Competition – Win or Learn
The competition isn’t a win-or-lose thing. The competition is an opportunity for you to lay it all out there on the line and keep giving it a hundred percent. At the end of the competition, go back and evaluate what happened, what targets were you comfortable...
Don’t Confuse Your Subconscious!
Emotional post-shot routines define success as making us happy. Non-emotional reactions to success confuse the subconscious. It is not sure whether it should continue breaking the target or not because its job is to make us happy. The greater amount of emotional happiness in our post-shot...
Peripheral Acceptance
We all have a problem letting that gun go, and it’s periphery acceptance. There’s no doubt about that. When you exceed your peripheral acceptance, your focus ratio goes straight down the hole. But it seems as though looking behind the gun and making and holding onto...
Cue, Response, Reward
Habits are built this way: cue, response, and reward. The cue is a trigger for the automatic response to start. The response is the behavior itself, and the reward tells our brain whether we should store this habit for future use or not. Toothpaste is a...
Don’t Neglect Nutrition and Sleep
You might not think of shotgun shooting as a physically strenuous sport. Now, if you’re an E-class shooter, shotgun shooting is probably not a very strenuous sport. But when you get into the master class competitions and you’ve got to be on cue at a...
The Post-Shot Routine and Happiness
When you visualize what the shot will look like (not necessarily the lead but what the end picture is going to look like) you know you’re going to be looking at that bird away from that gun. Being able to visualize exactly what that shot is...
Act Your Way to Right Thinking
You’ve got to put yourself in the game and fail enough times, but keep trying harder and doing the things that we’ve talked about on the Coaching Hour in order to succeed. Remember: you can’t think your way to the right action. You’ve got to act...
Turning Fear into a Motivator
You can turn your fear into a motivator. That’s what I’m trying to do. Every time I come to an impasse and I know fear is there, I can feel it. I know that there’s something good getting ready to happen. There’s something good on...
From Thinking (Behind) to Doing (Ahead)
When you’re in the subconscious mode, the anticipation circuit is projecting forward. It is anticipating what’s going to happen and it is coordinating all of your movements to bring about the action you’re about to do or that you’re in the process of doing; but the instant...
What Are Focus Ratios?
“Focus ratios” are what we call the amount of focus a shooter puts on the target versus the amount of focus on the gun as a term of percentage. For many people, these things change. For example, you might have 98 percent on the bird...