You really must get into the habit of doing this; it helps a tremendous amount, so bung a tape/minidisk in and record yourself whenever you practice.

When you're learning, it can sometimes be really hard to work out what's going on as you've got too many things to worry about and you've not really developed the skills to handle them all at the same time.  The chance to be able to sit back, relax, and have a listen to what you've just done means you'll be able to hear much more easily when and where things are going wrong.  The hope is that if you keep doing this - practice and review - you'll find that some of it rubs off on you so that when you're next on the decks, you'll be just that little bit better at working things out as you go along.

When listening to yourself, you should remember:

• Feel really pleased with everything that goes well.
• Feel really pleased with things that are going better than they have before (even if it's only a little bit).
• Where things do go wrong (which they will), try and identify the most important thing to concentrate on next time you practice as you can't really work on too many things at once.

Of course, another advantage of always recording yourself is that you might do a mix you're really really pleased with and if it's recorded you can listen to it again and again and feel really good about yourself and make copies to give to friends.