Speary wrote:It's near impossible to correct faults yourself as you only know what you know. I use golf as an example. I can practice till the cows come home but I will not improve unless somebody points out and corrects the faults.
I would strongly recommend joining your local IAM or ROSPA group
Many IAM groups such as mine offer free assessments and taster sessions and also offer reduced fees
Example of not getting training: we had a chap last year who came to our group and after one session declared that it wasn't for him. Shortly after we discovered that he had put himself in for test and guess what, he failed. The examiner said that he was potentially a good driver but it was clear from his lack of a system, observation and anticipation, that he had not had any training /guidance.
Not sure it's really that true that it is almost impossible to correct faults on your own. I think we all do it all the time - it is certainly a skill that a good driving instructor will attempt to instil in their clients; many of my students tell me what went wrong and why, and will try to remedy next time without me saying a word. I do it all the time myself when driving.
Of course you are never going to self correct all faults - for various reasons you may fail to identify them, fail to correct analyse the cause or fail to correctly identify how you can improve. As such one of the primary roles of a good coach or mentor is as a facilitator of self-reflection and self-analysis.
In the example you give the failure seems most likely to be at the first hurdle, identifying the fault. That may well as much as anything be because arrogance and/or complacency were too much to the fore. Often with learner drivers you will find that because these attributes are less well developed, fault identification is pretty good. It is the analysis that can then cause a problem.
A simple learner example might be jerky gear changes. It is not uncommon for a student to tell me out of the blue that they feel something is wrong with their gear changes, so they have identified it for themselves. They often offer a simple analysis and by extrapolation, remedy - "is it because I am coming off the clutch too quick?" is the norm. Now without me there if they just thought this themselves and tried coming off the clutch slower, it would offer a not outrageously bad remedy - allowing the speed differential across the clutch to be blended and balanced more gracefully. Of course I can offer better insight (although for most learners you can forget about full-on rev matching - they don't have the motor skills and judgement to start playing that game, but there are halfway houses to be explored).
So, yes you have to know that something hasn't worked as well as it could have, or that there is a better solution out there before you can self-correct, but in many cases it is eminently feasible. After all, how did we get to a theoretical 'perfect driving technique'? A pioneer or pioneers thinking about how they can do things better - i.e. there is some kind of fault that needs to be fixed. The new approach becomes the accepted best practice, and the pioneer(s) can spread the knowledge to others, but they have in effect self-corrected to get there.