At SHOT show, I got to hang out with a couple of the deputies I worked with in CA last month, and one of them brought up a good point. While I was demo’ing at class, my performance was as bad as it has ever been. Cold Heat was one hit for a couple days and 2 hits on the last day. FAST was a hair over time and with a miss to boot. As an instructor, this is pretty disappointing, but if you teach long enough, you will occasionally fail to perform as you might like.
As I think we have talked about here before, when something like that happens, it is best to acknowledge it, bring up a learning point if appropriate, and then move on. The worst thing you can do is to try again and again to “get it right”. I have watched other instructors do this in class, and it always makes them look worse. Not to mention, my classes are based around cold performance and on demand performance. As much as we try and are fairly successful, those two things will never be a given and they will vary from day to day.
So, after feeling a little dumb, and disappointed with my shooting, one of the deputies mentioned that the real benefit of high performance “normally”, is that when things conspire to reduce your performance, your results will still be good enough. This is of course correct, and is the right way to look at things. If I normally get three hits on Cold Heat, but only get one hit today, I still got a hit, in a vital zone. In my case at class, my hits were always the first shot. I didn’t spray wildly and fall apart, I just failed to connect with my subsequent shots as well as I might have liked. If you can only get one hit normally, failing to do so might be bad.
An old saw when I was teaching at NYPD was that you will fall to 50% of your trained level of ability. In the years since, some trainers have postulated that a well trained person may only drop to 70% or so of their ability. The exact percentage doesn’t matter, the idea does. In that case, I’ll take “all the training for $1000 Alex.”
That is not realistic, of course, and is why I came up with Cold Heat in the first place. Determine what matters to you, build that ability, then maintain it while building other abilities. When you occasionally fail to meet your expectations, you should still have enough ability left in reserve to get the job done.
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