Skip to main content

You Can Only Find What You Are Looking For

This month Blog post is written by sponsored shooter, Dalton Kirchhoefer.
Dalton and his dad, Tony practicing at his home club, Quail Run Sports.
 

You Can Only Find What You Are Looking For



My father has always told me, “You can only find what you are looking for in life, as well as competition”. I’m not sure I grasp the entire meaning but the light is beginning to shine a little brighter at the beginning of the shooting season. Regardless of the shooter’s skill, overcoming the feeling you have after missing a target you know you can hit or one you have hit 25 out of 25 in practice, is probably the greatest challenge a competitor faces during competition. The most important target in a tournament is the one following a miss. Will you be able to wipe the image of the miss from your mind, replacing it with a good picture of you smashing the next target? Or will you choose to play backwards rather than forward and carry the miss with you to the next station? Personally, my greatest challenge is mastering the skill of playing forward rather than playing backwards. If you can’t wipe the memory of the miss from your mind and replace it with a smashed target, you end up looking and waiting for the miss to come and just as my dad preaches “You always find what you are looking for”.


I’m starting to learn that the mental side of shooting is as important, if not more important, than the mechanics. Without good shooting mechanics, consistency is hard to find; without a strong mental, game consistency is impossible to find. Just as shooters have a pre-shot routine, you need to have a pre-shot mental routine. Personally, when I am shooting my best, I am staring down the targets using my hand as a guide and envisioning dusting the target well before I ever step into the stand. The frustrating part is how quickly the mental routine disappears when I’m not shooting my best. I know I am not alone in this and every shooter, from the beginner to the Hall of Famer, has struggled similarly. While struggling with this very concept during a recent competition, a question came to mind….How often do I practice the mental side of my game during practice? The short answer is, not very much. The challenge with practice is, if you miss, there is always another target waiting to change the outcome. During competitions, you don’t get a do-over. If you haven’t mastered something in practice you will never be able to master it in competition. With this in mind, one of my goals this year is going to be focusing on improving the mental side of my game. I will work to incorporate it in practice and develop a mental pre-shot routine that is every bit as consistent as my physical pre-shot routine. Most importantly, maybe taking a little of my dad’s advice, which isn’t always easy for a teenager; making sure I am looking for the right things as I am beginning to understand that “I can only find what I am looking for”.
 
Dalton Kirchhoefer



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Q & A: Cameron Hicks, MEC Outdoors New Sponsored Shooter

MEC Outdoors is pleased to announce the talents of Cameron Hicks as an addition to the amazing line up of incredible shooters sponsoring the brand.  Currently, MEC Outdoors partners with several exceptional shooters such as Dave Miller, Dalton Kirchhoefer, Makayla Scott, Shari Legate, Travis Mears, Will Fennell, Dani Zeigler, Morgan Craft and Richard Marshall Jr. Cameron Hicks is a fast rising star within the disciplines of Sporting Clays and FITASC and most recently has gone head to head with legends like Anthony Matarese Jr. and Bill McGuire. He was M5 at Georgia State, M3 at the NE Regional, Won Bison Cup in Virginia, M1 at South Carolina State Championship, M4 at North Carolina State and won the 2020 Gamaliel Cup FITASC and most of those were just in the past few months! So you might be wondering, who is Cameron Hicks and what got him into this sport?  Recently, MEC Outdoors spoke to Cameron and answered this and more in an in-depth conversation about him, the sport, and why
Post a Comment
Read more

Building A Skeet Field of Dreams Part 2

A lot has happened since my last post! Tons of schoolwork and practice.  With all the latest activities, the most exciting has been the Field of Dreams. We have both the skeet houses about 80% completed. That turned out be the easy part! There is a lot of planning and engineering that goes into a Skeet field, as we have learned. It’s not as simple as just building two houses. Everything must be on grade and all the angles correct.  Thankfully, two of our coaches have a background in engineering and survey, so they were able to lay everything out. This took a lot of time and extra careful planning and we got everything correct.  We are also thankful to have a few awesome carpenters on our team as coaches, and they have gotten the houses built. Recently, they got the stairs to the high house done, and will be putting rails on the stairs and top of the high house porch to make it safer to feed our MEC 300E Skeet Set machines dozens of boxes of White Flyer clays.
1 comment
Read more

All About Reloaders: Celebrating 35 Years at MEC

If you are one of the many Shotshell Reloader customers, chances are you may have gotten the opportunity to talk to Ron. Out of the last 35 years, Ron has spent t hirty-three of those years working as a MEC Reloader Customer Service Technician. He is our most senior technician and carries a wealth of knowledge with him. His casual and soft-spoken presence makes him an easy person to communicate with to troubleshoot a problem or just ask a general reloading question. After graduating Mayville High School, Ron worked at a grocery store in nearby Horicon, WI advancing to an assistant store manager position. During this time, he attended marketing classes at a nearby college . After two years, he knew it was not the future for him and decided to look for other opportunities . It just so happened that MEC was hiring. Ron’s mother had been working at MEC for a while and encouraged him to apply. Soon, he was offered a job on their newly implemented assembly line, building John Deer e lawnm
5 comments
Read more