Stubborn in Practice, Without Evaluation

When you watch an elite shooter, everything is always the same. You can think all you want to with the gun open, but once it's closed, it's go time.

If that gun closes and there's a thought, if you look at the barrel or a bird in the distance or something, you need to open it up and start over. I know if I hit the bird, I can't replicate it - it's luck. Being stubborn in practice is where all that comes from.

Most people think about evaluation as being the negative side, “Oh man, I shot like crap today.” But the positive evaluation is just as bad. “Oh man, I got this.”

When you're trying to have peak performance in a tournament, you have to be neutral. You can't let emotion come into your game, because if you do, you're screwed.

How do you coach that? Well, you just have to get out there and do it. You have to go out there and stink it up and realize, “Hey, today I sucked,” but you have to push yourself. Keep putting yourself in that situation so who you are on practice is the same guy who's there on the tournament days.

When you first start out, the guy who practices and the guy who's there on a tournament are two different people. Until you put yourself in that situation to where you're the same guy, staying neutral, staying positive, always trying to put a positive spin on everything, that's the lonely road that you have to go down. There's no easy way to put that.

This is an adapted excerpt from the April 2025 Coaching Hour podcast. You can hear it in full - along with more than 20 years of archives in audio and written form - with your Knowledge Vault membership.