Managing Your Expectations

With any effort to enhance personal skills to achieve a higher level, you have to manage those expectations carefully or you can set yourself up for lots of frustration which can lead to failure. Few shooters starting out in this sport can go from Marksman to High Master in a couple of months. If you set the goal to do this and fail badly, you may start believing you are incapable of shooting High Master scores and give up without giving yourself a fighting chance. Shooting at Master or High Master level is very difficult and few have risen to that level of performance. Some shooters spent decades trying to achieve it so don't expect it to happen overnight or within a few short months.

I believe in the incremental system of achievement and growth and the classification system for Bullseye shooting parallels that. Starting out, most shooters first classification is Marksman. Your first goal should be to achieve the classification of Sharpshooter, then Expert, then Master, then High Master. This is manageable and controlled.

Within those goals are more specific goals related to skills. Starting out you may have many weaknesses, poor trigger control, poor sight alignment, poor stance, inconsistent hold. Set goals to improve on those weaknesses one at a time. Train on those specific problems until you get better at them and see measurable improvements. Once you achieve that goal, move onto the next problem and set a goal to improve that and so on. Trying to do everything all at once is a recipe for disaster. You need to have focus to develop a needed skill and this is where training is different from practice. With training, you are going to focus on that one issue till you resolve it. Practice on the other hand is repetition to reinforce what you have learned.

Part of the problem with setting goals related to performance is in determining what those weaknesses are. Most shooters look at the pie chart showing what you are doing wrong based on where the shots go. I myself think that thing is a waste of ink for the majority of the people. If your group is the size of the target (which is the case for some shooters), how are you going to pin point what you are doing wrong with that pie chart? I have a difficult time trying to analyze the exact cause based on that chart and the majority of my shots are in the nine or ten ring. With a scattered target, there can be many problems contributing to that mess and most probably it is not just one thing.

As is mentioned over and over again, there are fundamentals in shooting and you must develop all of those fundamentals to achieve high scores. The fundamentals are the foundation of shooting performance, with a poor foundation everything else is susceptible to failure. A poorly executed fundamental will cause inaccuracy somewhere along the way in executing the shot. Elsewhere on this website there will be information to help you work on those fundamentals.

Setting realistically achievable goals allows you to progress with a positive emotion which is generally more rewarding than with a negative emotion. Most people need to pat themselves on the back or even better have others pat them on the back for achievement. That interaction breeds more enthusiasm towards achieving higher levels of performance leading up to the next goal.

Being a competitor, you may also beat yourself up on every error you make or on every setback. It is hard to resist that behavior when you are pushing yourself to achieve higher and higher levels of performance. Everyone deals with it differently but for me I have to be very careful in this regard. After a bad shot I usually cuss, try to figure out what I did wrong, and then move on. If I really let it get to me, it will cloud my thinking and judgment and will usually ruin my whole day. I do my best to avoid beating myself up on errors and move onto the next shot with extra care to not repeat the same error.