Secrets of Mental Marksmanship: How to Fire Perfect Shots

We have been giving lectures on the mental skills required for marksmanship for years (separately since the 1980s and together since the 1990s). We independently came to the same conclusion about these mental skills— you need them to shoot well.Whether you're aware of them or not, if you're a top marksman, you're using them.Whether you're a recreational or professional shooter, if you shoot well, you're using them.You may not know that "they" are something, you may not know all the right terms for them, and you maynot know how to call on them every time you need them. But when you shoot well, you're using them. And if you want to shoot well all the time, you need to learn how to call them up and use them all the time.When we met, one of us was an Olympic-style smallbore shooter and the other was primarily a military serv- ice rifle shooter. What we discovered as we each learned each other's sport was this: while the technical and physical requirements were different, the underlying mental skills were the same.You may not fully appreciate that no matter the kind of shooting you do, the underlying mental skills pro- vide a single foundation. You may not fully appreciate the similarities between passing your annual qualifica- tion, competitive shooting, and an operational confrontation. But once you have mastered the mental skills required to fire a perfect shot, you will find that they're the same for any gun, anytime, anywhere.The purpose of this book is to give you a different way to think about your marksmanship—your practice, your training, and your performance. The book describes the mental skills required to perform to the best of your ability and provides a set of tools that can be used to acquire and access those skills. This main theme of the book is illustrated with stories from the military, law enforcement, hunting, and competition realms. The reader who is most interested in only one of these areas can skip the stories from the other areas, but the read- er who wants a complete picture will read all of them.To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive book of its type. It's the first time that all of the mental tools used by successful shooters have been brought together in a single place. And certainly, it's the first time the tools have been organized into constructive units that support a particular area of development. And it's the first time that the commonalities between operational and competitive marksmanship have been supported by illustrative stories from a wide variety of personal experience and expert sources.Whether you're a soldier, a cop, a hunter, or a competitive marksman, you're certain to learn something that will improve your marksmanship skill. And if you're anything like most of our students, you will find something here that will improve your life skills. Read more