Annoyances

As shotgun shooters, we use concentration as one of our tools in order to be proficient at our chosen games.

Concentration is, in my opinion, the one thing that separates the mediocre shooters from the great shooters. We all can handle the physical parts of shooting, but the mental parts are much more important.

For many of us, there are things that we find annoying that break our concentration.

Among these are loud voices, tobacco smoke, aircraft flying overhead, and circumstances in your family or home life.

As you can see by that short list, the things that can annoy you vary from the complex to the mundane, but they are annoying.

Things like tobacco smoke can be minimized by picking your squad mates, but loud voices, aircraft, and family life are something we have to learn to ignore or put out of our minds while we are competing.

We must learn to FOCUS all our attention on shooting each and every target. Once we accept that these and many other annoyances will happen, we can develop individual techniques to minimize the breaking of our concentration.

Like Ralph Aaron says, “FOCUS.”

Stay safe.

Barry Hartmann is an NSSA Master Level and NRA Certified shotgun instructor who can help you improve your skills at American Skeet and wingshooting. To contact Barry, email him at threeat8@aol.com or give him a call at (918)803-2393.