We are all a product of everything we have ever done, and we are more a product of that we have given great emotion to.
However, research shows that we have a 3 to 1 negative bias toward how we remember our past experiences. As we have written before, you are three times more likely to remember something that happens to you as “bad” (or that you interpret as bad). But things that happen just are. The way you interpret them makes them good or bad.
“It is what it is; it becomes what you make it, and you become how you remember it!”
Be careful how you react to what happens around you – especially in a tournament. Our research has repeatedly shown that evaluation of anything is a performance KILLER! Being outwardly positive about any negativity, whether it came from you or someone else, is a habit that you want to cultivate. All great performers eventually realize the power of this human trait and live in it especially in competition.
Typically, the way you judge whether something that happens to you as good or bad comes from your expectations – especially when shooting a tournament. Under emotional pressure, people tend to revert to past negative memories and associations if they don’t affirmatively decide that they want to store their current activities, emotions, and memories more positively.
Our research has shown us that almost every thought a shooter has while performing will eventually bring his or her focus and attention back to the barrel and/or the lead. In some instances, the omnipresence of the seemingly uninterrupted stream of random thoughts turns into an avalanche of eventually negative gibberish. And none of it would make any sense if you heard someone else say it.
So where does this come from and why does it erupt at times when things seemingly are going good and not-so-good? Why does this happen and why are the thoughts almost always negative? It’s bad because of the negative bias!
It’s important to understand that how you react to a situation (good or bad) is in and of itself a habit that you have built through repetition. Since you built the habit, you can change the habit. But first you must recognize it for what it is and define it and consciously change how you want your reaction to the situation to be different in the future. Then through conscious repetition, you begin to train your new reaction to the same old situation. After about 25 to 30 days of facing the same situation with a different reaction, things will begin to change for you.
This evolution of change is like rust on railroad tracks. Every time the train goes down the tracks, the steel-on-steel of the wheels polishes the top of the tracks. Your conscious new reaction in the beginning is like an old set of railroad tracks that have not been used. Due to nonuse, they have become rusty. Then with repeated conscious use, the tracks become more and more polished, and the old tracks begin to rust over from nonuse and eventually the new habit begins to become more like you. Finally, the old tracks are rusty and overgrown with weeds and fade away in your past.
At the end of the day, the way you create the person you want to be must begin in practice. The problem with most athletes is they don’t value their practice time. They find themselves going through the motions, loading the gun, calling “pull,” and doing the same old things. If you always do what you have always done, you’re always going to get what you have always gotten!
Practice should be random. Try different targets in different break points with prediction and then execution of the prediction to see if, when implemented, the prediction breaks the target.
In each practice session you should try things that make you a little uncomfortable, because if you stay in your comfort zone you are not learning anything. If you are not failing, you are not trying and you are not out of your comfort zone. To get something you have never had, you must do something you have never done!
Practice without prediction is like repetition without feedback and will leave you with exactly what the bird left on the pump handle! The more vivid your predictions are the better the targets will break, even when you try to do something you have never done before. Every practice session should contain something that scares you a little.
All practice sessions should contain things like breaking that tower target in the first third of its flight path. You know that it will be going faster than you are used to going. It will be farther away than where you normally break it. You will program more lead than you are comfortable with and commit to having the gun uncomfortably far in front just to see if you can do it.
Most shooters will not try something beyond what they have already mastered because they might miss. And they don’t like the feeling they get when trying something new. It feels so much like failure. But what they fail to realize is the feeling they have trying something new or out of their comfort zone is what it feels like when the brain is connecting new neurotransmission highways. When we feel those feelings, we get excited because those feelings always precede discovering something new and exciting!
Now let’s talk about skill in a way that you probably have never imagined.
As we’ve shared with you in the past, our research has helped us understand that your skill resides in your long-term memory but your skill is actually your memory of experiences you have had in your past. It sounds like double talk, but the deeper you get into skill and skill-building, the more you understand that being skillful at anything has everything to do with how many times you have done something and how much you remember about what you did.
This is the leading reason that first-time shooters in wing or clay shooting have such a hard time being even marginally successful in the beginning. They have no memory of anything remotely close to shooting ahead of a moving target. For them to be successful, they must begin to create memory.
Your analytical brain will tell you if you have never done something (especially something like clay shooting) that if you could go to the best clay shooter that you know, they could simply explain to you what they saw and did when they shoot, then you could repeat it and become successful.
We’re sure you understand the logic. If you want to learn to ski or play tennis or golf you should go to a pro. But if you want to learn to shoot, ask your buddy! This might make logical sense to some, but skill is not transferable. It does not work that way. The way you see is way different than what your buddy sees because he sees things you cannot see until you have the experience they have behind the gun.
Remember what we said earlier: your skill is in what and how you remember your past. And skill cannot be transferred; it must be built one step at a time.
As a shooter becomes more and more experienced at clay shooting, their brain begins to chunk the component parts of what they do together. After they have repeated it hundreds or thousands of times, what began as many things now become one thing.
This is the skill building process. How you remember what you have done has everything to do with how many times you have done it and how many times you have done it the same way with a deliberate prediction and an execution based on the prediction. In this way, you are creating memory and through repetition, specific memory. This becomes a sequence of actions that, when done correctly, produce a desired result.
In clay/wing shooting, what it looks like when you pull the trigger is perhaps the most misunderstood thing in sports today. As coaches, just when you think you have heard it all, up jumps another perception that you have never heard! We must pay strict attention to these perceptions, because a coach’s success lies in being able to recognize a shooter’s beginning vocabulary and use that to bring perception in line with reality in the mind of the student.
As coaches, we are creating memory in the minds of shooters: what it looks and feels like to get the 32-inch gun barrel in front of their nose ahead of a target that is 32 yards in front of their nose… without looking at the gun! In the beginning we as coaches must first paint a verbal picture. Through various techniques, we communicate to the shooter what it looks like to shoot in front of a moving target.
This conundrum was the genesis of our animations in the Knowledge Vault, as well as our thousands of ShotKam videos of actual targets and game birds being shot. Just watching these animations and videos has enabled us to begin the memory process based on the reality of what must happen to be successful with a shotgun on a moving target – painted or feathered. These tools we have developed to help the beginner, intermediate and advanced shooter learn faster have led us to be able to more efficiently get shooters (regardless of experience or perception) to improve their consistency in the field and on the range.
Once you experience the beginning phase of wing/clay shooting and begin to have some memory that you can use to gain more experience, you are off.
Here we must explain there is no shortcut, especially in shooting a moving target with a shotgun. You cannot buy a good tomato, a good marriage, or a good shotgun game. All must be practiced and, through repetition, developed into what you remember. Eventually with patience and dealing with a lot of failure, your memory will become filled with better, more precise moves and mounts and success in breaking more and more targets.
You cannot remember something you have never done, and you will never be a success at something without failing. Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you can teach it. And just because you understand something does not mean you can do it!
The skill building process is an incredible journey that can yield success to remember and failures to be learned from. After all, Winston Churchill defined success as “moving from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm!”
Happy failing!
