When to Take a Shooting Lesson When Your Scores Plateau

When to Take a Shooting Lesson When Your Scores Plateau

What to look for:

1. Common sense reasons why you are having trouble or are not performing up to your potential. 
2. If you are having trouble with, say, dropping shots, it is not enough to have someone just show you how they do it.
3. It is more important for you to understand why you are not hitting the target.

We see shooters who think they are having trouble with a certain type of target, and they think that it is the target that is giving them the problem! When we watch the shooter it becomes obvious to us that it is a simple fundamental concept that they have either misunderstood or never understood that is causing the problem. Once the real problem is understood, we can go on to fixing the problem. However, it is not going to get fixed in that lesson. The fundamental concept will be understood through shooting and coaching. Then it is up to the student to go and practice the new concept enough so that they can incorporate it into their game. 

When, through practice and repetition, it is subconscious enough to be done without thinking about it, only then is it fixed. 

How long does it take? A week, two weeks, a month, 300 shots, 500 shots, 1000 shots? How long it takes is more determined by the commitment of the shooter to go through the misses while they are consciously learning the new concept.

The most common mistake we see in this phase of learning is the shooter wants the problem to go away instantly. Only through patience, perseverance and hard work will the problem ever go away. 

Remember: a bad habit, regardless of how good it feels, is still a bad habit. You never break old habits. You must replace it with a new one. This is the basic difference between advice from other shooters and advice from an experienced coach. A shooter will typically tell you how he or she does it. When you take a shooter's advice, you are limited to how well you can do what they do.

When you take advice from an experienced coach, the only limitations you have come from your desire to learn and your commitment to improving. No improvement happens without change. No change happens without failure. The only time failure is bad is when nothing is learned from it. Going through failure to succeed is a trait that few people possess and even fewer are willing to endure.

I believe it was Winston Churchill who defined success as going from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.