On Competition: Awareness vs. Concentration

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Introduction

Are you ready? Standby! *Beep*!

The next moment you hear, “If finished, unload and show clear…“. Aside from going over your plan one more time in your head, you remember little more than a blur.

“Two Alpha. Two Alpha. Alpha Charlie…Scoring complete!“

You look at your review and see you just took a stage win by a solid margin. However, the thoughts of “I didn’t see my dot most of that time” or, “did I forget my reload?” still linger. These thoughts certainly hung on me, until I got into understanding one of the keys to high-speed, accurate shooting. What is that? It’s performing with no thought, in an almost Zen like state.

This brings us to the concept of Awareness over Concentration. The difference between the two is that awareness is the passive act of processing sensory input, and concentration is the active act of processing sensory input with thought involved. Another way to view the difference is that if you are acting and aware, there is no internal monologue. It’s all just unconscious mind at work. If you are acting and concentrating, there’s an internal monologue associated with that. That’s the conscious mind at work, with awareness only occurring in the present.

If you’ve done a handful of stages, you’ve almost certainly felt both, (be it in moments of active target searching or flawless stage plan execution). Now let’s get to the details of how it works and how to apply it to shooting. I can promise you the results will be extremely tangible!

How It Works: The Eyes

Competitive shooting, (and many other high speed sports) are extremely visual in nature. There’s a lot to pay attention to, and split decision actions are the name of the game. Adjusting to a track in racing, hitting a baseball, catching a football, and executing a stage plan all are done on visual cueing, and take practice to get good at. Thinking about doing these actions while doing them will always slow you down. Now why is that?

The brain is an incredible thing, and extremely capable if you allow it to be. Thought is a process that uses many areas of the brain in harmony to produce a decision or action. Reflexive style actions use primarily what’s called the fast visuo-motor cortex. It’s basically a fast-track from the eyes to the body for action. Thought tends to hinder this process, overall slowing you down. This has the immediate consequence of making visual cueing without thought the primary force that drives you through a stage.

Application: Vision & training

The foundation of how to perform in a Zen like state rests upon the fundamentals: sights, grip, trigger pull, reloads. Being able to execute these actions well and on demand is essential. Practicing them often will bring one the consistency that can make or break ranks.

The primary actor, however, is vision and coming with it, visual cues. As you moves through a stage, targets appear in your vision which cues your body to put the gun on target. Your sights aligning on target at the desired spot cues your body to pull the trigger. Them returning tells you to do it again. Looking to certain positions cues the body to run to them, and so on. It’s all vision based. Cues are set during your stage planning.

Creating a stage plan (to the brain) entails looking through the stage as if you’re doing it, showing your brain all of the cues you’ll need to execute the stage. Take every bit of those few minutes to lock in your plan. The first time, you’re likely going to talk to yourself or others to get a feel for pathing, engagement order, reloads, etc. That’s all good stuff. The moment you’ve got your plan down, do a few dry runs of it as if it were live, with no thought. After that few minutes is up, visualize your plan again, without thought. Don’t tell yourself, “I need to reload from position 2 to 3”. Rather, repeatedly visualize yourself reloading between position 2 and 3. When on deck and making ready, give it good couple once overs, and get to work.

All of these actions serve to essentially pre-train the brain as to exactly what you want your body to do, as your eyes guide it through a stage.

Visualizing Drills

Functionally, there are a lot of styles of drills that can train your body’s response to the variety of cues you’ll encounter in stages.

One of my favorites is a modified throttle style drill. I’ll use 4-5 targets, staggered at 5-7 yards in distance. Sometimes, I’ll place no-shoots or hard cover type targets in the mix. I space the targets horizontally about 2-5 ft. apart (spacings that change your cueing may vary). The drill is just a simple, stationary, two rounds on each target on the buzzer. What it does, is train how you react to rapidly changing cues. I like to throw a no-shoot covering a lot of the second closest target in the array. This forces me to not point shoot like I do the first target, but to actually acquire my sights on a particular location on target before breaking the trigger. Changing target engagement order, throwing in mandatory reloads, and varying cover or no-shoot geometries are all easy ways to get a lot of training out of very little.

I’m a big proponent of making drills that train the things you know you need work on. Bagged 2 of 4 rounds at a half no-shoot target at 15 yards because the target before was open, and at 10 yards you didn’t verify the sights on the second? Set up a drill transition from a 10 yard open target to a 15 yard no-shoot. Forgot a mandatory reload before a wide transition? Drill that. The best part is that you can even do this in dry fire! Longer distance targets can be simulated by smaller targets at closer distance (I certainly can’t setup a 35 yard target in my living room).

Visualizing Focus

The last element is focus. I would describe this as a sort of passive filtering of your visual input over the course of a stage, allowing you to expand awareness for other things. In other words, to focus is to remove mental clutter. This is vital. Mental clutter will slow down your response to cues to shoot, move, and act in general. For example, on a Virginia Count 1 stage, I’m going to filter out visual information about my hits that would cue me to take a follow up shot, making room to be more aware of what level of sight verification I need to engage successive targets and respond to other cues.

Summary

Hit Factor is a measure of efficiency of stage performance: how fast and how accurate were you in response to the cues you planned. Increasing efficiency is about removing all of the “slop” in your execution. At the core of it, the most important place that “slop” can live in is in the mind. In a sense, the ideal mental state to best execute a stage is the same that’s reached in Zen mediation. We want that state of existing in the moment, indifferent to thought, focused on breathing. Getting to that point consistently is something that will require constant work and practice. However, those moments where everything goes accordingly to plan almost automatically are what keep me coming back for more. Thanks for reading!

Devil 6-1

AUTHOR'S NOTES | April 1st 2025

Starting off shooting, I was young and poor, but ambitious. I wanted to get as many meaningful rounds in as possible. Buying and shooting hundreds to over a thousand rounds a month just simply wasn’t feasible. After doing a little bit of digging, I came across the practice of dry fire, and immediately got to work. The gains from this were almost immediate.

While nowadays I’m able to afford ammo, dry fire still finds an extremely valuable and routine place in my training regime. I do it daily, as consitency and targeted practice are key. If you have the intention to continuously increase your skill and you’re not dry firing, you better get to it! Thank me later!

-Devil 6-1

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