by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
When Stay REAL You Can Slow Down to Speed Up Instead of Rushing and Causing Unnecessary Friction For Yourself
We live in a world that tends to worship doing things as quickly as possible and so many of us are running around chasing faster results, faster growth, faster ‘success‘, faster ‘healing‘, and faster…everything.
If you don’t believe me then just scroll through social media for five minutes and you’ll be hit with a barrage of ‘irresistible’ promises:
“10x your income in 90 days”, “Lose 10kg in a month”, “Manifest your dream life instantly”, etc. etc. etc. – it all feeds into the core idea that the faster you move, the quicker you’ll get where you want to go.
What’s interesting, though, is that – if you’ve lived long enough and paid attention – then you might’ve noticed something strange:
The more you rush, the more things seem to slow down because the energy of rushing just causes you to overthink, second-guess yourself, hesitate, burn out, make mistakes, lose clarity, and sabotage yourself.
(Then you wonder why it’s not working!?!).
This is where we need to introduce a deeper truth so we can align with reality instead of against it:
You don’t speed up your life by rushing through it; you speed it up by slowing down.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Slow Down to Speed Up: What We Cover in This Article
- When Stay REAL You Can Slow Down to Speed Up Instead of Rushing and Causing Unnecessary Friction For Yourself
- The Real Problem: Emotional Attachment to Outcomes
- Why We Get Stuck Here: Shame and Disconnection
- The Shift: From Outcome-Dependence to Outcome-Independence
- How It’s Possible To Slow Down to Speed Up
- What “Slow Down to Speed Up” Really Means (In Practice)
- Practical Ways to Slow Down to Speed Up
- The Simplicity of It All
- Final Thought: Slow Down to Speed Up & Get Out of Your Own Way
The Real Problem: Emotional Attachment to Outcomes
One of the main things that stops us getting the results we want from life is that we’re too emotionally invested in the outcome.
At first glance, that sounds counterintuitive because surely caring about the outcome is a good thing, right?
Well, yeah, we need to care about what we’re aiming for and doing with our lives to a point but when your emotional state becomes dependent on achieving a specific result, you cause problems for yourself because you stop engaging with reality and start trying to force it instead.
When you’re caught up in this energy:
-You rush the process.
-You become impatient.
-You override your intuition with ego and old patterns.
-You ignore feedback from reality itself.
-You cling to control instead of allowing yourself to be spontaneous and responsive.
Essentially, when you force yourself to speed up and start rushing around in a compulsive way then you’ll just find that instead of working with life, you start working against it.
The hidden cost of this kind of outcome-dependence (investing your self-worth and ability to feel ‘good’ in outcomes alone) is that it distorts your perception and pulls you out of the very process required to actually make things happen.
Even if your goal is real – which means it’s aligned with your values, grounded in truth, and meaningful – then your attachment to it can still sabotage you because you’re not acting from clarity – instead you’re acting from unnecessary pressure.
Why We Get Stuck Here: Shame and Disconnection
If we go a level deeper, we find the real root of this pattern:
Shame.
This kind of shame is a disconnection from yourself in realness because you picked up and internalised judgement somewhere along the line and started living in the Void.
When you’re disconnected from yourself and life in this way, then you start to believe – consciously or unconsciously – that something “out there” will ‘fix’ it and heal the rift.
This is when you start to treat ‘good’ things as the absolute ULTIMATE thing that will finally help you to feel complete again (when the only real way to do this is to return to a connection to yourself in truth).
Common examples of ‘good’ things that get treated as the ULTIMATE might be:
-A relationship.
-A business result.
-A physical transformation.
-Recognition.
-Validation.
-Etc. etc. etc.
When you pursue these things in an outcome-dependent way, then at some level you end up telling yourself “When I achieve this, then I’ll finally feel whole” but this is where things start to go ‘wrong’ because now you’re not just moving towards a goal.
What you’re actually doing is outsourcing your self-worth to it and, once this happens, everything becomes distorted and unreal.
Through the lens of this (emotional and mental) distortion, the goal appears to be way bigger than it really is (the ‘Ultimate’), the stakes feel higher than they actually are, the pressure intensifies, your thinking narrows, and finally your behaviour becomes reactive instead of responsive.
All of this ironically makes the very thing you’re chasing becomes harder to attain and just ends up making you feel even worse about yourself.
This is why you need to learn to slow down to speed up.
The Shift: From Outcome-Dependence to Outcome-Independence
Before we talk about slowing down in practical terms, we need to understand the key internal shift that makes it possible in the first place and this is the shift from outcome-dependence to outcome-independence.
Outcome-dependence says “I need this to work so I can feel good about myself” but outcome-independence says “I’m going to give this my best, but my worth isn’t tied to the result.”
Being outcome-independent doesn’t mean you stop caring or that you become passive or indifferent – it just means you stop placing your self-image and identity inside the outcome.
You still aim, you still act in a real way, and you still commit but you don’t CLING or CHASE.
In other words:
You do your best and let go of the rest.
Do your best = trust yourself.
Let go of the rest = trust life.
From a REALNESS perspective, this isn’t just a ‘nice’ motivational quote but a practical way of aligning with reality because when you remove your emotional dependency on the outcome:
- Your perception becomes clearer.
- Your decisions become cleaner.
- Your actions become more precise.
- Your nervous system becomes more regulated.
You can finally engage with the actual process instead of a projection of it in your own mind.
How It’s Possible To Slow Down to Speed Up
Once you become outcome-independent, you naturally begin to slow down – not in a lazy or disengaged way but in a grounded, present, and responsive way.
You stop rushing ahead of reality, stop trying to force outcomes, and stop reacting from fear and begin to meet each moment as it is.
This is where the paradox of “slow down to speed up” reveals itself:
1. You Make Better Decisions
Rushed decisions are usually reactive because they’re driven by urgency, fear, or pressure and not clarity.
When you slow down, you create space between stimulus and response and – in that space – you can actually see what’s happening.
This is ‘good’ news because when you can see clearly, you can act effectively.
2. You Reduce Mistakes
Most mistakes don’t always come from a lack of ability (which we can learn in most cases, anyway) – they come from impatience.
This is because, when you’re rushing around like a headless chicken trying to fill the Void, you skip steps, overlook details, and act prematurely.
Slowing down allows you to engage fully with each part of the process and this reduces errors and ultimately saves time in the long-run.
3. You Stay Regulated
A dysregulated nervous system will always struggle to produce consistent, high-quality results because if you’re caught up in sympathetic dominance and anxious, overwhelmed, or pressured, your capacity narrows.
This is because when you’re nervous system is seeing ‘threat’s all over the place instead of allowing you to feel SAFE in your own life and the process of moving forward then you default to the survival patterns of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
These patterns always shift your focus away from what’s happening as a whole and cause you to focus on the ‘threat’ only.
Slowing down helps you regulate your system and from this place, your actions become more aligned and effective.
4. You Become Responsive Instead of Reactive
Reacting is automatic but responding is conscious.
When you’re rushing, you react based on past conditioning but when you slow down, you respond based on what’s actually in front of you.
This responsiveness is what allows you to adapt, pivot, and evolve in real time so you can get actual results.
5. You Actually Do the Work
When you’re overly attached to the outcome, you often avoid the process and so you procrastinate, overthink, get stuck in analysis, and chase shortcuts.
On the other hand when you can step back and let go of that attachment then:
You just do what needs to be done.
No drama, resistance, or avoidance – just real action (the only thing that actually changes anyting in a real way).
What “Slow Down to Speed Up” Really Means (In Practice)
Slowing down doesn’t mean doing less – it just means removing the internal friction that makes everything harder than it needs to be.
(That doesn’t mean it will all be easy – it just means you’re not adding an extra level of difficulty that’s actually unnecessary).
From a REALNESS perspective, we can say that slowing down involves three core elements:
1. Detaching Your Worth from Outcomes
The first step is to train yourself to stop measuring your value based on results – not just at the level of intellect or conceptually grasping the idea but experientially.
What this means is that you learn to recognise that when you’re real – grounded, present, integrated, and generally (not always) in the FLOW – your worth is already intact.
This removes the pressure to be something you’re not (ego) which is what usually causes us to try and rush our way through life and take ourselves out of flow in the first place.
Basically, without unnecessary and self-imposed pressure, you can engage more honestly with what’s in front of you and actually engage with what’s real instead of what’s only in your head.
2. Regulating Your Nervous System
If your system is constantly activated then slowing down will feel uncomfortable at first because your nervous system is stuck in sympathetic dominance.
This means that you’re going to perceive ‘threats’ that aren’t actually there but are just a projection of the lack of safety you’re experiencing within yourself:
-You might feel restless.
-You might feel like you’re “falling behind”.
-You might feel the urge to speed back up.
-Etc. etc. etc.
This is why regulation is essential because when your body feels safe, your mind becomes clearer and – when your mind is clear – your actions become more effective.
3. Focusing on the Process
This is where everything that we’re talking about in this article comes together:
When you slow down to speed up then instead of obsessing over the end result, you bring your attention to:
The next step, the current task, and the immediate reality.
This means that you shift your inner stance from “How do I get there as fast as possible?” to “What’s the most real thing I can do right now?“.
And then you do it.
Practical Ways to Slow Down to Speed Up
This theory behind all of this is pretty simple but it’s not always easy so here are some grounded ways to implement this in your daily life without unnecessary fuss:
1. Pause Before Acting
Before making a decision or taking action, pause for a moment (not for long – just enough to check in with yourself and your intentions at the level of real or unreal).
Ask yourself a question about the place you’re about to act from:
- Am I acting from clarity or pressure?
- Am I trying to force something?
- What’s actually needed right now?
This small pause can completely change the quality of your actions because you choose to act in a real way before you even get going.
2. Bring Attention Back to the Body
Your body is always in the present even if your mind isn’t – this is ‘ good’ news because it means that if you feel rushed or overwhelmed, you can bring your attention back to physical sensations:
- Your breath
- Your posture
- The feeling of your feet on the ground
This grounds you in reality which is the only place real action can happen.
3. Define the Process, Not Just the Outcome
Instead of only setting goals, define the process required to reach them because – like we’ve seen – the PROCESS is where you want to be spending most of your time anyway (not in your head or your emotions thinking about the goal).
For example:
Instead of saying to yourself over and over again “I want to grow my business” (or whatever) choose to focus on:
- Creating content consistently.
- Speaking to potential clients.
- Refining your offer.
The outcome becomes a by-product of the process and by putting yourself IN the process you’re more likely to take yourself where you want to go.
4. Accept Where You Are
Resistance to your current reality just creates friction and friction slows everything down so choose ACCEPTANCE instead (acceptance is the opposite of resistance).
Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation – it means seeing things clearly so you can work with them effectively and BUILD on a solid foundation.
From acceptance, action becomes grounded in something real and you increase the odds of getting the results you want (as long as the goal is real and not ego-based).
5. Let Go (Repeatedly)
Letting go isn’t a one-time decision but an ongoing practice that allows you to stay grounded in the real over the unreal with greater frequency and depth.
It’s totally normal to notice yourself becoming attached to your goals (or anything else) again but all you need to do when it happens is to just recognise it and release it.
Come back to the process again and again.
If you want to go deeper into regulation and flow then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
The Simplicity of It All
At its core, the principle of slowing down to speed up isn’t complicated – it’s just uncommon because most people are trying to get somewhere else instead of working with where they are and building from there.
They’re trying to force outcomes instead of engaging with reality and trying to speed up by rushing…when the real path is to slow down.
Final Thought: Slow Down to Speed Up & Get Out of Your Own Way
You don’t need more hacks, more urgency, or more pressure – what you actually need is less interference, less forcing, less rushing, and less attachment.
When you remove these obstacles, you can finally move move forward efficiently, effectively, and in alignment with reality – not because you pushed harder but because you stopped getting in your own way.
And that’s the real secret:
Slow down… so you can finally speed up.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re tired of rushing around like a headless chicken and never changing anything for yourself then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you find a real foundation to build on.
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.
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