Gil: Welcome to the Coaching Hour for December 2015. This marks the fourteenth year, I believe. Brian Brewton, we started in November 2001, didn’t we? Yeah. And this is December 2015. We’ve been doing this for 14 years now and have quite a few of these recorded on the Knowledge Vault. I reckon we’ll make another good one tonight. I was going to start out talking about negative thinking, but I think I’m going to switch to threshold concepts, which is something that I referred to in my blog a few times and I’ve mentioned it here a couple of times, but I haven’t really done this in depth.
I sent an email out to everybody that’s going to be on tonight. And I was wondering if any of you had thought about what a threshold concept is. It is something that, once you experience in its completeness and understand it completely, it totally changes the way you look at what you’re doing. I didn’t know whether any of you had any time to think about some of the threshold concepts that you had been through in your shooting.
John Eagle went through a threshold concept of not losing his billfold to a pickpocket in France. That would be a threshold concept that you wouldn’t want to have to go through. Have any of you thought about anything like that? If you haven’t, that’s fine. I can tell by your silence that you probably haven’t.
John: Yes. It was Spain and not France, but that’s okay. [Gil laughs] I looked forward to getting my pocket picked in France. I thought about that since you sent me that email, and I think, if I have this right, you have a few thresholds in this. It’s like getting to a new pool, going over the edge, and getting into a nicer, bigger pool once you get over that threshold. And I certainly know what the last threshold concept is for me when you started that thinking process. I mean, there’s no other word for it than confidence. You look at everything different. It’s no longer “Can I do this, I don’t think I can do this, how am I going to do this, I’m not sure this is going to work,” to the next level of, “Oh, okay, how do we make this work, I know it can work.” As you’ve said a lot of times, the mindset of “Okay this is what we’re going to do.”
It used to confuse me a little bit when you would say “Oh, I just look and I know. I get up to a pair and I’ll have to think about it and look at it and know.” But for me there’s another threshold concept, which is the difference between “I know” and “I don’t know how to do this” versus I take that one for granted. And once you get over that barrier to “Now we’re going to do this job,” that’s a big threshold.
Gil: Yeah. I can agree with that. Those are some of the things that we’re going to talk about tonight. Anybody else?
Randy Lawrence: I had something kind of cool happen. I was shooting a gun that had been sent to me to write about, and it was set up very differently from my guns. And in the middle of a round of clays, I had just the neatest feeling that things are going well. There was this pair down in a valley, down below me, that was going away and sort of curling to the right. I can remember before, I would say, “Well, that’s a cool target.” And now if it’s a dove flight or a clay bird or something, the thought is “This is going to be really cool,” and “It’s going to be fun to put this to work here.”
Before, it was, as the other fellow mentioned, “Is this going to work? I don’t know, let me see, I wonder.” And now it’s like, “I can’t wait to try it, I can’t wait to put it to work, I can’t wait to get my hands moving.” That’s a very alien feeling for me, and I like it very much.
Gil: Well, let me interject another phrase that the college researchers threw at me. I think what you and John are both talking about is what they would call full application of the concept. John was really paying homage to this scenario. I mean, he was going through the steps that you go through to create confidence. You just said, Randy, “now that I know what a stable picture looks like, I’m not scared of anything. I can’t wait to go do it.” John Eagle was talking about the steps that you go through to achieve full application, and the thing about a threshold concept is it cannot only be a tremendous stepping stone into future performances, it can also be a roadblock to learning.
Here’s an example. I may have used this on this Coaching Hour before, but I go back to it because it’s so vivid in my mind. I breezed through Algebra 1 and Algebra 2, but I had a really hard time in Algebra 3. I don’t know whether it was the teacher, my mindset or what, but I got a D. I mean, I had a D average. Okay? And I had several Cs. So that tells you how close I was to flunking, back when you actually flunked something.
[Laughter]
You can’t flunk anything now. You get a blue ribbon that says four on it instead of one. They’re all blue. But in Algebra 1, I had full application. In Algebra 2 I had full application, but in Algebra 3 I had partial application. I understood it enough to get by, which you see a lot in college, which is where all of this comes from. All this comes from academia trying to change the paradigm in which they teach to get their students to have a better full application in a more timely fashion. When I barely got done with Algebra III, I had partial application, which means I could go no further. Okay?
It’s the same thing in shooting. We’ll get to what academia said about this paper I’m talking about later tonight or next month. But to me, as I looked at it from the standpoint of being a champion in sporting clays, which I have been, and Vicki has been, and many of you have been. If you haven’t won a big tournament, eventually you will if that’s what you want to do. But we’ve shared in a lot of journeys in the last 23 years. Homer Saye would say “the most mainest thing” that you’ve got to learn to shoot a shotgun well is to move and mount it correctly, consistently without even giving it a thought. To me, that is the absolute first base threshold concept that one must go through to achieve higher and higher and higher levels of learning.
I wasn’t going to talk about this, but I was in Florida all week last week, and dammit, there are still people out there looking down the damn barrel, shooting with a mounted gun with their weight on their back foot, wondering why they’re getting kicked so much, trying to aim the gun three feet ahead of the bird. It just baffles my mind. I must digress in that we write about it every month in the selection of magazines. We hear it a lot. We’re around it a lot, but I’m still flabbergasted by the looks on people’s faces when they say, “Well, I’m not consistent and I don’t get the lead. The lead looks right sometimes. It breaks and it looks right, sometimes it doesn’t break.” All the little things that occur when a person is trying to aim a gun in the invisible spot in front of a moving target. Vicki looks at them and says, “Well, you’re looking down the gun.” And they go, “Yeah.” And it’s just quiet. And then she’ll get pissed off. And then she’ll say, “Okay, this is the bird. This is the gun. You got to look at the bird, right? The gun has got to be over here, right? So, you can’t be looking down the gun.” It’s like, you go around the room and hit them in the forehead as hard as you can with a Nerf bat. [Chuckles] And they’re like, “Damn! I never thought about it that way!”
The other people out there who want to be good with a shotgun that won’t spend the time that it takes to learn to move and mount the gun is a great frustration to us. Because if you go through the basic threshold concept of learning to move and mount the gun, you don’t have to look at the gun to know that it’s safe. You don’t have to look at the barrel to know where it’s pointing. You don’t even have to think about what you’re doing.
I would say after going to the Nationals, watching people shoot, and looking at the attention they give the muzzle in their setup… I’m going to just reach out there and grab a percentage. I’m going to say 85 to 87 percent of the people that shoot sporting clays shoot with a mounted gun, and they have to check the barrel to make sure it’s mounted right every time before they call “pull.” Therefore, they do not learn the gun mount, and are not willing to go through what all of you have gone through to learn to move and mount the gun. They haven’t gone through the most basic fundamental threshold concept in learning to shoot a shotgun. They never will have full application. It will take them three to four times longer to learn anything, if they ever learn it. But they’ll never have full application. They’ll never be able to really progress as rapidly as they could if they just learned to move and mount the gun.
What do you think about that, John Eagle?
John: I couldn’t agree more. I mean, when people are nervous, you’ll see them look at the gun more.
Gil: Oh, God. Yeah.
John: When they’re unsure about what to do, you’ll see them mount the gun four or five times or they’ll take a little peek mount or something. And you know it’s not going to be good.
Jeff: I have a question for you. One of your frustrations as a coach (and tell me if this hits you) is when you work with someone and you explain some of these concepts to them, and you need to help them understand being in front of the target, and looking not down the barrel of the gun. And you talk to them about the move and the mount. And as they get frustrated, as they get tired, as things start to break down, they go back to their old way of doing it, and then that further frustrates and inhibits any learning or progress because they aren’t doing what you would call the fundamentals properly. Is that a true statement?
Gil: You are as spot-on as my mother could be. Okay? You’re right on target there. Let me just say this, then I’ll shut up and listen. What has evolved out of that is a concept that if we can get you to quit trying to break the target and just learn what we’re trying to get you to learn, you learn it three times faster. But wanting to break the target gets in the way of you learning what we’re trying to get you to learn. Go ahead and say what you want to say. I’m sorry.
Jeff: To my mind, that’s exactly a threshold concept, what we just talked about, right? That trust, ability and capability to perform the basic moves and mount to a degree that you don’t even think about it. It’s just part of your normal shooting process, right? The fact that not being able to do that inhibits any future learning or future growth.
Gil: Bingo.
Jeff: That, to me, would be exactly a threshold concept. When you see that, when you can put that together and look at a particular part of your technique or part of your game, perhaps the worst part is you kind of have to fight through it all before you can look back and see the stratification and the different layers. Once you can see that, it makes it clear where the threshold concepts are. And I would argue that maybe the biggest one is the fundamental trust in shooting with a low gun and moving and mounting and having a consistent mount.
You can’t even explain to someone, you can’t even teach them anything beyond the move and mount until they’re consistent enough that they can progress. If they can’t be consistent, everything looks different. The gun comes up in a different place. What they’re seeing is different every time they put the gun to their cheek. They’re never going to be able to learn with inconsistent visual information.
And I think one of the things that you guys have done that bridges that is what you’ve done with the videos and the virtual shooters and those sorts of things. I think there’s a little bit of a bridge there, and that helps people sort of think about and look at that particular concept in a way that allows them to learn it and understand that it’s a fundamental thing they need to know.
Gil: Yeah. Man, your summarization is spot-on. The frustrating part is they’ll say, “Yes, I understand,” but then they buy the flashlight and never take it out of the blister pack. I don’t know whether it’s that they don’t want to take the time.
Everybody on this Coaching Hour or that has ever been on this Coaching Hour knows the value of moving and mounting the gun and knows how important it is that it be 95 percent perfect… I’m not asking for perfection. I would settle for at least 90 percent perfect 100 percent of the time without conscious thought. And Jeff, you’re right. It is frustrating. It’s just almost the most frustrating thing in my life. [Chuckles]
Scott: The funny thing about it is your move and mount drills, your flashlight drills, don’t cost them anything. You can do that at home for free, yet they’ll spend hundreds and thousands on other junk and stuff and try to get the same results.
Gil: It’s so true, Scott. It’s just so true.
Scott: And they don’t want to take the time to do it.
Gil: Yeah. Because the beginner wants to equate intellectual understanding with skill. If they understand it, they think that they should be able to do it. The drills you mentioned are good, yes. I’ve got five more that we’ll talk about. But let’s talk about the ones you mentioned first. I think you all understand what a basic threshold concept is as well as full application and partial application.
In hockey, mobility on skates is a threshold concept. You’ve got to be able to move on skates better than you can move on your feet; better and faster. In basketball, it’s dribbling. Mobility on a basketball court through dribbling is a basic threshold concept. Once you can quit thinking about what you’re doing with the ball, you can achieve full application on the court and move around without thought. It just happens.
The first threshold concept in our game, as we’ve talked about, is moving and mounting the gun 90 percent perfectly a hundred percent of time without thinking about what you’re doing with the gun or looking at the gun. We all agree that this basic threshold concept has to be passed through before you can even have a gun fitted to you. That just occurs to me. We get people that come to us for gun fits all the time, and I look at them and I say, “I can’t do it. I mean, I can get you what I call a novice gun fit where you can shoot it and practice it, but I can’t fit the gun any better than you can mount it.”
“Oh, I can mount it.”
“Okay. Let’s go shoot the pattern board.”
And they go up to the pattern board and some of the shots are off the four-by-four plate. It’s just crazy.
But that said, learning to move and mount the gun is important because (and I think I said this before) you only have a hundred percent of focus or attention. Whatever attention you need to give the gun while you’re shooting is taken away from the target. It’s kind of like a Slinky; the more attention you have to put on the gun, for whatever reason, is taken off the target. I mean, it’s not like you’ve got an extra 15 percent of focus in your shirt pocket. It’s not like you can say, “Oh, shit, this is a hard one. Let me get my extra focus out and use it.” The harder the target is perceived, the more the focus goes to the gun until you get through that threshold, which is something that John was talking about as far as confidence.
It’s just something you’ve got to pass through and you’ve got to almost do it on your own. I can’t do that for you. I can lead you there, I can show you the ropes, but you’ve got to do it on your own. When a person performs a skill at higher and higher levels, they focus on less and less because they performed the skill so many times. The mechanics of the skill have been passed off to the automaticity part of the brain because enormous chunks of neurological circuits have been chunked together in so few chunks.
We talked about chunking the last couple of years, talking about The Talent Code and how the brain will take three actions. You do those three actions over and over, and then all of a sudden, the brain sees those three actions as one action. Then it takes ten actions that are three actions, which are really 30 actions. But because you’ve chunked each one of them, now the brain sees a 30-action circuit as one, and then it takes ten 30-action circuits and put those together which is 300 but it really sees it as one. That’s what happens. That’s how the brain chunks the circuits together. Finally, it has the whole circuit down, and it can hand it off to the automaticity part of the brain. That’s where it resides, because if you’re thinking about it, you can’t do it because there are too many things happening at one time. This frees up so much focus and attention that can be placed on fewer and much more important things, allowing the athlete to perform at higher and higher levels which allows for greater and greater speeds of learning.
I think that in and of itself should be one of the greatest motivators of learning to move and mount the gun. Because if you can move and mount the gun, you can learn stuff at a much higher pace than you would be able to if you had to think about what you’re doing with the gun. All of this is why the basic and first threshold concept of our game is to learn to move and mount that gun from any position at any speed in the right place on the face and shoulder over and over and over, time and again without thinking about it. It must be a reflex like breathing, brushing your teeth, walking, going upstairs, driving, speaking, or any other thing we do in our lives without thinking.
We hear shooters complain about losing focus or not being able to focus on the target consistently. What they need to understand is that until they pass through the first threshold concept, they will have intermittent periods of this lack of ability to focus. But it’s not really a lack of ability to focus. It is, however, their inability to do things automatically without thinking that causes them to divert precious focus on the target to things and tasks that they have not mastered. To them, it’s an inability to focus, but the reality is they still have things that are fundamental to their ability to achieve higher and higher levels of focus that they must master for more of their focus to be placed on the target.
How many times have you heard somebody say, “I don’t know what it was, I just lost focus? I just lost focus on the target.” We hear it all the time. It’s my experience, and I think Vicki would substantiate this and most of you guys who shoot a lot of tournaments that observe people, like Eagle was talking about. When you observe them, you observe this fluctuating attention to the gun. But people don’t understand the reason they have varying focus on targets isn’t a physiological thing. It isn’t because they don’t have $3,000 Pilla glasses. Okay? It’s not the lenses. It’s not the colors. It’s that you’ve only got a hundred percent, dude! And you can call it focus. You can call it attention. You can call it whatever you want to call it. Even being safe with the gun is an automatic reaction. Until you can get to that point, you can’t put 90 percent of your focus on that bird. I mean, it’s just crazy obvious to me.
I don’t know if I told y’all about going out to Greater Houston a couple of weeks ago with Vicki to shoot. There was nobody there. They had a big tournament the day before, and there wasn’t but 15 people at Greater Houston Gun Club. We went out there because we don’t get to go shoot much, and we needed to talk to the manager about doing some events out there. We shot a flat and a half between us, and as we were leaving, I was thinking that even when I took the gun apart and put it in the truck vault, I never remember consciously looking at it. When I was shooting and loading the gun, I never remembered consciously looking at it. Everything that I did with the gun, even putting it in the golf cart, I never consciously looked at it. It was just one of those things that I knew was okay. I knew where it was supposed to be, and I never thought about it. That’s what triggered this thing we need to talk about.
Whether it’s focus or attention, it doesn’t really matter. You can’t focus any harder on the bird than you’re not thinking about the gun. And until you pass through that first threshold concept, you’re going to have a focus problem. All of you shooters out there have experienced the zone where everything is in slow motion, easy, and just happens. And as soon as they recognize they’re in it, they’re out of it. Because they had nothing to do with getting there, they can’t get back there and can’t go there on demand. To me, what happened in their zone snippet was that everything they were doing at that moment was in their automaticity circuit. When they lost it, they really didn’t lose it at all. What really happened is when they were in their zone, they were familiar enough with what was about to happen that it was automatic. And after they got through with that station or those few stations, they came to a station that was not within their automaticity circuit for whatever reason. They suddenly had to place more focus on what they were doing which led to less available focus for the target; not because they couldn’t focus, but because their attention had to be diverted to a fundamental they had not done enough times and was not automatic which yielded a focus ratio that was less than optimal, which, in turn, yielded a performance that was the same.
Public speaking could be a perfect example of this, and we use this often because it’s one of the biggest fears of people worldwide. Without experience, it leads normal everyday people to become nervous, fumbling, out of control, and afraid human beings just because of the number of eyes looking at them when they do something that they do every day but just not in front of as many people.
The first steps to being able to overcome this fear is to master the material to the point that it is stored in the filler part of the brain and you have access to it and, more importantly, you have accessed it time and again before hundreds of eyes looking at you. All skill resides in the filler part of the brain, and when accessed, the brain just fills in the necessary parts to make their performance flawless. All the time, you were just focusing on doing it. Then you realize that the only way to overcome this fear is to understand what happens when you become afraid and accept the fact that if fear enters the brain, you will not be able to access any of the material and your greatest fear will be realized. You will freeze up and not be able to say anything in front of hundreds of people.
It is this fear that drives so many singers and actors and top performers in general to use prescription drugs to perform. And eventually the drugs don’t work and they either get help or they check into a rehab program. For most it’s an in-and-out thing until they decide to quit and eliminate the fear forever. That’s a fact.
In our game, the first threshold concept is learning to move and mount the gun without thought and being able to do it 95 percent perfectly 100 percent of the time. This allows for greater and greater focus on the target, which allows for the speed of learning to increase and performance surges. Unfortunately, there will always be those who, for whatever reason, choose not to learn to move and mount the gun And, unfortunately, they don’t understand the brevity of their decisions and the long-term effects it will have on their success and eventual enjoyment of shooting sports.
In fact, we have seen the frustration on the faces of the shooters who choose to shoot mounted gun, because they don’t want to put in the time and effort to learn to mount the gun, mostly because they don’t understand the benefits or setbacks this situation will inevitably bring. Those who choose to shoot mounted gun are destined to be disappointed in the speed of their learning and the visual confusion that muzzle awareness in the setup and shot will create for them. The amount of muzzle awareness in the setup and the shot will always be equal to or greater than the amount of muzzle awareness in the setup because they don’t know what it feels or looks like to have the gun correctly mounted. They are constantly checking the bead for correct alignment, and we all know what happens there.
The next threshold concept, once we’ve learned to move and mount the gun, is seeing the bird come to you by learning to play much further in front of the target with the muzzle and the hold point, actually controlling the target from in front and slowing the birds down by adjusting the muzzle speed to the bird speed as they merge together in the break point. It is here that the paradigm shifts from getting the gun in front of the bird to seeing the bird behind the muzzle every time the gun is mounted.
If the first threshold concept has been completed and passed through by the shooter, this threshold concept is quickly passed through and instantly, practice takes on an entirely different meaning because the shooter is seeing things they have only heard and talked about by better shooters, but they have never experienced before. And they can’t get enough of it and they become consumed with slowing the bird down, seeing it come to them, and how slow the game has suddenly become.
This is what Randy Lawrence was talking about. Right, Randy?
Randy: Yep. Exactly.
Gil: It is a game changer simply because you don’t have to try to take your performance or your practice to another level. Practice becomes something that is no longer mundane but is exciting to go do. It’s a complete game changer when you can actually slow the birds down and see that stable picture. You can’t get enough of it. You just absolutely can’t get enough of it.
It is at this point that all targets seem to go the same speed when they’re broken, and the game with so many variables becomes a game with many similarities, which makes the decisions on how to play the game much more obvious, which accelerates the shooter through this threshold concept into the next threshold concept.
It is at this stage that seeing the targets further and further behind the barrel becomes essential to progress, and the two-part mount must be embraced and learned, especially on left-to-right targets for right-handed shooters. It’s just the opposite for the left-hand shooters. Consistently seeing the target further and further behind the barrel allows for the anticipation circuit in the brain to anticipate the target’s arrival more consistently and more precisely, figure the lead as it adjusts the speed of the gun to the speed of the bird and stabilizes the picture.
It is this efficiency of movement that improves dramatically the consistency and timing of each shot and blends all shots into something that resembles a sameness that has a calming effect under even the greatest pressure, which, in turn, allows for the building of better routines used in performances. That to a tee, Randy, is what you were talking about. What you were saying is it’s totally turned the way you looked at a particular target. It was exciting because you had to deal with it. You lost your fear.
This threshold must be exploited in a dramatic fashion on all targets at all distances and angles enough times so that the movement and hold point, become automatic. Because it must be automatic in order to pass through the next threshold concept, which is shooting break points.
When learning to shoot break points, it becomes really a timing exercise, which, if the first threshold concepts have been mastered, will occur surprisingly fast and will be achieved first in practice and then will make competition easier because of the ability to make clear, concise decisions based on the shooter’s ability to control the speed of the target through a more efficient movement with the gun. And what seems a most difficult pair turns into something that is visualized as a simple exercise in break points. Absolutely amazing.
It is at this stage of the game that the shooter can begin to think about the three routines in sporting clays. They are the pre-shot routine, the postshot routine, and the correction routine, which is the next threshold concept that must be addressed. It is the consistent use of the simple routines that allows for the shooter to stay focused on the task at hand and to keep his mind from wandering into the quicksand of expectation, which is something every performer must face and really understand.
It is only after these threshold concepts have been met head-on and faced as threshold concepts and mastered through practice, both in a tournament and along on the practice field, that a shooter can even begin to hope to take control of their performance.
The sad thing we see is that shooters try to perform without even thinking of these basic threshold concepts that we spend so much time coaching, and they haven’t a clue of their existence or their importance or the order in which they must be mastered, which is why a threshold concept can really become a disability to some or a hinderance in the learning process to many.
The last threshold concept that must be passed through would be performance, which incidentally, if the previous threshold concepts have been truly mastered so that you have full application. The shooter goes through the beginning stages of performance with these and is suddenly competing and earning punches in master class and performance is easy, leading to higher and higher scores and confidence.
As a shooter goes through the first five threshold concepts, they will be working their way through the classes. About the time they move to the sixth threshold concept, they will be punching into master class and immediately be a contender because of the way they have pushed themselves through the first thresholds of learning to move and mount the gun. Yes, they pushed themselves at every level. They make higher and higher commitments to push through each threshold concept, sometimes not knowing what they really were, but they were never satisfied. That’s what you call passion, and passion is something that cannot be taught – only nurtured.
This I will tell you: there is no great shooter who is great for long because there’s not a constant return to the first threshold concept on an ongoing basis. They dance with that gun every day just to revisit all of those great experiences they’ve had on the course and in the field. This is, in essence, behind the “why” all of us are so affectionate toward a gun with a smooth bore that cannot be aimed. It must be pointed into the future pathway of a target and, most importantly, life itself.
Threshold concepts. I outlined the ones tonight: The gun mount, then seeing the bird come to you. Once you can see the bird come to you and you control the speed of the bird, then shooting break points, you can stabilize the picture at a certain point in the sky. Once you can shoot break points, then and only then can you really begin to create a strategy for breaking pairs. Once you can create a strategy for breaking pairs so that you don’t have to think about it, then you can begin to practice with your routines. Once you have routines down, you’re ready to go and work on performance.
I’ve listed them: Gun mount, seeing the bird come to you, shooting break points, shooting pairs, routines, and performance. All right. So, somebody tell me – do you think I have them out of order? Because let me tell you something. I was playing dominoes with no spots on them for a while, because I kept moving these things around and looking at them in different orders.
So, Jeff, do you think I have them in the right order? Or Eagle, do you think one should be ahead of the other? What do you think? Do you think the order is correct?
John: Yes.
Gil: You don’t have to say “yes” just because I’m the coach. You’ve never done that before.
John: No, I have never done that before and I’m not going to start now. [Gil laughs]
The only hesitation I have is that there’s another threshold concept of all these six. Every time you get to another one, it makes you revisit the last one. It makes it fast. You can keep refining it.
Gil: Let me help you, okay? I presented these to the educators. Jana, who was the lead educator at this university asked, “Are you having a good day today?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m having a great day. I’m talking to you.” She said, “Do you want me to candy-coat it, or do you want me to tell it like it is?” And I said, “You cannot hurt my feelings. I want to learn so bad. I want to be wrong every time so you can tell me what to do to get it right.” And she said, “While what you have said are essential concepts for a person to go from beginner to champion, they’re not your basic threshold concept.” And I said, “Really?”
And she said, “Yes. I’ve talked to Andy about it and I’ve talked to Jerry about it.” Andy Wolf is the guy that’s in charge of the Tarleton University skeet and trap team who’s applying this study. Jana and Jerry are the research scientists that are compiling the data that we’ll be able to look at hopefully in the next Coaching Hour.
She said, “We all three have gotten together, and we watched you and Vicki teach. You two are brilliant at what you do because everything you do is automatic. It was fascinating to watch you work with 19 different people in a one-day clinic. Vicki would take half of them and you would take half of them. We would go listen to Vicki, and we’d come back over and listen to you, and you are teaching the same thing. But with each person that would come up there, you had the ability to read them immediately, say more or say less than the one before and always say it in the right tone of voice and the right word usage and the right cadence, even down to going to the correct ear.”
And I was like, “So we were kind of on automatic, weren’t we?” And she said, “Your basic threshold concept is automaticity. That’s what you’re teaching.”
Now, the things that we talked about tonight are thresholds that have to be gone through. It’s like John Eagle said: You have to achieve automaticity in every one of these. This may be the order in which you have to achieve automaticity and performance in sporting clays, but the threshold concept itself… Let me back up.
In academia, they’re pushing themselves to go well beyond the obvious. I’m dealing with the obvious, Jana said. We expected you to say that, and it’s okay, but those really aren’t threshold concepts, but the threshold concept that you are helping people achieve is automaticity. So, I said to her, “Jana, the basic threshold concepts in doing anything at a high level is automaticity.” And she said, “Yes, that’s where you are.” She said a lot of other things that we’ll get into at another time. But this goes back to what Eagle understood, which is even though they’re different, they’re all interrelated. Right, John?
John: Yep.
Gil: They’re all interrelated. A breakdown in performance could be a breakdown in any one of those because you haven’t gone back and revisited and re-honed that skill. Is that what you’re saying?
John: What I’m saying is something that you said to me a long time ago. It wasn’t even to me; it was just in general – take the excess out. As we’ve continued to talk about this neural pathway of things, you got to get down to the basic neural pathway. So, you’ve got to keep doing less and less and less and more automatic and more automatic and more automatic.
Gil: Yeah. I have to tell you that it’s been a fascinating journey for me and Vicki, to go back to academia and listen to what they’re working on. Jana spent an hour with me on the phone, talking to me about inverted tornadoes and different learning processes that they’re going through. They want us to come back up there, and they want to observe us teach some more. Now there’s going to be about two dozen of these researchers up there watching us teach.
I said, “I don’t mind being the guinea pig as long as you speak in terms that I can understand about what you’re seeing, and help us get better.” She said, “That’s why you and Vicki are so brilliant. It’s not about your ego. It’s about getting better. You want to be better. You are driven to be better. What you and Vicki have done is take different threshold concepts, and because you understand things in a different way every time you learn something new, you spin it up to another level and continually spin things up to another level such that your learning level is so accelerated, and now when you look back at the people that you teach, you have so many different tools that you can go to.” ‘Oh, he’s not there, she’s over here, she’s got to learn this.’ That is what makes you two such good coaches.”
She said, “And you said things to those kids out there in a way that they couldn’t argue with you because they knew you knew what you were talking about. You told one of them, ‘Until you learn to move and mount the gun, you’ll never be good, and you may not like me for saying that. But you’re here for me to help, and the research project says that Vicki and I have one all-day session with you. So, I’m going to tell you, if you’ll do the flashlight drill and the three-bullet drill every day, you will get remarkably better by the end of it. It’ll be two weeks before you see any improvement. But in the third, fourth, and fifth week, you will make dramatic strides in being able to hit these targets.’
Jana said, “You say it in a way to where that girl actually did it. And what you predicted came true. She struggled the first two to three weeks, but suddenly it was like somebody touched her on the forehead and she became a shooter, and once she started learning, she learned at a rate that surpassed everybody else in the group. So, automaticity is what it’s about.”
Jeff, what do you think about the sequence in which I talked about things?
Jeff: Honestly, I don’t have as much of a concern about the order. Obviously, moving and mounting the gun is early. That’s something you have to be able to master first, but the other parts I think feed into each other. And I was listening to you talk about what the folks from Tarleton University said. And what strikes me is something that I was told when I started college. One of the early advisors stood up in front of us and said, “We’re not going to teach you everything you need to know. We’re going to teach you how to learn.” And that was true through all of college. Yes, they can talk a lot of about specific formulas and specific problems and specific things, but underneath it all were fundamental techniques and fundamental processes that you could use to solve any problem. To me, that’s when you think about a lot of what you’re talking about, and you’re starting to redefine what you teach this way. I think it’s the stuff underneath the covers that you need to learn. If you learn how to be in front of a target, if you get that concept first before you get comfortable with seeing the target behind the gun, I mean, that’s not necessarily wrong or bad. I don’t know what the right order is. I would almost say that those concepts have to evolve almost simultaneously.
To use an analogy, if you are pitching a tent, all the tent poles have to be of a similar height. Let’s say you have one that’s out of balance. That causes problems unless it’s the one in the center, because the balance is that all of the tent poles have to be extended at the same approximate rate. It’s the same with what we do. You have to learn more about each one of those techniques before you can apply and progress in another area. Having gone through it myself and having watched a lot of people learn and a lot of people shoot, to me that’s one of the things.
And to Sheep’s point, if you regress in any of those areas, it pulls it all back. You have to monitor that. You have to practice that. You have to maintain, right? You can’t sit on your laurels, and if you allow any one of those skills to regress, it will have an effect in those other areas. You probably have to pick an order to work on those things, but I don’t feel as concerned about what the specific order is.
Gil: No, that makes sense, and one person might be more predisposed to do them in a certain order than another based on where they come from, if they’ve ever done anything athletically or done anything that requires incredible timing. A drummer in a band has a predisposition for understanding the timing sequence. The timing as the simplest thing for them. If you’re a softball pitcher, focusing on a tiny part of the mitt is a basic threshold concept. I mean, they would be predisposed to focus on the target even more purely.
So, maybe it’s not the order in which we did it. It’s just the fact that, like you said, they all have to be practiced in a certain concert.
Jeff: Yeah.
Gil: Those are interesting concepts. I keep revisiting this. I’ve written this paper four times, and it’s gotten better each time. I’m still not ready to publish it yet, because I haven’t learned all that I want to learn about threshold concepts from the educators. As of right now, I’m going to stick with the threshold concepts that we’ve talked about tonight as threshold concepts until they give me the right name for them.
I can understand what they mean when they say the most basic threshold concept, you’re teaching is automaticity. And it is. Because we’re teaching you to shoot without thinking. Okay? We’re teaching you to trust your right brain and let the left brain look at the target, look at the stable picture, and let the right brain choose the lead. Everybody else is trying to get you to get the right lead. I say everybody else, but I think we’re the only ones out there that are really teaching you how to do this.
So, I’m going to have to give in and let them have their way, and I will do that. As soon as I get to talk to them in another couple of weeks and find out what’s going on at the university, we’ll discuss that with you guys.
Well, I find myself one-minute past again, and it’s gone by remarkably fast. Thanks to Eagle and to Jeff for sharing a little bit. And, Randy, thank you for popping in there. I appreciate that. Vicki and I want to wish y’all a Merry Christmas and a great new year. Don’t touch your guns until the circled date in January or February that you said you’re going to do it. Jeff has already cheated; I want you to know. It was 75 degrees in State College, he called me, and confessed. He told me he picked up his K-20 and went and shot. He didn’t shoot with his competition gun. He shot with his K-20 or something like that. I guess he had his fingers crossed behind his back when he was shooting. But resist the urge to go pick that gun up. Think about something else, I mean, completely. Do something else. I heard from Shane today and he said he was getting mighty itchy and he wanted to go shoot. So, Ben, don’t you let Shane cheat on you now, and both of y’all leave them guns alone until the dates you’ve circled on the calendar when you’re going to start.
So, anyway, guys, I’m signing off. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Thank you for calling in, and we will talk to you in January. Have a good holiday. Be safe. Have a drink for me. See you later. Goodnight.
