Monitor your own performance in real time using your mental representation

Keep part of your attention on comparing what you are doing to your representation of what you should be doing.

Why it works

One of the defining features of expert mental representations is that they enable real-time self-monitoring and correction. An expert musician can hear a technical flaw in their playing as it occurs and make micro-corrections without stopping. This requires holding the target representation active as a reference while simultaneously producing the performance — a split-attention capacity that is itself developed through practice.

How to do it

1. During performance, maintain an internal observer: "Does this match my mental model?"
2. When you detect a gap, note it without stopping — minor corrections can be integrated mid-performance.
3. Major deviations become targets for the next session’s deliberate practice.

Evidence

Self-regulation during performance is a feature of expert deliberate practice; experts consistently show more self-monitoring and more precise mid-performance correction than novices. This is documented in process-tracing and verbal protocol studies of expert performance. (observational)

Real-time self-monitoring can also interfere with performance at intermediate levels of skill (the "paralysis by analysis" effect); the monitoring needs to become rapid and minimally attention-demanding to function as experts use it.

Sources

• Ericsson & Pool (2016), "Peak" (self-monitoring as a component of expert mental representations)

Common mistake

Deferring all evaluation to post-performance review, which misses the micro-corrections that experts make continuously — losing the feedback density that accelerates improvement.