by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
15 Ways that Anybody Can Tap Into Their REALNESS and Live a REAL Life
One thing I’ve truly seen over the last ten or so years of coaching people is that all we’re all really looking for something REAL: a taste of life that feels like we’re actually doing what we’re supposed to be doing and being whatever it is that we really are.
What this means is that underneath all of the goals, ambitions, insecurities, relationship dramas, and endless attempts to improve ourselves, there’s a fundamental human desire to feel connected to life rather than constantly fighting against it.
In other words, what we really want is to feel whole instead of fragmented, to trust ourselves instead of being held back by doubt and fear, and to experience genuine connection and to move through the world with a sense that we’re finally on the right track.
There are a TON of articles on this site about how to live in this way and overcome the old conditioning and programming that can make us show up in an unreal way and we’ve already explored everything from shame and the ego to shadow integration, self-trust, and the courage to face uncomfortable truths.
This article gives you 15 practical Non-negotiables of Realness that will help anybody who’s on this kind of journey to tap into the flow and start building some real momentum.
These aren’t rules for becoming a ‘perfect’ human being (which is impossible anyway because we’re all perfectly imperfect) – they’re principles for returning to home to reality, integrating the ‘parts’ of ourselves we’ve disowned, and learning to live with more flow instead of frustration
Let’s dig a little deeper:
1. Stay in the Stretch Zone
The first non-negotiable to live out is that you can’t grow real if you keep shrinking away form yourself and life to avoid discomfort:
The truth is that real growth requires repeatedly moving beyond what’s familiar by challenging your assumptions and taking risks that stretch your current capacity.
This means that if you always choose the comfortable option then you’ll only succeed at becoming ‘good‘ at living within the limits of your conditioning and eventually stagnating.
This doesn’t mean throwing yourself into overwhelming situations that dysregulate your nervous system or confusing recklessness with courage (that means you’ve made it to the Panic Zone instead of the Stretch Zone):
Instead, the Stretch Zone is where you’re challenged enough to grow but have sufficient resources to integrate what you’re experiencing – in other words, you’re stretching just beyond what you currently know and are capable of and find the sweet spot of building creative tension and feeling fully alive.
How to practise it:
Identify one thing you’re avoiding because it makes you uncomfortable:
Have the conversation, share the work, try the new activity, or take the first step towards the goal – whatever you choose to do, start small enough to remain engaged but challenge yourself enough that you can’t simply repeat your old and familiar patterns.
At the end of the day, your comfort zone might be a lovely place to visit but it’s a terrible place to try and build an entire life for yourself.
Free Transformational Coaching Session
Ready to stop holding back and start growing REAL?
Book a free one-to-one coaching session with me – a truthful conversation about where you are, what’s in the way, and the real path forward.
Free. Just coaching (no sales pitch). No obligation. Pick a time that suits you.
2. Practise Patience
Reality unfolds at its own pace and this just “is what it is” regardless of how loudly your ego might complain about the allocated timetable.
In a way, it’s perfectly natural to want ‘instant’ results, certain outcomes, and definitive answers about where our lives are heading and so when these things don’t arrive on cue then we assume something is ‘wrong’.
Often, however, we’re simply trying to force a process that requires time and forgetting that our ‘cue’ for when things should happen or take place aren’t always the same as whatever timeframe reality itself is operating on.
Unless we acknowledge that ‘our’ time is often different to reality’s time then we can just end up causing friction, frustration, and misery for ourselves – the antidote for this is PATIENCE.
Real growth involves learning, practising, making mistakes, integrating experiences, and gradually becoming capable of living differently without rushing the process because we think we need something before we’re actually ready for it.
You can’t bully yourself or life into wholeness but you can slow down and learn to work with it (“no hurries, no worries”).
How to practise it:
When you feel frustrated by your perceived lack of progress in a given area of your life then ask yourself whether you’re genuinely ‘stuck’ or just being impatient.
If you’re genuinely ‘stuck’ then you need to wait it out and trust life until the next move reveals itself (which it always will) but if you’re just being impatient then it’s time to learn to shift your focus on to the next meaningful action rather than demanding that your entire future reveal itself today.
Patience isn’t passively waiting around and doing nothing but continuing to do what’s yours to do without insisting that reality conform to your preferred schedule.
3. Practise Self-Compassion
Awareness without self-compassion quickly becomes another form of self-abandonment:
For example, you might recognise that you’re people-pleasing, avoiding responsibility, or repeating an old relationship pattern over and over again and – even though this is useful awareness – it just creates another layer on top of the original problem if you react by calling yourself pathetic, weak, broken, or [any other judgement].
The underlying cause of this kind of self-condemnation is SHAME which always pulls us into fragmentation and away from integration because it encourages us to hide, defend, and perform instead of just accepting ourselves in our REALNESS.
Self-compassion is the way out of this type of judgement and it allows you to take your awareness, accept it, and then take real action because you’re willing to see yourself clearly without deciding that what you see makes you fundamentally unworthy (which you never are because what’s real is always real)..
How to practise it: When you notice an unwanted pattern or personality ‘quirk’ then aim to replace “What’s wrong with me?” with “What is happening here and what do I need to understand or change?”
Acknowledge whatever you’ve seen honestly, recognise its possible origins, and identify your next step but don’t beat yourself up and add more fuel to the fire of unreality by judging what you see.
Just because you’ve seen something about yourself that you may want to change doesn’t mean you can’t treat yourself like an actual human being.
4. Tell Yourself the Truth
This is probably the foundational non-negotiable because you can’t move towards reality while lying to yourself about where you are:
At the end of the day, the path to realness involves two essential steps:
- Uncover the truth.
- Live the truth.
This means being totally fine with telling yourself the truth about what you feel, want, fear, believe, tolerate, avoid, and actually experience as you go through life – as well as noticing where your stated values differ from your behaviour and where the story you tell about your life doesn’t quite match the evidence.
For example:
- You might claim to want freedom while arranging your entire life around other people’s expectations.
- You might say you’re happy in a relationship while privately knowing you’ve been checked out for months.
- You might say you love your job whilst day after day it crushes your soul.
- Etc. etc. etc.
The truth might be uncomfortable, inconvenient, or completely at odds with your preferred self-image but that’s precisely why you need to face it:
The truth will always free you from whatever is keeping you from your real life (even if it annoys you when it first shows up as it challenges your illusions).
How to practise it:
Spend five minutes each day exploring the gap between your interpretations of the truth and the truth itself – a good journal prompt to start with is as follows:
“What do I know to be true that I’m pretending not to know?”
Write down whatever comes up without immediately explaining it away – remembering that awareness begins with honesty and without it every subsequent attempt at growth is built on sinking sand instead of a solid rock.
5. Accept What Is
Reality doesn’t need your permission to be what it is and it doesn’t even care if you ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ it (it just “is what it is” anyway).
What this means is that you can spend years arguing with the past, resenting your circumstances, or insisting that life ‘should’ have unfolded differently but it’s not going to change anything at all (except it’s going to eventually make you ‘stuck’ as life keeps unfolding around you and you stay in the same place trying to figure it all out).
The path to realness is about acknowledging what happened and then deciding what to do next from a foundation of ACCEPTANCE.
Acceptance isn’t resignation, approval of something ‘bad’ or harmful – nor is it about passivity or tolerating mistreatment or abandoning your ambitions:
All “Acceptance” really means dropping the futile argument with what has already happened or what currently is so you can respond in an authentic to what’s happening now.
You can’t change yesterday’s decisions but you can change how you relate to their consequences today.
How to practise it:
When something difficult happens learn to try and separate the facts from your resistance to them.
For example you can ask yourself:
“What actually happened?”
“What can I actually influence?”
“What needs to be grieved, changed or left behind?”
Acceptance is what allows you to stop wasting your time, energy, and attention on demanding a different past so you can use it to start creating a real future for yourself.
6. Take Responsibility
There are a million and one things we can blame for the state of our lives but we can only start actually sorting them out and feeling real again if we take responsibility for what we do about it all:
Your parents, partner, society, circumstances, trauma, the government, your boss, your past, and your ego can all influence your experience of life but none of them can do your living for you.
Of course, this doesn’t mean pretending that injustice and disadvantage don’t exist and so you might not be literally responsible for whatever happened to you in the past (when you were a kid and your needs were dependent on other people, for example) but you are responsible for what you do with wherever you find yourself now and within the limits of your circumstances and capacities.
The ego loves finding someone else to blame because blame can provide temporary relief from the vulnerability of taking action and keeps us stuck in whatever unreal place we don’t want to be in.
How to practise it:
Whenever you catch yourself making on excuses or dwelling on all the reasons you can’t start moving towards the real life you know you could be living if you tuned back into yourself then ask a simple question:
“Given that this is the situation and that “it is what it is” right now then what is actually still within my control?”
In other words, identify what you can still own and take responsibility for and then figure out one real action you can take from that place.
Responsibility isn’t about carrying the entire world on your shoulders and trying to control the uncontrollable but about reclaiming the power you still possess if you CHOOSE to.
7. Feel What Needs to Be Felt
It’s a bold statement perhaps but most of the problems we face in our lives that make our lives unreal are because we don’t allow ourselves to feel whatever it is that we actually feel.
This doesn’t mean that our feelings are the truth or the ultimate guide in our lives – just that if we don’t allow ourselves to feel our actual feelings then we end up with emotional and mental blocks that distort our view of ourselves and life.
At the end of the day, you can’t ‘think’ your way out of every feeling and you certainly can’t integrate emotions you refuse to experience but this doesn’t stop many of us from finding remarkably sophisticated at avoiding emotional discomfort:
We distract ourselves, intellectualise our problems, work excessively, scroll endlessly. or construct elaborate spiritual explanations for why we shouldn’t feel what we’re feeling – unfortunately, though, an emotion doesn’t necessarily disappear because you’ve decided it’s inconvenient.
Believe it or not, emotions are actually pretty important because they can provide valuable information about your needs, boundaries, losses, and fears.
They aren’t always accurate instructions (they’re just “e-motion, energy in motion”) but they deserve to be acknowledged rather than automatically suppressed so we don’t distort our relationship with the truth by having them block our view from beneath the surface of things.
How to practise it:
When a strong emotion arises, pause, and just allow it to BE (don’t suppress it or try to express it in an unreal way just to get the energy out of your system).
Notice where you experience it physically, name it if you can, and then gift yourself some space to feel it without immediately acting on it so you can see what it might be communicating.
All you need to do is slow down, ground yourself, and let it be rather than forcing yourself through it but the goal isn’t to drown in emotion but to simply become capable of feeling without needing to run away from yourself.
This article can help you to go much deeper into this: Emotional Release: Stop Carrying Yesterday Into Today
8. Do the Work
Collecting endless insight without taking action on it is just sophisticated procrastination that eventually leads to depression (because we know we could be moving but we’re not and so get frustrated which turns into misery on a long enough timeline):
You can read every book about boundaries, listen to hundreds of podcasts about confidence, and develop an extraordinary vocabulary for describing all of your childhood pain in a beautiful, Shakespearean manner but if you continue saying “Yes” when you mean “No”, avoiding difficult conversations, and refusing to take risks then your everyday reality will most likely remain exactly the same.
The truth is that understanding matters and is important but eventually but realness has to display itself in your behaviour (because you get in touch with your BEING and then you put it into your DOING – we’re talking about doing as a form of distraction or escape).
Basically: at some point, you have to embody what you know rather than collecting more information about it.
How to practise it:
Take one insight you’ve gained recently and translate it into a concrete action.
For example:
- If you know you need a boundary then communicate it.
- If you know you’re avoiding a goal then schedule and take the first step.
- If you owe someone an apology then make it.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Don’t wait until you feel completely ready because taking that first step and taking action is often part of how readiness develops.
9. Keep Your Word to Yourself
Every time you repeatedly break your own commitments to yourself and others then you teach yourself that your word means very little (and so your lack of integrity gets stored in your unconscious mind).
This is unfortunate because self-trust isn’t something that you can manufacture through positive affirmations and mantras but something that develops through experience as you consistently make a commitment, follow through on whatever it is, and then give yourself actual EVIDENCE that you can rely on yourself.
Of course, life happens, circumstances change, energy fluctuates, and sometimes we have no choice but to adjust our commitments and so it’s not a problem to be flexible when we need to be but is when we repeatedly abandon ourselves without acknowledging what’s happening.
In general, though, you want to let your “Yes” be a Yes and your “No” be a No so you can keep your words, deeds, and intentions aligned and can continue to develop a more stable relationship with your capacity to trust yourself (and life by extension) over time.
How to practise it:
Get started by making, small, realistic promises to yourself and then keeping them:
For example, if you commit to exercising three times a week then choose a plan you can actually sustain (and if you need to change the plan, do so consciously rather than disappearing into avoidance).
Every promise kept becomes another piece of evidence that you can trust yourself.
10. Set Boundaries
Realness requires knowing where you end and someone else begins:
If you continually sacrifice your needs to keep everybody ‘happy’ then you might appear generous, agreeable, and exceptionally easy to get along with but internally you’re probably be accumulating resentment because nobody seems to recognise the price that keeps accumulating as your needs go unmet.
Saying “Yes” when you really want to be saying “No” isn’t necessarily kindness – sometimes, it’s actually self-abandonment disguised as being ‘good’.
Healthy boundaries allow you to remain connected to others without disconnecting from yourself and losing touch with your own real foundation.
How to practise it:
Start to pay attention to where resentment is creeping into your life because it can be a useful signal that you’re giving more than you genuinely want to give or that you’re tolerating something that needs addressing.
Practise saying things such as “That doesn’t work for me” or “I need some time to think about it” more often so you can give yourself time to consciously set boundaries instead of defiling them because you’re acting on autopilot because of old conditioning.
You don’t need to justify every boundary with a courtroom-quality argument but you can respect other people without giving them unlimited access to your time, energy and attention.
11. Stop Performing for Approval
Applause, appreciation and approval – the Class A drugs – are powerful drugs for the ego and so learning to manage your relationship with these things can make you much more real in the long-term.
Of course, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with enjoying recognition or wanting to be appreciated but it can cause problems when you cope with life by learning to organise your entire identity around other people’s reactions.
When the ‘Class A drugs’ have got a hold of you in this way, then you become whoever you need to be to get a reaction from people that you think will help you fill the Void:
You express the opinions that you think will make you popular, pursue goals that impress people but you don’t really care about, and hide the ‘parts’ of yourself that might threaten your carefully constructed self-image.
Eventually, you might become so successful at being ‘liked’ that you have very little idea who you are when nobody is watching.
How to practise it:
Before making an important decision then ask yourself:
“Would I still want this if nobody could praise me for it?”
The trick is to learn to notice when you’re performing rather than expressing something REAL – you don’t have to reject other people’s opinions but you can choose to stop allowing them to become one of the ultimate authorities in your life.
12. Serve Something Beyond Yourself
Realness isn’t narcissistic self-optimisation which a lot of ‘self-help‘ stuff tends to end up being these days:
Unfortunately, “personal growth” can become another ego project if you’re constantly monitoring yourself, analysing your feelings, and trying to become a more impressive or ‘improved’ version of yourself in order to compensate for feelings of shame or whatever else you might be carrying that’s unresolved.
One thing that can really help to break away from the ego is understanding that we’re all interdependent beings in reality – we’re not independent or separate from each other.
This is why our lives gain meaning through relationships, contribution, creativity, and participation in something that allows us to become involved in something that’s bigger than than our individual concerns.
What this means is that when you genuinely serve somebody else -in a real way (not for those Class A drugs) – then you move beyond the closed loop of endlessly thinking about yourself (which really only ever reinforces the ego).
How to practise it:
Identify one way to contribute to the world around you that feels meaningful and realistic (without trying to ‘save’ it – just by giving something real).
For example:
- Help somebody without needing recognition for it.
- Share your skills or teach them to others.
- Create something that serves others.
- Give your attention to a relationship that matters.
- Etc. etc. etc.
This isn’t about neglecting yourself or acting in a co-dependent way but about recognising that your wellbeing and the wellbeing of others are often connected.
13. Embrace Uncertainty
You don’t need to know exactly what happens next before taking the next real step and accepting this is one of the things that can help you more than anything else to build flow in your life.
Life is uncertain and unknown by default – nevertheless, the ego wants guarantees and so it wants to know that the relationship will work, the business will succeed, and the decisions you make will lead to the desired outcome before committing to anything.
Whichever way you look at it, life simply doesn’t offer that kind of certainty and so waiting for it just becomes an extremely effective way of avoiding life altogether.
Realness requires trusting yourself enough to respond to reality as it unfolds – even when you can’t predict the outcome and you can learn to develop this ability by trusting yourself and then trusting life (or remembering to “Do your best (self-trust) and let go of the rest (life-trust)“.
How to practise it:
When you feel ‘stuck’ because you don’t know what will happen then learn to distinguish between information you genuinely need versus a sense of certainty you’re trying to obtain because you’re afraid.
Gather the necessary information, consider the risks, and take the next reasonable step.
Courage isn’t knowing everything will work out but being willing to show up and participate in life without that guarantee (which nobody will ever get, anyway).
14. Keep Moving
Self-awareness is valuable but you can also become addicted to analysing yourself or trying to “figure it all out” which is ultimately just leads to a state of unreality over realness.
This is why so many people end up getting stuck on their ‘healing’ journey and it becomes the main facet of their identity:
You revisit the same childhood memories, examine the same insecurities, and search for the ‘perfect‘ insight that will finally explain everything – meanwhile, the actual business of living gets postponed indefinitely which means that – at some point – ‘processing’ just becomes another form of resistance.
One useful framework to understand and implement regularly is:
Regulate → Integrate → Accelerate.
- First, regulate your nervous system enough to engage with what’s happening without seeing unnecessary ‘threats’ everywhere.
- Then integrate the experience and whatever emotions need to be felt and allowing it to inform your choices.
- Finally, accelerate by taking real action and participating more fully in life.
Not every experience requires a prolonged investigation and even the ones that might don’t need you to know or heal ‘everything’ – just enough to be able to move forward.
Not every uncomfortable feeling signals an unresolved psychological mystery.
How to practise it:
When you notice yourself going around in circles then it’s time to ask yourself:
“What do I already know and what action will help me live out that knowing?”
Take the action, observe what happens, and learn from the result (then do the same with the next thing and then the next thing)
You don’t have to ‘finish‘ working on yourself before you start living – in fact, allowing yourself to live no matter what is part of the work.
If you want to get more in touch with your realness then dive deep with my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness.
15. Choose Reality Over Ego
Ultimately, all the other non-negotiables lead back to this point:
Whenever you have a choice between protecting your self-image (ego) and acknowledging what’s actually true then choose reality.
For example:
- Admit when you’re ‘wrong’.
- Acknowledge when you’re frightened.
- Recognise when you’ve outgrown a relationship, betrayed a value or pursued something for reasons you’d rather not admit.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Your ego will literally always have plenty of arguments for why you ‘should’ do otherwise and stay in a state of unreality because the ego is the opposite of reality itself:
This is why it will fight to remind you of everything you’ve invested, everything people might think, and everything you stand to lose by changing direction – listen to actual evidence, though, not merely to the voice that wants to preserve your existing identity to keep your shadow self at bay..
How to practise it:
When you feel defensive in relation to whatever life is throwing at you then pause and ask yourself truthfully:
“Am I trying to understand what’s true or am I trying to prove that I’m ‘right’?”
Then make the choice that brings you into greater alignment with reality, even when it requires humility, grief or change.
Basically: No matter what you’re dealing with choose reality over ego.
Again and again and again.
The Bottom Line: REAL Always Works
These 15 non-negotiables aren’t a checklist you complete once and then suddenly find that you’ve somehow ‘graduated’ from the human condition – they’re practices you’ll return to throughout your life over and over again until the day you die.
It’s absolutely not about being ‘perfect’ or rigid, though:
You’ll sometimes avoid the Stretch Zone, lose patience, break promises to yourself, and seek approval from people whose opinions shouldn’t determine your worth no matter who you are and that’s just part of being human.
The point isn’t to eliminate every mistake but to become increasingly capable of recognising what’s happening and returning to reality no matter what.
Remember also that realness isn’t about becoming somebody new:
It’s about integrating the parts of yourself you’ve disowned, challenging the conditioning that keeps you stuck, and learning to trust yourself enough to live in alignment with what you know to be true.
The more you practise these ‘non-negotiables’, the less energy you need to spend maintaining an artificial identity and the more you become available to your relationships, your work, your creativity, and the REAL opportunities that life actually presents.
This is how you move towards wholeness and flow – not by controlling everything, perfecting yourself, or finally ‘earning’ the right to exist but by becoming more honest, more integrated, and more willing to participate in reality as it is.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If it’s time to step away from an unreal life and start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start actually showing up in your own life.
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
