Barriers to success

I was reading an email sent out by our archery club secretary today, and was rattling through it casually, when I was brought up short by a single sentence:

[He] was 1st male novice, with an excellent score of 510 - first CUB novice to break the 500 barrier this year!

See anything jarring there? Maybe I'm being too pernickety, maybe I'm used to positive reinforcement techniques, but I balk at the word barrier for a couple of reasons.

Do not pass go, do not collect $200

 Let's talk semantics. The word barrier is synonymous with such words and phrases as "obstacle", "limit" and "bar to passage". Now, the competition the archers were shooting at was a Portsmouth round (5 dozen arrows at 20 yards on a 60cm target face). With metric scoring, the maximum possible score is 600. That is the "limit" - an archer cannot score more than that. (And if they have done, then something has gone wrong somewhere.) 500 - that's not a barrier. Many archers can score higher than that. And do.

So, it's not literally a barrier, is it? No, but look at it. It's a lovely round number. And what do we do with round numbers? Fixate on them to the detriment of our actual skill. After a term of shooting, a number of novices are getting 460, 480, having enjoyed a pretty steep learning curve up until then. But recently, most of their scores will be 400-odd, and it creates a greater sense of accomplishment to change that first digit, which has been around for too long without changing (and for some really good novices, it hasn't changed at all).

But there is 500, tantalising in its attainability. And then what happens is archers focus on that, getting that score, "breaking that barrier", and forgetting about little things like "shooting properly," "aiming at the middle", "keeping consistent". I'll own up, it's happened to me too - I can't begin to count the number of times I shot over 990 on a FITA and never managed 1000.

One thing I've learnt about archery: it isn't hard. What makes it a challenge (once you've learned how to shoot), is the fact that your brain will often get in the way of your shooting. Some archers find that if they start scoring generally well, they panic and shoot badly in "compensation", to end up with almost the same score they would have done had they been shooting at a mediocre standard throughout. And vice versa; an unusually low score might spur them on to "fix" their mistake, again with the result that they shoot much the same score as always.

There are various mental tricks archers can use to try and get the brain to think about something other than that holy grail of a score. Sometimes you can avoid knowing your score (just writing down arrow values and not adding them up). That's alright, but you can sometimes "feel" that you're doing better, and sometimes you're at a competition where they demand running scores, and you can't help but be aware of exactly how you're doing. Another idea is to aim for a different round number - slightly hard, because 600 is quite a way off, and 510 or 520 or 550 just isn't as round. Or aim for something else entirely; handicap tables - or the CUB Tabs based on them - are set at scores which are very decidedly not-round. If I remember correctly, a score of 480-something will earn you your black Tab, then 520-something will get you Blue. If you aim for those, somewhere in between you will have got 500, just like that.

So, back to the idea of this "barrier" then. It's a perception, caused by the fact that we have a decimal numbering system. There is nothing stopping anyone from getting over 500. Except that we refer to it as a "barrier". So let's change that - 500 is now a "benchmark" of success. We can see that we are better archers if we score higher than 500 more often than we did before. Let's use it as a way to show improvement, not as a limit to our talent.