What you will ultimately do, in teaching someone, is to both praise the positive actions and correct the negative actions. An example of this is best illustrated in sports. I was once a track coach, where I focused on teaching the throwers. These young men often have a good sense of their own raw power and would take to the discus or the shotput and try to just use their size and raw power to muscle the object as far as they could.
If we were just to focus on the throws that went well, there would be no improvement in the ultimate distance of those throws. The athlete would top out at what they could do, but to really improve in the task involves breaking down every aspect of the athlete’s form. When you are breaking down the athlete’s’ form, every step in the process is important.
Let us use as our example the discus. There is a tendency to want to grab the discus with your meaty paws and just heave it. But with beginners, you must finesse the throw. You grab the discus so that as you twist your body and throw the discus, it rolls off of your hand, spinning at about a thirty-degree angle through the air.
A successful discus throw is not just about the hand though. The hand is connected through the wrist and the elbow and down to the flow of the hips and the position of your feet. Once you learn how the discus feels as it comes out of your hand, then you can get a sense of that tacit knowledge of what it feels like when it is going right.
That knowledge is not gained just by going through what went right, but it is in constant repetition as you explore what went wrong. If your throw does not feel right, what is it that the student-athlete is doing that is not working for the best? Where are the mechanics off such that there is a definite problem with how the throw happened?
You must look at where things are going wrong and you cannot ignore these problems. Yes, you want to see things going well and you praise with positive reinforcement when it works well, but negative actions are not to be ignored. What the negative actions do is, in fact, allows for a place of learning. It is through making mistakes and examining the reasons that they happened that I find is the best sort of teacher. When you make a mistake, especially one that is visible and public to someone you want to impress, and examining that mistake is when you learn the most. If you did something well, of course you did it well, but that only happened because of all the other times that you did not do something well and you learned from your mistakes.