To be or not to be…that is the question. Whether it is better to know what the lead is before you pull the trigger or not.
There are as many opinions on this as there are shots in sporting clays, and there are many theories about what really happens when we shoot a moving object with a shotgun. The underlying reason there are so many different opinions about something so simple as shooting ahead of a moving object with a scattergun is that we cannot see the shot come out of the barrel and expand in front of the target and collide with it.
We suppose that when you think of other athletic endeavors that require “lead,” the one that comes to mind first would be football and the forward pass. It’s easy to see when the correct amount of lead is applied when a quarterback throws a pass to a receiver and he hits him in mid-stride. It is equally easy to see when the lead is not correct as the ball hits the ground.
Wonder how the quarterback corrects the improper lead on a receiver after an incompletion? Does he tell himself to throw the ball another 15 feet more or less the next time he throws that pass based on whether he over or underthrew the pass? Wonder what he says to himself? Is it about throwing mechanics or is it about focusing on the receiver and letting it go?
Sooner or later, you must look at shooting a shotgun just like a quarterback looks at throwing a pass. Look at the target and let it go. Trust your practice and technique and the timing they have created to put it in the right place. It is the same in baseball, basketball, tennis, golf, fishing, or any athletic endeavor as well as what we do every day in our lives.
Talent is built through repetition and begins as a cognitive action. After a given number of correct repetitions, automaticity is achieved and it turns into an intuitive action, and eventually a skill, depending on how many times the neural circuit is fired successfully.
While discussing this phenomenon with our good friend Steve Brown of the Ark-La-Tex School of Wingshooting in Kilgore Texas, we all began searching for a name for this paradoxically cataclysmic thing called a sight picture.
Were they conscious or subconscious, and could someone actually consistently shoot sight pictures in a game with as many variables as sporting clays? Why would someone tell you that they were totally focused on the targets as they ran the last station and when arriving at the next station and looking at the targets and seeing them as difficult, immediately wonder (to themselves) what the lead was?
And after watching someone on the squad that just finished who ran the station, ease up to that shooter and ask, “Hey man, what did you see on those targets?” Even though the last three times he asked the same shooter what he saw and he tried to use his sight pictures, they were wrong for him. What is it that makes a shooter facing a “difficult pair” always want to know what the lead is even though he/she ran the last station looking only at the front of the target?
Well, thanks to Steve Ray Brown we now have a name for this nasty habit – and some call it an actual disease!
RPD: RECOVERING PERFECTIONIST DISORDER
It’s created by a lingering or persisting presence of attitude that insists one can improve performance by maintaining cognitive control over an intuitive action. By opinion, all good shots have strong cognitive skills and at one time suffered from “RPD.” It’s like an illness that can’t be cured. But RPD can be managed, and some learn to enjoy very gratifying shooting lives.
A typical diagnosis would sound like this: “After watching you shoot, I am diagnosing you at a Level 10 RPD. But, with treatment, I think we can get it down to a 3 or a 2. And with time and with a lot of hard work, you may even get it down to a Level 1.”
