Learning Through Failure in Firearms Training: Why Bad Shots Make You Better

Do you struggle with progressing in your training?  Have you ever considered how humans learn the best?  Does true learning take place in repetitive practice only?  In this article let’s investigate how we learn best, and that might mean changing up our mindset of how we perceive ourselves and our progress on paper to meet our desired training goals, and not get caught in the trap of our own ego when things don’t go as we wish.

Our Mindset Can Help Or Hinder Our Learning

Yes, mindset has everything to do with how we go about learning, even in the firearm world.  In her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”, Psychologist Carol Dweck speaks about two specific mindsets that we have in anything we do and first we must understand our current mindset, and what our goals are before we can understand how our mindset can help or hinder us in obtaining those goals

How can we move to a growth mindset - a mindset that is open to learning, even if that means experiencing and working through failure?  It is believing that goals can be achieved through hard work and dedication.  The motivation might come from within to be in that growth mindset, or the motivation might come from observing others achieving their goals (observing others can also hinder us).  Either way, a growth mindset requires us to work through challenges, even failures, but not allow either of those to define ourselves or our skill level at the moment.  Aristotle was even quoted as saying “We can’t learn without pain.”  The growth mindset is understanding and working through the process, not necessarily focusing on the outcomes.

How To Learn The Hard Stuff

T. Alexander Puutio, Ph.D. writes in a Psychology Today article Why Struggling (the Right Way) Helps You Learn, that “Difficult learning is better learning”.  He describes three key items we need to consider when learning hard things.  Spacing, interleaving and self-testing.

Spacing means not trying to cram like in school for a test.  We’ve been there right?  We’re heading to a class and want to do well on the instructor drills that he’s running, but we wait until the weekend before to begin practicing them, and run them over and over again, trying to will ourselves to get better.  Instead of longer sessions trying to pack everything in, our brains learn through repetition over time.  Practicing something once for 2 hours is going to result in less retention and learning than practicing a skill 8 times for 15 minutes over the course of two weeks.  It allows our brain to reinforce the skill and the learning (again with a growth mindset and positive correction).

Interleaving is not focusing on one specific skill.  Let’s say I desire to get better at reloading my pistol at speed.  Focusing solely on the exact steps for a reload are not going to help the shot immediately after a reload, or the shot before a reload.  Our brains become challenged when we switch gears and it helps pattern recognition.  Practice the hard stuff along with other standard things that are a part of your goals.  You can practice or focus on one thing, but don’t neglect the big picture where that one thing comes into play.  Micro-drills help to refine that specific function, but it also needs to be practiced as the whole process.

We have benchmark drills within our MantisX Pistol/Rifle app, but what does that really mean?  A benchmark is a point of reference in which things may be compared with.  It measures progress towards a certain learning goal over time.

When working on a skill, start with a benchmark to know where you are at now, and that becomes what you can compare against as you progress.  Once you improve, that becomes your new benchmark.  Benchmarks are not static, they move as you improve.  Mantis makes it easy to benchmark skills.  You can do this by making notes (keywords) on drills specific to a task to filter your history and see the progression based on the key words you put into the notes, so any drill can be used as a benchmark for a task.

Embracing the Struggle

So what are your goals?  Or do you just practice to practice?  I would question the motive to practice without some goal in mind.  Just saying “I want to get better” is too vague and if you continue to repeat what you are comfortable with at the level you can do it comfortably, additional learning is not going to take place.  Learning or increasing skills should be uncomfortable and dare I say “hard”.  There is good news!  Learning requires some amount of failure.  We aren’t saying that you need this exact failure rate.  The principle given in this article is universal, but the application to you is very personal.  Shooting is a very specific sport that has a lot of moving pieces, but the gist of the concepts can still apply.

I think many people practice what is easy and comfortable and most importantly, what they are good at.  Ultimately, we all have egos and when we cannot do something well, depending on our mindset, it can affect us and our choices.  I cannot expect to get better at reloads if I am just practicing pressing the trigger at a target.  I must choose to practice reloading the pistol quickly and efficiently, even if that means my shot scores are vastly lower than my average shot scores.  We cannot allow “bad scores” to dissuade us from doing the practice.  That is our ego getting in the way of making progress.

Failure does not mean learning hasn’t or won’t occur.  Many psychologists believe that when things are hard, that’s when the learning, and ultimate breakthroughs happen.  Yes, this means we learn most when it’s a struggle.  Look back at your life and key learning moments that stand out.  Were they times where everything was daisies and roses?  Probably not.  We tend to remember things that we learned the “hard way”. 

How Do I Apply This?

Ultimately, this is hard because we have self-perception and that drives much of our personality.  We tend to latch onto and dwell on failure instead of looking at it as a learning experience and moving on because of how we perceive ourselves.  Scoring is something that we experienced all throughout our learning years, and the scoring didn’t stop.  Getting something wrong was considered “bad” and now we’re asking you to shift your mind to realizing that mistakes are valuable training opportunities.

The score you see or the target with holes is the outcome, and we often fail to pay attention to the process and we allow outcomes to define who we are or the progress we made, when that’s a very narrow window to look through.  If you use your MantisX or Laser Academy products on a regular basis, look at trends over time.  Consider what is happening during drills, not the end.  Pay attention to yourself and what you are feeling or experiencing.  

The Movement screen in the MantisX Pistol/Rifle App is often overlooked when that screen can show a great deal about a session, especially the lower half of the screen that shows the hold or sighting movement in blue and the trigger press movement in yellow.  In this example, I am executing a Tactical Reload drill and taking one shot.  My goal is having a shot score above 90, but keeping the reload time less than 4.85 seconds.

Doing this drill requires a large amount of movement in the pistol - bringing it in closer to the body to do the reload and pushing it out quickly to get the shot.  The first two shots show scores above 90, small yellow bars, but the hold movement was very large (and both shots were under 4.85 seconds).  When I compare that to shot 3, the score was lower (below 80) and I was slower, 5.64 seconds.  So this tells me I did not push the pistol out quickly after the reload to get my shot, and even though shot 3 “felt” smoother, it was worse than the first two “chaotic” shots.  

Stay in tune with what you are feeling physically with each shot, and recognize when something did not go right, but correct yourself in a positive manner, as we spoke earlier.  Do you struggle more at the end of a session versus the beginning?  Maybe it’s more than just technique, maybe it’s a mental lapse.  Having data can help quantify what is happening.  It’s not defining failure, it’s opening up opportunities to reflect and learn with each shot.  Learning happens with the process, not the outcome.  If you notice in the Movement Chart, I did not let shot 5 rattle me and shots 6 through 8 were back to being solid shots

Next time you practice, think about the why of what you are practicing.  Are you pushing the needle on your comfort zone?  Do you have a specific goal you desire to achieve?  Hopefully, these tips will help you look at learning and training differently, and ultimately help you focus on the important things, and not allow failure to derail the progress you are making!