Sooner or later, you will learn the value of not setting up so close to the trap and having to chase the bird with the muzzle. And when that happens, you will find yourself in B or A Class ready to move on up. Would you like to know what you will have to do to achieve that? It has a lot to do with how you handle your score.
In the beginning, as a new competitor, you’re mystified with how and why the target breaks. You’re not competitive – heck, you don’t even care who wins – all you want to do is go shoot and play with your newfound ability to hit moving targets with a shotgun.
Then you decide to buy a new shotgun, one of those over and unders, and then comes the fitting. And then the barrel modifications, the new chokes, the recoil pad, the trigger job. And the shooting vest with your name on it, then the clays car and trailer and the pallet of ammo. Before you know it, you’ve exhausted all the avenues of buying your way to being a better shooter and you have to actually practice.
When practicing more doesn’t get you to shoot any better than 72 (with an occasional 76) then you’re faced with the dilemma of going to take lessons from someone in order to learn some new things in order to improve your score.
So, you start by getting some videos made by some of the top shooters that show you “what the shooter sees” when he shoots, which makes you concentrate on the gap between the barrel and the bird. The problem is, when you try to do it, there are two barrels. Which one are you supposed to look at? You try not only what’s touted in the video, but what you’ve read in different magazine articles, all of which share a common thread. They’re all in conflict with each other.
Confused, you begin to ask your shooting buddies what to do. They all give you $10 worth of free advice, some of which helps and some that doesn’t. If you’re lucky, you seek out an experienced coach who can take your preconceived notions and mold them into a shooting system for you so you have the same approach on every target and can explain some of the mysteries of the game.
Well, hopefully, you got through all that and began to improve. You won a few class championships and are moving up the ladder. Eventually, you will find yourself looking at and worrying about your score. And if you do that after you have finished shooting, you will survive. If you make the mistake of looking at your score while you’re shooting, we’re afraid that you’ll make one of the most common mistakes we see: you will begin to shoot not to miss. When this happens, you become hesitant and confused and lose your rhythm and feel. Not good if you want to shoot well.
Eventually, you will discover that having goals will help you not only move along the Experience and Improvement Highway, but when the goals you create are correct, evaluation becomes discovery. Everyone talks about goals for the year and goals for practice, but what about a goal for every competition you shoot?
We’re talking more than just having fun. We are talking process goals: focus on every target before you move, eyes to the second target before we move the gun, see the front edge as the target moves into the breakpoint, stay in my routine for every pair, use the correction routine and when we miss, learn from it and move on.
These are goals that, if you stay true to them, will improve your mental and physical game by helping you stay in the present.
At the beginning of your competition career, you’ll find that you must first make goals and then you realize that you must stick to them, and it’s easier said than done. The first goals you make will typically be score goals, and those don’t ever work because of varying course difficulty. Then you’ll realize that you must begin to make better corrections when you miss.
What’s ideal? Well, let’s just say that there are 12 stations and you miss one on every station. If the misses all occurred on the first pair of each station, that would be good, because it means that you misread the target and corrected it, and ran the station out. In this instance, you are just a few tournaments away from running stations, and you gotta run stations to win tournaments.
If, however, the misses are at the end of each station, this could mean one of several different things. You could be taking focus for granted; you could be trusting your rhythm to break the target; you could be speeding up through the set; you could be counting the targets, which takes you to the future. There are so many things that could be going on causing the misses.
Here is where an experienced coach is worth his or her salt. Experienced coaches in just about any arena come to the realization that 60 percent of everything that is taught applies to everybody. And experience teaches you which of the other 40 percent needs to be introduced to the student and when. Knowing when is where the real expertise of an experienced coach pays big dividends for the athlete.
In the beginning, the shooter must learn to stick to their goals when things go bad. But in the end, the shooter must learn to stick to their goals when things are going well! That’s what learning how to compete is. Being able to stick to your goals and keep doing what works even when things aren’t going your way is the first battle the shooter must overcome.
When things go south, the tendency is to go immediately to the default goal of “not looking bad” when you’re learning to shoot and moving up through the classes. When you get to master class, you can shoot and now you must learn to keep it together at the end of the shoot. It’s possible to not know you’re down 23 but impossible to not know you’re only down three… and if you don’t know, your friends will let you know!
That’s where you stick with your goals and stay process-oriented when things are going your way to finish out a good card at a one-day shoot – then on day two of a two-day shoot, and day three of a three-day shoot.
If you’re not in master class, you might not understand what we’re saying, but take it from us, it is real. We have taught hundreds of master class shooters how to compete. And we know what has to be overcome to win and get punches in master class. We don’t write about it much, because the master shooter is such a small part of the whole. Unless you are in master class, you might be able to understand the words, but the application is impossible if you’re still trying to learn how to shoot.
Let’s look at this another way. It’s one thing to be able to shoot 10 straight on an easy, high, incoming pair that doesn’t take much lead and that is delivered so that there is no rush between the shots. That’s because we have taken all the doubt (pressure) out of the shot because the targets delivered as we described are well within your ability level.
The question remains, however, could you run 10 straight, 10 times in a row on similar pairs? Or on the same pair, for that matter? What would your answer be? Just remember what it was for a few sentences and let’s see if it changes.
What would happen if we were to add 50 people watching while you shot the same pair five times in a row 10 times? Now, what would happen to you if we were to change to 10 easy simple different pair, five times in a row?
Remember the people watching? What would that do to your score?
Now, let’s include one difficult station, two medium-difficult stations, and the other six simple easy stations. How would that affect your approach and score without the people watching? How has your thought process changed since we have talked about the original five easy high incoming pair?
Are you still as confident? Why? What does your lack of confidence make you think about? Do you look at this as an opportunity to show how well you can shoot and do the best you can, and learn to become a better shooter? Do you look at this as something you hope you can do without embarrassing yourself and looking like a fool?
Well, depending on how you answered the last two questions, it should be obvious whether you know how to compete or not.
When learning how to compete, you’re eager to put yourself into situations like this so you can perform and do the best you can. You’re not afraid to fail, because you know that, regardless of result, it is all feedback, because you look at this and every situation as an opportunity to learn. You enjoy the learning process and better yourself.
When you look at competition in this way, you’re in control of whether you win or not, because it’s all about learning what you do best and what you need to improve on.
This basic change in the way you look at competition has more to do with fear and how you choose to let it control or not control you. This is the difference between learning to shoot and learning to compete.
As our journey continues, it seems that there are a lot of fear-based decisions in our game, as well as the game of life. How you handle this fear in great measure determines how good you get at anything you do.
We realize that this may be hard for most of you to grasp. But then, again, we’re talking to a small majority of you out there who want to really learn to compete in master class. Most who have the fortune to punch into master class just give up and the learning and improvement stops. Then the funs leaves, and their performance goes anywhere but up. All of this because of one four-letter word that begins with “F”!
Wait until next month, ’cause we’re gonna change fear from “sunny-side up” to “over-easy.”
