HOW I BEAT Target Panic Nerves & Anxiety (Archery)

This concept is so big, it could change you. You may not be having real target panic. If your brain has a connection between aiming and releasing the arrow, then the most common mistake I've done is to... I so badly wish I could switch bodies with you for a couple of minutes. And I know this might sound crazy, but this would make a massive difference because feel is not real. Welcome to my video on overcoming knowledge gaps, target panic, nerves, and anxiety. I'm going to give you actionable steps, drills, and thought process that have made me a better archer. I am not an archery coach, but I love to aim and have been coached by some of the most elite sports psychologists. I understand the mind far better than I do the mechanics. In my opinion, the mind is powerful and is the most important factor when it comes to archery. If you experience target panic, then you have a lack of knowledge, a lack of practice, or a lack of mind control. This is my roadmap to overcoming nerves, target panic, and ultimately the mind. Number one, a lack of knowledge. The most common mistake I've done is to shoot too heavy poundage bow. You may not be having real target panic. You may be shooting a bow that's too heavy for you to be optimally accurate. With a 30-pound bow, I can pull this back and I can hold it pretty steady for a pretty long time. But I move up to a 50-pound bow, something pretty easy to pull back, but pretty quickly, within five seconds, I start shaking pretty good, and that's no good. We all have an optimal time we hold a bow at full draw. In your shot sequence, it may be for two seconds and then you shoot. The problem is, is if you have a bow that's heavy enough that within your optimal time at full draw, you start shaking, then you're in trouble. So for me, let's say I held a 50-pound bow for three seconds and then need to shoot. Well, when I get close to that three-second mark at full draw, I start to shake. In a sense, I start to panic, and when I start to panic, I need to release quicker and sooner because I'm getting a bigger hover. I'm shaking more and more and more and more. So I release prematurely with my release connected in my mind to where I'm hovering or where I'm passing by the target with my aim, and that leads to a lot of inconsistency. Number two, aiming and overcoming target panic. If your brain has a connection between aiming and releasing the arrow, then you may be experiencing target panic. It's counterintuitive to release the arrow when you're not aiming, but this has shown to have better results for most people. This concept is so big, it could change everything for you. We'll break this into two categories. One, shooting with a command release, and two, shooting with a surprise release. First, a command release. This is when you're passing by the bullseye and you say, shoot now. For example, this would be like shooting a shotgun. You aim and slap the trigger. Then we have a surprise release. This is more like shooting a rifle. You wanna sit and hover on that bullseye and slowly, slowly pull the trigger, and the rifle's gonna go off at a moment you're not exactly sure when, but your results are gonna be really good. If your goal's accuracy and you're shooting at still targets, we wanna be a sniper with a bow. This sounds easy, right? Well, it's not that simple for traditional archers because we're holding the string with our fingers. We have to perform a fairly complicated task of smoothly releasing the string in a consistent way every time without thinking about it. No, you're wrong. You can think about your release, but you can't think about your aiming. This is how I do it. When I played sports in college, I was blessed to have world-class sports psychologists come and teach me. I learned the illusion of no. Don't think about an elephant or its tail or the red on a Coca-Cola bottle and its logo, he would say. He would go on to describe these items in depth and say, do not think about it no matter what. What happens is we start to picture that item or that thing, that animal, and then we try to throw other thoughts into our mind and ignore the person talking so that we don't think about what they said to not think about. The point is your brain doesn't know no. K-N-O-W-N-O. No, no. Like, you don't know no. So if you say, don't do this, your brain says, do this. So he would teach, instead of thinking, don't screw this up, don't mess this up, the only thing you can think to be successful is the result you want to happen and all other thoughts have to go away. So what you feel when shooting may not be in reality what you're doing. Tiger Woods is famous for this. In golf, he would say. A lot of my feels sometimes aren't real. And what I mean by that is I feel like I'm doing this, but am I really doing this? No, you're not. But, you know, sometimes feel and reels aren't the same. But if I'm working on something, obviously it's not going to feel exactly what it looks like. But when he gets to that point, when feel and reel start intersecting and they start feeling like they're the same, that's when some pretty good magic starts to happen. This is how my thought process works. Yours will probably be a little bit different, but this is what works for me. I'm going to draw back. I like to draw back with the arrow on the left side of the target. And as I rotate back, pull into it. After I'm at full draw and I find my anchor, I'm going to aim. This aiming period, a half a second to two seconds. It doesn't matter if you're instinctive, gap, string walk, it doesn't matter how you aim. Compound bow, it doesn't matter. What you need to know is that once you're aiming, you should be able to hold it there. If every time you get to your aiming point, you release immediately, you probably have target panic. This is my secret sauce. I call it the hover. To make all of this work, you need to be able to hover on the spot you want to hit for a second or two minimum. I like to use a bow that I feel like I could hover for five seconds on the spot I want to hit. And if I can hover, so my arrow, and I'm moving slightly because I'm not perfectly still, but at any time I can release it and I'm hitting an acceptable shot, then my hover is really good and really tight. Now that I can hover right here at the same spot, I can release at any time. In my mind, I switch from aiming to my release. And the release isn't, I'm going to release now. The release for me is I'm going to increase tension, transfer to hold, whatever you want to call it. I'm here, I'm going to hover, and I'm going to slowly increase tension. And my fingers is disconnected to my mind. So I'm thinking of pulling my elbow back, not back away from me, but back behind me. And as I do that, at some point in there, my fingers just slip off the string and my mind's not telling my fingers to slip off the string. It's just a muscle memory. And I'm not thinking about aiming. So my aiming is so disconnected from my release. I will not jerk and I will not have any target panic. Here's an example. That is the exact thought process I go through. Most likely, if you have target panic, your release is connected to aiming in your mind. And this way is a much harder way to shoot. Here are a couple drills I've done according to feel that have really helped me out to disconnect my aiming from my releasing. We'll do two drills. One of them will be focused on aiming and one of them will be focused on releasing. And then when we put those together, we have step two of my shot sequence and step three of my shot sequence. We're gonna have the same thought process in the drill as we do in actually shooting. So first, the hover. If you shoot instinctively when you do the hover drill, pull back and then hold right where you feel like is the bullseye and just stare down that bullseye as like nobody's business. If you're string walking or shooting gap or compound bow, put that pin or put that arrow right in the smallest part of the target as you can right on your bullseye. What I'm gonna have you do is pull back and hold it. And you're gonna hold it there until you feel your hovers getting bigger. Once your hovers getting bigger, let the arrow down. This will help you know how long your hover is, but it will also help you practice not getting anxious while you're on the bullseye. You wanna be the most comfortable when you're hovering on the bullseye. Target panickers are the least comfortable when their arrow or their aiming method passes past the bullseye. They're anxious because they feel like they need to release quickly to hit that, but we're too slow for our own reflexes. So that'll never work. Drill number two, I've actually found useful. A lot of people don't find this useful, but kind of a blind bale shooting technique here. I'm not actually gonna close my eyes, but I'm not aiming. Get close enough you're not aiming and only think about your release. So I'm gonna draw, I average hold around two seconds and then I'm gonna release. So gonna draw, no aiming, and just release in the way you want to release. This is all practicing your release. The point of this is what do you think about when you release? You want a specific trigger in your mind. So for me, it's kind of like pinching my blade together and increasing tension. Let me think if I can figure out exactly what I'm thinking. I'll take another shot. I go so much by feel, sometimes it's really hard to explain what I'm feeling. Yeah, so what I'm feeling is I'm like contracting a muscle right here a little bit more. And when I contract that muscle with my brain, my brain says contract that muscle because I have the green light to shoot. My fingers release somewhere in that timeframe. It used to not be that way. It used to only be on command when I could release, but by practicing up close to a target, now I have a connection between thinking about that muscle and making it tighter. And then it just releases. By putting the hover drill and the blind bale drill together, we have a perfect shot sequence. At least it's helped me shoot the best I've ever shot. So we're just literally putting both drills together. You draw back, comfortable hover. Now that I'm hovering, I'm going to continue to hover, but I'm not going to think about hovering. It'll feel so weird when you first do this, but change over to whatever that next thought is for you In golf, they would call it a swing thought. Here, I'm going to call it a release thought. My release thought is tensioning that muscle. And then it's odd because, whoa, the arrow released and you look up and your shots are getting better and better but you're not commanding them to go where they need to go with this type of shot sequence. It's so odd, but it works. Just works. Okay, so that's the end of that section. Did that make sense to you? If you're really good in practice, but then when people watch you or you go to a tournament or the pressure's on and you're struggling, then I would say it is nerves and not target panic. And there is a very good way to overcome nerves. I used to get so nervous for an event or something new that I cared less about the event than it being over. I would want to just finish this thing so quickly that I didn't care the turnout because I was that anxious. This is a terrible place to live. It's been shown that it's very, very hard to get less nervous, but you definitely can train to get braver. The way to do this is to voluntarily add stress onto yourself to the point at which it's difficult, but not to the point at which you can't handle it. You can add physical stress or emotional stress. Both kinds of stress translate. What's important with archery is focus. So what we need to do is learn how to focus through stress. If you could learn to have 100% laser focus in the most stressful scenario, you could be fantastic at archery when your nerves are really high. I have three recommendations to improve your focus under stress. The first one is wherever you're at, sit down comfortably, stand up, whatever it is, and look at the corner of a table or look at the corner of a picture frame on the wall or a dot, just look at anything, but focus on one tiny little area. Start your stopwatch on your phone or something, stare at that area, and as soon as you realize you're not thinking about it, you're not focusing on that spot, go ahead and check your time. If you can't focus on one tiny little spot for three or four minutes without losing focus, your focus may not be good enough for handling a lot of pressure. So let's practice this. And if you're an extreme example like me with such extreme anxiety, then I would recommend practicing by yourself and add physical stress first. So the first thing you can do is do a couple pushups and then shoot and see if you have as laser amount of focus while you're shooting. Next thing, maybe do a sprint and then shoot. Add physical fatigue to yourself and then shoot. Once you get really good under physical fatigue, now we can move on to emotional fatigue and pressure from other people. So bring some friends in or go to the range, just shoot around people. Don't even tell them you're trying to grow in stress, but go to the range, stand 10 feet from somebody, take a shot. Were you thinking about that person at all or were you thinking about the target and how you're aiming? If you were thinking 100% about the target and aiming, try this. Hey, hey, I'm so sorry. I'm working on my form. Can you check if I move my elbow backwards when I shoot? Or hey, can you film me while I do this? Now take a shot. See if you can take a shot without thinking about them at all. That's not easy. The idea here is to add stress incrementally to yourself until you can overcome and be braver. That's exactly why I started making YouTube videos is because I do not like public speaking. I do not like talking in front of camera. I do not like talking in front of cameras. I do not like pictures of myself. And so this whole experiment on YouTube was to overcome fear. It is a worthwhile goal. It's something worthy to live for to overcome your fears. And it's very, very, very difficult. But I take that from life and I apply that to archery and sports and competition. And what happened to me is I'm better with more pressure and I'm better with more competition than I am with less. And that's because I've trained myself so much to be good under pressure. It's not because I was born necessarily good under pressure. It's because I've put myself in those scenarios voluntarily, continually, so that I now have the confidence to perform under pressure. And let's say your focus is perfect and you do everything that you planned on and wanted to do and you weren't thinking about anybody else and you miss. That's not a miss. That's a win.