Discovering what’s going wrong with action programs is often fairly straight-forward. A tennis player may realise, for example, that her backhand is letting her down; the learner driver that poor clutch control makes him stall on hills; the maths’ student that carelessness in checking answers is responsible for foolish mistakes in his calculations. Indeed, a primary task of coaches, instructors and teachers is to provide both the practical advice necessary to bring out such improvements in performance and also objective feedback about the students’ performance. However, action programs can often only be significantly improved upon once negative management programs have been identified and corrected.
I am going to describe a way of analysing your performance in order to diag¬nose, as precisely as possible, the reasons for any failures in performance.
This method, which I call differencing, helps identify both the positive and negative aspects of any performance. Fourteen questions enable you to clarify in your mind both what is going wrong and what is going right in any activity. This is important since almost every performance contains both successes and failures, both things you do well and those you do poorly. Adopting too global a view of any outcome means that one tends to pay insufficient attention to either the good or bad features of that attempt. If you concentrate solely on errors then your feedback will prove excessively negative, which is likely to decrease motivation while increasing anxiety. On the other hand, focusing solely on your attainments can result in an overly rigid attitude which prevents you from adapting performance to meet changing conditions.
