Coaching practices for Every Time Something Goes Sideways We Replay it Looking for Who Dropped the Ball and the Wins We Never Examine at All So the Lessons Just Evaporate and We Keep Relearning the Same Thing the Hard Way

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Every Time Something Goes Sideways We Replay it Looking for Who Dropped the Ball and the Wins We Never Examine at All So the Lessons Just Evaporate and We Keep Relearning the Same Thing the Hard Way, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

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

• Every time something goes sideways we replay it looking for who dropped the ball, and the wins we never examine at all
• 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
• I keep blaming myself and vowing to just try harder, yet the same failure happens again and again no matter how much willpower I throw at it
• I keep studying how the winners won, but it’s a thin lesson
• I keep making the same mistake over and over, and every time I just resolve to execute better next time

Practices that may help

1. Run brief after-action reviews without blame
   After any significant outcome — success or failure — ask four questions together as a team.
   Psychological Safety in Teams
2. 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
3. Distinguish system causes from individual causes in the analysis
   Most failures have system causes and individual causes; fixing only the individual leaves the system to produce the same result again.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
4. Build a personal library of failure post-mortems
   Deliberately collect, read, and learn from failure case studies in your domain.
   Survivorship Bias: Learning from What You Can’t See
5. Examine your assumptions, not just your actions
   When reflection reveals a pattern of repeated mistakes, look for the underlying belief that generates them.
   Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle: Learning by Doing and Reflecting
6. Reflect to turn experience into lessons
   After a task, extract what to keep and what to change instead of just moving on.
   Metacognition: Knowing What You Actually Know
7. Maintain approach framing after a setback
   When you miss, ask "what does success look like from here?" rather than "how bad was the failure?"
   Approach vs Avoidance Goals
8. Use the performance-feedback loop without Self 1
   Treat every outcome as information, not a verdict — adjust without judging.
   The Inner Game: Quieting Self 1
9. Actively watch for escalation of commitment
   Each new investment in a losing course makes the next exit harder — catch escalation early.
   The Sunk Cost Fallacy: Escaping Bad Investments
10. Plan a concrete experiment to test your new principle
    Close the loop by deciding specifically how you will apply the extracted lesson next time.
    Structured Reflection: Kolb’s Learning Cycle in Practice

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