How many times have you been on a roll in a shoot and all of a sudden you become hesitant, check the lead, lose your timing, and miss shots you know how to hit. You hit them just yesterday in practice!
What about this one? You come to a station with a fairly long crossing target and on the first pair, you nail both the long crosser and the quartering shot, and on the very next pairs, something inside you just will not let you put the gun far enough out in front of that longer bird. And you miss it the next three times because you doubted yourself!
What happens that keeps you from being able to trust yourself, especially after you have already hit a target on the first pair and the day before in practice?
Why can’t you trust yourself enough to let it happen, have you no faith or confidence? What’s missing? Why do you have to try to convince yourself to trust yourself?
Well, what we see time and again is doubt creeping into shooters’ games. Doubt manifests itself in a variety of different ways on different days and for different reasons, and most often the doubt comes from a lack of preparation or incorrect preparation!
So, here is the question we ask to many who find themselves in this conundrum: What is it exactly that you are supposed to trust? Where is the stuff you are supposed to trust located or stored? How does trusting it allow you to shoot better and more consistently higher and higher scores?
Of course, the fallback position for most is the six inches between their ears keeps them from ever reaching or pushing their potential!
We have had the privilege of coaching successful athletes from other arenas, and they seem to pick up what we teach more quickly than others. And for a long time, we wondered what it was about athletes that had excelled in another arena that made them able to learn at an accelerated rate and elevate their performance to a remarkably high level in such little time.
What was it in pro fishermen, golfers, basketball players, tennis players, softball players, and the like that enabled them to progress so quickly through the coordination phase of learning the fundamentals of our game and seemingly be able to trust what they had learned? Was it that they had mastered the “competitive” part of performance in another arena so when they took up sporting clays they were automatically able to “trust it” and almost immediately ascended to a higher level of competence when in a tournament?
Thinking that a scratch golfer has learned the secret to performance and just has to turn on “trust” on game day would fit most shooters’ imagined narrative about peak performance, but we have found this to be far from the truth. Most shooters think that the mental game is thinking the right thoughts in the right order, and once you find the right thoughts and order, you all of a sudden can trust yourself and let it go when in a tournament and win. Most shooters keep holding on to this idea because it fits their narrative that there is some magic that they must learn to have the confidence to trust themselves on 100 shots in a row in a tournament and win.
We see them continuing with the same effort, practicing the same way with the same gun and ammo, shooting the course over and over, and not getting better. But they are having fun while doing it, and all the time they’re waiting for the sporting clays fairy to come down and touch them with her magic wand, so all of a sudden they will be able to trust themselves.
They go buy different chokes, new shooting glasses, new bead sights that glow, faster ammo so they don’t have to lead the long birds as much…They ask other shooters who are better than them what they see when they are shooting, but they still shoot the same inconsistent scores. And they don’t get any better because they are looking for the secret.
Well, there is a reason that most great ideas are disguised as hard work and it is because they are. This thought process is perpetuated because shooters think that if they just knew the secret that the top shooters knew then they would all of a sudden be able to shoot like them and be a winner, too. They keep not getting better, but they still keep believing!
This cycle of thought is frustrating for most shooters and it drives them to the brink of quitting or buying expensive guns or scotch and sitting around the gun club lamenting about the rut they seem to be stuck in and how if they just knew the magic thought process or the perfect routine then they would be on their way to higher performances without having to change anything or make a greater commitment to learn and do something about their results.
Well, this might come as a shock to you but there ain’t no magic bullet or secret thought process that will allow you to become someone that is better than you already are. We are all the sum of all our experiences and we are more the sum of the experiences we have given great emotion to, especially those successes that we have worked toward and planned to the finest detail that have resulted in success, especially when the success occurs in front of others.
Your ability to trust yourself has very little to do with whether you want to or with how necessary it is that you trust yourself to let go of thinking while shooting. One thing is for sure, and we know you have discovered this on your own: “if you are thinking while shooting, you are stinking!” If you can accept this fact and understand why you can’t think while shooting then you are at least getting past the first step in building a game that you can trust.
What is it then, that you must trust or learn to trust? And where is this stuff located that you are trying to trust? The helping hand you are looking for is at the end of your own arm, and that stuff you are supposed to be trusting is in your past. You must build it, and few will ever take the time and make the commitment to actually deliberately practice enough to build the routines and sight pictures.
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