Well, we ended up last month talking about the “F” word – fear. And we mentioned that overcoming fear must be dealt with for you to really learn to compete. Hang on, this is gonna get real interesting. If you can understand what fear does to you and your game in sporting clays, you just might stumble onto a life lesson that could change your future.
A little lofty of a goal for a couple of shooting instructors from Texas. Dizzy Dean said, “If you can do it, it ain’t braggin’.” New York Jets Quarterback Joe Namath, just before winning the Super Bowl, said, “If you ain’t got it you can’t flaunt it!” (Of course he was wearing a pair of pantyhose at the time)!
All this nostalgia is meant to say we not only understand how to coach it, but we have also done it hundreds of times. Heck, that’s what our third hardback book, “Traveling the Innerstate” was about. As we keep coaching, we keep learning, and our journey has brought us to this one thing: fear must be dealt with in a way so that it is no longer a deterrent, but a motivator.
That’s right, we said it. Fear must become a motivator to your performance for it not to control you. Until then, it will control you and make you do things way out of character for you. If you don’t believe us, just look around at the next shoot you go to. You will see grown, successful adults, acting like sugared-up 6-year-olds, throwing shells, and using words that end in hard consonants! This is all because they cannot control fear.
Would you like to know what fear does to you when it is in control? Well, read on.
Fear brings the barrel between the target and the eyes! The more fear, the more it’s in the picture. The less fear, the less it’s in the picture. This is why we don’t teach conscious “sight pictures,” but that’s a topic for another article.
One of the first places you will find fear creeping into your game is when your hold point creeps back toward the trap so you can see the bird and the gun at the same time and try to figure out the lead. The next place you’ll see it in your game is in the mount.
When the shooter begins to pronounce the “p” in “pull,” the gun jerks up to the shoulder and the head goes down. And the chase is on trying to get in front of the bird. While looking down the barrels, trying desperately to see the bird, the realization that they are behind the bird again strikes. Again, fear in their mind.
Frustrated, at the last second the shooter slings the muzzles out in front of the target in hopes of getting the gun ahead of the target far enough to at least chip the back of the target. Everyone knows that if you move the barrels fast enough as you pull the trigger, you can spread the shot cloud in an oval so the pattern is wider and you have a better chance to hit the bird.
Another place you will find fear creeping in is when you get to the first station. It seems that those jitters come and go at the strangest times. They come before you have done anything. Then after you shoot well on the first two stations and begin to relax and have some real fun, on Station 8 you project ahead of your score, and all of a sudden you can’t hit anything. You guessed it; fear again.
How can that be fear, you ask? Well, in this instance it got in through expectation. Because of your good shooting, you began to think “Hey now, look what’s happenin’. If I keep this up, I could shoot my best score ever.” And just like one of them fancy high-efficiency commodes, your game went down the toilet.
You can’t smell fear but you can see, taste, hear and feel it. And we wouldn’t be surprised if someday we smelled it. There are many different things that people fear, and they are way too many to mention in this one article. But it seems the more we coach, we find the fear of failing or missing is the biggest thing that gets people all tied up in knots. The fear of losing is just about as bad, though you can’t control who wins or loses. You can only control what you are doing right now. The mental gurus call that being in the present.
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