Discover the Newest Secrets of Firearms Training for Today’s Recruits!
Training your Recruits to Shoot with Absolute Precision Accuracy is Easy When you Understand How They Will Take in Information and Represent that Information in Terms of Their Behavior.
The instructional process for teaching someone to shoot can be broken down into two components, 1) the physical skills and 2) the mental skills. The physical skills make up 20% of the process and the mental skills make up 80% of the process. This article will assist you in understanding how your students’ minds work and give you better insight into reading your students. We will profile the different personality types and create several models that will assist you in accelerating your student’s learning process and improve your effectiveness as an instructor.
THE PROBLEM IS THE DIFFERENCE
The recruits of yesterday grew up hunting and fishing. In both activities their role was one of a predator. The recruits of today grew up playing video games. Even though they role play with a gun, it’s not the same as tracking, shooting a real gun, and gutting your kill. Many recruits entering an Academy today have never even shot a real gun. It is important to realize that the psychology behind the hiring process used by many police agencies appear to be more focused on hiring “Social Workers” not “Warriors”. The mind-set and motivation of today’s recruits are very different from years previous. The sophistication of the new recruits has changed. Most of the new recruits have been to college and their model of learning is incongruent with the paramilitary model. Using the “Drill Sergeant” approach and inducing stress during the initial phases of learning actually inhibits the learning process, retards retention of the material presented, demeans the student and reduces their motivation to excel or even want to shoot. In order to meet the needs of this new breed of officers, our teaching methodology must also become more sophisticated.
Your students don’t see the world as it is, or in the way you saw it when you entered the academy. They see the world as they are, based on how they process information and their own personal experiences.
Example: Three people witness an accident. All three will experience a different reality and respond to it differently. One person may be shocked by what they saw. Another may feel pity and be sympathetic to the victims. Another may feel angry that people aren’t more careful. The same incident makes people feel and react in different ways. We will illustrate how the way a student feels during the learning experience; will determine what and how much they will learn.
STATE DEPENDANT LEARNING
Every recruit has the natural ability to shoot with precision accuracy provided they are in the right emotional state. (We are assuming they have ALL the required physical, visual and motor skills.) The natural state the recruit habituates will be the source and indicator of their ability to shoot with precision accuracy. A shooter who has an aversion to recoil will habituate a negative state.
It is the emotional value (the state) that prohibits or enhances a recruit’s ability to achieve peak performance in marksmanship. In other words; If you know how to change the recruits emotional “state” you will change the behavior. If you change the behavior, the recruit will achieve precision accuracy. The “emotional state” is the key. THE INSTRUCTORS ROLE
The biggest problem I’ve witnessed in firearms training is that some instructors will project their own personality and traits into the student rather than taking their students prospective and trying to understand what their student is thinking and feeling. People are very complex and this is why it is important to pay attention to the recruit’s every word, gesture and nuance. These subtle cues are as important to the instructor, as the contextual cues are to an officer who is faced with a shoot / don’t shoot situation. The key is to look at and recognize available indicators so you can predict how the recruit will think, feel and behave. This will allow you to use these indicators in structuring the learning process, so the recruit succeeds and develops the confidence and belief; “I Can Do It!”
SUCCESS BREEDS SUCCESS
Every recruit will miss a shot! Therefore we must pre-load their mind that a missed shot in the early stages of learning does not make them a bad shooter. Recruits easily adopt negative beliefs about their ability when ever they miss a shot. Erin Beck, a psychologist, states from his book Cognitive Theories and Emotional Disorders, “Such explanations cause feelings of having something wrong with one’s self.” In other words; the recruits personalize the miss and create a belief that there is something wrong with them. After several failures many recruits will quit trying and a minimal score in qualification becomes an acceptable standard in their mind.
In college many of these recruits were taught to use the thinking part of their brain to succeed. When learning to shoot with precision accuracy, thinking will often create “Paralysis Through Analysis.” Let’s face it, knowing the mechanics and skills required to make perfect shots every time doesn’t automatically improve proficiency. By now I am sure you’ve realized that no matter how hard a recruit tries to intellectually “will” their shots into the center of the target, conscious knowledge and will power just doesn’t work, especially under stress! Allowing a recruit to shoot hundreds of inaccurate shots will only instill habits that often leave your recruits disappointed and unmotivated.
Succeeding with 1-hole groups perpetuates and raises their self-esteem to continue to want to succeed. It raises one’s self-confidence and in turn they become more capable. It is critical to get “every” student shooting 1-1/2″ groups at 15 feet starting with their first 5 shots. Anytime you allow a student to throw a shot, the student has the potential to adapt negative beliefs about their ability. These negative beliefs can create doubt and a lack of confidence especially in the initial phases of learning. This can create a cycle of negative behavior and inaccuracy. The key is to structure the learning experience so the recruit succeeds and is motivated to want to shoot more and show-off their new skill. If you think about why we became instructors, you’ll realize it is because we were good shots. We need to give our students the same opportunity, motivation and skills.
TEST
Once the recruit has mastered the basics of marksmanship and they have repeatedly demonstrated the consistently to shoot 1-1/2 inch groups at 15 feet and 3 inch groups at 30 feet, you can progressively introduce more difficult drills which create intervals of stress. You can create pressure on the recruit by limiting the target’s exposure times or forcing them to identify contextual cues in a shoot / don’t shoot scenario and respond appropriately, etc. This will create a 3-dimensional picture of their profile. If you change the student’s emotional state, their profile will change and their behavior will change. The key is to learn how to predict their behavior before it happens. This gives you the opportunity to use a progressive training methodology to structure the learning experience so the recruit is able to succeed and generalize the application of marksmanship into any context. You can use hypnosis to future pace and reinforce the state, skills, and behavior; so they are programmed to the unconscious and shooting accurately becomes as automatic as driving a car.
BRAIN – BODY TEACHING PROCESSES
The Left & Right Sides Of The Brain
We know the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. Most people have a dominant side of their body such as a dominant right hand, or a dominant right eye or a dominant right leg. The left side of the brain is responsible for cognitive functions such as language, reasoning and many thinking types of processes. Generally it is the left side of the brain that is dominant with most people. Although you can have a right-handed person with a dominant left eye or left leg, their dominant hemisphere will still be their left. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. The right side of the brain is responsible for our creativity, imagination and the behavioral feeling processes. You’ll find most people have preferences of intellectual or creative activity. Most artists tend to be predominately right – brained. They are very creative, emotional and generally very sensitive in nature. Comparably most engineers are dominantly left-brain. They tend to have dry and very logical personalities.
I realize I am stereotyping but I feel it is necessary to give generalities to make the point: Everyone has different personalities and their personalities consist of models or perceptions of the world that are primarily derived from one hemisphere or the other. By appealing to the selected hemisphere through the way we teach or instruct our presentations, the language we use and how we deliver our demonstrations, we can directly meet the model of each person’s preferred learning style & strategy and significantly accelerate their learning process.
Left & Right Hemispheric Differences
Dr. Roger Sperry of the California Institute of Technology discovered that the left and right side of our brains have specialized functions. Subsequently, educators Butler, Gregore and Hermann made two further distinctions within each hemisphere; the Upper and Lower.
It is important to realize that no learning or thinking style is better or worse than any other style. It is also important to realize that one would expect to find that there are as many differences as there are similarities. Hemispheric dominance plays an important role in how our recruits process information and represent that information in terms of learning to shoot accurately. These differences play a very important role in how we teach.
To Be Continued . . .
In Part-2 of this article you will discover the differences in the way the brain processes information and how those differences create very different learning styles. You will discover how to identify your recruit’s specific learning style and strategy. You’ll learn what motivates them and how you can effectively direct their behavior based on how they process information so they can shoot with absolute precision accuracy “instantly”.