Setting Goals and Building a Plan

Hey guys, this is just a little recording that I put together after the production of this episode, but I wanted to put it in the beginning.

My plan in this episode was to use the submissions that I got from the goal submission link on The Journey Podcast website, which is on my website at dradulovich.com/podcast. I wanted to take some of the submissions, analyze them, go in depth, and use the information to refine and help you guys.

So you'll hear in this episode where there might be a transition point where I say, "Okay, let's get into your submissions," and then it gets into another topic. It sounds like there's something wrong with the episode. That's not the reason why I did it this way.

In the middle of doing all this, I was getting so many submissions online that I kind of want to let it die down a little bit. The reason why I'm allowing you guys to submit your goals and encouraging it is because, once I get those submissions, we're going to use that information to help you build stuff and move forward. It's going to be the foundational content for the podcast for the rest of the year.

I'm a little hesitant to start using that right now while there are so many of you who are wanting to participate in this podcast series live. I don't want to jump ahead of people and make it too late for them to submit their stuff, get behind, and not be able to take full advantage of everything.

So I'm probably going to restructure how I plan to do this. The way I wanted to do it was have a little snippet of doing that in this episode. I may just release a bonus episode solely going through different submissions and talking about them. That way, it doesn't get lost in the content that I'm trying to teach you, and I can do it at a time when the submissions start to die down and we get the most people involved as possible.

Because it's a new podcast, a lot of you haven't heard of it yet. Every time I make a post about something, I hit another portion of the audience for the first time. They get excited, and then they go submit. So I want to wait for that to die down a little bit, and then we'll start to incorporate that stuff.

Number one, don't get confused and think, "What happened? Is my podcast thing broken? Is it not playing everything?" No, that's how I released it.

Also, don't get discouraged if you were expecting to hear some of your goals and submissions on here and have me go in depth, because I am going to do it. I'm just going to do it in a way that helps everybody the most.

On top of that, I say this at the end, but I'm going to bring it in right now too because I want to give you guys enough time to digest the information in this episode. I'm going to push the YouTube Live that's supposed to be Wednesday, January 11, to Thursday, January 12. That way, we have at least about two days for you guys to listen to this. I don't expect you guys to be able to listen to this whole podcast in two days, but we'll push that one day further so there's some time for you guys to do that.

It'll be Thursday, January 12, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. Central Time. That way I can get people in multiple different time zones involved. If you're on the West Coast, you can join in later. If you're on the East Coast, you can adios early and stay as long as you want, or as little as you want. I just want to make sure I'm not doing it at a time that doesn't allow people to do it because they're either at work or going to sleep.

Cool. That's just my little post-production intro. Now we'll get into the real intro.

Well guys, welcome to the second episode of The Journey Podcast, and thank you for being here.

I have to say that the little surprise I threw in the middle of the last episode about some homework that I assigned for those of you who are wanting to participate in this podcast got overwhelming participation. We had over 400 people submit their goals for the 2023 shooting year.

What I'm going to be doing with that is using those submissions to go through and pick certain people's submissions, from people who gave me permission to use them, to look for common themes: mistakes made, or interpretations of how to set goals that can be modified to help actually accomplish them and build a plan.

Basically, I'm going to go through all those submissions and put together a way to present some of them so I can use your examples to cover the bases for everybody who submitted. That way, every person who did it in a way that might not help them as much as possible will still understand what to modify and how to change it. Going forward, we have the best possible outline, structure, and end goal for what the purpose of this whole podcast is going to be.

My goal with those submissions is exactly what I just explained: go through, look at all of them, and pick certain ones that I think I can use to cover the bases of every entry that was submitted.

As far as that goes, if you listened to the last episode, I laid out the structure for how this month will be and how every month going forward is going to have a different topic. I don't need to go over that again. If you want to understand how this podcast will work, because it will be a lot different than any of the other shooting podcasts you may know about in the shooting industry or clay target shooting, this is going to be a very interactive podcast.

It uses all of your submissions and participation in YouTube Live videos to work as a podcast that coaches you personally through accomplishing your goals. That was the purpose of submitting the goals. We're going to pull that information and use it as we go throughout the rest of the year.

With this episode, I'm going to quickly go through a summary of all the topics I want to cover and let you know some of the questions I want to answer for all of you. Then we'll hit the ground running after that.

I like to set things up in a way that allows you to understand what we're going to be talking about. I'll go over what we're going to do, then I'm going to go into it, and then I'm going to summarize at the end of the episode.

There are timestamps in the description of this podcast. If you want to comb through and listen to specific things, you can do so pretty conveniently without having to find what I'm talking about with no help. If you're trying to get into something quickly, always look at the description at the bottom of the podcast so you can use the defined timestamps.

As far as the summary of this episode goes, I'm going to cover a multitude of topics.

First, I'm going to get into goal setting. Obviously, that's where we're going to pull in some submissions and talk about them. Some questions I want to answer are: How do I set goals in a way that helps me accomplish them? What different types of goals should I set? What is a good timeframe to set goals within?

On top of going through the structure of goals and learning how to critique goals, we're going to answer those questions.

The next topic is what I'm calling important traits and skill sets. When we get to that topic, the summary title will make more sense. The questions I hope to answer are: What do I need to know about myself, or be able to do, in order to accomplish my goals? Why do I need to understand what traits and skill sets are important to accomplishing my goals? How do I find all these things out about myself?

Again, that'll make more sense later on. This is just a summary.

The next topic, and this is something that will continue to exist very heavily throughout the remainder of the year, is self-analysis or self-assessment. I'll touch on what those are and teach you about how to do it and the importance of it. The questions I'm going to try to answer are: Why is it important to be self-aware? What do I need to be self-aware about? How do I run a self-analysis? What do I use the information from a self-analysis for? How do I incorporate that information into helping me accomplish my goals?

After that, I'm going to touch on building a plan. Basically: How do I build a plan? What do I need to include in a plan so that it leads me to accomplishing my goals? What does a structured plan look like for somebody who hates structure? I know you can't see me, but I'm over here raising my hand. I am definitely not somebody who enjoys following a really tight schedule and making sure I check things off.

I want to make sure that I hit the importance of how to build a structured plan for somebody like that, so that can help all of you.

Then we'll talk about the importance of having balance in your plan. That's going to be really, really important because without good balance in your plan, the success is not going to be that good.

After that, I'm going to touch on staying focused and disciplined. Basically: How do I stay on track, keep making progress, and keep getting better?

Lastly, there's an overarching question that summarizes everything and hopefully doesn't apply to all of you, or many of you, but it will for some because we may get a little lost: What do I do if I'm not seeing any improvement or making progress toward my goals?

With that being said, let's get into the first topic. I'm really looking forward to it.

Okay, so goal setting. First topic. Let's just dive in.

Why is it important? Why do I need to set goals to help me progress in my shooting? Very simple but important answer: it really depends on the purpose for which you shoot this game and play this game.

Everybody has their own reason for being a clay target shooter. Some people do it because they're very competitive and they enjoy the competitive aspect of it. Other people do it because they love the game, and that's simply it. They don't even compete, or maybe they do, but they don't go to competitions for the competitions, specific results, or winning certain things. Instead, they go because of the camaraderie, the atmosphere, and the enjoyment of spending time with their friends.

Other people do this because it's part of their corporate event structure at work, or they just love the social aspect of it. There is no correct reason for why you play this game. But depending on the filter you use for participating in clay target shooting, sporting clays, FITASC, or whatever game you're playing, most everybody enjoys accomplishing things and the dopamine we get from that. We enjoy the experience of progressing forward in something we're passionate about.

If you're doing this, obviously it's something you're passionate about. So the question is: How do I set myself up in a way where I continuously experience that type of feedback from what I'm putting all this effort, time, and money into?

Goal setting is the first thing that comes up. If you just exist in doing what you're doing, you never really make any progress toward anything because you have nothing you're trying to progress toward.

The important thing about setting goals is that it gives you a defined roadmap. Without that roadmap for how you're going to move forward, we get stagnant. It allows you not only to track your progress and see what's happening, but also to get feedback and say, "Oh man, I'm doing really good." It increases your motivation and the joy you get out of doing what you're doing.

So it is very, very important to set goals. I know that's not a super great explanation of it, but I'm not here to explain just a basic understanding of goal setting. We're here to get into the nitty-gritty of what they are, how to do it, how to define it, and how to set it up so you actually end up accomplishing them.

In order to do that, we first have to understand that there are different types of goals.

I mentioned in the intro to this episode that I would get a little bit more into what that meant later on. That's what we're going to do first.

What we mean by important traits and skill sets is essentially this: what types of things are important to understand about yourself in order to put together a plan that best suits you?

The first question you need to ask is: How do I find out all the information about myself so I can go forward in doing that?

I have done a lot of research in this for my own personal benefit, trying to understand more about myself and know how to do all this as I've gone through my career. There's one thing I recommend doing, and that is going through different personality tests to objectively measure, in a holistic sense, who you are and how you work.

I have personally found that the most beneficial test you can take is called the Big Five personality test. The way it breaks down, structures, and presents who you are as a person is really easily understandable, and it makes it easy to apply toward the things we're going to be doing in the future in this podcast.

As far as where to find the Big Five personality test, I seriously recommend everybody listening to this go do that, because the information you get from it is invaluable. There are free versions all over the internet, and there are some you can pay for that have a little bit more information.

The best free version of a Big Five personality test that you can take is on the Truity website. It's T-R-U-I-T-Y. If you Google "Big Five personality test," you'll see a link on that website. That's the one you can take. After you take that, you can decide if you want to pay for more information.

But it's not as good as what I've found to be the best version of the Big Five personality test, which is on a website called Understand Myself. It's a side business owned by a psychologist named Jordan Peterson. He's got a podcast and a bunch of other stuff. I know a lot of people in the shooting industry, based on the information he talks about, seem to know him as a fairly popular public figure.

His version of the Big Five personality test is the one I found to be the best. That one you do have to pay for. It costs $9.95. Again, I would highly recommend it. For the cost of one box of shells, you can get more valuable information than anybody can teach you because it gives you a filter to understand how to do everything.

Seriously, go do one of those things because we will pull that information and use it. You'll use it outside of getting better at shooting. You'll use it every day.

I want to quickly go over some of the things you'll find out about yourself when you do this, filtered through the things that are important and can be used to build a plan to accomplish your shooting goals.

There are five different categories in the Big Five personality test: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience.

Agreeableness essentially measures how you interact socially with people. That's not super important to understanding how to build a plan to shoot better, so I don't need to go through that.

Conscientiousness essentially measures your impulsivity and how much you like organization. Within conscientiousness, there are two subcategories. One is industriousness, which essentially measures procrastination and what types of things motivate you. That would be important to understand so you know your probability of procrastinating. If you understand that about yourself, you're going to be able to build a structured plan around minimizing the impact of procrastination on accomplishing these things.

In terms of what types of things motivate you, that will help you understand what types of things you need to include in your plan so it actually excites you to follow through with it.

The next subcategory for conscientiousness is orderliness. That measures a couple of things, but I'm just talking about the things that are important for shooting: how much you gravitate toward routine, how well you follow through on plans, and how much disruption in your schedule will negatively impact you.

Again, very important to understand when putting together a routine and a plan for a tournament. If you know how much routine you like to have in your day-to-day life, that's going to help you build a plan that doesn't totally put you off from actually going through with it because it feels too structured.

If you know you're not somebody who follows through on plans really well, again, you can build your shooting plan to be structured in a way that's easier for you to follow through on. How would you do that? Figure out what types of things motivate you, excite you, get you to do extra work and input effort, and incorporate that into your plan.

In terms of how much disruption to your schedule negatively influences you, that's important because if you know that a big disruption in your schedule really negatively influences your emotions and your presence, it allows you to put more effort into making sure that your plan, structure, and schedule during times when you actually need to perform really well at a tournament are protected. You can avoid, or prepare for, that type of disruption by being detailed in your plan, structure, and schedule, or by trying to predict things that can happen and being prepared for them.

The next category is extraversion. That's one a lot of people already know about. Basically, it measures your sociability and how much interacting with people influences your energy levels. Within extraversion, you're going to look at enthusiasm and assertiveness.

As far as enthusiasm goes, that measures your positivity, optimism, and excitability. That would be important to understand through the filter of making a plan for your shooting, and all the different moments in time that your plan incorporates. If you trend toward being a negative person who is not very optimistic, what types of things can you do during an event, during practice, or before or after practice or events in order to mitigate the negative impact of those thoughts?

As far as assertiveness goes, that really measures your impulsiveness. Being impulsive means you don't really think through decision-making processes and understand, "If I go and do this, what types of things are going to unfold after I do that?" That's going to be really, really important in the future.

Going back to extraversion itself, it is incredibly important to understand because if you know a high level of social interaction drains your energy, then you can schedule or plan how you compete in events so you're managing that. For me personally, that's a big one. I'm an extroverted introvert. I really love social interaction. I love to talk to people. But the problem is that it hugely drains my energy, and when my energy is drained, it's very hard for me to focus, compete, and have the energy and motivation to put forth the work I need to put together a good performance at a match.

Likewise, if you're the opposite and interaction with people engages and energizes you, then you'll know maybe you should plan that into your routines and schedules at tournaments. You may want to interact with people and be on a specific type of squad that is very social while you shoot.

The next one is neuroticism. I always laugh at this because a lot of people totally misinterpret what it means. It has nothing to do with being a neurotic person. It basically measures your sensitivity to negative emotions. Inside neuroticism, we have withdrawal and volatility.

Withdrawal measures your response to anxiety and the intensity with which you experience negative emotions. That's very important. If you rank high on that scale, it means you hugely experience and react to predictable anxiety, like thinking in the future about something that's about to happen and getting anxious. That anxiety is amplified because of the way your personality works. You also experience negative emotions very intensely.

You're going to want to put things into your pre-shot routine or event routine that keep your thought process present, so you're not allowing your thoughts to drift into, "I'm sitting here Saturday night and I'm about ready to win this, and what happens if I don't?" That kind of thing is going to hugely influence your ability to perform.

Volatility measures the stability and predictability of your mood and emotions. If you're high in volatility in the neuroticism category, that would mean your moods can change very quickly, they can be very intense, and they can go from very positive to very negative very quickly.

That would be important to understand because, if you know that about yourself, then you can try to manage and control your external environment so you're not having any type of stimulus force you into thinking badly or having a bad experience.

If you combine high volatility, where moods can change very quickly and intensely, with a high level of withdrawal and high orderliness, meaning disruption in routine negatively influences you, then literally just an unplanned event at a tournament that changes your schedule can totally ruin your event. If you know that about yourself, you can make sure that type of thing doesn't happen, or at least try to limit and manage unpredictable things that are out of your control from influencing your ability to have the result you want. Incredibly important.

The last category is openness to experience. It measures spontaneity and how much you gravitate toward routine and structure. Inside openness, you have two subcategories: intellect and openness. That's kind of weird.

As far as intellect goes, don't confuse that with cognitive ability or IQ. Intellect is just the word they use to describe, in this category, your curiosity, how exploratory you are in your thoughts, and essentially your interest in abstract ideas.

Why would that possibly be something we'd want to know about ourselves through the filter of getting better at shooting? Great question. Really interesting answer.

If you rank very high in the intellect category of openness, and you're a very curious person who loves to explore new ideas, that would hugely influence how you should plan your practicing. Why? Because somebody with that mindset would really enjoy, benefit from, and learn a lot from a practice structured in a way that isn't about huge amounts of routine, repetition, and quantity. Instead, it's more about exploring limitations and capabilities.

For example: If I try to shoot a target faster and faster and faster, how does that influence my emotional state when I call pull? How does my emotional state influence my physical ability to make a specific mechanic happen? How does that emotional and physical state influence the ability I have to use my eyes in a specific way? Do my eyes get really jumpy when I get anxious because I'm trying to shoot very fast, and then I lose the bird off the arm? What emphasis do I need to put on how focused, calm, and relaxed I need to be?

Compare that with a practice where I go shoot a grid-style practice. I'm starting at a 25-yard crossing bird, shooting 10 in a row, stepping back, shooting 10 in a row, stepping back, and shooting 10 in a row. Those are two totally different approaches to practice. One would lend itself to a specific type of personality more than the other.

When it comes to practices like that, somebody very low in the intellect subcategory of openness, not IQ, would not really get much out of a practice that was very exploratory in its focus because they wouldn't really understand what they're accomplishing. They wouldn't gravitate toward the abstract style of thinking that would allow them to learn anything from that. Instead, they would kind of feel like it was a waste.

Whereas somebody high in the intellect subcategory of openness, by going through a practice routine like that, would come out of it having a huge amount of information that they could use in a tournament. They'd be able to apply certain amounts of that information to decision-making and how they approach a specific pair to limit the possibility that they're going to miss, even though they know what to do and can execute perfectly.

As far as the openness category of openness goes, that measures how drawn to creativity you are. This is one where I'm stretching a little bit to explain how it connects to building a plan to accomplish your shooting goals. But I am very high in openness, and I know that this personally influences successful results for me, so I do want to talk about it.

If you are high in openness, that means you gravitate toward art and beautiful things. You would really appreciate a beautiful view. You would be influenced emotionally by a great song. People high in openness have a very specific eye for architectural things and subtle changes in the way things look.

Why would that be important? As dumb as this sounds, it is actually very influential on a round. I can speak from experience. When I go to a tournament, if I'm staying at a hotel that's really ugly and the tournament is at a club that is very plain, with no terrain, boring-looking trees, and basically nothing external that positively influences my mood, that influences my ability to focus.

I'll give two specific examples. I don't mean any insult to the people involved in these places, because it is totally a personality thing that involves only me and nothing about them. There are two places in the United States where I have a very hard time performing well.

Again, no insult to these people. One is the National Shooting Complex, and the other is Coyote Springs. Why? When I go to Nationals, the course itself is a straight road with every single station on one straight road, all four courses combined into one. The stands are PVC pipes. The trash cans are all beat up. That sounds so mean, but it's not. It's just how I perceive things. There's no terrain.

When I go to Arizona to shoot at Coyote Springs, it's a desert with a bunch of small bushes. There are some people who personally love that type of view and experience. For me, number one, I should say I very much appreciate all the work put in by the people who run those events. But what happens to me is that the way I see things around me as I'm shooting doesn't excite me. I get the feeling of, "I don't really want to be here," not because the shoot is bad, but because I want to be stimulated by a gorgeous tree or a nice view. I'm energized by those things.

If I know that about my personality, I can say, "Okay, what other types of things make me feel that way, give me energy, and help me stay positive?" If I can't get that from the scenery of the club, the way the course is laid out, or the way the targets are, I can manually input that into what I'm experiencing with music or whatever it is.

This sounds insane, but for me, I know other people won't be able to relate to this at all. Your grades on these traits are not better or worse. They just are. I'm not saying I'm better than you because I'm high in openness. That's not the case. There are obviously, as you can hear, a lot of disadvantages to being high in openness. I rank in the 99th percentile of openness, so basically maxed out.

If I'm shooting a course where the targets are ugly, some of you won't even relate to this sentence, it's hard for me to focus. But if I go to a course where the lines of the targets are beautifully matched to the background, where they mimic the terrain or sculpt the line of the canopy of the trees, I walk up to the station and look at the pair and think, "Oh my God, that is... wow." That's my reaction. It makes me want to work hard because of the focus I get from it.

So if I'm not going to get that from what I have to work with, and I need to manually input that into what I'm experiencing, I can do that with music or whatever it is.

Going through and learning this about yourself defines a lot of undefined and unknown variables that influence your performance and go unnoticed because they are not things we talk about when we're trying to shoot well.

When you hear a professional athlete talk about what you need to do to shoot good at a tournament, you hear: "You need to practice. You need to focus on this. You need a pre-shot routine." Yeah, that's great. But the problem is, I can do all those measurable things exactly the same, with 100% effort and focus, and still ask: Why do I feel different at every tournament? Why does it feel like I have a different level of focus accessible to me every time I shoot, when I feel like I'm doing the same things? I have the same sleep schedule, the same nutritional plan, the same workout routine. Why am I experiencing these things differently?

Because of this stuff. These are the normally unmeasured metrics that influence your shooting. If you really want to make sure you accomplish your goals, strangely enough, these are the things we need to look at.

We'll leave it at that for now. We'll pull that kind of stuff in later on in the podcast to talk more about those individual things. If you have questions on that stuff, or if you just think I've absolutely lost my mind, let me know. But I'm telling you, it's my job to teach people how to get better, and I know that this makes a difference, both personally and from teaching students this kind of stuff.

The next question: What do I need to know about myself or be able to do in order to accomplish my goals?

The things we need to look for once we do that test and get that information are: What personality traits and trends will lend toward my ability to accomplish my goals? What personality traits and trends will detract from my ability to accomplish my goals?

It's very easy to see, in some of the examples I talked about, what things will hurt you or help you in the actual test of performance at the tournament. What personality traits and characteristics help me during a match, and which ones hurt me? Also, which traits and trends of my personality, and the assets I have in my life, like the money I have, time I have, and support I have from friends and family, will help or hurt my ability to follow my plan? Which traits and characteristics will help or hurt my ability to build a plan?

If you take those things into consideration, you really will be able to personally tailor a bespoke, detailed, structured approach to accomplishing your goals better than any other approach.

I fully recognize how hard it may sound, listening to all this, to go through and actually do it. That was probably the worst structured sentence in the history of the English language, but I think you know what I mean.

I'm giving you 100%. I'm talking about, at the most detailed level, what do we have to do? There will be some of you listening whose realistic goal may be that you want to win a world championship overall this year. If that's the case, I really hope you don't listen to my podcast because I want to win. But if that's the case, this is the level of detail you're going to have to get into.

If that's nowhere near the level of intensity of your goals, will you have to do all of this stuff? No. Will it help? Yeah, absolutely. You can pick and choose the types of things you want to do and incorporate.

Depending on your personality, if and when you do this type of thing and find out how much structure and routine you like, you may base how much of this information you're going to use on how structured of a plan you want to build.

By all means, I'm all for it.

Apart from that, you're also going to need to know your financial ability, the availability of time, and the commitments and other things in your life that you already have. Once you have that, it gives you the full-spectrum picture of how you're going to put this together and actually follow it.

That's the goal. We don't just want to put something on paper that looks awesome and you can be proud of. You want to actually execute all the steps of this.

Lastly, why do I need to understand what traits and skill sets are important to accomplish my goals?

If I didn't already answer that, the short answer is that you need to understand what traits and skill sets are important because if you don't, you're going to get lost trying to do it. If you don't know what's important to do everything you want to do, then you won't be able to navigate the complexity of the path ahead of you.

Maybe accidentally you'll get there in spite of doing it the wrong way. That's happened to me too. But if you want to give your best shot at accomplishing these things, you need to understand this stuff about yourself.

Then you can build a plan that works for you, that doesn't feel like work, that incorporates the things that motivate you into the plan so you actually want to do it instead of feeling like, "I have to go do this again because it's part of my plan, and I want to accomplish that thing a lot, but I don't want to do any of this stuff."

That's why it's very, very important.

I think what I'm going to do, to give you an example of how this works, is take one of my product goals and break it apart in a way that takes all this into account and puts it in a format you can understand and apply. But I'm not going to do that until you do it first. Not that I don't have it already, but I mentioned this in the last episode: I believe in having you try to figure things out first. It's okay if you mess it up. Then you come back to the table after attempting it, get the formula to do it correctly, look at what was put down correctly and incorrectly, learn from that, and rebuild it in a way that makes sense.

Otherwise, I don't want you copying and pasting the structure of my goals and plans. I want to make sure the way you do it is truly through your own filter, because that's the best way to guarantee success.

In the next recorded episode, at the end of the month, I will release that and talk you through it. Until then, we're going to work together as a team to build it up for you personally through the YouTube Lives and stuff like that.

Cool. Sounds good.

Let's get into the next category: self-analysis and self-assessment. This is not going to take very long to get through because I talked a lot about it in the one we just covered. We'll run through it kind of quick, but keep in mind we're going to be pulling this as a main focus of everything we do going forward for the rest of the year.

First question under this category: Why is it important to be self-aware?

Very simple answer. Actually, not simple. I lied to you.

It's important to be self-aware through the filter of making a plan because if you understand what things get in the way of you accomplishing that, and what things turn you off from going through with your plan, then you will be able to build a plan that is easy for you to progress through, which lends itself to the highest probability of accomplishing your goals. I have said that statement so much in this podcast. I know you're going to hate hearing it, but it's true.

Why is it important to be self-aware through the filter of your shooting? Because being self-aware of your strengths and weaknesses, your mechanical abilities and techniques, your physical limitations and strengths, your visual limitations and strengths, and your emotional limitations and strengths will help you, in real time, have the best strategy for how to approach every presentation at every station, or FITASC peg, or whatever you come across.

If you don't know what you're good and bad at in terms of your ability to shoot, then you may make a plan that incorporates something that is the worst thing you can do. Your ability to execute it the way you planned is going to be very, very low. You might have a great plan, but terrible execution every time you call pull. It may be a better plan than one you could put together using things you're good at doing, but the thing you can do and are good at is going to net you a better result than the thing you can't do.

That's why it's important to be self-aware through those two filters.

What do you need to be self-aware about? Take the whole last category that I just talked about. All of that, you need to be self-aware of as much about you and your personality as possible.

You also need to be self-aware about your strengths and weaknesses in your mechanical and technical abilities in shooting. You need to be self-aware of your emotional state in the current moment. You need to be self-aware of how good your eyes are working, not just in terms of clarity and definition, but in terms of the muscular movement of your eyes.

I'm going to give you a quick scenario. Let's say you are one station away from winning something that is your goal at the end of the year. The pair is a full-spring, quartering-out, edge-on bird where the target sits right next to you and has a little curl. Let's say it's a right-to-left bird. It starts on the right, right next to you, full spring and edge-on, and it's quartering out. Right when it gets to the center of the field in front of you, in terms of horizontally, not in distance but left to right, it leans a little bit to the right. It comes out real fast and then curls back to the right.

The second bird is a report pair. The second bird is a no-spring flopper sitting at 45 yards that doesn't go really anywhere. Your break point for the first bird is about 20 feet up in the air, or let's say 15 feet, and that second bird doesn't go any higher than about five or six feet.

Let's say you're not a self-aware person. In both scenarios I'm about to give you, you as the shooter understand that if you run this station, you accomplish the goal you've worked toward for the whole year.

First scenario: not a self-aware person. Because you know the situation you're in, you're nervous. We'll leave it at that. You're really, really nervous, with a lot of anxiety and adrenaline.

The first bird is going to look really, really fast because it's close to you. The trap is sitting right next to you, and it quarters away, so it covers a huge amount of two-dimensional space in your field of view very fast, faster than any other bird I can think of. That's why I came up with that target.

But you can't shoot it in the part of the line where that's the case. You're going to shoot it closer toward the center of the field, as it's starting to change directions again. At that point, it's no longer quartering. It's more like outgoing.

If you're really amped up, you not only don't have good physical control of your body, but you also don't have good mental control of your thoughts or emotional control of what you're feeling. Because of those things, you don't have a calm state of mind, emotionally and physically, where your eyes are going to be able to move very smoothly and calmly.

You're going to call pull. The bird is going to come out. It's going to look super fast. You're going to respond to that with a little snappy hand movement, and your eyes are going to have a really hard time connecting to the bird. Your hands are just going to fly over there.

By the time you get to your break point, the bird basically is not moving at all. It's moving 100% in the direction straight away from you, but it's moving 0% in any other direction. Physically, with a shotgun, there is no technique or movement that would connect to a bird just going in or out. We only get to move with a bird in two dimensions.

That fast, amped-up energy you have is going to translate to you pulling the gun off the line in some direction, and you're not going to see it very well. You'll make that little snappy move, bang, and then the second bird has no spring, coming out directly under your gun, where because of your first break point you've totally occluded it. Everybody would have a totally occluded second bird.

Because you hear the bird come out but can't see it, you have a little additional adrenaline spike and you throw the gun down to see under it. You overcorrect, get underneath the bird, and because you threw the gun down, the gun is off your face but in your shoulder. To get back in, you lean and lunge forward as you push the gun up with your hands. You have a huge physical movement with the gun on a target that has no spring. Then you shoot off the line and miss.

Trying to replicate that pair with perfect mechanics and execution four times in a row to win your goal? The probability that you're going to run that station is basically zero.

Now let's say you're a self-aware person. In your planning, you recognize that you are incredibly amped up because of the situation, the score, and being able to accomplish your goal. You know you're experiencing a lot of adrenaline. You know you don't have good control of your hands. You know your eyes are very reactive instead of controllable right now. When you see something fast, your eyes jump instead of smoothly connecting. You know you don't have good physical control of your body because of the adrenaline and shakiness.

You recognize that all these things combined make this pair very, very difficult.

What could you do? In your pre-shot routine before every time you call pull, you could put a huge emphasis on physically decompressing anxiety and tension. As you set up your hold point, you could make a strategic decision to hold a little farther out so you don't have so much movement in your hands that would make you feel like you're going to get beat because the bird is closing in so fast. That reaction would make your eyes snap out and your hands make a snappy move, and then you would miss.

So instead, you have a little farther out hold point and focal point. You consciously tell yourself, "When I call pull, this bird is going to be coming out super fast. Don't react to that. I know you want to, but don't, because if you do, it'll be bad. Just let it come. Because of the angles on this bird, by the time it gets to my break point, it will have no movement. I can be nice and calm. I can have nice, slow, minimal movement."

Then as you set up and put your eyes on your focal point, you put an emphasis on giving yourself just a little extra time to let your eyes settle. Take a nice deep breath and relax. You call pull and make the move.

You also know that, because you don't have very good control of your body right now, you're going to move very fast and jumpy. The second bird requires the complete opposite. So you say, "Okay, I can't try to connect to that one because I don't have the physical ability to make a movement with that much precision at that speed and in that small amount of space the bird's line is giving me."

"I know my coach teaches me it's important to make a connection on every bird. But I also know that if I try to make a connection on this bird, because of the way I feel, see, and think right now, my connection will be too much movement and it'll cause me to miss off the line. Instead, after I shoot the first bird, I'm just going to move my gun directly under the apex where I marked that point. I'm going to let my eyes go back to the trap. I'm going to watch the bird without moving, watch the bird hit the apex right when it stalls out, and pull the trigger with no movement."

Then hopefully you break as many as possible.

That is the difference between being self-aware while you're shooting and not being self-aware. Both people are the same person. They have the same mechanical skill sets and the same understanding of how to read the bird. The difference is that the first person in that scenario is going to miss targets not because they can't hit them, but because they made the wrong choice on how to try to hit them. The second person avoids that mistake as much as possible, not because they're a better shooter, but because they decided to make a better application of specific mechanics, plans, thoughts, and processes to avoid their real-time current limitations.

Self-awareness is huge, and those are the types of things you need to be self-aware about.

The first question under building a plan is: How do I build a plan?

I need to preface this whole category the same way I prefaced self-analysis and self-assessment by saying that the real answers to all these questions are the podcasts for the remainder of the year. I'm not going to get into huge amounts of detail now, both to save time and because we will go so in depth with this that this podcast is just a summary so you can try to start doing this on your own. I encourage you to do this on your own before we get into it. That way we can take what you have, modify it, and make it better.

To build a plan to accomplish your goals, you have to take everything we just talked about and put it together into one streamlined thing.

The first thing you do is take your product goals, the things you want to accomplish by the end of the year, and list them. Then put your process goals under each one. Say, "Here's my product goal for the end of the year. What types of things can I do continuously to help me accomplish that end-result product goal?" Those are your process goals.

After that, input your stepping stone goals. Ask: "What other types of things can I accomplish or do that would help me gain experience and knowledge that would help me accomplish my product goal?" Those are your stepping stone goals.

After that, do a personality test. I know there's going to be a lot of you listening who say, "I'm not going to do that. I can skip that step." Don't skip that step. It's more important than even putting together process and stepping stone goals. Without doing a personality test, you don't know how to structure anything else in your plan in a way that works for you.

You'll be able to put together a plan, but there will be parts of your plan that are polarizing to your personality, and that will prevent you from doing it, or at least doing it well.

Do a personality test. Learn about yourself. Learn what you gravitate toward, what gives you energy, what detracts from your energy, what helps you stay focused, what takes away your focus, what influences your mood positively and negatively, how easily that mood changes, how easily your focus gets lost, how much you like structure, and how much you dislike structure.

Once you learn about your personality, go back to your goals. Now that you have your main goal, your process goals, and your stepping stone goals for each product goal, start by categorizing the traits of your personality into strengths and weaknesses under every one of those process goals and stepping stone goals. Have a negative category list and a positive category list, where you put what traits of your personality are going to help you with that goal or process and which ones are going to hurt you.

You will find that some personality traits that help you in some goals will be the personality traits that hurt you in other goals. How do you manage that? You have to think critically, and we'll talk about that later on.

You want to know what parts of you, and how the way you think, operate, and live day to day, will influence your ability to accomplish those things.

Once you have those personality traits in those categories, under each point in your process and stepping stone goals, then ask: "What can I do, and what will I need to have that I don't have, in order to accomplish this?"

Things you can do might be: If one is "I need to be able to stay focused at a tournament," go back to your personality and look at what types of things take from your focus. Avoid those things. Emphasize the things that give you focus during a tournament. Put that in there, then build a routine for yourself at tournaments to follow that helps you do that.

If one goal is to have a weekly practice routine at a gun club, what can I do and what do I need to accomplish that? I can put together a schedule so I make sure that by the end of the week, I didn't accidentally not find time to do it. I can also put together a little part of a savings account to make sure I have the money to do that and to make sure I have financial goals that allow me to stay focused and keep on track with my shooting goals.

That's how you build a plan to work all that kind of stuff and make sure it happens.

After you do all that, in your goals, processes, and product goals, you will find where you should insert little moments of analysis or self-assessment to understand how to keep yourself on track.

Let's say you have practices scheduled in your plan because that answered the question of how you can accomplish one of your goals. Then you can say, "Okay, having a practice is great, but I need to know what to practice. In order to understand what to practice, I need an objective analysis of what I'm currently not doing well." So input self-analyses in there.

After you have all that, now you have a plan. Or at least you have as much of a plan as I want to talk about right now. Later on, we'll learn to get more in depth, and I'll actually go through and do it with you. As a community, we can build that up. But that is the skeletonized version of what a plan is to accomplish your goals.

I realize that in answering that question, I'm not giving you exact answers. I'm giving you a filter question to use to get yourself an answer. I have to do that because I'm not giving you your goals. You're assigning your own goals, process goals, and stepping stone goals. It's not possible for me to give you an answer to that question. You have to find the answer, and the way to do it is to use specific questions to ask yourself so you can fill in that information.

That's where we're going to get more in depth later on down the road for the rest of the year, finding that kind of stuff out, learning how to get to it, and learning how to self-assess more efficiently.

What do I need to include in a plan so that it leads me to accomplishing my goals? All of that information. Plus, you need to take what you got back from the personality test in terms of what motivates you, and if you already know that, use this too: incorporate things that motivate you into the way you structure your plan.

For me, publicly accomplishing a goal to put on my resume does not motivate me because I don't care what other people think about me. It doesn't help me accomplish anything if I just list things I want to win. Things that motivate me, because I'm a curious and exploratory-minded person, are the accumulation of knowledge and different experiences.

If I wanted to build a plan that would help me accomplish something, I would structure it in a way that has me learning things about myself through the process. Then I'm accumulating an understanding of how I operate and what makes me get better as I go along. If I'm not actively doing something in my plan, I'm going to be thinking about what I gained from doing my plan. That's going to make me want to go do it because I get excited about that kind of stuff.

As far as motivation goes, if you're somebody who needs external motivation and support, I would put things into your practicing or, if you have a health aspect of your plan in terms of fitness and nutrition, find somebody else who's a friend who can do those things along with you to give you accountability and help push you when you need motivation.

Understand if you're internally or externally motivated and structure what you're doing around that.

As far as what a structured plan looks like for somebody who hates structure, that question is very uniquely individual to each person, but it can be answered by understanding more about yourself and doing what I just explained.

I personally hate structure. I'm not going to build a plan that says, "Wednesday afternoon, you need to do this practice. You need to do a grid practice with 10 shots at every 10 yards back, and keep doing it until you can do it without missing." To me, that's so routine that I can't focus while I'm doing it. The mundane feeling of being on autopilot and going through the motions doesn't make me excited to do that.

I like creativity and exploring, so my plan would not be structured in a routine at all. My plan would be more like, "I want to learn this, I want to learn that, I want to learn this." Then I would go and try to do that and expect a lot of failure in the process, but I learn from the failure. I'm gaining knowledge as I go.

What does a structured plan look like for somebody who hates structure? The answer is: it accomplishes what you're trying to do or gain, but it doesn't make you feel like you're going through a routine.

The simplest way I can explain it is that you don't have routine in your structure. Your structure is definitions of things you're trying to gain, but your path forward in doing that is left undefined, but with guidance.

It would be along the lines of: "I need to gain this skill." Instead of writing down exactly what you need to do, when you need to do it, and how you need to do it, it would be more like, "This is going to be my focus for this specific practice. I'm going to go out and play around and explore these different types of targets. Every time I'm shooting, instead of trying to hit, I'm going to think about and use self-awareness to assess what I experienced and felt, and then grade each shot based on that."

I think that's good enough on the building-the-plan category. If you have any questions on that, feel free to submit a question on my website, as you can for any other category. We'll move on to staying focused and disciplined, and then see what happens.

With this category, it's pretty simple. I promise you this will be the shortest category in here.

Staying focused and disciplined: How do you do it? How do I stay on track, keep making progress, and keep getting better?

The answer is simple. Find a way to stay motivated and maintain some level of accountability to what you're doing.

As far as motivation goes, the only way to answer that question is to ask yourself another question: What motivates me? If you can answer that question, then build that into the process of executing your plan.

If the thing that motivates you is accomplishing your goals, that's going to be pretty easy. If you're somebody who procrastinates and doesn't like to do that kind of stuff, break down your process into smaller things. The smaller those things are, the easier it will feel to accomplish them, and then you'll keep doing it.

If the process of learning helps you feel motivated, structure your plan into that. If doing it with somebody else helps you feel motivated, structure your plan like that. If teaching or giving somebody information and watching them progress through their goals helps you stay motivated, use this podcast to help you teach them, work with them on that, and do both of your plans together.

Whatever you feel motivated by, long story short, put that into your process and use it as the fuel to fire you up and get you to do the things on your plan.

As far as keeping making progress, those two things are hand in hand. If you're motivated to execute what's on the list of things that are important to accomplishing your goal, then the further forward you go, the more progress you're going to make.

On top of that, the way you structure your stepping stone goals should help you make progress. It's not very valuable to just list the end product goal for the end of the year and say, "All right, here are all the processes I need to accomplish that by this time."

Break apart what experiences would be important to have to accomplish that goal at the end of the year, or whenever it is. Break apart what knowledge gained would be important and help you accomplish that when you're in the moment. Use the answer to that question to build stepping stone goals, so you can measure that and understand, "Okay, I am making progress because I'm checking off these stepping stone goals, and it's giving me important information and knowledge."

That's the way you stay focused and disciplined.

The other way you can do it is by participating in this podcast. The whole purpose of this is to build a community where all of us have the same goal of accomplishing our goals. The more you participate, submit things, and interact with people who are doing the same, the more you're going to feel energized to do all this stuff. You'll have people to help push you when you don't feel like doing it.

So participate and engage in the podcast. Find what motivates you. Work with people to hold you accountable, and you should be good to go.

Lastly, the last question, which hopefully doesn't apply to anybody as we progress through the rest of the year, is: What do I do if I'm not seeing any improvement or making progress toward my goals?

The easiest way to answer that is that you first need the structure built into your plan to assess and measure progress and improvement.

If you're not seeing any improvement or progress, go back and look to see if your plan has a way of actually doing that. If your plan only has your goal and the things that are important to attain that goal, it's not possible for you to see progress because there's nothing you're measuring.

Even if you have things in there that measure progress in your stepping stone goals, you may not have gone through and dissected that plan and goal well enough to use metrics and measurable information that track your progress in the way you really need to.

If you're not seeing improvement, the first thing to do is go back and assess: Does my plan allow me to measure this? If it doesn't, add that into your plan. If it does, reassess whether it allows you to measure success in all the ways possible.

Depending on the structure of your goals, it may be hard to understand what success looks like. Let's say one of your goals is to enjoy the socialization aspect of shooting a monthly league with your friends at your local club. Depending on your mood when you go, it's going to be hard afterward to assess whether or not you're being successful in that.

So you are going to want to define things like: What types of things do I enjoy when I'm out shooting with my friends? What success makes me have fun? Is it how well I interact with my friends and the things we do during or afterward?

That sounds like a crappy answer, and like a not-useful answer, but it really is useful. The definition of success to you is going to be important for measuring this.

Let's say after going back through, analyzing, and making sure everything is right, you find out that yes, everything is right. I defined it as good as I possibly can. I have the correct stepping stone goals and milestone trackers incorporated into everything, and I'm just not accomplishing these things. Every chance I get to measure success, I end up failing at it.

Then you need to ask yourself: Is the goal I set for myself truly something I really, really want?

I touched on that earlier, but I'll bring it back again. If your goal is something you put down because somebody else wants you to do it, or because you think it would be fun to talk about accomplishing, it's going to be hard to find the motivation to go through the process of accomplishing those stepping stone goals, measuring your success, or actually accomplishing your goal.

Make sure that's the case. If you can truly say your goal is something you really want, and that means a lot to you for whatever reason, then assess whether the structure of your plan has the correct types of things that motivate you built into it.

To say that an easier way: look at whether you're excited to go through and execute your process. If you're not excited about doing that, you're probably not doing it. If you are doing it, ask yourself: Am I doing it in a way that's just going through the motions to check something off the list, or am I doing it in a way that I'm actually learning from and getting better from?

If you're just doing things to check off the list, reevaluate what your process goals are, why they're there, and what they can give you once you're going through them.

Lastly, let's say everything is perfect and you're not making progress. If your motivation is good, your goals are good, your execution of your process and discipline is good, your focus during everything is good, and you're learning through all this, then you actually are making progress and seeing improvement because you're learning things about yourself.

Yeah, you may not accomplish your goal at the end of the year. The majority of us probably won't, because the purpose of a goal is to be something that's not easily attainable.

One of my product goals for the end of 2023 is to win the national championship. I have been competing for 23 years, and I'm probably close to having entered my 20th national championship if I'm not there already. I had 20 shots or so at doing that, and I've never won.

I have never prepared as much as I plan on preparing for this year's national championship. Still, even with that, the probability of me winning is not very high. That's okay with me because all the things I accomplish, gain, and learn along the way will help me do it the next year.

A lot of it is about the way you view what you're doing. If you're purely product-oriented and measure success only in attainable things, you may want to reevaluate the way you look at the process you're going through.

Really, the goals we have listed, we're going to work really hard to accomplish them, and I'm going to help you get to the point where you can. But if you don't, that doesn't mean you failed. It just means you didn't get it that time. You can always do it again next year.

The next time you do it, you'll have a better chance because you just worked the whole year to accomplish that goal. Yeah, you fell short, but you also gained valuable experience about what choices you can make in the middle of that round, or in the middle of whatever you're doing, that don't lend toward accomplishing that goal. The next opportunity you get, you won't make those decisions that time. You'll make different decisions.

Let's say, theoretically, this random goal has 20 possible things you can do at the very last moment, when you can do one more thing to either accomplish it or not accomplish it. Let's say only one of them results in accomplishing the goal. It may take you 20 attempts. If it's a tournament, that's 20 years. I'm hoping the national championship only has 20 different failure options because I don't know how long I'm going to keep doing this.

If it's a monthly event at your local club, that's about a year and a half. If it's just an experience you're looking to have, who knows how long that timeframe can be? But every time you do it and fail, in this theoretical example, you're 1/20 of the way closer to succeeding. It may take you all 20 attempts to get that successful attempt, or it might take two. Regardless, every time you do it, you learn one way not to. That's valuable.

That's all I've got for you on that for now. What we'll do with this question is have our own measurable milestones as we go through the year to check in and say, "How are we doing as far as making progress toward accomplishing all of our individual and unique goals?"

We'll see how many of us are on track and how many of us are not. If you're not, then we'll talk about and learn whether we need to restructure, reanalyze, and replan some of the things we're doing. Then we can make an analysis of whether this is working or not working, and with the information we've gained so far, put together a better and more knowledgeable attempt at getting to the point where we're seeing improvement and making progress.

We'll have those steps along the way to make sure we have the best attempt possible.

Other than that, just keep going through...

And a total ADHD mind blank on that one. I can tell you one thing: I've done that enough to know when I'm going to get it back and when I'm not. That one's gone forever. I have no idea what I was going to say, and I hope it was not important. Anyways.

I hope that this episode was entertaining and valuable for you guys. Let's quickly get into a summary of everything, then we'll wrap up and we're good to go. I will see you guys on the YouTube episode.

All right, so just a real quick run-through of everything that we talked about. I'm going to go in depth with everything I just said and explain it all again so we can double the length of this podcast.

I'm just kidding.

We first touched on goal setting. We talked about the types of goals, timeframes of goals, and what stepping stone goals were. Then we went into the important and required qualities you need to achieve your goals: how to find that, what to use it for, and why it's important.

We went into self-analysis, what that is and how to use it. We talked about building a plan and how to take all the things in this episode, put them together, and structure something that helps you move forward and make progress toward accomplishing those goals.

Then we briefly touched on how to stay focused and disciplined, and what to do if we're not seeing improvement.

Again, I'll mention, in case you didn't hear the other two times in the podcast, that there is an outline in the description of this podcast for the timestamps of all the different parts. If you want to go back through and take notes on something I said, you can look at those timestamps and go to that time in the podcast.

Also, if you have any questions on anything, because the purpose of this podcast is for me to teach you things, it's important for me to know what I'm failing at communicating to you.

On my website, there is always a question submission form. It will be very unique to every episode. If you go on there, click the question submission form, and click the episode you have a question on, it will detail out the categories and talking points I have for that episode so you can remember what we covered in a summary. You don't have to go back through and listen to the podcast again. Then you can type in the questions you have, and I will do my best to always answer your questions.

I want to help you guys accomplish these goals, and I think it would be super fun if we can all do this together.

My website, in case you don't know, is at the bottom of this podcast in the description. It's also just dradulovich.com. You can search my name in Google as well and it will pop up. If you go to the top menu of the page, it will say The Journey Podcast. Click that, and all the important stuff is in there.

The question submission form is there. The goal submission sheet is there if you want to redo that. The Shoot Analysis Sheet is on my website if you want to do that.

Also, my schedule for booking lessons is on my website, including all the different places I visit. I travel all over the country to book lessons, and I have a schedule that goes out to the end of 2023.

I also do video calls every day with students all over the world. They're really cool. They're recorded. We can go in depth with a Shoot Analysis Sheet, or we can do something totally different. I can take the videos you send me during your practice or tournaments and analyze those things. At the end of every video call, you will get a link with the whole video call recording that you can watch over and over again, and you never lose it. That's incredibly valuable, so I highly recommend any of you guys do that if you'd like.

Lastly, I'll cover some scheduling things. Because of how many people submitted their goal sheets, I'm going to move the YouTube Live informal episode. Instead of being Wednesday of this week, let's make it Thursday so you have two days to digest all of the information I just spewed in this episode, and you can come to the YouTube Live video with any questions or comments you have.

We'll do the YouTube Live informal episode, which is really just a hangout to get to know each other and goof off, on Thursday, January 12. So far on my schedule and calendar, I have it planned to start at 7:00 p.m. Central Time and go until 10:00 p.m. Central Time. Not because you need to be there for three hours, but because there are so many of you across so many time zones. I want to make sure I don't do it at a time when everybody on the West Coast is still at work, or so late that everybody on the East Coast is asleep.

I'll be there for three hours. You can be there for as much or as little time as you'd like. It'll be fun. We'll hang out, get to know each other, talk about this kind of stuff, answer any questions you have, and I will be looking forward to that.

Thank you guys again for listening to this episode.

Also, if you have any questions, concerns, or comments about how it would be helpful for me to structure things, even things like, "David, I hate the way you explain things because you ramble on for so long that I lose what you're talking about," let me know. If a lot of you tell me that, then I'm going to hire somebody to read off bullet points for these podcasts so I can be less confusing.

No, I'm just kidding.

That's all I've got.

I am currently in Houston, Texas, at Westside Sporting Grounds and have a few days in between. Next week, I'm going to be up in Rochester, New York, teaching at Rochester Brooks. I know there are probably going to be some of you guys there who have listened to these episodes, so I will see you there.

I think at the time I'm there, it's going to overlap one of the YouTube Lives, so maybe we'll do a little fun thing with all of us there and get a little group participation. We'll see what happens.

Thank you guys very much.

If you can, go to YouTube, log into YouTube, and subscribe to the YouTube channel so you get notifications of when the live events are up and you can participate.

If you're going to participate in a live, or if you're just going to watch a YouTube Live video where you want to interact with me and type in the chat so I can answer your questions and interact with other people watching, you will have to be logged into YouTube. I'm only saying that because there are some people here who might not understand how that works and might get frustrated.

If you don't have a YouTube account already, create one and subscribe to The Journey Podcast on there. That way I can talk to you on there and even pull you in on video if you want.

Thanks again, and we will see you guys in a couple of days.

Adios.