Yes, this sounds very familiar. I think like many sports, if you have metacognition about what you're doing, it pulls you out of 'the zone.' I think archery may have helped train my brain and body to be able to more easily focus in a similar way in everyday life.
It's good stuff and I really should make time to get back into the sport.
There's a lot to the mental side of this sport that's different from other sports. Archery is very closed focused, where you are not concerned with reading a play or predicting someone else's moves or shots in real time - you are just focusing on your own shot process.
The coaches and sport psychologist I worked with talked about awareness v arousal level (leaving this open for Bob to pounce on I'm sure). You had to be aware of the clock, the wind, etc., but you wanted your arousal level (how emotionally charged you were to put if another way) to be in a zone - not too low, and not too high. For me I was typically too jacked up in matches, and my best performances were when I had already had a good event, and was accepting of whatever this specific result in front of me was going to be, win or lose. That moved the consequences out of the way, so I could just focus on process. Fear of the outcomes is your enemy.
The current competition format actually takes a little pressure off. If people are interested in how this sport has transformed over the years, the 1996 archery technical film from Atlanta is the best at showing the change, and what the format was like that I competed under. There were no sets or set points. The match was shot as X number of arrows, and whoever had the highest total score at the end, won.
That format had it's drawbacks and many athletes disliked it, because you had to be perfect - if you blew one arrow, the match was over. In that 1996 games, the women's team event gold medal match - Germany had Korea on the ropes, when one of the German archers shot a 2. Match was over - cannot recover from that. In the current format, you lose the set but live on to perhaps recover and take the next set. So that one bad arrow doesn't completely kill your chances.
In that old format I was on both sides of the "one bad arrow" so both won and lost under it, but all in all it was extremely stressful on a micro level. But the stress has many layers to it - back then there was little funding, so we often self funded our way to tournaments, so you have spent thousands of dollars to get there, for meals and accommodation, taking time off work, and may end up with nothing to show for it. That is a whole different kind of macro stress. And on an even broader scope, you think about how bad you want this and what you are willing to do to get there. Do you quit your job, sell your house, move closer to coaches so you can train full time - these were all things that I considered at one time or another.
I know some who are not into sports are sometimes dismissive of the sacrifices that these athletes make, and the hardships they go through. From the outside it seems like a charmed life, but it really isn't.
