An examination of conscience, in the broader Christian devotional sense, ordinarily begins where the name suggests, with an inventory of sin: what wrong was done, thought or said, in preparation for confession or private repentance. Ignatius restructures that familiar movement by placing thanksgiving first. Before any fault is named, the Examen asks the reciter to notice and give thanks for what has been received that day, however ordinary, before turning attention to failure. The ordering is not incidental to the method; Ignatius's broader spiritual theology treats gratitude as the necessary ground for honest self-examination, on the reasoning that a review of one's faults conducted without first attending to grace received easily collapses into anxious self-scrutiny rather than genuine prayer.
This is also what separates the Examen most clearly from other prayers catalogued under this heading, such as the ancient world's nightly self-review traditions, which typically move directly to an accounting of the day's conduct without an intervening act of thanksgiving. The Ignatian sequence, thanks before fault, fault before petition, petition before resolution, gives the exercise a deliberately different emotional shape: not a court in which the reciter is examined and found wanting, but a review conducted from a starting position of having already been given something worth noticing, with the naming of failure arriving second rather than first.