When you shoot sporting clays, you should be doing it for a reason. That reason should be personal. Without a reason, you will have no goal and therefore you will never get any benefit out of it. People who compete well and don’t get in their own way understand that the benefits of competition happen only during the event they are competing in. These people play very close to their potential and rarely tighten up. People who think that the benefits of an event happen only when it is over will often tighten up.
In his book “Extraordinary Golf, The Art of The Possible,” Fred Shoemaker brings up some interesting views on how people look at competitive events. One of the views of competition he talks about was about determining the value of competition. If you feel that the joy and satisfaction of a competition can happen only when the game is over in the form of the praise and status that you get when you win, you will always feel a tremendous amount of pressure and have a hard time playing up to your potential.
Regardless of how much you try, you can’t control whether you win or lose. When you make the success or failure of the situation dependent upon something you can’t control, you put yourself into a very vulnerable and pressure-filled situation. Your success, your status, and your self-esteem are dependent on not only how well you shoot, but on the avalanche of things that could happen to you that are not in your control.
We have talked about this in this column, in our books, and on our Coaching Hour many times. You can’t control winning, because whether or not you win is not only determined by how well you shoot, but how well others shoot, as well as the course design, weather, and what goes on around you while you are shooting. You have no control over these things. The only thing you have control over is what you do and how you react to the things that go on around you and the situations you find yourself in while competing.
Tim Galway, in his book “The Inner Game of Golf,” talks about a performance triangle that we have seen work many times, not only for our students but for us as coaches. He describes a triangle with the word “performance” at the top and the words “learning” and “enjoyment” on the two bottom corners of the triangle. When your goal is learning and enjoyment, performance increases. As long as these elements are in balance, good things happen. When any one of the elements gets larger than the others, the triangle is out of balance and performance suffers.
During a competition, most people focus on the result of their performance and ignore the enjoyment and learning aspects of the event. When performance begins to diminish, (and it will) they intensify their focus on “performance” (score) which increases the imbalance and makes conditions even worse.
Learning and enjoyment occur during the event, not after. The games of learning and enjoyment are under your control and winning them will give you the best chance of winning the scoring game.
Shoemaker talks about a “default goal” that everyone has in golf, and it is no different in our game of sporting clays. Whatever your goal is, stick with it. If your goal is to trust your routine, stick with it. If your goal is to commit to the breakpoint, stick with it. If your goal is to be neutral or happy, stick with it. If your goal is learning and enjoyment, stick with it.
Don’t go to the default goal of “not looking bad.” That’s right. When you start to miss a few targets and begin to think of your projected score, (performance) stick with your goal.
Think about the comments you make or hear during a competition. When a person gives in to the default goal, their comments are always rooted in seeking others’ approval about how they performed that day. You can’t control what others think, say, or do, much less what they think or say about you.
At the beginning of a day, when we are watching people shoot and making our lesson plan for the day, often we will ask students what kind of targets they like – challenging or easy? “Challenging” is almost always the answer and the reply is always confident and quick in coming. It is a good answer because if the target is challenging, there is then an opportunity to learn something.
So, we go to a challenging target and they become hesitant when they see the target. We can see it immediately in their body language. We can see the wheels spinning in their heads. The voice is saying, “I said challenging, but not this challenging!” They make comments like, “this is a testy pair” or “this is definitely not an easy pair.” Because they are in a group, they might say (looking for sympathy), “this pair makes the ones you guys shot look easy!” At that point, they go to their default goal of trying not to look bad.
It is becoming more and more evident to us that this “default goal” that Fred Shoemaker talks about is the root cause for all excuses about performance or lack of it. Instead of sticking to their goal for the day, enjoying the learning process about whatever their goal was, shooters switch to the default goal at the first sign of difficulty. They become more focused on performance and results (score, which they cannot control) instead of learning and enjoyment, which was their original goal and something they can control.
Winning the scoring game is often regarded as the only way to look good. Is it worth it? It won’t get you a lot of money. The feeling you get from the praise when you win will be nice for a while. But it won’t last long. It probably won’t last past the next tournament.
We have both won our share of tournaments before we changed our goal to coaching, and with winning your share comes losing your share too. We both agree that we learned so much more from our losses than our wins. The wins were fun too, but anyone can handle winning! It is not what you know that makes you better; it is what you are willing to learn. Failure is only failure when nothing is learned. Winston Churchill defined success as “moving from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Winning the scoring game has very little lasting value. What does have lasting value are the qualities you can develop and the type of person you can become through competition. When you compete, stick to your goals, regardless of the result.
When your goal for the competition is learning and enjoyment, you are in control. When it shifts to performance or score, you will feel pressure and tighten up. Be aware of the default goal. Remember it is always rooted in the desire for others’ approval, which is something you have no control over.
