Sunday evenings and Mondays can be busy answering calls and emails from my students around the US. Typically, we're discussing this week-end's tournament - play by play - and results. Listening, I hear a Field by Field account of what happened and why.
It is worthwhile to do a post-game review of stations - provided we don't get caught up in replaying certain misses too many times and reinforcing those particular images - which we really don't want to do.
But there's one very important part of this review process I don't always hear in these discussions. So I ask this question after hearing the report: "What (specifically) did you learn from this match - that you can take to the next match?" If we're not asking ourselves this question, it's likely we'll make the same mistakes over and over again. Sure - if we make that mistake enough times - eventually - we'll "get it." But why eventually? Are we driving off and leaving valuable lessons back at the tournament grounds?
If we are serious about stepping our game up to the next level, that makes the question above all the more important. I'm suggesting we look a little deeper at our tournament "wrap up" until we find at least 1 good lesson for our next few training sessions, before the next match. Unquestionably - in contrast to the trial and error method - this more focused approach is shorter, faster and a much more reliable strategy to build the performance improvements so many of us seek. I recommend it highly.
