Often when archers start a tournament, they are worried about that first shot. For some reason, the first shot is more important in their minds. They say to themselves if I can just start strong everything will be fine. This process creates conditions that are applied to the shot. Simply put they are making a bigger deal out of the moment than they need to. By doing this, they pull their attention from the shot or moment. Executing the shot without the necessary focus usually leads to a very poor outcome.
Staying neutral is the concept of not getting emotional, too excited or too frustrated, and keeping a level head when you compete. This is a very important concept when it comes to archery. Archery is one of those sports that gets affected by being too emotional in any direction--your mental state is critical to your performance. We all know what happens if we get down on ourselves. You have a bad couple of shots, and you find yourself in a place that is hard to recover from. Your emotional swing down, and your score stays down with them.
Fortunately, like the rest of our practice, this skill of staying neutral can be developed. So please don’t think that you must be a victim of ever-changing waves of excitement and disappointment. While you will always have some fluctuation when it comes to shooting, you can apply staying neutral to your archery discipline and keep yourself in a much smaller emotional range.
This is done by practicing surrendering your attachment to the outcome of a good arrow and the bad arrows. What I mean by this is to maintain no opinion on the outcome of the arrows. It wasn't good and it wasn't a bad arrow. There is no point in judging an arrow after it has been shot . The experience is over and you can’t shoot it over so it’s kind of pointless. This will establish a new way of thinking around your shooting. I’m sure you’ve heard other people say do not be outcome oriented. But you have to do it in a complete way, not just the bad arrows.
If you watch some of the top shooters, they will do one of three things. With some of them, you will not see any emotional fluctuations if they win or lose. Some will show excitement for a moment and then let it go completely right away. Others will simply celebrate at a later time. This is not controlling your emotions. This is about not making ANY shot something to get emotional about. If you practice this mindset of detachment, it will become easier to do. This is the way you hold neutral ground in the mind and keep your focus strong with distractions kept to a minimum.
If you find yourself having great difficulty achieving a smaller range of emotions, it may have something to do with a hidden story in your subconscious mind. If those bad shots are too crippling, it means you are putting too much importance on them, you are judging yourself by the outcome of every shot. This generally is a learned behavior that you picked up somewhere in your life. Like getting a bad grade on a test when you were little and feeling like the world was ending. To a young mind, something simple like this can be devastating. These moments of high emotions often get stuck in the subconscious mind, which makes behavioral structures which haunt you later. Hypnosis is an awesome and fast way to take care of these kinds of problems getting you back to your peak performance quickly.
By developing this skill of not attaching yourself to the outcome of the arrow, you will be able to maintain your focus more easily and stay in the flow and cultivate a stronger archery game and practice. Reach out today if you want to try hypnosis and get to an easier state of shooting and controlling your emotions.