Performance Review at home!

My son has been playing competitive badminton for the last three years. He trains ~ 15 hours a week and participates in about six tournaments every year. Like every other athlete competing in the tournament, except for one, he wins a few games and loses some. After the match, his coach gives him feedback on what he did well and his improvement areas. In the past, he would only remember what he did well and forget about everything else. And would get upset when we talked about his areas of improvement.

After a few failed experiments on making him focus on his improvement areas, I decided to do the tournament’s performance review (similar to what we do at work) with him. Broadly, performance review involves — going over employee’s accomplishments, understanding challenges, brainstorming to address the challenges for next cycle, and identifying concrete steps to improve skills to perform at the next level.

After lots of back and forth discussions between us, we have settled on three goals for every badminton tournament — perform at full potential and win games, identify areas of improvement, and have fun. After the tournament, we do our review covering the following items:

1. Discuss wins and losses. We talk not only about the matches he won but also about his improvements since the last tournament
2. Go over the challenges. Few challenges that we have discussed in the past are: the courts had different drift, and couldn’t adjust to it in the first game; Was nervous in the first game; Lost first game because was not warmed up; Too tired in the evening match
3. Brainstorm solutions to address challenges (if we can). Few changes we have done based on identified challenges are: Book flights to reach tournament city early to practice in the court to adjust to drift; Do long rallies in the first few minutes of the game to tackle initial nervousness; Create a warm-up routine for the match; Rest in the hotel instead of playing with friends in the gaps between the matches
4. Lastly, we review recordings of his games (especially the ones he lost) and compare our notes on other matches that we watched to identify his key improvement areas and the next steps. These are the skills improvements that will enable him to perform at a higher level in the next tournament. Both of us understand that these improvements will require significant effort over a long time, so we try to pick only two-to-three.

So far, this approach is working well. I would be interested in learning how others are using practices from work at home!