The Role of Emotion in Your Shot Sequence

Coach Ruis's article today looks at emotion in your shot. Yes, we are mostly steely eyed archer folks but lurking behind the icy exterior we are seething emotional basket cases. Over to you Sensei..

I was reading a political screed when I encountered this: “When one political party responds to attacks from the other side with policy papers and fact-checks, they’re bringing a calculator to a knife fight. The human brain doesn’t process information rationally; it processes it emotionally, then justifies those emotions with logic.” And you are asking what does this have to do with shooting arrows. Good on you .. but it does!

Archery is known as a low arousal sport. Even table tennis has a higher arousal assessment. American football is known as a high arousal sport, as is boxing. But in every case there is an equilibrium point, a point at which higher or lower arousal is counterproductive.

Critical to archery is the nature of the emotion. I know of no case in which fear is beneficial, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any, just that it isn’t a common benefit. In archery, fear of losing is, well, a loser. In order to even reach a fear of losing one needs to project their score into the future to come up with a losing score. And dwelling in either the future or the past is a suboptimal tactic as it doesn’t help you shoot high quality shots.

I have written about an experience I had before but it is illustrative here, so I will describe it again. My club in California had an annual Club Championship shoot that was
handicapped using the NFAA’s handicap system. My handicap worked out to a fraction of a point over one point per 20-point target and at the end of the event, I was tied with two
other archers, unfortunately for me, both former national and world champions. The shoot-off format was a three target event, the first target of which was an 80-yard walk-up (one
shot at 80, 70, 60, and 50 yards each). I was tutored that while all three of us were shooting at the same time, it was advantageous to shoot first, so I did … and scored a 3 on the 5-4-3 target face. I was actually furious when the spotter called out my score … angry and embarrassed. I remember shaking more than usual on my next three shots and was still fuming as we finished the next two targets. I ended up with an 18/20 on that first target winning the shoot-off without needing my handicap. (It is possible the other two gentlemen, both mentors of mine, might have gone easy because the event obviously meant more to me than to those two highly-decorated archers … and I will never know as both have since died.)

I think I learned that if one is experiencing extreme emotion and one can channel it into focus upon one’s shot sequence, it can work to your advantage. The emotion I urge all my students to bring to the shooting line is not Mr. Spock like dispassion, but a heavy dose of passion for our sport, a passion for shooting well. I feed that with appreciation of the beauty of our sport, in the settings in the symmetry of the targets, etc.

So if you coach more advanced archers or expert archers, I recommend that you do not skip over the emotions of your charges, especially in your own shooting, too. They have a
role in scoring, either well or poorly.

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Steve Ruis is the author of many books on coaching archery and maintains a blog for archery coaches at archerycoach.wordpress.com. (its free and well worth a visit) He is the former editor of Archery Focus magazine.