Coaching practices for How to Review Performance

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Review Performance, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• It went well so I assumed I did everything right and moved on
• I only ever stop to reflect when something blows up
• When something goes badly I’ll pick it apart for hours, but when something actually goes great I just enjoy it and move on without a second thought
• Every time I review how I acted today I catch myself building a defense
• My days kind of blur together and I drift, always with a reason why it didn’t go how I wanted

Practices that may help

1. Debrief against process goals, not just the outcome
   After performance, evaluate whether you executed your process goals before evaluating the result.
   Process vs. Outcome Goals in Sport and Performance
2. Build a regular AAR cadence, not just crisis-triggered reviews
   Reviews triggered only by problems create a negative-events database; a regular cadence captures ordinary learning that compounds.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
3. Apply the AAR to successes, not only setbacks
   Reviewing what actually caused a win produces replicable insight; reviewing only failures produces only loss-avoidance.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
4. Seneca’s evening court — judge the day as an honest prosecutor
   Review the day as a fair judge would: what was the evidence, what was the verdict, what is the sentence?
   The Pythagorean Evening Review
5. Conduct a daily after-action review with zero excuses
   Review the day’s performance honestly: what happened, what should have happened, what changes.
   The Accountability Mirror: David Goggins’s Radical Honesty Practice
6. Review process goal execution separately from outcomes after each performance
   Evaluate how well you executed your process goals independently of whether you won or lost.
   Process Goals, Made Practical
7. The Annual Review (Tim Ferriss Method)
   Tim Ferriss’s annual review is built on two questions — "What went well this year?" and "What did not go well this year?" — applied systematically across major life domains and answered with enough specificity to produce different decisions next year. It is a practitioner tool without clinical evidence, but its mechanisms (structured reflection, explicit failure review, behavioral specificity) are consistent with goal-review and learning research.
8. Run the four-question AAR within 24 hours of any significant event
   What was planned? What happened? Why the gap? What next? — answered while memory is fresh.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
9. Run a quarterly life audit, not just an annual one
   Review all four quadrants of your life every 90 days while the feedback loop is still tight enough to correct.
   The Eisenhower Life Audit
10. The GTD Weekly Review
    The GTD weekly review is a structured 1–2 hour practice recommended by David Allen in Getting Things Done: you clear your inboxes, review all active projects and next actions, update your lists, and regain what Allen calls "mind like water." Evidence that the full review improves outcomes is largely practitioner-reported; the underlying components — external capture systems, project-level reviews, and outcome clarification — are consistent with cognitive offloading and self-regulation research.

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