To look yourself straight in the eyes and be completely honest with yourself in what you see takes real guts.  For our purposes here, guts refers to the fortitude to face adversity, difficulty, and the discouraging, head on.  We all enjoy reflecting on our successes but shining a light on our deficiencies, flaws, and weaknesses can hurt and be deeply painful.  Film analysis is the time to put ego aside for a moment and get vulnerable, truthful, and real with yourself.  By doing so, you can objectively look at your alter ego mindset progress to determine areas of success and failure, and the necessary changes for improvement of both.  This type of self-analysis requires guts because it is never easy or comfortable, but absolutely necessary if you are going to set yourself up for change toward an optimal mindset.

The analysis process occurs in two areas of the optimization loop.  The first is on the frontend while creating film, when you log the evaluation of your performance during a particular brain train or competition.  The second is on the backend during film analysis when you are looking for trends and patterns of your mindset progress over time.  In both front and backend scenarios, you want to be asking yourself the proverbial question “Why?”  In fact, you will want to keep asking yourself “Why?” until you get to the root of the matter.  This is a technique called the “5 Whys” ¹⁴ which was developed by Sakichi Toyoda and used by the Toyota Motor Corporation during the evolution of its manufacturing methodologies.  Whether a failure or success, you want to understand the core reason for the result and it often takes a sequence of “Whys?” to get there.  When faced with a failure, using the “5 Whys” approach will not only help reveal the nature of the problem, but also the solution.  As you look to understand and further a success, the “5 Whys” will help determine how best to build upon your strengths.  Needless to say, asking “Why?” is crucial to your self-examination and you will need to get comfortable with the question throughout the analysis process.

Now it is time to determine exactly how to improve upon both your failures and successes.  As previously stated, the solution may present itself during the “5 Whys”, but if it does not, you will need to determine a solution by asking yourself the question “How?”  How can you improve in this particular area?  You need to determine the necessary changes to overcome challenges, build up deficiencies, and turn around failures.  You also want to establish how to further develop your strengths and build upon your successes because there are always areas to enhance and ways to improve.  Answering the question “How?” can involve changing specific aspects of your alter ego or villain to produce more ideal results.  It also may lead you to discover your approach is correct, you simply need to stay the course and continue to practice.  Be open to wherever the “How?” question leads you because your optimal mindset is waiting for you there.

The analysis process helps you learn from your mindset journey and fosters self-awareness.  Self-awareness is the conscious knowledge of your situations, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results.  Every experience, decision, success, failure, and mistake provide an opportunity to learn and become more self-aware.  Whether it comes from your practice, competition, alter ego, or villain; tracking and reviewing data around your mindset progress will help you become more aware of what is going on in your mind.  The more self-aware you become, the easier it becomes to make corrections and increase the speed at which you can successfully complete the optimization loop.  Ultimately, you will be able to use your self-awareness skillset to make corrections on the fly and in the heat of the moment which is a huge asset to your mindset as well as your athletic performance.

Tips

1. Don’t lie to yourself or try and fool yourself with good intentions. Honest analysis is the only way to properly set yourself up for positive change.
2. Be constructive in your analysis. You do not need to beat yourself up or gloat.
3. Always be asking “Why?” and “How?” in both failure and success.
4. In some cases, it may be helpful to ask “Why?” and “How?” through the lens of your alter ego or a particular inspiration. This can be especially beneficial if you are struggling with answers for the “Why?” and “How?”.
5. Use self-awareness to your advantage so you can utilize the proper emotions and behaviors on the fly and in the heat of the moment.

No guts, no glory.  You need to have the guts to be honest in your film analysis so you can be in a position to change and therefore optimize your mindset. By doing so you set yourself up for the glory that follows an optimal mindset. The glory of peak performance and maximized potential.