Oli Anderson

Hi, I'm Oli Anderson - a Transformational Coach for REALNESS and author who helps people to tap into their REALNESS by increasing Awareness of their real values and intentions, to Accept themselves and reality, and to take inspired ACTION that will change their lives forever and help them find purpose. Click here to read my story about how I died, lost it all, and then found reality.

Why You Keep Attracting the Same People: Repetition Compulsion and Emotional Echoes

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Why You Keep Attracting the Same People: Repetition Compulsion and Emotional Echoes

You Keep Attracting the Same People Because You Haven’t Learned the Lesson Reality Wants You to Learn Yet

One of the strangest things about human relationships is how easily we can find ourselves repeating the same patterns over and over again even when we’re actively trying not to:

We might meet somebody completely different from our previous partner, for example – they might look different, have a different background, come from a different part of the world, and have entirely different interests meaning that – on paper, at least – there might be absolutely nothing connecting them to the people we’ve been involved with before.

But the, as if by some strangle black magic, the same dynamic eventually opens up between us and we’re back at square one with the same version of a different person:

  • Perhaps we always end up with somebody who’s hypercritical and makes us feel as though we’re never quite ‘good’ enough.

  • Perhaps we repeatedly find ourselves involved with emotionally unavailable people who keep us at arm’s length.

  • Perhaps we have a habit of getting into relationships that are pretty much doomed from the outset because of incompatible values, conflicting religious beliefs, or some other fundamental obstacle that makes genuine intimacy difficult.

Different faces, different names, different circumstances…but somehow the same old story – why exactly does this happen?

Perhaps more importantly, how do we break the cycle so we can finally experience a REAL relationship without all the unnecessary tension, drama, and emotional gymnastics?

There are all kinds of psychological theories that attempt to explain these dynamics, including attachment theory and these can all be useful for raising awareness and understanding some of the unconscious patterns that influence how we relate to others.

In this article, however, I want to strip things down to the basics and get to the fundamental issue which is that we’re either being UNREAL because we’ve learned to be that way somewhere along the line, or we’re being REAL because we’re grounded in ourselves and can show up in our lives in alignment with our own values and the truth.

Understanding this distinction really is the key to understanding why we keep attracting the same people.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Attracting the same people over and over again means there's a lesson in realness you haven't learned yet.

The Origins of Our Relationship Patterns

To understand why we repeatedly find ourselves in familiar relationship dynamics then we first need to understand something really fundamental about how we develop as human beings.

It all comes down to the idea that we all ultimately seek a taste of REALNESS and being REAL is ultimately about ACCEPTANCE: – first accepting ourselves first and and the the world and reality by extension:

When we’re born, we exist in a relatively natural state of acceptance which is why we don’t usually spend our first few months here on Planet Earth worrying about whether we’re ‘good’ enough, whether we’re ‘worthy’ of love, or whether we’re meeting somebody else’s expectations.

We simply ARE.

As we grow up, however, we gradually learn that certain aspects of ourselves are supposedly ‘unacceptable’.

For example:

  • Perhaps you have a strict parent who only seems happy when we’re obedient and don’t cause any ‘trouble’.

  • Perhaps expressing sadness, anger, or even joy is met with ridicule or rejection.

  • Perhaps you’re praised for your achievements but receive very little attention when you’re simply being yourself and so you’re encouraged to be human doings instead of human beings.

On and on it goes but – whatever the circumstances may be – the end result is that you slowly start to internalise the idea that something about you isn’t quite ‘good’ enough.

This is where SHAME starts to drive your life – shame, in this context, being the fundamental assumption that “I’m not good enough as I am“.

Once any of us start believing this is true (when, actually, it’s a literal disconnection from the truth) then we become disconnected from our natural state of acceptance and begin trying to compensate for the perceived deficiency in all kinds of different ways.

This is because we’ve entered the VOID: a state of restlessness, disconnection and inner emptiness that arises when we’ve strayed from the truth.

Because this Void is an uncomfortable place to try and ‘live’ then we start developing strategies to escape it – the biggest of these strategies being to start playing a character (the ego) to try and make all the feelings and problems of the Void disappear (which will never happen until we 1) uncover the truth, and 2) live the truth).

For example, we might create a self-image as being somebody who’s exceptionally agreeable, successful, attractive, intelligent, funny, helpful or emotionally detached or we might learn to control everything around us, seek constant validation, or make ourselves indispensable to other people.

These strategies are different for everybody but they ultimately serve the same purpose:

We try to ‘WIN’ the acceptance we’ve become disconnected from (even though you can’t and don’t need to ‘win’ something you already have because what’s real is always real).

Unfortunately, the more we rely on these strategies, the further we can move away from our REALNESS and that’s where our relationship patterns begin to develop and then become our default way of operating.

How We Keep Repeating the Same Emotional Patterns

The strategies we develop to compensate for shame don’t simply disappear when we grow up and become ‘adults‘ – instead, they become part of our ego it’s unreal self-image (the identity we construct around the things we believe we need to do to survive emotionally).

Over time, we stop recognising these strategies as strategies and start believing they’re simply who we ARE which is particularly problematic in relationships because our unconscious attempts to ‘win’ acceptance can create dynamics that reinforce the very shame we’re trying to escape.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:

The People-Pleaser and the Overpowering Partner

Imagine somebody who grew up with an exceptionally strict parent who was difficult to please and so they learned that keeping the peace, being agreeable, and anticipating other people’s needs was the safest way to receive consistent approval (or, at least, not get yelled at or whatever).

As an adult, they carry this pattern into their relationships and so they might repeatedly find themselves with partners who are demanding, controlling, or domineering simply because they’re unconsciously recreating a familiar dynamic:

They tolerate behaviour that doesn’t feel right, suppress their own needs and become increasingly disconnected from themselves and the more they people-please, the more overpowering the relationship becomes.

The Emotionally Detached Person and the Unavailable Partner

Now imagine somebody whose parents shamed them whenever they expressed sadness, anger, or vulnerability and so they ended up learning that emotions were somehow ‘unacceptable’ and that the safest thing to do was suppress them.

As adults, they grow into a person who’s phlegmatic, detached, and uncomfortable with any type of emotional intimacy:

The end result is that they repeatedly find themselves in relationships with emotionally unavailable people because this dynamic allows them to avoid confronting their own emotional disconnection from themselves.

In many cases, they may complain about the lack of intimacy in their relationships without realising that they’re unconsciously contributing to it themselves.

The Performer and the Relationship That Never Feels ‘Good’ Enough

Our next case study is somebody whose parents only seemed to accept them when they achieved something – for example, when they received praise for good grades, sporting achievements, or being particularly responsible.

This might sound nice (and it often is) but it’s CONDITIONAL acceptance that leads to the lesson that acceptance has to be earned through performance instead of being or presence.

Surprise, surprise – as adults, they approach relationships in exactly the same way and so rather than simply BEING with their partner, they’re constantly trying to DO something to force the the relationship to work:

They organise everything, solve every problem, anticipate every need, and try to engineer the perfect relationship but, sadly, because their underlying motivation is to earn acceptance and not just to express something real then nothing ever feels quite enough (another symptom of the Void).

The Disconnected Masculine and the Dominating Partner

Many men who grew up without a healthy relationship with their father – or who experienced their father’s masculinity as threatening – often become disconnected from their own natural assertiveness, direction, and drive.

Being disconnected from all this, they often find themselves repeatedly entering relationships with partners who are overly domineering because they never learned to occupy their own space and take responsibility for their own REAL lives.

Again, the relationship ends up becoming another opportunity to recreate and hopefully resolve an old emotional dynamic without knowing that this is actually what’s going on.

Of course, none of these examples are rigid psychological laws that are always true because people are complicated and relationship dynamics can have many contributing factors.

They illustrate an important principle, though:

We often externally recreate the dynamics that we’re still carrying internally and so – until we become aware of these patterns – then we can keep participating in them without realising that we’re doing so.

The Student Keeps Repeating the Lesson Until They Learn It

An important principle that’s worth remembering when it comes to relationships is as follows:

THE STUDENT WILL KEEP REPEATING THE LESSON OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL THEY LEARN THE LESSON.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that life is deliberately punishing us or that we’re somehow responsible for everything other people do – it just means that when we keep approaching situations from the same unconscious assumptions and identity then we’re increasing the odds of generating familiar outcomes.

What follows from this is that if we repeatedly attract the same ‘type’ of person and recreate the same unreal dynamic then there’s probably something about our own patterns that we haven’t yet recognised or outgrown.

The important distinction to always pay attention to here is between our REALNESS and the ego/self-image we created to survive the Void:

For example, the people-pleaser doesn’t necessarily recognise that people-pleasing is a learned strategy and so, instead, he might genuinely believe that he’s just a ‘nice’ guy who wants everybody to be happy.

He doesn’t see that his apparent ‘niceness‘ might actually be driven by a fear of rejection, conflict, or disapproval (all symptoms of that underlying shame of disconnection from the truth) and so – as a consequence – he keeps choosing relationships in which he can play the familiar role of the agreeable, accommodating person who sacrifices himself to keep somebody else happy.

Until he recognises that the people-pleaser isn’t his actual identity and not his REALITY then he has little to no chance of changing the underlying dynamic.

Instead, he’ll keep repeating the lesson because he hasn’t yet understood what it’s trying to show him.

Thankfully, the fundamental lesson is always ultimately the same:

STEP AWAY FROM UNREALITY AND GROW REAL.

This means recognising the unconscious strategies we’ve developed to win acceptance, accepting the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected, and learning to trust ourselves and life rather than trying to control everything from the ego.

When we do this, then we stop needing other people to play out the same old roles in our lives.

Breaking the Cycle: Awareness, Acceptance and Action

The process of growing REAL involves three fundamental stages: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action and each one helps us to move away from the unconscious strategies that keep us trapped in repetitive relationship dynamics (or any of the other unreal patterns that show up in our lives).

Here’s a quick overview:

1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step is to become aware of the patterns you’re repeating and, more importantly, the identity that’s keeping them alive (if you’re not aware of something how can you expect to change it?):

Instead of simply asking why we keep attracting critical, unavailable, or controlling people(for example) then a good starting point here is to begin asking what we’re bringing into these relationships ourselves.

For example:

  • Do I regularly suppress my needs because I’m afraid of upsetting somebody?

  • Do I feel responsible for keeping everybody happy?

  • Do I try to earn love by being useful, successful, or indispensable?

  • Do I avoid emotional intimacy because vulnerability makes me uncomfortable?

  • Do I repeatedly choose people who are fundamentally incompatible with me?

  • Do I mistake intensity, uncertainty, or emotional struggle for genuine connection?

These questions can all help you start distinguishing between your REALNESS and the ego strategies that you’ve picked up and learned to survive your past.

Another useful exercise is to look back at your last three significant relationships and identify the common denominator by forgetting about what these people looked like, what jobs they had, or where they came from and instead focusing on the DYNAMIC.

  • What role did you repeatedly find yourself playing?

  • What did you tolerate?

  • What did you avoid expressing?

  • What were you constantly trying to ‘get‘ from the other person?

You might be surprised by how consistent the underlying pattern actually is – either way, the goal isn’t to blame yourself or the other people but to recognise that you’ve got more influence over your participation in these dynamics than you might previously have realised.

2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

Once we become aware of our patterns then the next step is learning to accept the ‘parts’ of ourselves we’ve previously rejected for whatever reason.

This is known as Shadow Integration:

The Shadow contains the aspects of ourselves – both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but nevertheless very REAL – that we’ve learned to consider ‘unacceptable’ and therefore pushed out of conscious awareness and hide behind the ego.

  • For the people-pleaser, this might include anger, assertiveness, selfishness, or the willingness to disappoint somebody.

  • For the emotionally detached person, it might include vulnerability, sadness, fear, and the need for affection.

  • For the performer, it might include laziness, uncertainty, imperfection, and the willingness to simply BE without achieving anything.

Again, these qualities aren’t necessarily ‘bad’ – they’re simply aspects of being human that we learned to reject somewhere along the line.

The problem, though, is that whatever we refuse to accept within ourselves tends to keep influencing our lives from the shadows and so we project it onto other people, feel threatened when they express the same ‘part’ in some way, or repeatedly find ourselves in situations where we’re forced to confront it (until we finally learn that lesson!).

Integrating the Shadow basically just means bringing these rejected aspects back into the light and recognising that they’re part of our humanity.

A useful exercise in the context of attracting the same people over and over again is to identify the qualities you find most uncomfortable expressing in relationships – for example, saying “No”, asking for affection, expressing anger, admitting you’re wrong, or telling somebody that you don’t want the same things.

Once you’ve spotted something here then ask yourself:

“What did I learn about this same quality when I was growing up and what would happen if I allowed myself to express it in a healthy way today?“

The objective isn’t to swing to the opposite extreme and become unnecessarily aggressive, demanding or self-centred (though, the Seesaw Effect is a real phenomenon on the path to realness) – it’s to become WHOLE.

You don’t need to become somebody else to be accepted – you just need to stop rejecting yourself.

The Inner Child Toolkit for Men: six black and gold workbooks fanned out

If you’re a man who wants to overcome your old patterns and grow real then the Inner Child Toolkit for Men could be exactly what you’re looking for.

3. Action: Learn to Trust Yourself and Life

The final step is in putting your newfound awareness and acceptance into practice by taking real action:

This is where things become even more REAL because we stop merely understanding our patterns intellectually and start making different choices.

Some more examples:

  • If you’ve always been a people-pleaser then practise saying “No” when you genuinely mean it.

  • If you’ve always avoided emotional intimacy then start expressing what you actually feel rather than hiding behind a cool detachment.

  • If you’ve always tried to earn love through performance then work on allowing yourself to be present without constantly trying to make something happen.

  • If you’ve repeatedly chosen unavailable partners then start recognising emotional availability as an essential quality from the get-go rather than something you hope to extract from somebody eventually.

Most importantly, learn to trust yourself enough to walk away from relationships that require you to abandon your values or compromise your integrity.

Of course, this can be uncomfortable because your old ego identity might interpret these changes as ‘dangerous’ (which, from the POV of the ego they kind of are because you’re returning to reality which is the opposite of ego).

This means that the people-pleaser might feel guilty for establishing boundaries, the detached person might feel exposed when expressing vulnerability, and the performer might feel anxious when they’re not constantly doing something.

This is totally normal because you’re essentially learning to live without the strategies you’ve relied upon for years and so you’re leaving your comfort zone and entering your stretch zone:

Every time you act from your REALNESS rather than your old conditioning, however, then you strengthen your connection with yourself and create the possibility of a different kind of relationship with others (and, indeed, life itself).

One important thing to remember here is that becoming REAL doesn’t mean you’ll never encounter difficult people again:

You can’t control who enters your life and being grounded in yourself doesn’t magically make everybody else emotionally available, compatible, or even particularly pleasant – what does change, though, is the way you participate in life.

You become less willing to tolerate dynamics that aren’t aligned with your values, more capable of recognising incompatibility early, and increasingly able to leave situations that aren’t right for you.

Finally, you stop confusing familiar patterns with compatibility.

If you're attracting the same people then it's because you're living outdated ideas.

The Final Word: When You Become REAL, Your Relationships Change

Ultimately, one of the biggest mistakes we can make in relationships is treating another person as a substitute for the acceptance and wholeness we’ve become disconnected from:

When we’re living in the Void, we tend to make something outside ourselves the ultimate thing that will finally make us feel complete (when the only true ultimate is our relationship with life itself).

For some people, it’s romantic love – for others, it’s approval, attention, sex, status, the feeling of being needed, or [literally anything else]…

Whatever it is, when we unconsciously approach relationships as though the ‘right’ person will finally give us something we’re missing then it just puts an enormous amount of pressure on the relationship because we’re asking another human being to provide something that can only really come from reconnecting with the truth of ourselves and our relationship with LIFE itself.

Our relationship with life is the only ultimate relationship and everything else -even ‘good’ things – need to find their proper place within that.

When we understand this then intimacy becomes something quite different because instead of trying to WIN acceptance, we can share it, instead of trying to make somebody complete us then we can meet them as two people who are already whole enough to show up honestly, and instead of recreating the emotional dynamics of our childhood then we can start building something new.

Finally, instead of being attracted to people because they unconsciously allow us to repeat familiar patterns, we can start recognising genuine compatibility, mutual respect, and the possibility of growing even more real together.

So, if you keep finding yourself in the same relationship with different people then it’s probably time to stop asking why the world keeps sending you the same type of person and to start asking what you’re still trying to learn about yourself.

Remember: THE STUDENT WILL KEEP REPEATING THE LESSON UNTIL THEY LEARN IT.

Once you learn the lesson, you no longer need to keep repeating it and you can finally stop living out the echoes of your past and start creating relationships that reflect who you REALLY are.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to drop those old patterns and to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start freeing yourself so you can build something new.

The Intellectual Ego: How ‘Smart’ People Can Become Their Own Worst Enemies

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The Intellectual Ego: How 'Smart' People Can Become Their Own Worst Enemies

The Intellectual Ego is What Happens When You Use the Intellect to Trap Yourself Instead of to Help You Face Yourself and Life Head-on

One of the more interesting things I’ve noticed for sure after years of working with people on their transformational journeys into realness is that some of the most intellectually gifted people can also be some of the most resistant to change.

The types of people that I’m referring to are the ones who who can analyse almost anything, understand complex psychological theories, explain their motives and the origins of their behaviour, identify patterns within themselves and their relationships, and articulate precisely why they feel the way they do. They’ve usually also have read all the books, listened to all the podcasts, and developed an impressive vocabulary for discussing their inner worlds.

That might all sounds great and yet – despite it all – somehow, they’re still STUCK.

They know they’re unhappy, they know something needs to change, and they might even ‘know’ what the next step is but – for some mysterious reason – whenever they get close to taking that step, they find another reason why it isn’t quite ‘right’, why the timing isn’t suitable or they’re not ‘ready’, why the circumstances are too complicated or why they might as well just keep doing what they’ve always done (even though they’re not happy about the results it’s getting them!?!).

All of this is what happens when we fall into the trap of the Intellectual Ego which the phenomenon where our intellect becomes weaponised against us by the ego and allows allowing us to construct increasingly sophisticated arguments for avoiding the very realities we need to face to become whole again.

The irony is that the more intellectually ‘smarter’ we are, the better we can become at convincing ourselves that staying stuck is the most intelligent thing we could possibly do.

This article is about exploring why this happens and, more importantly, what we can do about it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Intellectual Ego is based on the trap of forgetting that we really learn by doing.

Intelligence Isn’t Just About Being Intellectual

Before we go any further, it’s worth pointing out that there are many different kinds of intelligence and that we need all of them to navigate life successfully:

For example, there’s emotional intelligence, social intelligence, creative intelligence, practical intelligence, physical intelligence and plenty of others – each one allowing us to understand and interact with reality in different ways so we can navigate it with flow instead of force and frustration.

What’s interesting, though, is that the majority of people who consider themselves particularly ‘smart’ tend to place a disproportionate amount of value on intellectual intelligence and this becomes the basis for their whole self-image (i.e. they take pride in identifying as the ‘smart one’ or the ‘clever one’, etc.)

This is understandable in many ways because this sort of ‘intellectual’ intelligence the kind of intelligence that we’re generally encouraged to develop and rewarded for in educational institutions – for example, by learning concepts, memorising theories, absorbing facts and figures, and becoming increasingly skilled at manipulating abstract ideas.

That isn’t to say that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with this and, of course, intellectual knowledge is incredibly useful because it helps us understand the world, refine our actions, and make better decisions in life.

What is interesting, however, is that problem begin to arise when we start believing that this sort conceptual knowledge is the pinnacle of intelligence when it absolutely isn’t.

In fact, I’d argue that the realest form of intelligence is REAL ACTION because action is where our understanding of life – and, therefore, the validity of the conceptual knowledge we’ve acquired, actually gets tested.

In other words:

We can have the most sophisticated theory in the world but if it doesn’t translate into something that actually works in reality then it’s ultimately just an interesting idea.

  • You can spend ten years studying the theory of swimming but you’ll still need to get in the water to learn how to do it.

  • You can read every book about relationship but you’ll still need to learn how to actually love somebody by showing up and being present.

  • You can understand everything there is to know about confidence but you’ll still need to put yourself in situations where you have to demonstrate it and develop it.

All of this is to say that REAL intelligence doesn’t just accumulate information – it actually uses information to engage with life and get results.

An implication of this is that when we overvalue intellectual intelligence then we can end up spending so much time thinking about life that we barely participate in it – in other words, we can become experts in appearing to ‘understand’ reality without actually experiencing it.

And that’s where things start to get weird:

Conceptual Knowledge vs Experiential Knowledge

One useful distinction we can make to simplify all of this a little is between two different kinds of knowledge:

  • Conceptual knowledge: What we know THAT something is true or how something theoretically works.

  • Experiential knowledge: What we know HOW to do because we’ve actually experienced it.

A simple example of this is driving a car:

You could read an entire book explaining how to drive and get to the point where you can memorise the Highway Code, understand the mechanics of an engine, and learn precisely what happens when you press the accelerator, brake or clutch.

You might even become incredibly knowledgeable about driving and what makes a ‘good’ driver compared to a ‘bad’ one…

None of this knowledge THAT things work in a certain way means you actually know HOW to drive, though:

To acquire this kind of experiential knowledge instead of just the conceptual then you’d need to actually get behind the wheel, make mistakes, respond to what’s happening around you, and gradually develop the practical understanding that only experience and learning by doing can provide.

The same principle applies to almost everything else in life – for example:

  • You can understand the theory of setting boundaries without ever actually setting one.

  • You can understand the psychology of shame without allowing yourself to experience the vulnerability of being truly ‘seen’.

  • You can understand the importance of taking risks without ever doing anything that makes you leave your comfort zone.

  • You can understand the theory of letting go without ever actually releasing your grip on anything.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

This is a really important distinction to understand because conceptual knowledge can create the illusion of progress without requiring any actual transformation.

This leads to a kind of ego trap that we can fall into where we convince ourselves that because we understand at the intellectual and conceptual level then we’ve somehow integrated the lesson or moved beyond whatever we need to leave behind.

At the end of the day, though, understanding something intellectually and integrating it into our lives are two very different things:

One happens in our heads whereas the other happens through experience and – when we’re trying to move towards realness – we actually need both.

How the Ego Weaponises the Intellect

So now we come to a simple but powerful question:

What does all of this have to do with the ego?

Well, quite a lot:

As I’ve explored in many of the other articles on this site or in my books, the ego is essentially the identification we develop with the protective patterns, beliefs, and behaviours we’ve accumulated to navigate painful experiences and to ‘survive’ whatever we went through in the past.

Unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity) all usually contribute to this process and encourage us to hide very real aspects of ourselves (our Shadow Self) and construct an identity that feels safer than being fully seen even though it’s unreal and almost always eventually turns into a prison.

When we start moving away from the ego and back towards realness (for whatever reason) then we have to (re)face the realities we’ve spent so much time resisting which means that we need to become aware of our conditioning, accept the parts of ourselves we’ve rejected, and take action that allows us to integrate those previously hidden aspects.

(Awareness, Acceptance, and Action works every time)!

This return to reality threatens the ego because the ego is built on a non-acceptance of reality and so integration means that the old identity can no longer operate in quite the same way.

This is exactly where the intellect can become particularly useful to it:

Rather than simply resisting change through obvious fear or avoidance, the ego can latch onto our intellectual abilities and use them to construct impressive arguments for why we shouldn’t change – this means it can turn pretty much any reality into a philosophical problem that needs another six months of consideration (at least!).

This is why the intellect in the service of the ego can and will always find reasons why we’re not ‘ready’, why the world isn’t ‘ready’, why other people need to change first, or why our particular circumstances make taking action impossible.

In other words, the ego doesn’t need to make us stupid to keep us stuck – it just needs to make us clever enough to defend our ‘stuckness’.

In fact, the more intellectually capable we are, the more elaborate these defences can become – for example:

  • We might recognise that we’re unhappy with our relationships but develop a sophisticated argument about why intimacy is fundamentally incompatible with personal freedom.

  • We might know that we’re avoiding a difficult conversation but convince ourselves that communication is pointless because human beings are incapable of truly understanding one another.

  • We might recognise that we’re hiding behind perfectionism but argue that the world simply isn’t ready for what we have to offer.

  • On and on it goes…

Some of these arguments might contain elements of (conceptual) truth but that’s exactly what makes them so convincing.

The question isn’t whether we can construct a convincing argument, though – it’s whether that argument is actually helping us engage with reality or giving us another reason to avoid it.

The Trap of Always Having a Reason

One of the most ironic aspects of the Intellectual Ego is that it often affects people who are already aware that something needs to change:

What this means is that they’re not necessarily in denial about their unhappiness and might even be extremely articulate about what’s ‘wrong’ with their lives and the psychological reasons behind it – in other words, they’re ready for change (or, at least, say they are).

Despite this knowledge, every time they approach the point where change requires something REAL from them, another reason appears and then another one (and then another one):

  • They need to understand themselves a little better first.

  • They need to wait until circumstances improve.

  • They need to figure out another issue before addressing the one they already know about.

  • They need to consider all the possible consequences.

  • They need to find the perfect approach before they can get started.

Before they know it, years have passed by, and nothing really has changed except maybe the weather…

What’s happening here is that the intellect is being used in the service of the ego to keep reality at a comfortable distance (which makes sense because the ego is the opposite of reality).

The person in question might genuinely believe they’re making ‘progress’ because they’re constantly discovering new insights and developing increasingly sophisticated explanations for their situation but if none of this translates into a change in how they actually show up in life, they’re essentially going round in circles.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of all this is that at the conceptual level we can usually construct an argument for almost anything:

We can argue for taking action and argue against it, we can defend vulnerability and defend emotional withdrawal, we can explain why we should take responsibility and why we’re actually not responsible for anything, etc. etc. etc. – given enough time and intellectual gymnastics, we can make almost any position sound reasonable.

The key point to remember and to start escaping the intellectual ego is that reality doesn’t care how impressive our arguments are:

If we’re unhappy, we’re unhappy.

If a relationship isn’t working, it isn’t working.

If we’re avoiding something we need to face, we’re avoiding it.

We can rationalise these realities indefinitely but the realities themselves always remain and so the way forward can only truly reveal itself once we ACCEPT them.

When We Become Identified With Our Arguments

Have you ever noticed how some particularly ‘intellectual’ people become incredibly emotional when their arguments are challenged?

You might think that somebody who values reason and logic would welcome having their ideas tested because if an argument is sound then it should be able to withstand scrutiny.

What’s interesting, however, is that a lot of ‘intellectual’ people can have surprisingly defensive and emotional reactions to their arguments being questioned or challenged (even though the truth itself is not threatened by any arguments – only our conceptual understanding of the truth is ‘threatened’).

This happens because the person has become identified with their arguments and so instead of seeing an argument as something they HAVE, they experience it as something they ARE.

When people are identified with the concepts (arguments) they carry in their heads like this then challenging the argument feels like challenging their identity and so they start to freak out.

This is an important distinction because an argument should be an attempt to interpret or communicate something about the truth and never an actual substitute for the truth itself:

When we identify with our intellectual positions, though, we stop being curious about whether they’re accurate and start becoming invested in defending them – in other words, we’re no longer using our intellect to understand reality; we’re using it to protect our ego from reality.

This is another way of understanding the separation between ourselves and life that creates the Void (a restless state of frustration we find ourselves in when we become disconnected from the truth):

We put another layer of interpretation between ourselves and a true experience of life itself and then defend that interpretation as though our existence depends on it.

In many ways, of course, the ego does depend on these unreal interpretations (which is why it weaponises the intellect to make them seem more and more convincing):

The way out and back home to realness is to remember that we are not our thoughts, our theories, or our arguments and that they’re all just things we can observe, question, refine and discard when they no longer serve us.

In other words, we don’t need to defend an idea simply because we once believed it and the most intelligent thing we can do is admit that we were ‘wrong’.

Don’t Confuse Emotion With Truth Either

At this point, it’s probably really important to be clear that the answer isn’t to abandon intellectual intelligence and start treating our emotions as the ultimate authority (or becoming so open minded that our brains fall out) because that’s just gonna end up causing even more unnecessary problems:

Emotions are important because they give us information about our internal experience and we have to feel them in order to let them pass through our system without getting ‘stuck’ (emotions are just “e-motion, energy in motion” and allowing ourselves to experience them is an essential part of becoming whole).

However, emotions aren’t the truth either because they can contradict each other and they’re always impermanent (whereas the truth doesn’t contradict itself and lasts forever).

Some common examples:

  • Feeling afraid doesn’t automatically mean something is actually dangerous.

  • Feeling guilty doesn’t automatically mean we’ve done something ‘wrong’.

  • Feeling attracted to somebody doesn’t automatically mean they’re ‘right’ for us.

  • Feeling angry doesn’t automatically mean somebody has mistreated us.

The point is that just as we can become trapped by identifying with our thoughts, we can also become trapped by identifying with our feelings and so Realness requires us to develop the capacity to observe both.

This is where the idea of Witness Consciousness becomes useful:

What this means is that rather than automatically believing everything our intellect tells us or reacting to every emotion we experience that we learn to step back and observe what’s happening.

-We notice our thoughts without assuming they’re facts.

-We notice our emotions without assuming they’re instructions.

-We recognise the patterns of our ego without automatically acting them out.

From this place of awareness, we can start to make conscious choice about how to respond so we can act in a REAL way instead of an UNREAL one.

This isn’t about suppressing our thoughts or emotions – far from it, in fact – but about creating enough space to relate to them without being controlled by them so that we can start choosing actions that are actually aligned with reality.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

If you want to get more in touch with reality and away from the ego then check out my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness.

How to Get Out of the Intellectual Ego Trap

If you recognise yourself in any of this, then the ‘good’ news is that you don’t need to become less intelligent to become more real and that you simply need to stop allowing your intellect to operate independently of experience.

Here are some practical ways to start doing exactly this:

Ask yourself whether you’re learning or avoiding.

Whenever you find yourself analysing something over and over again without really getting anywhere then pause and ask yourself:

“Is this actually helping me move forwards or am I using thinking to avoid something I already know I need to do?”

Be brutally honest with yourself:

Sometimes, another book, podcast, or psychological insight is exactly what you need but – other times – you already have enough information and just need to get on with it.

Separate conceptual arguments from experiential evidence.

When you find that you’ve developed a a convincing reason not to do something that you know is REAL then ask yourself what actual experience supports your conclusion:

Are you responding to something that’s genuinely happened or are you (unconsciously) defending yourself against something you imagine might happen?

Basically: don’t fall into the trap of confusing theoretical possibility with an established reality.

Identify the REAL action you’re avoiding.

More often than not when we’re ‘stuck’, it’s because something there’s something relatively straightforward that we already know we need to do or face which we’re resisting (including consciously choosing to do nothing but accept what can’t be changed).

It might be having a difficult conversation, setting a boundary, admitting something to ourselves, ending a relationship, starting a project, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, or even just doing the work to accept that some things in life are inevitable and can only be accepted (like death, for example).

Strip away all the conceptual complexity and ask yourself:

“If I stopped rationalising and intellectualising for a moment then what would I actually do?”

The answer might be uncomfortable but that’s often a useful clue that resistance really is coming into it and you need to find a way to stretch yourself back into your own real life.

Experiment with experience instead of endlessly analysing it.

  • Rather than trying to ‘think’ your way into confidence then it’s usually better to take an action that requires confidence and start building through experience.

  • Rather than analysing vulnerability then it’s usually better to just practise being vulnerable.

  • Rather than studying boundaries indefinitely it’s better to just set one.

You don’t need to make enormous changes overnight to start improving your life – you just need to start with small experiments that allow you to gather real experiential knowledge.

If you can let go of the ego’s tendency to hold back and hesitate and do this then life will teach you things that thinking alone never could.

Practise being ‘wrong’.

This is particularly important if you’ve built a lot of your identity around being ‘intelligent’ and therefore needing to be ‘right’ or having it all ‘figured out‘ all the time.

The way to undo the dame of this is pretty simple (though, of course, it takes effort to actually train yourself to do it):

  • Allow yourself to change your mind.

  • Admit when you don’t know something.

  • Let other people challenge your assumptions without immediately preparing a defence.

You don’t lose your intelligence by being ‘wrong’ – you actually give it room to develop because you expose yourself to opportunities to actually learn.

Observe your thoughts and emotions through Witness Consciousness.

When you feel yourself becoming defensive in the future then take a pause and start to witness the argument forming in your head, any emotions underneath it, and also what you’re trying to protect yourself from.

You don’t need to judge any of it – but you’ll always benefit by creating enough space to decide whether your next response is coming from reality or from an old ego-based pattern.

Measure progress through real-world results.

Ultimately, the question isn’t how much you understand about personal transformation at that conceptual level but whether or not the understanding that you’ve acquired is changing how you actually live in a REAL way.

Are your relationships becoming more real?

Are you taking responsibility for your choices?

Are you expressing yourself more freely and in alignment with your values?

Are you becoming more integrated, more grounded, and more capable of responding to life in real-time?

If none of these things are happening for you then it’s probably time to stop collecting concepts and start applying what you already know.

The intellectual ego just keeps you from real life.

The Final Word: Real Intelligence Means Returning to Reality

The Intellectual Ego is a particularly frustrating trap to fall into because it can make us feel as though we’re constantly working on ourselves when, in reality, we’re just finding increasingly sophisticated ways to stay the same.

When this happens, we just become experts at explaining away our limitations rather than moving beyond them and in defending our unhappiness with such impressive arguments that we eventually forget we’re allowed to do something about it.

The purpose of ‘intelligence’ isn’t to help us construct a more elaborate prison but to to help us understand reality and engage with it more effectively.

Like we explored, intellectual knowledge has its place but so also do emotional understanding, creativity, intuition, and every other form of intelligence that helps us navigate life.

Either way, though, none of these can ever replace the experience of actually living!

When we’re moving towards realness, we need to become aware of the ego patterns that lock us in an unreal state of fragmentation, accept the parts of ourselves we’ve spent so long hiding from, and take action that allows us to integrate those parts into a more whole way of being.

You don’t need another ten theories about why you’re stuck if you already know what the next step is, you don’t need to win an argument with your ego before you can start living, and you certainly don’t need to become any less intelligent – you just need to stop using your intelligence to protect yourself from the REAL life you’re trying to return to.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If it’s time to leave the mental prison and start growing real so you can experience your actual life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take some real steps forward.

The Seesaw Effect: Why Becoming More Real Often Means Going to Extremes Before Finding Balance

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The Seesaw Effect: Why Becoming More Real Often Means Going to Extremes Before Finding Balance

How the ‘Seesaw Effect’ Plays a Role in Your Transformational Journey into REALNESS

Perhaps one of the most interesting things about becoming more REAL is that, sometimes, you have to become at least little bit more UNREAL before you can find your way back to the truth.

This might sound a bit weird but it’s something that I’ve observed repeatedly over the years whilst coaching people through the process of transformation and integration:

Essentially, when people start becoming more aware of themselves, identifying the patterns that have been holding them back, and making a conscious effort to change then they can often go through a period of swinging from one extreme to another.

I’ve started calling this phenomenon the See-Saw Effect:

The basic idea is that when we recognise that we’ve been living with too much of one quality and not enough of its opposite then we consciously start cultivating the quality we’ve been missing.

Because we’ve spent so long suppressing, neglecting, or avoiding that part of ourselves, however, then we sometimes overcompensate and temporarily swing too far in the opposite direction.

This isn’t necessarily a ‘bad’ thing, though – in fact, it’s often a necessary part of the journey towards wholeness and so understanding the See-Saw Effect can help you navigate your own transformation without getting frustrated, judging yourself unnecessarily, or mistaking one extreme for another version of the ‘truth’.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Seesaw effect shows that extremes are a necessary part of life but never the realest long-term strategy.

Why We Sometimes Need to Go to Extremes to Find Balance

Usually, when we reach the point where we genuinely want to change our lives, it’s because we’ve become aware of some tendency within ourselves that’s causing problems and holding us back from being whatever it is that we want to be in our REALNESS.

In other words, we reach a kind of point of no return where we know we have to change something – for example:

  • Maybe we’ve noticed that we’re too emotional.

  • Too serious.

  • Too lazy.

  • Too busy.

  • Too passive.

  • Too controlling.

  • Too promiscuous.

  • Too frugal.

  • Too [whatever].

Whatever it happens to be, the point is that we’ve reached a stage where we recognise that something about the way we’re currently showing up within ourselves and our lives isn’t working and so it’s time to start doing things differently.

The See-Saw Effect is the process that people tend to go through as they try to balance themselves out in this way.

Here’s what I mean:

  1. Somebody realises they’ve been lazy and inactive and so they suddenly go into an extremely active mode and start filling every available moment with exercise, projects, and productivity.

  2. Somebody realises they’ve had unhealthy boundaries for most of their lives and so they turn up the volume and suddenly become extremely rigid with everybody, refusing to compromise on almost anything.

  3. A man realises he’s been out of touch with his masculine energy and so he turns up the volume on being as ‘masculine’ as possible, perhaps becoming overly assertive, competitive, or dominant (depending on which idea of ‘masculine’ he picked up).

  4. Somebody realises they’ve been terrible with money and so they become extremely frugal, scrutinising every penny and denying themselves things they could comfortably afford.

  5. Somebody thinks they’ve been too promiscuous and so they become absolutely abstemious when it comes to sexual activity – perhaps treating even healthy expressions of desire as something to avoid.

In all these cases, the See-Saw Effect is consciously being set in motion because somebody is trying to cultivate new qualities within themselves and so they’ve recognised an imbalance and are attempting to correct it.

The problem, though, is that – initially – their approach is often just as unbalanced as the original pattern they were trying to escape because they’ve gone from one extreme to the other in an attempt to ‘fix’ whatever flaws they’ve noted in themselves.

What’s really interesting, though, is that his initial imbalance can be a necessary part of becoming more balanced and whole overall.

Let’s explore this in a bit more detail:

Bringing the Shadow Back Into the Light

One of the fundamental principles of real life transformation and integration is that many of the qualities we struggle to express in our lives are often qualities we’ve somehow been conditioned to suppress at some stage in the past.

The abridged version of this is that through our conditioning, experiences, relationships, and attempts to ‘survive’ the past then we develop certain ways of being that help us navigate the world as we understand it:

These adaptations to what we’ve been through are often useful and are usually necessary at the time – as we grow and our circumstances change, however, the same qualities that once helped us survive can start holding us back because they’re no longer aligned with reality.

Here are some common examples how this can unfold:

  • We might become overly accommodating because we learned that expressing ourselves wasn’t ‘safe’.

  • We might become passive because taking action once resulted in criticism or rejection.

  • We might become excessively serious because our playfulness was never welcomed or got us in some kind of ‘trouble’.

  • We might become too agreeable and ‘pleasing’ because our anger was seen as a threat and so we had to send it into hiding.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

All of these adaptations – and any like them – eventually become a cornerstone of our EGO whilst the qualities that we’ve suppressed end up in our SHADOW SELF (the disowned version of ourselves that is still very REAL and so don’t really go anywhere because what’s real is always real).

The important thing to understand is that these qualities don’t simply just ‘disappear’ because they’re still ‘part’ of us and lie in waiting to be acknowledged, accepted, and (re)integrated so we can be whole instead of fragmented.

Take the person who’s been acting in a ‘lazy’ way, for example – they might not actually be “lazy” at all and so what’s actually going on is that their capacity to act, initiate, and move towards what matters has simply been sent into the shadows for whatever reason (almost always because of the Unholy Trinity of shame, guilt, and/or trauma from the past).

When they finally recognise this and start taking action then they might initially ‘seesaw’ to the other extreme and so go a little overboard and so might might exercise religiously every for hours at a time day, start three businesses, reorganise their entire house, and suddenly decide that sleeping is an unnecessary inconvenience invented by people with insufficient ambition.

Obviously, this isn’t a particularly balanced or real approach but at, at the same time, it’s still an opportunity for the person in question to reconnect with an active, dynamic side of themselves that had been neglected for years and so they’re still actively engaged in the process of bringing something out of the Shadow Territory and back into consciousness.

The same principle applies to all the other examples that we explored above:

  • The person developing boundaries is reclaiming their capacity to say “No”.

  • The man exploring his masculine energy is reconnecting with qualities he previously neglected.

  • The person becoming more financially responsible is developing a healthier relationship with security and resources.

  • On and on it goes.

None of these characters are necessarily becoming something new – they’re just reclaiming something that was already within them and that’s exactly why the See-Saw Effect can be such an important part of the integration process.

Why You Sometimes Have to Overshoot the Mark

Think about an actual seesaw for a second:

If one person is sitting at one end with their feet firmly on the ground then the other person has to move in the opposite direction before the balance changes.

The whole point of the “Seesaw Effect” is that something very similar tends to happen when we’re trying to correct deeply ingrained psychological patterns.

Again, some more examples so you can see what I mean:

  • If we’ve spent twenty years avoiding conflict then becoming slightly more assertive might not be enough to shift the underlying conditioning and so we (probably) need to spend some time being considerably more assertive than feels comfortable.

  • If we’ve spent decades neglecting our physical health then a gentle commitment to exercise might not initially be enough to interrupt the old habits and so we (probably) need to throw ourselves into movement and experience what it’s like to be somebody who actually takes care of their body.

  • If we’ve spent most of our adult lives being convinced that our anger is somehow ‘wrong’ then becoming somebody who can actually use this anger to protect our boundaries and to give us fuel for making healthy changes might involve being a bit ‘snappy’ for a little while.

In other words, we have to overshoot the mark sometimes so that we can get a sense of where the middle actually is and also to really feel whatever energy we’ve been denying in ourselves in a heightened way (so that it becomes something we can experience and become familiar with).

This is pretty important because in the scheme of the things as a whole because when we’ve spent so long living at one end of the scale, we often have very little experience of the other end.

When we don’t yet know what healthy boundaries feel like, what healthy ambition feels like, what it means to express ourselves freely, or to be comfortable with stillness then we have to experiment a little so we can recalibrate our relationship with these things (and, sometimes, experimentation means going a little too far).

The ‘trick’ is to recognise that the extreme end of the scale isn’t necessarily where we’re supposed to stay but it’s often somewhere we might need to visit to discover what we’ve been missing out on.

Bob and the Problem of Saying Too Much

Let’s imagine a man called Bob:

For most of his adult life, Bob has struggled to express himself in a REAL way and so he’s spent years holding back his opinions, swallowing his feelings, avoiding difficult conversations, and generally trying to keep everybody else comfortable and happy except himself. In fact, he’s become so accustomed to suppressing himself that he’s barely aware he’s doing it anymore.

Thankfully, through coaching, Bob has finally become consciously aware of this pattern and decides that enough is enough and so he’s going to finally start expressing the truth whenever he gets a chance…and so he does.

Now, galvanized by his new awareness, whenever an opportunity to express himself comes up, Bob takes it:

He tells people exactly what he thinks, shares every opinion, challenges all of the things he disagrees with, and refuses to hold back.

Go, Bob!

Initially, this feels liberating because he’s finally doing something that he’s spent years avoiding, discovering his voice, and experiencing the freedom of not constantly filtering himself through other people’s expectations (which are usually just projections of his own emotional ‘stuff’, anyway).

After a while, though, some shiny new problems start appearing in Bob’s life:

  • People feel unnecessarily criticised.

  • Some friends become reluctant to open up around him because they don’t know whether they’ll receive an unsolicited opinion or a lecture.

  • Conversations become more confrontational than they need to be.

The jury is in: Bob has gone from one extreme to another.

Whereas previously he was suppressing his expression, now he’s expressing himself indiscriminately but the interesting thing – in relation to the Seesaw Effect, anyway – is that these new ‘problems’ aren’t necessarily evidence that Bob is failing.

They’re actually opportunities for REALITY to help him COURSE CORRECT so he can return to REALNESS.

Thanks to the feedback he’s receiving, Bob can now start to recognise that there’s a difference between expressing himself because it’s genuinely appropriate and relevant versus expressing himself simply because he’s trying to overcome an old pattern.

No longer does Bob need to ‘prove’ that he’s somebody who speaks his mind – he just needs to develop the capacity to CHOOSE when and how to express himself from a REAL place.

Sometimes, the realest thing to do will be to speak up. At other times, it will be to pause and actively listen. From time-to-time, it’ll be to challenge somebody outright and at other it’ll be to let something go.

The point isn’t to become a person who ALWAYS expresses himself (because, rarely is there an “always” in life – other than that things are always changing and real always work) but to become somebody who CAN express himself without being controlled by the old fear of doing so.

That’s a very different thing.

Reactive vs Responsive: The Difference That Changes Everything

This brings us to one of the most important distinctions in the whole process of real life transformation which he difference between being REACTIVE and being RESPONSIVE.

Here’s how you can look at the difference between the two:

  • When we’re REACTIVE, we’re essentially operating from ‘old’ conditioning rather than consciously choosing how to respond to what’s happening.

This can happen in two ways:

First off, we might be reacting from an old pattern that we’ve never actually questioned – for example, whenever we automatically agree with people because we’ve learned that disagreement is dangerous, when we avoid taking action because we’ve associated visibility with criticism, or when we constantly stay busy because stillness brings uncomfortable feelings to the surface that we’d rather resist.

Secondly, we might even become reactive to the same patterns we’ve started noticing in ourselves and this is where the See-Saw Effect comes in:

  • We recognise that we’ve been too passive so we become aggressively assertive.

  • We recognise that we’ve been too serious so we become excessively frivolous.

  • We recognise that we’ve been too accommodating so we become completely inflexible.

In all these cases, we’re still being controlled by something which is that we’re either acting from the old conditioning or reacting against it because we became aware of it and neither is quite the same as being REAL.

Being RESPONSIVE means something different:

  • RESPONSIVE means that we’re no longer trying to BE anything in particular or ‘prove’ to ourselves and the world that we’ve changed – instead, we’re able to look at what’s happening in the present moment and make a choice based on what reality actually requires of us.

When we’re responsive we can answer a simple but powerful question:

“What’s the REALEST thing to be done right now?”

The difference between reactive and responsive is that with responsiveness we aren’t asking what somebody who’s confident would do, what a masculine man would do, what a productive person would do, or what somebody with perfect boundaries would do – we’re simply asking what’s true and appropriate in the situation we’re facing.

Sometimes, the answer will involve taking action, others it’ll involve doing nothing, at other times will mean speaking up, and sometimes it’ll mean listening

Sometimes, we’ll need to be more YIN and sometimes we’ll need to be more YANG – the important thing is that we’re making a responsive CHOICE rather than automatically reacting.

Yin and Yang: Learning to Move Between Opposites

A useful way to understand the See-Saw Effect is through the lens of ancient Chinese concepts of YIN and YANG.

In simple terms, Yin (black on the image above – which is the symbol known as the Taijitu) represents the qualities in both nature and human beings associated with stillness, receptivity, reflection, and allowing.

On the flipside, Yang (the white) represents qualities associated with movement, expression, action, and dynamism.

Neither is inherently better or worse than the other and both are necessary aspects of a balanced life which also contain the seeds of their opposites.

When we become overly identified with one side over the other, however, then problems can start to emerge that take us out of the natural flow of reality itself.

For example:

  • If we spend all our time in Yin then we might become passive, withdrawn, and disconnected from the opportunities that life presents. We might also spend so much time reflecting, processing, and contemplating that we never actually get around to doing anything real with ourselves as life passes us by.
  • On the other hand, if we spend all our time in Yang then we might end up becoming restless, controlling, and exhausted because we eventually burn out. We might constantly push ourselves, chase achievements, and try to make things happen without ever allowing ourselves to stop and enjoy what we’ve created or letting certain things happen to us.

In either case, we’re missing out on REAL life which is where we find a balance of both qualities by learning to trust ourselves to do what we need to do (Yang) and then let go and trust life to do what we can’t do (Yin).

With the See-Saw Effect, people who have become aware of their own tendency to be overly Yin will often make a conscious attempt to become more Yang, and vice versa and so the person who’s spent years sitting on the side-lines suddenly starts taking action and the person who’s spent years pushing themselves suddenly discovers the importance of rest and allowing.

Initially, they might overdo it and ‘seesaw’ from one extreme to the other but, eventually, as they become more aware of themselves and their relationship with reality (which is always giving us feedback so we can course correct) then they start developing the ability to CHOOSE.

They no longer need to be permanently identified with either position and so they can finally respond by being still when stillness is appropriate and dynamic when action is required.

(Just as they can CHOOSE to be assertive without being aggressive, receptive without being passive, disciplined without being rigid, and relaxed without becoming avoidant).

In other words, they’re finally beginning to MERGE THE OPPOSITES and this is where real integration starts to happen.

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

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

How to Work With the See-Saw Effect in Your Own Life

So now we get to the practical part that shows you how you an you use this understanding to support your own transformation.

Here are five practical steps for realness:

1. Identify the quality you’re struggling with.

Start by becoming aware of the tendencies that are causing problems in your life in the first place – for example:

Are you too passive? Too controlling? Too serious? Too emotionally reactive? Too withdrawn? Too busy?

Be honest with yourself without turning the observation into another reason to judge or beat up on yourself by remembering that all you’re doing is identifying a pattern and not defining your entire identity.

2. Explore the opposite quality.

Once you’ve identified the pattern then it’s time to consider what might be missing from your life because of its hold over you:

  • If you’re passive then perhaps you need to develop assertiveness.

  • If you’re controlling then perhaps you need to develop trust and surrender.

  • If you’re constantly busy then perhaps you need to rediscover stillness and learn to chill out from time-to-time.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Ask yourself a simple question to start developing deeper awareness:

“What quality have I been neglecting, avoiding, or suppressing?”

This is often where the SHADOW WORK begins and you start to take your Awareness and turn it into Acceptance (so you can take real Action).

3. Give yourself permission to experiment.

Now it’s time to start consciously cultivating the ‘hidden’ quality you’ve identified by experimenting with it:

  • If you struggle with expression then practise speaking up.

  • If you struggle with discipline then create some structure.

  • If you struggle with boundaries then start saying “No” when something genuinely isn’t right for you (say “Yes” to the real stuff and “No” to the unreal stuff)

Don’t fall into the trap of expecting to get everything perfectly balanced immediately – in fact, you might need to hop on the ‘seesaw’ and spend some time exploring the opposite end of the scale before you understand what a healthy middle even looks like.

(Of course, experimentation isn’t an excuse to disregard other people or cause unnecessary harm and you can challenge your conditioning without abandoning consideration and even common sense).

4. Pay attention to reality’s feedback.

As you experiment then make an effort to notice what’s really happening:

Are your new behaviours helping you move towards wholeness or are they creating a different set of problems that take you deeper into fragmentation?

Are people responding differently to you?

Are you feeling more integrated or simply more identified with a new way of behaving?

Don’t automatically interpret every uncomfortable consequence as a sign that you’re doing something ‘wrong’ because – more often than not – real growth involves discomfort.

Always be willing to learn from the feedback you’re receiving, though, because this is how you start COURSE CORRECTING and returning back to REALITY.

5. Regulate, Integrate, Accelerate.

Ultimately, the goal is to move beyond reacting to your old patterns so you can start responding to reality from a grounded place that moves you towards a real vision for who you want to become next.

This requires three things:

  • REGULATE: Learning to regulate your nervous system so that you’re not constantly operating from fight, flight, freeze, or other survival-based responses. Instead, you can give yourself enough space to see what’s actually happening.

  • INTEGRATE: Acknowledging and working through the emotional ‘stuff’ connected to your old conditioning by allowing yourself to feel what needs to be felt rather than suppressing it or acting it out unconsciously.

  • ACCELERATE: Once you’re grounded and more integrated, then it’s all about taking action from that place of awareness and acceptance so you can make choices based on what’s real rather than trying to compensate for who you used to be.

This is the movement from REACTION to RESPONSE and it’s where the See-Saw Effect eventually starts to settle down.

Overcoming the Seesaw Effect allows you to step into wholeness and the interplay of reality itself.

The Final Word: Beyond the See-Saw & Finding Your Way Back to Wholeness

Ultimately, the See-Saw Effect is a natural part of many people’s journeys towards REALNESS:

When we’ve spent years – or even decades – living in ways that lead to a disconnection from certain aspects of ourselves then we shouldn’t necessarily expect to find balance as soon as we start making changes – in fact, sometimes, we have to swing to the opposite extreme to discover what we’ve been missing.

In other words, sometimes we have to become a little too assertive, a little too active, a little too disciplined, or a little too expressive before we understand what those qualities actually mean when they’re fully integrated.

The important thing is not to become attached to the new extreme and to over-identify with it:

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because we’ve finally ‘discovered’ something that’s been missing from our lives then we now need to make it our entire identity but that’s just another version of the same old problem.

-If you’ve spent your life being passive then you don’t need to spend the rest of it being aggressively assertive.

-If you’ve spent years being excessively busy then you don’t need to become somebody who refuses to do anything ever again.

-If you’ve suppressed your masculinity then you don’t need to turn yourself into a caricature of what you think a masculine man ‘should‘ be.

All you need to do is integrate which means that you start to develop a relationship with those ‘exiled’ qualities that allows them to emerge naturally as part of the natural drive towards wholeness that’s always unfolding in our lives.

REALNESS isn’t about becoming ‘more’ of one thing or ‘less’ of another but about becoming WHOLE enough to choose.

When you reach this point, there’s no longer any need to constantly swing between opposing extremes because you can stay regulated (because your self-image isn’t under ‘threat’) and then embrace Yin and Yang, stillness and dynamism, action and conscious non-action, strength and surrender, without being controlled and ‘defined’ by either side.

You’re no longer trying to ‘prove’ that you’ve changed or need to compensate for the person you used to be – you’re simply responding to life as it unfolds.

And that’s the beauty of integration:

You don’t have to keep trying to BE something because you finally have access to the full range of what you already ARE.

The goal isn’t to spend your life balancing on a seesaw but to get off it, stand firmly in your REALNESS, and move with whatever life requires.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start growing real and bringing more balance and flow into your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take steps towards integration.

The Responsibility Trap: The Trap of Taking Responsibility for Other People’s Emotions

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The Responsibility Trap: The Trap of Taking Responsibility for Other People’s Emotions

If You Think You’re Responsible for Other People’s Emotions then You’re Gonna Have a ‘Bad’ Time

One of the things that can hold us back in life more than many others is an unstated assumption that many of us carry around without ever really questioning it:

That w’ere somehow responsible for other people’s emotional ‘stuff‘.

We might not believe this at the level of the conscious mind but when we start to examine our own behaviour it becomes pretty clear that we’re driven by this nevertheless:

  • We hold back on sharing our opinions because somebody might disagree with us (shock! horror!).

  • We avoid pursuing our real goals because somebody might ‘disapprove’.

  • We bend over backwards trying to make everybody happy all the time – even when doing so leaves us feeling exhausted, resentful, and completely disconnected from ourselves.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Why do we act in these insane ways?

Usually, because – somewhere along the line – we were conditioned to believe that upsetting somebody in any way whatsoever is practically a crime against humanity.

This is why if somebody feels uncomfortable because of something we’ve said or done then we assume we’ve done something ‘wrong’.

It’s why if somebody disapproves of our choices then we feel compelled to justify and explain ourselves (even though, as a fully functional adult human being, the only justification you need is “because I want to”).

It’s also why if somebody reacts emotionally to us simply being ourselves, we immediately start looking for ways to make things ‘right’ (which is really just code for “find a way to make all feelings and emotions be swept under the carpet again”).

The longer we carry on like this, the more we just end up increasing the odds of burning out because we’re managing everybody else’s emotional experience whilst neglecting our own.

The problem is that this isn’t just exhausting, though – it actually gets even worse because it keeps us trapped in an unreal version of ourselves (a.k.a. the ego), constantly performing, adjusting, and holding back to maintain the ‘approval’ of people who may not even care that much about us in the first place (and even if they do, we still don’t need their ‘approval’ to function and be real in the world).

In this article, we’ll explore where this pattern comes from, how it affects our lives, and how we can finally free ourselves from it.

At the end of the day, the bottom line is pretty simpe:

You’re responsible for how you treat people but you’re not responsible for doing their emotional work for them.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

When you take responsibility for other people’s emotions then you just end up making life unnecessarily difficult for yourself.

Where Do We Learn to Take Responsibility for Other People’s Emotions?

Like many of the patterns that tend to hold us back in adulthood, the tendency to take responsibility for other people’s emotional ‘stuff’ often begins in childhood.

There are several ways this can happen:

  • We might have grown up with a parent who was struggling with their own unresolved emotional ‘stuff‘.

For example, perhaps they carried a great deal of shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity) and hadn’t developed the awareness or capacity to deal with it in a real way.

As a result of this, whenever their children behaved in ways that challenged their expectations, expressed uncomfortable truths, or simply demonstrated the uninhibited realness that children naturally possess, then parent would overreact as a way of keeping their own ego in place and preventing their shadow self from becoming reintegrated.

Common examples of this in action are when a child expressed anger, disagrees with a parent, asks an inconvenient question, or simply wants something the parent doesn’t want to provide and so – instead of responding with understanding – the parent becomes defensive, angry, withdrawn, or emotionally overwhelmed.

This essentially conditions the child to start believing something along the lines of “When I show up as myself then something bad happens” (and so then they stop showing up as themselves so that only ‘good’ things keep happening – in this case, ‘good’ meaning that the parent doesn’t freak out and overreact as much).

In short, children don’t have the psychological understanding to recognise that their parents might be reacting to unresolved issues of their own and instead tend to assume that the problem lies with them (and, in many cases, this actually ends up calling lifelong problems).

  • 2. We might have been controlled through guilt, threats, or emotional manipulation.

Sometimes, a parent may have consciously attempted to make us feel terrible for wanting independence, expressing disagreement, or behaving in ways they didn’t like:

Maybe they suggested we were ungrateful, selfish, or difficult, or – in some of the more extreme cases I’ve spoken to people about – they might have threatened to send us away (to boarding school or whatever) or withdraw their affection if we didn’t behave as they needed us to behave (or, more accurately, as their ego needed us to behave).

Whatever it may have been, the message received was clear:

Our acceptance depended on our ability to manage their reactions and so we’d better pay extra special attention to how they’re feeling and then adapt ourselves accordingly.

  • We might have become a substitute for a parent’s unmet emotional needs.

For example, a parent struggling in their relationship with their partner might end up turning to their child for emotional support by sharing problems the child isn’t equipped to process or expecting them to provide the understanding and comfort that should come from actual adult relationships.

What this means is that the child effectively becomes responsible for carrying emotional weight that was never theirs to carry in the first place (or even that they can carry).

There are other possibilities but these examples all illustrate the underlying pattern which is that:

The child learns that being loved, accepted, or treated well depends on managing somebody else’s emotional state.

They learn to perform to keep the piece, anticipate to deal with whatever might be about to arise next, and to suppress whatever might cause a problem even if it’s totally healthy, natural, and REAL.

Perhaps most importantly:

They learn to confuse being a ‘good‘ person with keeping other people happy.

This lesson usually ends up being ‘bad’ news because what begins as an adaptation to childhood circumstances eventually becomes a blueprint for adult life as a whole:

  • We grow up physically but we continue relating to the world through the same conditioned assumptions we picked up as kids.

  • We still behave as though somebody else’s disappointment means we’ve done something ‘wrong’ – even when we’re perfectly entitled to make our own choices and to do whatever we need to do (as long as it’s real).

  • We’re no longer the child who depends on a parent for survival but we still respond as though our emotional safety depends on keeping everyone around us ‘happy‘.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

In short, the past might ‘officially’ be over but it’s still dictating the present and holding us back from ourselves and our real lives.

The Symptoms of Taking Responsibility for Other People’s Emotions

Once this pattern becomes established then it can and does influence almost every area of our lives:

For example:

  • We might find ourselves constantly trying to curate situations so that everybody is ‘happy’ all the time (even though this just ends up draining our energy).

  • We become the unofficial emotional management department for our friends, families, partners, and colleagues (which again can be totally draining and disempowers others to deal with their own ‘stuff’ like adults).

  • If two people disagree then we feel compelled to mediate.

  • If somebody seems quiet then we wonder whether we’ve done something ‘wrong’ and start to think of strategies to make everything okay again.

  • If somebody is disappointed then we immediately look for ways to ‘fix’ it (even though it’s not our job to do so in most cases).

  • We’re forever trying to keep the emotional weather ‘sunny’ despite having absolutely no control over the weather in the first place.

  • We might also hold back our real thoughts, feelings, and opinions because we don’t want to rock the boat.

  • We agree when we disagree, laugh when we don’t find something funny, and pretend to be comfortable when something makes us deeply uncomfortable.

Over time, we become so accustomed to editing ourselves that we struggle to know what we actually think or feel or even who we actually are any more:

We might even become social chameleons, adopting different personalities depending on which people we’re around and so becoming one person with our friends, another with our family, and somebody else entirely at work.

Of course, adaptability isn’t inherently a problem because we all adjust our behaviour to suit different circumstances but the problem arises when we abandon the actual truth because we’re terrified of somebody else’s reaction.

Instead of expressing ourselves in a REAL way, we become whatever we think other people need us to be.

This can also prevent us from pursuing our purpose and so we take ourselves away from the real path that we actually want to be walking when we’re being authentic – perhaps we want to change careers, start a business, create something meaningful, or make a major life decision, for example, but before we take action, we start imagining all the people who might disapprove and so we just end up being ‘stuck’.

What will our parents think?

Will our friends understand?

Will somebody feel abandoned if we change?

Will people judge us?

Before we’ve even started to make a move, we’re already negotiating with imaginary objections and losing and so we just end up playing everything safe – not because our dreams aren’t important but because we’ve unconsciously decided that other people’s emotional comfort matters more than our own lives.

Then there’s the guilt which causes us to do all kind of unreal things:

We feel guilty setting boundaries, saying “No”, prioritising our own real needs, or simply doing something for ourselves.

In the most severe cases, we might remain in one-sided relationships because asking for more feels ‘selfish’ and so, eventually, we become resentful because we’re constantly giving whilst receiving very little in return.

Unfortunately, the existence of this resentment doesn’t necessarily make us recognise the underlying problem and so often we simply conclude that we’re surrounded by selfish people who don’t appreciate everything we do for them.

What we fail to recognise is something very important:

We’ve been participating in the arrangement by repeatedly abandoning ourselves to maintain it.

This isn’t to say that other people are never unreasonable or exploitative – of course, they can be but when we habitually take responsibility for their emotional states then we make it much harder to recognise where our responsibility ends and theirs begins.

The result of living out the “responsibility trap” is a life of constant vigilance, suppressed needs, and increasing disconnection from ourselves which, ultimately, leads to us being trapped in the Void (that empty, unreal place where we’re so busy trying to be acceptable to everybody else that we lose touch with the person we’re actually here to be).

All of this just because we’ve been taught that somebody experiencing an uncomfortable emotion is somehow an emergency….

The Truth About Other People’s Emotions

Naturally all of this raises the question about how we begin to move beyond this pattern of taking responsibility for other people’s emotional ‘stuff’ when it’s not ours.

We can make a start by embracing a simple but potentially life-changing truth:

We are responsible for feeling and dealing with our own emotions. Other people are responsible for feeling and dealing with theirs.

Notice the word “feeling” because this isn’t about pretending that our behaviour doesn’t have consequences or claiming that we can do whatever we want without considering other people:

When all is said and done, we have a responsibility to treat people with respect, communicate honestly, honour our commitments, and avoid deliberately causing unnecessary suffering which means that – if we behave cruelly, manipulate somebody, break an agreement, or knowingly violate a boundary, then we can’t simply shrug our shoulders and declare that their reaction is their problem.

Our actions matter more than pretty much anything else (except for the intention behind those actions) and so we should always be be willing to acknowledge the impact of our behaviour, apologise when appropriate, and make amends when we’ve genuinely done something wrong.

Having said that, though, there’s a really crucial distinction between taking responsibility for our behaviour and taking responsibility for another person’s entire emotional experience.

Here are some simple facts of the matter:

  • We can behave respectfully and still upset somebody.

  • We can tell the truth and still disappoint people.

  • We can establish a healthy boundary and still make somebody angry.

  • We can pursue our dreams and still trigger somebody else’s insecurities.

  • We can love somebody deeply and still make choices they don’t agree with.

These things aren’t necessarily signs that we’ve done anything ‘wrong’ – in fact, they’re often simply part of being human and living a human life here on Planet Earth.

We don’t control what other people feel, think, and desire and we can’t guarantee that they’ll interpret our behaviour in the way we intended.

Two people can experience the same situation and have completely different emotional reactions because they’re bringing different histories, expectations, beliefs, and unresolved issues to it and have different ‘juice’ in their emotional reservoir that comes out when they get ‘squeezed’ (metaphorically speaking – the juice is their own unresolved emotional ‘stuff).

One person might see our independence as inspiring, for example, whereas another might experience it as threatening.

One person might appreciate your honesty and another might feel attacked by it.

The ‘juice’ that comes out when we get ‘squeezed’ shows what’s already going on inside us – that’s all.

This all points to the fact that if somebody feels something uncomfortable because of something that we’ve done then it doesn’t automatically mean we’ve done something inappropriate:

Sometimes, our behaviour really is the problem, and we need to take responsibility for it but – at other times – our behaviour has simply touched something unresolved within another person.

All we can really do is keep developing enough awareness to be able to distinguish between these possibilities rather than automatically assuming that we’re at fault.

This is where understanding projection becomes important:

When people project their unresolved emotional stuff onto others, they interpret the world through the lens of their own internal struggles which is why their reactions may tell us something about their history, fears, expectations, or insecurities, rather than simply reflecting what’s happening in the present.

For example:

Somebody who believes that being a ‘good’ person means always putting others first might feel offended when we establish a boundary and so they’ll interpret our decision to say “No” as selfishness because – within their own worldview – prioritising personal needs is something to feel guilty about.

Their reaction may be the only one available to them because of what’s in their emotional reservoir (unresolved guilt, in this hypothetical example) but that doesn’t make their interpretation objectively true.

On the other side of the coin, we can also project our own unresolved guilt onto them and so we imagine that they’ll be devastated, offended, or unable to cope because we feel uncomfortable with the possibility of disappointing them because we assume they need protecting from an emotional experience that we ourselves have been taught to fear (usually in childhood like we discussed at the beginning of this article).

This kind of projection is why we intervene, justify and explain ourselves excessively, abandon our plans, or change our behaviour to prevent an emotional reaction that probably would never have been as significant as we imagined.

The final irony is that we can end up creating far more unnecessary problems by trying to prevent discomfort than we would by allowing people to experience and process their feelings naturally and by themselves.

Why Taking Responsibility for Other People’s Emotions Is Disempowering

There’s another important point here that can help you to reframe and then reclaim yourself:

Taking responsibility for other people’s emotions isn’t necessarily the generous, virtuous, and selfless act we imagine it to be – in fact, it can actually be pretty egotistical.

This doesn’t mean that people who struggle with people-pleasing (which is really just a symptom of underlying shame and/or guilt) are arrogant or deliberately selfish but consider what’s happening beneath the surface:

When we assume that somebody else can’t handle their own emotional discomfort then we’re effectively treating them as though they’re incapable of doing their own inner emotional work.

This means that we end up appointing ourselves as the manager of their internal world and get to somehow decide which feelings they’re allowed to experience and which ones must be prevented at all costs.

We might tell ourselves we’re doing this because we ‘care’ about them and, sometimes, we genuinely are motivated by compassion but compassion becomes entangled with control when we believe we’re responsible for preventing another adult from experiencing any discomfort.

In fact:

By trying to ‘rescue’ people from their own emotions then we can inadvertently disempower them from learning how to deal with those emotions themselves.

Think about it for a second:

  • If somebody is disappointed because we can’t attend an event then they have an opportunity to feel that disappointment, process it, and move on.

  • If somebody disagrees with our choices then they have an opportunity to confront that disagreement and decide how they want to respond and make their own choices about things.

  • If somebody feels uncomfortable because we’re changing then they have an opportunity to examine their expectations and motives so they can adapt to the new circumstances.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

All of these kinds of things are just ordinary parts of adult life and even though we don’t need to make the experience harder for them neither do we need to remove every uncomfortable feeling from their path (which may actually just be a projection of our own perceived discomfort anyway).

The truth about being a real human being is that we’re all capable of experiencing emotional discomfort – in fact, developing the capacity to experience it without immediately running away from it is an important part of becoming more psychologically resilient and REAL overall so we can deal with life and get our needs met.

When we take responsibility for other people’s emotions, it’s often because we’re struggling to accept this truth in ourselves:

  • We don’t want to feel guilty so we try to prevent anyone from becoming disappointed in us.

  • We don’t want to feel rejected so we work tirelessly to remain acceptable.

  • We don’t want to experience conflict so we suppress whatever might provoke it.

In other words, we project our own emotional limitations onto other people and then try to manage their lives accordingly.

The way out is to recognise that we can allow other people to have their feelings without making those feelings our responsibility to ‘fix’:

This means that we can care without controlling, we can support without rescuing, we can listen without absorbing and merging with another person, and we can love people without abandoning ourselves to keep them comfortable.

This is how we begin to free ourselves and the people around us to be REAL.

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

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

Regulate, Integrate, Accelerate

If you’ve spent years taking responsibility for other people’s emotional states then understanding these ideas intellectually probably isn’t going to be enough to help you flip the script.

For example, you might know perfectly well that you’re entitled to say “No” and still feel a surge of guilt when you do or you might understand that somebody else’s disappointment isn’t necessarily your fault and still feel compelled to make things ‘right’.

This is because these reactions often operate below the level of conscious reasoning and are basically just conditioned responses that developed to help us navigate earlier circumstances and to keep the ego you created because of whatever you went through in place.

To move beyond this old conditioning, we need to work with the pattern and replace it with something more real rather than just telling ourselves to “stop doing it”.

A really useful and powerful framework for this is Regulate, Integrate, Accelerate.

Regulate: Stop Treating Emotional Discomfort as a Literal Threat

The first step is almost always in learning to regulate your nervous systems so that you no longer interpret every sign of somebody else’s discomfort as a threat to your safety, moral worth, or sense of belonging.

For example, when somebody seems annoyed with you then you might might instinctively feel anxious, tense, or compelled to repair the situation immediately

Instead of reacting automatically, though, you can actually train yourself to pause and and allow yourself to experience the discomfort so you can make a conscious CHOICE about how you show up instead of responding automatically (and then getting the same results you’ve always got).

The process for this is pretty simple but you’ll need to practise it consistently for a while until you start noticing a change (which you wil):

  • Take a few slower breaths through your nose.

  • Notice the sensations in your body as literally just sensations (no stories attached to them – just the physiological sensation).

  • Feel a sense of safety and presence in your body as you just allow whatever you’re feeling to just ‘be’ (instead of supressing it or expressing it in an unreal way which is what we normally tend to do when we’re in ‘react’ mode).

  • Give yourself time to recognise what’s happening before deciding what to do.

  • You might remind yourself something like “Somebody is upset but that doesn’t automatically mean I’m in danger or that I’ve done something wrong.”

The aim isn’t to eliminate discomfort but to develop the capacity to experience it without allowing it to dictate your behaviour – read this article if you want to go deeper into this:

Emotional Release: Stop Carrying Yesterday Into Today

Remember, emotional discomfort isn’t the same thing as an actual threat and so we can train ourselves to feel anxious, guilty, or uncertain without needing to escape those feelings by abandoning ourselves.

The more we practise this then the less power these automatic reactions have over us (sit with yourself daily and just feel whatever you’re feeling so you can have more power over yourself when feelings flare up in real time).

Integrate: Own Your Own Emotional Stuff

The second step in this process is to work on integrating the unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ that keeps you trapped in the pattern.

In this case, toxic guilt is especially important:

‘Healthy’ guilt can alert us when we’ve violated our own values or actually harmed somebody but ‘toxic’ guilt – on the other hand – makes us feel that we’re doing something ‘wrong’ simply because we’re prioritising our own needs, expressing our truth, or disappointing somebody.

You need to learn to distinguish between the two if you want to free yourself from the effects of toxic guilt (the main one, of course, being that you feel responsible for other people’s emotional ‘stuff’ when you’re not).

Next time guilt shows up then ask yourself:

  • “Have I actually done something ‘wrong’ or am I simply uncomfortable because somebody might disapprove?“

  • “Have I violated a real responsibility or am I breaking an old rule that says I must keep everybody else ‘happy’?”

  • “Am I responding to what’s happening right now in the present or am I reacting to an old fear of rejection, punishment, or abandonment?“

  • “What would I do if I trusted myself to handle the consequences of being REAL?“

These questions can be helpful when it comes to separating genuine responsibility from conditioned guilt so that you can then start practising allowing the emotion to be present without automatically obeying it.

  • Sometimes, this means accepting that somebody might be disappointed in us (but “So what?“).

  • Sometimes, it means tolerating the uncertainty of not knowing what somebody thinks (but “So what?”).

  • Sometimes, it means recognising that you can’t make everyone understand or approve of your choices (but “So what?”).

Nor do you need to ‘punish’ yourself for experiencing guilt whilst you’re at it – instead, you can acknowledge it, understand where it comes from, and then choose your next move according to unconditioned reality rather than conditioned fear.

The bottom line is simple:

The more you integrate our own emotional ‘stuff’ then the less likely you are to project it onto other people.

Accelerate: Move Towards Your Real Life

Finally, it’s time to actually show up and stop allowing imagined emotional reactions to dictate the direction of your life as a whole.

What would you pursue if you no longer believed that disappointing somebody was the worst thing you could possibly do?

What would you say if you actually trusted yourself to handle the possibility of disagreement?

What boundaries would you establish?

What real conversations would you finally have?

What goals would you stop postponing?

These questions aren’t invitations to become reckless or inconsiderate (though, of course, you could choose that if you really wanted) – instead, they’re invitations to recognise where fear has been making decisions on behalf of your REALNESS.

Start with something small and practical that can move you towards realness instead of unreality:

Say “No” to a request you genuinely don’t want to accept, express an honest opinion without wrapping it in endless apologies and justifications, or make a decision that reflects your values (even if somebody might ‘disagree’ with it).

Whatever you choose then be sure to notice what happens after you’ve done it:

  • You might feel guilty.

  • Somebody might be disappointed.

  • The world might not respond with universal applause.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Allow all of these types of things to be true without automatically concluding that you’ve made a mistake or that you have anything to be responsible for or feel ‘guilty’ about.

Obviously, if you’ve genuinely behaved badly then take responsibility and make amends but if you’ve acted integrity and just done something real that’s part of your personal journey into deeper wholeness then practise letting other people have their reactions without allowing them to shake you from yourself.

Every time you do this, you strengthen your ability to live according to what’s real rather than what you’ve been conditioned to fear – gradually, you begin to reclaim the energy that was previously spent managing everybody else’s emotional ‘stuff’.

Finally, you can invest energy that was once being wasted on something unreal into something real like your relationships, your creativity, your purpose, and the life you’re actually here to live.

Taking responsibility for other people’s emotions when you don't need to is a one-way ticket to prison (not literally but metaphorically!).

The Final Word: You Can Care Without Carrying

Ultimately, overcoming the tendency to take responsibility for other people’s emotions is about learning to recognise where your responsibility ends and somebody else’s begins:

You’re responsible for how you treat people, for being truthful, respecting boundaries, acknowledging your mistakes, and making amends when you’ve caused harm but you’re NOT responsible for ensuring that everyone approves of you, agrees with you, or feels comfortable with every decision that you make in life. You’re also NOT responsible for protecting other adults from the ordinary emotional discomfort that comes with living in the real world.

When we confuse where our responsibility belongs then we end up sacrificing our lives to manage reactions that were never ours to control in the first place, disconnect from the truth, suppress our needs, abandon our dreams, and gradually lose touch with ourselves and remain stuck in the Void.

The way back home is to recognise that we can be kind without being compliant, compassionate without being controlling, and loving without making ourselves responsible for everybody else’s feelings.

Realness doesn’t mean deliberately upsetting people or disregarding their needs – it just means coming from a place of wholeness over fragmentation, responding to reality rather than fear, and allowing ourselves and others the freedom to experience life as it actually is.

When we’re grounded in wholeness like this (and the endless journey into a deeper experience of this) then we don’t need to manipulate, punish, or deliberately hurt anybody to feel powerful because we can be honest without being cruel and establish boundaries without treating other people as ‘enemies’.

We can also recognise that other people’s reactions belong to them – just as our reactions belong to us.

This brings us to one of the great paradoxes of any transformational journey in life:

When we stop taking responsibility for everybody else’s emotional world then we become much more capable of showing up for people in a real way.

We no longer need to manage them, rescue them, or constantly seek their approval – instead, we can meet them as they are whilst allowing ourselves to be who we are to embrace the ultimate truth that “It is what it is and I am what I am“.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re sick of carrying other people’s ‘stuff’ and you’re ready to put it down and grow real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get back on track.

How to Find Real Peace in Life (Without Any BS)

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How to Find Real Peace in Life (Without Any BS)

Finding Peace by Working With Life Instead of Against It

One thing that pops up a lot when I’m talking to people in coaching sessions is that they’re seeking a sense of peace in life:

When I dig a little deeper and ask them exactly what this means to them, it’s almost always the same thing which is basically that they want to reduce their stress, stop caring about things they know don’t really matter but can’t stop caring about, and feel like they can handle whatever happens without losing their minds so they can build flow with life instead of feeling frustrated by it all the time.

In other words, they want to feel like they’re actually living a REAL life rather than constantly fighting their way through existence.

Really, who can blame them?

Life can be a bit of a mission sometimes (to put it lightly):

There are bills to pay, relationships to navigate, responsibilities to honour, difficult decisions to make, and all manner of unexpected tosh and nonsense that can turn an otherwise pleasant Tuesday into an absolute horrorshow.

As the old saying goes, “life is one darned thing after another” and that’s only if it keeps coming (we are all going to be DEAD one day, after all).

The simple truth about life is that “it is what it is” and “we are what we are” and so there are never going to be any magic bullets or panaceas that will make all of this magically disappear:

What this means is that there’ll always be something to deal with, accept, or contend with and – even if you manage to get everything you’ve ever wanted – you’ll eventually have to deal with the reality of having it.

(For example, you finally got the new relationship but now you have somebody else’s dirty dishes and laundry in your house).

Despite all of this, though, there are absolutely positively indubitably things that we can do do to experience more peace, more of the time and it all begins with a simple change of perspective.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You find peace when you accept reality and work with it instead of against it.

What Are You Making Your Life Other Than Your Life?

Here’s a coaching question that can be surprisingly powerful when it comes to understanding why you might lack peace:

“What are you making your life other than your life?“

This might sound a little cryptic at first but bear with me and you’ll see exactly what I mean:

The basic idea to understand first and foremost is that the only ULTIMATE thing in life is our relationship with life itself.

From the perspective of Realness, this means that we’re constantly evolving towards deeper wholeness, learning to accept more of ourselves, integrating the parts we’ve rejected, and taking the real action necessary to keep this process moving.

As we become more whole, we become more integrated which means that we stop fighting ourselves, release the emotional baggage we’ve been dragging around since the dawn of time, and become increasingly capable of responding to reality as it actually is.

This is an ongoing process that continues until the day we die and so there’s no ‘final destination’ where you receive a certificate confirming that you’ve officially become a complete human being and can now spend the rest of eternity lounging about in a hammock or anything like that:

There’s always more to discover, more to accept, and more opportunities to grow – that’s just how it goes because we can always go deeper.

The important thing to remember is that when we make this process of going deeper into life and wholeness our ultimate priority above all others then life tends to take on a different quality that brings us increased purpose, meaning, and flow.

This is simply because – rather than trying to force life to ‘conform’ to some image we’ve created in our heads we’re actually learning to participate in it in alignment with the truth.

This is ‘good’ news because – as I’ve said a bunch of times on this site now – all any of us really need to do is:

  1. Uncover the truth.

  2. Live the truth.

And, really, this is where peace begins because:

We learn to trust ourselves to do what needs to be done and trust life to do the rest.

Or, to put it another way:

Do your best (self-trust) and let go of the rest (life-trust).

(See my book ‘Trust‘ if you want to go much deeper into this).

This doesn’t mean becoming passive, giving up on your ambitions, or sitting cross-legged in your living room waiting for the universe to deliver the winning lottery ticket that will finally solve all your problems – it means recognising the difference between what you can influence and what you can’t, taking responsibility for your side of that equation, and allowing reality to be reality.

In short, you do what you can, learn from whatever happens, adapt when and as necessary, and stop wasting your life and energy trying to control the uncontrollable bits that were never yours to control in the first place.

It’s simple (not always easy) and points us towards something important which peace isn’t something we have to manufacture:

Peace is something that becomes readily available when we stop working against ourselves and life and allow ourselves to receive what’s always being offered to us: reality.

Why We Lose Our Peace in the First Place

This way of being in ourselves and life is our natural state but we lose touch with it because of mental and emotional blocks:

We’re naturally driven towards greater wholeness, integration, and connection with life but the problem is that we pick up shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity) along the way which causes us to become fragmented and split from our realness which leads to us to misperceiving ourselves, the world, and reality itself.

This creates a number of issues that keep us from our real lives:

  • Instead of feeling safe enough to be ourselves, we learn to hide.

  • Instead of accepting reality, we try to control it.

  • Instead of trusting ourselves, we become dependent on external circumstances to tell us whether we’re good enough, safe enough, or worthy of being here.

  • Instead of trusting life we fear the unknown and hold back and hesitate on doing what we know deep down needs to be done.

This all comes down to the ego which is the character we play in the Void we opened up by becoming disconnected from the truth:

In the context of Realness, the ego is the false identity that we construct to protect ourselves from the aspects of reality we’ve learned to fear or reject (including the reality of ourselves which the ego tries to force into the shadows).

For example:

  • We hide our anger because we’ve been taught that anger makes us ‘unlovable’.

  • We hide our vulnerability because we believe we must always be ‘strong’.

  • We suppress our ambitions because we’re afraid of being judged.

  • We hide our need for connection because we’ve decided that needing anybody makes us ‘weak’.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

The possibilities are endless but the end result is always the same: fragmentation instead of wholeness.

In other words, we’re no longer living in alignment with the truth of who we are and have chosen to try and maintain an image of who we think we need to be.

Maintaining an unreal image in this way takes energy – A LOT of energy!

You have to monitor yourself constantly, manage other people’s perceptions, suppress uncomfortable feelings so you don’t face that underlying ‘stuff’ that birthed the ego in the first place, defend your unreal decisions and choices, and keep the whole elaborate construction from falling apart.

It’s a bit like running a twenty-four-hour security operation for a building that doesn’t even exist in the first place – and then people wonder why they lack peace?!

When we’re fragmented and disconnected from ourselves and life, we’re living in what I called the Void earlier on which is a state of disconnection from truth that leaves us feeling incomplete, dissatisfied, or somehow separate from the life we’re actually living.

To make matters worse, we usually fall into the trap of mistaking the Void for the human condition itself and so we assume that feeling vaguely empty, anxious, dissatisfied, or restless is simply what being human ‘means’ and there’s just nothing we can do about it.

That’s not true, though:

These feelings can and certainly are a ‘part’ of being human, of course, but the chronic disconnection that keeps us searching for something to make us feel whole isn’t an inevitable prison sentence we have to serve.

In fact, we can do something about it.

Unfortunately, we usually try to solve the problem in precisely the wrong way…

How We Try to Fill the Void

When we’re disconnected from the truth about ourselves and life, we naturally look for something to fill the gap that opens up which means that we look for substitutes for the truth (because we don’t realise that disconnection from the truth is the core problem).

What’s interesting about this is that these ‘substitutes’ don’t necessarily have to be ‘bad’ things – in fact, they’re often things that are genuinely ‘good’.

For some people, the substitute is WORK:

They become so consumed with building a business, climbing the career ladder, or proving themselves professionally that everything else becomes secondary and so their achievements become the source of their identity and every setback feels like a threat to their very existence itself.

For others, it’s RELATIONSHIPS:

They make finding a partner, keeping a partner, or being loved by a particular person the ultimate measure of whether their lives are worthwhile or not and so their peace depends on whether somebody else is behaving exactly as their ego needs them to behave.

For some people, it’s ART whereas others become obsessed with fitness, money, spirituality, personal development, or collecting Lego or something…

The point is that it can literally be anything and – to be clear – none of these things are inherently ‘wrong’ (indeed, like we said, they’re often ‘good’ but they’re being treated as the ULTIMATE).

  • Work can be meaningful.

  • Relationships can be beautiful.

  • Art can be transformative.

  • Lego can bring joy to the people that collect it.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

The problems always begin when we stop treating these fragmented things as the whole of our lives and start treating them as our lives themselves.

When we treat a fragment as the whole then we end up putting it on a pedestal and make it the ultimate source of our identity, meaning, security, or worth:

In doing so, we take ourselves out of the natural process of becoming more whole and end up becoming dependent on something outside of that natural process to give us a sense of completeness that it can never permanently provide.

As you might’ve suspected, the cost of this is always the same:

OUR PEACE.

The reason for this is pretty simple:

Anything we make ultimate that isn’t life itself eventually comes into conflict with reality.

Your business might fail, your relationship might change form, your artistic work might receive criticism, and your carefully organised collection of plastic bricks might be knocked off the shelf by a visiting child with absolutely no respect for the architectural integrity of your Millennium Falcon.

Life happens and that’s perhaps all we really know for sure and – if you’ve made any of these things the foundation of your existence -then life ‘happening’ becomes a threat to your entire sense of self:

  • You can’t relax because there’s always something to protect or defend.

  • You can’t enjoy what you have because you’re terrified of losing it.

  • You can’t accept what happens because you’ve decided that things must happen a particular way for you to be ok.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

You’ve given something that can never offer you complete security the responsibility of making you feel secure in ULTIMATE ways which is just a job description that reality never agreed to and so it’s never gonna work.

(Even though REAL ALWAYS WORKS)

How to Recognise What’s Stealing Your Peace

If you feel like you’re lacking peace right now then a really good starting point is to take a moment to consider what happens when you’re alone with your thoughts.

Here are a few questions to get your noggin-a-joggin’ in that direction:

  • What do you tend to think about when there’s nothing to distract you?

  • What occupies your mind when you’re staring at the ceiling at night?

  • What situations do you keep replaying?

  • What are you worrying about losing?

  • What do you believe absolutely has to happen before you can finally allow yourself to relax?

Be absolutely honest with yourself as you reflect on all of this even if it’s painful in the short-term (that ‘pain’ is just emotional discomfort – which we’re all built to handle – and not literal physical danger):

You might discover that you’re preoccupied with getting somebody to love you, proving somebody ‘wrong’, achieving a particular level of ‘success‘, or finally becoming the person you think you ‘should’ have been years ago.

Ultimately, you might find yourself worrying about things that you already know – intellectually, at least – aren’t worth the energy you’re giving them and so the question will really turn to why you’re giving them that energy in the first place.

Often, the answer is that you’ve made something other than your relationship with life itself the ultimate thing – in other words, you’re treating a FRAGMENT as the WHOLE.

If so, this is just a source of unnecessary stress in your life because reality refuses to organise itself around whatever fragments you’re treating as the ‘ULTIMATE’ – no matter how much you attempt to resist the actual truth about things.

Notice that I said unnecessary stress and not all stress:

This is because some stress is just part of life that is necessary and inescapable (and so must be used as fuel for our growth) because some situations are genuinely difficult, life really does hurt sometimes, and there will often be genuine and practical problems that require your full attention.

Realness isn’t about pretending that everything is wonderful or convincing yourself that you should be happy when you’re struggling – it’s about recognising that there’s a difference between the difficulty of a situation and the additional suffering we create by insisting that reality must be different to whatever it is in its ‘is-ness’ before we can engage with it.

For example:

  • You can be disappointed without deciding that your life is ruined completely.

  • You can experience uncertainty without treating it as proof that you’re unsafe all the time.

  • You can lose something you love without losing your entire sense of who you are.

  • Most importantly, you can care deeply about something without making your entire existence dependent on it.

All of this is what becomes possible when you stop putting fragments on pedestals and tap into the whole of your life first and foremost.

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

If you’re ready to go deeper into growing real and finding peace then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

How to Find Real Peace: Awareness, Acceptance, Action

So, how do we actually make use of all this ‘stuff’ so we can actually acquire a deeper sense of peace in life?

Well, in my coaching containers, I use a three-part process that helps people reconnect with themselves and life:

Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego).

Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow).

Action (Trust Yourself and Life).

(Really, this process is never linear and always more of a spiral because you can always go deeper into each stage but the general pathway follows these steps overall).

Let’s break down what we’ve said in this article using this framework so you can start moving forward and getting real about things.

1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step is always to become Aware of the stories, beliefs, and assumptions that are shaping your relationship with yourself and your experience of life as a whole.

One of the best starting points when it comes to uncovering what’s keeping you from more peace is by asking yourself the question we’ve been exploring:

“What am I making my life other than my life?“

Then it’s time to dig a little deeper:

  • What do you believe you need to achieve, acquire, prove, or experience before you can finally feel at peace?

  • What are you afraid would happen if you stopped making this thing so important?

  • What does it supposedly say about you if you fail, lose it, or don’t get what you want?

For example:

-You might discover that your obsession with ‘success’ is really about trying to prove you’re ‘good’ enough because of underlying shame (which is just the internalised assumption that “I’m not good enough as I am”).

-Perhaps your need to control a relationship comes from a fear of abandonment.

-Maybe your endless self-improvement projects are driven by the belief that who you are right now isn’t acceptable in some way (again, because of underlying shame).

These are the kinds of insights worth exploring but the goal is never to judge yourself for having these patterns – it’s just to see them clearly enough that you can stop mistaking them for the truth.

You don’t have to stop caring about your work, relationships, or ambitions – you simply need to stop asking them to make you whole (which is something they can never do).

2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

Once you become aware of what’s happening, the next step is to cultivate Acceptance of the ‘parts’ of yourself you’ve been trying to avoid or suppress and this is where shadow integration comes in.

Like we said, the shadow contains the aspects of ourselves that we’ve rejected, suppressed, or learned to hide because we believe they’re unacceptable.

Here are some common examples:

  • Perhaps you have anger you’ve never allowed yourself to express honestly (even though anger is a powerful emotion that protects our dignity and boundaries).

  • Perhaps you feel envy towards people who have what you want but you’re ashamed to admit it.

  • Perhaps you’re lonely, frightened, or uncertain, and you’ve spent years pretending to be completely self-sufficient.

  • Perhaps it’s your joy, love, or sense of abundance that’s been sent into exile because they got you in ‘trouble’ somewhere along the line.

Whatever it is – both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ qualities that are nevertheless REAL – the more you fight these experiences, the more energy you spend maintaining your fragmented identity and destroying your own peace.

Acceptance means being willing to acknowledge what’s actually happening inside you without automatically condemning yourself for it so that you can actually feel your feelings and not become emotionally and mentally stagnant.

Again, some examples:

  • You can recognise jealousy without becoming a jealous person in every situation.

  • You can acknowledge anger without acting destructively.

  • You can admit that you’re frightened without making fear the final boss of your life.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Ultimately, you can begin to recognise that some of the things you’ve been desperately trying to obtain were never going to resolve the underlying disconnection that led to you living your life in the Void in the first place.

The more of yourself you can bring into Awareness and Acceptance, the less you need to rely on external things to compensate for what you’ve rejected internally:

In other words, you become more integrated and so you have less to hide, less to defend, and less to prove.

And that’s a pretty good starting point for peace.

3. Action: Trust Yourself and Life

Finally, you have to put what you’ve learned into practice by taking real Action (which is the highest form of expression):

Realness isn’t just about understanding yourself but about taking the actions necessary to live in greater alignment with the truth.

  • Sometimes, this means having a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding.

  • Sometimes, it means setting a boundary, admitting a mistake, changing direction, or accepting that something you’ve been chasing no longer makes sense for you.

  • Sometimes, it means continuing to work towards a goal while letting go of the belief that achieving it will finally make you worthy of being alive.

The important thing is to act on what you know to be true rather than allowing fear, shame, or the need for control to make your decisions for you.

This is how you develop self-trust because you learn that you can handle uncomfortable feelings, make difficult decisions, and respond to unexpected circumstances without needing to control every possible outcome in advance.

As you develop this self-trust (which is basically a ‘muscle’ you can train) then you can begin to trust life a little more, too:

You don’t need to know exactly how everything will turn out – you just need to know that you’ll keep responding to what happens as truthfully and effectively as you can.

Do your best and let go of the rest.

That doesn’t mean abandoning your responsibilities or expecting everything to work out in your favour but it does mean recognising that your responsibility is to participate in life without trying to control everything.

You’re NOT the centre of the universe (which is a peaceful thing to embrace):

You do your part.

Life does its part.

And you stop confusing the two.

Peace is found when you turn inwards and overcome the Void.

The Final Word: Peace Is What Happens When You Stop Fighting Life

Ultimately, finding peace isn’t about eliminating every uncomfortable feeling that pops up, escaping difficult responsibilities, or reaching some permanent state of bliss where nothing ever bothers you again.

Peace is about becoming more whole and learning to participate in life without constantly fighting yourself or reality.

This means that you can have peace overall whilst still experiencing still experience stress, grief, frustration, disappointment, and uncertainty.

These are part of being alive.

You don’t have to turn every difficult experience into a crisis of identity, though, or to make every outcome a verdict on your worth because you’ve put something on a pedestal that doesn’t belong there.

You don’t have to spend your entire life trying to fill a Void that ‘exists’, in large part, because you’ve become disconnected from the very thing you’re trying to find:

Indeed, the way out is to return to the truth about yourself and life which you can do by becoming Aware of the ego structures that keep you disconnected, by cultivating Acceptance and integrating the parts of yourself you’ve been hiding, and taking the real Action that allow you to trust yourself and life a little more deeply every day.

You’ll never reach a point where there’s nothing left to learn, but you can reach a point where you no longer need everything to be perfect before you allow yourself to live.

I guess all of this is to say that if you’re seeking more peace in your life then don’t immediately rush off to download another meditation app, book a retreat in Bali, or buy a £400 crystal ball that supposedly harmonises your nervous system with the frequency of the moon.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with meditation, retreats, or crystals and so if something helps you relax then enjoy it but don’t mistake the tool for the truth.

Instead, start with our question:

“What are you making your life other than your life?“

Whatever your answer is, try taking it off the pedestal and learn to let it be something you care about rather than something you need to be whole.

And get on with living.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to take your unreal life off of the pedestal and to start building something real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to build some real flow.

The Shadow of Love: How to Stop Hiding from Love and Start Growing Real

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The Shadow of Love: What Can Happen When You Disown Your Love For Yourself & Life

Love is one of the most natural and real things in the whole of the human experience which means that we all have the capacity to tap into it and to allow our lives to become richer, deeper, and more meaningful as we feel more connected to ourselves, other people, and to life itself.

Unfortunately, ‘love’ can also get us into trouble if we’re not careful – for example:

  • Perhaps you opened your heart to somebody who made you regret it.

  • Perhaps you were taught that showing affection was a sign of ‘weakness‘.

  • Maybe you discovered that being vulnerable left you exposed to ridicule, rejection, or disappointment.

  • Maybe you learned that the only way to receive love was to become useful, agreeable, or indispensable to somebody else.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Whatever might’ve happened, there are many encounters that we can have with the world that can leave us picking up and internalising a pretty unreal message:

“It’s not safe to be yourself when love is involved“.

What normally happens when we receive this kind of message is that – instead of accepting the capacity to love and learning to express it in a healthy way – is that we send it into exile in the Shadow Territory.

The problem with this kind of exile is that that love – just like anything else that’s REAL – doesn’t magically disappear simply because you refuse to acknowledge it…instead, it finds other ways to express itself which often create problems that seem to have very little to do with love at all.

These new problems are symptoms of the Shadow of Love: the ways we distort, suppress, and misdirect our capacity for love because we’ve lost touch with our ability to accept it within ourselves.

This is the fourth article in our series exploring the passive and active shadows of some of our most human qualities and – as we’ll see – reclaiming love is an essential part of tapping into your own realness and living a life that feels REAL.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Shadow of Love is about accepting yourself and your life so you can become yourself live your real life.

What Is the Shadow Self?

When people think about the shadow self, they often imagine a dark psychological basement filled with all the things they’d rather not admit about themselves because they’re ‘bad’ in some way – for example, anger, fear, hatred, jealousy, selfishness, and our more animalistic instincts.

These qualities can certainly end up in the shadow but the often forgotten fact of the matter is that the shadow isn’t exclusively made up of things we consider ‘bad’.

In fact:

Anything we disown about ourselves can end up in the shadow – including many of our most ‘positive’, beautiful, and even powerful qualities.

For example:

  • Your creativity might end up in the shadow because expressing yourself once attracted criticism.

  • Your confidence might be suppressed because you were taught that standing out in some way was ‘arrogant’ (or whatever).

  • Your natural playfulness might disappear because you learned that being serious was the only way to earn respect.

In relation to what we’re talking about in this article, your love might go into hiding because, at some point, expressing it didn’t feel safe and was perceived as a threat to your sense of belonging or acceptability by those around you.

This can happen in myriad different ways – for example, perhaps you were rejected after telling somebody how you felt, only received love and affection from your family if you met certain conditions (even though real love is unconditional), or you discovered that loving somebody only ever meant putting your own needs aside and then ended up becoming a people pleaser.

You might even have been mocked for being sensitive, caring, or emotionally open – even though these qualities often require a lot of strength (assuming you’re not identified with your emotions and lost in a victim mentality or whatever)!

Whatever the original experience, the end result is that you begin to associate love with danger and then – in order to protect yourself – your ego developed a simple strategy in order to help you survive the pain you’d been through:

Stop acknowledging the ‘part’ of you that loves.

When people stop acknowledging this ‘part’ of themselves then it tends to go in one of two ways:

  1. They become emotionally distant – insisting that they don’t need anybody.

  2. They become excessively attached to people, desperately trying to secure the love you don’t know how to access within themselves.

These two responses to inner pain and a separation from oneself (because they sent something very real into ‘exile’) appear to be opposites but they’re actually two expressions of the same underlying problem which is that they’ve disowned their love and the ego is trying to maintain the illusion that it isn’t there.

Unfortunately, REALNESS doesn’t work like this because whatever is real within you will continue to influence your life, whether you acknowledge it or not and so the question isn’t whether your love will express itself, but whether you’ll own it consciously or allow it to emerge through unconscious patterns.

This brings us to the two shadows of love:

1. The Passive Shadow of Love: Afraid to Open Your Heart

The Passive Shadow of Love develops when we suppress our capacity to love and become disconnected from our feelings:

Rather than risking vulnerability, we learn to keep people at a distance, intellectualise our emotions, avoid difficult conversations, and convince ourselves that relationships are more trouble than they’re worth (which, of course, in some cases, they are but not all relationships).

The passive shadow of love can also turn us into experts at appearing unaffected and totally unbothered by life:

For example, somebody expresses affection and we make a joke.

Somebody else asks how we’re feeling and we change the subject.

Somebody gets close enough to see beneath our carefully constructed persona and suddenly we need some space (so that we can “process”).

We might even pride ourselves on being independent, rational, and self-sufficient so that we don’t need to have any real contact with other human beings (even though in reality human beings aren’t independent but interdependent).

There’s nothing wrong with independence, rationality, or self-sufficiency, of course, but problems start to arise in our lives when we use these qualities as camouflage for our fear of being seen.

When we disown our capacity to love then emotional distance can become a substitute for emotional freedom.

  • We tell ourselves that we “don’t need anybody” but beneath the surface, we’re terrified of needing somebody and discovering that they don’t want us.

  • We convince ourselves that we “don’t care” but we spend an extraordinary amount of energy making sure nobody can tell that we actually do.

  • We avoid vulnerability because we don’t want to get hurt – forgetting that vulnerability is also what makes genuine intimacy possible in the first place.

It’s all just an extension of the mask that we try to trick ourselves into forgetting that we’re wearing…

The Void Behind Emotional Avoidance

When we don’t allow ourselves to actually feel our feelings then we don’t simply eliminate the possibility of emotional pain but we also reduce our capacity to experience connection, joy, intimacy, meaning, and even real purpose.

In fact, the less we allow ourselves to feel whatever is being felt, the less connected to ourselves we become because our feelings are part of (not all of) the information through which we understand our needs, values, boundaries, and desires.

What this means is that the more we suppress this information, the more inner friction we create, and then eventually that friction turns to frustration, and then misery (on a long enough timeline) as we put an unnecessary distance between ourselves and reality.

For example:

  • We might remain in relationships that no longer feel ‘right’ because we’re afraid to admit the truth.

  • We might struggle to identify what we actually want because we’ve spent years prioritising what seems ‘sensible’, ‘acceptable’, or ‘safe’ (and so we’re performing our way through life instead of being present).

  • We might even create unnecessary drama because unacknowledged feelings continue to influence our behaviour indirectly – for example, somebody who refuses to acknowledge their fear of intimacy might repeatedly choose unavailable partners and then when the relationships inevitably fail, they can tell themselves that nobody is capable of loving them properly (and so their apparent independence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy).

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Eventually, anybody who refuses to feel what they actually feel experience the Void which is the familiar sense of restlessness, the endless search for something ‘more’, or a vague sense disconnection from themselves, other people, and the truth of their own experience.

The irony of all this, of course, is that the person who suppresses love to avoid suffering can end up creating a life in which they suffer from the absence of the very thing they’re trying to avoid (and which is nevertheless already there because WHAT’S REAL IS ALWAYS REAL).

2. The Active Shadow of Love: Trying to Love Your Way Out of the Void

The Active Shadow of Love develops when our disowned capacity for love becomes exaggerated, misdirected, or compulsive and so – instead of withdrawing from relationships (like with passive shadow) – we throw ourselves into them.

When the active shadow is driving us like this then we find ourselves becoming excessively attached, constantly seeking reassurance, or obsessively focusing on somebody who seems to hold the key to our happiness (because we’re treating them as the ultimate thing in our lives).

In the worst cases, we might mutate into the kind of jealous person who always needs to know where their partner is, what they’re thinking, and whether they still feel the same way about us.

Alternatively, we can also become a ‘rescuer‘ and end up dedicating ourselves to ‘fixing’ other people’s problems, trying to take responsibility for their emotions (which is impossible), and helping them become the people we believe they could be (instead of supporting them to be whoever it is that they actually are).

In all of these cases, we might tell ourselves that we’re being loving and, sometimes, we genuinely are trying to help but beneath our apparent generosity, there is often a less comfortable motivation which is that we’re trying to use somebody else’s needs to escape our own disconnection from ourselves and our lives in the Void.

Perhaps in some unconscious way it all makes ‘sense’:

  • If we can make ourselves indispensable then perhaps nobody will leave us.

  • If we can ‘rescue’ somebody then perhaps we’ll finally feel ‘worthy’.

  • If we can get another person to love us enough then perhaps we’ll no longer have to confront the shame, emptiness, or uncertainty we carry within ourselves.

Whatever the case may be, ‘love’ has now become a strategy for managing our own unresolved feelings and – because such strategies are driven by shame and fear – we can gradually lapse into control freakery.

We might give advice nobody asked for, resent people who don’t follow it, feel betrayed when somebody we’ve helped fails to appreciate us in the way we expect, or become so invested in another person’s potential that we can no longer accept the reality of who they actually are.

None of these things are ‘love’ but the ego trying to negotiate a deal with reality so we can avoid facing ourselves and then returning home:

When Somebody Else Becomes the Source of Your Love

One particularly powerful expression of the active shadow is obsessive attachment:

This can happen when somebody experiences limerence which is an intense preoccupation with another person – often accompanied by idealisation, intrusive thoughts, and a powerful desire for reciprocation in order to be able to feel ‘whole’ or ‘complete’.

In these cases, the person experiencing it might feel as though they’ve encountered somebody extraordinary who has awakened a feeling in them that nobody else could ever inspire:

And, whilst the experience certainly can feel extraordinary, there’s an important distinction to make which is that:

The person who awakens your love didn’t create your capacity for it.

What usually happens when we feel the obsessive attachment of limerence is that another person activates feelings, desires, and possibilities that we’ve kept hidden from ourselves – they don’t actually ‘add’ anything to the equation but there’s something about them that ‘unlocks’ whatever we’ve been hiding from ourselves (because psychologically we let our emotional and mental barriers down in either their presence or as we imagine an idealised version of them).

In other words, their attention makes us feel alive, their affection helps us experience our own tenderness, and their apparent interest gives us permission to feel worthy, desirable, or hopeful but then we mistake the person who activated these feelings for the source of them.

This can make us believe that our emotional survival depends on keeping them close which is why we idealise them, overlook incompatibilities, and become attached to a fantasy about what they represent (which is really a fantasy about leaving the Void without simply returning to the truth about ourselves and life).

When they withdraw, we feel as though we’ve lost not only them but also the ‘part’ of ourselves that came alive in their presence – the truth, though, is that our capacity for love was never exclusively theirs to give us and even though they may have awakened it, it’s still up to us and us alone to own it.

Until we do, we might keep searching for another person to recreate the feeling, repeating the same patterns with different faces as the the Void remains and our attempts to fill it become increasingly exhausting.

3. The Real Expression of Love: Deep Connection Without Control

The Passive and Active Shadows of Love emerge from the same fundamental disconnection:

One response is to suppress our love so that nobody can hurt us whereas the other is to overexpress it so that somebody will make us feel safe, worthy, or complete.

Both approaches are attempts to manage the vulnerability of being human, both involve resisting reality, and both prevent us from experiencing love as something we can consciously own and express.

The real expression of love is different and it’s about finding a sense of balance:

Real love allows us to connect deeply with somebody or something while accepting that it is what it is and we are what we are.

What this means is pretty simple (but not always easy to actually live):

  • We can care about somebody without needing to control them.

  • We can be vulnerable without demanding that our vulnerability guarantees a particular outcome.

  • We can appreciate what somebody brings into our lives without believing that our happiness depends entirely on keeping them there.

  • We can love somebody and still recognise that the relationship isn’t ‘right’ for either of us and so we don’t try to force things.

  • We can feel disappointed when somebody leaves without concluding that we’re worthless.

  • We can help somebody without trying to take responsibility for their entire life.

  • We can allow ourselves to be ‘seen‘ without treating every possible rejection as the final verdict on our value.

None of this is about becoming detached, indifferent, or invulnerable – nor does it mean pretending that we don’t need other people because, at the end of the day, human beings are relational creatures and so we all need relationships and are affected by them.

Realness simply means that we stop making other people responsible for resolving the ‘parts’ of ourselves we’ve refused to accept ourselves.

When we actually OWN our real capacity for love then we can give ourselves more fully because we’re no longer asking the other person to complete us:

We don’t have to hide our feelings to protect our ego and we don’t have to exaggerate them to secure somebody else’s attention – instead, we can love freely and in the flow because we aren’t using love as a disguise for fear.

4. How to Reclaim Your Love and Start Growing REAL

Here are five practical steps to help you start balancing out the active and passive shadows of love so you can step into your realness even more:

Step 1: Notice Where You Disown Your Love

A good starting point is to train yourself to become aware of the situations in which you suppress, deny, or exaggerate your emotions:

Do you withdraw when somebody gets close to you?

Do you struggle to tell people that you care about them?

Do you find yourself obsessing over somebody whose attention feels uncertain?

Perhaps you habitually ‘rescue’ people, even when they’re capable of solving their own problems.

Maybe you give far more than you genuinely want to give and then become resentful when your efforts aren’t reciprocated.

Don’t judge yourself for whatever patterns you notice in yourself – simply become curious about them and allow yourself to see them without identifying with them (they are something you have, not something you are).

These self-coaching questions can help:

  • When do I find it difficult to acknowledge that I care?

  • When do I feel compelled to prove my love or to try and earn somebody else’s?

  • Where am I pretending not to need connection?

  • Where am I expecting another person to make me feel whole?

The aim isn’t to label yourself as avoidant, needy, or co-dependent but to recognise where your behaviour might be protecting you from feelings you haven’t yet learned to accept and actually feel.

Awareness is the first step towards reclaiming what’s been disowned and putting yourself back on the path to wholeness.

Step 2: Accept the Feelings You Were Taught to Hide

Once you’ve identified your patterns then it’s time to begin practising acceptance – for example:

  • If you feel affection then let yourself acknowledge it.

  • If you feel lonely then actually admit it.

  • If you’re frightened of rejection then allow yourself to recognise the fear without immediately building a strategy around it.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Acceptance isn’t the same as impulsive expression and so you don’t need to act on every feeling and you certainly don’t have to tell everybody everything you feel – you just need to allow your experience to exist without treating it as something else.

Try this simple exercise to see what I mean:

When a strong feeling arises, pause, and then say to yourself:

“This is what I’m feeling right now – I don’t need to deny it, justify it, or immediately do something about it.“

Then notice what happens in your body and mind when you just allow things to BE:

You’ll most likely discover that the feeling becomes easier to tolerate when you stop fighting it and you’ll also probably notice the stories your ego creates to protect you from it.

Practise allowing those stories to be there without automatically believing them because the more you accept your own experience, the less you need to organise your life around avoiding it which frees you up to do something REAL.

Step 3: Separate Love from the Need to Control

Another helpful step is to pay attention to what happens when somebody you care about behaves in a way you don’t like – for example:

  • Do you immediately try to change them?

  • Do you withdraw affection to punish them?

  • Do you become anxious and seek reassurance?

  • Do you start imagining how different everything would be if they would finally become the person your ego wants them to be?

These reactions might be understandable in a way but they also deserve a little closer examination so it’s worth asking yourself:

“Can I accept this person as they are whilst also being honest about what I need and what I’m willing to accept in my life?“

Remember, acceptance doesn’t mean approval, passivity, or abandoning your boundaries:

You can accept that somebody is unreliable and decide not to depend on them, you can accept that somebody doesn’t reciprocate your feelings and choose to move on, and you can accept that a relationship matters deeply to you while recognising that it isn’t healthy.

Real love doesn’t require you to surrender your own judgement – it just requires you to stop confusing your desire for a particular outcome with the truth of what is actually happening.

Step 4: Practise Vulnerability Without Demanding a Reward

If you’ve spent years suppressing your love, start expressing it in small, manageable ways.

Tell a friend that you appreciate them. Let somebody know when they’ve made a difference to your life. Have an honest conversation about something you’ve been avoiding.

If you tend towards the active shadow, practise expressing care without turning it into a transaction.

Offer help without assuming responsibility for the other person’s choices. Give affection without using it to secure reassurance. Allow people to make their own mistakes without automatically stepping in to rescue them.

The important thing is to stay within your Stretch Zone: the space where you’re challenging familiar patterns without overwhelming yourself.

You don’t need to transform your entire emotional life overnight.

You simply need to start behaving in ways that are more aligned with the truth of what you feel and what you value.

And remember: vulnerability doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the response you want.

That’s precisely why it matters.

You’re learning to express yourself because it’s real, not because you’ve found a clever way to control the outcome.

The Co-Regulation Codex workbook leaning against a stone

If you’re ready to stop hiding from love and start growing real with your partner, the Co-Regulation Codex for Couples gives you 30 days of shared practice to get honest and build intimacy together.

Step 5: Build a Relationship with Yourself That Doesn’t Depend on Somebody Else

The final step is to practise offering yourself the acceptance you’ve been seeking externally:

This doesn’t mean becoming so ‘self-sufficient’ that you no longer care about connection – just that you recognise that another person’s approval can never substitute for your willingness to accept yourself at the most foundational level.

Here’s what this might look like:

  • When you make a mistake then practise responding with honesty rather than self-contempt.

  • When you feel lonely then acknowledge the loneliness rather than immediately searching for somebody to distract you from it.

  • When you want something then allow yourself to want it without making its achievement a condition of your worth.

  • When you experience rejection then let yourself feel the disappointment without turning it into a story about your fundamental inadequacy.

This is vital because the more you accept yourself, the more freely you can participate in relationships without having to wear a mask:

You can want somebody without needing them to validate your existence, you can enjoy being loved without making it the only evidence that you’re lovable, and you can open your heart without handing somebody else the responsibility for keeping it open.

This is where love starts to become a genuine expression of realness rather than another strategy for escaping the Void.

When you truly face the Shadow of Love (or anything else) then you can deal with whatever comes your way instead of running from yourself.

The Final Word: Love Is Something You Own, Not Something You Have to Earn

The Shadow of Love reminds us that our greatest emotional struggles don’t always arise because we lack something – sometimes, they arise because we’ve disowned something we already have.

We suppress our love because we’re frightened of being hurt (Passive Shadow) and we become obsessed with finding it externally because we’ve forgotten how to accept it within ourselves (Active Shadow).

In both cases, we’re trying to escape the vulnerability of being REAL but love isn’t something you have to ‘earn’ by becoming indispensable, impressive, attractive, or endlessly useful to other people – nor is it something you have to suppress to prove that you’re strong enough to survive without it.

It’s just a capacity you already have and can learn to acknowledge, accept, and express with an even greater grounding in its truth.

As you reclaim it, you’ll probably discover that you still experience fear, disappointment, grief, and uncertainty because realness doesn’t exempt you from being human.

What changes, though, is your relationship with these experiences:

-You become less inclined to hide from your feelings and less compelled to make other people responsible for resolving them.

-You can connect more deeply because you’re no longer trying to control every possible outcome.

-You can give without keeping score, receive without suspicion, and let go without pretending that you never cared.

Above all, you can recognise that loving somebody and needing them to complete you are two very different things.

The more you own your love, the less you need to use other people to find it, and the less you need to use them, the more freely you can love them.

That’s the real expression of love.

So stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If it’s time to step out of the shadows and start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start moving towards balance and flow.

15 Non-Negotiables of Realness: A Practical Guide to Becoming Whole

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15 Non-Negotiables of Realness: A Practical Guide to Becoming Whole

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:

Realness is the freedom that comes from embracing the truth (even if it's hard at first).

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.

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:

  1. Uncover the truth.

  2. 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.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

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.

Realness comes from working with reality no matter what,

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,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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.

Talent is Overrated: Why Being ‘Good’ at Life Doesn’t Mean You’re Living a Real One

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Talent is Overrated: Why Being 'Good' at Life Doesn’t Mean You’re Living a Real One

Talent is ‘Good’ But It isn’t ‘Ultimate’ (Only Your Relationship With Life Itself Is).

There’s a funny and peculiar thing about being human which is that we can be incredibly ‘good’ at doing things whilst having absolutely no idea how to actually be ourselves.

Here’s what I mean:

We can be talented, successful, entertaining, intelligent, productive, creative, charming, generous, and seemingly everything else that makes a person impressive from the outside whilst also spending years developing our abilities, building our reputations, and becoming the sort of people others look up to…only to find that something still feels like it’s missing when we finally get a moment alone with ourselves.

We might even become so good at performing that we forget there’s a difference between the person we’ve learned to present to the world and the person we actually are underneath it all and this is why we need to distinguish between talent and performance on the one hand and REAL character on the other.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

  • Talent is what you can do.

  • Performance is how you show up and what you achieve.

  • Character is your capacity to accept reality and work with it rather than constantly trying to manipulate it into giving you the validation you think you need.

All three can be valuable but only one provides a foundation for becoming whole instead of fragmented and – if we confuse them – we can spend our entire lives getting better at being somebody whilst never quite learning how to be ourselves.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

We put talent on a pedestal because we're desperate - not because we're real.

Why We Get So Attached to Our Talents

Life is confusing and – to make matters worse – nobody gives us a detailed instruction manual explaining who we are, what we’re supposed to do, or how we’re meant to make sense of the strange experience of being alive.

This leads to a situation where pretty much all of us are searching for meaning and most of us are also looking for some kind of validation that we ‘matter’ and have a legitimate place in the world and one of the easiest ways to find this validation is through our talents and our ability to perform.

Maybe you don’t understand everything that’s happening in your life, perhaps you’re not entirely sure whether you’re on the ‘right’ path, whether your relationships are healthy, or whether the things you’re working towards will ever amount to anything meaningful, but if you’re the best guitar player in your friend group at least there’s something you can point to.

Maybe you can write better than anybody else you know…

Perhaps you’re the funniest person in the room, the most intelligent person at work, or the person everybody describes as being unusually kind and generous…

Maybe you’re brilliant at business, exceptionally good-looking, a natural athlete, or simply somebody who always seems to get things done…

Whatever your particular talent or ability happens to be, it gives you something to HOLD ON to that makes life make at least a little more ‘sense’ and so you might not know who you are exactly but at least you know you’re good at something (and if other people recognise that something then that’s even better).

What you’re really holding onto when you see your talents and abilities like this is the evidence that you’re worth something:

You’ve got an identity, a role to play, and a reason to feel a little more secure in an otherwise uncertain world.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with this – developing our abilities, taking pride in our work, and enjoying the things we’re ‘good’ at can all be healthy parts of being human but the problem begins when we turn these things into the ultimate source of our worth and happiness and sop enjoying our talents for what they are and start depending on them to tell us WHO we are.

For example:

  • Instead of playing guitar because we love music then we play because being the “best guitarist” makes us feel special.

  • Instead of writing because we have something meaningful to express then we write because being a “talented writer” protects us from feeling ordinary.

  • Instead of being kind because somebody needs our kindness then we become kind because we need to be known as a “good person”.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

In other words, when we put them on a pedestal then our talents become more than just abilities and become psychological survival strategies.

That’s when things get complicated.

Talent Won’t Save You From the Void

The Void is the experience of being disconnected from truth at the levels of ourselves, from reality, and from the deeper sense of wholeness that becomes available when we stop organising our lives around shame, guilt, and/or trauma (The Unholy Trinity).

When we’re caught up in the Void, we experience ourselves as being somehow incomplete (even though this actually impossible and it’s just a misperception caused by mental and emotional blocks):

There’s a feeling that something is missing, that we’re not quite enough, or that we need to become somebody else before we can finally relax and enjoy being fully alive.

Having ‘talent’ can temporarily distract us from this empty feeling and the success and recognition talent sometimes brings can provide a welcome injection of validation and the impression that we’re finally becoming somebody.

That might be great in the short term but no amount of validation or becoming ‘somebody can ever resolve the underlying disconnection from truth that opened up the Void in the first place:

Think about the classic case of the tortured artist, for example – if talent were all it took to feel real and find our place in the world then we wouldn’t have so many stories of extraordinarily gifted people struggling with chronic and profound unhappiness.

The cultural mythology surrounding the so-called Club 27 phenomenon reflects this contradiction (even if the stories behind those deaths are far more complicated than any single explanation) and we’ve all encountered the funny person who seems to light up every room but privately feels miserable (you might even be that person) or met successful people who can’t enjoy what they’ve achieved – no matter how much external evidence they have that they’re “doing well”.

It’s also likely that we’ve stumbled across people who are so accomplished, ‘successful’, and talented that others are practically worshipping them and yet they treat everybody around them terribly because they’re so tortured and profoundly messed-up in their special talented ways (really, because being ‘talented’ is seen as an excuse to not deal with one’s emotional problems in service of the craft or whatever).

Steve Jobs is perhaps a famous and useful example of the distinction between professional achievement and character here (not that I ever met him): his extraordinary achievements at Apple are well documented as are accounts from colleagues describing his abrasive and sometimes even cruel behaviour.

Whatever we think of his methods, his (alleged) story illustrates an important point:

Being exceptionally talented at building something doesn’t automatically mean you’ve developed the character to relate to other human beings from a place of REALNESS.

In short, you can have a genuine vision and still be an arsehole because the vision doesn’t magically excuse the behaviour – in fact, the more talented you become, the more important it might be to examine your character because your abilities can give you more opportunities to get away with things that would otherwise have consequences.

For example, people may tolerate your arrogance because you’re brilliant and they want to ride your coattails, they might excuse your selfishness because you’re ‘successful’ and they want to be too, and they may even convince themselves that your cruelty is simply the price of being around a genius.

That might all sound great until you start believing your own mythology which is another one of the dangers of putting talent on a pedestal:

The very thing that makes you impressive to other people can become an excuse not to grow real as a human being.

The bottom line is that talent is ‘good’ but it’s not enough and if you treat it as the thing that’s going to save you, sooner or later, the pedestal is going to wobble and you’re gonna come crashing back down to reality.

The Attention Economy: Performing for People Who Don’t Know You

Our culture doesn’t exactly make all of this any easier:

Social media encourages us to turn ourselves into little entertainment products, constantly presenting our abilities, achievements, opinions, bodies, relationships, and personalities for public consumption.

This is because we’re living in an attention economy where clicks, views, ‘likes’, and followers are often treated as evidence of personal value and so the unspoken promise is that if enough people see you, appreciate you, and acknowledge your talents, you’ll finally feel like you matter.

This is why so many of us end up going into performance mode:

We film ourselves dancing in public, demonstrating our extraordinary abilities, making people laugh, showing off our physiques, or doing whatever else might convince the algorithm that we’re worth distributing to a wider audience.

Some of this is harmless fun, some of it is genuine creative expression, and some of it is even a way of making a living but sometimes, what looks like “self-expression” is really a request for the world to rescue us from our own underlying emotional ‘stuff’ – in other words, we’re not necessarily sharing something because it means something true to us but because we want somebody else to tell us that we mean something.

This drive to perform might even cause us to intrude on other people’s space, disrupt their experience, or turn ordinary public life into our personal stage because the need to be seen has become more important than our connection to what’s actually happening around us.

The distinction isn’t whether we perform publicly but whether we’re expressing something real or trying to extract validation from an audience.

After all:

  • You can have a million followers and still feel completely alone.

  • You can be admired by strangers whilst remaining disconnected from the people closest to you.

  • You can spend years building a personal brand whilst neglecting the actual person who has to live behind it.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

People stay hooked in these cycles because the attention economy encourages us to believe that our lucky break is just around the corner and so all we need is one viral video, one breakthrough project, or one spectacular achievement and suddenly everything will finally fall into place.

But what happens when it doesn’t? Or what happens if it does – only for you to discover that the Void has followed you all the way to the top?

The key point is that the problem was never that you weren’t talented enough but that you’ve been asking your talents to do a job they were never designed to do.

You Don’t Need Talent to Live a Real Life

So having said all that, here’s the bit that can actually help you to find more freedom in life:

You can have absolutely NO remarkable talent whatsoever and still develop the capacity to live a real, meaningful, and fulfilling life.

You don’t have to be the ‘best’ at anything, you don’t need to impress anybody, and you don’t even need to discover some extraordinary gift hidden inside you (although the odds are that you probably will as you find your real essence and start expressing it – i.e. you get in touch with your realness and take real action).

You can be perfectly ‘average’ at almost everything you do and still keep going deeper and deeper into wholeness as you live your life.

This is because realness isn’t about becoming ‘exceptional’ or ‘special‘ but about about overcoming the fragmentation that keeps us disconnected from ourselves and life.

What this means is that no matter how much or how little talent you have:

  • You can still learn to feel your actual feelings rather than suppressing them, distracting yourself from them, or turning them into another self-improvement project.

  • You can still accept yourself unconditionally without needing to ‘prove’ that you’re more intelligent, attractive, ‘successful’, generous, or spiritually evolved than somebody else.

  • You can still accept life without demanding that it constantly reassure you that everything is going to work out exactly as you want.

  • You can still show up for the world in ways that are genuinely useful and real – even if nobody ever writes a glowing review about you.

-Imagine helping somebody because they need help, rather than because you want to be known as a “helpful person”.

-Imagine creating something because you have something to actually express – rather than because you need the finished product to establish your worth or to feed into your self-image (the character you play within the Void).

-Imagine being able to admit that you’re ‘wrong’ about [whatever] without feeling that your entire identity is under attack.

-Imagine enjoying somebody else’s success without needing to diminish it or compete with it because you have a scarcity mindset.

-Etc. etc. etc.

None of these things requires exceptional talent or being ‘special’ in any way, shape, or form – they simply require character which, in the Realness philosophy, isn’t about becoming some morally perfect superhero who always knows the ‘right’ thing to do but about developing the capacity to accept reality and work with it even when doing so is uncomfortable.

Sometimes, this might mean acknowledging a feeling you’ve spent years avoiding.

Sometimes, it might mean admitting that your behaviour has hurt somebody.

Sometimes, it means recognising that the life you’ve been pursuing was built around somebody else’s expectations.

Sometimes, it simply means allowing yourself to be an ordinary human being without interpreting your ordinariness as a personal failure.

You don’t have to become extraordinary to be whole – you just have to become willing to be REAL.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

If you want to get more in touch with your realness by embracing reality then check out my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness.

Character Over Performance: Three Practical Steps

So how do we take all of these ideas and begin shifting our focus from talent and performance towards character?

Well, as always it comes down to three interconnected movements: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action (these are the transformational steps I build my coaching containers around whilst working with clients).

Let’s look at this in a bit more detail:

1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step is to cultivate Awareness by noticing where your talents and abilities have become entangled with your identity.

You can ask yourself some simple but powerful coaching questions:

  • What am I proud of being ‘good’ at and why does it matter so much to me?

  • What would I be afraid of losing if I could no longer perform this particular role?

  • Do I really enjoy doing this thing or do I mainly enjoy the way people respond to me when I do it?

  • Where am I using competence to avoid feeling inadequate, ordinary, or uncertain?

Don’t use these questions to shame yourself for enjoying your achievements!

The point isn’t to destroy your confidence or pretend that your abilities don’t matter but to simply become aware of the hidden bargain you might be making with life:

Perhaps you’ve unconsciously decided that being intelligent means nobody can dismiss you, that being funny means nobody can reject you, or that being helpful means nobody can accuse you of being selfish.

Once you recognise the bargain then you can start questioning whether it actually serves you or not – your talents are things you can develop and enjoy but they don’t have to be the foundation upon which your entire identity rests (that’s your relationship with life itself instead of the Void).

2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

The next step is to practise Acceptance of the ‘parts’ of yourself that don’t fit the image you’re trying to maintain – for example:

  • If you’re known as the strong one then can you acknowledge when you’re struggling?

  • If you’re the intelligent one then can you admit when you don’t know something?

  • If you’re the ‘good’ person then can you face the times you’ve been selfish, resentful, or unkind without collapsing into shame or inventing excuses?

It’s at the ‘Acceptance‘ stage where character develops = not through maintaining an immaculate self-image of perfection or whatever but through becoming willing to face the truth about yourself.

The same also applies to life – for example, you might never become the most talented person in your field, you might not receive the recognition you believe you deserve, or you might discover that a particular ability you’ve spent years developing isn’t going to lead where you hoped.

Can you accept these realities without turning them into evidence that you’re somehow ‘defective’?

Acceptance doesn’t mean giving up on your ambitions but it does mean allowing yourself to see what’s actually happening so that your next move can be grounded in truth rather than desperation.

3. Action: Trust Yourself and Life

Finally, it’s time to start acting from what’s REAL rather than what will make you look ‘good’ and to practise doing things that matter without needing to turn them into performances.

For example:

  • Help somebody without mentioning it afterwards.

  • Create something without immediately posting it online.

  • Have an honest conversation without trying to control the other person’s response.

  • Try something you’re bad at and allow yourself to be a beginner.

  • Ete. etc. etc.

All of this is particularly important when it comes to the idea of serving others:

There’s a difference between helping somebody because help is genuinely needed and helping somebody because you want the psychological reward of being seen as generous.

The outward behaviour might look identical but the inner relationship with life is different:

In the first case, you’re responding to reality but, in the second, you’re trying to manipulate reality into giving you something – of course, human motivations are rarely perfectly pure and Realness isn’t about achieving some impossible state of motivational purity.

It’s about becoming aware of your motives, though, and accepting their complexity so you can gradually allow your actions to be guided more by truth than by the need to fill the Void.

Keep repeating the cycle: Awareness, Acceptance, Action.

You don’t need to master it once and for all (and none of us ever will ‘master’ it) – you just need to keep returning to it as life gives you new opportunities to become more whole (which it always will).

You can have all the talent in the world and even be the "best" without being real.

The Final Word: Stop Trying to Become Somebody. Start Learning to Be Yourself.

One of the strange ironies of personal development is that we can turn the whole thing into another performance:

We start trying to become the most self-aware person, the most emotionally integrated person, the most authentic person, or the most spiritually advanced person in the room which means that we’ve just taken the same old ego-driven strategy and dressed it up in the language of “growth”.

Character isn’t necessarily something you sit around cultivating all day but is most often what naturally emerges when you stop fighting reality and learn to work with things as they are.

It’s less about constructing an impressive identity and more about recognising what’s true and responding to it honestly so that we can say (and mean) perhaps the truest statement a human being can utter:

“It is what it is and I am what I am”.

Ultimately, a real life isn’t one in which you finally become talented enough to deserve your place in the world but one in which you stop treating your place in the world as something you have to earn through constant performance.

The bottom line is that talent can enrich your life, performance can help you express yourself and contribute to the world, but neither can replace the deeper work of becoming whole.

At the end of the day, you don’t need to be impressive to be real – you just need to be willing to face the truth, accept what you find, and act from that place.

That’s where the Void begins to lose its grip and it’s where life can finally become something you participate in, rather than something you spend your entire existence trying to prove you’re worthy of.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to stop performing and to start participating in your life in a real way then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you move forward by taking real action.

Small Penis Syndrome: How to Stop Letting Penis Size Define Your Life

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Small Penis Syndrome: How to Stop Letting Penis Size Define Your Life

Fixating On Having a Small Penis Only Holds You Back from Your REAL Life

In this article we’re going to talk about something that many men worry about but very few feel comfortable discussing openly: the size of their penis.

This is a little different from the majority of articles on this site but I’m writing it after working with a few guys recently who’ve shared how their limiting beliefs about the size of their penis have held them back in life – often even in situations that have absolutely nothing to do with sex.

This is because the underlying problem isn’t the size of the guy’s penis in itself but the shame that distorts their relationship with this and what it ‘means’ about their place and value in the world.

One of the worst things about shame is that it doesn’t respect your boundaries:

It follows you into the bedroom, the gym, the workplace, your relationships, and even the way you walk down the street until – before you know it – something that should be just one relatively insignificant aspect of your physical existence has become a source of anxiety that seems to colour everything that you experience.

For some men, this might just be an occasional insecurity – for example, they might wish they were bigger, feel self-conscious from time to time, or worry about what a sexual partner might think…for others, though, these fears and doubts about penis size can becomes much more consuming.

When this happens, their racing thoughts become persistent, their behaviour starts revolving around the (mis)perceived problem, and they may avoid relationships, intimacy, or even everyday situations like going to the gym or the swimming pool because of what they believe their body says about them.

There’s a term used to describe a severe preoccupation with penis size and that’s Penile dysmorphic disorder (PDD) and clinically significant cases can fall within the broader diagnosis of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) which involves a persistent distressing preoccupation with perceived physical ‘flaws’.

The important point to note before we get into the nitty-gritty of all this is that we’re talking about a spectrum with ordinary insecurity at one end and potentially debilitating distress at the other – whatever your experience, though, I want to explore this issue through the lens of REALNESS which means looking at how we can embrace reality and acceptance to deal with this wherever you might find yourself on this spectrum (assuming you’re on it which is what I’m doing seeing as you landed on this page).

The aim isn’t to convince you that penis size never matters to anybody or that you should magically stop caring about something that genuinely bothers you but to help you understand where these beliefs come from, question the ‘meaning’ you’ve attached to them, and help you to start developing a healthier relationship with yourself and life.

At the end of the day, you’re considerably more than just one part of your body and it’s time you started living like it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Small penis syndrome is about losing confidence in one of the things you need the most: your body.

Where Does Penis-Size Insecurity Come From?

Before we get too deep into all this, it’s really worth asking a fundamental question which is:

Where does this problem actually begin in the first place?

The simplest answer is that, in many cases, it starts OUTSIDE-IN which simply means that something in the external world gives you an idea about how you ‘should’ look and you then use that idea to judge yourself.

For example:

  • Perhaps you see other boys in the changing rooms as a teenager and start comparing yourself to them.

  • Perhaps you watch pornography and see performers with freakishly large penises which leads you to assume that what you’re watching represents the ‘norm’.

  • Perhaps you absorb cultural narratives about women preferring bigger penises or hear people making jokes about men who don’t measure up and the internalise this as a standard against yourself.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Whatever the original trigger may be, the process often folds in the same recognisable pattern:

1. The Trigger: You encounter a standard that makes you question your penis size.

2. The Interpretation: You decide that being smaller than this standard means you’re inadequate or not as valuable in some way.

3. The Reinforcement: You start comparing yourself with other men, checking or measuring your penis obsessively, seeking reassurance, avoiding intimacy, or withdrawing from situations where you fear being judged.

4. The Underlying Vulnerability: If you’ve already picked up shame somewhere along the line (which most of us do in childhood) then the judgement feels like confirmation of something you secretly fear about yourself: that you’re not good enough as you are.

The important thing to pay attention to here is that that the original trigger and the underlying vulnerability aren’t necessarily the same thing (in other words, if you already have a degree of underlying toxic shame that’s hard to handle then the original trigger will make things seem even worse than they actually are).

In other words, seeing a man with a larger penis might prompt a natural sort of comparison but it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll feel inferior – it’s the SHAME that makes the comparison become much more powerful when you interpret the difference as evidence that something is ‘wrong’ with you (which is what shame is already telling you).

To make matters worse for yourself, once you start behaving as though the (mis)perceived flaw is some kind of a threat to your happiness and ability to feel ‘safe’ within yourself and your own life life, then you can inadvertently reinforce the belief that there’s something to actually be worried about (because you start acting in an unreal way which eventually gets you unreal results from life which you interpret as more ‘evidence’ that there actually is something wrong with you).

In other words, this new obsession with having a small penis affects the way that you behave and distracts you from your actual life and reinforces your negative beliefs that keep you from it in the first place:

  • You avoid intimacy so you never get the opportunity to discover that a partner might accept you exactly as you are.

  • You repeatedly measure yourself and so you keep your attention fixed on the very thing you’re trying to stop worrying about.

  • You seek reassurance and feel better briefly only to find yourself needing reassurance all over again (because you’re only dealing with the symptoms of your emotional problem and not the fundamental problem which is a lack of acceptance of yourself).

The end result is that your mind becomes trapped in a loop that you can’t get out of but it’s not your ‘small’ penis that’s really bothering you:

The meaning you’ve attached to having a ‘small’ penis is the actual source of your problem(s).

The truth of the matter is that if you’d never encountered these external comparisons or picked up the idea that penis size somehow determines something important about your worth as a human being then you’d be way more likely to accept your body as it is (not the kind of ‘acceptance’ that becomes an excuse but just an acceptance of where you actually stand in reality so you can stand on that foundation and keep building something REAL).

If you didn’t have a distorted view of things then your penis would be just like any other part of your body – i.e. just another ‘part’ of the whole package that makes you whatever it is that you are. The problem begins when you turn a physical characteristic into a verdict on your identity or self-image and this is where we need to talk about shame.

Shame: The Real Problem Beneath the Surface

In the context of REALNESS, shame is the belief that “I’m not good enough as I am“:

It’s arises because of a disconnection from the truth because you picked up judgement instead of acceptance and so instead of embracing the whole of yourself as a human being with strengths, weaknesses, limitations and possibilities, you start treating your existence as something that needs to be justified because you think that some fragments of your wholeness are more important than they really are (for whatever reason).

Shame essentially makes you believe that you have to become something else before you’re allowed to feel ‘good’ about being yourself which just leads to an endless state of inner friction in the Void.

Most of us develop shame-driven beliefs about ourselves (and our bodies) during adolescence which is when we’re particularly vulnerable to comparison and desperate to understand where we ‘fit’ into the world:

If you’ve already picked up shame through family dynamics, bullying, rejection, or other difficult formative experiences then you’re more likely to interpret differences between yourself and others as evidence that there’s something ‘wrong’ with you and this reinforces the disconnection from your real self that shame has left you with.

In relation to what we’re talking about in this article, penis size can then become a convenient target for existing shame because it allows the mind (in the service of the ego) to find ‘evidence’ that we’re truly not “good enough as we are” (which is what the shame has been trying to convince us of.

Shame isn’t an accurate assessment of reality, though, because it’s a disconnection from the truth and therefore actually a DISTORTION of reality:

The literal size of your penis might be a physical fact that can be measured or whatever but the conclusion that this somehow makes you fundamentally inadequate or worth ‘less‘ than others overall is just an interpretation.

Your problems around your penis size aren’t caused by the ‘fact’ but because you started believing the interpretations that you added to the facts because of your underlying shame and this is why it’s possible for people to spend years trying to compensate for something that was never proof of their inadequacy in the first place.

The INTERPRETATION of what your penis size ‘means’ is what causes you to perhaps avoid intimacy, obsessively measure yourself, seek reassurance, or withdraw from relationships before anybody has the opportunity to reject you – it may even cause you to carry insecurity into situations where your penis has absolutely no relevance whatsoever.

That’s how powerful an unexamined belief can become – especially when you treat unreal interpretations of reality as the final word about you as a whole.

The Absurdity of Penis Size (When You Take Away the Stories)

Here’s a thought experiment to show you how these interpretations can actually be pretty absurd:

Imagine you lived in a world where people didn’t care about penis size in any way, shape, or form – instead, society had decided that the size of your nose is what determines your masculinity, attractiveness, and general value as a human being:

In the back of the newspaper or in some of the darker corners of the internet, you stumble across adverts promoting nose enlargement, you go to the gym and have to listen to other men comparing nose sizes in the changing rooms; pornography now features men with enormous noses blowing fiercely into handkerchief and people make jokes on TV shows and in movies about men with “micro-noses” who can’t quite measure up.

In this world, you’d have millions of men walking around feeling inadequate because their noses weren’t big enough and they’d picked up the external standard that this somehow ‘means’ something:

Some would avoid relationships, others would spend their lives obsessing over their measurements, many would believe they couldn’t be confident, successful, or genuinely masculine until they’d somehow ‘fixed’ their noses, and everybody would accept this as perfectly reasonable because the entire culture had agreed that noses were incredibly important.

Would this cultural agreement mean that noses actually were the defining characteristic of a man?

Nope.

Although it might seem absurd, the same basic mechanism is operating when you become consumed by penis size:

The body part changes in our imaginary world but the structure of the problem remains the same:

An external standard becomes an internal judgement and that judgement becomes a source of suffering.

I should probably point out that penis size and nose size aren’t identical in every respect because sex has a particular significance in human relationships and anatomy can definitely influence sexual experiences:

The point, though, is that the ‘meaning’ you attach to a physical characteristic isn’t the same thing as the characteristic itself and your penis is just a part of your body as a whole – not a measurement of your soul, your masculinity, your potential or your value in the world.

The stories surrounding it aren’t the same as the truth itself and – once once you start separating the two – then you create room to breathe and get some real perspective.

But Doesn’t Penis Size Matter?

If we want to be real about all this then we need to be honest so let’s say a few things that need to be said:

The truth is that some people absolutely do have preferences regarding penis size which means that a larger penis may be desirable to certain partners and size can influence particular sexual experiences.

Also true, though, is that a larger penis isn’t automatically better for everybody and so size alone doesn’t determine sexual satisfaction (a related thought here is that just not everybody is compatible around personality types, not everybody is compatible to the body types and features they’re attracted to etc.).

No matter how ‘big’ or ‘small’ a man’s penis there are all kinds of other factors like comfort, communication, arousal, compatibility, emotional connection, and understanding what a partner enjoys that can all make a difference when it comes to having a successful relationship (or fling or whatever it is that people are up to).

There are also many ways to give and receive sexual pleasure that don’t depend on penetration or penis size in any way, shape, or form.

Finally, from a reproductive perspective, a smaller-than-average penis can still function perfectly well and so penis size alone doesn’t determine fertility.

So, yeah, there may be advantages or disadvantages associated with different physical characteristics in particular contexts but here’s where we need to distinguish between something ‘GOOD’ and something ‘ULTIMATE’:

In this context many of the ‘good’ things in life are desirable, useful or advantageous but if we treat them as the ‘ULTIMATE’ thing then we end up misperceiving whatever it is as somehow becoming the thing determines that quality of our lives above everything else.

Treating ‘good’ things (like sex, money, power, or whatever else) as being ULTIAMTE is one of the most common mistakes people make in life because it causes them to take something that might be very ‘good’ indeed but then turn it into something they believe they absolutely MUST have to be happy, accepted or complete.

When that happens, they create unnecessary friction between themselves and reality which means that – instead of working with the life they actually have – they end up resenting their lives based on the type of life they imagine they should have.

A big penis might be something you’d prefer to have and you could sure make it’s a ‘good’ thing to have in the world we live in but it’s still NOT the ultimate thing that determines whether you can have a meaningful relationship, enjoy sex, build something worthwhile, or feel at home in your own skin.

The only real ultimate is your relationship with life itself and so the ultimate question, from the perspective of REALNESS, is this:

“What kind of relationship are you building with life itself?“

At the end of the day, nothing can stop you from cultivating a healthier, more truthful, and more fulfilling relationship with life regardless of your penis size.

In fact, you could have one of the biggest penises ever known and still be miserable if you’re disconnected from yourself, dependent on external approval, and constantly searching for the next thing that will finally make you feel ‘good’ enough.

The problem isn’t necessarily what you have or don’t have – it’s what you believe having or not having it ‘means’.

Would a Great Man Still Be Great If He Had a Small Penis?

Here’s another thought experiment that can help here:

Think about a man you genuinely admire – perhaps he’s a great leader, a warrior, an artist, an entrepreneur, or somebody who’s overcome extraordinary adversity.

Now, imagine that this particular man has achieved everything you admire him for but you somehow discovered that he had a small penis the whole time.

Would it suddenly invalidate everything he’d achieved? Would his courage disappear?

Would his integrity evaporate? Would his contribution to the world become meaningless?

I’m pretty confident we can file that away as “Absolutely not”.

Now, I suppose you could argue argue that he’d never have developed the confidence to achieve those things if he’d been insecure about his penis – perhaps, but notice that this argument still makes penis size the ultimate factor and assumes that a particular insecurity must determine the entire direction of somebody’s life when it doesn’t.

People can develop confidence while carrying insecurities all the time because confidence isn’t about ‘thinking’ your way into feeling good but about training yourself to take ACTION.

This is why people can pursue meaningful goals without feeling ‘perfect’ and can learn to stop allowing one perceived limitation to dictate what they believe is possible overall (again: any time you treat a good thing as the ultimate or a little ‘part’ as the whole then it just leads to misery).

Eventually, as long as they keep moving forward and learning by doing then they can discover that the things they once thought disqualified them from life were never disqualifications at all – they were just outdated beliefs picked up from the outside-in.

Here’s a more personal version of the above thought experiment:

“What would I still respect about myself if I stopped using penis size as a measure of my worth?“

  • What personal qualities that you’re genuinely proud of would remain?

  • What have you already overcome in life?

  • What do the people who genuinely care about you value about who you really are?

  • What could you contribute to the world if you weren’t spending so much energy worrying about this one thing?

Don’t turn this into another exercise in trying to prove that you’re secretly brilliant or something like that (even though you might be) – simply use it as a way of recognising and ACCEPTING that your identity is much bigger than the characteristic you’ve been fixating on.

A man isn’t ‘great’ because he has the perfect body but because of how he lives, his personal qualities and values, how he treats people, what he contributes, and the degree to which he embodies his real values.

Your penis is one thing about you – not the whole of you who you are and what makes you REAL.

What Are You Really Looking For?

Let’s go a little deeper and see what might really going on beneath the hood:

If you believe you need a bigger penis, ask yourself why – as in, literally, what do you imagine having one would give you?

For example:

  • Perhaps you’d feel more attractive.

  • Perhaps you’d worry less about being rejected.

  • Perhaps you’d feel more masculine, more sexually capable or more confident approaching women.

  • Perhaps you imagine you’d finally be able to relax because you wouldn’t have to wonder whether somebody was judging you.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

These are understandable desires and there’s definitely nothing ‘wrong’ wanting and need intimacy, acceptance, confidence or enjoyable sex but look carefully at what’s happening

You might not actually be seeking a different physical characteristic as much as you’re seeking something you believe that characteristic will ‘win‘ for you from other people.

Sometimes, there are things that we feel tempted to chase when we believe we need external validation to feel whole like approval, appreciation, validation, being ‘seen’, or [anything else you can think of] and a lot of the time this is what people are truly seeking when they wish they had a bigger penis.

One of the problems with this approach to things is that if you make your self-acceptance dependent on other people’s reactions then you’ll always be vulnerable to the next judgement, comparison or perceived rejection.

This problem will remain if you suddenly change the thing you’re insecure about (getting a bigger penis, in this case) because the underlying pattern of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ will just move onto the next ‘thing’:

Today it’s your penis but tomorrow it’s your height, your hair, your bank balance, or the fact that some bloke on Instagram appears to have a better life than you – in other words, the target of your focus and fixation changes but the underlying shame (disconnection from your real self) remains.

All of this brings us to another useful question to ask yourself which is this:

“What need am I trying to meet through the belief that I need a bigger penis?”

This need could be anything but here are some examples:

  • If the answer is confidence then start exploring what confidence looks like in your actual life and then acting accordingly.

  • If it’s intimacy then learn to build intimacy over time by getting out of your comfort zone.

  • If it’s acceptance then practise accepting yourself first and foremost so you can develop relationships in which acceptance can grow.

  • If it’s sexual satisfaction then learn about sex, communication and your partner’s preferences rather than assuming that one measurement determines everything.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

You don’t have to pretend your desires don’t exist but you do need to stop making your relationship with yourself dependent on fulfilling them in one particular way.

That’s how you free yourself from being in the prison of ‘Small Penis Syndrome’ (which is really just the collective symptoms of thinking penis size ‘means’ something that it never can).

If you want to understand yourself and start developing unconditional self-acceptance then check out my controversial book: Shadow Life: Freedom From Bullshit in an Unreal World

The AAA Model: Three Steps Towards Realness

You can start changing your relationship with yourself when it comes to all this ‘stuff’ by using the AAA model I use in my coaching containers with clients: Awareness, Acceptance and Action.

These three stages give you a practical way to begin dismantling the beliefs that have been running your life and holding you back from your own realness.

1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step is to become aware of the stories you’re telling yourself:

Your ego, in this context, is the collection of beliefs, identities, and reactive defensive strategies you’ve developed to try to feel safe, significant, and acceptable despite whatever unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma you’re dealing with (the Unholy Trinity).

When your ego tells you that your penis somehow makes you inadequate then don’t automatically accept that judgement as the truth and train yourself to start questioning it.

Try this exercise:

Take a piece of paper and complete the following sentences:

  • I believe having a small penis means that I am…
  • I imagine women will think…
  • I’m afraid that other men will…
  • If I accepted my body as it is, I worry that…
  • I believe having a bigger penis would finally allow me to…
  • The first time I remember worrying about my penis size was…
  • When I compare myself with other men, I usually…
  • When I feel insecure, I try to make myself feel better by…

Don’t censor your answers and just be real with yourself (obviously, you don’t have to share what you write with anybody else unless you choose to) and you might uncover fears about rejection, humiliation, masculinity, intimacy or being seen as less valuable than other men.

Then ask yourself another question:

“Where did I learn to believe all this?“

Was it pornography? Bullying? A comment somebody made years ago? An assumption you’ve never properly questioned?

Next, identify which part of the four-stage pattern of Trigger, Interpretation, Reinforcement, and Underlying Vulnerability you’re caught in:

Are you responding to a trigger? Treating a comparison as proof of inadequacy? Reinforcing the belief through constantly judging yourself or through some kind of avoidance? Discovering that an older sense of shame is giving the whole thing its emotional charge?

Finally, separate observable facts from the interpretations you’ve attached to them – for example, “My penis is smaller than the average reported measurement” is a factual claim that can be assessed but “Therefore, I’m inadequate as a man” is a judgement that doesn’t logically follow.

You don’t have to believe every thought that enters your head and Awareness gives you the opportunity to stop treating an old and unreal story as an unquestionable truth.

2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

Acceptance doesn’t mean pretending you’re thrilled about every aspect of your body if you’re not – it just means allowing reality to be what it is without turning it into a reason to reject yourself.

The shadow self contains the aspects of ourselves we struggle to acknowledge or accept which, in this case, might include your fear of being sexually inadequate, your desire to be admired, your envy of other men, or your vulnerability around rejection in general (or a whole bunch of other things – again, we’re all different even if the fundamental principles are the same).

The way forward and into realness is always to give up trying to suppress these feelings and to bring them into the light – for example, you might say to yourself:

“I’m afraid somebody will judge me. I want to be attractive. I don’t want to feel inadequate and I’m struggling to accept this part of my body”,

Notice that you can acknowledge and the accept all of these things without concluding that there’s something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with you.

You can have an insecurity without becoming the insecurity.

Try this exercise:

Write a short letter to the part of yourself that feels ashamed of your penis.

Don’t lecture it or tell it to stop being ridiculous – just treat it as a ‘part’ of you that’s been trying, however unhelpfully, to protect you from rejection or some other difficult emotion you fear facing.

Acknowledge what it’s afraid of, recognise how much energy you’ve spent trying to avoid humiliation, and then remind yourself that you don’t need to achieve perfection to deserve intimacy, respect, or to live a meaningful life.

Acceptance begins when you stop making your right to exist comfortably in your own skin conditional on becoming somebody else or having something that you can’t have.

3. Action: Trust Yourself and Life

Awareness helps you see through the story, Acceptance helps you stop fighting yourself and life, and Action allows you to build a life that isn’t organised around your insecurity (which is great new because if you put real in then you’re most likely to get real out).

This is where you start doing things differently and making actual behavioural changes:

  • If you’ve been avoiding intimacy then it’s time to begin working towards relationships built on honesty, mutuality, and genuine connection.

    You don’t have to rush into situations that overwhelm you but you can start taking manageable steps rather than allowing fear to make every decision.

  • If you’re constantly comparing yourself with men in pornography then it’s time to reconsider how much time you spend consuming material that reinforces unrealistic expectations and makes you miserable.

  • If you’re repeatedly measuring your penis or asking for reassurance then it’s time to notice whether these behaviours actually settle your anxiety or simply keep it unnecessarily alive.

  • If you’ve been postponing meaningful goals because you don’t feel confident enough then it’s time to ask yourself what one practical step you could take today.

Start taking it.

Try this exercise:

Identify one thing you’ve been avoiding because of your penis-size insecurity – for example, dating, initiating a conversation, pursuing a relationship, or simply being more present during intimacy.

Break whatever it is into manageable steps and take the obvious first step without making your success dependent on feeling completely confident first.

You might still feel anxious and that’s totally okay (and normal) – the goal isn’t to eliminate every uncomfortable feeling before you actually allow yourself to live your life but to learn that you can live meaningfully without allowing those feelings to dictate everything you do.

Check out this article about emotional release to go deeper into this topic: Emotional Release: Stop Carrying Yesterday Into Today

Trust isn’t the belief that nothing ‘bad’ will happen but the willingness to participate in life without demanding that every uncertainty be resolved beforehand and this is a much stronger foundation for confidence than obsessing over a measurement.

Small penis syndrome is made way less difficult to deal with when we face reality

The Final Word: Take Your Penis Off the Pedestal and Put Your Life On It

Ultimately, everything we’ve covered in this article comes back to a simple principle:

Your penis is one part of your body which means it isn’t the whole of who you are or everything you have to offer.

Any time you treat a fragment as being the whole in life then you run into problems:

If you’ve spent years believing that its size determines your masculinity, attractiveness or value, then I understand that changing this belief might not happen overnight because these ideas can become deeply ingrained, especially when they’ve been reinforced by shame, comparison, and fear of rejection.

What you definitely can start to do right now, though, is to begin to to question these unhelpful beliefs:

You can recognise where they came from, accept the feelings you’ve been trying to resist, and start taking action based on what matters to you rather than what you’re afraid other people might think.

You can also stop treating external approval as the price of admission to your own life and begin to discover that the freedom you’ve been looking for was never entirely dependent on changing your body but rests upon changing your relationship with it.

This isn’t about tricking yourself or deluding yourself but about accepting reality:

REALNESS means learning to meet life as it actually is rather than spending your existence fighting an imaginary version of how things should be.

It also means recognising that you can have preferences without making them prerequisites for happiness:

You can acknowledge your limitations without turning them into your identity and you can want to improve something without deciding that you’re unacceptable until you do.

At the end of the day, you can have insecurities (like most of us do) and still be a man who still builds relationships, pursues meaningful goals, enjoys intimacy, and contributes something valuable to the world.

Your penis doesn’t have to become bigger for your world to become bigger so take it off the pedestal and put your real life on it instead.

You deserve to find out what becomes possible when you stop letting one fragment of yourself stand in the way of the whole.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If it’s time to let go of unhelpful and unreal beliefs about yourself so you can show up and live your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get back in the zone.

Stop Trying to Figure It All Out

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Stop Trying to Figure It All Out

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:

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.

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