Bring Your Game to New Levels!

We have been discussing how you can bring your game to new levels in our podcasts for the last three years. It’s all there and like this post when you understand that you have to build your game and you cannot use anyone else’s game it pretty much puts things in perspective!

I don’t know why shooters think there is a magic bullet out there that the tournament winners know about. And if they could just know or see what the pros see then they, too, could shoot like them.

That does not exist but shooters keep hoping they will have a breakthrough and magically ascend to a higher level of performance.

Putting in the Time

To get a different result you’ve got to change your approach. This requires the one thing that shooters will not do: putting in the time and working to build the skill the right way so they can depend on it. Almost without exception, shooters will not really put in the work to build their skill level so their game can elevate to higher levels.

There is so much misinformation out there on this. Shooters keep believing it and keep hoping to get better.

There is a lot of shooting advice out there, but few, if any, have studied skill-building in the brain as much as we have.

Focus is an evolving phenomenon from beginner to master class. And the conundrum is that the better you get, the less you must see to perform at higher and higher levels! What the brain perceives as you become more skillful is an amazing evolution, and it’s something that we have been studying and documenting for 27 years as professional coaches.

There are certain steps that as a shooter you must go through to keep pushing your skill to higher and higher levels! These steps are not based on how someone else did it or what someone else sees. It is based on what specifically you have done and where you are in the evolution of your vision.

In the end, it takes a greater and greater commitment to training longer and at higher levels to achieve higher and higher successes.

How Skill is Built

Sooner than later that commitment is not met with the desire of shooters to put in the time, which leads to looking for a shortcut by trying to see or do what other shooters are doing. News flash: you can’t do what another shooter who has put in the effort can do and work to achieve higher successes. Skill is not built that way.

The brain understands skill as a sequence of events that, through repetition, allows it to anticipate ahead of what you are about to do and take over the tasking of orchestrating the shot while you focus on the target.

When approaching a shot under pressure, if you have trained that shot hundreds of times with prediction and then execution of the prediction, it becomes easy to trust it because you trained it!

Hello?! This is what practice is for. This is why I said when you are not practicing the correct way, you are not building long-term memory.

Most shooters never take their practice game to higher levels; therefore, they are not building long-term memory that they can trust. Then they begin to hope and try to think their way through the sequence. The brain doesn’t recognize the sequence and cannot perform the task, even though it understands intellectually what you are asking it to do. And this is where the frustration comes from.

It’s like public speaking. We can all talk. But how many of you could have a conversation about what we are discussing with 30 shooters? 100 shooters? 500 shooters? I can, because I have done it and I have put myself in the game enough times that I understand the topic and the misconceptions that shooters have about skill-building and performance. Through deliberate practice, I am a master of the material.

This took 27 years of research and study. I stopped hoping and began to take responsibility for my outcomes. And I put forth the determination to better my understanding of how this process works, understand that I will fail, but in doing so will learn to become better and better. Then I was freed from hoping and began to learn.

Few, if any shooters look at their practice as building skill, and they never get any better. When it counts, they have nothing they have trained to trust, so they think their way through the sequence and fail.

“If you are thinking you are stinking!”

Here’s a perfect example:

We have had eight to ten shooters call in the past weeks after Nationals. They have been taking lessons from shooters in their area and have gotten their scores to 83-85. The shooter coaches told them to go shoot more tournaments and call them when they find a shot that is giving them trouble.

The shooters call us and are in the Knowledge Vault for less than two to three weeks and are already understanding why they are performing like they are. We begin to help them develop a practice regimen to build skill and raise their performance to higher and higher levels through deliberate practice!

It’s pretty simple to us, but then we have written 16 books and have been doing it professionally for 27 years!