Shoot to Win interior

As with everything in life, you can’t get good at something if you don’t practice. Natural skill will only take you so far, and everyone at some point needs to consult with someone better than them. Shooting is no different. I’m still learning a lot, and I proactively seek out advice and training from those who have much more experience than I do. I believe learning is a lifelong pursuit, and the moment you feel like you’ve learned everything, you’re either not pushing hard enough, or perhaps your ego has gotten in the way.

The starting point for learning is wanting to learn. When I taught leadership courses at Google, occasionally there were students who was only there because their manager thought it was a good idea. (I’ve been in that position, too.) This type of student didn’t want to learn and wasn’t ready to hear new ideas. From a facilitator’s perspective, my approach was to simply present the leadership frameworks and lessons, and engage the skeptical student as equally as I did other students.

Thankfully, the vast majority of students were there to learn. They wanted to learn the content, and they knew what their goals were, along with how the content would help them excel in their jobs. Learning how to shoot is no different. At the beginning of this book, we explored the many reasons why someone would want to learn how to shoot. The list was not exclusive, so perhaps you came up with your own reason. Or maybe you saw a reason you weren’t thinking about, and now you’ve added it to your list of reasons.

Part of a learning mindset is being ready for failure. You will probably fail many times when you start practicing the exercises in this book, but we all fail, and pushing through it is part of learning. Remember that it can take 300–500 repetitions to learn a single fine motor skill. There will be a lot of failure through these reps.

When practicing, you should set specific goals for that particular session. It could be as simple as dissembling your firearm to learn how a particular part works. Or focus on your trigger trapping, sight alignment, or some of other aspect of shooting. The main point is to keep the list very short, one to three goals at most, and structure your practice session so that you’re focused on achieving those goals. If you don’t have a structure, it can be very easy to get distracted, especially at the range, where I, too, can get distracted and derailed from my practice goals. A good way to stay on track is to shoot with a friend so you can keep each other honest.

Marksmanship is a shooting sport, and I’ve noted how I’ve pulled on my baseball background to help improve my marksmanship. To go a little further, I wanted to learn a little bit about kinesiology, the scientific study of human movement and sports psychology. Head football and surfing coach Mark McElroy, of Saddleback College, provided me with his insight.

With regards to motor learning principles, there are four different levels. Imagine football as an example, with the level of difficulty in ascending order:

For the beginner marksman, start with the first level, where you are standing still and shooting at a stationary target. Once you master level one, you can then move on to the more difficult levels. Mastering this first level means being able to consistently and repeatedly hit your target at varying distances.

There are two learning strategies to note, random practice versus blocked practice. Here’s what they boil down to:

For a golfer, an example blocked practice session would be to putt a ball 3 feet from the hole over, and over, and over again. Then perhaps after 5–10 minutes of mastering that distance and the break of the green from the same position, the golfer will move back to 5 feet and perform multiple repetitions.

The random practice session would be the golfer putting once at 3 feet, then moving to a different spot on the green and putting from 8 feet, then moving to 15 feet, and maybe back to 6 feet, all in consecutive putts.

While there are many fans of random practice sessions, it’s really a strategy for intermediate to advanced trainees, as adapting to randomness and variance is part of most training.

For the beginner marksman, we should go for blocked practice sessions where you are stationary and shooting at a static target that is perhaps only 3 yards away from you. Keep sending shots until every single shot consistently hits the target. Then you can maybe move it back to 6 yards and perform the same repetitive block.

As a beginner, what you don’t want to try is a random practice session where you take 5 shots at 3 yards and then move the target all way out to 15 yards to make it really hard. Then after missing a bunch, you move it back into 7 yards, and so on. If you never mastered the 15-yard practice session, what makes you think you’ll master moving all over the place in a random session?

Work your way up to that 15-yard target and beyond through blocked practice sessions. Once you’ve become somewhat proficient at a particular skill, moving to a random practice session makes more sense.

Seeing yourself succeed is a huge part of being successful. I used this technique throughout my entire time on Top Shot, where, before a challenge, I’d see myself going through all the motions of loading the weapon, breathing, aligning my sights, getting a solid sight picture, focusing on my front sight, and squeezing the trigger. I’d note my mouth drying up as the adrenaline kicked in. I would even go into further detail, such as feeling the sun’s heat or the wind, hearing my teammates and the host narrating the action, and seeing TV cameras and dirt getting kicked up everywhere.

It’s about activating all of your senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and even taste.

Self-visualization actually goes even further by envisioning your balance and acceleration, your temperature in specific parts of your body (are you sweating, or are your hands shivering, but your body warm?), your kinesthetic sense (where are your body parts in relation to other parts?), pain, and sense of time. It’s literally trying to recreate the exact sensation of what it’s like being in a particular moment, performing a certain activity or set of activities.

If you want to improve your shooting, before stepping up to the line you have to imagine yourself successfully hitting the target, and diving deeper into the mechanics of what it feels like to grip your firearm, align your sights, take a breath, squeeze the trigger, manage the recoil, smell the burning powder, see the smoke and flash from the muzzle, and, if you’re indoors, hear some reverberations, too.

Self-visualization is used by athletes all around the world, and it can definitely be applied to marksmanship, or even work and other hobbies. Whenever I had a particular work project, I would envision myself researching, perhaps even struggling, then succeeding in finding what I needed. I would update a spreadsheet I was using as my project tracker, and I’d envision sending out emails, going to colleagues’ offices, and placing phone calls and instant messages for updates. I’d also imagine what success looked like when I was done with the project and what my report might look like.

This is all in my mind’s eye, using my imagination to see myself accomplishing the task at hand. If you’re open to it, give self-visualization a try the next time you have a chance.

Also known as the Yerkes-Dodson law, the inverted-U hypothesis simply states that there is an optimal relationship between performance and arousal. If you are too aroused, that could translate into nervous energy and a lack of focus. Too little arousal, and you may lack the energy or focus to excel.

Different activities varying from intellectual concentration to fine motor skills (like shooting) require varying levels of arousal, and naturally it varies from person to person. The main point is to be aware of the fact that your body often needs to be in between being bored and throwing-up nervous to be effective.

Nerves of Steel

Whether I’m giving an important talk or competing, I know that I have to be a little nervous to be at the top of my game. With the stress, my senses and attention get sharpened.

During a 1,500-yard Top Shot challenge, we used a long-range sniper rifle to see who could explode a target in the fastest time. I remember not being nervous at all—I was too relaxed. This was bad, as I placed second to last in the challenge. The last place finisher was eliminated, and it could have easily been me. Overconfidence in my ability led to my poor performance in this challenge. In this case, trying to increase my stress could have led to a better performance. It should be noted that calming down when you’re too stressed out can be a challenge as well.

Knowing your body and what things you can do to control your stress levels are important. Here are some things I’ve found that help me: To calm myself down, I take a few deep breaths or go for a quick walk. To increase my stress levels, I jump or run in place or perform some other physical activity, such as push-ups, or I slap myself in the face a few times.

Obviously, there are plenty of other tactics and techniques that can be employed. Each person is different, and you’ll need to explore your own solutions.

Most beginner shooters are at the overaroused end of the curve. They’re not used to recoil and are generally excited or fear firearms. With practice and becoming familiar with your firearm and the mechanics, your arousal level should drop over time. However, once you move from beginner to intermediate and begin pushing yourself into new, unfamiliar territory, your arousal levels may go back up.

You’ll need to find that optimal arousal level that works best for you, as it’s different for everyone.

Attentional focus is about broadening or narrowing your focus on the task at hand. For example, a baseball player may be walking up to the plate, and the crowd is cheering, or possibly even heckling him. His focus is pretty broad, as he’s looking at any men on base, the positions of the defense, the position of the sun, and other factors. But once he’s in the batter’s box, all of those distractions fall to the side and he’s narrowly focused on the pitcher. Once the ball leaves the pitcher’s hands, a good batter can see the stitching and determine what kind of movement is about to occur.

As you are practicing marksmanship, you can use this same approach of going from broad to narrow. Before you shoot, take note of your environment, the noise, the lighting, and other external factors, then narrow your focus down to what your body is doing: stance, grip, sight alignment, sight picture, trigger-finger squeeze. Then let the shot surprise you.

Finally, athletes often describe “the zone” as a place where mind and body work seamlessly together in an almost unconscious state. This is where we want to be in whatever task we are working on, whether it be shooting, working, or playing. Once you’ve mastered the core fundamentals of marksmanship, you’ll be one step closer to getting in the zone. While there is plenty of further reading on this, all of the concepts mentioned in this chapter feed into helping one get into the zone.

I think part of a winning mindset is also being ready for whatever challenges may await you. Whenever I’ve been in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable situation at work, sport, or play, I always tell myself that being uncomfortable is actually a good thing. Managing that discomfort level is a skill that will help me throughout my life. “Resilience” is a good word to describe how we have to be strong in the face of adversity. Some people simply ignore the difficulties and press on. Others acknowledge the challenge but gather the strength to move forward. And then there are those who get crushed by the pressure. Pushing through the hard times, staying positive, and keeping a winning mindset are vital to success.

As it relates to shooting or any other activity, being in the zone is simply where you perform all the correct actions in correct form while barely thinking about it. It’s almost instinctual. Getting to this state normally takes thousands of hours of practice, building in muscle memory by performing the same tasks over and over again.

Finding a way to press on and perform at your highest potential is a key goal I’m always looking to accomplish. Sports psychology has helped me attain my highest potential both on and off the field, at work, at play, and in life. I hope you will find these frameworks useful when applying them to your life challenges.