Entire tomes have been dedicated to the mental side of sports. Archery is no different than any other sport when it comes to being ready to perform at your mental peak.

I would like to address one small piece of the topic here. Internal and external expectations and how they affect your shooting performance.

I have been a tournament shooter for quite some time. There is the external expectation from other shooters that I perform at a certain level. There is an internal pressure which expects the same thing. Peeling away these expectations is important so that I can perform optimally.

Well Gabe, that is easy to say, but how the heck do you do that???

Crowd out your expectation anxieties with your shot process. Being able to narrow your focus will allow you to go through your shot sequence and eliminate the distraction of other, possibly negative, thoughts.

Put yourself in the position where those distracting thoughts most often occur and train yourself to pivot to your shot. For tournament shooters this means shooting in as many tournaments as possible. The expectations and anxieties will surely occur, but you will deal with them! At first perhaps not very effectively, but later, you will get better at focusing on your shot and keeping those pesky expectations at bay.