If you are like so many of our clients worldwide, you always want to do your best when doing anything – especially when shooting a shotgun at clays in front of other people watching.
Whether you are an avid clays shooter or just a casual one, the fact you are shooting in front of other shooters adds a little pressure to an activity that is supposed to be fun and relaxing. This is especially true if you are shooting in a competition. Even shooting in a charity fun shoot can be a pressure-filled situation, but the pressure is self-induced. It comes from the fear of what others might think about you and your ability with a shotgun!
In coaching competitive shooters all around the world, this topic eventually comes up. We have helped many shooters learn how to turn an otherwise dreaded situation into an opportunity to help themselves get better, regardless of whether they shot well or not as well as they could.
We are products of our past experiences. The way you remember these experiences in great measure will determine whether your experiences will develop you as a shooter and a person.
The bottom line is that we don’t get better from our experiences; we get better from reflecting on our experiences. How you choose to remember them has a great deal to do with how well you will handle similar experiences in the future.
Eventually, your game will elevate to another level and your fellow shooters will begin to notice your scores are either becoming more consistent and/or higher. You will begin to be complimented on your game and the normal response to a compliment about your improving scores is to be humble and say things like, “Well, a blind hog finds an acorn!” or “Aww, I just got lucky today!”
Humility is a trait that is honorable in a person and we all like to be around a humble person. But being humble is not necessarily the best way to take full advantage of your success and create a memory of your performance that you can draw on in future competitions.
If you can attach your performance to specific things that you did that enabled you to shoot the way you did, then you are rewarding your brain for doing a great job without being boisterous or conceited.
After you make eye contact with the person who complimented you, the absolute first thing out of your mouth should be sincere thanks for noticing your performance.
“It’s nice to be noticed. Thank you for noticing my score today. I’ve been working hard on my game and a lot of things came together today for me. My plans on every station were spot on and the breakpoints I chose were the correct ones for me and I hit them well. I’ve been working hard on single targets working on visualizing how I want the shot to come together and where, and that stuff really works.”
In conversation, you can add things like “I had been working on my routines which helped a lot today” or “my coach and I have been working on my correction routines and I hit every target out there. When I missed, I corrected and kept correcting until I hit it and ran the station out!”
You could also say, “my rhythm was off the charts today and it was easy for me to get in sync with the targets. Man, does that slow the birds down. I felt in such control today on every station.”
Several things happen when you attach a compliment to what you have been doing in practice that helped you achieve your performance, and the notice others give you. At that point, you are rewarding your brain for doing a great job under pressure. You are attaching the compliment to your preparation and the hard work you did in your deliberate practice sessions leading up to your success.
Well, guess what happens when you do this?
The biggest thing is that you finally realize that getting better is hard work and the result of structured deliberate practice is an improvement. Not to mention your confidence soars and your practice sessions move to higher and higher levels. In turn, this moves your game to higher and higher levels.
Things that happen to you just are, but how you remember them turns them into strong influences on who you will or can become. When you attach something positive that helped you achieve the memory, it becomes more like you.
We are all products of our past. How we remember our past determines how we see things around us in the future, which in turn motivates us to become the person we deep down want to be. It is not necessarily what happened, but how you remember it that is really important.
This is where the “win or learn” attitude comes in. Humans have a 3:1 negative bias on how we remember things, so left to your own way of remembering things the likelihood of remembering your past as negative is great. Building a habit of seeing the good in everything allows you to be more likely to see the good in all that happens around you.
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