by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Gimme Something REAL or GTFO: The Power of Ignoring Things that Don’t Matter and Don’t Deserve Your Time, Energy, and Attention
There’s an unhealthy idea floating around that you somehow owe all kinds of things in the world your attention when you absolutely don’t.
Here are some examples of what I mean:
- Somebody sends you a text and so you have to reply.
- Somebody wants to see you even though you haven’t spoken in years and now you have to explain why you can’t or don’t want to.
- Somebody’s offended by a decision you’ve made about your life and so you somehow have no choice but to make them understand.
- A negative thought pops into your head and so you have to spend the next three hours analysing it as if it were a message from God himself.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Meanwhile – whilst all of this ruminating and dilly-dallying is taking place – your REAL life is patiently waiting for you to finish dealing with all this nonsense and remember who you actually are and what life is all about.
It goes without saying that there’s always going to be something to have to deal with (“life is one darned problem after another“, as somebody once said) and so as long as you’re alive there’s going to be an endless supply of people, opinions, obligations, distractions, fears, expectations, notifications, arguments, and other people’s emotional baggage competing for your time, energy, and attention.
The question is, though:
Who decided you had to give your time, energy, and attention to all of these things in the first place?
Maybe it was a conscious decision you made? Maybe it was your parents way back when? Or your culture?
Maybe it’s just conditioning or you learned somewhere along the line that being a ‘good’ person meant being permanently available, endlessly accommodating, and ready to justify your existence and explain yourself to anybody who demanded an explanation.
This article is about a liberating alternative:
You can just ignore stuff.
Not because you’re cruel, because you’re running away from reality, or because you think you’re better than everybody else but for the simple fact that you have a REAL life to live.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Text Message that Didn’t Need a Reply
Here’s a quick anecdote about the power of ignoring stuff:
I was working with a client recently who’d been trying to move on from a group of people because he’d become very aware that he’d reached a point where he recognised that they didn’t share his values, had a completely different sense of morality, and, didn’t share a real vision about where they were all headed in the long-run.
He knew for a sure that he had no interest in returning to that world because it absolutely wasn’t where he wanted to be and so he was trying to move forward once and for all but then – as is quite common for some inexplicable reason when you’re psyching yourself up to leave something unreal behind – the ‘universe’ (or whatever you wanna call it) decided to test him:
The test in question came in the form of a text text from somebody in the group he’d been trying to leave behind inviting him to meet up – nothing particularly dramatic, just a message from somebody he hadn’t heard from for a while.
At first, upon receiving this message, he froze in fear because he’d found himself stuck between a rock and a hard place:
He had absolutely no intention of accepting the invitation but he still felt that he ought to be polite or to be a ‘nice guy‘ – surely he ‘should’ send a message explaining why he didn’t want to meet and perhaps offer some kind of justification so that the other person (who he already knew he had no intention of ever seeing again) wouldn’t think he was ‘rude’.
Around and around he went on the hamster wheel for a while:
What should he say? How ‘should‘ he say it? Would the other person be offended? ‘Should‘ he explain the history? ‘Should‘ he make it clear that there were no hard feelings? ‘Should ‘he leave the door open? ‘Should‘ he close it properly? What SHOULD he do?
After much of this musing and ruminating, he eventually he hit upon a solution that was so simple it almost seemed ridiculous:
He could ignore it completely. That was it.
He didn’t want to meet the person, he wasn’t interested in continuing the relationship, there was no practical responsibility that required him to respond, and the message wasn’t an emergency, a legal notice, or a matter involving somebody who depended on him – it was literally just text on a screen and he didn’t have to do a single thing about it if he didn’t want to.
Now, I totally get that this might all sound like a very ‘small’ thing and – in one sense, it definitely was because it’s not like anybody’s life depended on whether he replied to that message or not.
For a people-pleaser who had spent much of his life being controlled by guilt, fear, and a false sense of obligation, it was actually a pretty big deal because he’d just tapped into the REALITY that he could CHOOSE where to direct his own attention which meant that he could remain focused on his own real path, keep moving forward, and stop allowing the past to pull him back into a world that no longer represented who he was becoming within it.
He didn’t need to make a speech, he didn’t need to win an argument, or to convince anybody that his decision was valid – he simply just needed to ignore it.
Sometimes, that’s exactly what freedom looks like.
Ignoring isn’t the Same as Avoiding Reality
Before we go any further, we need to clarify something that’s really important:
When I talk about ignoring people or things, I’m not talking about suppression, repression, or resistance – these are always going to take you in an UNREAL direction instead of a REAL one.
- Suppression is when you consciously push away a feeling, thought, or something true because you don’t want to deal with it.
- Repression is the more unconscious version, where difficult ‘stuff’ becomes buried outside your immediate awareness because your ego / self-image isn’t ready to deal with it yet.
- Resistance is the tendency to fight against or avoid what reality is presenting to you in a given moment (and it always makes things worse over time because – as Carl Jung said – “what you resist, persists“).
All three of these processes are ultimately ways of avoiding reality which is ‘bad’ news because avoiding reality is never a particularly good long-term strategy (reality is always the ‘medicine‘ we need as it provides the solid foundation on which we can build something real – even when what it presents is initially uncomfortable).
The point is that you don’t get to ignore the truth simply because it’s inconvenient.
That’s not what we’re talking about here, though:
In this context, ignoring is a conscious choice not to engage with somebody or something because you recognise that it isn’t aligned with your realness in the form of your VALUES and the VISION you have for your life.
It’s not about denying that the thing exists, tricking yourself into believing that you don’t feel what you feeling, or refusing to deal with your responsibilities – it’s just about deciding that certain things don’t deserve your attention and participation so you can focus on something REAL instead.
At the end of the day, there’s a big difference between “I don’t want to face this even though it’s real” versus “I have faced this and I’ve decided not to give it any more of my time because it’s unreal“:
One is avoidance but the other is discernment.
Your Most Valuable Assets aren’t Money or Material Things
I’ve used a fairly crude expression in my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World to describe this attitude:
Gimme something real or GTFO.
It’s crude, but it hopefully gets the point across which is that:
Your time, energy, and attention are the most valuable assets you have.
This isn’t because money, possessions, or opportunities are irrelevant but because your time, energy, and attention are all limited resources:
When it comes down to it, you can earn more money, you can replace a possession, and you can find another opportunity but there’s no way you can ever get yesterday back.
- You can’t recover the time you spent arguing with somebody on the internet.
- You can’t reclaim the physical, mental, and emotional energy you wasted trying to make an unreasonable person understand you.
- You can’t reclaim the attention you gave to a fear that never actually materialised or to doom-scrolling on social media.
Every single day, these assets become a little rarer so why would you CHOOSE to give them away to things that are unreal?
The answer, of course, is that most of us have been conditioned to do exactly that and so we don’t even realise that this is what we’re doing with each passing moment…
The reason we get conditioned to believe that we have to give these precious assets away is because – somewhere along the line – we became fragmented instead whole because we picked up shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity) that made us judge ourselves instead of accept ourselves.
This kind of judgment causes us to identify with the ego which is just a limited, conditioned version of ourselves that makes us start believing that we have to chase things, ‘prove’ things, ‘fix’ things, and perform certain roles for the rest of our lives in order to be worthy of love, safety, or belonging.
Most of our wasted time, energy, and attention just comes from trying to keep the ego in place instead of letting go and focusing on the real ‘stuff’ instead.
How the Ego Convinces You to Waste Your Life
There are two major ways that unreal conditioning like this causes us to waste our time, energy, and attention:
1. We chase unreal goals instead of real ones
When we identify with a fragmented version of ourselves (ego) then we start chasing goals in an attempt to fill the Void that opens up as a symptom of inner disconnection from truth.
Our goals might be perfectly reasonable and even ‘good’ – like money, success, fitness, a relationship, recognition, personal achievement or whatever else.
The problem begins, though, is that because we’re trying to fill the Void then we put these things on a pedestal and treat whatever we’re chasing or think we need as the ultimate thing.
This is why we start believing things like this about our goals:
-“When I get [whatever], I’ll finally be ‘enough‘.“
-“When I achieve [x], I’ll finally be happy.“
-“When this person approves of me, I’ll finally be safe.“
-Etc. etc. etc
In short, our goal has stopped being something we freely chose and has becomes something we desperately need because we think it will get rid of the Void when the only thing that can do that is stepping away from judgement and back into acceptance of the truth about ourselves and life.
(This overcomes shame which is really just a disconnection from truth and what makes the Void appear real in the first place).
In this state e become trapped because we dedicate more and more time, energy, and attention to chasing [the thing] whilst ignoring the fact that our relationship with it has become increasingly unreal.
The result is friction, frustration, and misery but the answer isn’t necessarily to abandon the goal but to stop treating it as the thing that will complete you because it’s somehow ‘ultimate’ (when only a truthful relationship with yourself and life is).
It’s totally possible to pursue ‘success’ without worshipping it. You can exercise without making your body your identity. You can build a business without needing it to prove your worth.
You can want something without handing your entire life over to it.
2. We try to achieve acceptance instead of just receiving it
The second major way we waste our lives is by trying to achieve validation and acceptance rather than simply receiving them:
This is where people-pleasing, approval-seeking, and compulsive performing come into the mix- all of which are just massive drains on your time, energy, and attention.
Essentially, if you learned early in life that acceptance (which is the same as love) was conditional upon you being ‘good’, useful, successful, agreeable, emotionally convenient, or [some other thing] then the odds are that you carried the same patterns into adulthood.
This is why:
- You become the person who replies immediately to every message because you feel obliged.
- You explain every decision and think you need to justify your existence.
- You apologise for having healthy boundaries.
- You worry about whether somebody is disappointed in you.
- You say “yes” when you mean “no”.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Whatever the case may be, you’re conditioning is causing you to waste your life trying to earn something that was never supposed to be earned through performance in the first place (because acceptance is your default, natural state when you’re being real).
Unfortunately, because the ego can literally never be satisfied because there’s always ‘more’ to be done to fill the Void then you keep performing – the irony of the whole situation being that the more you try to achieve acceptance like this then the less time, energy, and attention you can put into actually receiving it.
The Internal and External Distractions
All of this conditioning affects both your inner and outer worlds:
Internally: You start to believe that every negative thought, fear, or emotional block deserves your attention and so you become obsessed with your Gremlins – all of the self-limiting beliefs, doubts, and anxieties that arise when you’re disconnected from yourself in your realness.
Here’s the reality, though:
- A thought isn’t automatically pointing to anything true just because it appears in your head.
- Fear isn’t automatically a command that you have to act on just because it arises.
- An emotion isn’t a reliable instruction for being real (it’s just energy moving through your system).
- Etc. etc. etc.
The point is that you can acknowledge what’s happening inside you without allowing every thought or feeling to dictate your behaviour.
Externally: You start to believe that you have obligations to people and the world that you simply don’t have in reality.
This is why you think you need to justify your existence, have to explain why you’ve changed, or keep expired relationships on life support because of shared history (even though you didn’t even get or give anything real out of what was shared).
You think you need to respond to every opinion, invitation, criticism, or demand but…you don’t because you’re not required to perform for survival and approval in every situation and there’s zero obligation to make your life understandable to everybody.
The bottom-line is that you’re absolutely not required to keep giving your time, energy, and attention to things that take you away from your realness…so don’t!
Responsibilities are Still a Thing
Now, we gotta be really careful here or it all turns into an excuse for being an arsehole (which we all are sometimes but you don’t want that to become a chronic condition).
The fact is that we all have obligations and so if you have children, you have responsibilities towards them, if you’re married or in a committed relationship, you have responsibilities that help maintain and sustain that relationship, and if you’ve made a promise, signed an agreement, taken on a job, or created any other responsibility through your own choices then the consequences are yours and you can’t just ‘ignore’ them.
Realness isn’t about pretending that your actions don’t affect other people but about recognising which obligations are real and which ones are products of conditioning.
-You don’t owe your children neglect because you’re “protecting your peace.”
-You don’t get to ignore a genuine commitment simply because you don’t feel like honouring it anymore.
-You don’t get to abandon somebody who genuinely needs you in a real way and call it self-development.
Here’s the distinction that brings this all into clarity when it comes to ignoring things or not, though:
In every situation, you have no obligation to be unreal.
For example, you can fulfil your responsibilities without performing a false version of yourself, be a loving parent without being available to every random person who wants something from you, and be a committed partner without abandoning your boundaries.
You can also be a real human being without explaining yourself to people who have no genuine place in your life because responsibility and people-pleasing aren’t the same thing, kindness and self-abandonment aren’t the same thing, and being ‘polite’ and giving people compulsory access to your life aren’t the same thing either.
Sometimes, the most “responsible“ thing you can do is stop wasting your resources on what doesn’t matter so you have more to give to what does.
(You might as well because you’re going to be dead one day).
How to Decide What to Ignore
To figure out what deserves your time, energy, attention and what doesn’t you can use the process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.
Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego
The first step is to raise your Awareness of the beliefs and conditioning that are keeping you in ego over realness and driving unreal behaviour.
Here are some questions to get you started: :
- Why do I feel that I have to respond to [whatever it is]?
- Am I acting from genuine care or fear of disapproval?
- Is this a real responsibility or have I created an imaginary obligation?
- Am I trying to prove something?
- What am I afraid will happen if I don’t engage with [whatever]?
Questions like this help you to identify the ego’s agenda – for example:
- Maybe you believe that ignoring somebody makes you a ‘bad’ person (nope).
- Perhaps you think that setting a boundary means you’re “selfish” (nope).
- It could be the case that you’re afraid somebody will dislike you if you stop participating in their drama (oh, well)
Awareness allows you to see the pattern rather than blindly obey it.
Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow
The next step is to cultivate Acceptance of what’s actually happening inside you and what’s hiding behind your ego in the Shadow Self:
- If you feel guilty about ignoring somebody then acknowledge the guilt instead of suppressing or resisting (learn how to practise emotional release).
- If you’re afraid of being judged then feel the fear and realise judgment is just emotional discomfort and not actual physical danger.
- If you’re angry about how somebody treated you then recognise the anger and use it to reclaim your dignity (that’s what it’s for).
You don’t need to pretend that these feelings aren’t there but you also don’t need to blindly obey them like an automaton – like we said, they’re just energy moving through your system (emotion = “e-motion, energy in motion”).
This is where integrating the Shadow becomes important because all of the ‘parts’ of yourself you’ve rejected or disowned to uphold the illusion of ego contain information about your unmet needs, boundaries, and unresolved experiences.
- Maybe the ‘part’ of you that wants to say “No” has been labelled as selfish (when actually saying “Yes” to something real and filling your cup will allow you to GIVE more to others anyway).
- Maybe the ‘part’ that’s angry has been told it’s unacceptable (when your anger is a healthy emotion that protects you).
- Maybe the ‘part’ that wants to walk away has been conditioned to believe that leaving is a ‘betrayal’ (when it’s actually just a healthy boundary).
- Etc. etc. etc.
Cultivating Acceptance allows you to bring these ‘parts’ back into awareness without letting them run the show so that you can make a conscious choice about who you want to become and how you show up in your own life.
Action: Trust Yourself and Life
Finally, it’s time to start taking Action from a place of realness:
This means that – once you’ve recognised that something isn’t aligned with your values – you have to trust yourself enough to stop participating in unreality that’s rooted in old conditioning and shame (which leads to ego).
That might mean not replying to a message, leaving a group chat, unfollowing somebody, declining an invitation without a lengthy explanation, or even refusing to engage in an argument that has nothing to do with your real life.
The action itself may be ‘tiny’ in the scheme of things as a whole but this tiny actions carried out consistently over time create a powerful shift that in how you relate to yourself and life.
Instead of asking yourself things like “What do I need to do to make everybody happy?“, you begin to ask yourself something more powerful like “What’s the realest thing to do here?” – even if the answer to that question is “NOTHING“.
If it’s time to get real and overcome the Void then my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace can help you take yourself there.
A Practical Exercise for Realness: The Attention Audit
If you want to put all of this into practice and start ignoring things in a real way then try this Attention Audit over the next seven days.
Here’s how it works:
At the end of each day, write down three things that received your time, energy, and/or attention during the day then ask yourself:
“Was this real or unreal?“
A real investment of your time might be something like spending time with your children, exercising, building your business, having a real conversation, resting, or dealing with a genuine responsibility.
On the other hand, an unreal investment might be along the lines of obsessively checking whether somebody has replied, arguing with strangers online, trying to impress people you don’t even like, or worrying about a problem that you can’t do anything about.
Once you’ve explored this in terms of real and unreal, take it a little deeper:
- Did this activity align with my values?
- Did it move me towards the life I’m trying to create?
- Was I acting from choice or conditioning?
- What could I have ignored?
- What would I rather have given my attention to?
Don’t use this exercise to beat yourself up because that would just be another form of unreality – just use it to become more aware and to remind yourself that EVERYTHING HAS AN OPPORTUNITY COST (sorry for shouting)…in other words, all of the time, energy, and attention you gave to anything unreal could’ve been given to something real instead.
Over time, you’ll start noticing the subtle ways you give away your life and once you notice them, you can choose differently (because you raised Awareness, cultivated Acceptance, and can take different Action).
The Final Word: You Don’t Need to Give Time, Energy, and Attention to Every Invitation
One of the most liberating things you can realise is that not every invitation requires your attendance and you can choose to ignore literally anything you like.
- Not every conversation requires your contribution.
- Not every opinion requires your own opinion in return..
- Not every message requires a reply.
- Not every feeling requires you to react to it.
- Not every person deserves access to your inner world.
- Etc. etc. etc.
This doesn’t mean that you become cold, indifferent, or disconnected from life – quite the opposite, in fact, because when you stop wasting your time, energy, and attention on the unreal then you become more available to what’s real both internally and externally.
This leads to having more patience for yourself and the people you love, more energy for your work, more attention for your creativity, and more time and capacity to experience the world as it actually is.
Next time something comes along and places a demand on your time, energy, or attention then pause before you respond and ask yourself whether it’s real, whether it’s aligned with your values, and whether it’s just pulling you back into the Void.
If the answer is that it doesn’t need you, doesn’t deserve you, and doesn’t belong on your path, then you already know what to do.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If your life has become unreal and you’re ready to shift focus and start moving into your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get back on track.
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.
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If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
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