Twelve?

John: Eleven.

Gil: Eleven. Well, see how optimistic I am?

John: Sure.

Gil: So you’re shooting well. I mean, you finally got a real shotgun. It’s an invitation; but you finally got a real shotgun. You can shoot it. It’s fitted to you, and you’re making some training commitments and you’re shooting better. You just need to learn to shoot big tournaments better, and the only way you learn to shoot big tournaments better is to not evaluate until it’s over. Does that make sense?

John: Yep.

Gil: Do you think you’ll be able to do that?

John: Well, no. I know I’ll be able to do that.

Gil: Yeah. You know, that’s what you and I are going to be talking about for the rest of this year and next year, is how to get through it without evaluating, because the human psyche wants to know: How am I doing? Especially in a game with as much downtime as our game has in it.

And if you’re doing great, you’re going to know you’re doing great; but even if you don’t, your friends are going to tell you that you’re doing great. So eventually you’re going to have to face the scorecard and you’re going to have to face the music and learn, yep, I’m killing them; but right now what I’m going to do is not worry about the outcome. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, and we’ll let the the outcome take care of itself.

And all those cliches, you know, you’ve heard them. I’ve heard them. I’ve said them a thousands of times; but the more I delve into performance and the more scientific studies I read about performance, the more the curse is evaluation prior to the end. That’s the kind of thing that’ll just absolutely kill you.

What Will You Change Next Time?

Gil: So 11 punches or 12?

John: I have 12; but I earned 11 at the Open.

Gil: Okay. So what was your takeaway? What are you going to do different from a training standpoint before your next shoot? When is your next big shoot?

John: The World FITASC.

Gil: So what are you going to do different?

John: Well, that has a different learning curve. There’s all kinds of travel considerations for that one. I have three targets to work on seriously before the World FITASC that will help for all FITASC.

Gil: What are they?

John: Anthony Matarese and Joe Tandy had kind of the same type of targets. It winds up being the same. They had different terrain. Anthony put his on a 10 foot platform. The thing only goes about 30 yards. It’s maybe 30 or 40 yards away, and it’s going down the whole time. It doesn’t have any up to it, and I’ll be darned if I could figure out how to shoot that, and then the variation got me too. There were two targets on two different parcours, and Tandy’s one was way below your feet coming to you; but, again, it only traveled 20 yards, maybe 25 yards.

Gil: Really slow?

John: Really slow, yep. And until I got to the side of it, I never even sniffed it. Once I got to the side of it, I guess I broke it a couple of times. I’m not saying I knew what I was doing; but I did break it a couple of times. Anthony’s target I never did break, and the only good news was they didn’t throw it in the regular FITASC or I would have cried even more.

Gil: So that’s putting the trainer spring on that thing and it’s a real soft target.

John: Yep.

Gil: I’m seeing a lot of that.

John: It took me awhile to get them on the way up. You know, I’ve got a big spring here on a Promatic, and I can do it. I called my buddy and said: Hey, we need a platform and he just laughed. But when you get in the rhythm of those FITASC things, there’s a certain rhythm that really no matter the distance, no matter the targets, well, you can really get into and you can do some damage; but it’s the ones that fall outside of that rhythm that then kill you.

Gil: Sounds to me like you need to set it up and shoot it like we used to.

John: Yep.

Gil: Okay. Well, good. Congratulations. Good shooting. That’s just great.

Inconsistency and Other Priorities

Gil: Hey, Rick, you shot a 92 or a 93?

Rick: Ninety two. 

Gil: And tell me about it.

Rick: Do you know what, Gil? I hope you didn’t open a can of worms; but it’s not so much the 92. It’s all the stuff that’s been going on between the 93 that I shot after the advanced school and the 92 that     I just shot recently, and I’ve been wildly inconsistent between those two scores.

And what’s going on? I know I’m not the only dad to experience this, and there’s others that have been there before me; but you know, life is getting in the way right now. Now, see, my boy is nine and he’s playing competitive baseball. I played baseball when I was a kid, and when he started to play, I was elated. Gil, when baseball season came around this year, it was just more important for me to go and be with him. I wanted to pitch at batting practice for him. I wanted to build up his arm strength and throw long toss, and I wanted to videotape him and help him.

Shooting, whether I wanted it to or not, took a back seat, and  my scores suffered because of it; but I wouldn’t trade the experiences that I’ve had this baseball season with Jack for any high score because it only happens once. It’s a very fleeting time of life where you’re still their hero. They still want you around and they still want to hold your hand. And so I’m giving this kid everything I’ve got, and although I still practice shotgunning, I still practice shooting and look at my log very carefully. There were nights where I had to say, no, I’m not going to go practice tonight because I want to work with Jack. He’s got a big game coming up. We need to go out on a trainer and I need to work with him on his drills. And now that baseball season is over, I want to add this little final thought to baseball, and it keeps getting in the way of shooting, is that Jack and his team won the triple A little league baseball championship.

So I was extremely excited. It was worth every single minute to be with him and to see the elation on his face. I’m still crying about it. It just happened over the weekend; but, you know, I just shed tears of joy for him.

Now, I had to tell you that story before I got into the 92 because when I can’t give a tournament my full attention, when I’m not there where I’m thinking about: Do you know what, gosh, I should be home, I should be helping out at the house with Jack, you know, I really want to be with him, I shoot dismally. Just why did I throw 85 bucks out there? I should have just thrown it at the stations and left.

So when I have a chance to think about the tournament that’s coming up and focus, and I have to tell you, this 92 came at a period where Jack had a layoff. It was during the period where there was the Memorial Day holiday. No baseball games were scheduled for the week, and I could really get into the game again and focus on shooting, work on the pre-tournament routine where you shoot intense targets up to a certain point. Then stop for two days and I came out and just shot lights out.