Mental Concepts in Training, Part 3.

Continuing our look at the “softer” side of training, if you want to win, you need to find small, short-term things to win at. Small victories add up. This means that if you want to win a national competition, say Bianchi Cup, you need to figure out some more reasonable goals to start winning. Building the habit of winning, is what we are talking about.

I might start with a local match. Maybe that’s too ambitious right now. Start with a stage win. That may be too ambitious as well. Start with the goal of shooting your best score on a particular stage. That goal is not dependent on other people and is completely within your control. Maybe that is a bridge too far right now. Start with the goal of drawing your gun better, and executing that correctly during the match. If you draw well all match and have no fumbled draws, that’s a win!

Once you start winning, add something else. Maybe it takes a few months or a year to get all the small wins you can in a shooting sport. Move on to things like stage wins, local match wins, etc. This concept can be applied to anything, and the only limit is your own imagination and standards.

Winning, from a mental toughness, On Demand Performance standpoint is something you get to decide on. Its not about trophy’s or external accolades. It comes from within you. Something as simple as “I’m going to dry-fire every day for the next month,” can be a good goal to accomplish. What did you win? You followed through on a plan that you laid out. Most people cannot do that, so the win is proving that you can. If you can dry-fire every day for 30 days, you can probably learn anything you want when it comes to shooting. Discipline is a practiced skill, and is much more important than motivation. You don’t fight when you want to, you fight when you have to. The mental toughness you build through discipline will serve you better than all the excitement you generate when you are motivated.

Winning “the big match” is not something most people just wake up and do. Start by building a reservoir of smaller wins, so that when the time comes, you are simply doing what is already familiar to you. This concept plays nicely with the idea that you need to maintain mundanity, winners don’t choke.

In short, if you are used to winning, then a competition is not a stressful event. You have built up your ability to realize that this is just another day, doing what you normally do. If you think that a given match is a big deal, and not like the ones you normally shoot, then you are adding a level of stress that doesn’t need to be there.

Instead, if you realize that it is just another match, like the many, many others you have shot, then it is not special, it is mundane. Mundane things do not stress us. People choke when they get stressed. Don’t get stressed, don’t choke. It really is that simple. The hard work part is that you have to actually put in the work to get to that point. Simply lying to yourself when you have no history to fall back on, is not usually successful.

So, find some easy wins and build on them. Easy wins now are better than hard wins down the road when you are trying to build a winning history. As you get better at winning, the harder wins will come, as long as you are putting in the work.