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Competitive mindset and affirmative decisions

Learning the skills to be competitive is fun, but applying these skills on demand can be frustrating, especially when we are emotionally invested in the results. Indeed, the biggest challenge facing the competitor is to simply trust his subconscious mind to direct his performance just as he trained it to do, and set his ego aside when it really counts most. It’s not enough for you to develop the skills; you need to develop a system to apply these skills on demand.

You’ve trained hard and smart to develop the technical shooting skills you need to succeed in practical competition. Yet, your match performance doesn’t meet your potential ability. Your attention wanders as the pressure you put on yourself from your expectations builds before each stage. Rather than shooting proactively through your subconscious, you become tentative, conscious and reactive. Your fear of missing drives your performance and your results are marred by procedural errors, poor trigger control and a sense of being rushed.

If the above description sounds familiar, you are in excellent company. If you arrive at the range without having a clear plan of action, you’ll invariably make poor competitive decisions in response to self-imposed pressures driven by our expectations and fear of failure.

The difference between a great competitor and a good one isn’t in his shooting skill, but rather in his ability to deliver a higher percentage of that skill in competition. Most likely, he has a system that anchors him emotionally against the changing tides of match pressure, future expectations and past results, and frees his subconscious from these distractions to do the job he’s trained it to do.

Your system should emphasize staying in the moment, focused on the process of shooting while letting the results take care of themselves. Just as your subconscious mind responds well to the visualization techniques you use to develop practical marksmanship skills, you can use visualization to build the competitive system you need to excel.

It will help you greatly to give yourself a set of rules to follow. Here’s a set of affirmations and positive decisions to guide your thinking and prompt your best performance. I stole these from many other shooters over the years, but you’ll immediately recognize a consistent theme: each decision reinforces the process used to reach your goal, rather than focusing on the goal itself.

In no particular order:

• I’m committed to the marksmanship process.
• I’m committed to this event.
• I trust my subconscious to direct my performance as I have trained.
• I am focused on what I am doing and do not care about results.
• I take the time I need to prepare for each stage.
• I visualize each stage carefully, completely and vividly.
• Once I am loaded and ready, I focus exclusively on a visualized image of the sights on the first target, and let my subconscious direct me through the stage.
• I am not influenced by other shooters, range officers or previous performance.
• I replace tension and anxiety about my performance with a poised spirit and sense of fun.
• I have worked hard to be here.
• I want every shooter to do well.
• I give myself permission to “win”.
• I define “winning” as performing to my potential, not as beating others.
• “Performing to my potential” means seeing the sights, prepping & pressing the trigger and following through on every shot.
• I replace conscious control of the process with active observation.

Remember to have fun! You will achieve your ideal state of performance when you are poised and enjoying the process of shooting well as en end unto itself, for the simple sake of running the gun, watching the sights and pressing off good shots. Be free. Strive for this state of having fun at all times; putting a smile on your face when the pressure hits you will go a long way towards reminding you why you are there.