FOLLOW YOUR INSTINCTS

We all know what instincts are…it’s where our bodies act or react without
conscious thoughts from our brains.
We’ve all had someone toss us something when we weren’t expecting it. Our reaction (our instincts) is to catch the object with no conscious thought about it.
I was at a baseball game with my family last night when I noticed how the people sitting behind home plate instinctively ducked when a foul tip came back towards them even though there was a protective net. Their brains
didn’t have to tell them to try to avoid the ball, their bodies reacted instinctively and immediately to get out of the way even though there was
there was no possibility of them getting hit by the ball.
This morning, I read an article that talked about making our brains work better. One part of the article described how we should listen to our feelings. You know, that gut instinct that tells us the phone call we just
got telling us we won a million dollars, just doesn’t feel right and that we shouldn’t give out our credit card number to the caller.
This all got me to thinking about how this applies to archery. Yeah, yeah, I know…archery is about all I think about. So? Anyway, I came to realize that through practice and repetition, we can make our bodies know what to do, without conscious thought, every time we pick up an arrow and snap it on to our string.
Why is this a good thing to try to accomplish? Because our mental energy should be focused on one thing and one thing only when we come to full draw…and that is aiming.
If at full draw our minds start to think about things like our stance, our grip, or our release hand, we’re taking the mental energy away from aiming, which is where is should be directed.
I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who is in a bowling league. He told me he had bowled nine strikes in a row the night before but blew the tenth frame because he got nervous. And guess what he told me. When he got into position, all he could think about was getting a strike. His body knew how to approach the line and deliver the ball…he had just done it nine times in a row. But his brain betrayed him. He stopped thinking about where to aim on the lane, missed his mark, and left the 10-pin standing. He was so flustered, he even missed the spare. Had he focused on hitting his mark
(AIMING) and just let his body do what it knew how to do, he may have had his first perfect game.
We’ve all heard the horror stories of that big-racked buck that enters a shooting lane at 20 yards and stops broadside only to bound away unharmed because the hunter was looking or thinking about the antlers rather than
focusing on aiming for a spot and letting his body do what it’s supposed to do. I once watched a video of an Olympic Silver Medalist archer miss a nice buck at 18 yards. He had literally shot tens of thousands of arrows in his
life but his mind failed him because he simply didn’t focus on aiming.
Now don’t get me wrong, we still need to think about our stance, our grip, or our release hand but when we come to full draw, we need to re-direct all of our conscious thought towards aiming while our body instinctively and
automatically goes through the mechanics of sending the arrow on its way.