by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
You Always Get What You Want
More often than not, the things that you have in your life now are the things that you once wanted for yourself.*
Though you might not realise it – or may even be trying to hide from it – the current state of your life and the situations that your life is comprised of are the CONSEQUENCE of all the CHOICES you made in the past.
These choices will be affected by all kinds of different factors:
-Your underlying emotional ‘stuff’.
-What you’ve been conditioned to believe is possible.
-What you’re trying to hide from about yourself, the world, or reality.
-The relationships in your life (which you’ve also CHOSEN to stick around in or not).
-Your general way of thinking (‘negative’, ‘positive’, or REAL, etc.).
-Etc. Etc.
Either way, however you may have happened to end up thinking about life, these thoughts will always affect the way that you go about making CHOICES in life, and the end result will always be the same:
If you made REAL CHOICES – i.e. choices that are based on your authentic values and intentions rather than just your instinctual programming or social conditioning – then your life will predominantly be REAL too and reflect this.
If you made UNREAL CHOICES – i.e. choices that were rooted in your EGO or your fears about yourself, the world, and reality that caused you to HIDE your true values and intentions from yourself – then you’re life will predominantly be UNREAL too and reflect this.
A simple PRINCIPLE of life that applies to us all (and that we’ve mentioned before on this site and in my course the 7-Day Personality Transplant):
If you put real in, you get real out; if you put unreal in, you get unreal out.
It’s pretty simple, but a lot of the time we forget this or we think we are being real (even though we’re not getting the results that we want – the only sure sign that we’re actually acting in a real way: we’re either at peace because we ACCEPT life or we’re at peace because we’re getting the RESULTS we want).
This article is about how it sometimes takes current reality a little time to catch up with the beliefs we’re putting into the world but how almost ALWAYS, the things we have in our lives now are simply a reflection of how we used to THINK about life and how those thoughts affected the actions we took.
You need to know this and to ACCEPT it so that you can start making better choices RIGHT NOW so that you stand a better chance of living a life you want to be living further down the line.
Here we go.
*Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everything in your life as some things are completely out of our control (‘acts of God’ like natural disasters, people dying, illness, etc.) and so this isn’t one of those solipsistic posts about how we completely create our own reality like some kind of omnipotent being (if you’ve read my books you know I think that’s BS and a lot of the ‘spiritual’ philosophies out there that that say that ‘stuff’ are just selling people what they want to believe, not the truth).
Emotional ‘stuff’ leads to assumptions leads to belief systems leads to thoughts leads to actions leads to emotional ‘stuff’.
You need to understand that the way you feel, think, and do things when you’re running on autopilot is circular and builds on itself.
If you don’t step back and take control of this process (by growing REAL, the whole point of everything discussed on this site), then you just end up getting caught in the THE LOOP and feeling that you’re powerless and have no control over your life because you forget that: 1) you have a CHOICE, and 2) what you currently have is the CONSEQUENCES of those choice.
Here’s how things unfold for most of us when we don’t step up and take control:
Here’s an example of how this might show up in your life if you’re not aware of your ability to make a CHOICE to change something at ANY of these different levels (a good thing because you can CHOOSE to change the area that’s easiest for you personally and still break the cycle of ‘The Loop’):
You have some underlying emotional ‘stuff’ like shame.
This shame causes you to make the fundamental assumption that you’re just not ‘good enough’.
This fundamental assumption causes you to create a kind of ‘people pleaser’ belief system where you survive by putting the needs of others before your own (so it doesn’t trigger the shame you’re trying to avoid).
This ‘people pleaser’ belief system cause you to have unreal thoughts about yourself – for example, that you can’t do the things that you’re really interested in doing in life because it might upset people or they’d disagree with your choices (for example).
That causes you to take actions that keep you in your comfort zone and to avoid your edge for fear of upsetting others or stepping up and pushing through your own emotional ‘stuff’.
The fact that you’re being passive and not taking the real actions you want to be taking (i.e. because you’re not aligned with your true values and intentions) causes you to feel more shame and so your CHOSEN actions (or lack of action) just causes you to PERPETUATE your emotional ‘stuff’ instead of healing it.
The cycle continues.
The interesting thing here (imo) is that 1) most of us aren’t AWARE that we’re involved in this cycle of ‘The Loop’ and so it just keeps repeating and we get more deeply entrenched in our lives as a CONSEQUENCE of being on the hamster wheel, and 2) because we’re not AWARE of it we don’t realise how much CHOICE we have to change our lives for the better.
We can change our lives by changing the cycle (or, more accurately, starting to change the cycle so we can get different RESULTS from life – as the old quote says “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results).
For example:
We can CHOOSE to change the level of our emotional ‘stuff’ by doing some introspective work and figuring out what’s going inside of ourselves, meditating, talking to others about our ‘feelings’ (often just talking will dissolve shame, etc.), working out emotions through our creative art, etc.
We can CHOOSE to change our fundamental ASSUMPTIONS about ourselves, the world, and reality, by doing exploratory work, digging deeper into the way that we see things through introspection or journaling, etc. and seeing what PATTERNS emerge.
We can CHOOSE to change our BELIEF SYSTEMS by actively continuing to learn new things, putting ourselves in difficult situations, chasing new experiences that push us through our EDGE, testing the validity of our beliefs and the conclusions we’ve made about ourselves, the world, and reality by philosophical enquiry, etc. etc.
We can CHOOSE to change our THOUGHTS by learning to see when our thoughts are too negative, understanding when we’re held back by LIMITING beliefs, paying attention to our inner monologue and the language we use (maybe it’s passive and unreal – for example, always about how we will “try”, “always” or “never” do certain things, etc.).
We can CHOOSE to change our ACTIONS by learning what our REAL VALUES are and translating them into goals, we can act on our REAL INTENTIONS by making sure that we know what they are (by digging beneath the surface or our social conditioning, etc.), we can create a VISION for ourselves based on the real version of ourselves we want to become (instead of who we think we are right now because of false beliefs and BS), etc. etc. etc.
In short, there’s absolutely LOADS we can choose to do if we want to change our lives for the better and get out of the passive cycle of just UNCONSCIOUSLY CHOOSING to have each of these levels feed into each other as part of a cycle of negatively based on how we might ‘feel’ about ourselves.
Whatever life you’re living right now is a CONSEQUENCE of how you’ve engaged with this cycle in the past.
To paraphrase what we said above:
If you’ve been real at all or some of these levels your life will now be more real than if you’d be unreal.
Unreal in, unreal out; real in, real out.
If you start WORKING to change your relationship with yourself at these levels then you will eventually see that your life becomes more real down the line (it won’t change overnight because you need to wait for reality to catch up – this is called the REALITY LAG).
The Payoff of ‘Negative’ Consequences
Because we make a CHOICE about how we interact with ourselves at each of the levels on this cycle – even if we just choose to let things unfold on their own terms by doing NOTHING – then we can say that the life we have right now is whatever we actually WANTED for ourselves.
This applies just as much to the ‘positive’ things we have in our lives at present as well as the ‘negative’.
For example:
Maybe we have a crappy job that we hate right now and we’re stuck in the WAGE CAGE – we might have CHOSEN this because it reinforces the negative assumptions we have about ourselves as not being good enough (in the example given above) and so we don’t have to change or can prove ourselves ‘right’ on an unconscious level.
Maybe we can’t find a relationship despite telling ourselves we want one – we might have CHOSEN this because unconsciously we fear that a relationship will cause us to change our THOUGHTS about ourselves and that would mean having to face our emotional ‘stuff’ (that those thoughts only exist to keep us avoiding in the first place).
Maybe we have our own business and we’re constantly busy taking action but never get RESULTS (no sales or whatever in this context) – this might be because we have decided to only focus on the EASY actions (like doing spread sheets all day or whatever) so that we don’t have to do the stuff that would actually push us through the EDGE to the next level (like networking or making sales calls or whatever).
You could come up with all kinds of examples but the basic point is that we choose to keep acting in ways that keep the cycle of THE LOOP going so that we can avoid growing through our comfort zone and facing the fundamental emotional ‘stuff’ that has been shaping our life since day one.
What You Can Do: How to Break the Cycle and Escape the Loop.
To start breaking this cycle and to start getting different CONSEQUENCES then you need to change your patterns at each level (though because they’re all connected then just changing in one area will make a difference in all the others).
I’ve already given some examples above but the abridged version at each level:
Emotional ‘Stuff’: You need to start DISSOLVING your shame (etc) instead of being DRIVEN by it.
Assumptions: You need to actively work to replace unreal assumptions (“I’m not good enough”, for example which is never real because it involves a judgement) with REAL assumptions (which are designed to promote self-acceptance which is REAL – for example, “I am capable of succeeding just as much as anybody else”, “I can handle whatever happens”, “Nothing can stop me being real”, etc.).
Belief Systems: You need to replace belief systems that hold you back or make the world seem like a place where good things can’t happen to you with a belief system that supports your GROWTH.
Thoughts: You need to learn to step back from your thoughts, realise that they’re not ‘You’, and to condition yourself to never give into negative thoughts that stop you from acting on your true values and intentions (such as inner criticism etc.).
Actions: You need to make sure that you actually do ACT (because action is the only thing that will get you where you want to be), but you also need to make sure that you increase AWARENESS of what’s real (about yourself, the world, and reality), that you ACCEPT your true goals, and that the ACTION you take is not just a distraction from your emotional ‘stuff’ that keeps this unreal cycle going.
In your own life, you’ll know which one makes the most sense for you to experiment with and make the most progress but I think that the ‘easiest’ way to start making changes is to change our approach to taking ACTION.
This is because if we CHOOSE to act on a vision for the highest, most real version of ourselves then the rest will kind of fall into place as the RESULTS we get from taking real action shows the futility of feeling ‘bad’ about ourselves, negative thinking that stems from this, and so on.
I’ve actually seen it quite a lot in the coaching relationships I have with people: once clients start taking real action and ACTING in a way that’s congruent with who they want to BECOME (not just who they fear they are right now) then they start to build momentum and collect EVIDENCE that goes against the foundation of feelings and thoughts that are rooted on an unreal relationship with any emotional ‘stuff’.
The short-version of what this looks like is that you need to start running towards something REAL instead of just trying to run away from the unreal stuff (that comes from your emotional ‘stuff’ and the emotions it gives you about yourself).
The steps that will put you on this path are quite simple:
- Figure out your true values and intentions for your life by digging into how your life would be different if you weren’t HOLDING BACK.
- Turn this into a VISION for the future version of yourself and what your life would look like if you could realise this vision.
- Ask yourself who you need to BECOME to make that vision a reality (i.e. what skills and qualities would you have).
- Figure out what GOALS you need to dedicate yourself to in order to close the GAP between where you are now and that highest vision.
- Go out there every day and start DOING what needs to be done to close that gap.
Like I said, that’s a very simple process but it will be harder to actually do in real life (instead of just on the screen or wherever you’re reading this).
Coaching can help you with this (*cough*) but so can just being DISCIPLINED and realising that if you do have a struggle along the way then it will be a struggle at one of the levels shown on the cycle above.
If you can figure out which and start attacking it then you can unblock yourself and get going again.
Either way, once you start making a shift, your life will make a shift too and eventually the life you’re living will be a CHOSEN consequence of being REAL, not just a passive consequence of being UNREAL and getting lost on the hamster wheel of THE LOOP.
Go get it.
If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂
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