Musings About Practice

Both Chris and I are trained musicians and several times have talked about how this applies to learning firearms skills.  Breath control is something that translates very easily from one application to the other.  Fine motor skills as well - there are a lot of people out there who aren't used to controling their body in such precise ways.

What I'm thinking about today, however, is practicing.  My defensive firearms instructor used this continuum very frequently: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence.

Obviously you want to proceede along that spectrum and eventually end up at unconscious competence.  The instructor also said that it would take tens of thousands of repetitions to achieve this, which I cannot disagree with.

I remember one moment in early high school very clearly, the moment my eyes reading music and my fingers and face and breath creating the sound all simply clicked together and I realized that I didn't have to actually think about this at all.  That is the feeling I associate with unconscious competence.  Now, I hadn't mastered my instrument by then (does anyone ever master an instrument?  The learning process always continues) but that particular aspect of it had reached the desired level.

Today, I looked back at how I got to that one moment.  Years.  To master that one skill took five years of practice.  Now mind you, I'm a bit on the lazy side.  I was not and am not one of those people who practices for hours a day.  To be honest, during that time frame my parents were satisfied if they could bully me into practicing once or twice a week.  But it wasn't just the practice.  From the get-go, I had private lessons once a week.  I had rehearsals for school ensembles every day, after the first year.  I had rehearsals for an out-of-school ensemble weekly.  I might not have been practicing every day, but I was certainly playing just about every day, and that counts as repetition as well (so long as you're doing it correctly).  Now, if we only count the school year (I didn't play nearly so much in the summers), that's about 289 days a year.  Let's say the first two years were only a quarter of that each, so 80 days the first two years, 289 the next three.  That's 1,027 days, about an hour a day.  That's how long it took to reach that unconscious competence for that one particular area on my one particular instrument.

That's a lot of time.

I don't put that much time into shooting.  I bet most people don't.  Shooting is more expensive.  It's more time consuming.

These days, I tend to leave my instrument sitting out on a chair, so that as I walk by I can simply pick it up and play for five or ten or fifteen minutes and then continue about my day.  The time adds up - not as much as when I was in school, but enough to maintain the competence I've already earned.

Shooting is different.  Obviously I can't just leave my gun sitting out and bang out a few shots a few times a day.  Also, I haven't yet earned that level of competence with my firearm that I have with my horn.  But how do I find the time to put in a thousand hours of practice?  I'm an adult now, with grown-up responsibilies, and when the range is forty minutes away, an hour's practice becomes three hours really fast (and gas is expensive!).  All that lead is money that I'm shooting downrange as well.  When I blow a few notes in my horn it doesn't cost a penny, but the ammo adds up.

As I said earlier, I was not a "practice every day" girl.  But I still got those playing hours in, and this was how:

Lessons.  In music, this was once a week for an hour.  In firearms, that's probably not reasonable, but taking a class every now and then is.  Classes are expensive, but they give you a lot of time with the gun and expert advice to boot.  We've been pretty good about this.

Ensembles.  This was the best thing that got me playing - even today, I try to always be playing with some group that meets once a week.  I can block out one evening a week and put up two or three good hours of playing.  For firearms, maybe this is some sort of shooting club or some IDPA or something along those lines.  Maybe it's just you and your friends agreeing to go to the range every Saturday morning for a few hours.  Being responsible to the group is more likely to get you out.  This is something I need to try more.  I had a goal of doing some IDPA while out here, but that's fallen to the wayside.

Practice.  Yeah, I hated it as a kid, but there's really no way around it.  To head off the time and money issues in the firearms arena, it seems like dry-fire is the answer.  No lead expended.  No need to drive to the range.  The biggest issue here is to make sure that you are doing this safely.  Better people than me have written all about this, so I'll leave that to them.

I've only been shooting for two years at this point and most of my skills are either consious incompetence or conscious competence.  Sometimes this is depressing, but coming back and thinking about all the hours I put into my horn to get where I am brings it back into perspective.  I just need to apply those lessons to shooting.

I think it's time for some dry-fire.