Deliberate Practice: Perform the Skill Without Thinking

If you practice deliberately and with a detailed preload of the movie of the shot coming together before you close the gun and call “pull,” then, through repetition, the brain can recognize the exact skill you are planning to use and can anticipate ahead of every action in the sequence.

This allows for you to perform the skill without thinking because the skill now resides in your long-term memory. You trained it.

When performing a skill at a very high level, the brain can alter human behavior as it is happening. This is why trying to “see what someone else sees” when shooting a moving target with a shotgun is so futile.

What you see when shooting a moving target with a shotgun evolves. In the beginning, it’s quite confusing when using short-term memory, because short-term memory must look at everything in the picture and consciously identify what it is!

This is the big reason why in the beginning things are so visually confusing. And in large part, it leads to ocular dominance anomalies, due to being consciously aware of the bird and the barrel and the varying distance between the two.

This is why showing a person what it really looks like (across or behind the barrel) solves so many vision problems.

As they train the sight pictures, what they are aware of when they shoot evolves with the amount of skill they build through deliberate practice and the amount of skill present in their long-term memory.