Stop Trying to Figure It All Out

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

You Don’t Need to Figure It All Out to Move Forward and Grow REAL

There’s a strange phenomenon I’ve noticed in people who are trying to change or transform their lives but keep getting ‘stuck’:

They keep trying to figure out the things they ALREADY know.

This looks slightly different for everybody but the basics are always the same:

They research, analyse, and journal a little bit more; they talk to friends and therapists about things they’ve already talked about a million times; they talk to AI or use it to make plans, mind maps, diagrams, spreadsheets and flowcharts that will help them to understand what they ALREADY KNOW even more, and then they read another book, watch another video, sign up for another course and have another profound realisation about their childhood which helps them understand the problem they ALREADY KNEW they have from a slightly different angle.

Not only is all of this exhausting but after all of this “figuring it all out” they somehow find themselves standing in exactly the same place they were in when they started.

I guess it would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic at the same time:

They’ve acquired enough information to fill a small library that’s full of books about themselves but they still haven’t done the thing they knew they needed to do five years ago.

I guess all this boils down to a basic truth about things:

Sometimes, the problem isn’t that you don’t know what to do – sometimes, the problem is that you do know what to do but you’re absolutely terrified of doing it but can’t admit it to yourself.

Maybe it’s time to get REAL?

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You don't need to figure it all out when you can just get started.

The Great Quest for Readiness

Imagine somebody wants to start a business:

They’ve been thinking about it for years, know roughly what they want to offer, who they’d like to help with said offer, and also the first practical step they need to take to make this happen.

For whatever reason, though, instead of taking this clear, practical step they decide they need to do more ‘research’ and so off they go on a mission to learn way more even though they ALREADY know what they need to do:

They research the market a little more, then they research their competitors (even though they already know why they’re different etc.).

Then they research alternative business models (even though they’ve already good a good one) and watch a few videos about entrepreneurship (even though these videos are mainly about self-help in entrepreneurial language), then they ask A.I. to analyse their personality and tell them whether they’re psychologically suited to being an entrepreneur.

Then they create a five-year plan which they break down into a three-year plan but this just reveals that their five-year plan doesn’t align with their values so they create a values exercise only to discover that they’re afraid of failure.

Now they need to understand where that fear came from before they can do anything (even though it’s the ‘doing’ that kills the fear) and so the investigation inevitably continues…

By some great mystery, they’ve become extraordinarily knowledgeable about “starting a business” without actually starting one – in other words, they’ve just added more conceptual knowledge to their stack of wisdom but none of the stuff that actually counts: EXPERIENTIAL KNOWLEDGE.

This is what I mean when I say that a lot of people out there are stuck because they’re trying to figure out what they already know (because they think they have to figure out everything instead of enough).

The particularly insidious part of this phenomenon is that it’s pretty easy to mistake the whole process of “figuring it all out” for actual progress and development because it looks productive:

You’re doing things, you’re learning things, you’re having insights, and you’re making (conceptual) progress of sorts – the only problem is you’re not moving towards the thing you actually want:

You’re moving sideways around it.

When Fear Dresses Up as Productivity

Usually, there is an underlying fear lurking behind this kind of pattern and it’s pretty simple really when you step back and take a good look at it:

You know what you want to do but something about actually doing it scares you.

For example:

Maybe you’ll fail.
Maybe you’ll ‘succeed‘ and your life will change and you’ll have to let go of certain things.
Maybe people will judge you (which triggers your unresolved judgement of yourself).
Maybe you’ll discover you’re not as talented as you’ve been hoping.
Maybe you’ll discover that you are talented and will have to take yourself seriously and level up even more.
Maybe you’ll disappoint somebody that you care about.
Maybe you’ll outgrow your current identity.
Maybe you’ll have to stop blaming circumstances and take responsibility for your life.
Etc. etc. etc.

There are countless variations of how this shows up but it’s almost always because there’s some unconscious intention outweighing your conscious desires and causing you to freeze up in fear and sabotage yourself.

The problem, though, is that – rather than actually feeling the fear – the mind tries to get rid of it by doing something that feels productive and allows us to resist the energy of fear and what it’s either offering or telling us.

This is where we enter the endless quest for ‘readiness’ or ‘research’ or getting to a stage where you know ‘everything’ instead of ‘enough’.

You tell yourself things like:

“I just need a bit more information“.
“I need to understand myself better“.
“I need to heal this first“.
“I need another qualification“.
“I need to work out exactly why I want this and make sure it’s for the ‘right’ reasons”.
“I need a perfect plan instead of a ‘good’ one”.
“I’ll start once I’ve figured everything out” (even though that can literally never happen).
Etc. etc. etc.

All of these types of thoughts end up doing is giving you a new project to work on:

Figuring out how to start the project you actually care about.

The irony is magnificent because the thing you’re trying to avoid is sitting there waiting for you while you build an elaborate intellectual obstacle course around it all.

The Ego Loves Complexity

From a realness perspective, this is one of the ego’s favourite tricks because the ego loves to take something relatively simple and makes it seem impossibly complicated.

It loves to do this because complexity creates distance between you and reality and reality is always the ego’s biggest enemy (because the ego is really just a reaction to our avoidance of reality in the first place).

The bottom line, though, is pretty simple and not the complicated or complex at all:

If you already know the next step then you don’t need another theory – you just need to find the courage to take it.

Courage in this context really just means feeling something uncomfortable without allowing that feeling to dictate your behaviour (because you know it’s just emotional discomfort and not actual physical danger).

This is much harder for the ego to deal with (because the ego needs you to remain in that state of discomfort) and so it keeps you analysing because – as long as you’re analysing – you’re not acting and – while you’re not acting – you don’t have to discover what happens when you actually put yourself into reality.

The important point here is that action exposes you to some level and shows you what reality is:

You discover what you’re actually capable of.
You discover where you’re strong versus where you’re weak.
You discover what needs to change.
You discover what you believe.
You discover what you’re willing to tolerate.
You discover what you actually want.
You discover where your expectations and ideals do or don’t align with reality.
Etc. etc. etc.

In other words, you start meeting yourself and seeing what’s true about yourself!

This is where the shadow gets involved again because the shadow contains the ‘parts’ of ourselves we’ve pushed away, rejected or decided weren’t acceptable and the ego doesn’t particularly want those ‘parts’ coming out to play (because if they do then we might actually integrate them and become whole instead of fragmented which will bring us out of the Void and so the ego will lose its power).

In short, then, sometimes keeping yourself “not quite ready” is a remarkably effective way of avoiding yourself and staying where you don’t want to really be but have become familiar with!

Shame, Guilt and Fear

Most often lurking behind this pattern is shame which is the fundamental assumption about yourself that “I’m not good enough as I am”:

In relation to feeling like you need to “figure it all out” before you can get started, this kind of shame basically makes you believe that you can’t get started until you’re somehow finally ‘worthy’ to take real action.

This can show up differently for everybody but it usually entails being ‘more’ in some way:

‘More’ confident.
‘More’ knowledgeable.
‘More’ healed.
‘More’ disciplined.
‘More’ successful.
‘More’ [whatever].

To make things even worse guilt sometimes gets added to the mix too:

Guilt is the core assumption you picked up somewhere along the line that “If I do what I really want to do then I’m a ‘bad’ person” – maybe you’re familiar with it:

You might upset someone.
Maybe you’ll become selfish.
Perhaps you’ll outgrow people who don’t want to change or grow real.
Maybe you’ll stop playing the role you’ve been playing for years and it’ll cause others to question the roles that depended on your unreal performance.
Perhaps you’ll finally admit that the life you’ve built isn’t the REAL life you actually want.
Etc. etc. etc.

This just causes you to hold back and hesitate on what you ALREADY KNOW is the next clear step towards realness and this just feeds into the cocktail of shame and guilt to exacerbate your fear.

An acronym that can be worth remembering when it comes to this type of fear is F.E.A.R: “False Evidence Appearing Real”.

The fear physiological sensation of fear in your body is an actual experience you’re having but that doesn’t mean that the story attached to it is:

It’s just you’re own shame, guilt, and doubt projected onto the future and causing you to freeze in a place you don’t need to be.

Suppression or Unreal Expression?

When difficult emotions arise, people generally have two main ways of avoiding them and distracting themselves from whatever is actually passing through them (remember: emotions are “e-motion, energy in motion”):

Suppression

The first is suppression which means that some feeling or emotion appears and you immediately push it down:

“I’m fine“.
“It doesn’t matter“.
“I shouldn’t feel like this“.
“Just get on with it“.
“I don’t give a !”@&”.
Etc. etc. etc.

Basically: you disconnect from the emotional energy and pretend it isn’t there.

Unreal Expression

The second way of avoiding is what I call unreal expression:

This is subtler in the sense that you know you’re feeling something but instead of actually feeling it, you do something with the emotional energy so you can try to get it out of your system.

For example:

You rant and rave.
You obsess.
You endlessly analyse and figure things out.
You consume doom-scroll.
You redesign the plan (again!)
You ask AI another question.
You start another project.
You seek another opinion.
Etc. etc. etc.

Basically: you do something that allows the e-motion to move but the behaviour you choose isn’t actually aligned with your realness…this is why unreal expression can be so deceptive – because it feels like you’re processing the emotion but you’re just running away from it in a more sophisticated outfit.

This is exactly what the endless quest for readiness and “figuring it all out” is.

Feel Your Actual Feelings (Even Fear)

There is a third way beyond suppression or unreal expression which is to be REAL:

Feel your actual feelings.

That’s literally it.

Let’s take fear as an example:

Instead of immediately creating a story about what it ‘means’ when it pops up and then having to either suppress or unreal express, you can instead CHOOSE to bring your attention into your body.

Where do you feel it as a physiological sensation?

Your chest?

Your stomach?

Your throat?

Somewhere else?

Wherever it shows up for you then just let the feeling be and don’t try to make it disappear, explain it, or judge it.

Don’t ask what your childhood has to do with it, ask A.I. what it means, or try to figure it out…just feel it and let the sensation be there – in fact, consciously allow it to expand instead of resisting it or distracting yourself.

Even though this might sound almost ludicrously simple, it can be transformative because – when you remove the story – all you’re left with sensation and sensation is just energy:

E-motion, “Energy in motion“.

The lesson here is that an emotion itself isn’t necessarily a problem but the resistance to experiencing it and the story we build around it sure can be.

When you allow the energy to move through you without turning it into an elaborate psychological drama then you discover something important:

You can feel fear without being held back by it.

That’s the freedom of being REAL.

You’re Probably Already More Ready Than You Think

Once you’ve actually felt the fear and no longer see it as actual danger or a bona fide ‘threat’ then the endless need to prepare and “figure it all out” most often starts losing its appeal.

You can finally accept that you ALREADY KNOW what to do:

You might not know everything (in fact you definitely don’t but that’s how it’s ‘supposed’ to be).
You might not know how it will turn out (that’s just the way it is too).
What you do know, though, is ENOUGH and enough is enough.

Working with reality instead of your ego’s perception of it from behind the Void is about knowing that you don’t need to know the whole route before taking the first step:

You just need to know the first step then you take it and the next step becomes visible. Then you take that one. Then another.

This is how almost everything real gets built:

You don’t figure out the entire staircase before climbing it – you just take it.

This is why action is so powerful because action always gives you information about yourself, the world, and reality itself that ‘thinking’ alone never can.

For example, you could spend the next six months of your life thinking about and imagining what running a business will be like or you could actually go out and have a real conversation with your first potential customer.

The second option will teach you something the first six months couldn’t because reality always gives you feedback and realness means that you’re willing to accept it so you can keep moving forward in a real way.

Do Your Best and Let Go of the Rest (Trust Yourself & Trust Life).

Ultimately, this all comes down to learning how to trust yourself and life so that you can keep moving forward in a real way.

We can define these two types of trust (Self-Trust and Life-Trust) as follows:

Self-trust: Learning to do your best and knowing that you can handle whatever comes your way because you can keep adapting and learning accordingly.

Life-trust: Learning to let go of the things outside of your control and trusting life to fill in the blanks as you ride through periods of unknowing and uncertainty.

Or, to sum this up in another way:

Do your best and let go of the rest.

This is probably the most real attitude to carry through life as you move forward because it encompasses the truth which is that all of us are smaller than life itself and have to work with it if we want to get real results:

You can’t control every outcome.
You can’t predict every obstacle.
You can’t guarantee that your plan will work because “the map is not the territory“.
You can’t eliminate uncertainty.

All of this just adds up to remind us that you certainly can’t research your way into a life where nothing unexpected happens but you can develop the confidence that whatever happens, you’ll deal with it.

This is the deeper way to overcome the fear of the unknown and to just stay real instead:

You don’t need to know that everything will be okay – you need to know that you’ll handle whatever isn’t.

That’s trust.

And once you have that, uncertainty becomes much less threatening because you’re working with reality instead of against it.

A Simple Way to Stop Overthinking

So what can you actually do if you recognise yourself in this and want to make some practical changes?

Start here if you want to get off of the mental merry-go-round and put yourself back on a real path that takes you towards something real instead of just around in circles:

1. Ask: “What do I already know?”

This is perhaps the simplest but most powerful shift you can make:

Forget the ten-year plan, the ‘perfect’ strategy, or becoming completely different person and just start focusing on what you already have clarity about in the here-and-now.

Ask yourself one of the most basic questions of them all and remind yourself what’s real:

“What do I already know I need to do?“

Don’t analyse the answer – just accept what you ALREADY KNOW and then start to shift towards doing it.

2. Notice what you’re doing instead

Now, pay a little attention to what you’ve been doing instead of what actually makes sense because you’ve been caught up in resistance or distraction for whatever reason:

What are you researching even though you already know enough?
What are you planning even though you already have a workable plan?
What are you consuming that’s just a rehash of the same old thing?
What are you trying to understand that you already understand?
What conversation are you having for the fiftieth time?

None of these things are necessarily ‘bad’ but ask yourself honestly:

“Is this helping me move forward or helping me avoid moving forward?“

3. Feel the fear

Before taking any action then pay a little attention what happens in your body and actually feel the physiological sensations of any fear that might be swimming around in there:

Don’t suppress it, turn it into another research project, or try to make it ‘disappear’ – just let it be there and then act anyway, knowing that you’re already safe and already enough.

4. Take the smallest real step

Give up the preparatory steps that make you feel like you’re gonna be ‘ready’ and take a REAL step instead:

Send the email.
Make the call.
Publish the post.
Apply for the job.
Go to the gym.
Have the conversation.
Make the thing.
Ask the person.
Put the offer out there.
Etc. etc. etc.

Whatever your version of this might be, do something that changes your relationship with reality and gets you flowing again.

5. Let the next step reveal itself

You don’t need the whole map (and the map never aligns perfectly with the territory, anyway) – you just need enough awareness to see where you’re standing and enough courage to take the leap.

Once you start moving, then reality instantly starts giving you feedback and so you can adjust, learn, and then move again – this is how how real progress works.

Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace

If you’re ready to go deeper into letting go and trusting yourself and life then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Vision, Goals, Habits

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should abandon planning and knowing what you’re trying to achieve altogether – it just means the planning and researching and [whatever else] don’t become a distraction from the actual doing.

A simple structure is enough for most of us and it goes like this:

VISION → GOALS → HABITS → ACTION

Have a real vision for where you’re going, turn that vision into concrete goals, turn those goals into daily and weekly habits, and then actually do the habits consistently over time until you start to become the version of yourself you want to be.

The mistake many of us make is turning the vision into an endlessly expanding intellectual universe that allows us to avoid doing anything whilst making it seem like we’re doing a lot.

Don't waste time trying to figure it all out - "live the questions" and find out the truth first hand.

The Final Word: You Don’t Need to Figure it All Out – You Just Need to Be All You Can Currently BE

You don’t need another diagram, plan, or brainstorming session – you just need another day of doing what you said you’d do:

You don’t need to become perfectly ‘ready’ but you do need to find the ‘part’ of you that’s willing and then lean into it:

Willing to feel the fear, willing to be uncertain sometimes, willing to be ‘seen’, willing to fail, willing to succeed, and willing to discover who you actually are when you stop hiding behind ‘preparation’ mode.

The truth is that life doesn’t usually reveal itself to people who sit around trying to figure it out because it can only truly reveal itself through participation.

You act and reality responds, then you learn, adapt, and act again:

Somewhere along the line, you discover that you didn’t need to know everything – you just needed to know enough to take the next step, trust yourself, and let go of the rest as you dance with life instead of asserting yourself (your ego) upon it.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re tired of trying to figure it all out and you want to build flow instead then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start taking real action.

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.

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Real Always Works

You Don’t Need to Figure It All Out to Move Forward and Grow REAL