So, if you have been following along, you’ve read about my travails as a shooter this year and what approach I’ve taken. There are now a few conclusions.

I did have a good pair of eyes look at my shot. The conclusion was that the shot was in basically decent shape.

I took a look at stills and video of my shot. At first glance it was all good. I’ll have a bit more to say about that later.

Taking a positive attitude to the range was hard, but I really do enjoy shooting and was able to stay curious and positive, for the most part.

One additional step I took was a hard look at my target, the area of misses and the magnitude of those misses. This is where things started to make some sort of sense.

My misses were generally high, which is not the norm for me. Over the years my miss has been a right miss, when I stick on the string. But this indoor season, when I missed, it was a very high miss. This, it turns out was the key to diagnosing what was amiss in the shot. You see, I had set my right elbow too high. The consequence was too much pressure on my index finger, which led to some very big misses high. I set my clicker back about 1/4″ and the elbow came down, leading to much cleaner shots.

So you see that looking at the picture in a holistic manner gave me the answer. I compensated for a poor clicker position, by raising the right elbow, to keep a clean shooting line. The elbow position change was slight enough that I did not pick it up in my film work. It was only after looking at my miss pattern and some extended thought, that I was able to pick it apart.

I dare say that I would not have been able to pick it apart had I become disgusted by the whole thing and not thought it through. So the mental part of staying engaged through a slump was really important.

But there is more. After a protracted period of not shooting well, confidence ebbs. Mine did. There is more work to do to in this area. Tournament shooting is all about knowing with absolute certainty you can execute properly, time after time. The mental part of the game is what separates the good from the performers. So now it is about building and maintaining that level of certainty. Bring it on.