How to Deal With a Miss: Limiting Misses
by: Paul Giambrone, III
How do you deal with hearing the “lost” word from the referee? There are all kinds of ways to deal with this situation and very few are correct, actually only one way is correct. Get over it, move on, give the next shot 100%. On the flip side, my personal favorites are the guys that throw their hands up in disgust like they should never miss, throw their hulls all over the place, or one guy who threw his high high end shotgun in the garbage can because it was the equipment that caused the miss, not the shooter. I have news for these shooters, most of them are not that good to be that pi&%ed off after a miss. A great story from the late Wayne Mayes follows this school of thought. This guy was taking a lesson from Wayne and kept having temper tantrums every time he missed. After this happened so many times, Wayne looked at him with that Tennessee accent and said “Buddy, you ain’t that good to get that mad after you miss.” I couldn’t agree with Mr. Mayes more. We are going to make mistakes, some silly, some legit but either way we must be able to move past the mistake to prevent further mistakes. Much easier said than done!
Let me start by saying I do everything I can to prevent a miss. I work very hard perfecting my mechanics, constantly check my setups of hold and look points along with my foot positions and work each and every shot to the best of my ability with the proper mental execution. About half of my misses each year can go back to a failed mental execution. Either I didn’t plan out the shot correctly, my setup was wrong and I knew it before calling, I didn’t react to the flash or didn’t acquire my hard focus on the target. I consider all of these mistakes mental failures and can be easily corrected on the next shot by following my mental checklist of steps. These are the ones where I will shake my head with disappointment because the miss could have easily been prevented. However, we have to remember that we are human and this will happen on occasion. When these misses take place, it is very important to recognize where the mental breakdown took place, add the correct phase back into the next shot and execute ALL of the mental steps (not just the one you failed to execute on the shot before). Failure to execute all of the steps on the next shot will just result in another miss or another bad shot because you’ll forget to do one of your other steps. Meaning, do not put so much emphasis on the step that was missing from the first shot to the point where you forget to execute all of the other mental steps. For example, if I know that I reacted slowly to the flash on the first poor shot, I do not want to focus so much on moving on the flash on the next shot to the point where I get lazy on my hold point and look point. My mental steps are very detailed and each step deserves 100% of my attention, not 100% divided by my 4 steps. Therefore, 100% of my attention goes into my setup (foot position, hold point, look point), once the gun is mounted and everything is settled, my next step is match gun speed and target speed on the flash then my last mental step is to acquire a hard focus on the target when it enters my break zone. Failure to do any of those steps will result in a poor shot and possibly a miss.
Onto the next set of scenarios, what about the misses that cause frustration and worry that will likely cause more misses? Some of these misses are the ones we discussed in the previous paragraph with the shooter not letting it go. Meaning, instead of chalking it up to a silly mental mistake, they get ticked off and don’t let it go. When this happens, this is going to cause further mental errors and mistakes causing more poor shots and misses. This will just add fuel to the fire. If necessary, take a step back, reset and clear the anger and cloudiness of thoughts, then get back up there and rip into that next target! There are times where I won’t necessarily miss the target, but I make a bad enough move where I need to let the negative thoughts go away and my nerves settle before going onto the next shot. This saves several misses for me each year. Keep in mind, I do not look for a reason to reset or back off the station, I only do it when it is required. Looking for a reason to reset will push your squad back on time and put shoot management in a bind. Back on the topic, why not just simply move on? Think about it. What good does it do us to get all worked up over a little orange target? Well, speaking from experience, when I see that target fly off in one piece, it gets me pretty fired up on the inside, but I can’t let it consume me and show that frustration on the outside. This is another way to help us move on quickly. Keep it all on the inside, take a deep breath, and give the next shot all you got!
To close, when I work with all of my clients, this topic comes up a good bit of the time. How do you move on from a miss or deal with adversity? As stated, the simple answer is to move on and not let it bother you. Long answer: well it’s not that simple most of the time. However, what we must realize is once the shot is fired, we can’t get it back. We don’t get any mulligans or do-overs, so why dwell on something that has already transpired? Why not do everything possible to not let it happen again versus giving into temptation and letting it get to us and have it happen again? You know which scenario this applies to the most? When we shoot a 94 and over half of those misses are in one round. Scores 24, 25, 21, 24. That one bad round. That round usually starts off with one miss, then we start thinking about our score which leads to another miss, then we start thinking about why we are missing instead of executing our shots like we did the first two rounds. This leads to that one bad round where the shooter fails to control those thoughts. What we should do is focus on our shooting routine and mental process to prevent further misses. There is absolutely no reason why a shooter should have that one bad round when these thoughts creep in. They did well 3 of the 4 rounds so it can’t be all technique or equipment, it has to be our mind! It has to be about the mental control to not let these thoughts get in the way of our routine. Another way to help is to do a quick review of the shot as I mentioned in the first paragraph. Analyzing your mental execution to get your answer. Guess what, sometimes we can do everything we wanted to do mentally and still miss the shot (not often but it does happen). Usually when this happens, there is a technique failure. The most common one is is the shooter lifts their head just enough to cause the miss. Everything looked correct and felt right, but that target doesn’t break. I simply execute all of my mental steps on the next shot and make sure my head stays firmly down on the gun. Enjoy the smoke when you hammer that next target!
Tip of the month: Learn to start dealing with this in practice. Do NOT just shrug your shoulders when you have this bad round in practice. This is setting the precedent for tournaments! When these negative thoughts and bad things happen in practice, work really hard on sticking with your shooting routine and mental focus to get through it and not give in. If you work at it in practice and overcome this in practice, this will help you limit your misses when you get in a tournament. It is just like anything else. What you do in practice will carry over to the tournament. This should give you the incentive to work hard in practice on this to help you limit the misses in a tournament. Also, incorporate a short analysis of the bad shot but keep it very brief. You do not want to spend so much time on a negative memory where it overcomes the positive ones. Bob Palmer has me visualize a good shot 3 times in a row after a miss to help me get over it and it works rather well. I can count on one hand the last few years where I have missed more than one target in a round since following that exercise.