What if You Could Watch Your Own Life's Game Tape?

Athletes watch game tape to see their unconscious patterns and practice different responses.

What if you could do the same with your life?

In my work in sports, witnessing how you play is normalized. Most people "out of the arena" choose to live without this feedback loop.

You complain about chronic tension, relationship dynamics, work stress, creative blocks - but you never see yourself from the outside.

That's one of the reasons I don't listen to your stories very much, I listen into them: I'm watching body language during sessions. Observing how you actually move through your environment. I see the images that subconsciously slip into your verbal expressions.

The gap between who you think you are and how you actually behave - is where the practice of endless refinement lives.

The Small-Sided Games Approach

What's unique about athletes is that they actually sit down to look into the "mirror" after the game ends. (Of course some get blocked over-analyzing, but that's another tape).

Basketball skill coaches design complex match scenarios - as if they take out a couple of frames of the game tape - where players struggled in the game.

Practice is repeated in a variety of ways until new, conscious responses become automatic.

What if we did this with life patterns?

Social anxiety? We create controlled immersions. In business meetings you swallow your words? We simulate those power dynamics. Certain relationships make you disappear? We replay those pleasing moments. Re-occurring dreams? We enter the script.

Whether you're an athlete in the arena or one in "daily life" - your nervous system learns through repetition, not intellectually knowing it.

Your Unconscious Patterns Are Always Visible

I've had dozens of clients who said 'I thought I had processed this' and that unprocessed material became chronic tension in their body.

Like existential detectives (re-watch I Heart Huckabees), your work is to track multiple data streams: Your posture reveals something about your relationship to authority, it reveals attitude, status play. Your breathing changes when certain topics arise or two girls randomly laugh behind us in the park. You unconsciously step into other people's stories instead of staying in axis.

Your body doesn't lie. Your conditioning does.

Then we create "behavioral simulations" - controlled environments where the old triggers might arise, and now you have a dedicated space to practice new choices.

You're learning, training to become better and better in the old stories that live in your movement, your posture, your breathing, your thinking, your choices (or lack of them)…

Getting Your Own Game Tape

The "game-changer": seeing yourself from outside yourself.

"Look. Look. There I go again, immediately shrinking when someone raises their voice."

"Watch how I abandon my position and retreat in my own posture the moment I sense disapproval."

"Notice how I'm allowing the other to lead me again."

Awareness creates a return to choice. Choice breeds perpetual change. Change creates new patterns.

Unlike talking about and analyzing your problems, you don't just stop at "great insights" - it's embodied practice in real-world simulations.

Imagine if athletes would only watch game-tape but never practiced the actual scenarios they want to become better at…

Why This Works

As a side note, professional athletes often have 2 sessions per day working on the tactics, scenarios and skills they want to improve on - on the exact court/environment where they'll compete.

Pressures and stressors are often introduced in training to mimic the trigger patterns of the athletes. (Once I even heard a story of a NBA player using a life-sized cardboard of his father during practice because his stats decreased significantly when his dad was present at his games.)

Most 'personal development' however happens in artificial environments, in offices.

Real transformation seems to require more: practice in the actual contexts where your patterns play out.

You get to see yourself clearly AND practice, practice, practice new options until acting from options that are in front of you becomes natural.

Like an athlete training for the moment when everything's on the line.

The real question: How do you unlearn acting yourself until "you" is spontaneous?

What patterns would you most want to see on your own "game tape"? In which exact situations do you catch yourself performing instead of being?

IN SEARCH OF...

From I Heart Huckabees: "How am I not myself? How am I not myself? How am I not myself? How am I not myself?"

Alfred Jarry on demolishing: "We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings."

Salvador Dali on your real treasure chest: "The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant."

Marcel Duchamp on self-contradiction: "I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."

From Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland on: "But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!"