Have you ever stopped to think where you are going with your shooting game?
How do you define success? Getting out of C class? Winning your way into A? AA? Master? Winning the club championship? Being able to fit in with the group, regardless of who is in it? Being able to beat Billy Bob?
Your own definition of success is not nearly as important as having one. Without a definition of success, how can you ever expect to reach any goal? How do you ever expect to feel good about yourself or your game? How can you measure improvement?
Every day we see students and fellow shooters who, through their reactions about themselves or their performances, make us wonder why they ever shoot a shotgun.
In fact, I had a lesson a few weeks ago with a man who was one of the most negative people I’ve ever met. Take the shotgun out of his hands and he is as nice and polite as anyone you would want to meet or know. But put that shotgun in his hands, and it was one negative phrase after another. He talked to himself constantly:
“I hit all of these yesterday… Why can’t I hit them today? That’s not how I shoot a dropping shot. The fact that I cant hit a dropping shot consistently has nothing to do with my technique, it is the fact that I haven’t been able to practice enough. Why can’t I ever beat so-and-so?”
This guy was eaten up with negativity. He had no definition of success. He was consumed with only his failure. He could never come up to an ever-changing mythical level of performance that changed like the mood swings of an 8 1/2 month pregnant woman with either ice cream or pickles in the fridge. This guy was so negative he would shoot six pairs in a row and instead of saying “that felt great,” the first thing out of his mouth would be “why couldn’t I do that yesterday?” or “I’ll never be able to do that again!”
I began to talk to him about the conscious and subconscious minds, and how they worked. He interrupted me and said, “I don’t know whether this psychological junk you talk about is real or just a bunch of BS.”
At that point in time, the lesson was over. I explained to him that I could not help him until he made up his mind as to whether the psychological junk was real or not. I didn’t care whether he thought it was real or not. I could only help him if and only if he made a decision.
Defining success is a simple thing that leads to better performance and a change in attitude about failure. Winston Churchill defined success as going from one failure to another failure with no loss of enthusiasm. He, like all great performers, realized that without failure, there is no success. Only through learning from failure does one achieve success, regardless of one’s definition.
Ultimately, success and failure are more a result of attitude than anything else.
