In his book Peak, the late Anders Ericsson went to great lengths to explain that everything we do in life is a circuit in the brain. The more we have fired that circuit, the more easily it fires. It eventually becomes automatized and fires more precisely and quickly with less and less thought. He refers to these automatized circuits throughout his book as mental representations (MR) and explains that everything we do that can be done without thinking is a skill and becomes an MR.
MRs allow for access to huge bits of data in an instant. Even though the MR might seem just one thing to us, it is hundreds of thousands of linked circuits in our brain that, through repetition, have learned to fire our muscles synchronously on command to create a skillful act.
Everything you do in our hobby of sporting clays (if you do it without thinking) is an MR. The experts in our game have a higher quality and greater quantity of MRs! Expert shooters, coaches, and target setters who have more experience at firing their circuits in their respective fields continue to expand their MRs in both quality and quantity.
The expert shooter will recognize things that the majority of other shooters will never see. And this expertise comes, in great measure, from being fooled by a target setter who understands how the shooter will set up for each shot, using momentum and balance against the shooter.
Expert coaches can see deeply into a shooter’s mental and physical game and, through experience in coaching, can coach a shooter on things that may not seem to be a problem now at the shooter’s current level, but eventually will have to be addressed. Better now than later.
The more experience at expert levels that shooters, target setters, and coaches have in their respective fields, the more easily they can perform and diagnose under pressure. Great performers can see fewer visual cues, and at the same time perform at higher and higher levels because of their cumulative MRs! When facing a separator target, expert shooters will have a very detailed MR, and less proficient shooters will have a much less detailed MR!
Experts have incredible MRs, which enable them to have better memory, pattern recognition, and problem-solving than less trained athletes because they’re able to evaluate more possible outcomes in a shorter period of time. Expert athletes are 35 percent faster and 31 percent more accurate in complex decision-making than untrained athletes.
We are all products of our past, and our future, as seen through the eyes and experiences of our past, our bodies, and minds, want to always turn into what we’ve been in the past. We look at that as our comfort zone. This is called homeostasis, and improving and becoming skillful at anything to fulfill your potential requires changing homeostasis, and taking control of your destiny by forming new skill circuits and MRs through deliberate repetition, both on the practice field and the tournament course.
The better and clearer the MR is, the better the performance will be! In as little as a tenth of a second, a decision to shoot or not shoot can weigh heavily on the outcome of a shot. We see this as the difference between finishing or not finishing a shot. Always finish every shot in practice and tournaments.
Baseball hitters have stored huge amounts of data in their MRs called hitting the ball. They are able to make hit, no-hit, and contact point decisions in 150 milliseconds! Their MRs allow for instant anticipation farther and farther out in front of what is happening, giving their anticipation circuit the ability to alter human behavior as it is happening!
The relationship between your MRs and your skill is a virtual circle. The better the MR, the better the skill; the better the skill, the better your MRs. The brain can only do things as well as you can picture them.
