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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
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Speaker 2: Everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light.
00:00:24
Speaker 3: I’m your host, Sony Peterson.
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Speaker 2: In today’s episode is all about how difficult deer hunting often is and what we can do to make it a little bit easier in a way that you probably don’t expect. The impetus for this podcast came from explaining shed hunting to my daughters.
00:00:45
Speaker 3: If you can believe that, well you should, because it’s true.
00:00:48
Speaker 2: When it comes to white tail hunting, I find myself constantly stuck between explaining what are simple concepts but that don’t play out in the real world very easily or simply. Most of the time, there’s a hard truth about white tail hunting that will a lot of us don’t really want to acknowledge, but it’s tied to a greater aspect of light. Now, if you go back a couple of weeks and listen to an episode that I did with Mark on our regular Ware to Hunt podcast. You’re going to hear all about this, but I’m also going to break it down in more detail right now so we can understand how to literally retrain our brains to be better not only at white tail hunting, but a whole lot of stuff. Have you ever noticed how the people who seem to be able to do difficult things can often do a variety of difficult things. I thought about this at Mediator recently when I was thinking about how many of my co workers have authored books. Now, I’ve written a handful, and while they can be enjoyable at times, it’s also just a grind in a lot of ways, especially once the rough draft is complete and it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty parts. But then it occurred to me that a hell of a lot of my coworkers who also have written books, you know, they’re also in good shape, and a lot of them play instruments. That’s not an accident. And I haven’t even gotten into the hunting part yet. You see, inside of our brains is this thing called the anterior mid singular cortex, which is a region of the brain that is responsible for helping us overcome difficulty and find motivation, and it helps us with effort. What’s bonkers about this is that the anterior mid singular cortex can grow or shrink depending on what you do with yourself, what decisions you make, the more difficult things you do, things that you don’t want to do, you know, the stuff that feels like a struggle that helps this region of your brain grow. If you do fewer things that challenge yourself and feel like a struggle, that part of the brain’s gonna shrink. Our brains evolve to conserve energy and keep us safe. And this is a part of the reason why we resist discomfort so much. But we need it and if we use it correctly, it helps us. Now, I’m not going to go full David Goggins here, but pay attention to this because it’s important. The more you push yourself through discomfort, the more you’ll be able to push yourself through discomfort. Struggle that scares us off leads to more struggle that will scare us off. When it comes to dieting or exercise, or killing public land white tails or saving up for that dream out hunt. We mostly fail. Yet the people who figure out how to get through just one of those things are more likely to get through all of them. This is intuitive if you pay attention to the people in your life, but also no accident. It’s not that those people start with more willpower or discipline or have some secret genetic code that others just don’t possess. It’s that they work through struggle and discomfort, and their brains changed to allow them to keep working through struggle and discomfort. People say to me all of the time that they hate running, so they can’t do it. They think because they see someone like cam Hagn’s running all of the time, that he must love it. They say that to me as well, but they’re wrong. I freaking hate running. I rarely, rarely look forward to it, but I never regret it when I’m finished. It’s always worth it. That’s not something I was born with. It’s just a product of forcing myself to lace up my on clouds and go when I don’t want to, which is pretty much every time. And that last part matters a lot. If you want to make your anterior mid singulate cortex grow, you have to do things that you don’t want to do. If you wake up and you absolutely love everything about going for a run.
00:04:51
Speaker 3: It doesn’t work.
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Speaker 2: That’s not a bad thing, mind you, that’d be great, but it’s not going to help you get through other unrelated difficult tasks. Do you know what is a pretty difficult task that we are constantly trying to make easier for ourselves. Yep, golf, Just kidding. It’s deer hunting. The problem with deer hunting, at least in today’s world, is that it looks just like getting in shape, or running one hundred mile mountain marathons, or climbing some building in Taiwan while Netflix’s film crew follows you up.
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Speaker 3: We are constantly.
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Speaker 2: Exposed to the people who have already cracked the code for doing difficult stuff. And when they do difficult stuff, it not only looks easy to us, but they’re also trying to make it look easy. But it’s not easy to us, and there is often a huge disparity there in the realm of deer hunting. It makes it look like there is a secret strategy or some type of tactic that will just take us from not being big buck killers to being big buck killers, but it doesn’t work that way. The people who are in really great shape who also learn how to play guitar and who also can kill public land bull elk every season, aren’t capable of that stuff simply because they are built different from most folks. It’s that they actively pursue difficult things. So much of natural talent, which definitely exists, is just a reflection of this reality. And don’t get me wrong, deer hunting for the vast majority of hunters is difficult, so difficult that they often don’t fill tags, and when you break it down to who kills big bucks and who doesn’t, that number shrinks further. Look, this can be hacked through enough money or a banging spot, which I’ve talked about plenty, but for most folks who don’t have access to either or both, this is not an easy thing to do, which is a huge reason and why we love it now. I’ve killed some really big bucks in my life on various hunts, and I can tell you they were fun, really fun, but they didn’t mean that much to me. In fact, the buck that has been my favorite in a hell of a lot of seasons is the eight pointer I killed in Wisconsin last year, because it took me eighteen seasons over there to finally kill a legit pope and young buck. I could write a book about my struggles just in that one county, and eventually might just do that for the hell of it. I’ve killed other bucks, you know, in Nebraska and Illinois and Iowa and Texas and a handful of states that didn’t challenge me hardly at all. And while they were all fun and there were lessons I took away with each, none of them felt like that Wisconsin buck. Struggle, in a weird way, is our friend. Not because it keeps us from success, which it does, but because if we just do what we need to anyway, struggle rewires our brain to do difficult stuff more easily. Now you might be thinking, sweet dude, but what do I have to do to be able to embrace discomfort and eventually become the mighty white hunter that you are. Well, science has pretty much figured this out, which is good news, and it starts with negotiation. Think about how often you’ve had an opportunity to hunt outside of the rut or pre rut October tenth and you’ve sat there in your office or on the job site and thought, is it worth.
00:08:05
Speaker 3: It to go sit tonight?
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Speaker 2: The wind is out of the west, so I could sit this stand or this blind. Then imagine how easy it is to say to yourself, but it is the lull.
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Speaker 3: It’s not right.
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Speaker 2: The bucks aren’t going to move, and my odds are really low, So you don’t go. You’re negotiating with yourself to reach a conclusion you already wanted to reach because you thought going out wouldn’t result in a dead big buck. So it’s just better to not go. A better way to look at this would be I have the evening to go hunting, to go do the thing I love more than anything in the world. Here are the conditions, and now I’m going to solve for how to hunt where a big buck might go in them. Then you go hunting. You probably won’t kill a big one, but getting over that mental hurdle and sneaking in with a saddle or a hang on or building a natural blind and trying is the thing that matters the most. Sometimes you kill big bucks that way. Also, not negotiating yourself out of hunting because it will be easier to not go, that one evening on stand or in blind will generally always be worth it. It’s a small meaningful step on the path to becoming the kind of deer hunter who will go when the going probably sucks. It’s a small step, but it’s important because small steps are the way you level up and rewire your brain. This is something I can’t stress enough. But we are sold this process or this strategy, or this big wholesale change to finally be super skinny or be able to bench three hundred pounds or kill public land bucks every season. But the big moves don’t stick usually, And anyone who has gone from no exercise for years to trying to work out six days a week knows how hard it is to mentally get there.
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Speaker 3: It’s damn I’m near impossible.
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Speaker 2: Baby steps matter, and just going out during the lull when you know for a fact you won’t see a big one, is a huge step. And what I learned from that is that if I hunt the lull enough, I almost always see big ones, and I often kill them, sometimes on public land, likely because most folks negotiated themselves out of hunting, and the dear no damn well when fewer hunters are in the woods with them and they move more. Another way to look at this is the all day sit thing most hunters won’t do it because it’s too big of an ask for them, So go sit an extra hour. If you usually would leave the woods at ten am, figure out a way to just sit until eleven. Or if you’d usually go out at two pm for the evening sit, go at one. You’re doing a small thing you don’t want to. But when you get in at one and a buck eventually cruises by at one point fifteen, the next time you can hunt, you’ll have your happy ass in that stand at twelve thirty.
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Speaker 3: There is also a very.
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Speaker 2: GoGG andesque component of this whole thing as well, which involves not viewing the struggle as painful but instead as growth. I know this is kind of woo woo, but think about how your attitude shapes the enjoyment of your hunts. If you go out and expect to see nothing, your effort and results will generally reflect that. That’s because we set the bar too high, and instead should view it not as pass or fail depending on a big buck encounter, but pass or failed depending on whether we tried something new and saw it through. I’d rather blank on a hunt and learn something, then skip a hunt and feel like I did a good job by literally not doing the thing I love the most in the world. I look at this kind of thing like fishing. I’d rather make more cast than fewer, because the more times I cast, the more likely it is that I’ll catch some fish.
00:11:51
Speaker 3: Look.
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Speaker 2: I know, on paper this all sounds great, but there is a component of it that is kind of non negotiable.
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Speaker 3: Setting goals.
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Speaker 2: I know people grow when they hear that, but goals are super important. The reason I run so much, or at least the thing that keeps me accountable, is that I set yearly goals for miles. When I turned forty, a buddy and I both set a running goal of one thousand miles for the year. That was a lot more miles than a year than I’d ever run, and it took me a seven mile er on New Year’s even a blizzard to cross that threshold, but I did cross it, And ever since then, I’ve set a yearly goal. And it’s not something I dread, but something I used to keep myself honest. I know this shit sounds hokey, but it works. But it only really works once you train your brain that you will keep doing something difficult until you’re done. Now, with white tails, we all kind of set goals, even if they’re loose goals, but they’re generally based around the wrong thing. We go I killed a one thirty five last year, so I want something bigger this year. Or I killed a six pointer last year and now I want something that’s seven or eight points or more, or you know, I want a five year old buck, and anything younger gets a pass. Look, if you have that money spot, this might be all you need to do because you’re hunting. Isn’t all that difficult and the formula is easy to follow. But for a lot of us, a goal of shooting x size of deer keeps us out of the woods a lot, and it’s generally a great way to feel let down by most of our hunts. A goal instead to maybe arrow your first dear off the ground without a blind, or to hunt every chance you can, or to try to kill an october deer in the woods when all you’ve ever hunted is field edges or whatever. It’s a different thing. It takes the focus off of a dead buck, and it puts on us actually doing something that could lead to us encountering more deer, which reinforces our behavior and yes, eventually usually leads to big dead bucks over time. The last component of this that I don’t adhere too much, but I guess I kind of do through my photography, is to track your progress. I use a running app on my phone that tallies up my miles and gives me a whole bunch of stats, so I can see whether I’m slacking or right on track, or crushing it and getting ahead of my pace a little bit. But with deer, you know some hunter’s journal, most don’t, and most don’t keep track of their progress. They hunt when the conditions are good, kill or don’t kill, and then wait for the next opportunity. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t do something else difficult and keep track, which leads to being able to see through the discomfort of other difficult tasks. The result in the long term is that you are literally making yourself mentally tougher. When that metaphorical snowball starts rolling in the right direction, it makes life better and all aspects of deer hunting a little easier to embrace. I explain this sort of to my daughters recently, when we put on quite a few miles to find zero antlers in a long weekend of trekking through the woods. They discouraged about not finding antlers, but I told them that I mostly don’t find antlers and that going shed hunting is worth it anyway, because it is. It’s just good to go walk through the woods. Most of what we do with deer hunting is tethered to our eventual success and in a different but equally relevant way, our failures. If you can learn to go shed hunting when you don’t expect to find one, sometimes you will find one, and that’s awesome, But when you don’t, you’ve still done something worthwhile, and your brain is going to reward you for that. It makes it easier to go winter scouting when you’re having a hard time mustering up the energy to go into the woods and try to a vision what that work will turn out at in like nine or ten months.
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Speaker 3: I’ve often thought about.
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Speaker 2: The first big buck I killed and how it’s just opened the floodgates to killing more big bucks, and how I’ve seen the same thing in my hunting buddies. It took me twelve seasons of hunting really really hard to kill that buck, and I was convinced it was just never going to happen. I believed it. I expected to screw up, and I almost always did, and the whole thing just felt impossible. Then I killed a big old fourteen pointer in a beanfield. It’s now twenty years later, and I’ve killed big bucks pretty much every year since. The realization that something that difficult is suddenly doable changes us, and the fact that a hell of a lot of the big ones since then haven’t been easy only reinforces that truth. This is one of the reasons a lot of people who start hunting and decide that it’s only a big bucks or nothing have such a hard time. When killing a two year old eight pointer in a whole season is really difficult, killing one hundred and thirty inch er as your first buck is nearly impossible, and your brain knows it. But killing that two year old shows you what’s possible. It makes it seem like a three year old isn’t a crazy challenge, but is still definitely a challenge. I guess the best way to frame this up before I sign off is this, When we opt out of doing something challenging, it’s usually not because we physically can’t do that thing. It’s because our brains make the case that it won’t be worth it, and we buy into that reasoning. But our brains aren’t our friends in a lot of ways, because they are looking for the easy way out to help us preserve energy and avoid potential failure. This is why it’s so difficult, but also why the folks who break through that membrane and learn that the difficult stuff is worth it are the ones who can go anywhere and hunt pretty much anything they get a tag for. And while they won’t always be successful because that’s how this stuff goes, they are usually far far more successful than the average hunter. They’ve conditioned themselves to just lean into the struggle and the discomfort because they know, on the other side, it’s always worth it. If you want to be a better deer hunter, forget what you can buy for a second and think about what work you do. Avoid in that harsh truth is the path to killing more big bucks. And while it might seem daunting or not worth it, remember that’s just your shrunken anti mid singulate cortex talking. Don’t listen to it. Go do the difficult thing and force that sucker to grow. You won’t regret it. You also won’t regret coming back next week because I’m going to talk about why we should all try to find a new place to hunt and just how to go about that process. Right now, that’s it for this episode.
00:18:33
Speaker 3: I’m Tony Peterson.
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Speaker 2: This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. You might want to go check out some first Light right now if you’re getting ready for Turkey season, because that’s coming up super fast. You might also want to just go check out the mediator dot com to find something entertaining or educational or a nice mix of both. We drop new content every single week. We drop films, tons of podcasts, tons of articles. Some of them are just straight how to pieces on you know, figuring out how to catch.
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Speaker 3: More trout or shoot more deer or whatever.
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Speaker 2: A lot of them are on the latest conservation issues. So if you want to find out what’s going on in the great big world of conservation, the mediator dot com is your source. Go check it out and thank you so much for your supporter
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