Why the Journal Only Asks for Your Best Shots

You get home from a training session. Boules by the door, kettle switched on. You sit down with your pétanque journal and it asks you for three shots.

Three that were worth repeating. What you were doing when it came off, and how it felt.

The misses aren’t missing from the page. You rate how you handled them, and one lesson goes down in writing. What you don’t do is play them again.

You get better at whatever you play back. I built it that way on purpose, and this year I read something that made me glad I had.

You already do this

The drive home from your last competition. Which boule did you play again in your head? Mine is never the one I left short. It’s the one where I picked the landing spot, saw what the terrain would do with it, and watched it happen. Every time.

For a long while I thought that was me being soft on myself.

It isn’t only me. Valério and colleagues in Brazil gave some golfers sixty putts this year and told them they could ask for feedback whenever they liked, as often as they wanted, after any attempt they chose.

Across every group, they asked mostly after the putts that had gone well.

Nobody told them to. It’s just what people do when you leave them to it.

You become what you rehearse. That’s Lanny Bassham in With Winning in Mind, one of two books that changed how I practise, and one I wrote about in Week 1: Awareness. Play the miss back and the miss is what gets rehearsed. So going back to the good one is the right instinct.

All the page does is make it deliberate. You were doing it anyway.

Our memory is good at picking which shot to keep. What it tends to lose is everything around it. It hands you the good moments and forgets the session they came from, so what you carry home is a highlight with nothing attached to it.

That’s why I ask for three, with the date and the session beside them. Three of them make a record of your pétanque training. One is just a nice memory.

What your one word is for

Each of those three gets one word, and one detail to keep. Quiet. Soft. Clean. Full. On time.

One word looks like nothing. It’s the most important thing on the page.

Soylu and colleagues in Turkey took fifteen experienced archers. Before they shot, half an hour of a hard concentration task, the sort of thing that leaves you fried. Another day, same archers, but they watched a documentary first. Then both times they shot a full competition. Seventy-two arrows at fifty metres.

Tired, they scored about thirteen points worse.

Their heart rates were the same. Their anxiety scores were the same.

You may know that state. You come straight from work, or you’ve driven two hours to get there. You’re not nervous and you’re not tired exactly, and if somebody asked, you’d say you were fine. Nothing showed on those archers either. It cost them anyway.

That’s the readiness question I keep coming back to in Week 5: Trust.

Now turn it round.

The afternoon when it all came off easily didn’t look any different from the outside. Your heart rate was normal. Nobody on the sideline could have told you why it was working. You were present in a way you can’t point at afterwards, and you were the only one who knew.

An hour later you’ll still have the score. The feeling will usually have gone.

So that’s the job of one word. It’s a trigger. Small enough to carry, and it takes you back to a throw that worked.

It’s why the page finishes by asking for one word to take into the next session. The next session opens by asking you to read it before you warm up.

Nine times out of ten it’s the same word. What you felt when it came off becomes the cue you throw with next time, the way we made one in Week 2: Slowness.

The page also asks how well you executed it. Not whether the boules went in. Whether the word did its job.

One more thing from that study.

The score wasn’t the only thing that moved. They enjoyed it less, too.

They were still shooting. They just weren’t enjoying it. That’s why the self-rating page asks how much you enjoyed the session, alongside how present you were and how you handled the misses. Their heart rates never registered any of it, and yours won’t either.

A miss is worth exactly one thing

The page asks you to rate how you handled the missed shots. Rate it. It never asks you to write about it.

That’s deliberate. It’s also what I got wrong for years, and the thing players ask me about most.

Because a miss does carry something. Nearly always one thing. You read the terrain wrong. You were half a metre short on the landing spot. You rushed it. Pick that up and it comes with you to the next boule.

Once is enough. Go round it again and you get less, not more. By the third replay I’ve stopped looking at the terrain and started looking at myself.

Last week I wrote that the boule you threw two minutes ago is still in the frame. That is where a replayed miss goes. Straight into the next picture, taking up the room the next shot needed.

So keep it small. One thing, then go. The calm you get is just what having only one thing in your head feels like.

There’s one word that breaks the rule, and it’s the one most of us reach for.

Pressure.

Nygaard and Havnen put that word to 150 footballers from Norway, and it turned out to cover four different things. Nerves in the body. Worrying. Losing the thread of what they were doing. And what a player believed about their own worrying.

They didn’t move together. What a player believed had nothing to do with whether they lost concentration.

So pressure isn’t one thing you can carry. It’s four, and not one of them is sharp enough to use on the next end.

If that’s the word that keeps turning up, writing more about it won’t help. Work out which of the four it was. Take that instead.

An arm that rushes the release. A mind on the score before the boule leaves your hand. Stepping into the circle without choosing your landing spot. The idea that a relaxed player is a careless one.

Four different problems, and the word fixes none of them. What Does Your Body Do After a Miss? goes further into the first.

The three best shots get a word for how they felt because you want to find that feeling again. A miss gets one fact and a rating. No feeling, because that isn’t one you want to find again.

Make the Miss Useful is the drill for it. Take the one thing. Leave the rest on the terrain. It’s how I build every pétanque drill here, and Give the Drill a Target Before You Throw is where that starts.

How far can we take this?

Everything above is what I’ve read and studied from other sports. Whether it works for us pétanque players is my gut feeling, not their finding.

None of these papers built the journal. The pages came first, and the reading came after, because I wanted to know whether what I’d built had anything behind it. So here’s what I took from each, and what I left.

From the golf one I took the direction and nothing else. I’ve only got the abstract, so I can’t tell you how many players were in it or how big the effect was. What it shows is that people asked for feedback after their good putts, in all three groups. It doesn’t show that asking made them better.

The archery one has the cleanest design of the three. The same fifteen archers, both conditions, seventy-two hours apart, nothing different between them but the fatigue. That’s why I trust the direction it points. Fifteen is fifteen, so I take the shape of the result rather than the size of it.

From the football one I took the four pieces, and I’d trust those. What it can’t tell you is which way round they work. Everybody described themselves, nobody watched anyone play, and the strongest predictor of competitive anxiety wasn’t a belief about worry at all. It was depressive symptoms.

This is noticing, not treatment. If something in your notes points at a problem that doesn’t lift when you leave the terrain, take it to somebody qualified rather than to a journal.

These papers gave me better reasons for pages I’d already written. That’s usually the most you should ask of research.

Before it goes

Quiet. Soft. Clean. Full. On time.

One of those belongs to something you did this week. By Thursday you won’t be able to find it again.

That’s the whole argument for writing it down, and Volume 1 of the Pétanque Performance Journal is six weeks of pages built to catch it.

Everything else that happened out there has already done its job.

Research

Nygaard, M. U., & Havnen, A. (2026). The relationship between metacognitive beliefs and competitive anxiety among elite and amateur soccer players. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, 1880234. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1880234

Soylu, S., Arslan, E., Kilit, B., & Soylu, Y. (2026). The effects of mental fatigue on psychophysiological responses, mood states, and archery shooting performance under a simulated archery competition: A randomized cross-over study. Brain Sciences, 16(5), 459. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci16050459

Valério, M. M., Chiviacowsky, S., Cardozo, P., & Drews, R. (2026). Effects of conceptions of ability on the learning of a sport motor skill in a self-controlled feedback condition. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/17479541261467990