“There’re a lot of people looking for jobs out there, but
damn few are looking for work!”
-Anonymous
“There are a lot of shooters out there that want a good
shooting game, but dang few are willing to put in the work!”
-Brian Ash
After all, we took up shooting sporting clays to have fun and to monkey around with our shotguns, because “monkeying” is fun, especially with a shotgun. And that thought process lasts about as long as it takes to shoot two rounds of clays.
The reason is, to improve you’ve got to change something. And nobody wants to change anything because of the inevitable failure that accompanies change. There are actually shooters out there that think that they are not good enough to go take a lesson and what they eventually learn is that…
Everything they are looking for is on the other side of fear!
Our research had brought us to several conclusions that on their surface might not make much sense to you, but they are really important is improving your consistency and your scores.
The biggest thing that we spend the most time on with shooters of all levels from Master all the way down to the charity shooter is self-correction. We see so many shooters that are trying to learn to shoot better without missing, which leads to a thought process that is 100 percent doubt and keeps the shooters in their short-term memory while they are shooting not to miss.
In our clinics, we
tell all shooters that we are going to make them miss. In some cases, it will
not be as difficult as others but for us to teach them how to self-correct, they have to miss so we can show them how.
It’s as if shooters are allergic to missing or making mistakes. When shooters make a mistake, the first thing our gut tells us to do is to look away, ignore it, and pretend it did not happen. This is not good, because mistakes are the signposts on the road to improvement.
In “The Little Red Book of Talent,” Daniel Coyle talks about how brain-scan studies reveal a vital instant, 0.25 seconds after a mistake is made, in which people do one of two things – they look hard at the mistake or they ignore it. His conclusion, as well as ours, is that people who pay deeper attention to a mistake learn significantly more than those who ignore it!
Coyle says, “Take mistakes seriously, but never personally!”
A shooter’s mistake is usually a missed target. And without fail, after the miss, they all look down at the ground or the end of their muzzle and try to visualize what happened when they pulled the trigger! Our correction routine requires that the shooter look immediately back at the breakpoint where the miss occurred and accept responsibility for the miss. While looking at the breakpoint, visualize what happened, make a conscious change that you can believe, visualize the change and go back to your routine and shoot the next pair.
We talk
about this and show you our correction routine in our DVD, “The Three Routines
of Sporting Clays” and also in our book, “You Gotta Be Out of Your Mind.”
There is one small little detail that we can add that will help you eliminate more misses. The OSP system of shooting is about seeing the target behind the barrel and adjusting the muzzle speed at the end of the shot to be the same as the target, which makes the target appear to slow down as you take the shot.
A side benefit of our system is, because everything is moving in slow motion, the root cause of the miss becomes instantly more obvious, especially if a detailed visualization of the movie of how you want the shot to come together is pre-loaded before you close the gun and call “pull.”
The more specific the preload and the greater the commitment to take the shot the way you have planned it, the more obvious the error becomes!
