Fishing in the Central Valley: This trick can help you become a better angler
As an former Olympic class decathlete and a professional striper guide the one thing I’ve noticed that being distracted keeps most anglers, as well as regular folks, from success. I believe that we are surrounded by a thing I call systemic distraction.
Whether it’s at the gym or out fishing with guests I see people being overwhelmed with a myriad number of messages coming at them from every direction. Getting someone to concentrate for just a minute, and not get pulled away by a cellphone call, text or Instagram that just popped up is difficult. We’ve become adrenaline internet junkies that flit from thing to thing, very rarely being able to really stop and focus on the really important priorities we keep procrastinating. It’s all around us and we carry this destructive busy habit into our fishing too.
On the water with guests, my biggest challenge is getting folks to put away their phone, relax and concentrate on catching some fish. It’s not normal for them to put their phone away and really be in the moment, to actually experience and learn.
My Olympic coaches were masters of setting goals, establishing the workload, and staying on task each and every time they coached.
There was no multitasking, they expected you to be focused completely on the job at hand that workout and any competing distractions were just not allowed.
I realized later that this focus was what separated the winners and the wannabes. Most folks understand the correlation of this in world class training but I suggest that its application to daily lifeis now more important than ever to keep us focused and from running off in all directions.
My point is that distraction can be the biggest reason we don’t improve as anglers.
It’s so innocuous and pervasive in our culture – we tend to overlook this huge energy and life force drain. Taking this bad habit with us when we fish and allowing ourselves to get sucked into just about everything that’s screaming at us for our attention is a trap that keeps us from becoming better.
In our training for the Olympics, we would boil our time down to an exact agenda that we knew worked if we followed it.
It may seem simple.
One of the biggest life lessons I’ve ever been taught- was by a World Record holding athlete who was trying to coach me to get stronger and faster for the 1980 Olympics which the US boycotted.
He initially asked me what kind of training program I had followed. I explained. He took one look at my plan and told me that it would never work. He explained that I was spread out all over the place with my strength training, wasn’t focused and was being distracted by too many different ideas.
The big idea: I needed to realize that I only had a finite amount of physical and mental energy to expend during a single intense workout and I had to use this limited reserve wisely.
He changed my strength workout to only 45 minutes, with nearly complete focus and intensity on a very specific set of only three exercises. No distractions or changes allowed. If I didn’t finish it in the set time, I had to stop. It was very intense.
He taught me to go to my strength workout totally focused, every set and rep preplanned for maximum benefit and nothing added or subtracted. Each workout built to the next. My strength level skyrocketed in six months.
It was amazing to see how clear focus kept things simple and on track and my energy under control
I was finally focused on doing the right things in the right way and I wasn’t getting distracted by every shiny object that would lead me away from my plan. I no longer allowed anything to interfere with or distract me from what I knew was working.
There was no wasted effort as all of my mental and physical resources were being maximized in a very concentrated and exact way.
Try eliminating as many distractions as you can, especially when you’re on the water and you’ll be a better angler.
Stay strong, stay focused and mentally control what you can. It pays off with results. And never give up.
