In motor learning, a popular area of research has been to examine the importance of where individuals focus their attention during the acquisition of motor skills. Researchers in this area have proposed that, when teaching a motor skill, the instructions used to direct the learner's attention can affect the immediate and long-term retention of that skill. The direction of the resulting attentional focus has been categorized as either internal (the body's movements) or external (the effects of their movements). The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of consistency between focus of attention and task objective on the performance of a balancing task. Specifically, the authors hoped to further explore the benefits of an external focus of attention proposed by Wulf and colleagues (1998) by determining whether those benefits are due to the focus-of-attention direction itself, or the relative consistency with the task objective. It is hypothesized that participants who are given an external focus of attention will outperform those with an internal focus when a typical external task objective is provided, echoing results of previous research. However, it is also hypothesized that those who are given an internal focus of attention will outperform those given an external focus when the task objective is also internal. It is therefore predicted that having a consistent focus of attention and task objective direction will result in superior performance compared to when those factors are inconsistent. (Contains 2 figures.)