Sharpening Your Anticipation Skills

When you react, you’re going fast. When you anticipate, you’re going slow.

What do we want you to do? We want you to get to the breakpoint early so that in effect slows the bird down so you can control the bird. Anything that has to happen precisely can happen in slow motion rather than happening with the motion speeding up.

That’s probably the biggest difference between being early in the breakpoint and timing the insertion and taking the shot. When you’re timing the insertion and taking the shot, you’re playing close to the bird. Everything happens really quick at the end when the gun goes out to where it needs to be. Everything is speeding up. Therefore, the gun has a lot of momentum and it can’t move these subtle lines that it has to move on some of these birds.

But when you play way out in front of the bird, everything happens in slow motion at the end. When your peripheral acceptance is 20 to 30 feet where you can play way out in front of the birds, then you never get jammed. And more often than not, you kill the bird every time.

However, putting yourself in the game and getting beat by the illusions of the target setters and learning from this failure allows you to anticipate and not just react. Not in practice. But on game day.

Said another way: it’s the experience you get from being in the game that allows you to sharpen your skills of anticipation.

This is an excerpt from the December 2011 Coaching Hour podcast. You can listen to it and read a written transcript, along with more than 20 years of archived episodes with your Knowledge Vault membership.