Gil: Welcome to the Coaching Hour, for November 2015. It was November 2001 that we began this odyssey. That’s 14 years ago and we’re still going strong. Everybody who I talk to says that they just keep getting better and better and better, and we agree with that. And the information, the science data that we’re getting keeps getting better and better and better, thanks to Bob Shannon and several other people who keep sending us good stuff and interpreting it so that we can understand it. It’s an interesting journey. There are a lot of good things happening with us and for us.
So, that said, I want to talk tonight about sleep first. I have Jeff Wolfe to thank for this. He sent me a link to an article he saw on sleep and some studies that have been done on sleep. I sent it to Bob Shannon tonight, and he’s confirmed that a lot more research has been done on that. I’m going to start with that. I think there are going to be some things that will be very interesting to most of you and I’m sure they will be interesting to everybody else who listens to it on the Knowledge Vault.
Then we’ll talk about some Nationals’ experiences. I know Dean, Shane, and Max are here. I don’t know if anybody else is here that shot Nationals, but if they are, what you felt like, how well you prepared, what you would do differently? I know, Dean, this was your first Nationals. And Max, I think it’s your second Nationals. And, Shane, this is not your second or third. I don’t know how many you shot. But anyway, we’ve got some people on tonight who have a different amount of experience shooting the largest sporting clays tournament in the country and perhaps even in the world. I’m looking forward to having an open dialogue on that. If we get through that but everybody goes mute and doesn’t have anything to say, I’ve got some other things to talk about. I know that probably surprises most of you, but I’ll try to rise to the occasion.
Sleep Habits, Performance, and Reaction Time
Gil: And, Jeff Wolfe, thank you very much for sending me a link to an article entitled “Lights Out Football.” It’s a study on how sleep is a necessity for peak performance. I know that on this Coaching Hour many times since 2001 we have said we can get by with not the best nutrition. We can get by without a lot of the best things. But what we absolutely have to have is sleep. We’ve got to have enough sleep. We didn’t know why that was, and this article explains a lot about it.
I’ve just got some highlights here I want to go through, and I want to invite Bob to come in and give us his doctor side of all of this. The professional athlete today does a lot of crazy and sometimes expensive things to give them the ability to have a peak performance. But it seems like there is one thing that is free they seem to always neglect, and that is sleep. Listen to this now:
[reading]
“A good night’s sleep is directly tied to key factors such as reaction time, mental awareneness, muscular recovery and converting what you’ve recently learned into memory. That’s why the science of slumber has become one of the hottest trends in the NFL: Teams are no longer leaving it to chance that their multimillion dollar investments will manage sleep cycles all on their own.”
Some teams have even put dark rooms in some of the practice facilities for the guys to take a nap.
All these players who are getting less than six hours of sleep, which is probably at least a third of the team, if not half, when they learn some new plays in practice, it doesn’t become automatic because of their lack of sleep. Come game time, it might look as if they’ve never practiced at all.”
Bob, I think looking at the Kill Shot Reviews is so powerful: twice the night before and once in the morning when we get up. The night before, they imprint in the brain, and the brain goes over them over and over. Would you agree with that?
Bob Shannon: Actually, I disagree just a little bit.
Gil: Okay. Tell me why.
Bob: What we talk about, and we’ve known this for a very long time, is that the motor skill consolidation is what occurs in the last two hours of sleep for your normal sleep cycle. We think that that’s true of people who get six hours. Below that, we’re not so sure. And it is certainly true if you get eight hours or more. If you’re learning something new intellectually or consolidating some timing stuff that’s not an actual physical skill that you’ve worked on, you can watch the videos, take a nap for 30 minutes, then watch them again. You’ll consolidate that information faster.
Intellectual stuff turns out to respond faster to naps than physical skills that you’ve performed and are practicing. Whereas, the physical skills you get in the last two hours of the night. You take all of that consolidation and that’s why they talk about spindles and motor connections and motor memory. But the intellectual stuff, like if you were trying to get them to recognize patterns on another team, for example, in football, that’s why they do the naps. They’ll go over that stuff on film, and then they’ll have them take a nap and then they’ll go over it again.
Gil: I thought it was also interesting that the nap time was 30 minutes or 90 minutes but not 60 minutes.
Bob: Yeah. That one is not so clear, because it changes as you get older. As you get older, beyond 30 minutes is probably too much. There’s good data that 60 minutes appears to leave you just groggy and the 90-minute stuff, eh, I’m not so sure about that. That’s a lot more confusing, mainly because it’s very difficult to get people to take a 90-minute nap. So, it’s not really clear how much semi-awakeness they have after 60 minutes.
Gil: But 20 to 30 minutes is optimal?
Bob: Oh, yeah, definitely as you’re aging. 20 to 30 minutes is optimal.
Gil: Are you talking to me?
Bob: [laughs] No. I’m talking about us, all of us. Now, when you’re a baby, you can take a nap for two or three hours. It doesn’t bother you at all, but in the stages up to about four years where you are wiring and rewiring for efficiency constantly, that’s extremely exhausting on the brain. But that’s what you’re doing at that age, and that’s why they can just conk out anywhere at any time when they need to. I wish we could all do that.
Gil: It was just interesting to me how not having sleep affects reaction time.
Bob: No, I agree with you a hundred percent. I’ve learned this ten years ago for me. I’ve talked to a lot of shooters in their fifties who begin to see the same effect. If it’s two or three nights of good sleep, they have a great shoot. Miss a couple of those and they don’t do as well.
Gil: It’s one of the reasons we added onto the log sheet about ten years ago: how long did you sleep and what was the quality of your sleep? Was it deep? Was it restless? We input that into the patterns that people saw in their performances.
Bob: Yeah. I kind of have a vague recollection that we even discussed that bit on the Coaching Hour about ten years ago.
Gil: Yeah. And I think that was back when the You Gotta Be Out of Your Mind book came out eight or ten years ago, and we had the log page in there. We added that on the Coaching Hour to the log page and discussed “how many hours did you sleep? Was it deep and restful? Was it restless?” And the guys who did it immediately established a corollary between the deep sleep and good performance and the restless sleep and not so good performance.
In fact, Danny Cummings never could sleep well on the road, and one night on the Coaching Hour, I said, “Why don’t you take your own pillow with you? Stuff it in your suitcase.” And he took his own pillow with him on the road, slept like a baby, and had a great performance.
I mean, it’s something that we take for granted way too much, and we don’t realize the benefits from a learning standpoint, and from a reaction standpoint. I know that I don’t care if I don’t have the best food. It doesn’t matter. When we’re traveling, we try to be in bed, off of our feet, watching TV by eight o’clock at the very latest. We may not go to sleep until 9:00, 9:30, ten o’clock and get up at 6:00. But we try to be in bed at eight o’clock, and it’s just one of those rituals that we do, because we know if we don’t do it, we’re going to have a sluggish day and we’re not going to be as sharp as we could be.
Bob: And I think the other thing in this that you alluded to, is they say don’t have that big meal at that fancy restaurant, because you’re not going to sleep well afterwards.
Gil: Oh, yeah, for sure. No alcohol three hours before bedtime, no caffeine after 2 PM. Eat light, eat right, and get in bed. I believe those were some more things that were in the article that I just passed along. So, anyway, if any of you would like a link to that full article, all you have to do is email me tomorrow and I’ll be glad to give it to you. And, Bob, thanks for contributing on that.
Reflections from Nationals and Practice Leading Up to It
Gil: Shane, any reactions to the shoot at Nationals?
Shane: I had a great shoot. This was my sixth one, I believe. I think this was year six. Funny that you brought up the sleep article at the beginning of this, because this was the first year that I slept well every night. It wasn’t a problem. Great shoot. Shot well. I had a good time. Put a tremendous amount of pressure on myself going into the last eight for the Main. A lot of pressure, to the point that I was shaking on the first two or three stations, down 12 going into the last eight and dropped 12 on the last eight. Such is life. But overall, I had a great shoot. I had a really great time. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more disappointed not to shoot in the rain on Saturday than I was that day. I don’t have a problem shooting in the rain, because we’ve done it enough that it’s just another shoot.
We’ve been working with Vicki, honing our practice routine and looking at some of the finer points to start paying attention to, and I think Ben and I are both seeing some payoffs from that. We were meticulous, I would say since about June or July. Probably July is when we really started looking at what we were doing in practice and what we needed to do in order to have a peak performance when we wanted to have a peak performance.
One of the things I’ve come to realize is that everyone is cyclical, but if you look at a lot of the top shooters, they’re very cyclical. And it’s very apparent to me when you look at the shoots they attend and where and when they show up. If you go back and look and do a little bit of research, you can see a very clear pattern of decent performances, one or two peak performances, and then they just disappear again for a while. There’s a few of them that just shoot all the time everywhere, but most of the guys at the top you don’t see every weekend. They show up and do well for six, eight, ten, twelve weeks out, and then they have a good performance and win the Open or a Regional or something like that, and then they kind of disappear again for six or eight weeks, and then you start seeing them come back again. We’ve been trying to kind of emulate that a little bit.
We paid a lot of attention to the quality of targets we go shoot now. We don’t shoot near as many local shoots as we used to, simply because economically for us, I can take the money I would spend shooting three weekends in one month and go somewhere. A lot of times if we go to Dallas or maybe Houston or somewhere like that, we can go somewhere, shoot two days in a row, then come home and see four or 500 targets that we feel like we need to see, put ourselves in a little more uncomfortable position, and go to clubs we’ve never been to before. We’re reaching for those things because I think that’s the next step. That’s what needs to happen in order for that to be just another shoot.
But in our practice, we’ve been paying a lot of attention to that as far as practicing just like we were in a competition. I thought we were paying good attention to our practice nine months ago, and while I think our practice was productive, I hesitate to say we were building a habit of messing around. When I look back on it now, I think we were messing around a lot more than we were training. We were working on targets, but we couldn’t figure out what the difference was between being able to hit three or four or five pairs in a row in practice and being able to do it on game day. I think the biggest change was because we weren’t practicing like we would do it on game day, i.e., watch a show pair, watch last pair of the guy in front of you, then get in the cage and shoot five. And we’d get up there, look at it, and we’d shoot six or seven pair or whatever and mess around and then go to a different target and shoot that one six or eight times and mess around a little bit. I think some of the things that we’ve been paying attention to and changing has paid off for both of us in dividends.
So, like I said, we had a great time. I shot well, took home some punches, had some good performances, and shot a 92, I think, on the FITASC. I think we were talking about it earlier. Yesterday I told you I shot a 92 on the Krieghoff Kup, and I dropped five birds on one station.
Here’s something that I take away from our practice: I may not realize it while I’m in the cage, but when I have a station like the one where I took a three on and I dropped five birds there, it dawns on me halfway through the rest of the course or after I’m done with that course, that mistakes stay with me longer, I guess you could say. I’m not saying that I dwell on the fact that I missed the targets. I won’t say the mistakes stay with me. The correction becomes very apparent, and I seem to hold onto that longer now. Whereas, I used to find myself missing the same kind of target for three or four or five shoots in a row, and then it would just kind of shift to a different kind of target. Now, because of the way we practice, I think it becomes more apparent and I don’t know if I’m more receptive, if the solution is more apparent, or if the depth of my practice has increased to the point that I am assimilating and retaining that knowledge at a higher level. But I can now clearly tell you the trick that I fell for, why I missed the target, and I know that it’ll not happen again.
I think all those things are the fruits of us working with Vicki for the last four or five months, consolidating practice, and, getting some feedback and things like that. For us, Nationals this year was great. We thought all the targets were good. There were a couple of courses I thought were a little boring and repetitive, but I don’t recall seeing anything that was stupid this year. So, like I say, we had a great time.
I’m certainly not going to say that the sleep issue was a hundred percent what caused me to have a good performance the whole time I was there, but I certainly don’t think it couldn’t help. I think it’s a consolidation of things. I will agree with what you were talking about earlier about sleep. And there are very few times that I have gotten less than six or seven hours of sleep and done any good at all anywhere. I’ve sure gotten in the truck and gone somewhere and not shot poorly, but I certainly don’t know that I’ve ever gone somewhere on four hours of sleep and had a peak performance either. I certainly agree with what you were talking about there.
On the whole, I think everything was great this year, and I have already made my goals for next year. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Ben about where he’s at on that, but we’ve already made goals, a calendar for next year, and the big shoots are on the calendar. We’ve put the guns up, we’re going to hang back for six or eight weeks, and probably the first of the year we’re going to pick them back up and go at it some more.
Jitters and Using NLP
Gil: Well, that’s good. I want to share with you something that Jeff Wolfe sent me September the 15th after we had a Coaching Hour on the jitters.
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“I think you can become acclimated to anxiety and stress to a certain point by going to shoots and just shooting with no expectation of score. But at least for me eventually you need to experience it for real, and the more times you experience it, the more routine it becomes. It doesn’t mean you have to fail before you can see, but nothing can approximate the actual experience of being there when the score actually means something. I think that’s a threshold that you’ve just walked through.
I also have the type of memory that I know what my score is. I can’t escape it or ignore it. I remember every shot and every lost target. It fades after a couple of weeks, but I can still replay every station in my mind from last Sunday’s courses. Eventually you’ll have to accept that you will know what your score is and what other people’s scores are, and you will just have to be able to deal with it.
The cliché about not being able to control other people’s scores is old and true. I would add that you also can’t control the targets you’ve already shot. It doesn’t matter what you did on Station 1 when you’re on Station 2, good or bad. That’s history and won’t change no matter what you do. There’s no value in giving it any more thought.”
So, what you’re describing is something that you and Vicki have gone over and that we’ve talked about here on the Coaching Hour. You’ve grown a lot since we’ve first met you, and the maturation process of being in the limelight is obvious. It’s just a matter of getting to that point to where you know what you are about to do and you’re less concerned about results and more concerned about what you’re doing right now.
What I would suggest you do is get on the website and search for the NLP exercises that we did with Bob Palmer and work on your congruency. If you’d like to review that, give me a holler and Vicki or I will go over that with you. I know that there are a couple of exercises that I still use today that he taught us. My, Vicki, how many years has it been since Bob was here? Eight or ten years ago?
Vicki: Well, at least, yeah.
Gil: And I still use those every day of my life, especially when I’m getting ready to get up and give a presentation to 450 people like we will at Safari Club. It’s just something that I do. It helps me equalize my anxiety levels and my fear. It helps me stay congruent. I know when I’m congruent. I have an exercise that I go through when I become incongruent and I can feel my body starting to go a little crazy on me. I can do my exercise and get right back into that congruent state, which keeps me from getting the jitters. It also calms my mind. We might want to talk about some of those in the next month or so if you’re inclined to do that.
I would recommend that you, like I said, search “NLP” on the Knowledge Vault and listen to the Coaching Hours that we did with Bob Palmer, because we went through each one of those things. If you need some help with that, I would recommend that you and Ben both begin to do some of that because it’s a powerful thing. I know it’s a very powerful thing for me. Because to know that you’re in control of the adrenaline in your body, to know how to control it when you feel it getting out of balance is a very powerful thing when you’re having to perform and when you’re having to perform under pressure.
Just because you’re congruent and in control of your adrenaline doesn’t mean you’re going to win. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have the best peak performance of your life, but what it does is it improves the probability that something like that could happen. If you’re not in control of your adrenaline, the chances of it happening are slim to none. If you are in control, you have a higher percentage of opportunity for having a peak performance.
So, that’s something that I would encourage you to do. Sometime in the future, just let me know what you find on the Coaching Hours. If you want to go over some of it, Vicki or I will be more than happy to help you with it.
Shane: Okay. I’ll take a look at it and go through some of it.
Turning Compliments into Enthusiasm
Shane: I just want to make two quick comments. You were talking about being congruent, and one of the things that I found that was completely unexpected that pulled me way out of congruency was on more than one occasion I had somebody come up to me and tell me, “I don’t know how you do that, but I wish I could be that smooth.” And the guy actually told me, “I wish I could be as anticlimactic as you are when you’re shooting, because you get in the cage, and you’re just smooth and very determined, and you just break targets. If you miss one, you just go back to breaking them and then you come out and get back in the cart.”
There is nothing that will pull you back into your conscious self faster than having somebody point that out, I can assure you. If you want to try to lock that little guy back in the cage, you can, but that was something I had not experienced before. I’ve had people tell me you’re shooting good or whatever, but I’ve never had anybody come up and say that “I wish I was that smooth and anticlimactic.” That pulls it right out in front. And then for about three stations, I didn’t shoot poorly, but it was like all I could think about was making sure I was smooth instead of just doing my job and running the routine. Do you know what I’m saying?
Gil: Yeah. There is a Coaching Hour that I did with Tony Morrow, and I did it specifically with him before the National Championship. He was in AA and went into the National Championship. He was shooting well, but he wasn’t scoring as well as he thought he should. I said, “That always happens before you have a spurt of great performances, but I want you to understand something. When you’re shooting at the Nationals, people are going to come up and tell you, ‘You’re shooting great, you’re doing this and that.’”
And I explained to him how to accept or receive a compliment. The long and short of it is whenever someone gives you a compliment like that, you need to immediately look at them and acknowledge what they’ve said by saying “Thank you very much.” Then you need to tell them how you have worked hard on doing what they just complimented you on. That gives you control over the compliment. If you don’t do that, then the compliment has control over you.
It’s just like somebody walking up to you and saying, “Man, you stunk it up today.”
You say: “Well, actually, the 78 that I put up today was probably one of the best scores I’ve ever shot in my life, simply because I just didn’t have it today. This is one of those days where nothing felt right. I don’t know why. I can’t put my finger on it, but I struggled for every target in that score of 78. It was one of the best scores. Maybe not numerically, but as a personal best, it was one of the best scores, because I had to struggle for every one of those 78 targets.”
Now, do you see how I took what was said and turned it into something that I had control over?
Shane: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll look that up.
The other thing I was going to say was that you were talking about being in control of your adrenaline. When I was starting the last course the last day, I thought about it for probably a good ten days. I think the last time that I was shaking that much, I had gotten off a motorcycle before it was stopped, which is hard on fat white guys, I promise you. And that’s on me. I know now that you can’t not want it. Do you know what I’m saying?
Gil: No, no. I understand completely. I do understand.
Shane: I know what it’s like now and I know what’s going to happen, and now I can start working on how to deal with it.
Gil: Yes, sir.
Shane: And you can’t lie to yourself, there was no sense ignoring it. We talked about it on Saturday. It was me, Ben, and Max. We were sitting somewhere, and one of them asked me what I was thinking, and I’m sitting there thinking “We’re only shooting three courses, and they’re taking the top of however many scores. I’m only down 10 or 12 targets. I think I can be in the shoot-off tomorrow night.” And there’s not any sense in not talking about it because I’d sure like to be there.
And I missed it by a few targets, but now going forward, I know what it’s going to be like and I know how to recognize what’s happening, and hopefully I can stay ahead of it.
Gil: Well, just remember you can’t not think those thoughts. You’re exactly right. And you can’t lie to yourself. But every time you have one of those thoughts, you’ve got to back it up by telling yourself what you’re going to do to achieve that. It’s just like when somebody comes by and says “Man, you really shot great today.” The first impulse to a compliment like that is, “Well, I just got lucky.”
No. “Thank you for noticing how well I shot today. I’ve got to tell you three things: Every plan I made today was perfect. I don’t know why. Some days I have perfect plans. Some days they’re not all perfect, but I can survive. But today, the plans were perfect. I felt like my routines were as smooth as they’ve ever been, and I hit every break point except one today on my plans.” If you can attach what you did to why you received the compliment. First of all, acknowledging the compliment is good for you. Okay? It is good that they are complimenting you. If you follow that up with explaining to them, “I had a great day. I could really see well today. I got a lot of rest last night. I got new glasses. I just had my eyes fixed. You know, my wife just had plastic surgery.” I don’t know what it is that makes you see well, but whatever. Okay?
[laughter]
Shane: Easy, Gil. Easy.
Gil: Now, if you can attach what you went through to get that compliment, then the compliment is a good thing for you. The typical reaction is from humility: “Yeah, thank you for noticing. Yeah, I shot well today, I got lucky.”That’s not going to help you.
Shane: Well, basically what you’re saying is that you need to focus on turning that into validation instead of being gratuitous.
Gil: Exactly.
Bob: Actually, it’s a little different and I’m going to phrase it differently to you.
Gil: Okay. Go for it.
Bob: Turning it into enthusiasm, which helps your performance the next moment you step in to perform.
Gil: There you go. And you need to talk to your steering wheel a little bit. Talk to that CNC lathe, because those phrases need to roll off your tongue. When somebody says, “Man, you shot great today,” you can’t think, “Okay, what am I supposed to say? What should I say?” You need to have eight to ten phrases that just roll off your tongue. Because you know as well as I do that there are six or eight things that you’re going to do that are going to really help you every day, and each time you have a good performance they’re going to be three that are stellar for you.
It’s just like when my wife’s father died, I was in the room there. And I was the one in the room that was the least affected by his death. I was the in-law. Okay? Everybody else in the room were direct family, and I knew what I had to do when his life was leaving his body. And that was to be the rock in the room. I was the one that wasn’t crying. I was the one that was standing up, I was congruent, my shoulders were back, and everybody was looking at me and getting strength from me.
Before the funeral and before the viewing, I wrote down eight phrases, said them over and over and over again. And those phrases were answers to the things that the people were going to say at the viewing and at the funeral. Because I knew I was the one in the room that was going to have to keep it together, be congruent, not crack, and be able to say the right things when someone would say to my wife something about her dad that I knew she couldn’t answer. I could walk in there and I would say the right phrase because I had rehearsed it, and it enabled me to be her rock and everybody else’s rock in the room, and I knew I had to do it. It was my choice to do it, but I was ready with the phrases. I was ready to say those things. I didn’t have to think when the pressure was on me to react. I had already gone through it. I did the same thing for Patrick when he had to go to a funeral of one of his loved ones. I did the same thing, and he came back and thanked me over and over.
It’s just something that you need to be aware of: how to receive a compliment and how to receive something that’s not quite so complimentary.
“Hey, I understood you were straight to the last station and you dropped six and you’re third.”
“Well, yeah. I learned something today, though.”
And you need to be able to, number one, be proud of what you’ve done. But you should also be able to attach why you were able to do what you did. Or turn it around.
I never will forget this as long as I live, and I’ve said this on this Coaching Hour several times. When Picabo Street was coming back from a bad knee injury, she never came back. She was coming down the slopes, she fell, and the commentator went over to her and said, “Well, Pic, it just didn’t happen today.” She never once said anything about how she fell or why she fell. She systematically went through the top four downhill skiers’ performances, talked about how well they did on the edges and what they did to ski well. She went through every one of them, because she wasn’t going to let the commentator pull her into why she fell and the disappointment that she had. She stayed up and she stayed positive. I learned a lot from her that day.
You can control how your brain reacts to things that are said to you. You can control how your brain reacts to the situations you find yourself in. You’ve got to do some rehearsal, and I think that’s what you need to work on. And, Bob, that’s a good point. What did you say?
Bob: It turns it into an enthusiastic response, which research shows to be extremely powerful for continued high performance. And if you think about it, when you’re being humble you tend to down everything.
Gil: Yes, sir. Your head goes down. It’s an incongruent position.
Bob: Yeah. I have one question for you, Shane. How would you rate your confidence and your corrections now, compared to two years ago?
Shane: I wouldn’t even say they were in the same ZIP code, much less at the right ballgame. Confidence is the number of hours you put in the practice. Two or three years ago I went down there, and I wanted to shoot well. I had a good time, but I wanted to shoot well. This year I went down there knowing I was going to shoot well. And I think that alone would tell you the difference between the two.
And one of the things I can say leading up to that, is when we went to the South Central Regional a couple of weeks before Nationals. We were down there and shot the Main with a guy that is on the pro tour. He was pretty salty, and we set ourselves up not to have a peak performance. Ben was in Houston on business. He ended up flying into Dallas at about two in the morning and had somebody bring him out to where we were staying, and he didn’t get in until three o’clock. We had to rush to the club the next morning to get him registered and all this other stuff.
But even given all the stuff that we did, I won’t say it was wrong; it just wasn’t optimal. We still hung with him except for one or two stations. That was a big boost in our confidence or it was for me, anyways, to know that I can walk off a course, be down eight and that guy down five. Do you know what I’m saying? And then as far as error correction goes, error correction now is not always but almost immediate.
I talked earlier about the station on the Krieghoff Kup course where I shot a three on a station. I won’t say I talked myself into a three, but what happened was that I saw a target I had never seen before. It was not a presentation I had never seen before. It was not dissimilar to targets that I have crushed repeatedly in practice, but it was a target I had never seen. It was a flat rabbit thrown through the air like a flyer, but it was flat. I looked at it, immediately looked at Ben, and I said, “I’ve never seen that target.” And none of us had. Now, I’ve only shot 3,000 of those birds quartering away, rolling over to the left and dying, and a lot of times we shoot them, they throw them down a small hill or something. But I’ve only shot 3,000 of those. Go to the 85-yard line, wait until it rolls over and start to draw, punch it, kill it, and be done. Not Shane. Shane has to back up to about the 15-yard line, and when the rabbit goes by, he has a small sizer and whips his gun to get back in front of it because you know that big iron doesn’t just take off or stop on a dime, either. So, he shoots three feet in front and over that rabbit every time but once. The first time I shot at it I missed it. I stood there with my mouth open, about three seconds went by, and I went, “There’s a really nasty midi coming somewhere, I think.” And that was a lost pair, Bob.
And so, with the exception of that one station, error correction is miles beyond. And I want to say it has evolved tremendously in the last three to five months, in no small part because of the changes we have made in practice. And I find now almost universally that if it’s not a bad read or I didn’t fall for the trick, it’s a routine issue almost every time. And so now I just have one of three places to go. Does that make sense?
Bob: Absolutely.
Shane: You know, I’m not trying to run through a whole folio of what I did wrong. It’s either that I read the target wrong – which happens – or I fell for the trick, and sometimes they just get you. If you’re shooting something first and you don’t have a chance to look at a target from 10 or 30 feet off to the side or whatever, you may not appreciate that it’s turning and falling. It just looks like it’s turning, it might be falling or something like that. Which, again, is kind of a bad read, but maybe that was the trick. So, it’s either a bad read, I fell for the trick, or it’s a routine issue.
So, for me, I’ll just say now that most of my misses are on the first pair. Very rarely are they on the third or fourth pair of a station. Usually if I miss it on the first pair, I’ll have a loss dead and run the station out or a dead loss and run the station out, and that’s where almost all my misses occur. That’s an experience thing, I think, because you know you need to be early. You know you need to be in front, but sometimes, you’ll have a target that’s just a little bit faster than you thought it was or the wind will push it or whatever. I would say because of the evolution of our practice, my error correction is twice as good and ten times faster than it was at this time last year.
Bob: That’s my point. The real thing is the confidence and the ability to fix it. That’s huge in your ability to perform. Just huge.
Gil: Yeah. Fat boys don’t do good falling off of a motorcycle before it stops. Is that what you said?
Shane: That is correct. I can tell you what it’s like when you’re sliding across the mud on your back. I’m glad that they have dead cows. I got off the motorcycle, made a quick left at a crescent, coming down a hill, and I was going probably 150 miles an hour. I was in the top of fifth gear, I didn’t have enough gravity, and I fell down. Then there was way more gravity than I wanted there to be. And, they tell you about a hundred times “don’t stand up until you stop,” but when you’re looking and there’s this big Airfence coming with a tire wall behind it, you think, “You know, I’m slowed down pretty good. I could probably put my heels down and pop up and run into the Airfence instead of going under it.”
So, I planted my heels, and apparently I had slowed down quite a bit, but I was still going about 50 or 60 miles an hour. So, then I went from sliding on my rear to sliding on my face. And luckily, I could no longer see the tire wall coming. All I could see was mud. But, yeah, it’s one of those things.
Gil: [laughs] Well, I’m glad to see that your error correction has improved.
Shane: For the right money, I’ll put those leathers on and recreate that for you somewhere if you can’t get that picture out of your head. I won’t be going that fast, but I’ll do a swan dive across the grass for you. It’s going to cost you, though.
Gil: I don’t want your body to have to go through that again. Just visualizing it was enough for me to feel sorry for you.
Shane: Yeah. Oh, it was great.
Gil: Hmm. That’s an interesting synopsis. And Bob’s question is pertinent because your error correction is almost instantaneous, and that’s what it takes. And if all your zeros are on the first station, and it’s just a matter of time before there’s no zeros on the first station. That’s just all part of the process. Just like we talked about the other day. You’re not going to be able to think your way to the right action. You’ve got to act your way, the right way of thinking will follow, and it’s just all part of it. I really would like for you to listen to the Coaching Hours on NLP. I think that will be helpful.
Shane: We’ll get on the NLP stuff, and I’ll look up the one about the compliments too. We’ll get it taken care of.
Gil: If not, I’ll find it and we’ll go over some of that next month or the month after.
Bob: Gil, that book I had your manager get, Performance Under Pressure has a good section on enthusiasm.
Gil: Oh, really? All right. I will recommend that to Shane. I’ll send that to you tomorrow.
Shane: Okay. Thank you.
Gil: Yeah. Vicki is in the middle of that right now, and I’m in the middle of two others. We’re going to compare –
Bob: I know the problem. I did finish the paper finally, but I haven’t gotten a chance to email you about it.
Gil: That’s all right. I have resigned myself to the fact that when it’s supposed to happen it will. It’s not going to happen before it’s supposed to happen, and I’m tired of pushing the chain. I’m just going to let things happen like they’re supposed to and be alert and be ready when they do so that I can make the most of them. I’m going to be working with some educators from the university on Thursday about threshold concepts. I was going to talk about that tonight, but we got a little bit longer on the Nationals’ things which was good. There’s some good information there.
But next month I want to talk about threshold concepts. I’ll be writing some on the blog about it. The concept of a threshold concept is new to me. Evidently in academia they’ve been talking about this for a few years now, but I’ve never really heard it put that way. But, man, now that I’ve been thinking about it, they really have sung to me. A lot of the things that we’ve been talking about here have to do with certain threshold concepts that have to be mastered before you can get better. And one of the threshold concepts is learning how to shoot pairs and learning how to make corrections which you have to master to get to the top part of game. So that’s something else that we’ll add in there.
So, anyway, we’re out of time again tonight. And, Shane, thank you for sharing. Bob, thank you for sharing. To the guys who we didn’t get to talk to tonight that were at Nationals, we’ll talk about that next time, too. So, without further ado, I’m going to take my wife home and go to bed. We’ll see y’all next month on the Coaching Hour. Y’all be careful.
Be sure and mark your calendars for when you’re going to stop shooting and when you’re going to start shooting for next year and be sure and take a break for the winter. Put the gun down. You can go hunting if you want to. You can go fishing, but put that gun down, stop training, stop shooting tournaments. You’ve got to get away from it or you’re going to experience a slump in June or July. So y’all pick your time for your layoff and be sure and circle a day on the calendar when you’re going to pick the gun up next year.
All right. Goodnight, everybody.
