Compare each practice attempt to your mental representation of the target

After every attempt, evaluate it against your internal model — not against how it felt.

Why it works

The feedback loop that drives deliberate practice requires two things: an accurate representation of the target and an accurate read of the current attempt. Most learners evaluate attempts by feel ("that didn’t feel right") but cannot say specifically what was wrong. A sharper mental representation enables a sharper gap analysis: you know exactly what was different and what to adjust in the next rep.

How to do it

1. Before each practice session, vividly rehearse the target representation.
2. After each attempt, articulate specifically what matched and what did not.
3. Focus corrections on the most significant specific gap, not on general improvement.

Evidence

Specific, knowledge-based feedback is consistently more effective than general or affective feedback in skill acquisition research. The representation-to-attempt comparison model is Ericsson’s theoretical account of why deliberate practice works — empirically consistent but theoretical in form. (mechanistic)

Measuring "mental representation quality" directly is not possible; this is inferred from performance characteristics. The mechanism is principled and consistent with what is directly observable.

Sources

• Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993), "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance", Psychological Review

Common mistake

Ending each attempt with "that was okay" or "that felt off" without being able to specify what the gap is — leaving the practice loop without the targeted correction that drives the next rep.