Website Progress and Agenda
Gil: Welcome to the Coaching Hour, April 2015.
We just got all of the Coaching Hours uploaded on the new website thanks to Brian Brewton. For some reason, we’d lost 12 to 15 of them, and Brian had a disc on every one of them. He let use his disc to get them uploaded, and they’re all being uploaded right now. So be patient with us. The new website is great. It’s faster than anything I ever dreamed of. The search engine is phenomenal. It’s just doesn’t have everything on there to search yet. So y’all be patient.
It’s a work in progress, and I must tell you that I am redefining my definition of patience. People tell you one thing, you send them money, they give you something else, and then they’re shocked when you don’t like what they give you because it’s not what you asked for. It’s an amazing thing. Anyway, that said, we’re working through it, and we will get through it because we’re dealing with some good guys.
So tonight, I want Jeff to talk to you a little bit about reflections on tournament performance and practice. Then I’m going to go over some scorecards that Doss had sent me from the Browning-Briley shoot that he shot last week. I will tell you how I analyze scorecards and what they show me, and then I’m going to go over one of Jeff’s scorecards. Jeff is going to be on until about 9:30 his time, and then he’s got to get on an airplane. After that, I’m going to go Max, and we are going to talk about some unique revelations that he shared with me over the last 30 to 45 days in some of the shoots that he’s been to.
I’ve got a lot more to talk about, but I don’t think we’re going to get to it. I’ll be honest with you. There’s some good stuff that’s going to come out here. And Ben, if there is anything you or Sheep Eagle want to add, just jump right on in here.
I don’t know whether you’ve been following the blogs or not, but I blogged about a week and a half ago. Is that right, Jeff? How long ago did I blog about Doss shooting so well and not practicing?
Jeff: Yeah. I’d say a week. It was before last weekend for sure.
Gil: Yeah. And then Jeff sent me an email. I agreed one hundred percent with what he said and asked him to put it up on the forum, but he’s been too busy to do that. So, I’m going to put it up there anyway.
Jeff: It’s there now. I just did it.
Gil: You just did? Thank you very much. They are some great observations. Just to give you a little background, Doss Bourgeois has been studying with Vicki and I for almost 20 years and is a consummate student. I mean, he was a roper and a bronco rider until he got old and started shooting sporting clays and is a really gifted shooter. Would you not agree that he’s a gifted shooter and has great insight into performance, Jeff?
Jeff: Absolutely. I shot with him a couple of times, and, yeah, I would agree with that.
Gil: He’s a pleasure to shoot with, and it’s an honor to be able to shoot with him. When he gets excited, he gets fast, and I’ve had to really work with him on that. He’s not the only one who has that problem, present company included.
But he has shot hundreds of thousands of competitive targets. And I was talking about a tournament that he had won first in two events and was runner-up in the third. It was my son’s last tournament set at American Shooting Center before he went to work for us, and Doss, with four boxes of practice and watching the kill shot reviews, went out and won two events high overall with all the Houston big dogs there. He was runner-up in the third event at one of Brian’s tougher shoots.
I was bragging about that and him in a blog post. Jeff, why don’t you summarize what you sent to me, and then we’ll talk back and forth about it a little bit.
Using the Brain’s Filler in Performance
Jeff: Yeah. I kind of called out the statement that “he didn’t practice.” You know, I think in your blog post, it came off to me a little bit as, “Oh, he did all of this without practicing.” And I posted on the forum tonight. Basically, (and people have heard me talk about this before) I’m a big fan of fundamentals. And Doss has a lot of time under his belt practicing the fundamentals of Gil, Vicki, and other people. I think to that end, the fact that he has that base and can draw on that base and he has that experience makes doing things like reviewing the kill shot review more meaningful, right?
You know, you hear people talk about visualization. Hitters visualize making a hit before they swing the bat. We talked about visualizing shots before we shoot them. I think that’s different for someone who doesn’t have a large target inventory and doesn’t have a solid fundamental base than it is for someone who has those things.
It’s not that it’s not meaningful for someone who doesn’t have the extensive inventory that I do, but I think it’s incredibly powerful for people who do. And that once you have the fundamental base to build on, these other tools and things that we talked about doing become that much more meaningful.
Gil: I would agree with that one hundred percent. I think that they become more meaningful from an advantage in performance standpoint. I think that they’re meaningful at every level of experience, and it goes back to reinforcing or bringing into the forefront in your mind the filler that you’re going to use. I keep going back to this filler stuff. It’s an incredible thing to me to know that I am building what I am going to trust to help me perform on game day.
Jeff: Well, that’s the real issue, too, right? You build that information and you add it to your subconscious, for lack of a better term. Then you rely on it and you use it to build more information and more filler over time, right? You build a base and you add a layer. Then you add another layer over time. So, depending on your position and the progression and the curve of progression, you start out and you don’t have much. You add some, it becomes something you can rely on, then you practice for a while, and you get comfortable with it. You get to use it. You get to understand it, and then you can move forward another step, right? Then you can add some more.
I’m speaking in big terms because that might be more trust in your mount, it might be more target inventory, it might or might not be whatever. But it’s not something you can just dump all in at once. It’s something you need to build over time, using layers as opposed to just kind of going out and absorbing it all in one session or one unit of practice.
Gil: Yeah. And the big thing to me in this discussion over the last 45, 50 days is that it’s not some nebulous thing that’s located somewhere in your unconscious brain that’s just suddenly going to show up one day. And you’ve got to trust that it’s going to be there. The fact is, as your skill level increases, the amount of things that you consciously focus on decrease dramatically and become filler. This allows your conscious focus to go to a level that you’ve never seen or experienced before. This, in turn, allows you to build more and more filler at a higher and higher level which allows you to focus on less, which allows you to focus better and so on. That’s the spiral of improved performance.
You know, you read the books and they say “Well, eventually you got to stop thinking and got to start trusting it. You’ve got to start letting it go. You need to start getting out of your own way.” Well, where is all that “getting-out-of-your-own-way” shit stored? How does it get there? You know, who puts it there? Where is it?
And, finally putting the bricks in place in the foundation; every time you go out, you’re building filler. It’s the myelin wrap. You’re going to build filler every time you do something. It’s your choice whether it’s good filler or bad filler. It’s your choice one hundred percent. Now, if you go out and practice with a purpose, and I mean a very strict, stern purpose, which means staying away from all the lollygaggers and the butt pinchers, you’ll build the right filler. When you practice, you’re out there to do one thing, and that is to create repetition and correction.
The last two principles in the principles of learning are correction and repetition. Those are the last two principles, and it’s those two principles that build the filler. The better you get at correcting, the less you need to make that same correction because the brain learns not to do it and the better the filler becomes. Then suddenly, you find yourself not having to correct anything and then you’re there.
But I’ll go back to what I said a while ago. So many times, when people are practicing, they’re trying to memorize what they did. They’re trying to do what they did on the last one rather than training a circuit in their brain and creating filler. So, when they’re performing, they’re trying to remember what to do instead of using filler. That was a big thing to me, because it goes to the kind of practice you do, Jeff.
There are two kinds of practice talked about in scientific research today: blocked practice and random practice. Thank God for Snowflake; he’s been sending me these scientific reports about the differences in the two. Blocked practice is when you go out and you shoot 50 targets at the same target from the same place. In practice, eventually you get to where you hit the target every single time. It’s not a big deal, but it gives you a good feeling in practice. But because you’re not challenging your brain to come up with different timing sequences to break that target in different places and different distances, it gives you a good feeling in practice, but it breaks down on game day.
Jeff: Another thing I would throw out there about that is I think you fall into the trap of the outcome of your practice. The way you judge success in your practice is by the broken target, and not by whether or not you properly executed whatever the shot was, right? You talk about it all the time when you’re coaching, right? It’s not about breaking the target, it’s about proper execution. I think a lot of times people fall into the trap of wanting and defining the success of their practice by how many targets they break and not how effectively they execute the process.
Gil: I agree one hundred percent. I had a doctor come in from Lafayette all day Monday, Dr. McKay came over. I’d never met him before. He kept trying to break the target, and I said “Robert, quit trying to break the target. Just make the gun and the bird go the same speed.”
And I would ask him when he would do it perfectly, “Were
they going the same speed?”
“I can’t answer that question.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I ain’t going to lie to you. I’m not going to tell you something I don’t know,”
he said
I didn’t know he was a doctor at that point in time. So, I said, “Okay, good. Let’s try it again.” And he’d do it again, and finally he would do it four or five times in a row. But because he was checking the lead and was so conscious of what he was doing, he wasn’t being aware of what I wanted him to be aware of. So, I took his bullets away from him, and made him move on a target until he could tell me without a doubt immediately that he was going the same speed as the bird. I had to take the bullets away from him to make him do this.
To your point, Jeff, I had to take the bullets away from him to get him to understand what I wanted him to execute so the brain could begin to build the right filler. And when I gave his bullets back to him, he’d hit a target and smash it with a modified choke, and I’d say, “Okay. Was it?” And he said, “I was going the exact same speed as the bird.” I said, “Now we’re getting somewhere.” And that guy progressed so quickly once his brain understood what we were asking it to do. His brain responded dramatically fast, dramatically fast.
So, yes, does Doss have a lot of competitive filler? Yes, he does. He’s been competitive his whole life. That’s why he’s in the position in the company he’s in. He has always strived to be the best. And on the Gulf Coast, if you want somebody in charge of drilling operations, everybody on the Gulf Coast knows who Doss Bourgeois is, and they know he knows his stuff. And they also know if you cross him, he’ll be polite, but when you walk out of his door, you’ll never hear from him again. That’s just the way it is. Now, I’ve been fortunate enough to know him, coach him, be around him, and help him through personal problems just like I have for almost everybody on this phone call. He is 110 percent wherever he’s at.
Jeff, I will confess to you, that’s one of the reasons he’s got so much good filler. When he is somewhere, he is all there. I mean, he’s a hundred percent there. You saw that at the advance class when you shot with him and when you shot with him at a tournament. That in and of itself from a competition standpoint is a huge asset.
Bob Palmer would call that his “board of directors.” He has an exercise that he calls board of directors. I don’t know what he calls it now, but when I was learning from him, he called it board of directors. You delegate certain things in your mind that are in your consciousness to somebody who looks like you that sits at the board of directors. And each one of those people takes on something that’s occupying your mind that’s getting in the way of you performing. Once you delegate those authorities out to somebody that looks just like you, that enables you to go in and be all there and do your performance and then come back over and pick up each one of those things and solve each one of those problems. Doss is very good at that.
Now let me tell you what Doss did. He went to shoot a tournament, and he watched the kill shot videos over and over on his big screen TV. Now, he just got back from the Browning-Briley. He didn’t have time to practice. He was in Washington, talking to senators, trying to get things fixed in the oil patch etc., and going back and forth every other day up there and just didn’t have time to practice but he went to shoot. He took one of our good friends, Mark Cruse, with him. His scorecards looked like this on a 50-bird Super Sporting: He missed one bird and shot a 49. The next shoot was a prelim, and on the prelim, he shot 88.
How Gil Analyzes Scorecards
Gil: Now, here’s how I looked at scorecards. Okay? Pay attention. First pair, second pair, third pair, and fourth pair. On the first pair, he missed three birds on the first pair of all 15 stations. He missed six birds on the second pair of all 15 stations. On the third pair, he missed three birds, and on the fourth pair, he never missed a bird. Here’s how I look at that: I want all the misses to be on the first pair. We don’t want any misses on the last pair. We don’t want any misses on the third pair. We don’t want any misses on the second pair. If you miss one, you want to miss it on the first pair. You want to correct it and run it out.
Because the misses were random, and they weren’t on the same target on every station, that tells me he’s not in his rhythm. He needs to work on his rhythm. He needs to put in more practice time, and he needs to be behind the gun, which is what I’ve told him in the email.
His main event was the same day, another hundred birds. He shot an 86 on the main event on Saturday. Now, listen to where his misses are, okay? On the first pair, he had four misses. On the second pair, he had three misses. On the third pair, he had four misses, and on the fourth pair, he had three misses. Missing still throughout the sets. There’s no pattern; it’s just random misses. Now, what does that tell me? He needs to put in some practice time. He can shoot. He’s got a lot of filler, but he hadn’t been training.
On the day he shot an 86, he commented that somebody who practices a lot shot a 99. He’s able to say things like that; not in a spiteful way, but in a matter-of-fact way. This is what I wrote him: “Four misses on first pair, three misses on second pair, seven misses on last two pairs. That shows, as a rhythm routine thing, that is what practice is for. That score is a result of great shooting without practice.” On his last hundred birds, he shot 50, 100, 100. He shot 250 competitive birds in row. I don’t know whether he practiced or not.
On Sunday, he missed one bird on his first pair. On all his second pairs, he missed one bird. On all of his third pairs, he missed two birds, and all of his fourth pairs, he missed two birds. So, on his last pairs, he missed four birds, and on his first two pairs, he only missed two birds for a 94. So, he got progressively better, but because he hadn’t been practicing the “five pair, move the bucket” with his routine, he wasn’t able to carry that consistently, even though he only had one miss on his first pair and one miss on his second pair. He wasn’t able to carry that consistency through to not missing any on the third and fourth pair.
Now, I looked at Jeff’s scorecard. Jeff shot a 91, and somebody ran it. Didn’t you tell me, Jeff?
Jeff: Yes, someone ran it.
Gil: And on Jeff’s scorecard, he missed four birds on the first pairs, two birds on the second pair, one bird on the third pair and two birds on the fourth pair, but he missed three birds on the same station. I would have to go back and look at the birds on that station. I don’t have the scorecard up here, but I’ll look at it, and you and I will talk about it tomorrow. But I would want to go back on the nine birds that he missed. He missed three birds on one station, and it was “dead lost, dead pair, lost dead, dead lost.” So that tells me that he needs to spend more time practicing because he can break those birds, but there was either a break in concentration or something going on elsewhere in his brain that kept him from being all there on those stations.
So anyway, that’s how I look at scorecards. I look for telltale signs. If you hit a bird in the first pair, if you’ve hit both birds in the first pair, there is absolutely no reason for you to miss any birds in the rest of the pairs. John Eagle, does that make sense to you?
John: It makes sense to me, but it seems unobtainable.
Gil: [chuckles] It seems unobtainable?
John: No, no. It seems difficult.
Gil: Well, it’s difficult where you are. How do you think you’re going to get there?
Blocked vs. Random Practice and Missing Second Pairs
John: I guess my question is about the level of trying to get better is. When you look at your scorecard and you break that first pair and then you miss both of the second pair, it’s very depressing.
Gil: Well, you can look at it as depressing or you can look at it as something that you need to work on. When most of the misses occur on the second pair, that means to me that the filler is there, but when you’re practicing, you haven’t been trusting the filler as much as you should. It would also indicate that possibly there’s more blocked practice than random practice. Would that make sense?
John: I don’t understand that.
Gil: Blocked practice is when you go out and you shoot one bird for quite a bit of time until you think you got it. Then you go shoot another bird for quite a bit of time and you think you got it, and you feel good because you’ve shot six different presentations, and mauled them after the first four or five shots. You really found it and you stayed with it. It gives you a good feeling on practice day, but on game day that falls apart.
Random practice would be going out and shooting the same bird from one position in the same break points six times. You may not hit six out of six, but you hit it five out of six times. Then you move ten steps to the right and back five, and you shoot it in the same place six more times. And then you move up and you shoot it ten more times. Then you move back to the left and shoot it at a different break point. You vary the timing in the sequence as much as you possibly can at the risk of not hitting all the targets, but for the gain of making the brain push itself to change the timing circuits while you practice.
The research shows that blocked practice gives you a good feeling on practice day, but falls apart on game day because you’re not making the brain work under stress and create different successful timing circuits at the spur of the moment. Once the brain figures out how to break it, you shoot two boxes at it and you feel great, and then when you go out on game day, it falls apart.
But when you sacrifice the need to break the targets all the time with challenging the brain and pushing it to its limits as far as timing and break point goes, the science shows us that when you practice that way, although your number of breaks during practice is not as high, the residual filler left from building skill that way shows up on game day and better scores. Does that make sense?
John: It does, but my question remains. Now, you go and you have two targets that will have the same targets four times, and you break that first pair. You don’t reproduce that timing, evidently, when you go to the second pair when you miss them both.
Gil: What do you think the problem is?
Bob Shannon: I think it has to do with loss of focus. You got them the first time. They were easy, and, therefore, you didn’t pay as much attention to them.
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