This month, let’s look at some of the ways fear gets into your game and makes you miss targets. Our game is riddled with fear-based decisions. We have found the first step in conquering fear is not only recognizing it but recognizing what it makes you do when you let it in.
We have mentioned before in this column that any time fear gets in your game, the gun gets between the eyes and the target and the eyes come off the target and go to the gun to check the lead. Well, we don’t know how long it will take for you to understand that to have any hope of having any mental game at all, your whole game must be done enough to become subconscious. And this includes lead.
You can’t think about anything and be in the present, and you not only have to be in the subconscious when you’re shooting, but your routines must be subconscious. This means all of them.
We would be the first to say that perhaps the most difficult part of our game is performing well using both the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain. You must use the conscious part of the brain to analyze the pair and to choose the best breakpoint to make shooting the pair efficient with respect to eye movement and gun movement. It’s at that point that you must believe your plan and trust your ability to break the first bird in the chosen breakpoint and do the same with the second.
So, the plan is conscious and the shot is subconscious. While this is perfectly logical and understood by most shooters, they don’t have the courage to actually do it.
Fear and how different people recognize and handle it determines their mindsets. Their mindsets determine how they view talent and what they perceive when having to face the possibility of failing. The fear of failure creates a fixed mindset and overcoming failure at any level garners a growth mindset.
We have talked about this on our Coaching Hour and in our books and even in this column, but we find going over things repeatedly seems to get people to look at things more deeply, which is needed to implement changes and accept the failure that change brings.
That’s right, we said “accept the failure that change brings.” Because we have found that trying to learn to shoot without failing is in itself a failure.
When a person adopts a fixed mindset, they look at their abilities or talent as something they either have or don’t have, and there’s nothing they can do to change or improve them. When you look at your abilities in this way, the eventuality is that you want to look good at all costs.
Incidentally, this is where the “default goal” that we’ve talked about comes from! Do you know how the feeling of wanting to not look bad in front of others overcomes you when you begin to miss? People who have fixed mindsets, if given a choice of two tasks, one deemed as hard that might create a failure in front of others (even at the risk of learning something), and one that is seen as easy and very doable… guess which one the fixed mindset will choose?
Remember, they want to be seen as “lookin’ good” at all costs. Ever wonder where all those excuses come from? You know, the ones you hear hanging around the scoreboard at just about any shoot you might go to. Could it be people who are blaming their failures on everything and anything except themselves? Could it be that the excuses are in a way a justification of how they shot or did not shoot? Well, welcome to a fixed mindset and trying to look good.
“Excuses are the crutches of the untalented,” to quote one of our friends from Louisiana. And they seem to perpetuate the same level of performance of those who use them, and they are a reaction to fear. Funny how that word keeps coming back into this conversation. At our first of two Advance Schools this past March, Vicki was in her zone and said, “The reality is, trying to learn anything without failing is in itself a failure!”
The person with a growth mindset will never worry about being seen as good or smart, nor will they ever worry about failing (unless it is about a life-threatening situation) in front of others, because their mantra is learn, learn, learn. They will always be eager to take on the task that pushes them beyond their abilities and thereby expand their abilities without the slightest worry about failure.
Gil was working with a collegiate golfer who was the best on the team and had never really had to practice a lot to shoot scores good enough to be on the team and justify her scholarship. As she began to want to do better, she began to practice more and more, which was something that she had never had to do in golf. At a match, she shot the inevitable 92 and really stunk it up and got mad. She made the statement that she had been working so hard and deserved to shoot better because she felt she had earned it on the practice tee.
She had either switched from a growth mindset to a fixed mindset, or she never had a growth mindset to begin with, because you don’t earn a good performance on the practice tee. You will never deserve to shoot a good score just because of the amount of time you have put in. It’s not the amount of time – it’s the quality of the time you put in that makes a difference in your game.
Athletes with a growth mindset look at talent as a job and something that must be developed and they greet failure as the first step in the learning curve. Fear in any non-life-threatening situation has never done you well. We see the fear kick in big-time when shooters reach master class and they look at it as the end of the road for them because they “can’t compete against the pros.” Well, welcome to the fixed mindset, what it does to you, and how it keeps you from learning anything.
It’s sad because when shooters think like that, they are right. Learning stops, and so does the fun. Shooters who look at their position in master class at the end of the road either quit shooting or begin to buy more gadgets, expensive guns, and shoot more practice and corporate events just to have fun. The sad thing is, they do this just so they can look good because they will not risk looking bad by being seen as really wanting to compete in master class and continue learning things to get better and failing.
Shooters with a growth mindset don’t care about failing and actually look forward to learning from all of their failures. They always look forward to training and getting better. Will they ever become a world champion? Probably not. But there are many things a shooter can learn from shooting and competing in the game of sporting clays. These are not just about shooting but about themselves and how to become better as a person.
We were probably the first to talk about learning life lessons on the sporting clays course and as we continue this journey, we continue to be amazed at the number of life lessons that can be learned if you are not afraid.
Of the many lessons our students learn, recognizing fear for what it is and how it affects the speed with which they learn is big. Learning accelerates dramatically when the student can let the unconscious brain do the calculation on the lead side of the equation. Then all the student needs to do is to maintain focus on the front of the target and control their gun speed at the point of insertion. And great things happen.
This can’t happen if the shooter is worried about their mount or thinking about the lead. This is why we encourage all of our shooters to practice their move and mount until they are flawless, so they don’t have to think about them during the shot. You can’t be in the present if you’re thinking!
