Coaching mental aspects before issues arise

[Keith Langmead]

Does anyone have any suggestions for good ways to coach people in the mental aspects of Archery before problems start to arise, rather than waiting for them to happen, and try to fix the problem afterwards?

I've got a number of students who have minor / major mental issues with their archery, which I'm looking at ways of helping them, partly through reading through the Psychology section of this forum (thanks to everyone who's posted suggestions to date... you've certainly given me some ideas to try out!), but that doesn't really help the rest of them.

When we teach technique, we show them the correct way to do things from day 1, we don't let them go off on their own, do things wrong, get into bad habits, and then come along afterwards to clean up the mess. So why not follow the same approach with mental training.

Of course it's harder to train someone in something which you can't see as an outsider, but hey, I certainly didn't get in to coaching for an easy life! :-)

What I'm ideally trying to come up with is some thing(s) that I can go through with the whole squad, to suppliment the one on one work I'll be doing to cover individuals specific problems. In particular exercises to help the novices who have minimal competition experience keep going when something goes wrong, which I've noticed at recent competitions many of them suffer from badly.

[James Park]

Good topic Keith. (Would be nice to hava esome good approaches to this one).
One thing I do is where I know that archers could get into problems later, I try to get them to develop processes in their early life as archers that build in ways of minimising them.
For example, one thing you often see is archers freezing on the clicker or release device trigger. By encouraging archers to have a definite, positive and smooth approach to this in the early days you can build in technique that minimises later challenges.
Similarly, getting archer to early on learn to lower their heart rate between shots can help in later dealing with tension during competition.

[Purple Hats]

I've found having a clear-cut mental routine to run through each shot (for me it's just thinking about aspects of my form or things I need to do each shot) helps immensely. This is not difficult to build in early, and it works amazingly well in maintaining concentration and preventing people from thinking about things that detract from their shooting (score, last arrow etc). Hope this helps.

[Oldtimer]

I don't think it is helpful to specify mental problems to someone who is not suffering from one. Once you do that, they now know what to look forward to, and it will happen quite fast. Better to do as suggested and develop a step-by-step path to shooting an arrow, and keep an eye on your pupils. If you feel that someone is developing a mental problem, you can tackle it at the start, still without labelling it, by perhaps altering their step-by-step path. The brain can only do one thing at a time, so everyone needs to develop their own unique shooting sequence.

[Keith Langmead]

Thanks for all of your comments / suggestions.

Yeah funnily enough I wasn't planning to stand there and tell everyone "welcome to archery, in a year or so you'll be so screwed in the head you won't be able to hold the site on the gold, you'll lose conscience control of your fingers, and you'll spend hours kicking yourself for screwing up a single shot... no stop... don't leave!" :-)

I agree with the step through approach. I think the tricky part is finding an effective way to instill these ideas alongside the technique elements, while not being obvious that you're doing it. A bit like explaining safety rules, and the dangers of getting stabbed with an arrow when it's pulled from the boss, while not scaring people off by telling them how dangerous everything is.