resources for victory. No person is born with these qualities. They are partly developed in the course of the shooter’s life and the activities of daily living. Good marksmanship training will solidify these traits and develop the minds ability to control mental processes.
C. ESSENTIAL TO MARKSMANSHIP
1. Mental control is essential to marksmanship. Mastery of the physical skills alone does not provide the control of performance necessary to compete at the highest level. Emphasis must be placed on how and what to think. The capacity for intense concentration will provide for exacting control. Coordination of the essential factors is necessary for the delivery of an accurate shot on the target.
2. Mental discipline provides the control you must have xx of your mental faculties to maintain confidence, positive thinking, and sustain the ability to duplicate a successful performance. Mental discipline will help to avoid overconfidence, pessimism and withstand conditions that disrupt mental tranquility. It also provides the emotional stability necessary for the development of a champion shooter and confidence in his ability to successfully employ the basic skills of marksmanship for a dependable performance under all types of stress.
D. DEVELOPING MENTAL DISCIPLINE AND CONFIDENCE
The continuously repeated, successful execution of a completely planned shot results in the gradual development of mental discipline. If your mental discipline has developed sufficient force you will be able to control your thoughts and exercise unhampered mental concentration. Also, your preparations and shooting routines will always be the same.
1. Response to a problem: Psychologists have determined that there are four basic methods of responding to a problem. Two methods are positive and classified as direct or indirect. Two methods are negative, classified as retreat and evasion.
a. Positive Response.
(1) The direct, positive approach. This is the self-confident, self-sufficient, direct, positive attack. You realistically face the facts, analyze them, identify and evaluate the obstacles to a successful solution. You know what you want to accomplish and you take direct steps to attain it.
(2) The indirect, substitute or compromise approach. This is characterized by small diffident, tentative, indirect action. Sidestepping leads to seeking shortcuts. When the probable solution is tried, there is much fervent hoping that the fates are on your side. You are only hinting and probing instead of establishing definitely what you need to do. There is only a minimum of positive effort here.
b. Negative response.
(1) The negative retreat: The failure to give the honest try to see what you are capable of accomplishing. Surrendering without a sincere effort. The flight habit can become chronic. This is the man that cannot accept the responsibility for a mistake or failure. A bad shot produces excuses.
(2) Evading the issue: Evasion is the lack of incentive. Why? Is the approach. Why do I have to do better then anyone else? If the desire to excel is not there, you will never aimlessly or otherwise achieve the degree of accomplishment that crowns the champion.
2. Analyze the problem.
a. Psychologists have discovered that one of the chief reasons for difficulty in the solution of problems is inability to soundly analyze. Pose a clear-cut plan of action in full array. Face the specific difficulty and make a determined effort to break it down. If it can be identified there is a solution for it. There are shooters on your team or some other team that are operating without this specific problem putting a brake on their performance. Talk it out. A communal pondering session will break it wide open,
b. There is a four-point system of analyzing and solving specific problems. It reduces the whole big problem to four small ones: “STEPS IN THE PLANNING”; “ SPECIFIC DIFFICULTIES”; “SUCCESSFUL SOLUTIONS”; “DOUBTFUL OR NO WORKABLE SOLUTION”. Weigh your “specific difficulties” and “doubtful solutions” and start an improvement campaign to resolve each area of deficiency.
3. Confidence. Confidence results from repeatedly bringing under control all the factors that create conditions for firing an accurate shot. An accurate shot is one that hits the center of the target. You must have confidence to shoot well. Confidence in what? How do you get it? How do we keep it once it is obtained?
a. You must have confidence in the fundamentals. You must be convinced that if you control their employment correctly, you will achieve excellent results.
b. You must also have confidence in your ability to execute the proven fundamentals correctly. You will have proven your ability to do this in your practice sessions.
c. Think big! Think positive! “I will do it”, and you will succeed. However as soon as you admit the slightest possibility of failure, your chance of success is questionable,
d. It has been said that a shooter must have an open mind, implying that we must have the ability to accept new ideas. What we should also strive for is a mind that is open to positive thoughts and completely closed to negative thoughts. You have heard so many times “Don’t jerk that trigger”. True as this axiom may be, it is of no advantage to have this thought enter your mind when you are trying to get off a shot. It is negative, it implies failure. Such thinking continually occupies your mind with something you don’t want to do, rather than something you should do. Would it not be more advantageous to think, “I must follow through, for when I do this, I will get an “X””. This is the positive side of the picture, it implies success. It gives you something that you should do rather than something you should not do. What the shooter needs is a mind full of positive “do’s” and “wills”. There is no room or necessity for those distracting “don’ts” and can’ts“. However, just thinking positively is not enough; we still must have definite ideas of how we are going to employ positive thoughts. There is no room for vagueness or vacillation in our technique of shooting.
e. A confident attitude adversely affects your competitors. A match is generally conceded to a small number of confident individuals who expect to win. Confidence is contagious and favorably affects your teammates. Smile. Give no comfort to your competition by revealing by word or by act that anything is wrong that might affect your chances of winning the match.
4. Channeled mental effort resists the tendency of the mind to drift during the period when intense concentration on the relationship of the front and rear sights is essential.
a. Channel mental effort relentlessly toward the final act.
b. Complete exclusion of extraneous thoughts for a brief period (three to six seconds) is necessary for controlled delivery of the shot.
c. Prior planning of the sequence of action gradually enables the shooters to sustain concentration for a longer period.
d. Coordination of thought and action is the result of experience obtained through extensive practice and match shooting where the same satisfactory plan of action is followed repeatedly. Precise coordination is absolutely necessary in controlling the delivery of each shot during the entire match. Split second coordination and timing are maintained by frequent practice. When the practice time is insufficient, do not be overconfident and expect to be able to sustain coordination through prolonged match shooting conditions.
E. WHY CAN’T YOU BE A WINNER? (THE DANGER OF NEGATIVE THINKING.)
1. Who won the last match in which you participated? If you did not win, what was the reason?
Why is it so difficult to shoot championship scores? It is not that most of us have not been taught the fundamentals of shooting, the fault usually lies in that we open our minds up to thousands of negative reasons why we cannot shoot good scores.
