Overthinking A to Z?

Hi all! I'm in the (obviously) very early stages of my steno journey and wanted to ask some hopefully not super annoying advice.

I'm halfway thru A to Z and find that with all my practicing, I'm not having a lot of trouble with muscle memory. I'm drilling letters, consonant combos, numbers, and words words WORDS. I create recordings on my phone and practice until I have no hesitation pushing the right keys.

What I feel I'm lacking though, is correctly indentifying or spelling out words & letters in raw steno. I can hear/see the word "maid" and pretty quickly type the right combination of letters, but when asked to spell it out I goof up every time. I usually have to type it on my steno keyboard to know what it is. Right now, I feel like my fingers are smarter than my brain.

So my question is - do I need to start focusing harder on memorizing raw steno like initial m is "PH" and long a is "AEU" and so on? My tentative goal for right now is to finish A to Z and take a month to really drill and practice what I've learned before starting school. So I can take that month so also really focus on memorizing the correct outlines if that's something I need to improve.

Sorry if this is frequently asked and answered! And thanks so much in advance for any help.