Developing Your Skills into Habits

The beginning shooter must train themselves to develop good habits that they can depend on when they are performing. Nothing is a skill until it becomes a habit.

Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky said, “We are all creatures of habit. The better your habits are, the better they hold up under pressure.”

Tennis great Martina Navratilova said, “Every great shot you hit in a match must have been hit hundreds of times in practice!”

Everything new feels strange until it becomes old. So you are hopefully beginning to see that as you develop skills, they become habits through the brain chunking together larger and larger groups of circuits so they become one. And they fire more and more precisely without you having to think about them.

The more you use the habit, the more comfortable you become while performing it. And the more comfortable you become, the less and less you actually must focus on while doing it.

This is how your focus on the targets improves and evolves to levels you have never experienced. In turn, this allows for higher and higher levels of performance. The bottom line is, a C-Class shooter cannot see what the A-Class shooter can see. The A-Class shooter cannot see what the master shooter can see, and the master shooter cannot see what the top shooters in the world can see.

What you are able to see has nothing with how well you focus on the target! It has everything to do with what you don’t have to focus on.