Eventually, your game will elevate to another level and your fellow shooters will begin to notice your scores are either becoming more consistent and/or higher.
You will begin to be complimented on your game. The normal response to a compliment about your score is to be humble and say things like, “Well a blind hog finds an acorn!” or “Aw, I just got lucky today!”
Humility is an honorable trait for a person to have, and we all like to be around humble people. But humility is not necessarily the best way to take full advantage of your success and create the memory of your performance that you can draw on in future competitions. If you can attach your performance to specific things that you did that enabled you to shoot the way you did, then you are rewarding your brain for doing a great job without being boisterous or conceited.
After making eye contact, the absolute first thing out of your mouth after a compliment should be a sincere thanks for noticing your performance.
“It’s nice to be noticed. Thank you for noticing my score today. I’ve been working hard on my game and a lot of things came together today for me. My plans on every station were spot-on. The breakpoints I chose were the correct ones for me and I hit them well. I’ve been working hard on single targets, working on visualizing how I want the shot to come together and where. That stuff really works!”
In conversation, you can add things like you had been working on your routines, which helped a lot today. Or, “my coach and I have been working on my correction routines and I hit every target out there. And when I missed, I corrected and kept correcting until I hit it and ran the station out!”
You could also say “my rhythm was off the charts today. It was easy for me to get in sync with the targets, and man does that slow the birds down. I felt in such control today on every station.”
Several things happen when you attach a compliment to the practice that helped you achieve your performance and the notice others give you. At that point, you are rewarding your brain for doing a great job under pressure and attaching the compliment to your preparation and hard work in the deliberate practice sessions leading up to your success.
Well, guess what happens when you do this? The biggest thing is that you finally realize that getting better is hard work. And the result of structured deliberate practice is improvement, not to mention the fact that your confidence soars and your practice session move to higher and higher levels. In turn, this moves your game to higher and higher levels.
Things that happen to you just are. But how you remember them turns them into strong influences on who you will or can become. When you attach to the memory something positive that helped you to achieve this memory, it becomes more like you.
We are all products of our past and how we remember our past determines how we see things around us in the future. In turn, this motivates us to become the people we deep down want to be. It is not necessarily what happened, but how you remember it that is really important.
Here is where the “Win or Learn” attitude comes in. We have a 3:1 negative bias on how we remember things. So left to your own way of remembering things, you have a high likelihood of remembering your past as negative.
Building a habit of seeing the good in everything that happens allows you to be more likely to see the good in all that happens around you.
“While I did not score as well today as I had hoped, I made a lot of shooters take their game to a much higher level than they ever have.”
