Coaching Hour – Confidence and Negative Thinking – May 2016
Coaching Hour – May 2016 – EXCERPT
Gil: It doesn’t matter whether you’re learning to grind recoil pads or whether you’re cutting somebody’s comb to make it fit them better or whether you’re public speaking. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You’ve got to go through different levels of awareness of how you’re doing.
I mean, hell, if you’re a pro golfer, there’s a guy carrying a plaque around telling you what your score is and where you are in the overall tournament. I mean, sooner or later you’ve got to have shot enough competitions to where you don’t let what you have done in the past affect how you’re going to do in the future.
I’ll tell you something. One of the biggest places to do that is when the score thought comes in. It’s going to come in, and when it comes in, acknowledge it. “That is correct. I’m only down four, and I’ve got three stations to go, and if I don’t miss any more, I’m going to shoot a 96 today. That one is correct. You are right. But right now what I’ve got to do is I’ve got to get in here and I’ve got to look at these targets and I’ve got to see that one, and I’m going to shoot that one there and I’m going to shoot that one there, and then we’ll talk about what I’m going to do if I run the rest of the stations when I get out of this stand.”
And you get right back in that stand and you do your business, and then you get out. Because it’s coming.
I mean, the worst thing that can happen is for your whole squad to know you’re just knocking the snot out of the targets and you’re on pace to beat everybody by five birds, and on the last four stations, it’s like you’re at a funeral. Nobody talks to anybody. I mean, don’t you want your buddies to be normal when you’re really shooting well, Shane?
Shane: Oh, absolutely. I don’t need anybody to get quiet or to stop talking about it because then I start wondering. To be honest with you, with the group of guys I shoot with, if I can’t hear them yelling at me or throwing stuff past the cage or making fun of me for some reason while I’m shooting, I begin to wonder just what the hell they’re up to back there, and then I get nervous.
“Trying Harder Doesn’t Work”: On Being Yourself
Gil: [Chuckles] I mean, to me, you want everybody just to be themselves. When I shot my best scores, I’ve been Gil Ash. And that’s one of my big realizations in writing this thing about how trying harder doesn’t work. I lead off with how the difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. Vince Lombardi said that. In here I talk about this evolution that we’re talking about right now.
Now, let me ask you a question, Shane. This is a great opportunity for me to be able to see if I’m on the right track here. In the beginning when you were shooting, there was a Shane that was in the operating room and there was a Shane that was doing whatever Shane was doing every day and then there was a different Shane when he went to a tournament. Would that be a fair evaluation?
Shane: Absolutely. 100 percent, yeah.
Gil: Okay. So, it occurs to me that the reason you never shoot well when you’re trying hard, which obviously you were doing when you were at the tournament — but in your everyday life you didn’t have to try as hard because you’ve been through the college of hard knocks and you already knew how to do things.
When you go to a tournament and you feel an uneasy feeling and then you tried too hard or tried harder for a variety of reasons and because you weren’t acting normally, your brain did not know how to run the computer. It didn’t know what to do because all the highways in the brain are based on how many times you’ve done them and who you really were. But when you went to a tournament, you weren’t the Shane that I met at the barbecue joint the night before. You were “Tournament Shooter Shane.”
Shane: Absolutely. I think that’s something that people fail to realize. Well, there are two aspects to that. The first one is you have to develop that person, and that does not happen overnight.
Gil: Bingo.
Shane: You have to become that person. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people, you say, was determination and —
Gil: The difference between successful and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.
