What Caused the Errors?

Deciding what caused the errors is the most critical part of self-evaluation. That’s one of the unique things about our system. Once you start working on being really smooth, once you’re early in the breakpoint, you can better evaluate why you missed.

When we show our students how to be early in the breakpoint, they are absolutely blown away.

Because we have taken the excess movements out of your game and left you with minimum movement, you all begin to realize that the errors that occur are much more easily focused on, not the fact that you missed, but why you missed.

Average performers look at errors and say they were caused by factors outside their control: Targets are too hard, luck, weather, noise, glasses, chokes, coaches, shooters, and squad mates. Top performers take responsibility for their performance, good and bad.

This is not just a difference in personality or attitude. The best performers have set highly-specific process goals and strategies for themselves. It’s all set up so that there’s something learned from every situation that you put yourself into. Therefore, the tournament no longer becomes a test. It’s an opportunity to learn something.

The best performers have thought through exactly how they intend to achieve what they want; therefore, when something doesn’t work, they can pinpoint certain elements that went wrong. By creating specific goals, they have removed the random excesses from their game just like minimum movement because their failures become more obvious. It’s having very specific process goals: “I’m going to do this.”

Top performers focus relentlessly on their own performance. They don’t care about anyone else’s. They shoot the tournament. It wasn’t perfect. It could have been downright unpleasant. The top performers respond by adapting the way they act to what is going on.

Average performers respond by avoiding those situations in the future. They have goals like “I want to have fun today.” Average performers go into a situation with no clear idea of how they intend to act or how their actions would contribute to reaching their goal. Therefore, when things turn bad, they attribute the problems to vague forces that are outside of their control. They are clueless about how to adapt and perform better next time, which is why they had rather just avoid going through anything like that again. This means they have zero chance of getting any better.

 

This is an excerpt from the February 2012 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.