Being Honest with Your Score
You can’t run away from the score, but your ability to admit what the score is and admit the situation you’re in is huge. Controlling doubt and fear is also huge because if you can admit the fact that you’re only down two going into the...
Fear is a Funny Thing
Shooting with confidence and trust is a whole new and wonderful way to play our game. It’s very typical to learn conscious sight pictures, and one day hopefully you’ll be able to trust them. But if you learn to trust from the beginning without the fear...
Honing Your Self-Talk
Most of the time self-talk is just babble. It’s just going on and on and on. There are times and places for self-talk, but most of the stuff that we hear on the sporting clays course is a justification to people around you that you know...
Jitters and Your Learning Curve
All of the disappointments that shooters go through are just spots on the learning curve. You know the ones I’m talking about: The first station jitters, the last station jitters, the station running jitters, the long crosser jitters, the window shot jitters, being in the lead jitters,...
What Fear Does
Expectation comes about because of fear. Fear will bring the eye, the bird, and the gun together. Fear puts the gun in the way, puts the gun in the equation, and the first thing that fear does to you, if you have any amount of fear...
Fear is a Precursor to Courage
Fear always pulls the gun into the picture. Fear always puts the gun between the eyes and the bird. “I have a hard time admitting that I was afraid,” a student once told us. “But the more I thought about it, it is fear. I’d never...
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...
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...
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...
Being in a Position to Fail
You’ve got to be willing to put yourself in a position to fail in order to succeed. And you’ve got to be willing to look at it from the standpoint of “the more times I put myself out there in a position to fail, the...