Ep. 580: Foundations - Go Ahead, Get A Little Cocky

being confident helps you kill white tails. We all know that it also helps you get the girls and make the team and get a raise and win a fight or a thumb wrestling match or whatever that helps in a lot of ways. Having a little swagger is a good thing, but it's kind of like respect. You have to earn it. Confidence doesn't just come from some divine finger snap and suddenly infect your being so that you're just, like, I don't know, a stone cold killer or an unstoppable

ladies man. And this episode is all about that. I mean, the first part, you're on your own with the second part, and you sure as hell don't want to listen to me if you want to become a ladies man. And you really don't want to listen to Mark if you've seen his mustache so you know he's not the guy. Listen up if you want to learn about how confidence can help you kill some bigger deer. As many of you know, the baby making phase of my life was

short and sweet. I got a two fur out of the deal, a deal where I saw my wife only a couple of times during Turkey season over a decade ago. Those little girls born in the middle of December. They have changed my life in a lot of ways, too many to count. And while the obvious stuff of parenthood should be obvious, they've taught me so many things that I did not see coming. One that really surprised me

is a lesson on confidence one of my daughters. Now keep in mind, if you're one of my slower listeners, that these girls are twins, so theoretically we should kind of expect them to behave in similar ways. One of my daughters, she's pretty self conscious. She worries too much about what other kids will think, and that is a factor in so many of her decisions. Her sister, on the other hand, has probably the most unearned confidence I've ever seen in a person. She's like a ten year

old girl. Version of Kenny Powers, the main character from the Masterpiece series that is eastbound and down. Honestly, that daughter of mine believes in herself so deeply that I'm kind of jealous. I think most of us harbor I don't know a fair level of anxiety and self doubt, and as adults we just kind of learned to hide it better and learn to avoid situations where it will be obvious to casual observers. Now, this girl, or my daughter,

she doesn't really operate in that world. She knows, and I mean absolutely knows she can do things that she literally cannot do. Imagine that she has full faith in herself in an astounding way. This was truly evident to me as we coach the girls in a false offtball league recently, my not so confident twin daughter, she wouldn't pitch in those early years of player pitch, all eyes are on the picture and mostly they are terrible. And it's not a great place to be if you're not confident.

And you know, honestly, all those kids are terrible, But that doesn't make suffering through the personal experience of being the terrible picture right now in front of everybody is something I don't know less mortifying, I guess. So she wouldn't pitch. Her sister, though, the confident one, was bagging

us to pitch. Even though she was mostly terrible at it, she had some bright spots, maybe possibly because the batters, I don't know, they couldn't hit a beach ball off at tea if he gave them tense swings at it. But she also got shelled a few times. And when those girls would get into a batting groove, it often didn't make the defense look too good. And during those times, my daughter would walk off the field and honest to God, she said this to me, I guess it just wasn't

my day to pitch. She shook that shipped off like an NFL quarterback, and it made me jealous. I couldn't imagine not mind grinding over that for at least a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks or months. Her confidence in herself, it's going to be a life changer for her. Your confidence in yourself could be too,

if you learn how to develop it properly. Around hunting, I know this sounds easy, like maybe you should go out and just shoot a few more big bucks and really get your swagger on when you stop into the local watering hole with fresh blood stains on your first light camo and a few times periscoping their way out of the edge of your pickup bed. But it's not so simple because to kill a good one or I don't know, seven or eight for that matter, you've got

to get more than lucky. You have to make a lot of the right decisions and string them all together, sometimes over a matter of quite a long time, and that's just not easy. Instead, i'd take a long, honest look at what parts of hunting caused you to have that nagging feeling of anxiety. An easy jumping off place here is with shooting. And I covered this quite a bit earlier in some episodes, so I won't go down

that rabbit hole again. But I'll say this, there's really no excuse not to be a good enough shot at say, I don't know sub forty yard ranges. At least if you're shooting a somewhat modern compound, there isn't that's really on you. Now, I know, shooting foam targets is a different deal than shooting living, breathing antler, sporting deer. If you have all of the confidence in the world that you can shoot spots on a target well, but you don't really have that closer mentality when a deer walks in.

The ugly truth is that you don't have confidence in your ability to make that kind of shot happen. Now, your confidence extends as far as the shooting range boundaries go in that situation, but not any farther, like into the woods. This is a huge problem with a lot of bow hunters, and they intentionally hamstring themselves by targeting low odds deer and getting to go through the moment of truth motions only maybe once or twice a season. I've said this a lot, and I'll say it again.

You can't get good at shooting deer correctly without shooting quite a few deer. If you go to YouTube, you can see plenty examples of this on different platforms. Shaky arms, poor form, and just a general sense of someone who is about to lose his freaking mind. Now, all of us should get excited when we shoot a deer, so

I'm not dogging on anyone for that. Hell, I do to like an embarrassing level, but you should work to have the confidence to make good shots, knowing full well you'll be functioning largely off of your reptile brain, and that's one of those moments where confident shines. Or how about another example that sort of plays off of the shooting thing. How confident are you shooting off of a stand?

What about a saddle? I think one of the biggest disservices we have done to the bow hunting masses is not talk about how long it takes to get confident using a saddle and then not only hunting out of one, but being mindful enough of your shooting form from one to not send your point of impact way off when you're taking shots from them. There are plenty of examples of this on YouTube. Now how do you fix that? Well,

you practice from one a lot. You make it second nature to check your form while shooting around the tree on both sides and hanging off and shooting directly away from the platform. Really, these rules apply to any type of act tool hunting shot. How many hunters do you know who have shot the side of a blind while turkey hunting or deer hunting? I have, and I can

tell you one thing. It sucks. Not only do you definitely not get the critter you're shooting at, you scare the living shite out of yourself and you have a hole in your blind. If you're really unlucky, you might even hit a support pole and have some carbon fiber slivers in your future. I'm sure my neighbors think I'm a certifiable nut case, but I used to practice shooting from blinds a lot, and I used to set up a tree stand in my yard or shoot from my deck.

Now it's not always easy, but it's always worth it to have a bend there done that attitude. You have to be there and do that a lot. I guess I'll give you another example of confidence. You can't replace it with someone else's experience. In September, a good buddy of mine was looking at hunting Wisconsin's deer opener. He's an Iowa guy, born and raised in Iowa, so he's used to two things. An October opener and having the entire rut to bow hunt, literally the best state in

the Union. As the opener loom closer. I started getting these anxiety ridden texts from him about the weather. It was supposed to top out around eighty in the day, and he was bemoaning the fact that we wouldn't have the right weather to kill a big buck with he had no confidence in hunting that hot weather, and he talked himself into going fishing more than he sat on a stand. If you've listened to me for any length of time, you know how that probably drove me nuts.

I don't care about hot weather at all, and I honestly don't think it kills deer movement enough to keep me home ever, especially if I have something green to sit over, or better, something wet to sit over, and it happens to be the early season when the deer are pretty accustomed to hot weather. That with my buddy was that he just didn't have any confidence in hunting those conditions. He's used to being able to wait for

better weather, so that's his default. But how the hell do you think you learn to kill September white tails, or really any month white tails if you don't hunt them in the conditions that are thrown your way. You've got to shoot your shop, my friends, And you know what happens when you do and you make it well, you get confidence. I have so much confidence in my September abilities that it's probably bordering on kind of danger zone territory, which is another component of confidence that we

should be aware of. Being too confident in something is going to kill your chances. Let's say you spent your formative years hunting a family farm in a pretty good white tail state. You had access to controlled land, and you had pretty good success, I don't know, rattling, grunting,

maybe running a full body decoy around Halloween. You've had the good life for a long time, but then grandma dies in a skydiving accident, and suddenly the farm is up for sale, and you're out there with the rest of us chumps knocking on doors and you get lucky in. A farmer tells you, sure, shoot all those crop eating rodents you can, and you think, well, I will, but he also says, oh, you know, my grandson and my grandson's friends hunt, and so do a couple of the neighbors.

It doesn't really matter, though. You think, I got a wall full of big ones, and I know, dear. So you wait for the right cold front and the right moon phase, and you go to your best field edge stand and you clang those antlers together and nothing comes running in, and you think, maybe maybe my timing is off,

so you try again a few days later. You know, maybe moving in a little deeper into the best timber, and not only does nothing come then, but you watch a white tail bound to away from you the moment you hit those antlers together. This becomes sort of like a lather, rent repeat situation, and now you're confidencing what worked. It worked free for a long time is a liability and not an asset. This happens to me often on specific chunks of public land that are always changing, and

I hate it. Drives me nuts some years, and I even fully admit this. I want an easy one. I just want to repeat my performance from the year before, but that so rarely rarely happens. Instead, there's always some new program I have to figure out. I'm sure you can relate to this for a lot of you can, do you see how muddy this ship starts to get. I told you to develop confidence in various aspects of hunting, and then I told you too much confidence will kick

your square in the delegates. And now I'm going to tell you that you have to be super confident again when I inevitably get divorced because my bride has had enough, this podcast will probably be used in court against my character. Here's the thing, though, Confidence has to be earned remember when I said that earlier. Confidence doesn't come from a one off encounter. Usually it comes from stacked experience. Confidence

that comes too easily should be questioned. If your entire deer hunting experience consists of hunting one good property, your confidence should be high. But it should be high only for that one good property. If you've gone to I don't know, seventeen different states and shot pope and young bucks on public land and all of them, then you should have confidence in yourself to get it done, no matter what mother nature throws at you, and no matter

where you're hunting. And that's the biggest one. And I know that most people will never get the opportunity to visit seventeen different states, let alone hunting them. I get that. So you've got to scale it down. Do you have plenty of experience hunting from a stand and from a blind and from a saddle and still hunting or whatever? If not, maybe your favorite forty acre chunk isn't the best place to still hunt, but the five thousand acres

of public land down the road could be. Do you not have much confidence in settling your pin on a deer's vitals because you've only killed a few Could you hunt a few more doughs? Could you both hunt turkeys or some other critter? Where can you get more experience? You should ask yourself that, because it's an important question. Do you put yourself in a position to be challenged in new ways? I think the importance of this can't

really be overstated. One on a state trip a year that takes you to unfamiliar territory and forces you to figure out things on the fly. That's going to help you build confidence in a major way that you're gonna take home with you, especially if you go through right to the end of that hunt, you don't give up or phone it in. I realized this might be a little overwhelming, and I might be out driving my headlights here. So let's back up a second and get a little

granular with this concept. Where are the little mistakes you make during your hunts? Are they that you didn't clear your entrance routes very well or cut shooting lanes very well? Maybe you didn't eat scout to the point where you had a lot of confidence that you were going to have real options, you know, ambush options on the various properties you hunt. Those are kind of easiest things to get better at. What mistakes do you make getting into

your stand? Are you always racing the clock in the morning? Maybe you just gotta set your alarm a little earlier and bite the bullet that you're gonna get a you know, a few less minutes of sleep. I guess. Do you often realize that you're climbing sticks, squeak on the tree, or your ladder stand creeks and pops when you shift your weight in it. Those things are going to cut your confidence off at the knees, even if they don't seem like that big of a deal most of the time.

Trust me, if a buck is close and you're terrified to move for fear of making noise, that buck is pretty damn safe. And maybe you've shot a few deer and you've gotten poor penetration on them. There's a confidence issue built in there that is going to come roaring back to life when you see a deer walk in that you want to shoot. Maybe it's a broad hit issue, or a bow tuning issue or something else, but whatever it is, it's also a confidence robber. Instead of thinking

I've got this, this is over. He's as good as being in the back of my truck and tagged. You'll be thinking, I hope I've got this, and that is bad, bad, bad. And look at the big stuff and ask yourself where you believe in yourself, what are your strengths, play off of them, but also look at your weaknesses, the secret things that make you nervous. Those are the things you

have to really figure out now. I'll never forget as a young man chasing a bass fishing dream that went nowhere, how nervous I'd be heading to a body of water that was famous for a certain bite, like say a Carolina rig by, or maybe a deep rock pile or weed line type of bite that just wasn't my thing, Even if I didn't fully acknowledge it, I was always always full of nervous energy over not being able to do the single thing I probably would need to do

to catch a limit. It forced me, in my off time to work on those techniques and figure out how to catch fish on them. I know that probably sounds dumb, but it took that to give me confidence to fish anywhere with basically any style I might have to use. And hunting is like that, except we don't do it for competition, thank God. And we mostly do it alone also, thank god, but we do need to try to develop a whole bunch of different skills. It will all be

linked together. And we do need to find mental space that fuels the flames of belief in ourselves. That says without question, if that buck walks in within forty yards and stops broadside or quartering away in a decent opening, that he's going to be wearing our tag by the

into the hunt. When you get to that place, it's pretty nice, even if the footholds and the handholds aren't always as solid as they seem, because after all, things can go sideways in a variety of bad ways, but they don't have to, and they often won't unless we allow them to, the best way to not force those outliers situations to happen is to work on ourselves in small doses for years to be become more confident in our abilities to do exactly what we need to do.

Every time we enter the woods and you can get there, I promise you that, And if you do, you're gonna shoot it some deer, So you know what you're gonna have to blood trail some deer. The next two episodes are going to be all about that process, so be sure to tune in. That's it for this week, my friends. I'm Tony P. And this has been the Wired Hunt

Foundations podcast, brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for your support, and if you want more of a white tail fix, feel free to check out Mark's new show on the Mediator YouTube channel, which is called Deer Country. You can also visit the wire to Hunt YouTube channel for how to videos and go to the mediator dot com slash wired to read all kinds of white tail related articles