Learning to Compete in Master Class

As you work your way up through the classes you’re actually learning to shoot; but once you punch into master class, you have to really learn how to compete.

As you’re going along doing your best to compete and learning to compete, one of the reasons that you’re able to compete in master class is the fact that you have a system to shoot. You have a system to fall back on.

There are people out there, believe it or not, that make it to master class shooting birds different ways. They might swing through some of them and pull away on some of them and spot shoot some of them and lead some of them and don’t know what they do on some of them.

Those are the kind of people that are going to get to a certain level even in master class. And they’re going to have a major reconstruct with their game because you’ve got to learn something new or you have to relearn something that’s old in a different way at every level you get to.

Now, that might mean learning a different move in your shooting. It might be learning how to shoot rabbits a different way. For our student Dean Olson, it was learning how to shoot teal a different way. It’s just different for everybody and you being able to compete well is a personal thing for you.

You’ve got to go out and put yourself in the game enough times to where you see how you react when you’re in the game to see what it’s going to take for you to learn to compete. It’s not going to be the same for each one of you. Each one of you has a unique blend of pressure points that you have to be aware.

Or instead of pressure points, we could call them reactions to perceived pressure. If you try to explain pressure to a Martian, you can’t do it. Pressure is self-induced. But each one of you is going to have something that’s a little bit different that allows fear to come into your thought process and into your game.

The first year or so that you spend in master class, you’ve got to put yourself out there in the gauntlet enough times so that you learn.

This is an excerpt from the October 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.