It's easy to spend most of your time as a coach telling sailors what they did wrong. It feels productive. You saw the mistake, named it, corrected it. Job done.
But correction — on its own — is one of the least effective tools in the toolkit. And I've seen the over-reliance on it hold a lot of young sailors back.
What correction actually does
When a coach corrects a sailor, a few things happen. The sailor becomes aware of the mistake. They think about it. They try not to do it again.
The problem is that thinking about what not to do is not the same as knowing what to do. A sailor focused on avoiding a mistake is a sailor focused on the wrong thing. Their attention is on the error, not the correct movement. And attention is powerful — it tends to produce more of whatever it's pointed at.
Correction has its place. But it works best when it's specific, rare, and immediately followed by an opportunity to execute correctly.
What positive feedback does instead
Positive feedback — given at the right moment, on the right behavior — tells a sailor exactly what to repeat. It's precise. It's immediate. And it builds confidence rather than eroding it.
A sailor who hears consistent positive feedback on correct execution knows what good feels like. They can find it again. They start to own it.
That's a fundamentally different outcome than a sailor who has been told a hundred times what they're doing wrong. That sailor knows their mistakes. They don't necessarily know their strengths.
Frequency matters
One of the biggest mistakes coaches make is treating feedback as something to hand out sparingly — as if too much praise will make sailors soft. In my experience, the opposite is true. Frequent, accurate positive feedback keeps sailors engaged, motivated, and improving.
The key word is accurate. Positive feedback only works if it means something. Empty praise — "good job" after every maneuver regardless of quality — teaches sailors nothing. But specific, earned positive feedback, given often, is one of the most powerful things a coach can do.
The standard doesn't drop
None of this means lowering expectations. The standard stays exactly where it is. What changes is how you communicate progress toward that standard.
The best coaches hold sailors to extremely high standards — and get there by reinforcing every step in the right direction, not by cataloguing every step in the wrong one.
That's not a soft approach. It's a smarter one.
