May puts us 1/3 of the way through the year, with Nationals being the ending. Last month we talked about adjusting your goals and commitments based on the less-than-inviting financial outlook we’re facing. By now, you should have made whatever adjustments necessary and are going about accomplishing your short-term goals in preparation for achieving your long-term goals for the year.
One word of caution: don’t marry your goals, especially the long-term goals. Be very flexible and forgiving when looking at and evaluating both short-term and long-term goals, especially in a business climate with as many unknowns as the one we’re in.
The situation we find ourselves in can be offset by looking more frequently at your progress on short-term goals. At the same time, keep in mind everything else that’s going on in your life and the lives of your family. This is where a shooting log pays one of its biggest dividends. If you want to reach or pass your goals and haven’t been keeping a log, you’re a fool. Be sensitive to your responsibility to your immediate family, because they’re unfortunately the ones we most often forget.
After all, we’re talking about pursuing something that you want. The last time we checked, no one takes up clay target shooting with an empty dance card, expecting to make or save money!
What we’re finding is that some shooters are not going to have the luxury of practicing as much as they have in the past. If you are faced with this situation, you better take a good, honest, realistic look at your overall game and be excited to find a weakness. This will give you something to focus on in practice that will improve your overall game.
Just be aware that there are two kinds of practice that you need to be doing. We talked about this on our Coaching Hour last month when we reviewed an article by Richard A. Schmidt, Human Performance Research, entitled “Principles of Practice,” from the fall issue of USOC Olympic Coach E-Magazine.
In this article, the author states that the one most important thing one can do to improve performance is to practice what psychologists call “deliberate practice.” The real question however is how to practice.
The “Champions Do It This Way” theory, he says, ignores more than 100 years of research and scientific study of optimal practice. We have come to the same conclusion from our own research. On the surface, it would make sense that if XYZ is a champion and he or she does it this way, it must be optimal and the best way to do it. The problem with this reasoning is that it’s optimal for the champion, but for you, based on your physical attributes (height, strength, age, vision, even the amount of time and actual hands-on experience you have had shooting) it’s not optimal for you.
Like everything you do in life, when you look at optimal performances, it eventually comes down to how many times and how long you’ve done something. That will determine how well you can consistently do anything, especially shooting a shotgun.
In the distant past, we’ve shot actual competitions with students and coached them on how to plan the shots and shoot the pairs. On the surface, that makes sense. However, we’ve found that coaching during the actual competitions did nothing to help the students, because they always scored better when shooting with us, but not nearly as well when shooting by themselves or others. This left the students with a feeling that they had actually learned something, when in reality, they shot well with us because they were using our experience to help them plan the shots and how to execute them as well. Although they shot well, the reality was that they didn’t learn anything. Their score gave them a false sense of accomplishment.
Coaching during an actual competition, in our experience, is more like blocked practice as opposed to random practice – two topics we’ll discuss later on in this column. We have coached at competitions but never during one. Our research shows that observation during a competition and coaching afterwards yields the greatest gain for the student, because so many skill sets are required to succeed at our game. So much of our game is the strategy of figuring out the breakpoints on the pairs and then having the skill to break them all, regardless of how many pairs there are.
In the “Principles of Practice” article, the author draws a definite distinction between learning and performance. Learning is measured by changes in performance. When you practice, two kinds of results happen. Practice can produce effects in us that are somewhat permanent, which is what we’re looking for. We call this learning. Practice also produces temporary effects on performance. Sometimes these effects are positive and you shoot well, and sometimes the effects are negative and your performance is depressed during practice. The mistake is to consider skill gains in practice as a signal that you’ve actually learned something, when the improvement is actually due to temporary factors.
Allow us to explain. Just because you shoot a shot well in practice doesn’t mean you’ve mastered something, because your result in practice could very possibly be to the number of repetitions of the same shot in practice. When you’re called upon to shoot the same shot in a competition, even as soon as the next day, your results are less than experienced the day before.
In short, it’s one thing to consistently shoot a shot five times in a row after you’ve shot it 50 times in practice but it is an entirely different situation to shoot it cold turkey in a tournament. The same thing happens when you are coached in a competition; your score is a reflection of the coach’s experience, not yours. And although you shoot a good score and your performance appears to have increased, little, if anything has been learned.
Eventually you’re going to have to be able to do it all yourself on your own. This means you’ll have to begin to learn from your own failures and learn to cope with failure itself. Many of our students have repeatedly told us that perhaps the most valuable tool they’ve learned from us is how to keep their emotions under control when facing a failure – whether it’s a missed target or something that happens in their life away from sporting clays. Being able to look at failure as the beginning of the learning curve and not a statement of your self-worth is something all shooters eventually will have to come to grips with. Trying to get good at this game by not ever wanting to fail is not the way to go about it. There are no shortcuts. If you can’t handle missing and learn from it, you’re going to quit this game because of the amount of built-in failure that comes with it.
That’s right. We said it. This game, like baseball and some others, has a lot of built in failure. How you’re able to handle them emotionally and learn from them will determine how well you do playing this game. Learning occurs when your performance changes – and the key word in that phrase is “your.” If your scores are a result of someone else constantly coaching you during a tournament, then what’s going to happen when you’re in the shoot off arena and they’re not there?
There are no shortcuts. And the sooner you begin to learn from your own failures – not only in sporting clays, but in life as well – the sooner real learning will occur and your performance will increase.
