“I’m missing the “gimme” targets. This target should have been easy for my skill level, but I missed it anyway. How do I recover mentally from making dumb mistakes or otherwise missing easy targets, and how do I prevent it in the future?”
***
“No improvement happens without change; for every change, there is
a price. The value is in the commitment to change.”
– Vicki Ash
Nobody likes missing, especially when you miss targets that you feel are well within your ability. And the bottom line is, when newer shooters go to tournaments, at first they are trying to “not miss” instead of trying to hit.
In fact, the big conundrum in our game is that shooters are trying to learn to get better by resisting the very thing that must happen for them to get better – failure or missing. Adding to that, shooters all over the world want to get better, but what we have seen in our 27 years as professional coaches is that they are hoping they could get better.
But hope is not a plan. Change and failure are what everyone is afraid of, and those two things are the very foundation of improvement.
We had a shooter call the other day with a problem on right-to-left long crossers. They wanted an hour with one of us to get them on track. In the ensuing discussion, we brought up the fact that while their perception was that they had a problem with right-to-left long crossers, our experience has shown us that a recreational shooter’s perception of their problem is rarely the real problem.
When it was suggested that the lesson might take more than an hour to find the root cause of the shooter’s problem and create a practice regimen that would allow for the shooter to begin to solve the problem, there was resistance.
“I don’t want you to change my foot position, hold point, focal point, or anything else,” the shooter said. “I just want you to show me how to hit right-to-left long crossers!”
If we were on a skeet field and the shooter was having trouble with low 5 (which is the same in Frozen Butt, Alaska as it is in Houston, and goes the same speed and same direction) then that would probably be something small, and a tweak might just solve the problem. However, in sporting clays, especially on longer targets, there are so many things that can get in the way and cause a shooter to be inconsistent and miss the same trajectory consistently.
Our research shows that the direction or distance the target flies is rarely the problem for the shooter. In most instances, on longer targets, it is one of a few things or a combination of several things that must be mastered to become consistent on longer targets.
There are certain plateaus shooters have to experience as competitors. The bad news is that you must go through them to put them behind you. The good news is that something will be learned from each of them that will make you a better shooter/competitor if you have the correct mindset.
Here is the progression shooters must go through to get to the point that they hit all the easy ones and get their share of the hard ones:
You go to the tournament and are really excited to be there. You are going to try to shoot your best, but because of the way you have practiced (just going to shoot the course and having fun) when you begin to try, you are trying to think your way through the shots. Simple shots that you would hit without thinking are all of a sudden beyond your grasp.
After the first third of the course, you have missed so many that you can’t win, so you stop trying and you shoot like you normally would, and you stop missing easy targets. You do that enough times so you begin to not try on the first third of the course. And after the first third of the course, you realize you are only down five targets – and you have never been in this position down so few targets before.
You get tentative and begin to try and you associate trying with thinking and you begin to miss targets that you would normally hit. And after another few stations of less-than-stellar performance, you have missed enough targets that you can’t win. You stop trying and shoot like you normally would and stop missing easy targets.
Then after a few more tournaments, you finally begin to not try on the first two-thirds of the stations on the course. And you are only down eight through the first two-thirds of the course.
You guessed it. Because you have never been down so few targets before, you get tentative and begin to try. And you associate trying with thinking, and you begin to miss targets that you would normally hit! Finally, you associate trying with thinking and you begin to realize you cannot think and shoot to a high level.
You say to yourself, “If I could just not think and trust myself, I could shoot so much better!” As professional coaches, we could not agree more.
But the question that you must eventually ask is “what do you have to learn to trust?” And where is this mystical stuff stored that you need to learn to trust? Don’t make the mistake of thinking that “not thinking” and “trusting” are the same thing. They are not – and if you are thinking, you are stinking!
This is where an experienced coach can be of great benefit. Working with an experienced coach that can talk to you about what and how and how often you are practicing and can make suggestions for changing your approach to practice to get a different result is a great time saver. And with each pair you shoot costing about $1.40, it’s a money saver too.
Our research shows that shooters rarely shoot better than they prepare or practice. Almost without exception, to improve their scores they must change the way they practice and be much more disciplined in their approach to training and practice.
The bottom line is, the stuff you are supposed to trust is stored in your own long-term memory and it is the accumulation of the hundreds and then thousands of shots you have taken in deliberate practice with a prediction and an execution that mirrors your prediction.
Let’s see if we can make it a little easier for you to understand. We have seen thousands of shooters go through the process in shooting tournaments that we just described, and they inevitably get stuck between 65-75 and just don’t get better. They buy any and everything they can afford to shoot better and eventually, they begin to understand that the helping hand they are looking for is at the end of their own arm.
Some shooters take their coach’s advice and change their practice approach, adopt good solid routines and visualization skills, and begin to build a library of sight pictures that they can recall instantly on any course in the country. You must build what you can trust. You can’t use anyone else’s library of sight pictures and you can’t see what someone else sees unless you have deliberately shot close to the same amount of targets that they have.
Shooters tend to go to their buddy who is hitting a target that they are having trouble with. Their buddy tells them what they see and the shooter tries to see it the way his buddy sees it. He hits a few more, but the success is short-lived.
Building skill is done through deliberate repetition with a detailed preload of what you are about to ask your brain to do in the ½ to ¾ of a second as the shot comes together. Predict. Execute. Repeat.
As you build your inventory and begin to better visualize in detail where and how you want the shot to come together, eventually you will begin to recognize shots that you have seen before in your practice. Instead of calling “pull” and chasing the target down and trying to fix the shot at the end, you see the movie of the shot coming together, and all of a sudden you know how to hit the target. You predict and execute based on your prediction and the target breaks!
But instead of feeling relief which comes from hope, you stop and visualize what you just saw in detail, then you load the gun, predict what you are about to do visually, close the gun, and execute based on your prediction and you repeat this process until they tell you to stop shooting.
So, what happened was you experienced confidence. And while you thought, you were thinking visually about where and how you were about to break the next target because you had done it so many times before – therefore, you could trust it.
Confidence and consistency cannot be practiced; they are the residues of deliberate practice, which is where all skill-building begins. Confidence comes from competence, which is built through deliberate repetition with a focused visual plan before the gun closes and you call “pull.” It is foolish to think that missing the easy targets is something that can be avoided by knowing the secret password or the magic lead formula.
There is no magic bullet. You can’t use what someone else sees as a shortcut to your skill, because skill is not built that way.
You must, through your own experiences, deal with the ups and downs of building skill with a shotgun. An experienced coach who has helped many shooters in varying points along this journey can save you some time and money, but it is you who must put in the time to deliberately train and practice to bring your game to higher and higher levels of consistency and competence.
Our brains are constantly automatizing our skill circuits. The brain sees skill as a sequence of events that, when repeated deliberately enough times, the sum of the parts in the sequence becomes one thing and it happens without thinking!
The more skillful you are at anything, the less input you need to perform at higher and higher levels without having to think while performing.
Our research shows that to be a consistent shooter you first must learn to self-correct so you can turn every shot into a lesson that makes you better. A miss is only a failure if nothing is learned.
The first step is being honest with yourself about what you want to get out of your game and the time and money necessary to get there. From that honesty will come the discipline to set aside time and money and put forth the effort to achieve your goals. Until this occurs, you will not be able to learn from your failures, which is why you are destined to continue to miss the easy targets for no apparent reason.
