The above video shows a great example of seeing things from a different perspective. The coach wants the gymnast’s pinkies to touch first. That wasn’t happening, even with explicit instruction. Instead of focusing on the end result, the coach found a creative way to make the pinkies touch first. The tag point… “keep the foam in there” gave the gymnast something to focus on that CAUSED the desired end result and kept her mind off the various things she was doing wrong in previous attempts.

When creating tag points, always try to think about what CAUSES a behaviour, as opposed to thinking about the end result of behaviour itself. For example, if you want someone to jump higher, you should focus on muscle movements that are a precursor to a higher jump. The tag point “jump higher” is ill-defined. If you tag at the top of a jump that is the desired height, the learner does not get much useful information. The muscle movements that caused the higher jump happened well before you tagged the height of the jump. The most effective tags are those that come immediatlely as the behaviour is happening. This helps the learner know exactly what muscle movements caused the behavior to happen. Here are some other examples of ill-defined instructions that would not be suitable tag points:

Run faster

Sing louder

Stay afloat

Engage your core

Balance through your turn

Talk quietly

Turn tighter

Hit the ball farther

Say you wanted someone to hit a baseball or a golf ball farther, tagging when the ball landed would not help them. This feedback comes too far after the fact and they can see where it went anyway. You would need to find something about the grip, the stance, the swing or the weight transfer (or all of these) and come up with individual tag points to CAUSE a more effective swing.

Say you want someone to sit up straight to improve their posture. The tag point “sit up straight” is ill-defined. The person would probably do it anyway if they knew exactly what it looked and felt like. They may already think they are sitting strainght, although you can see that they aren’t. A way to make this happen might be to put your hand behind their shoulder and give the tag point “shoulder to hand”. Tag when their shoulder touches your hand. Sitting so as to put their shoulder against your hand CAUSES the behaviour of sitting up straight.

If a learner is making a consistent error, it is unlikely that just making that into a tag point is going to fix the problem (although sometimes it does!). For example, your kids may come home every day from school and kick their shoes off and leave them all over the place at the door. Giving a tag point “shoes away” is unlikely to change this behaviour, since you’ve probably told them a thousand times to do it. A strategy that could work better is to put shoe outlines in the closet and use the tag point “shoe to outline”. This gives them something specific to do in placing their shoes on the appropriate outlines on the closet floor.