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.

Eat Like You’re REAL: Whole Foods for Whole People

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Whole food for realness

Eat Like You Care About Your Future & The Process of Growing Real

Let’s not dance around it or beat around the bush:

You might be telling yourself that you want to live a real and meaningful life but have you ever really stopped to think about the source of fuel for the life that you’re building: your FOOD.

All it really takes is a simple question:

Are you fuelling your life with real food or are you stuffing your face with fragmented garbage and numbing yourself to the Void while pretending everything’s fine?

Now, before we get into it, this isn’t some trendy food blog designed to guilt you into quitting crisps or cutting out bread (I literally love bread so sue me):

It’s a call to arms and a reminder that your REALNESS starts with your choices…and few choices are more fundamental, more telling, or more powerful than what you choose to put in your mouth and eat.

The bottom line is that food isn’t just about taste, convenience, or macros.

It’s about alignment and the natural drive that we all have towards wholeness.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

If you want to eat like you're real then eat whole foods.

Wholeness Isn’t Just for Big Picture Thinking

We often talk about ‘wholeness’ like it’s some abstract philosophical goal – something to strive for when we’re doing deep inner work, integrating our shadow, or getting spiritual in a yoga class.

All of those things are my bread-and-butter but here’s the truth:

Wholeness is about everything which means it’s also in the ‘small’ stuff.

It’s not just about emotional breakthroughs or psychological insight – it’s also about what you put on your plate every damn day because every meal is either a vote for wholeness or a vote for fragmentation and every snack is either supporting your realness or selling it out to short-term dopamine hits.

If you’re serious about living your real life – a life of truth, presence, and power – then you need to start treating your food like it matters.

Because it literally does.

It’s one of the foundations for everything else that you ever do (no food, no life; no good food, no good life).

We Are Systems Within Systems Within Systems

Let’s zoom out for just a second:

Human beings aren’t separate entities floating through life with no connection to everything else in the universe – we’re systems within systems within systems (to paraphrase Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness).

Your body is a complex organism made up of other systems (nervous, digestive, cardiovascular, endocrine, etc), operating within your home, your community, your society, your ecosystem, and so on – it’s all just one system fed into by various other systems.

Everything affects everything else and vice versa.

What you eat doesn’t just stay in your mouth or your belly – it actually becomes part of you:

It affects your mood, your thoughts, your energy levels, your sleep, your ability to concentrate, your immune system, your libido, your ability to stick to your goals, and your general sense of wellbeing.

In other words, it affects your whole life.

When you eat lifeless, dead, hyper-processed sludge then you’re literally blocking your optimal capacity for realness and end up disrupting your system because you’re jamming the signal and poisoning the flow of your very being.

As dramatic as that might sound, the choice is clear:

When you eat whole foods, you restore the signal and connect back to the whole.

What Are Whole Foods, Really?

Let’s keep it simple so you can actually make some real changes if that’s what you need:

A whole food is something that you can look at and know what it is.

A potato is a potato. A banana is a banana. An egg is an egg. A chicken thigh is… you got it, a chicken thigh.

These are all REAL foods that are still recognisable from nature:

They’ve been pulled from the earth, plucked from a tree, caught from the sea, or recently killed and they haven’t been tampered with by a bunch of chemicals or factory processes.

In contrast, processed foods are fragmented and unreal:

They’ve been broken down, reshaped, chemically stabilised, preserved, dyed, flavoured, and often stripped of all real nutritional value.

In fact, we could basically say that most processed food is made to trick your senses into thinking you’re getting something good when you’re not.

If you need to read a label to figure out what something is… chances are, it’s not real food.

Why would you want to eat something like that, really?

Fragmented Food, Fragmented Life

Here’s why all of this is so important when it comes to your quality of life and wellbeing:

Most ultra-processed foods aren’t just nutritionally poor – they’re also metabolically destructive.

Study after study has linked ultra-processed diets with increased risk of obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, depression, and even early death.

A 2023 study published in The BMJ found that high consumption of ultra-processed (extremely fragmented) foods was associated with a 31% higher risk of all-cause mortality and another large-scale study in Cell Metabolism showed that people who ate a diet high in ultra-processed foods consumed more calories, gained more weight, and experienced poorer metabolic outcomes even when the meals were matched for macronutrients.

Why?

Because processed foods are designed to bypass your natural satiety signals (the signals that tell you you’re full) and they’re usually high in empty calories, full of artificial ingredients, and low in fibre, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

They spike your insulin, fry your dopamine pathways, and leave you tired, anxious, and craving more.

In other words:

Fragmented food leads to a fragmented state of being which just exacerbates the problems that most people already have from shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

Life or Death on a Plate

One way to think about it is this:

Whole food is close to life: It’s still alive (like fresh fruit and veg) or it was only recently alive (like meat or fish). Because it’s closer to life, there’s still energy, vibrancy, and at least a trace of the life force in it.

Processed food is close to death: It’s kept ‘edible’ through artificial preservation and the life has been stripped out of it and replaced with synthetic stimulants like flavour enhancers, stabilisers, dyes, and emulsifiers.

You might technically survive on processed food but you’ll never thrive on it and be able to get anywhere close to your real life.

But I’m Not a Monk…

Of course, one mustn’t get holier-than-thou and nobody’s expecting you to live on kale and bone broth alone.

That’s good news for us flawed huma beings because the reality is that you don’t need to be perfect – just intentional.

A powerful rule of thumb is the 80:20 rule:

This basically means aiming to eat whole, real food at least 80% of the time and then giving yourself some wiggle room for celebrations, cravings, social situations, or just the occasional indulgence without spiralling into shame or passivity.

We’re not eating whole foods to punish ourselves but to empower ourselves (plus they taste good once you’ve weaned yourself away from the processed sludge).

Whole Foods = Whole Fuel

Let’s bring it back to the realness and how this simple shift in choosing wholeness over fragmentation when it comes to food can improve your life:

If you want to live a life that’s full of purpose, clarity, strength, and peace – if you want to live a life that’s aligned with your realest values and vision – then you need to fuel that life with real stuff.

Whole foods will benefit your life in a number of key areas:

  • Mood: Research shows whole food diets are associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety.

  • Energy: Nutrient-dense food provides consistent energy rather than sugar crashes and the ensuing fatigue.

  • Digestion: Fewer additives means less inflammation and bloating so you feel better in general.

  • Sleep: Better nutrition improves your circadian rhythm and sleep quality so you’re more energised throughout the day.

  • Hormones: Real food keeps your system balanced as opposed to those darn processed foods which can wreck your gut and endocrine system.

  • Recovery: Whether you work out or not, your body is always repairing itself and whole foods speed that up so you can do more and get stronger.

All of these things are connected and interdependent (that’s wholeness once again, folks) but in general we can say:

More energy = more focus.

More focus = more alignment.

More alignment = more growth.

It’s all connected.

What Your Diet Says About Your Self-Worth

This might sting but it needs to be said to bring it all home:

How you eat reflects how much you respect yourself.

When you’re regularly choosing fake, toxic, dead food, it’s often because you’re driven by unresolved shame and you’re in survival mode. Your nervous system is frazzled, you’re stressed, checked out, and probably trying to soothe some deeper wound.

(That’s not a judgement but it is a pattern worth understanding).

If you want to grow into the person you know you’re capable of becoming and to become shame-dissolving instead of shame-driven, then you’ve got to start showing up for yourself now…that means giving yourself the fuel you’d give someone you actually cared about.

Because real food supports real growth and real growth is what realness is all about.

Food Has One Foot in Reality and One in the World

In the Realness philosophy, I’m always talking about how the world is not reality:

Instead, ‘The World’ is all of the the noise, the collective fragmentation, the distractions, and the ego-driven illusions that pull us away from truth and keep us locked within the Void.

What’s interesting about food is that it’s one of the few things that still has a foot in both because it’s produced in the world but it can still be of reality if it’s handled with care.

If your food comes from exploitative, industrialised, chemical-heavy systems that treat nature, human beings, and animals like lifeless objects then don’t be surprised if your energy starts to feel lifeless too because you’ve bought into a fragmented system.

On the other hand, if your food is sourced with respect, handled minimally, and eaten mindfully, then you’re most likely aligning with nature and with realness.

Again, it’s a ‘small’ thing, but food isn’t just about your body – it’s about your connection to the whole.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Check out my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you’d like to go deeper into understanding your own realness and your interdependence with everything else.

Practical Steps to Start Eating Like You’re REAL

  1. Follow the 80:20 Rule
    Make at least 80% of your diet consist of whole, natural foods. Plan it in advance if needed so you can actually stick to this (without becoming so rigid it sucks all of the life out of your life).

  2. Shop the Perimeter
    In most supermarkets, the real food like fresh veg, fruit, meat, dairy is around the edges. The processed stuff lurks in the middle where they know there’s less of an escape (no doors etc.).

    Even better, you can avoid the supermarket and go to a farm shop or somewhere closer to the source of production.

  3. Read Labels (Or Better Yet, Avoid Needing To)
    If there’s more than five ingredients – or you can’t pronounce them – it’s probably not worth it. Remember the general ‘rule’ of whole foods: if you can look at it and know exactly what it is, then it’s safe to eat.

  4. Cook More Often
    The simplest way to control what goes in your food is to make it yourself instead of buying sludge that’s pre-packed and made in a lifeless factory somewhere. If this is new to you, then start with one home-cooked meal a day and work up from there.

  5. Hydrate Like a Human
    Ditch sugary drinks and aim for real hydration – water, herbal tea, and maybe some electrolytes if you train hard.

    If you’re one of those people that thinks they “don’t like water” then there’s a high chance that you’ve been sucked into the matrix of fragmentation and processed food and drink.

    Your body is literally made to ‘like’ water (though, really it’s beyond like and dislike – it’s just REAL).

  6. Listen to Your Body
    Tune in to how you feel after different meals:

    Whole foods will leave you lighter, clearer, more grounded whereas the process ‘stuff’ will leave you feeling heavy and flighty.

  7. Don’t Make Food a Moral Issue
    It’s not about guilt or shame – it’s about truth and keeping things real.
When you choose to eat in a real way you are no longer alone.

Eat Like You’re Real Final Word: Your Fork is a Weapon

At the end of the day, what they say about how “You are what you eat” is true – the only question is do you wanna be real or unreal?

Every time you eat, you’re making a choice about what kind of future you want:

Do you want a future of clarity, energy, and connection where your body supports your purpose?

Or a future of confusion, fatigue, and frustration where your body is dragging your spirit down?

Choose the first one and you increase the odds of everything else that you do becoming more real because when you eat like you actually care about your future, you create a future worth living.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to grow real and start living with purpose and direction then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to step up.

Men Who Chase Women: The Shame Behind the Game and How to Stop Playing It

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Men who chase women

Chasing Anything In An Unreal Way Just Takes You Away From Your Realness

There’s a strange paradox at the heart of modern masculinity:

On the one hand, men are told to “be confident”, “have game”, and to “go after whatever or whoever they want” but on the other, many are silently driven by an inner emptiness that no amount of attention, conquest, or validation can truly satisfy.

(This inner emptiness is what I call (the Void).

One of the most common expressions of this inner split is the endless chase – whether it be chasing money, sex, power, or anything else that we’ve somehow convinced ourselves will fill the void and allow us to feel real again.

This article is for the men who chase women – thinking that somehow managing to ‘conquer’ enough of them will ever be enough to make the void go away.

This is a potent topic because chasing women is a vital part of the male experience and – for this reason – is a sort of twisted rite of passage.

Even though it’s perfectly ‘natural’ – and indeed a ‘good’ thing if done in a real way – the ‘chase’ is also something that becomes unreal when it’s fuelled by culture, peer pressure, shame, and the desperate hunger to feel like “a man” when we hand it over to the ego.

Beneath the surface, this version of the natural chase has very little to do with women and everything to do with the man who’s playing it and the inner relationship they have with themselves.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Men who chase women have not mastered themselves.

The Illusion of the Chase

A lot of men are driven by a pressure to prove themselves as ‘men’:

Whether this is from biology, peers, social media, internalised beliefs about masculinity, or a complicated cocktail of all of these and more, there’s an unconscious script running that often says:

If I can sleep with lots of women, I’m worthy.

So – without really stopping to ask themselves what they really want in there realness, they chase, they hook up, and then they move on. Rinse and repeat (all the while, remaining untouched by real intimacy).

Let’s be clear because I don’t wanna put anybody on the opposite path (which is just as unreal):

If you’re a man, then women are a GOOD thing – a very good thing, in fact. One of the best.

This article isn’t about demonising desire or pretending sex isn’t enjoyable but if you’re hoping that women will fill the hole inside you, then you’re in for a rude awakening because the only thing that can fill the Void is truth.

Trying to find purpose, self-worth, or identity through chasing women (or anything else for that matter) is a race you can never win – not because of women themselves, but because what you’re chasing can’t be found outside yourself.

My Story: From Chaser to Realness

When I was younger, I lived in that same loop:

I deep down thought the number of women I could sleep with equated to how ‘manly’ or ‘cool’ or ‘whatever’ I was. Over the years, I even entered relationships where I was expecting my partners to fill the void in some way (though I didn’t know that’s what was going on for me at the time)…deep down, I was looking for something they could never give me because didn’t know myself, let alone know what I wanted and really had to give in return.

As you might imagine, these relationships lacked depth and so they they were never truly real or intimate. – if anything it was more about role: I was the ‘boyfriend’ and she was the ‘girlfriend’ and so we’d do stuff together and hang out and even live together.

The truth is that we often had completely different values because we had both gone into the relationship not being as real as we could’ve been. Of course, I can only talk about that really from my own experience and so it’s probably more fair to say that it wasn’t them (in the sense that there was anything ‘wrong’ with them). It was me being disconnected, avoidant, and unaware of the shadows of myself (which are always needed to be brought to light if we want to have any chance of being real).

Eventually, I started facing myself after life forced me to do so and I was given the opportunity to sit with the Void instead of trying to seduce my way out of it. Over the years, I did the work: shadow work, emotional regulation, semen retention, nervous system healing; I found purpose, grounded myself, and I stopped running.

These days I’m not out there ‘chasing’ things like a lunatic but the connections I have are deeper than ever because they’re more real and more intimate (which it turns out is what I was looking for all along).

The Real Reason Behind the Chase

Here’s the truth:

The urge to chase has nothing to do with women – it’s not about their beauty, their energy, or their desirability but about the boy inside the man who hasn’t healed.

Sure, our evolutionary biology drives a certain instinct. And yes, sex is great. But when chasing women becomes your identity, you’ve lost control because you’ve become mastered by your ego.

In this case, the ego tells you that seducing women makes you ‘better’ than other men – more alpha, more worthy, more powerful. It tricks you into thinking you’re getting somewhere and that you’re really something, when really, you’re just avoiding yourself because of underlying SHAME.

Shame is the root wound that causes human beings to identify with the ego in the first place:

It tells you that you’re not ‘enough’ and so you go on an endless chase to prove that you are – “Look how many women I’ve slept with” we’re talking about in this article but it can literally be anything.

Whatever it is, it will never be enough because shame is never satisfied and can only ever want more.

Men Who Chase Women - PDF Guide
Click the image above to open up a (free) visual PDF guide to the ideas shared in this article.

The Addiction to the Chase

A potentially brutal truth here is the fact that men are only addicted to chasing women because they have no real purpose:

They haven’t claimed a vision, set meaningful goals, or developed habits that grow them into integrated men who have a solid grounding in themselves and their lives.

Stuck in this purposeless state, they substitute purpose with pleasure:

The thrill of going from stranger to seduction becomes their only excitement but – because it’s just a cheap and basically empty high (except for a bit of sexual release) like fast food for the soul – eventually, it leaves you sick and being acutely aware of the fact that you need something deeper and more real.

In extreme cases, this addiction leads to deceit both of themselves and the women they chase:

These kinds of addicted men start wear a persona – a lie – to attract women. They pretend to be more successful than they are; they flaunt money they don’t have; they act ‘nice‘ when all they want is sex and they really couldn’t care less about the women they’re chasing outside of that.

This is manipulation that turns women into targets and eventually even turns you into someone even you can’t trust (because you know what you’re really doing).

The Cost of Chasing Women

When you’re stuck in this cycle, you stop growing and become more-and-more unreal:

You’re distracted from your realness and so you miss the moment when the ‘right’ woman comes – not because she isn’t there, but because you’re not (because you’re hiding in that void behind your ego).

Worse still, you start to feel hollow because ultimately unreal sex doesn’t mean much anyway:

The validation fades and you’re still left with you – a man disconnected from his soul and unable to feel fulfilled because he lacks real purpose.

Chasing women turns them into objects into goals to be conquered rather than souls to be known an that’s not love – it’s projection.

A projection of what?

A projection of your own lack of love for yourself that’s causing you to live an unreal life instead of your real one.

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

Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’re ready to stop chasing the unreal and start living in a real way.

Practical Steps to Stop Chasing Women & to Start Living Your Real Life

So how do you stop chasing women and start becoming real?

Here are some practical steps to help you begin to change your trajectory:

1. Ask Yourself: What Am I Really Looking For?

Is it approval? Validation? Power? A sense of self-worth?

Get radically honest with yourself – even if the truth is painful it’s also liberating because it will show you the way towards a real foundation that you can build on.

2. Become the Void

Stop trying to fill the emptiness and start listening to it:

The Void is not a flaw – it’s just a signal that you’re being unreal and need to make some changes.

It shows you where you’re still fragmented and disconnected and where you have some opportunities to start being more whole within yourself.

When the void shows up, sit with it, breathe into it, and let it teach you.

3. Semen Retention

Try retaining for at least 30 days so that you can get some control of your instincts (instead of having them control you).

Better yet, make it a lifestyle (unless you’re in a real, intimate relationship – and even then there are things you can do to keep going if you choose).

You’ll gain clarity, energy, and the power to choose connection over compulsion.

This article goes into this in a lot more detail: Semen Retention Benefits: How this Ancient Practice Can Help You Grow More Real

4. Reconnect with Purpose

What are you here to build?

What do you want to create?

Where are their opportunities for you to step up and lead?

Your real purpose is always connected to service and growth and about making your values valuable to others.

Start small with goals, daily habits, and structure that ground you in reality.

Check out my free 7-Day Course if you want to start designing a real purpose for yourself: The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness & Life Purpose

5. Regulate Your Nervous System

If your body is dysregulated, your instincts will override your wisdom and you’ll act according to your feelings way more than your principles.

Learn breathwork, move your body, and get support from a coach like me so you can start to heal your emotional baseline.

Men who chase women are often doing what they've been told - not what they actually want to do.

Final Words: Real Men Don’t Chase Women – They Create Something Real

You don’t need to chase women to be a man but you do need to face yourself:

Sex is good and women are good but they’re not the ultimate thing that will give your life a sense of real meaning – that title belongs to truth.

When you stop playing the ‘chase’ game, you start living the real life because when you stop chasing, you start becoming and when you stop proving, you start loving for real.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to stop chasing and you’re ready to start growing real and living with purpose then book a free coaching call with me and I’ll help you shift focus (and keep you accountable).

Fear of Real Change: When Doing Something Real Feels Scary

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fear of real change

Why the Life You Want Comes With Consequences

There comes a point in many people’s lives when they know deep in the very being of their bones that something has to change.

It usually starts as the dawning realisation that they’ve been going through the motions for too long:

Maybe they’re ‘stuck‘ in a job that slowly kills their soul; maybe their relationship is more about playing out learned roles than real connection. Maybe they’ve been performing a version of themselves that’s palatable, polite, and that people even ‘like’ but that’s completely unreal and keeping them lost to the Void.

Whatever it is, something in them starts to stir – a quiet voice, a gut feeling, or an existential panic attack at 3am.

And that something always says the same thing:

It’s time to get real again.

What they’ve found themselves on is a turning point – the threshold between their ‘old’ unreal life and a newer real life that is more aligned with who they really are and what life is. They reach a point where the soul says “Enough is enough” and where they awaken to the idea of making actual changes but then… nothing happens.

In this state, the realisation, ideas, and desires are all there but – despite this pull towards something more real – action never seems to be taken and so nothing seems to change (or, if it does, it ends up being hesitant, half-hearted, or sabotaged).

Why is this?

Because doing something real always comes with consequences that we might not think we’re ready for (but only because our thinking belongs to the ‘old’ version of ourselves that we’re trying to outgrow).

These consequences may not always be catastrophic ones but they will always be an invitation into some deeper truth:

Emotional consequences. Relational consequences. The kind of consequences that ask us to face our lives honestly.

For most people this verges on the cusp of being terrifying but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The fear of real change is all that stands between you and the treasure of your real life.

Why We Fear Growth Into Realness (Even When We Crave It)

If you ask someone what they truly want, they can usually tell you and they’ll say things like:

“I want to start my own business”.
“I want to leave my relationship”.
“I want to express myself with more creativity”.
“I want to live with more peace and purpose”.

And they usually even know the steps they’d have to take to get there….but then comes the hesitation, the delay, and the excuses because of a kind of inner friction that keeps them looping in the same old patterns.

This isn’t because they’re lazy, stupid, or unmotivated but because there’s a hidden, unconscious intention at play that wants them to stay exactly where they are.

That intention is almost shaped by a cocktail of three things: shame, guilt, and fear.

  • Shame says, “Who am I to change?”
  • Guilt says, “What if changing hurts the people I love?”
  • Fear says, “What if it all falls apart and I can’t handle it?”

All three of these unconscious forces are usually stronger than whatever we’re saying to ourselves at the conscious level which is why the things we keep telling ourselves at the level of the mind don’t lead to lasting change.

It’s only when we look behind the veil of our own programming and dig into what’s hiding in the shadows that we can actually start making the changes we’re craving.

The Hidden Pull of Unreal Programming

Most people are living according to some kind of internal script that was written in childhood and then patched together and refined by culture, school, media, family systems, trauma, and fear.

It’s not their fault that it’s there driving them but it is their responsibility to deal with it if they want to actually transform their lives.

These scripts tell us how to behave, what success looks like, how to stay safe, and how to keep the approval of those around us and so – when you finally hit that moment of “I need to change” – you’re not just facing a choice but an entire identity system that needs to be rewiring.

I usually call this identity system the ego and it will do whatever it can to keep you in the familiar place you’ve found yourself (as an extension of acting according to what the ego has shown you) instead of changing your life in a way that’s more real.

This is because from the point of view of the unconscious mind an unfulfilling life is better than one that threatens the familiarity that it’s become accustomed to.

This is why people don’t act on the things they know are real and tend to stay in their comfort zones even when it’s crushing their souls day after day – not because the action is impossible but because they haven’t yet updated the systems that are still playing out in the background.

Three Systems That Keep You Stuck (and How to Flip Them)

To break free and build a life based on truth instead of performance, you have to work at the level of deeper systems not just surface-level decisions.

Here are the three internal systems that matter most when it comes to getting over your fear of real change and actually taking action:

1. Belief System

You need to upgrade your inner programming so it’s actually aligned with reality:

Most people never question the beliefs that shape their lives and just assume that their assumptions are facts (and if somebody is making assumptions about their assumptions we know they’re in deep!).

If you dig into your resistance to change, however, then you’ll almost always find unreal beliefs hiding underneath that limit you in some way and cause you to be unable to trust yourself or life to give you what you really need.

Some examples of these limiting beliefs might be:

  • “If I do what I really want, I’ll disappoint everyone”.
  • “I need to earn love by sacrificing myself”.
  • “I’m not good enough to live life on my terms.”

These are lies that we treat as the truth and act according to the dictates of but they feel true because they were installed so early on in our lives that we just take them at face value.

The price of not challenging and updating these beliefs is that they’ll override any conscious desire for change and you’ll keep saying you want something while unconsciously pulling in the opposite direction.

The fix for this is pretty simple:

Start observing your thoughts with curiosity instead of judgement and start to look for patterns that limit you and hold you back.

Write them down and trace them back.

Ask yourself:

Where did I learn this? Is it actually true? What’s a more real belief I can replace it with to change my life in that real way I crave and know I really need?

2. Nervous System

You also need to regulate the emotional body at the level of the nervous system:

A huge part of why people resist real change is because their body sees it as a threat.

Even if your mind wants to take action, if your nervous system is dysregulated, you’ll freeze, fawn, fight, or flee every time you anywhere even close to the truth – you’ll feel overwhelmed, anxious, detached, angry, tired, or emotionally numb. And all of this will convince you that “now isn’t the right time.”

The fix at this level is to become more grounded:

Start regulating your nervous system through breathwork, grounding practices, movement, and somatic practises like yin yoga.

The more safety you can create in your body, the more capacity you’ll have to hold emotional intensity and to navigate the uncertainty of change and transformation without letting it derail you.

3. Vision System

Finally, you need to create a vision of a future that pulls you forward:

Without a vision for the life you want to create, your old patterns will keep winning, and you’ll just keep getting the results you’ve already got.

Real change isn’t just about what you’re moving away from – it’s also about what you’re moving towards (and making sure that whatever this might be is real).

You need a real, meaningful, heart-aligned vision that you can break into clear goals and then daily habits that make those goals inevitable.

The fix is to take the steps to create clarity around your own vision:

Ask: If I was being completely real with myself, what kind of life would I create?

Don’t censor it. Write it down and make it vivid.

Then, turn it into steps and commit to small, daily actions that move you in that direction – even when it’s uncomfortable.

My free 7-day Video Course will help you create a real vision that you’re excited to move forward with: The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness & Life Purpose

Realness Comes With Consequences But So Does Staying Unreal

Here’s the truth that a lot of people don’t want to admit:

Doing something real might shake things up and – in the process of being shaken – some of the unreal things in your life might fall by the wayside.

You might disappoint people, you might lose approval, and you’ll definitely have to let go of a version of yourself that’s been keeping you ‘safe’ but slowly killing your soul.

But don’t forget that staying unreal and not making any of the changes that are calling out to you from deep down in the shadows of the current version of yourself comes with consequences too:

  • A job you dread waking up for (because it’s not aligned with any of your real values).

  • A relationship that makes you feel lonely even when you’re together (because nobody is being real and so there can be no intimacy).

  • A body that stores tension and stress because it’s sick of playing roles (and so you keep everything inside instead of letting things flow).

  • A voice that never says what it really wants to say (because you’re disconnected from your core realness).

  • A life that looks fine on the surface but feels hollow underneath (because it’s not rooted in anything true).

So, yes, doing something real may be uncomfortable at first but it’s the only thing that leads to real results and ensures that your life is one you actually feel authentic in.

Why Some People Won’t Like It (And Why That’s Okay)

One of the biggest hidden reasons people don’t act on their truth is because they know deep down that it will force others to confront their own unreality.

This is essentially because when you start living in a real way, you shine a light and not everybody will be ready for what that light reveals about themselves and their own lives.

They may say you’ve changed (which you have); they may feel rejected (because you’re not playing the same role they became accustomed to); they may try to pull you back into the version of you they’re more comfortable with (so they can keep their ego where it currently is and resist growing real).

The only thing you can do in cases like this is to let them get on with it (whilst having compassion for the how shifting dynamics are asking them to look at themselves in some way)…

You’re not here to manage other people’s comfort but to live in truth – that doesn’t mean that you should purposely set out to harm or make others uncomfortable but it does mean that you shouldn’t hold back on being real just because something might have to deal with their own emotional ‘stuff’ (which is different to physical danger).

Often, the realest thing you can do for the people you love is to lead the way by stepping up and being real first because – when you stand in your realness – you give others permission to do the same – even if they resist at first.

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

Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’re ready to become unstuck and start trusting yourself to make real change in your life.

Practical Steps to Start Living Real Without Holding Yourself Back

Let’s bring all of this down to earth and start shifting into some ACTION that you can take…

If you’re standing on the threshold of knowing something in your life needs to change but still holding back and resisting then here’s where to begin:

1. Name what’s real.

Ask yourself or journal on this simple, probing question:

What do I know is true but that I’ve been avoiding?

Be as honest as you possibly can be with yourself about what you already know is real but you’re not doing anything with or about.

2. Spot the unconscious intention.

Notice where you say you want something but your actions don’t match and so nothing ever changes.

Dig into this to try and figure out what’s going on:

What fear, guilt, or shame might be keeping me stuck here?

There’s an article that goes into more detail about unconscious intentions here: Hacking the Unconscious Mind: A Psychological Hack for REALNESS

3. Challenge the belief system.

Take some of your core beliefs and interrogate them by trying to determine if they’re based on reality or just old programming.

A good exercise to dig deep here is known as the 5 Whys Technique which helps you to get to the root of your beliefs.

To use it, you simply keep asking “Why?” until you hit rock bottom:

For example:

“I want to change my life by starting a new business but I can never find the time.”

On the surface, this might just seem like a simple time management issue but using the 5 Whys technique, we can dig deeper and uncover the real source of (unconscious) resistance.

1st Why:
Q: Why do I feel like I can never find the time to start my new business?
A: Because my schedule is already packed with work, chores, and other commitments.

2nd Why:
Q: Why is my schedule packed with all those things?
A: Because I say “Yes” to everything and try to keep everyone happy even if it leaves me no time for myself.

3rd Why:
Q: Why do I feel the need to say “Yes” to everything and please everyone?
A: Because I feel guilty when I prioritise my own goals over other people’s needs.

4th Why:
Q: Why do I feel guilty for prioritising my goals?
A: Because, deep down, I don’t fully believe my goals are as important or valid as helping others.

5th Why:
Q: Why don’t I believe my goals are as important or valid?
A: Because I’ve tied my worth to being useful to others instead of allowing myself to follow what’s meaningful to me.

What we can see here is that the belief “I want to change my life by starting a new business but I can never find the time” isn’t really about being too busy at all:

It’s actually about not giving yourself permission to value your own dreams because of underlying shame and guilt which is setting an unconscious intention that outweighs the conscious desire to make real change.

4. Regulate before you act.

Create emotional safety by regulating your nervous system:

The simplest way is to make time every day to breathe, move, and feel whatever you’re feeling (instead of resisting it).

There’s more about nervous system regulation here: Nervous System Regulation for Realness: Finding Your Natural Rhythm

5. Craft a real vision.

Decide what you want to move towards and know that your reasons for moving in this way are real.

This article will get you started with the vision work: REAL LIFE VISION: Merging Past, Present, and Future

6. Take micro actions.

You don’t need to flip your entire life overnight:

Just take one real step today and then another tomorrow.

This will allow you to build the muscle of realness through repetition as you learn by doing and compound your results over time (for example, if you want to write a book and you write 100 words a day you’ll have 700 words each week).

This article has some ideas for micro actions that will change your life over time: 30 habits you can start RIGHT NOW to improve your life.

The fear of real change just leaves your life to chance.

Final Thought: You’re Not Here to Perform

You’re not here to play it ‘safe’ all the time and you’re not here to repeat someone else’s script.

You’re not here to tick the boxes of a life that looks good but feels dead.

You’re here to be REAL.

Yes, it might come with consequences but those consequences are usually the cost of freedom whereas the consequences of staying unreal just keep you ‘stuck’.

So step across the threshold topple the false foundations of anything unreal in your life.

Let people see the truth and build a life that’s real from the inside out.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to cross the threshold from unreal to real in order to finally start changing your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you find your way (and keep you accountable).

Emotionally Absent Fathers and the Mask of Masculinity: How Men Get Lost Trying to ‘Be a Man’

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emotionally absent fathers

Shifting Back into a Real Timeline After Being Emotionally ‘Unseen’ in Boyhood

A lot of men live out their lives as the walking wounded but they won’t necessarily let anybody know this – in fact, you won’t usually see it at all:

They might be the funny guy, the stoic guy; the guy with the plan, the nice guy, the successful one, or the ‘provider’…but underneath it all, something’s missing and has been for as long as they can remember:

A father.

This might not necessarily be in the physical sense of literally being present – his father might’ve once-upon-a-time been there in the house and paid the bills. He might’ve even said “I love you” or other fatherly type things but if he was emotionally absent – by showing up as distant, angry, unavailable, or cold – then chances are, he unwittingly sent his son hurtling into what I call the Void.

This Void is the inner emptiness men inherit when they grow up without emotional guidance or mirroring from their dads:

To survive the feelings of restlessness and shame that come with it, boys put on a mask of masculinity – one that allows them to go through life showing the world that “I’m fine”, “I don’t need anyone” or “I’ll prove I’m a man anyway”.

But the mask is never the man and the longer you wear it, the more lost you become, and the more symptoms of the Void you start to experience in your life.

This article is about how to take the mask off and reclaim the real life you were meant to be living all along.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You don't inherit masculinity but earn it so don't worry about your emotionally absent father.

What Happens When a Father Is Absent or Unavailable

When a boy grows up without his father’s emotional presence – without being truly seen, heard, and validated – a few things happen that can affect the course of his whole life if he doesn’t understand what’s going on and reclaim himself:

  1. He internalises shame: He doesn’t feel worthy, because the first masculine figure in his life didn’t show up emotionally so he blames himself, thinks “It must be me“, and becomes ashamed about his own real core.

  2. He distrusts the world: If the one person who was supposed to love him unconditionally didn’t give him that love, how can anyone else? This holds him back from trusting and being able to go out there and live in a real way.

  3. He wears a mask: He builds a version of himself designed to ‘survive’ – which usually means to get attention, praise, sex, money, and control but never true connection (because all of these things he’s trying to ‘get’ are substitutes for the only thing that can help overcome the Void: the truth).

That boy becomes a man who’s physically grown but emotionally stuck – a kind of ‘boy’ in an adult body who’s walking around trying to be a ‘man’ but underneath still feels like a lost child wondering where Dad went and who he’s supposed to be without him.

This is the false timeline of the unreal man.

This is because living from this wound creates a distorted masculine timeline which becomes the life of a man who’s always chasing something but never arriving anywhere real.

Symptoms of living in this timelines include:

  • People-pleasing and perfectionism.

  • Overachieving without ever feeling satisfied.

  • Rage and repressed emotion

  • Addictions (sex, drugs, validation)

  • A deep inability to connect vulnerably

Men on this timeline might succeed for a while; they might even ‘win’. But none of it really matters because it’s all a performance and he doesn’t know who he is without the proving.

The False Timeline of the Man Who Had an Emotionally Absent Father

Many men in our generation generation were born into a timeline that was never meant for them:

The fatherless timeline.

This wasn’t necessarily because their fathers were ‘bad’ people but because they were simply too busy dealing with (or running away from) their own emotional ‘stuff’ or having to spend too much time at work and away from the family home. Even when they were at home, their thoughts were often distracted and preoccupied in facing the difficulties of the world and figuring out what to do about it.

Either way, the end result of all this has been a generation of men raised with no map:

Those ‘boys’ in adult bodies, silently screaming for initiation, aching for a sense of direction, but told to “man up” and get on with it (though, it must be pointed out that “manning up” is one of the best things you can do as a man if you do it in a REAL way and not in a way that suppresses).

Getting on with it is exactly what most of these men learned to do in order to cope with life:

They learned how to wear the mask; how to hustle for love; how to ‘prove’ their worth by chasing money, status, women, muscle, or meaning (again, as substitutes for the truth).

But underneath it all, many of them continued to feel like frauds:

This is because they were just playing characters in the dreamworld of the Void and so there was always that endless low hum of shame that haunting them:

“If only my dad had seen me, I’d feel like a real man by now“.

It’s not often talked about, but it’s there – a fractured and fragmented foundation of the self…the quiet belief that we were never enough for our fathers and so we might not be enough for ourselves.

When you build a life on this belief, everything becomes a performance:

You don’t trust life because you can’t trust yourself (because you lost any sense of solid footing); you become outcome-dependent which means that you outsource your self-worth and levels of acceptance into external results.

You say what people want to hear instead of speaking the truth; you become passive, avoidant, or reactive and you may even become addicted to suffering or success – doing just about anything to distract yourself from that Void.

This is how emotional fatherlessness creates a ripple that can stretch across a lifetime:

You grow older but you don’t grow up; you feel something is missing but you don’t know what. You become a man with no inner throne, drifting through life as a people-pleaser, a perfectionist, a porn addict, a passive partner, or a high achiever who still feels hollow.

But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

There is another path a way to reclaim your seat at the table of your own life and it all starts with something radical.

If you’re a man who can relate to this article then the Father Wound Workbook in the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can help you to start letting go and moving forward in a real way.

Realness: Breaking the Mask, Reclaiming the Man

Here’s the hard truth: your dad’s emotional absence probably wasn’t your fault but healing from it is definitely your responsibility (if you want to live your real life that is…).

You don’t heal by blaming either him or yourself forever but by reclaiming your masculine soul – by stepping off the false timeline and becoming real.

Realness is essentially about living from the truth of who you are not from the mask; it means becoming the father to yourself that you never had and grounding yourself in purpose, structure, and vulnerability, not performance.

Here are some practical ways that you can start to do this:

Reclaiming Your Life and Growing Real

Kill the King: Let Go of the Idealised Father

Many men unconsciously spend their lives trying to please or punish the ghost of their father for being emotionally absent in some way. The problem is that no matter how they do this – whether through rebellion, imitation, or some other device – their identity is still shaped as a reaction to someone who isn’t even here (or never was).

To be free, you need to let go of the fantasy and fully embrace the fact that the father you wish you had is not the one you got. Mourn this lost ideal and then move on.

You don’t need to hate the father that you actually have – just release the story that keeps you trying to win his approval.

You can’t move forward if you’re still unconsciously waiting for an idealised version of your dad to show up and bless you yet many men are walking around with a fantasy father in their psyche by clinging to an idea of the one who should have seen them, taught them, or affirmed them.

Seriously, let that go. Mourn it. Rage about it if you need to.

Write the letter. Burn the letter. Whatever you need.

Just kill that ghost.

Step Into the Fire & Feel What Was Never Felt

The reason the mask exists is because there are parts of you that feel too dangerous to express – sadness, fear, helplessness, longing or even feelings like joy and love – but these are the very things that make you human and ultimately, whole.

These parts of you are hidden behind the mask (ego) in what I like to call the Shadow Territory – the domain where your Shadow Self (all of the hidden parts of yourself) have been sent into exile despite being totally real and totally needed for you to live your realest life.

The only way forward is to take off the mask and yourself feel whatever it is about yourself that you’ve been hiding from yourself:

This might mean working with a coach like me; it might mean journalling, breathwork, or even just learning to feel again.

Either way, real men feel, and if you want to put yourself back on your own real timeline then you’re gonna have to feel in order to make the time leap.

You have to accept yourself before can become the version of yourself you want to be.

In other words, you need to accept yourself fully – ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘light’ and ‘dark’ – so that you have a solid foundation on which to build your future.

If you only build on the foundation of the mask and the mask is unreal then whatever you build is destined to crumble.

Build a REAL Life By Creating Structure From Truth

Once you’ve let go of the mask and faced the Void, you get to build something new: a real life based on truth, not survival.

This essentially means:

  • Owning your values and living by them.

  • Pursuing a purposeful vision that allows you to keep growing more real.

  • Cultivating emotional and relational integrity within yourself (which improves your relationships with others).

  • Surrounding yourself with real people (because iron sharpens iron).

This is how you become the man you were always meant to be – not by proving you’re a man, but by actually being one.

This type of structure provides a masculine container for your life so you can cultivate focus, discipline, and direction.

Build the Vision

Once the old script dies, you can write a new one and that comes down to knowing your vision (as mentioned in the last section).

As simple way to get started with this is to ask yourself what kind of man you want to be – not to prove anything but because it’s real to you.

Without this vision, you’ll always be vulnerable to the world’s noise and will be more likely to become distracted.

You can also use it as a way to GIFT yourself some of the qualities that you felt were lacking in your idealised relationship with your father: maybe that means growing in terms of compassion, self-respect, or simply just giving yourself the attention you need.

With the right vision, you can heal any wounds.

Regulate Your Nervous System

If you were raised in an environment of emotional neglect or pressure, your body might still be in survival mode which means that your nervous system needs to be regulated (because you have sympathetic dominance which means you’re stuck in fight-or-flight).

Learn to calm your nervous system so that you can act from choice instead of reaction:

Breathwork, cold exposure, somatic therapy, conscious movement, yin yoga – find something that works for you because your body trusts you, your confidence grows and you will be more able to tap into your natural masculine grounding.

Reclaim the Throne

When you stop waiting for someone else to initiate you into your real life as a man, you begin the process of self-initiation.

This is how you become a man – not just a boy in an adult body:

You stop outsourcing your self-worth, you stop fearing your emotions, you stop judging yourself and others, you replace projecting shame with integrated truth.

Real confidence isn’t about feeling good all the time but about moving in alignment with what’s real even when you feel afraid or have to leave your comfort zone; it’s the ability to act without needing a guarantee and the result of inner abundance over outer approval.

That kind of confidence isn’t something you think your way into but something you live your way into.

Every man – no matter his past – has access to this if he steps up and switches from an unreal to a real timeline.

Don't argue with yourself about who you should be because you had an emotionally absent father. Be who you are at your realest.

Emotionally Absent Fathers Final Words: The Mask Isn’t You

If you grew up with an emotionally absent father, then accept that the pain you feel is real but that the man you became to survive isn’t the man you have to keep being.

You can put down the mask; you can step out of the Void; you can step into a new timeline.

The journey begins when you stop trying to be a man and start BECOMING yourself.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to step into your truth and reclaim the power that was buried under the shame, I can help – book a free coaching call with me today and I’ll help you shift back into your real life.

People Walk All Over Me (and How to Stop Being A People Pleaser)

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People walk all over me because I'm a people pleaser

How You Conditioned Yourself To Be a People Pleaser & How To Get Your Realness Back

Let’s cut straight to the chase:

If you keep letting people walk all over you and acting like a people pleaser, it’s not because you’re weak or because you’re inherently broken or destined to be a doormat for eternity but because – somewhere along the line – you got convinced that playing small was the best way to get through life.

Over the years, this kind of shrinking away from yourself and life instead of LEANING INTO it all became a habit and you started to play the role so well that you’ve forgotten it’s not actually you.

This article is about changing that once and for all so you can reclaim your real life:

We’re going to explore why so many of us end up in the habit of over-giving, people-pleasing, and tolerating disrespect and – more importantly – how to break the cycle.

We won’t be attempting to do this via performative confidence or fake-it-til-you-make-it assertiveness ‘hacks’ but by getting real with yourself, your shame, your ego, and the hidden power you forgot you had.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The reward for people pleasing is that people walk all over you.

The Real Reason You Let People Walk All Over You

When you’re walking in your own realness (the truth about yourself without masks or performance), there’s a natural give-and-take to life that you actively engage in:

You know when to say “yes”, when to say “no”, when to lean in, and when to step back – it’s a balanced flow that comes from working with reality instead of against it.

On the other side of the coin, when you’re not real – when you’re caught up in ego patterns or playing roles – that flow gets hijacked and your life starts to pick up unnecessary friction that brings frustration and misery in the form of anxiety and even depression:

In this unreal ego state, you either give too much (people-pleasing) or take too much (entitlement). Both of these approaches are just different reactions to underlying SHAME.

If you’re someone who tends to get walked over and ends up effacing yourself because of people pleasing tendencies, then it’s because you’re stuck in a pattern of over-giving:

That usually means you’re caught up in a neurotic loop (fuelled by your underlying shame) and blaming yourself for everything, trying to ‘earn’ your place, and hoping that if you’re just nice enough, generous enough, or agreeable enough, that people will like you and stop you from feeling that creeping sense of shame you carry.

Unfortunately, even though this people pleasing strategy is an attempt to escape from that underlying shame, it only ever masks the problem because the more you deny your truth to please others, the stronger the shame gets (because shame is really just a disconnection from the truth).

Shame, Ego, and the Role You’re Playing

When we’re stuck in over-giving, we’re living our lives from behind the filter of a false self – the mask of ego:

You created this mask to survive because, somewhere along the line, your nervous system decided that being agreeable and useful to others was the safest way to get attention, approval, or protection.

This probably worked for a while but, over time, that strategy became a prison and you just ended up living as a character in someone else’s story – or many people’s stories – instead of allowing yourself to be the main character in your own.

Here’s the road that you probably took to find yourself where you currently are (with people walking all over you if you’re reading this article):

  • You said “Yes” when you meant “No” (usually saying “No” to the real ‘stuff’ and “Yes” to the unreal ‘stuff’).

  • You stayed silent when your boundaries are crossed (because your shame made you feel like you didn’t deserve basic respect).

  • You over-explained yourself to avoid conflict (because you’ve become disconnected from your core sense of truth).

  • You gave, gave, gave…and then felt resentful (because nobody really appreciated your efforts, you ran out of energy, and your shame still didn’t go anywhere).

Deep down, you know this way of being and behaving in the world isn’t the real you – in fact, the more you be and behave in this way, the more you can feel the Void creeping in – the sense that you’re disconnected not just from others but also from yourself and life itself at the deepest possible level of truth.

Realness = Balance

Being real doesn’t mean swinging to the other extreme and becoming hard, cold, or selfish – it just means returning to a healthy inner balance where you can:

  • Give when it’s real to give (because you’re in touch with your realness and so you know what gifts you have to share with the world).

  • Receive when it’s real to receive (because you know that you’re worthy of receiving the gifts that life has to offer and your shame doesn’t block this from happening).

  • Say “Yes” when it’s a yes and “No” when it’s a no (because you’re rooted in the truth and know it as part of your being).

All of this is basically about living from your centre instead of your F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”) and it starts by going through the three stages of real transformation: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

(These are the three stages I build my coaching containers around when working with clients).

Stage 1: Awareness – Deconstructing the Ego

This is where you get radically honest with yourself and take a good look at that mask you’ve been wearing (ego):

It starts by asking yourself some questions about the people pleasing pattern that’s led to people walking all over you:

  • When did I learn that being overly-accommodating would protect me?

  • Whose love or approval was I trying to win?

  • What am I afraid will happen if I stop playing this role?

You might find that this pattern goes way back to your childhood, school years, or early relationships in general. Don’t get too caught up on it because it doesn’t actually matter where it came from…what does matter it’s that it’s not REAL and if you want to start making lasting changes then you need to figure out what real looks like instead.

The ego isn’t evil or anything (despite what you might have heard about killing it etc. – you can’t kill something that’s unreal) – it’s just a coping mechanism that became outdated and so doesn’t serve you anymore.

“Deconstructing” it doesn’t mean hating yourself – it just means seeing your story clearly so you can finally let go of the script and start actually living.

Stage 2: Acceptance – Reclaiming Your Shadow Power

Once you’ve seen the pattern and the ways that the ego is causing you to hold back and hesitate, the next step is accepting that your real power has been exiled into the Shadow Territory as ‘part’ of the Shadow Self.

You haven’t lost this power; you’re just disconnected from it.

In Realness work, we talk about the Shadow Territory a lot and it refers to the ‘parts’ of you that you’ve hidden away because you thought they were too much, not enough, or somehow something to feel shame around.

For people-pleasers, this often includes:

  • Anger

  • Assertiveness

  • Self-worth

  • Boundaries

None of these things are flaws – far from it, in fact, they all help you to protect your dignity and to serve as fuel for your real life. They’re actually vital aspects of your wholeness and need them to live fully and in a real way.

Acceptance at this stage doesn’t mean resignation – it means reintegration which simply means welcoming these lost parts home and back out of unnecessary exile.

Stage 3: Action – Trusting Yourself and Life Through Real Movement

Here’s where things change permanently: through real action.

It might be tough for some people to hear (though you’ve probably heard it before) but the truth is that nothing will shift in a real way until you do something different….you can’t just ‘think’ your way out of being a doormat.

You have to act your way back into the truth by acting in alignment with what you know is true.

As I like to say on this site:

All you really need to do is:

  1. Uncover the truth
  2. Live the truth

This means that you start to:

  • Say “No” to the unreal ‘stuff’ that you used to say “Yes” to.

  • Setting boundaries and holding them because you live according to your lasting principles more than your temporary feelings.

  • Speaking when the time comes (even if you’re scared).

At first, this will feel unnatural and you might feel guilty or face some push back from people but this is all part of the process:

In fact, here’s something to watch out for once you put yourself on this path:

When you change, the people who benefited from the old version of you will often resist your growth and try to coerce you into going back to the ‘Old’ You.

They might say you’re being selfish; that you’ve changed; that you’re not “being nice” anymore, but – honestly – that’s not your problem, it’s there’s (if you’re being real).

It’s all just a sign of growth because what’s really happening is this:

The reconfiguration of your ego and the roles you were playing has caused them to look at themselves and they’re not ready for that (because of their own emotional and ego ‘stuff’ that’s causing them to be unreal).

Let them deal with their discomfort and work on it whilst you stay focused on growing real.

Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World

Read my book Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World if you want to go much deeper into understanding your own shadow and the process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

Obstacles on the Path (And How to Handle Them)

As you start to make the shift from unreal to real and overcome some of your people pleasing traits and tendencies, you might have to contend with some of the following emotional ‘stuff’ that was fuelling it in the first place:

1. Guilt

It will feel wrong to prioritise your realness at first but that’s totally okay. Do it anyway. It’s only happening because you’re going against your old habitual way of showing up (which was just ego).

2. Fear of Rejection

Some people might actually walk away from you if you step out of the familiar roles they’re used to you playing but the ones know the real you will stick around. Let the seasons change and what’s real will always remain.

3. Self-Doubt

You’ll wonder if you’re overreacting but you’re probably not – if you feel walked on, then that’s enough information for you to know that it’s time to start making some changes.

Anchoring Your Realness with Vision, Goals, and Habits

If you want to supercharge this transformation then getting clarity about your direction for moving forward will speed up your progress, dissolve those old and unreal stories that keep you people pleasing, and help you to avoid distractions.

You can do this by creating a real vision for who you want to become, break it down into clear goals, and then building daily habits that move you in that direction.

This helps because:

  • It gives your energy somewhere productive to go instead of having it turn against you.

  • It keeps you focused on who you’re growing to BECOME when others try to drag you back into old roles.

  • It helps you build evidence that you’re growing into someone stronger, truer, and more powerful and so those old gremlins of ego no longer have power over you.

Over time, your old identity and all of the people pleasing software it was running against you will feel alien – in fact, it won’t even make sense to people-please anymore because you’ll know how unreal it was.

Practical Steps: How to Stop People Pleasing and Letting People Walk All Over You

1. Daily Realness Check-In

Finish each evening by reflecting on your day as a people pleaser:

  • Where did I compromise my realness today?
  • What one action can I take to reclaim it?

2. Boundary Rehearsals

Practise saying “No” in low-stakes situations and build the muscle over time.

3. Shadow Work Journalling

Journal on the parts of you that you hide and ask yourself questions like “What would happen if I let this part speak today?”

This page has a lot of Shadow Work exercises that can also help you to get in touch with your shadow self: 100 Shadow Work Exercises: Making the Unconscious Conscious & Growing Real

4. Ego Role Spotting

Watch out for yourself playing roles like the Nice Guy/Girl and stop and pause when you find yourself in this state.

Pause. Then ask yourself:

What’s the real version of me want to say or do right now?

Do that instead.

5. Build a Realness Vision Map

My free 7-day video course comes with 158-page workbook and will help you to create a vision for yourself so you have a solid direction to move in:

The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness & Life Purpose

When you people please, you shrink.

People Pleasing and Letting People Walk All Over You: Final Words

You don’t need to become somebody or something else to stop being walked over – you just need to stop pretending to be unreal.

Realness isn’t a mask but a homecoming.

Stop giving yourself away to people who only know how to take and reclaim a relationship with the truth instead of ego. Reclaim your power and start walking your own path with the kind of presence that doesn’t need to shout to be heard.

If people say you’ve changed then smile and agree that you have. Let them know that you’ve finally come home to yourself and that they can too if they like.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to grow real and stop being walked all over then book a free coaching session with me today and I’ll help you start leaning in instead of shrinking away.

Fake Confidence vs Real Confidence: How to Know the Difference and Grow

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fake confidence vs. real confidence

You Can’t Fake Being Real But You Can Fake Being Unreal

Let’s be honest for a hot minute:

The world is full of people pretending to be confident – just look around you and you’ll see that they’re literally all over the place (it’s the real pandemic):

Puffing out their chests and walking around like they’re carrying a carpet under each arm, talking too loudly and too often, flaunting their wins on social media, and throwing around buzzwords like ‘alpha energy’ or ‘high value’ like they’re playing a role in a badly-written Netflix series.

It might look like confidence, sound like confidence, and maybe even smell like confidence but – at the same time – something doesn’t quite add up.

That’s because it’s not REAL.

This article is going to teach you a skill that will serve you for the rest of your life because it’s based around a simple fact about life:

You can smell fake confidence a mile off if you know what you’re looking for.

We’re going to explore the difference between fake (unreal) confidence and real (earned, grounded) confidence:

More importantly, we’ll also look at how you can grow in terms of real confidence for yourself – the kind that doesn’t need a performance, doesn’t collapse when things go ‘wrong’, and doesn’t depend on endless applause and validation to stay standing.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Fake confidence is what happens when your fear dictates your life.

The Myth of “Always Feeling Good”

Let’s start by debunking one of the biggest myths out there when it comes to what confidence is all about:

Real confidence doesn’t mean you always feel good.

In fact, real confidence often involves feeling uncomfortable, uncertain, and sometimes even scared because it means that you have to live in such a way where you keep stretching yourself and taking yourself out of your comfort zone.

The difference between real confidence and fake confidence is that when you’re truly confident, you act anyway because you have a bias for action that keeps you in the zone and so you trust yourself to move, even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

Fake confidence, on the other hand, is rooted in the need to feel ‘good’ all the time (usually because that’s what the ego needs as a denial of reality to sustain itself):

It’s a brittle form of self-belief that relies on controlling perceptions and outcomes but that just means that as soon as something goes wrong the mask slips, the insecurities come flooding in, and suddenly Mr “High Value Male” is curled up in the foetal position because someone said a simple “No” to him.

Real Confidence is Grown in the Flow, Not Forced

Here’s the good news about all this:

Confidence is not an innate talent – it’s a muscle.

You don’t need to have been born with a deep voice and an unshakeable presence to grow real confidence.

In fact, real confidence often comes after you’ve experienced rejection, failure, and all the awkwardness and confusion that comes from testing yourself in the furnace of life and learning from whatever this process has to teach you.

It’s not about faking your way into a feeling with the whole “fake it until you make it” idea that’s so popular – it’s simply about showing up again and again until you become the kind of person who trusts themselves to handle life (and who also trusts life to be handleable).

Real confidence is built on a history of consistent, real action.

You don’t become confident by thinking about being confident:

You become confident by doing real things like having the hard conversation, setting boundaries, failing publicly, following through on your commitments, and showing up even when you don’t feel like it (because your visions and principles keep reminding you that it’s what you need to do and so your ‘feelings’ – which can change from moment to moment – don’t really get a say).

This is an empowering truth about life because it means anyone can grow confidence, no matter where they start.

Even you.

Judgement Kills Confidence

Real confidence isn’t loud, isn’t pushy, and it definitely isn’t judgmental.

This is why we can say that one of the clearest signs of fake confidence is constant judgement of others:

Mocking, belittling, or trying to one-up everyone in the room.

People only do this to project power because they don’t feel powerful internally and so they’re trying to self-inflate and distract themselves from the shame that’s really driving them.

But here’s what real confidence knows and lives by:

Judgement is almost always projection.

When we judge others, we’re really showing the world where we’re still insecure and when we judge ourselves harshly, we’re cutting off the very growth that would allow confidence to emerge naturally.

Real confidence means we stop needing to judge in order to feel okay:

We recognise that people are on their own path and so are we and so we can drop the comparison game, drop the need to be better than anyone else, and stop trying to win imaginary battles around points that don’t even matter (like we do in popularity contests, for example).

Confidence doesn’t mean you think you’re better than everyone – it means you no longer feel the need to prove that you are because you’re too busy expressing what’s real about yourself.

Scarcity vs. Abundance: The Real Test

If you want a quick shortcut to test whether someone (or yourself) is acting with real or fake confidence, ask this:

Is whatever you’re currently doing coming from scarcity or abundance?

Fake confidence is deeply rooted in scarcity which is why it says things like:

  • I need to win this or I’m nothing.

  • I must be liked or I have no value.

  • I must dominate or I’ll be dominated.

It’s brittle, fragile, and reactive and always leads to outcome-dependence which is the unhealthy need to achieve a certain result in order to feel worthy.

This kind of scarcity thinking is where most people go wrong when it comes to real confidence – they confuse external success with internal security.

Real confidence is born from abundance and says thinks like:

  • I trust myself to grow even if I fail.

  • I don’t need everyone to like me because I like myself and the people I care about like me.

  • I’m expressing something real, not proving something unreal.

This means you’re outcome-independent:

You still have goals, sure – but your sense of worth and acceptance of yourself doesn’t depend on achieving them.

You don’t need to prove your worth to the world, because you’re already living from it.

Expression Over Performance

At its core, real confidence is about expression, not performance:

Fake confidence puts on a show to get something: admiration, validation, praise, power.

Real confidence shows up to give something: honesty, value, presence, truth.

One of these approaches is just a hustle but the other is a flow.

When you’re truly confident, you show up with your whole self because you can accept everything about yourself (including your shadow self) – flaws, doubts, fears – because you’re not trying to manipulate the moment…you’re there to connect, not control.

Perhaps ironically, this kind of confidence is the most magnetic of all because people can trust it – they lean into it and feel it, even if they can’t quite name it (usually because they can tell that the person with this kind of confidence has a regulated nervous system and so they feel ‘safe’ around them).

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

Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to learn to trust yourself and life deeply so you can develop true confidence.

Practical Steps to Grow Real Confidence

So now that you understand all the ‘theory’ behind all of this ‘stuff’ how do you move from fake to real confidence? How do you stop performing and start expressing?

Here’s a simple, powerful framework you can start using today if you want to make all of this practical:

1. Build Trust Through Action

Stop waiting to feel confident before you act and, instead, act to build confidence as a by-product of stretching that ‘muscle’:

  • Set small, achievable goals and follow through consistently.

  • Speak up in situations where you’d normally stay quiet but have something real to share (don’t just say something unreal for the sake of it).

  • Stretch your comfort zone with micro-challenges (e.g. asking for something you want, taking a cold shower, having a tough conversation).

Confidence isn’t born in theory – it’s born in doing.

2. Ditch Outcome-Dependence

Detach your sense of worth from external results:

  • Before any action, ask: “Am I doing this to prove something unreal or express something real?”

  • Celebrate effort and honesty over success and polish.

  • Redefine failure as feedback – not as a judgement of your worth.

3. Practise Non-Judgement Daily

Judgement is the enemy of flow because it just ends up placing mental barriers in your path that cause you to hesitate and hold back from real action:

  • Notice when you’re judging yourself or others next time you catch yourself judging things: “What fear or insecurity is behind this judgement?”

  • Replace judgement with curiosity and commit to learning about yourself, the world, and reality daily.

  • Surround yourself with people who challenge you without condemning you so that you can keep growing by letting go of the unreal (iron sharpens iron).

4. Create a Vision of Your Own Realness

Define what confidence means for you as a reflection of your own realness:

  • What would you do differently in your life if you weren’t trying to prove anything?

  • What values would you live by if you trusted yourself completely?

  • What are the daily actions that align with this version of you?

Reflect on this vision for yourself often and keep updating it as you take real action and move forwards.

5. Get Comfortable with Discomfort

Real confidence often feels a bit scary because it involves finding your own edge…that’s just part of the deal.

  • Practise sitting with fear without needing to eliminate it.

  • Learn to breathe, ground, and move with the fear.

  • Repeat the mantra: “I can do hard things, even if I don’t feel ready.”

All of these things are about learning to regulate your nervous system so you can sit with uncomfortable emotions and still feel safe with them instead of treating them as actual physical danger.

Fake confidence just holds you back from life.

Fake Confidence vs. Real Confidence: Final Thoughts

Real confidence isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room or walking with a swagger that screams, “Look at me” – instead, it’s about walking through the world without needing to shrink or puff yourself up.

It’s about trusting yourself to face life, not needing to control it. In other words, it’s about being real.

Anyone can fake confidence but growing into the real thing? That’s where life starts to open up in a powerful way that will change the trajectory of your whole life.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start growing real and you’re interested in coaching then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take real action and keep you accountable.

Overcoming Lust as a Man: Mastering the Fire and Reclaiming Your Path

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Overcoming lust as a man

Lust Can Either Lead You into the Void or into Liberation

Let’s be real (that’s what we’re here for, after all):

One of the biggest internal battles most men face – often silently and pretty much daily – is the battle with lust.

It’s not that fashionable to talk about it and it’s not easy to admit to but behind closed doors – behind the phone screen at midnight or behind the string of half-hearted relationships and one-night encounters – there it is…lurking and guiding our actions without so much as a second-thought.

If lust is something that you’re becoming tired of letting control you in your own life, then you’re definitely not alone and many men have experienced feeling out of control when it comes to their sexual urges or behaviours.

If you can relate to this then it doesn’t mean that you’re ‘broken’ or that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with you but it is a sign that you do need to get serious about the path you’re walking so that you can start growing REAL.

This article is going to help you understand that lust isn’t just a naughty little itch that you can scratch and be done with – instead, it’s more like a fire.

And when you don’t know how to contain fire, it burns down the whole house.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Lust is about craving things that can never satiate or satisfy you.

Lust: The Fire That Consumes

Lust is unlike most other distractions – it’s not passive like scrolling social media and it’s not subtle like the games we might be addicted to playing to get a quick ego-stroke and feel good about ourselves.

Instead, it’s raw, it’s animalistic, and a kind of living fire that starts in your gut and demands fuel – any fuel and at any cost – to keep burning.

The more heat this ‘fire’ accumulates as it roars, the more tension builds within you:

It sits in your chest, creeps into your mind, and suddenly you’re no longer able to focus on on what matters because you’re completely restless and can no longer sit still.

It’s in these moments that you choose to open incognito mode or wing that text over to somebody you know that you shouldn’t. You rationalise and make excuses in your head simply to justify a release of the tension the fire has caused you. You know you won’t be able to rest or focus until you get it.

And, really, that’s the whole problem, isn’t it?

Lust makes us feel like we need to consume – that we simply must act on it or it’ll eat us alive or drive us mad.

And that’s exactly what it makes you do when you don’t have mastery over yourself:

You seek release: masturbation, porn, or casual sex, empty relationships that always lead to drama or pointless conflict in the long-run.

What happens after the ‘release’ is perhaps even more interesting:

Numbness, regret, shame, the dull ache that what you really want is still missing, and the knowledge that you’ve just wasted more of your time, energy, and attention.

These (time, energy, and attention) are your three most valuable assets and lust – left unchecked – robs all three.

Ego, Sex, and the Void

Now let’s make something clear: sex is not the enemy. No where near.

In fact, sex – real sex – is one of the most powerful and beautiful experiences available to us as human beings.

On the other hand when you put sex on a pedestal and treat it as a substitute for purpose, connection, and truth then the fire of your lust becomes unbearable and your sexual activity starts to become a prison. That’s when it becomes a problem.

The specific problem is this:

When you’re disconnected from truth (i.e. living in the Void), then your ego starts to steer your life instead of who you are in your realness.

In this state, your ego becomes the part of you that says, “If I can just get laid, I’ll be enough” or “This desire I feel must be satisfied immediately otherwise I’m failing as a man”,

But here’s the truth:

You are not your lust; your lust – like any sensation or emotion – is just something that you HAVE.

You are not your ego’s interpretation of what sex means and when you chase sex – or anything else – from a place of emptiness, you’ll always end up more empty.

The Lust Trap

Let’s break down how the process of lusts fire consumes you a little more:

  • You feel first flickers of the fire (lust).

  • You mistake it for something that needs urgent release which makes it burn with even more ferocity.

  • You feed it something fast and easy (porn, a hook-up, a call to your ex, etc).

  • You get a temporary hit of relief (which just pours gasoline on the fire in the long-run).

  • The fire comes back stronger next time.

  • Repeat.

The more you follow this cycle, the more disconnected you become – from your purpose, from presence, from real relationships.

In short: the more you feed the fire with ego-fuel, the more it owns you and changes the trajectory of your life from real to unreal.

Some men spend their whole lives repeating this cycle and so never get out of the Void…they end up living what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation”.

Is that really the life you want to be creating for yourself?

Sex Is Not the Ultimate (But It’s Still Awesome).

This is a hard pill to swallow in a hyper-sexualised culture:

We’ve been told that sex is the prize and that getting it = success, not getting it = failure, and that more sex = more man.

But here’s the truth again:

Sex is great but it’s not ultimate source of meaning in your life.

If you live as if it is – because you’ve become detached from your core realness – then your identity gets warped around chasing it and you’ll start treating yourself and other people as products to be consumed. You’ll lose the ability to be real with both other and yourself..

Worst of all, you’ll sabotage the very thing that actually has the power to help you overcome your lust once and for all:

Real connection with yourself, the world, and reality and the fulfilment and sense of wholeness that this connection brings.

If you’re a man who wants to go deeper into mastering lust instead of being mastered by it, then the Sexual Transmutation Worksheet in the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can help you reach your goals.

Lust as Fuel for Your Real Life

The way forward starts with a radical shift in your perception:

Learning to see lust not as an enemy to be eradicated but as energy that needs direction.

What probably goes without saying is that the fire isn’t going anywhere because your biology is evolutionarily wired to desire.

The question, then, isn’t whether you’ll feel it but:

What will you do with it?

Will you waste it on fantasy and distraction or will you use it as fuel to grow real?

If you want to stop wasting your time, energy, and attention and live your real life then there’s only one answer.

Step One: Master Yourself

Let’s get practical so you can take this off of the page (or screen) and start overcoming lust like a real one:

1. Practice Self-Discipline

It always starts with the basics:

  • Semen Retention (or even a conscious reduction in ejaculation frequency) is a powerful way to train your system to build flow rather than leak energy.

    This article is a good starting point: Semen Retention Benefits: How this Ancient Practice Can Help You Grow More Real

  • Avoid Porn: not out of shame but because it wires your brain to associate arousal with fantasy, isolation, and passivity. It hijacks your brain’s reward system and makes it hard for you to stay present and focused in life.

    This article will help you understand the mechanics of your reward system: Rewiring the Reward System: From Ego Hits to Realness

  • Choose real interactions over digital ones: When you do engage sexually, let it be from a place of real connection – not just because you’re horny and restless.

Every time you resist the urge to escape into release, you grow stronger, show yourself you’re in control, and overcome the ego and how it holds you back.

2. Question Your Identity

This is where the first stage of my coaching process – Awareness (Deconstruct Ego) comes in.

Ask yourself some powerful questions that help you to start seeing yourself and your own assumptions:

  • What does sex mean to me?

  • What do I believe it says about me if I get it? Or if I don’t?

  • Who told me that being sexually desirable = being valuable?

Strip away the ego stories and you’ll see that most of them are lies (or, at the very least, illusions):

They’re just distortions we’ve picked up in the Void that have little to do with the actual truth.

3. Embrace Your Shadow

Here’s a truth most men never hear:

Your sexual drive is not ‘bad’, it’s not shameful, and it’s not something to ignore or even ‘purge’ or ‘transcend’.

It’s part of your power as a man and a human being.

The key to tapping into this power is to integrate it – not repress it or worship it.

You do this by working to Accept (the second stage in my coaching model) your Shadow Self: all the ‘parts’ of you that might seem primal, animalistic, or just a mere ‘urge’ to the ego.

When you accept these things (and similar) and learn to guide it toward something that makes you whole then they become something that you can build with – not something that breaks you apart.

The goal is always wholeness over fragmentation – realness, not ego.

4. Take Real Action

Imagine directing all this energy you’ve been leaking because your time, energy, and attention were in the service of lust towards a vision.

Create a vision for you life, break it down into goals, and set daily habits that pull you towards something meaningful.

Let the fire of lust be the engine that drives you, not the trap that drains you.

Your lust wants release and the best way to do this is by giving yourself a transformation.

5. Regulate Your Nervous System

Often, lust spikes when you’re dysregulated and feeling anxious, bored, or stressed:

That inner tension is real but if you don’t know how to sit with it, breathe through it, and process it consciously, then you’ll default to autopilot and reach for a quick dopamine hit.

Learn to regulate your nervous system by learning to truly:

  • Breathe.
  • Meditate.
  • Ground yourself.
  • Move your body.

Build mindfulness, cultivate presence, and train yourself to to feel your horniness without needing to act on it (this is called Urge Surfing).

When you can hold tension without exploding, you become real (and real is always powerful).

Overcoming lust is about mastering your cravings so you can grow real.

Overcoming Lust: Burn Away the Unreal

Lust isn’t your enemy but the way you’ve been managing it might be:

When you start to see your lust as a powerful fire that can either destroy you or drive you, you gain back your power and put yourself on the path to a real life.

The key is to direct the fire to burn away the ego and to let go of the false ideas you’ve had about yourself and your worth along with any illusions of what sex is ‘supposed’ to be.

Practical Steps

  1. Commit to a 30-day dopamine detox from porn and meaningless sex.
  2. Track your urges and what emotional states trigger them so that you can get to know your fire.
  3. Create a vision for your life that excites you and write it down.
  4. Use the Awareness, Acceptance, Action framework:
    • Awareness: Journal about your identity beliefs around sex.
    • Acceptance: Explore your shadow with compassion, not shame.
    • Action: Replace time-wasting behaviours with value-creating habits.
  5. Practice a daily nervous system reset: try breathwork, cold showers, mindful walks, or yoga.
  6. Get around real people. Find or build a community where real conversations matter and lust isn’t treated as either taboo or a trophy.

You are not a slave to lust.

You are a man capable of transforming that fire into purpose, presence, and power.

It starts when you stop looking for escape and start living for something real.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to overcome your lust and start living your real life, then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you change your own trajectory once and for all.

I Regret the Past: How to Let Go and Grow Real

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Living with regret

Regret Visits All of Us at Some Time in Our Lives

An absolute fact about the human condition is that we all mess up:

Some of us mess up spectacularly with fireworks, fallout, and full-on existential crises whilst others do it quietly – behind closed doors – in subtle ways that no one else may ever see.

Either way, regret visits us all at some stage in our lives and, when it does, it tends to stick its claws in – not because we’re ‘bad’ people – but because we’re all human and humans are gonna human which means that it’s messy sometimes.

Nevertheless, if you’re finding yourself feeling and thinking “I regret the past” or something similar – haunted by what you did (or didn’t do) – then this article is for you.

We’re going to talk about why regret feels so heavy, how it links to ego and shame, and why it’s also a weird gift in disguise. Most importantly, we’re going to explore how to let it go, integrate its lesson, and get on with being real.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Regret is a reminder that what you resist persists. Face it and grow real.

Why Regret Feels So Heavy

To really understand what you’re going through when it comes to regret, you need to understand that regret isn’t just about wishing things had gone differently – it’s about a break in your identity.

Here’s how it tends to unfold:

You look back at something you did – the relationship you ruined, the opportunity you missed, the thing you said (or didn’t say) – and something in you recoils in horror and shame.

“That wasn’t me” you tell yourself but, deep down, you know it was and now you’re left in a kind of limbo where you’re holding on to a version of yourself that you can’t accept.

Here’s the truth that can start to free you from yourself:

Regret is what happens when we hold onto the past so tightly that it stops us from being real in the here-and-now.

Why do we hold on so tightly?

Because fully facing what happened would mean looking at the emotions we’ve buried – usually the Unholy Trinity of shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

To make matters trickier, really learning from the past and facing these hidden, unresolved emotions means threatening the fragile ego we’ve built to survive in the world for as long as we can probably remember.

The reason this is so difficult is that your ego and your shadow self are locked in a Shadow Dance, constantly vying for dominance:

Most people let the ego win because it feels ‘familiar’ and gives them a sense of illusory control over themselves and life but when regret knocks on the door, it’s almost always because you’ve had a glimpse of your own shadow before your ego is ready for it (which it never really is)…and that can be terrifying.

Regret, Ego, and the Shadow Self

The ego is the version of yourself that you think you need to be – it’s how you survive:

How you present yourself to the world, how you make sense of things, and how you protect yourself from emotional pain that reminds you of the past.

On the other hand, the shadow is all the ‘stuff’ you’ve rejected:

The parts of you that hold the truth about your mistakes, your vulnerability, your capacity to cause harm and also your deepest wisdom.

As it says in Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World:

“Your Shadow is all of the things, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, that you’ve denied about yourself and hidden beneath the surface of the mask you forgot that you’re wearing.”

Regret is that weird emotional cocktail that comes from shame, guilt, and trauma about what’s down there in the Shadow Territory all mingling together – it makes you judge yourself harshly and question your own identity.

But because your ego is so attached to being someone (even if that ‘someone’ is a lie), it clings to an outdated image of who you were or should have been – that, right there, is what blocks the flow of real lessons and stops you integrating what the past was trying to teach you, keeping you stuck in a mental time loop.

What Acceptance Really Means

Here’s another truth about regret:

If you’re dealing with serious regret, then you’re not accepting who you are now.

You’re not accepting:

  • What you learned about yourself but haven’t integrated yet (because the lesson threatens your ego).

  • The way the world works (with all its unpredictability and how this threatens your egos sense of perceived control).

  • Your place within life as a whole (including your limits and your potential – with your ego denying both (your limits and what’s possible for you in your realness).

That might sound harsh but it’s also empowering because what it means is this:

You can choose to accept yourself – ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘light’ and ‘dark’ – even with the all the scars and the ‘failures’ and start again…not as a brand-new person but as a more real one.

We’re All Human (And That Means We’re All Flawed)

Let’s be honest (not that we haven’t been already):

No human being is perfect; no one gets it right every time. We are not omniscient or omnipotent; we’re limited, we’re emotional, and we’re always learning (if our egos can handle the lessons).

That means it’s pretty much guaranteed that at some point before you die, you will do or say something that fills you with regret.

(The ‘good’ news is that so will everyone else).

So what if we stopped pretending that regret is something to avoid at all costs and instead saw it as something to prepare for and learn to live with when it comes to visit for a while (it always goes eventually)?

Not by living recklessly but by embracing it as part of the human condition:

When we do that, we take the sting out of it and remove the self-judgement, spiralling blame, and all of the hypothetical “What if I’d done it differently?” fantasies.

When we live in a real way and accept life as it is then regret is no longer a personal failing – it’s just a part of the terrain on the journey we’re all on towards wholeness.

When you can see this, then you’re finally free to face yourself without the interpretations and misperceptions of the ego putting unnecessary obstacle in your path:

Not to label yourself as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but to be real.

Realness Beats Regret

The less you resist your own realness, the less likely you are to hurt others or yourself in future:

This is because when you’re not acting from ego – when you’re not hiding behind an image or trying to maintain control and trying to force life – then you’re in the flow and you’re aligned with wholeness.

In this state, you make clearer decisions, you listen more, and you understand what matters because you’re not tearing yourself in different directions. You stop repeating the same patterns that caused the regret in the first place.

This is what shadow integration is really about:

It’s not about wallowing in what you did but about owning it so fully that what’s hidden from view no longer controls you.

The Lao Tzu Reminder

There’s a quote often (possibly wrongly) attributed to Lao Tzu that goes:

“If you’re depressed, you’re living in the past. If you’re anxious, you’re living in the future. If you’re happy, you’re living in the present.”

Whether or not he actually said it, the point stands:

You can’t heal or grow anywhere but in the now and that requires cultivating presence.

If you’re caught in regret, you’re stuck in the past but the way out isn’t to forget what happened – it’s to bring your presence to it so that you can learn from it, digest it, and use it as a catalyst for realness.

You can’t rewrite history but you can always choose to rewrite the meaning it has in your life and the future direction you’ll be moving in towards something more real.

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

My book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace will help you go deep into the flow so you can get over the past and live your real life.

Practical Steps to Deal with Regret and Move Forward

Here’s a process to start working through regret in a real and grounded way:

1. Awareness: Name What You’re Regretting

Be as specific as possible.

Don’t just say, “I regret the past”, for example – what exactly do you regret?

  • A choice you made?
  • A person you hurt?
  • A risk you didn’t take?

Write it down and be brutal but tender with yourself. Definitely don’t sugar-coat it because the more clarity you have, the more power you have to face it.

2. Acceptance: Drop the Judgement

Now ask yourself some questions that get you into the deeper shadow ‘stuff’ that needs facing:

  • What emotions are tied up in this regret? (Shame? Guilt? Trauma? Others?)

  • What did this regret teach me about myself that goes against my ego?

  • What ‘part’ of me finds this hard to accept?

This step is about seeing the truth without judgement and reminding yourself that you’re not a monster (or whatever).

You’re a human. Accept that fully.

3. Action: Integrate the Lesson

Now ask yourself some questions to start shifting away from the past and into the future:

  • How can I grow real from this?

  • What boundaries, values, or truths will I take forward from this?

  • How can I show up differently today and moving forward?

This is the part most people skip – they feel the regret, maybe even accept it, but then do nothing.

But real change happens when we act because real action is the only ‘cure’ for anything.

You might want to reach out and apologise.

Or forgive yourself.

Or start doing that thing you were too afraid to try before.

Whatever it is — do it…that’s how regret transforms into growth.

Regret means that you're not living in your own time.

Final Words On Regret: Don’t Waste Your Life on a Lie

It’s never too late to grow real but you can waste your whole life dwelling on the times you were unreal.

So if regret is knocking, open the door:

Not to punish yourself, but to listen, to learn, and to integrate.

Whichever way you look at it, the truth is simple:

You are not your past. You are the person who’s alive right now – reading this article – with a choice to make.

Are you gonna move towards wholeness in yourself? Or are you gonna keep tearing yourself to pieces?

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to let go of the past and start taking action that will carry you towards your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to take your first steps.

Why Men Should Do Yoga: It’s Not What You Think (It’s Better)

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Yoga for men

Regular Yoga Can Help You to Embody Your Masculinity & Find Presence

If you’re a man and you think yoga is all about incense, bendy women, and whispering “namaste” in a candlelit room then you’re probably not the first and you won’t be the last.

It’s one of the most enduring misconceptions out there but let’s get one thing straight from the start:

Yoga is not just some soft, passive thing that you do just to feel ‘nice’ or ‘relaxed’ or whatever, it’s not just about stretching, and it’s definitely not just for women.

In fact, yoga was invented by men and practiced for centuries by sages and warriors who understood its power not only to make the body stronger and more flexible, but also to forge resilience, sharpen focus, and cultivate true inner strength so they can have a better relationship with the ultimate truth about life. That doesn’t sound very ‘girly’ to me.

As a man who’s been doing power yoga for about 17 years (along with my weights workouts) – and also thrown yin yoga for the past two – I can tell you this without exaggeration: if I could only do one form of exercise for the rest of my life, it would be yoga.

No question. Not even close.

This article will help you to figure out if yoga could be the missing ingredient in your own life.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Yoga helps you to see what's real so that you can accept it and build with it.

The Myth of the Bendy Woman in Spandex

Let’s deal with this up front:

Somewhere along the way, yoga was rebranded as a lifestyle product for women: a kind of relaxation tool to help stressed mums unwind with some spa music and a few deep breaths.

This watered-down version of yoga is not unhelpful for women who need that kind of thing in their lives but it’s a fraction of what yoga really is…and it’s not necessarily the kind that changes lives or helps people grow more real.

The truth is that real yoga is a mirror:

It shows you what you’re made of – physically, mentally, emotionally -and then it challenges you to meet yourself as you are, every single time you step on that yoga mat.

When I First Started

When I first started doing power yoga, I actually thought I was pretty strong (because of the other types of exercise I already did).

Then I got on the mat and was humbled almost immediately:

There were poses I just couldn’t do no matter how hard I tried.

I’d fall over, shake uncontrollably as my muscles were pushed to the limit, and I’d lose my balance and come crashing down to earth (in more ways than one).

I got frustrated every single time but here’s the truth yoga slowly revealed to me:

It wasn’t my body causing me to fall – it was my mind.

The more I tensed up and tried to force the pose – instead of flowing with it – the worse I became.

But when I learned to breathe through the discomfort, to stay calm under pressure, and to accept where I was – everything changed for me.

That’s when I started to really grow – not just in the poses, but in life (because I realised that that time on the yoga mat was a microcosm of how I’d been living my life as a whole).

“Take Your Yoga Off the Mat”

There’s an amazing saying in yoga: “Take your yoga off the mat“.

What this means is that the lessons you learn in practice are meant to change how you live your life.

For example, balancing in tree pose isn’t about looking cool or becoming a human flamingo but about staying calm and steady even when things feel unstable. That mindset translates directly into everyday life: relationships, work, health, and purpose.

Yoga teaches you to stop fighting reality and start meeting it head-on with breath, presence, and trust so that you can actually get better relationships in life as a whole.

That’s where real change happens and why absolutely all of us can benefit from adding some regular yoga asana (the poses) to our routines.

Why More Men Need This

Let’s be honest: a lot of men are conditioned to push through pain, ignore emotion, and to “man up” without necessarily facing reality. While that might work in short bursts, it eventually leads to burnout, disconnection, or breakdown.

Yoga is a tool that helps you to be strong without needing to be hard on yourself or life all the time:

It gives you the space to feel, to breathe, to connect with your body and calm your nervous system without making you soft or overly ‘vulnerable’ towards life.

In fact, yoga often demands more discipline and mental strength than a brutal gym session but – in this case – the challenge is internal:

Can you hold an uncomfortable pose without reacting? Can you keep breathing when your ego is shouting at you to give up?

If you can do that, you’re stronger than most, and you will slowly come to master yourself.

The Benefits (Backed by Science)

Here’s are some of the things that yoga can do for you – physically, mentally, emotionally:

Physical Benefits:

  • Improved flexibility – makes daily movement smoother and reduces injury risk.

  • Increased strength – especially in stabilising muscles often neglected in gym routines.

  • Better posture and spinal health – which combats and reverses the hunched-over look of modern life.

  • Greater mobility and joint health – helping you stay pain-free as you age (I can validate this one through experience when I compare myself to all my friends who haven’t been doing yoga over the years and have knee and back problems).

  • Enhanced breathing capacity – because increased oxygen intake means better energy and endurance.

  • Boosted recovery – yoga helps flush out lactic acid and reduces inflammation which helps with your other workouts.

  • Hormonal balance – some studies show yoga can increase testosterone and lower cortisol because it makes you more resilient and better equipped to handle stress.

Mental and Emotional Benefits:

  • Greater focus and clarity – because meditation and breathwork sharpen the mind and help you to be less impacted by distractions.

  • Stress relief – yoga down-regulates the nervous system, calming the body and mind, and allowing to to flow through life with more ease.

  • Improved mood – regular practice has been linked with reduced depression and anxiety.

  • Better emotional regulation – because yoga shows you how to stay present instead of reactive.

  • Deeper sleep – studies show improved sleep quality with even short yoga routines (and especially with yin yoga).

And then there’s the big one:

Yoga helps you process emotional baggage and trauma stored in the body.

As The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk highlights, trauma lives in the nervous system, not just the mind:

Movement, breathwork, and body awareness – as practiced in yoga – are some of the most effective tools for releasing stuck emotions and healing from within.

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

My book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace will help you to go deeper into your own presence and to build a life that’s real.

Power Yoga vs Yin Yoga (And Why You Need Both)

Over the years I’ve practiced both power yoga and yin yoga, and I can honestly say both have been vital to my development as a man (and a human being):

  • Power yoga is physically intense and builds strength, focus, endurance, and presence. It’ll make you sweat, grunt, and grind but in a way that clears your head and charges you up.

  • Yin yoga is the opposite: slow, passive, deeply meditative. You hold stretches for 3–5 minutes, breathe deeply, and access the deeper connective tissues. It helps with recovery, releases trapped tension, and strengthens your nervous system by teaching you to be still and stay with sensation.

Together, they’re a perfect combo. One is fire, one is water but both are transformative.

I do a free online yin yoga class every three weeks – if you’d like to sign up for the next session then there’s a form here: olianderson.co.uk/dissolution-hour

Yoga Is a Discipline, Not a Trend

You don’t need to chant, you don’t need a man bun, and you don’t even need to be flexible to start – all you need is the willingness to show up and meet yourself honestly.

Yoga is a discipline, not a gimmick – it’s not about performance, but presence. It’s not about perfection but about actively engaging with the process of growing real.

Every time you get on the mat, you train yourself to become more balanced, more focused, and more real.

That doesn’t just benefit you – it benefits everyone around you too (because it allows you to show up in a real way).

Practical Steps to Get Started With Yoga as a Man

1. Start with 30 Minutes a Day

You don’t need a 90-minute studio session to benefit:

Begin with short, consistent routines such as power yoga videos, yin sessions before bed or whatever else works for you.

Try:

2. Focus on the Breath

Yoga without breath is just stretching:

Every inhale and exhale is your anchor. Focus on breathing deeply and slowly through your nose – especially in difficult poses.

3. Don’t Judge Yourself

You’re not supposed to be good at this at first (or in fact, necessarily ever) – that’s the point.

Stay curious, let go of ego, laugh when you fall and then get back up and try again.

4. Use the Frustration

Every wobble and fall is an invitation.

Ask yourself: what’s this showing me?

Stay calm and keep coming back because that’s where the growth is.

5. Integrate It Into Life

Take your yoga off the mat:

Next time you’re in a tough conversation, stressed at work, or facing discomfort remember to breathe, stay present, and respond instead of reacting.

That’s yoga.

Yoga will humble you so you can actually find yourself.

Yoga For Men Final Thoughts: Real Strength Starts Within

Yoga doesn’t take away your masculinity – it deepens it by stripping away all of the performative layers that keep you from life and giving you a real, grounded, powerful presence.

It makes you stronger – not just in your body, but in your mind and character whilst teaching you discipline, patience, humility, and courage.

It also reminds you that being a man isn’t just about dominance but about alignment with what’s real, strong, and true.

You don’t need to be flexible. You don’t need to be spiritual. You just need to be willing so get on the mat, meet yourself, and keep showing up.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in yoga and growing real then book a free coaching session with me – with some of my clients I do yoga as well to help them find their own flow.

Being a Blessing: Being Real For Others One Small Act at A Time

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Being a blessing

Somebody Has to Step Up and Be a Blessing So It Might as Well Be You

Let’s be brutally honest and maybe even a little bit edgy for a second:

Most people are drowning in their own nonsense.

You know it. I know it. We all know it.

What’s even worse is that we all do it from time to time and so nobody can totally escape from this kind of nonsense completely:

The average human being – living their “lives of quiet desperation” (as Thoreau said) spend their days tangled in a web of half-baked worries, imagined slights, overblown ambitions, and the chronic need to be seen as special or important.

In all of this noise, we can forget the obvious:

Reality is always there, quietly waiting for us to notice, so we can start living our REAL lives.

In a world preoccupied with appearances, illusions, and constant mental chatter, becoming a blessing for others – a reminder of what’s real – might be the most radical, quietly transformative thing any of us can do.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t require you to be a guru on a mountaintop or to launch some glittering social media empire – nor does it require you to save the world (which, by the way, is often just another ego trip in disguise).

All it asks is that you step up and show up with the intention to be a genuine presence – somebody who helps others remember there’s something deeper and more REAL beneath all of the surface-level drama.

The bottom line is that the world needs some of us to step up and be a blessing in this way and, so, it might as well be you.

This article will explore why this matters, how it works, and how you can start right now.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Being a blessing is about serving in a real way.

What Does It Actually Mean to Be a Blessing?

The word “blessing” might conjure up images of angels, incense, and a slightly patronising air of spiritual superiority but that’s definitely not what I’m talking about here in this article:

A ‘blessing’ – in the sense we’re exploring it – is very simple:

It’s anything that helps another person touch reality again.

Here are some examples to help you understand what I’m on about:

  • When somebody is stuck in a cycle of self-pity, a blessing might be your willingness to listen – as in really listen – without trying to ‘fix’ them or judge them.

  • When someone is chasing validation and acting in shame-drive way, a blessing might be your refusal to play along with their performance and to gently reflect back the truth you see in them instead.

  • When someone is overcomplicating their life, a blessing might be a simple act of kindness or encouragement that reminds them of their own strengths and the successes they’ve had in the past.

In short, a blessing isn’t about forcing enlightenment on people – it’s about creating a little space for reality so they can feel whole again.

The Curse of Fragmentation

Before we get into how to be a blessing, it helps to understand what you’re counteracting.

Most of us live in a state of fragmentation which essentially means that we think we have to compartmentalise everything in order to fit in with what our ego needs us to perceive based on where we find ourselves.

The end result of this is that we can end up playing and identifying with multiple conflicting roles:

  • There’s the ‘professional’ self with all its polished edges.

  • The ‘social’ self which is desperate to be liked.

  • The private’ self, carrying secret worries and old wounds.

  • The ‘aspirational’ self, perpetually comparing itself to everyone else.

This kind of fragmentation is exhausting because it disconnects us from our core realness (which is unchanging) and breeds chronic insecurity as it dulls our natural capacity to connect in a real way.

The more fragmented we become, the more we clutch at illusions to feel better: status, drama, overachievement, validation.

When you choose to be a blessing, you’re not just helping others:

You’re also choosing wholeness over fragmentation in yourself by refusing to engage in all the shallow games of the world.

This in itself can become a powerful reminder to everyone around you that there’s a different way to live.

The Myth of the Big Gesture: You Don’t Need to Save the World

One of the traps that keeps people from stepping up is the idea that in order to be of value, you must do something monumental:

People imagine that to “make a difference” means some grand sweeping gesture that “impacts” the whole of humanity (which is impossible anyway because of fragmentation):

  • You need to launch a viral movement.

  • You must write a bestselling book.

  • You have to build a multi-million-pound business that “changes the world” or “puts a dent in the universe”.

If you feel called to do any of that, go for it but don’t fall for the myth that bigger is better because the most impactful blessings are often the smallest:

  • A phone call to check in on someone who feels forgotten.

  • A note to let someone know you appreciate them.

  • A moment of honesty that cuts through all the pretending.

  • Visiting your sick friend in the hospital.

  • Forgiving somebody for something that they did to you in the past that doesn’t even matter anymore (and letting them know if they need to know).

  • A willingness to sit quietly with someone in their grief without trying to distract them from it.

  • Etc. Etc. Etc.

These small gestures are potent precisely because they’re REAL:

They come from presence, not performance, and they remind people that – in a world obsessed with spectacle – reality is still the only thing that matters.

Avoiding the Ego Trap of ‘Saving’ Others

When you start showing up in a more intentional way, it’s easy for your ego to pull you into the role of the Saviour:

The saviour basically says:

“Let me rescue you. Let me fix you. Let me prove my worth by solving all your problems.”

This is just a trap that keeps your ego firmly in the driver’s seat and holds you back from experiencing anything actually real from your own service to others.

The truth is, you can’t ‘save’ anyone – let alone the whole world.

Even if you wanted to, you can’t drag someone into wholeness before they’re ready to choose it for themselves, because waking up to awareness (the first step before acceptance and action) is always an inner journey.

Being a blessing isn’t about carrying other people on your back but about simply standing beside them and holding a mirror up to reality without judgement or fanfare.

When you let go of the saviour complex and just serve for the sake of being real, you can show up with real compassion:

You don’t need others to change to validate your own sense of worth – you’re simply there as a quiet testament to what’s possible when you stop living in fragmentation.

The Power of Everyday Presence

One of the most overlooked superpowers you have is your presence:

When you’re present, you naturally radiate a kind of quiet confidence and peace that people can feel even if they can’t articulate it but it feels like safety and clarity (because – if you have this kind of presence – your nervous system is regulated).

In contrast, when you’re stuck in your own mental spin cycle, you radiate anxiety, even if you’re trying to hide it behind a polished facade (because your nervous system is seeing ‘threats’ everywhere).

Thankfully, you don’t have to be ‘perfect’ to be present:

You just have to be willing to slow down, to breathe, and to notice what’s real – right here, right now.

When you do that, you give people around you permission to do the same and everything starts to become more REAL.

Choosing Wholeness Over Fragmentation (Again and Again)

Being a blessing is not a one-off decision – it’s a practice.

You will have days when you forget and where you’ll get sucked back into your own distractions and distortions or wanting to impress, fix, rescue, and try to be important.

That’s okay.

Every time you notice you’ve strayed from your intention to be real, you have an opportunity to come back.

That’s the heart of this whole approach: returning to reality over and over again by consciously checking in with yourself and choosing wholeness over fragmentation.

Practical Ways to Start Being a Blessing Today

Let’s bring this down to earth with some practical things that you can do to make this workable.

Here are some simple, practical ways you can start being a blessing in your own life without needing permission or the perfect conditions to get started:

1. Check in Without an Agenda

Pick someone you care about and reach out without any motive other than to see how they’re doing:

No hidden sales pitch. No expectation that they’ll validate you in return. Just genuine curiosity and care.

A text message can be a blessing. A two-minute voicemail can be a blessing. A quick coffee can be a blessing.

Just show that you care in a real way.

2. Offer Presence Instead of Solutions

When someone shares a struggle, resist the urge to ‘fix’ it straight away and, instead, just be there:

Listen. Reflect back what you hear. Acknowledge their feelings.

This creates space for reality to surface and, sometimes, that’s all someone needs to find their own awareness of what they need to do next.

3. Be Honest Without Being Harsh

If you see someone getting caught in their own illusions, you don’t need to lecture them, but you also don’t have to pretend you don’t see it.

You can gently name what’s real without shaming or blaming.

For example:

“It seems like you’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself to prove something. Is that really true for you?”

4. Model Wholeness

Live according to your own real values and consistently practice returning to what’s real in your own life.

When you do that, you naturally inspire others to do the same – just remember, people learn far more from who you are and how you actually SHOW UP than from what you say.

5. Celebrate Small Wins

When someone you care about makes even the tiniest step towards wholeness – like setting a boundary, telling the truth, or letting go of something toxic – acknowledge it and show that you ‘see’ what they’re doing.

These small moments are how real change happens and your encouragement can be a blessing that helps them keep going.

6. Be Consistent

One-off gestures are nice but being a blessing is about consistency – it’s about showing up again and again in small, real ways that shows your realness recognises the realness of others.

Serving others and being a blessing is the best way to improve your own happiness.

Being a Blessing – Closing Thoughts: Real Is Always Real

At the end of the day, all the surface-level ‘stuff’ like status, pretence, and appearances falls away and what’s real is all that remains.

When you make a conscious choice to be a blessing, you’re not just helping others – you’re also anchoring yourself in the only thing that never wavers: reality.

You don’t have to wait to be perfectly enlightened or entirely healed to start; you don’t need a polished plan or a grand mission statement. You simply have to decide that you’d rather be real than be impressive.

You’d rather be whole than fragmented and you’d rather be a quiet reminder that there is something deeper beneath all the noise – a truth that can never be lost but only temporarily forgotten.

So, yeah, somebody has to step up and be a blessing and it might as well be you.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start living your real life and you’re interested in coaching then book a free coaching session with me today and I’ll help you take real action.

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