Stop Caring What People Think: Finding Your Real Voice

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Life Philosophy/Mindset/Personal Revolutions/Psychology/Relationships

Breaking Free from the Opinions of Others and Growing into Your REAL Voice (Stop Caring What People Think and Do ‘You’).

If you’ve ever found yourself paralysed by what people might think about you or hesitated and held back from taking action because of potential whispers, side-eyes, or disapproving looks, then this article is for you – it’s going to help you stop caring what people think so you can grow REAL:

The ‘good’ news is that you’re probably not alone because many of us – often without realising – live in a state of unreal servitude to the perceived opinions of others (and so we become ‘People Pleasers’ etc.).

When we end up falling into this trap, we start shaping ourselves not by what’s real, but by the fleeting thoughts and judgments of people who may not even share our values or aspirations. This can send us on all kinds of wild goose chases as we take action that we shouldn’t ever be taking and walk paths that don’t belong to us.

This brings us to a key lesson of realness:

You need to listen to others in life, but you don’t have to listen to everyone.

When you stop caring what people think in an unhealthy way, you free yourself to go do something that’s true to you.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Fine Line Between Awareness and Over-Concern

“It doesn’t matter what other people think” is common advice that gets dished out all over the place but – if we step back and examine it a little – we see that it can be both empowering and dangerous to totally stop caring what people think, depending on the person and the circumstances:

On the one hand, if you blindly reject all external feedback and just STOMP through life doing everything your own way then you risk becoming out of touch with reality – acting purely on impulse without considering the impact of your actions and risking becoming reckless, selfish, or even a little delusional.

On the other hand, if you constantly shape your decisions around how you think others perceive you or might judge the choices you make, then you’ll end up in a psychological prison – never acting authentically, always filtering yourself through the imagined judgments of others, and never getting anywhere new or real.

As almost always, the truth lies somewhere in between:

The TRUTH is that when we’re being REAL, we’re not independent, but interdependent.

Your self-image isn’t formed in a vacuum but is built in response to interactions, feedback, and relationships that you share with the people in the world around you.

This doesn’t mean every opinion holds equal weight but it does mean that you need to CHOOSE which voices are gonna shape you and your relationship with yourself.

The Problem with People-Pleasing

This is really about finding a sweet spot because if you put the opinions of others on a pedestal then you just you spend your life trying to avoid criticism, rejection, or disapproval.

That might help you avoid short-term pain and discomfort but in the long-run, you’ll just end up:

Watering yourself down to be ‘acceptable’ to everyone (and end up resonating with no one because a ‘friend’ to all is a friend to nobody).
Avoid taking necessary risks, staying stuck in ‘safe’ but uninspiring patterns and then getting lost to the Void.
Be easily manipulated by the fears, insecurities, and unresolved issues of others that they project onto you.
Delay or even abandon your real purpose because you’re too concerned about external validation.

The bottom line is that you can’t find a real purpose and build a meaningful life by outsourcing your sense of self to the opinions of the crowd.

At some point, you have to stand for what’s real – no matter who disagrees – and just say to yourself “I am that I am” and “It is what it is”.

Stop caring what people think and listen to yourself instead.

Choosing Whose Opinions Matter

A simple but powerful rule that can help you keep things REAL:

If you wouldn’t want to be like someone, don’t let their opinions define you (or even take advice and/or criticism from them).

Think about it:

Would you take fitness advice from someone who’s never exercised a day in their life and eats donuts for breakfast? Or business advice from someone who’s never started anything? Or relationship advice from someone who’s never even been in a relationship? Probably not.

Yet many of us allow random strangers, bitter acquaintances, or deeply insecure people to influence how we see ourselves because of some random opinion that they’ve expressed and that we CHOOSE to hold onto (usually because we have unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma and their opinions get stuck in the brambles).

When we do this, we’re just letting the passing comments of those we wouldn’t trade places with dictate our choices. It’s mental.

A more productive and healthy alternative is to seek something REAL instead…

For example, you can seek out people who:

Share your real values and ambitions.
Are living in a way that inspires you and actually DOING things in a real way.
Have your best interests at heart (even if their feedback is sometimes hard to hear).
Push you to be better and to help you grow REAL rather than keeping you small and locked in unreality.

Iron sharpens iron: Surround yourself with people who challenge and refine you, not those who try to make you seem smaller or more unreal than you actually are.

You Can’t Control Others – Only Your Response

No matter what you do, people will always have something to say, so you might as well just do whatever it is that you want to do anyway (if it’s real).

You can’t control how people are and how they react and move through life according to their own emotional and ego ‘stuff’ but what you can control is how you respond:

If someone insults you, for example, you have two choices:

You can hold on to it and get caught up in worrying about their opinion, replaying it over and over in your mind, letting it ruin your day, and trying to make it fit into your reality.
You can pause, ask yourself what you think about yourself, and act in alignment with that instead.

Nothing is worth taking personally unless you CHOOSE to take it personally.

The truth is, most people don’t even know you well enough to make accurate judgments about you, and – even if they do – their perspective is filtered through their own biases, fears, and personal history. This means that the final decision is always with you anyway.

In short, there’s a difference between REALITY and INTERPRETATION and so not all feedback is truth.

Just because someone thinks something about you doesn’t mean it’s valid (though you might treat it that way if you’re caught up in your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ more than your REALNESS).

Context Matters: Not All Opinions Are Created Equal

Let’s say someone criticises you – before taking it to heart and treating it as gospel truth, ask yourself:

Who is this person? Do they know the real me or are they making assumptions?
What’s their motive? Are they offering constructive feedback or are they projecting their own issues because they have some unreal agenda?
What’s the emotional state behind their words? Are they speaking from a place of realness or from anger, envy, or insecurity in the moment?

Of course, the context can affect how you need to treat the message:

A random insult from an angry stranger? Not worth your time. A bit of hard truth from a close friend who cares? That might be worth considering.

Again, though, the burden of interpreting feedback is on you – don’t take everything on board straight away but don’t dismiss everything outright either (just know when to stop caring what people think when it really doesn’t matter).

Realness is always the key.

Breaking Free: How to Stop Worrying About What People Think

Here’s a practical strategy for breaking free of being overly-impacted and concerned with the opinions of others:

1. Defining Your Core Values Helps You Stop Caring What People Think

If you don’t know what you stand for, you’ll be swayed by every passing opinion.

It’s worth taking time to define:

What matters most to you.
What kind of person you want to be.
The kind of life you want to create and the values it will embody (for example, truth, freedom, creativity, etc.).

2. Conduct a “Whose Opinions Matter?” Audit

Make a list of people whose opinions you tend to worry about then ask yourself:

Would I trade places with them?
Do they share my values?
Do they genuinely have my best interests at heart?

If the answer is “No” at any level then you can start mentally detaching from their influence.

3. Reframe Criticism as Information, Not a Verdict

When someone criticises you, instead of reacting emotionally, view it as neutral data and then it’ll be much easier to stop caring what people think when that’s the right thing to do:

Is there any truth here?
Does this person’s perspective actually matter in my life?
Am I giving this more weight than it deserves?

4. Strengthen Your Inner Voice

Every morning, set your intentions and know your REAL VISION for where you’re headed in life:

What do I think about myself? What do I want to create today?

Then check-in with yourself at night: Did I live in alignment with my values and vision today?

When you regularly check in with yourself, the opinions of others lose their grip.

(Check out my Flow Builder Journal which has a morning and evening self-check-in for building flow and managing your thoughts to stay real).

5. Take Action Despite Fear

The fastest way to stop worrying about what others think is to do the ‘thing’ you’re afraid of.

Publish that post.
Have that difficult conversation.
Step into that spotlight.

Every time you push through your EDGE, you strengthen your resilience – over time, what once terrified you becomes second nature and you build evidence of your own REALNESS that makes you invulnerable to what other people might think anyway.

Final Thought: The Only Opinion That Truly Matters

At the end of the day, there’s only one person who has to live with your choices that you make in life – You.

You can either live life trying to satisfy the fleeting opinions of others or you can take charge and build a life that’s REAL.

The world will always have its critics – let them keep talking and go DO you.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty seven in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

The Abundance Mindset: Don’t Chase It, Attract it

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Creativity/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Relationships

An Abundance Mindset is the Key to Real Success in Relationships and Business

We live in an ego-driven world and the Ego is obsessed with scarcity – this means that many of us are running around filtering everything through the ‘scarcity’ lens and missing out on REAL opportunities in life:

Maybe you’re one of these people yourself – constantly worrying about losing opportunities, feeling like you’re missing out, or even that – at some fundamental level – you’re not ‘enough’.

In this article, I want to help you understand that this way of thinking is just an illusion, a trick of the fragmented mind, and your own emotional ‘stuff’ projected out into the world around you (perception is projection, after all).

The truth is that abundance is real and an abundance mindset is not just about positive thinking or deluding yourself – it’s about aligning with the deep reality of wholeness and the way that things actually are.

When you understand that what’s real is always real, everything changes and you open up the door to your real life.

Let’s dig a little deeper to see what all of this means for you and your life:

Abundance comes when you start to see things as they are

What is an Abundance Mindset?

People love to talk about “Abundance” these days but what does it actually mean when we’re being REAL about it?

Let’s start with what an abundance mindset isn’t:

An abundance mindset is not about wishful thinking, nor is it about pretending everything is fine when it isn’t. It’s not about deluding yourself into thinking you can just have whatever you want without working for it or putting in any effort; nor is it about “faking it until you make it” or doing anything else that involves pretending to be something that you’re not or that the world you live in isn’t what it actually is.

Instead – when we’re REAL – an abundance mindset is about recognising that you’re already connected to everything you need and that you already have the power to create and make the most of the opportunities that are available to you. It means trusting in the natural flow of life, rather than grasping for external validation or forcing things to happen, and moving towards your goals with an open-mind instead of a closed one and with REALNESS instead of ego.

Abundance means knowing that what is real cannot be lost because, like I said above (and in my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World), what’s real is always real:

If something is ‘meant’ for you, it will either come (if you take action) or it will stay with you; if something never arrives or leaves, it wasn’t truly yours to begin with.

This is about connecting to and staying rooted in a sense of wholeness – the foundation of an abundance mindset (and also the foundation of being REAL because everything comes back to being whole).

If you can learn to operate from this place, both your relationships and your business thrive because you no longer operate from fear or lack – instead you’re just grounded in what’s real about yourself, the world, and reality.

To get to this place, you may first need to learn to LET GO:

The Power of Letting Go

One of the greatest barriers to success in any area of life is attachment to the unreal and treating the FRAGMENTS of life as the WHOLE of life:

When we become obsessed with a particular outcome, we unknowingly push it away, because we’re putting it on a pedestal and treating it as something that is disconnected from us. This just takes us out of the process of moving towards it and causes us to see it as being way more important than it actually is (we think that it will fill the Void inside ourselves without realising that this is just because we think it can give us what only wholeness can give us…despite our already being whole).

Getting ‘obsessed’ in this way just makes us desperate and desperation repels things (“if you chase it, it runs away). The opposite of this is the confidence that comes from being grounded in the REALNESS of WHOLENESS – important here because confidence attracts.

In short, then, an abundance mindset allows you to be outcome-independent, meaning you are not enslaved to external results for your self-worth (because you know that what’s real is always real and so you don’t need to outsource your self-acceptance to your goals – instead, you can just enjoy your goals as an expression of your realness).

When you operate from abundance like this, you can also LET GO of needing something to happen in a particular way. Instead, you focus on the process of moving towards things by taking real action. Ironically, this detachment makes success more likely because when you are too fixated on results, you are not present or engaged with reality.

Instead, when you stay rooted in the process, the results take care of themselves.

Trusting That There Are Always More Opportunities

The truth about life is that it’s filled with opportunities, but only if you are open to them:

The scarcity mindset tells you that every ‘failure’ is the end of the road; the abundance mindset tells you that ‘failure‘ is just another step towards what is real. Scarcity makes you more fragmented but abundance leads towards wholeness.

Even if something doesn’t work out, it serves you in the end because every experience that brings you closer to acceptance also brings you closer to wholeness.

This applies to everything: jobs, relationships, sales, personal goals. The moment you realise that life will always provide new doors to walk through, you stop chasing.

And when you stop chasing, you start receiving.

The Garden and the Butterflies

Imagine your life as a garden:

If you spend your time frantically running around, trying to catch butterflies, they will always flutter just out of reach as they fly away from you. But if you tend to your garden, instead – if you cultivate yourself, your skills, your mindset, and grow REAL – the butterflies come to you naturally.

People, opportunities, and success are no different – when you focus on growing real, instead of grasping for things to fill the Void, life moves in your favour because you’re moving with life instead of against it.

This is the essence of abundance – not just taking but creating.

Staying Grounded No Matter What

The key to true abundance is staying grounded and rooted in your REALNESS:

The world will test you whether you have a scarcity or an abundance mindset (that’s just how life goes) – you will face setbacks, losses, and moments of doubt – but an abundance mindset is about giving up the unnecessary struggle that comes from resisting life and instead trusting that even the inevitable struggles serve a higher purpose.

Staying grounded means:

Trusting in the process instead of panicking about results
Detaching from external validation and knowing your worth is intrinsic
Letting go of control and allowing things to unfold naturally
Taking real action instead of forcing things out of F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).

Abundance in Business

Many people think that in order to succeed in business, they must be aggressive, chase clients, and push for results but this approach often backfires.

This is because people unconsciously pick up on desperation – they recoil from those who try too hard (just like those butterflies in the garden that fly beyond your grasp).

A business rooted in abundance, however, thrives on service:

Instead of forcing things, you focus on creating value; you trust that by showing up in a real way, the right clients, opportunities, and growth will follow.

Even in high-stakes environments where results are necessary (e.g. sales targets, commission-based work), staying indifferent to the outcome leads to better performance. This is because it keeps you focused on the process, rather than the pressure and the desperation that comes from caving into it.

Abundance in Relationships

An abundance mindset transforms relationships because it allows you to show up as you are, without needing others to validate you. In this sense, you’re no longer trying to ‘prove’ your worth or manipulate situations to get what you want. Instead, you trust that the right connections will naturally align with you because you’re being real (and if people don’t align you get let them go without drama or taking things personally).

This makes you more attractive, not just romantically but in all areas of life – whether in friendships, partnerships, or networking, people are drawn to those who exude the real confidence that abundance brings.

In short, real confidence comes from knowing you have nothing to lose – because what is real is always real and so are you.

Bringing Abundance into Your Life: Practical Steps

Understanding abundance is one thing but how do you live it?

Here are some key ways to integrate an abundance mindset into your daily life:

Shift Your Focus to Process Over Outcomes
- Set clear goals, but don’t obsess over them because you think they will fill the Void.
- Stay engaged with the present moment.
- Let go of needing things to happen a certain way.
Practise Trust
- Remind yourself that life always provides what you need in the end (if you don’t believe me, look back at your life)
- Reflect on past situations where things worked out unexpectedly.
- When something doesn’t go your way, say, “This is a lesson, not a loss.”
Detach From External Validation
- Stop outsourcing your self-worth or levels of self-acceptance to achievements or approval.
- Recognise that you are already whole and that you can express from this wholeness instead of chasing things to make you feel whole (because you already are – it’s just our ego and its mental blocks that stops us seeing this sometimes)
- Take actions because they align with your values and what you want to express in a real way, not because you need validation.
Cultivate Realness
- Focus on growing real in yourself instead of chasing results.
- Take action from a place of authenticity, not fear.
- Trust that the right people and opportunities will align with you when you are real (and then watch it happen).
Stay Grounded
- Develop a daily practice that keeps you centred (e.g. meditation, journalling, getting into your body with breathwork or yoga etc.).
- When things don’t go as planned, pause and remind yourself of the bigger picture and KEEP TRUSTING ANYWAY.
- Surround yourself with people who reinforce abundance thinking (i.e not haters or people who never take action but complain about everything etc.).

The Final Truth About Abundance

An abundance mindset serves you because it aligns with reality -it allows you to move through life with confidence, trust, and presence and makes you more effective in business, more fulfilled in relationships, and more at peace with yourself.

The world is full of opportunities, connections, and resources but you’ll only see them when you stop chasing and start trusting.

Tend to that garden, stay grounded, and remember: what is real is always real.

Stay real out there,

Men, It’s Time to Get Angry: Reclaiming Strength, Purpose, and Dignity

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Life Philosophy/Men/Mindset/Psychology

Your Anger as a Man is Fuel for Your Real Life

This is a quick article about ANGER and how refusing to suppress yours, getting angry, and using it as a source of energy can turn your life around and help you become the man you were born to be (a REAL one).

It seems to me that for many men these days, anger is an emotion they’ve been taught to fear, suppress, or even feel ashamed of:

Maybe they were told as boys that their anger was ‘bad’ or ‘unacceptable’ for some reason (despite it being a perfectly normal and healthy human emotion); maybe their anger was used before it was mastered and got them in some kind of ‘trouble’ or left them wounded and wary of ever expressing it again.

What do people tend to do in these cases? They BURY their anger deep down in the Shadow Territory and try to live and breathe as though it’s not a very real and healthy ‘part’ of them.

That might’ve worked for a little while but here’s the problem: anger doesn’t just disappear because you’re pretending it’s not there. As Carl Jung said, what you resist persists, and, so, when anger is pushed into the shadows, it festers, warps, and turns against the very person trying to suppress it and becomes destructive instead of constructive.

Hidden from view, anger can manifest as depression, indecision, lack of purpose, or even the creeping sense of powerlessness of living in the Void.

Sometimes, it might seep between the cracks in our personalities (the identity/ego created to try and survive life as a person ‘without’ anger) and so it can creep out sideways through passive aggression, people-pleasing, or resentment.

One thing that I’ve seen over the years is that a lot of men who struggle as adults – whether with confidence, purpose, or relationships – are, at their core, disconnected from their anger and the gift of masculine energy and direction that it can bring to their lives if they just step up and lean in.

This sense of disconnection from anger isn’t necessarily because they don’t feel it, but because they don’t own it:

Instead, they’ve built an identity around being ‘nice‘, ‘laidback’, or ‘easy-going’ all the time to avoid confrontation and to (usually without luck) try to win the favour of people by being ingratiating and obsequious.

All this really serves to do is to cause them to lose touch with their sense of self-respect, boundaries, purpose, and REALNESS. In other words, it’s a failed strategy (mainly because it’s unreal and real always works).

The truth is, anger is not your enemy – it’s a powerful, necessary, and deeply human emotion that allows you to live the life you’re supposed to be living.

When properly understood and mastered, it protects our dignity, fuels our purpose, and gives us the energy to act on what matters most.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Getting angry is a tool that can either shape your life or destroy it

Anger as a Guardian of Realness, Dignity, and Values

Anger, in its heart of hearts, is protective:

It arises when something we care about – our values, our boundaries, our self-respect, or the people we love – is being threatened. It’s an instinctual way of saying to ourselves “This matters” or” This is not okay” and then getting ENERGISED to DO something about it.

When anger is suppressed or shamed, men lose this protective instinct and they start to let things slide that shouldn’t slide – they tolerate disrespect, they hesitate when action is needed, and, over time, they lose their sense of dignity as their real life starts to slip between their fingers.

Let’s imagine a man, for example, who has spent years avoiding conflict, always trying to keep the peace:

He prides himself on being Mr Easy-going and never causing trouble but – beneath the surface – he feels unseen, unheard, and powerless (because he never stood up to be seen, heard, or to be REAL which is our true source of power).

Mr Easy-going is chronically frustrated but doesn’t know why; he has dreams and ambitions but can’t seem to act on them or commit to anything. He tells himself he’s just “not an angry person” but in reality, his anger has turned inward, suffocating his drive and sense of self-worth and is weighing him down and holding him back.

When we disconnect from our anger, we disconnect from the fire that pushes us forward, and our lives become more and more unreal.

To get REAL again, we need to RECONNECT:

Mastering Anger: From Destruction to Creation

Anger, when left unchecked, can be destructive – it can lead to aggression, violence, or reckless behaviour.

When owned and mastered, on the other hand, anger is a creative force – it fuels action, sharpens focus, and sets and maintains boundaries.

This is where most men get stuck and end up living those lives of quiet desperation – they either:

Suppress their anger completely, turning into passive, frustrated shells of themselves (aka a ‘Nice Guy‘).
Let it explode uncontrollably, hurting themselves or others (then getting called ‘Toxic’).
Try to ‘release’ their anger in a way that actually makes it worse (e.g. hitting a punching bag or screaming in the car but not actually addressing the root cause and so just getting addicted to temporary release).

The thing that’s missing in all these cases is integration (becoming WHOLE again, instead of being FRAGMENTED and filtering everything through an outdated ego).

To integrate anger in a healthy way, there’s a few steps that can help:

Acknowledge it – Recognise when anger arises and what it’s trying to tell you – is a boundary being crossed? Is something important being ignored? What’s the lesson? What’s it realness is being protected?
Own it – Accept that anger is a ‘part’ of you (something that you have, not who you are) – you don’t have to act on it impulsively, but you also don’t need to pretend it’s not there and live in an unreal way.
Channel it – Use anger as fuel for real action – if something in your life is making you angry, do something about it: Set boundaries. Speak up. Take action. Move forward.

When anger is embraced, it transforms because it shifts from raw, chaotic energy into something powerful, decisive, and purposeful.

Don’t run from your anger – use it to CREATE and BUILD a real life for yourself.

Real (Healthy) Anger vs. Toxic (Unhealthy) Anger

One of the biggest myths about (male) anger is that it’s inherently “toxic”‘ – but toxicity doesn’t come from anger itself (or any other emotion, for that matter) – it comes from how it’s used:

Real anger:
✔ Acknowledges an actual problem
✔ Fuels action, growth, and change
✔ Protects values, boundaries, and dignity
✔ Comes from a place of clarity and strength

Toxic anger:
✘ Is rooted in ego, insecurity, or unresolved pain (shame, guilt, and/or trauma)
✘ Seeks to control, manipulate, or dominate others
✘ Expresses itself through manipulation, aggression, or avoidance
✘ Lingers and festers instead of passing through and dissolving (emotions are “e-motion, energy in motion”).

True masculinity isn’t about avoiding anger (or anything else); it’s about mastering it:

It’s about knowing when to stand firm, when to let go, and how to channel raw emotion into something constructive so you can build something REAL.

Breaking Free from the ‘Nice Guy’ Identity

For many men, the struggle isn’t just about anger but more about the false identity (ego) they’ve built around not expressing it. This often shows up as being a “nice guy” who will do whatever it takes to please others and pretty much nothing to please himself (which is a failed strategy as you can’t pour from an empty cup).

The “nice guy” identity is often a defence mechanism, a way to avoid conflict and stay safe (usually because the guy in question has Daddy Issues) – but at what cost?

They avoid difficult conversations and let resentment build.
They struggle to set boundaries because they don’t want to “rock the boat” or to say “no”.
They prioritise being liked over being real.
They feel stuck in life but don’t know why (answer: because they’re blocking the expression of their realness behind ego and not taking real action).

Reclaiming your real anger means breaking free from this pattern; it means stepping into realness, even if it means confrontation and valuing respect over approval.

Being real doesn’t mean being reckless; it doesn’t mean being aggressive; it means being whole – someone who can express anger without fear, but also knows when to let it go and move on with the flow of life to keep growing even more real.

Practical Steps to Reconnect with Your Anger and Purpose

If you feel disconnected from your anger, here’s how you can start integrating it in a real and healthy way:

Identify What Makes You Angry – Start paying attention to what consistently frustrates or irritates you. Are you ignoring something important? Are you tolerating situations that go against your values? What’s the deeper issue within yourself (perception is projection)?
Express It Constructively – Instead of suppressing anger or letting it build up and explode, channel it into direct, real action. If a boundary is crossed, assert yourself; if something needs changing, take action; if you need to GTFO, then GTFO.
Recognise Your Triggers – Are there certain people or situations that make you defensive? What patterns do you see? Understanding your triggers helps you respond rather than react so you can keep moving towards your vision. Check out this free tool that can help you stay on top of this: Hamster Wheel Thought Log
Move Your Body – Physical movement helps process emotion and regulates your nervous system: Strength training, running, martial arts, yoga, or even breathwork can help channel anger into energy.
Develop a Purpose – This is probably the most important thing you can do for your life as a whole – especially in this case, because anger needs somewhere to go. When you have a goal, vision, or purpose, your anger becomes fuel rather than frustration and it’s easier to stay present and move forward from one-moment-to-the-next.
Set Clear Boundaries – Stop saying yes when you mean no. Stop tolerating disrespect. If something doesn’t sit right with you, speak up. Simple.
Let Go of Shame Around Anger – There’s nothing ‘weak’ about being angry or with standing up for yourself. The only problem is when anger controls you instead of the other way around. Learn to own and control it by directing it into your REAL life.

Final Thoughts: The World Needs More Healthy Anger

The world doesn’t need fewer men with anger – it needs more men who own their anger and use it wisely. One of the main reasons the world is so unreal at the moment is because so many men are out of touch with their REALNESS and the anger that can serve as fuel for realising and expressing it.

When anger is expressed in a healthy way, it creates clarity, strength, and purpose; it protects what matters and it moves things forward.

If you currently feel out-of-touch with your masculinity, start by getting angry in a real way—not by lashing out, but by standing up and taking real ACTION.

Your anger is not your enemy – it’s your rocket fuel.

Stay real out there,

Conflict to Connection: How Self-Awareness Transforms Relationships

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Life Philosophy/Mindset/Personal Revolutions/Psychology/Relationships

Shifting from a stance of “Me vs You” to “You vs Me” will give you more power.

It’s a familiar scene and a classic episode within the human experience: a conversation escalates into an argument and suddenly it’s me vs you – two opposing forces locked in an unseen battle for validation and being ‘right’ and trying to ‘defend’ themselves no matter what.

Or, sometimes, maybe it’s a classic episode of me vs the world – life itself seemingly conspiring against us…leaving us defensive, reactive, and entrenched in our own narratives and projections as we slip into autopilot and no longer seem to have any control over ourselves.

Have you ever stopped to really think about these ‘battles’ that can just creep up on us out of nowhere? Have you ever wondered if the real battle isn’t against others at all?

What if it’s all within us?

As usual, the truth can be simple but brutal – in this case, it’s as follows:

The way we engage with conflict—whether in personal relationships, the workplace, or even online – is largely dictated by our own inner landscape and is a reflection of our relationship with ourselves (almost always because of underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

There are two general ‘rules’ or principles that come into play here:

The more we operate from a place of defensiveness, the more we project our unresolved fears, insecurities, and wounds onto others.
The more we believe that others must change for things to improve, the less power we actually have in shaping the quality of our relationships.

This article explores how self-awareness can break the cycle of conflict, shifting us from adversarial dynamics and fragmentation to deeper connection and wholeness:

By embracing the “You vs Me” approach rather than defaulting to “Me vs You”, we create space for understanding, growth, and real transformation – not just in our interactions with others, but also within ourselves.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Why We Get Defensive: The Fear of Change

At the heart of most human conflicts is one key issue: the fear of change and how it can ‘threaten’ our own ego ‘stuff’.

Change is difficult because, on a deep psychological level, it forces us to confront aspects of ourselves that may be uncomfortable – our mistakes, our flaws, our blind spots, and all of the things hidden behind the ‘security’ of the Ego in the Shadow Self.

When faced with disagreement, we instinctively protect our ego by doubling down on what we already think we believe – usually, as an extension of our ego – resisting the possibility that we might need to adjust.

This is where the “Me vs You” dynamic emerges:

We attempt to control the external world to preserve our internal stability, forcing others to see things our way, agree with our perspective, or validate our feelings.

This may give us the buzz of feeling like we’re winning but it also causes problems because, when we push, others push back (because of their attempts to preserve their own ego ‘stuff’).

This just opens up a vicious circle where our defensiveness breeds their defensiveness, their resistance fuels our frustration and – instead of communication – we get combat.

So what’s the alternative?

The Power of “You vs Me” Thinking

The “You vs Me” approach flips the script:

Instead of projecting our ‘stuff‘ onto others, we take responsibility for it.

We recognise that, just as we have our perspectives, so do others and their reactions are not always about us, just as ours aren’t always about them.

It asks us to ask ourselves:

What is it like for others to deal with me?
How does my way of thinking, feeling, or acting impact the dynamic?
Am I leading with my ego or am I actually listening and being present?

When we approach situations this way – i.e. with an awareness of our own ‘stuff’ and how it blocks communication – something powerful happens: we stop being reactive and start being proactive.

Instead of engaging in an emotional tug-of-war, we bring self-awareness and curiosity to the interaction.

In other words, we start to show up from our REALNESS and not just the Ego:

We don’t immediately assume bad intentions.

We don’t feel the need to ‘win’.

We don’t force our views on others – nor do we need them to validate these views because we know that the truth doesn’t need defending.

The irony is that by LETTING GO, we actually start to put ourselves in a stronger position and to have more influence, not less.

This is basically because people are more open to dialogue when they don’t feel attacked and because they’re more willing to listen when they feel heard.

When you stop being adversarial and putting your ego first, you give others the best possible chance to engage with you in a way that leads to mutual growth, rather than mutual destruction.

Instead of tearing things down in an unreal way, you can start to build something REAL together.

Understanding Your Own Patterns: Think, Do, Feel

One way to cultivate this self-awareness is by examining how you naturally process the world as you move through it.

Each of us tends to move through life in a pattern that prioritises one of three things – Thinking, Doing, and Feeling:

Think-first people – tend to prioritise logic, structure, and analysis; they may struggle with emotional nuance and can come across as cold or dismissive in conflicts.
Feel-first people – lean towards prioritising emotions and connection; they can sometimes misinterpret rational discussions as personal attacks (usually because they identify with their feelings and emotions instead of letting them pass).
Do-first people – have a tendency to act before thinking or feeling, leading them to be impulsive or reactive.

Understanding your dominant mode helps you see how others might experience you in conflict so that you can come at it with more influence:

For instance, if you’re naturally a think-first person, you may believe you’re being logical in a discussion but a feel-first person may interpret your tone as uncaring or distant. On the other hand, if you’re a feel-first person, your emotional reactions may seem overwhelming or irrational to someone who leads with logic.

By recognising these dynamics, you can adapt your communication to better engage with others (based on whether they’re a think/feel/do type), rather than triggering unnecessary conflict.

Shifting from “Me vs You” to “You vs Me” in Practice

So how do we actually apply this to real-life situations?

Here are some practical steps to move from reaction to realness:

1. Develop Awareness: Spot Your Own Triggers

Before jumping into conflict, take a breath and ask yourself:

What is this really bringing up in me?
Am I reacting from some past ‘stuff’ or old wounds or from the present moment?
Am I trying to control, prove, or defend something?

Recognising your emotional triggers interrupts the automatic cycle of defensiveness and opens space for conscious response. It gets you out of ego and into your REALNESS.

2. Practise Acceptance: Let Go of Control

Accepting others as they are doesn’t mean agreeing with them – it just means acknowledging that you cannot control how they think, feel, or behave – only how you respond.

When faced with disagreement, remind yourself:

I don’t need to ‘win‘ this argument to be real (because what’s real is always real).

I can hold my perspective while respecting theirs (because perspectives are just interpretations of reality, not reality itself).

Their reaction is about them, not me (because it shows their projections).

This mental shift immediately de-escalates tension and allows for more meaningful engagement that actually allows you to keep building and moving forwards.

3. Take Conscious Action: Respond, Don’t React

Instead of launching into a defensive stance, try these alternative responses:

Instead of: “You’re wrong” → Try: “That’s interesting. Tell me more about how you reached these conclusions”

Instead of: “You always do this” → Try: “I notice that when this happens, I feel/think [x]. Can we talk about it?”

Instead of reacting impulsively, → Try: Pausing for 10 seconds and getting into your breath before responding.

By choosing how you respond, you redirect the energy of conflict into growth rather than destruction.

This keeps things flowing and keeps everybody involved REAL.

The Real Goal: Growth, Not Perfection

The point of all this isn’t to become some Zen master who never gets triggered or never argues – that’s unrealistic.

The real goal is to stay in the process of becoming more real – to work through our own limitations so we don’t unconsciously project them onto others and take ourselves away from the Natural Drive Towards Wholeness that is unfolding at all times.

When we can stay in the process and keep growing REAL:

We stop taking everything personally.
We stop forcing others to change before we’re willing to change ourselves.
We stop reacting to life and start consciously engaging with it.

Ultimately, this is what deepens our relationships, our self-awareness, and our experience of life itself.

So the next time you feel tension rising in a conversation, ask yourself:

“Am I making this Me vs You… or can I make it You vs Me?”

Because the moment we stop fighting against life and start engaging with it, we can actually start GROWING REAL.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty six in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Deep Acceptance: On ‘Fixing’ Others and Their Personality Defects

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You Can’t ‘Fix’ People – But You Can Grow REAL

One of the hardest lessons to learn in this wonderful life is that you can’t change people (which also means that people can’t change you either):

No matter how much your might try or how much you might like to, you can’t ‘fix’ somebody’s personality defects, reshape their minds, or make them see reality in exactly the same way that you do.

This is because people change and transform from the inside-out, not from the outside-in:

No amount of ‘logic’ (or what seems logical to you, at least), persuasion, or even love will work unless they’re ready – unless something within them cracks open and allows truth to seep in from the inside-out.

To make things even more complicated and infuriating, the more you try to fix someone, the more they resist and cling to the things that you want to ‘change’ in the first place.

Human beings are funny old creatures but it’s just the way that things go (humans are gonna human, after all):

If you’ve ever tried (but no doubt failed) to help a stubborn friend, a ‘toxic’ family member, or a self-sabotaging partner, you’ll know exactly what this means – instead of hearing your ‘wisdom’ (you might be wrong, of course) and taking it on board, they double down on their flaws; they hold on even tighter to the very things that are holding them back, as if protecting some fragile part of themselves that isn’t yet ready to dissolve (i.e. the Ego).

So what does that leave us with? How do we deal with the difficult, stubborn, or destructive people in our lives?

The answer is simpler than you might think: acceptance – but not the weak, passive kind: this is about Deep Acceptance – the kind that allows you to keep flowing instead of forcing and to stay real instead of getting caught up in the unreal and lost to your own ego ‘stuff’.

Let’s break it down and dig a little deeper:

The Illusion of ‘Fixing’ Others

There’s a deep-seated belief that if we care enough, try hard enough, or say the ‘right’ things, then we can somehow save people from themselves.

Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), real transformation doesn’t work like that.

Think about the biggest changes you’ve ever made in your own life:

Did changes take place because someone nagged, guilt-tripped, or pressured you into them? Or did they happen because something inside of you ‘clicked‘ – a realisation, a moment of deep truth, a rock-bottom experience that forced you to wake up and become more AWARE in some way (so you could then go more deeply into Acceptance and then Action)?

(Check out this free guide to Awareness, Acceptance, and Action if you want to transform yourself and your life even more: Ego | Shadow | Trust: Build Flow & Become Unstuck).

For change to be real and lasting, it has to come from within and, so, until someone is ready to face themselves, no amount of external force or pressure will make any difference whatsoever – if anything, it will just push them further into their defences, reinforcing their current state instead of dissolving it and making whatever ‘problems’ you perceive way worse.

That’s why trying to change people is not only exhausting but counterproductive – it creates resistance instead of transformation and just takes everybody involved in the change process further and further away from their own REAL path and sense of timing.

The Sacred Mantra: Everyone is F’d Up—Love Them Anyway

So, this all being the case, what are we supposed to do with the troublesome or ‘difficult’ people in our lives? How do we help people to change – if they’re genuinely ready to do so – without losing ourselves in frustration, resentment, or endless battles at the same time?

The answer is found in a simple yet powerful lesson I’ve shared before:

EVERYBODY IS F’D UP BUT LEARN TO LOVE THEM ANYWAY (INCLUDING OURSELVES) .

This doesn’t mean you excuse bad behaviour or tolerate mistreatment; it doesn’t mean you lower your standards or accept things that go against your values. What it does mean is that you stop wasting energy trying to force change where it isn’t ready to happen and, instead, focus on your own growth and the things that you can actually control.

Ultimately, this comes down to letting go – not in a way that makes you passive, but in a way that makes you free and helps you find the strength of your own REALNESS.

Acceptance vs. Endurance

“Acceptance” doesn’t mean being a doormat and having the world and its ‘difficult’ people walk all over you – nor is it about tolerating toxic behaviour or letting people take advantage of you or disrespect you.

It simply means recognising reality for what it is and accepting some of the things that mean it is what it is:

Some people will never change and that’s not your problem.
Some people will grow but only when they are ready (and some people never will be, depending on how much ego ‘stuff’ they have going on).
Your job is not to ‘fix’ anyone – it’s to be real and to let others walk their own path whilst you walk yours.

There’s a huge difference between acceptance and endurance (and extreme version of tolerance):

Endurance is gritting your teeth and suffering through something because you feel you have no choice (when you always have a choice).
Acceptance is seeing things as they are and making a conscious decision about how to move forward with what’s actually there.

If someone in your life is toxic or harmful, you don’t have to endure them – you can walk away; you can set boundaries; you can protect your peace.

But you don’t have to waste time and energy trying to force them to be different than they are or to ‘fix’ the qualities that are testing you in the first place..

Let them be who they are and allow yourself to be who you are.

Flowing Instead of Forcing

When you accept people as they are – without trying to control them, change them, or ‘fix’ them – something powerful happens:

You stop resisting reality and start to ACCEPT it (acceptance is the opposite of resistance).

When this happens, you start FLOWING:

Instead of getting tangled up in the drama of other people’s dysfunctions and defects, you actually move forward with your own life; instead of exhausting yourself trying to ‘help’ people who don’t want to be helped, you channel your energy into your own growth and your own realness.

This is how you grow real instead of getting caught up in the unreal and getting lost to the Void and those “lives of quiet desperation” (as Thoreau called them).

Practical Steps: How to Integrate Deep Acceptance into Your Life

Here are some key ways to live and breathe the kind of Deep Acceptance we’re talking about:

1. Stop Trying to ‘Rescue‘ People

Recognise when your desire to help is actually a desire to control and is, therefore, linked to your own ego ‘stuff’ (and not reality). If someone isn’t open to change, let them be (even if that means you might have to walk away for at least a while).

2. Set Clear Boundaries

Deep Acceptance doesn’t mean allowing people to mistreat you. It means setting firm, healthy boundaries and sticking to them to protect your own peace.

3. Focus on Your Own Growth

Every time you feel the urge to ‘fix’ someone, turn that energy inward and see if there’s some Shadow Self ‘stuff’ going on: What parts of yourself still need healing? What areas of your life could benefit from deeper self-awareness? How might you be projecting and what does this tell you about your own journey?

4. Love People Where They Are

Not where you wish they’d be…. Love them as they are, while maintaining your own integrity and living with your own values, goals, and principles.

5. Let Go of the Need for ‘Closure‘

Some people will never give you an apology or the answers that your ego might feel you ‘need’ to be able to move forward. The brutal truth is that some people will never change and there’s nothing you can do about it because some of us are just ‘stuck’ in certain (unreal) patterns our whole lives long. Make peace with that and move on – it is what it is.

6. Choose Flow Over Force

Instead of fighting reality – which is impossible – flow with it. Work with what is, rather than what you wish was and build with that foundation of DEEP ACCEPTANCE instead of resistance (you can only build on a solid foundation, anyway, and the most solid foundation is REALITY).

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, the only person you can change is yourself.

The more you focus on ‘fixing’ others, the more you disconnect from your own growth.

When you shift your attention inward and stop trying to control what isn’t yours to control you become lighter, freer, and more real.

Stay real out there,

Living Without Labels: Seeing Reality and Finding Your REALNESS

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Life Philosophy/Mindset/Personal Revolutions/Psychology/Relationships/Shadow Life

Beyond Black and White: Embracing the Shades of Grey Within Ourselves and Life

Humans are gonna human and so we like to think we know who we ‘are’ and construct narratives, attach labels, and categorise everything into tidy little boxes like ‘good’ or ‘bad, ‘right‘ or ‘wrong‘ and ‘success‘ or ‘failure‘

This is a nice way to feel a sense of control in our lives but – the truth is – reality doesn’t work that way because the world isn’t made of rigid absolutes – instead, it’s an ever-shifting, ever-changing flux of different shades of grey.

What this basically means that if we want to live in a REAL way then we need to learn to see beyond black-and-white thinking and embrace the complexity of both ourselves and existence itself.

This applies to every single one of us – including YOU:

To your personality, your struggles, your growth. You are not just one ‘thing’ that makes perfect ‘sense’ all the time but a living contradiction, a paradox, a spectrum of seemingly opposing forces that coexist within the same being.

You need to know this because REAL growth doesn’t come from cutting yourself into neat, digestible fragments but from integrating your wholeness – from learning to accept, navigate, and work with all the different ‘parts’ of yourself (some of which may hide in the Shadow Territory) instead of forcing yourself into an illusion of simplicity and separation from the TRUTH (that’s just ego).

Let’s take a deeper dive:

The Problem with Black-and-White Thinking

Black-and-white thinking is a defence mechanism that simplifies reality so that we don’t have to confront its messiness. It allows us to judge ourselves and others quickly – without having to sit in the discomfort of complexity (which is often a threat to the ‘simplicity’ that comes through filtering everything through the familiarity of our own ego ‘stuff’).

We do this in all areas of life and for many of us it’s just our ‘default’ way of thinking, feeling, and being in life.

For example:

Relationships – We tend to label people as either ‘good’ or ‘toxic’ when, in reality, they are flawed and evolving, just like us.
Personal growth – We see ourselves as either ‘successful’ or ‘failing’ instead of understanding that REAL growth happens in seasons, always has setbacks, and unfolds in spirals – not straight lines (even if you take yourself through the transformational process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action – see my free guide here: Ego | Shadow | Trust: Build Flow & Become Unstuck).
Morality – We label actions as purely ‘right’ or purely ‘wrong‘, ignoring that context, intention, and perspective always play a role and a lot of the time our moral standards have nothing to do with ‘morality’ and everything to do with our own subjective interpretations.

Black-and-white thinking – boxing everything of neatly into either/or categories – is comfortable because it gives us a sense of control and prevents little to no threat to our ego (the identity we’ve created to keep uncomfortable truth at bay). It prevents us from having to wrestle with ambiguity.

That would be great if it wasn’t for the fact that real life isn’t comfortable and is instead dynamic, shifting, and full of contradictions.

To grow real, we have to stop seeing things in binary terms and see things as they are not as we need them to be.

Perception Exists in a Spectrum

In our experience of life as fragmented creatures in fragmented bodies on a fragmented planet then nothing is ever 100% ‘good’ or 100% ‘bad’.

If this were the case, life would be much simpler – but it would probably be very boring and definitely wouldn’t be real. Even history’s most infamous figures, like – dare I say Hitler, were not completely devoid of humanity (though he may have found it hard to get in touch with his humanity). This definitely doesn’t excuse their actions, but it reveals an important truth:

Everything contains the seeds of its opposite.

This applies to me and to you too:

You may be generous but there are moments when you act selfishly.

You may be disciplined but there are days when you procrastinate.

You may be kind but you’ve had moments of cruelty.

You may be a ‘good’ person overall but there are still ‘bad’ things that you’ve done (and vice versa for the ‘bad’ people overall like Adolf mentioned above).

Do these ‘seeds’ of opposition to your default way of being make you a bad person? No. They make you REAL.

This is why labelling ourselves (or others) too rigidly is a mistake that takes us away from our REAL LIVES:

When we say things like “I’m just an anxious person” or “I’m not a leader” we create an illusion of permanence and stasis. We trap ourselves in a narrow, fragmented identity based on concepts instead of recognising that we are a dynamic process that’s always evolving towards more wholeness that can be experienced.

This opens up a paradox:

To keep growing and evolving towards wholeness (which is ABSOLUTE because it’s the TRUTH) then -here in our life as fragmented creatures – we need to start stop thinking in terms of absolutes and to reflect on accept ourselves and others in terms of spectrums and continuums.

How to Shift into a ‘Shades of Grey’ Mindset

If you want to see reality more clearly, you need to learn to operate in the grey areas – here’s how:

1. Stop Using Absolutes – Use a Scale Instead

When you catch yourself thinking in black and white, reframe it:

Instead of: “I’m a failure”
Try: “On a scale from 1 to 100, how bad is this situation really?”

Instead of: “That person is toxic”
Try: “What percentage of their behaviour is difficult and what percentage is actually neutral or positive?”

Most of the time, things aren’t as extreme as they seem because when you shift from absolute labels to a spectrum-based mindset, your perspective expands and you release yourself from JUDGEMENTS that ‘belong’ to your ego and not reality.

2. Embrace Contradictions Within Yourself

In reality, you don’t have to be one thing or another – you can be both:

You can be confident and insecure, depending on the context.
You can be disciplined and lazy sometimes, depending on your energy levels.
You can be loving and struggle with resentment, depending on the situation and your own emotional ‘stuff’.

Trying to force yourself into a singular identity only creates inner conflict in the long run:

REALNESS comes from embracing yourself as a WHOLE and accepting all of it – from realising that you are made up of seemingly opposing forces that can coexist and even complement each other when you zoom out and see the bigger picture of yourself and your life.

3. Recognise That Growth Is a Process, Not a Destination

Black-and-white thinking makes us believe that growth is a one-time event – that we can suddenly “arrive” at a final, perfect version of ourselves and therefore ‘stop’ growing because there’s no longer any point.

The professional term for this way of thinking is ‘bullshit’:

REAL growth is messy and non-linear – it doesn’t follow a straight path from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ but it moves in cycles.

One day, you might feel like you’ve completely healed from something, and the next, you might find yourself struggling with it again as your unconscious releases something else for you to process (for example).

That doesn’t mean you’ve ‘failed‘ – it means you’re still alive, still growing, still in process because that’s just how life goes.

Moving from Fragmentation to Wholeness

When you stop splitting yourself into pieces, you start to integrate your Shadow Self and start to overcome the great Shadow Dance between the Ego and your hidden REAL self; you stop trying to eliminate your ‘bad’ parts and instead bring them into awareness, learning how to work with and accept them rather than go against them (which means you’ll be ready to take real ACTION).I

In short, wholeness isn’t about becoming perfect – it’s about embracing your REALNESS:

Realness means embracing the full spectrum of who you are and the TRUTH about what life is – the light and the dark, the order and the chaos, the certainty and the doubt. It means being fluid as you move through life rather than rigid, present rather than trapped in an identity/ego, and open to growth instead of fixated on control and futile attempts to stay the ‘same’ (the idea of which is always based on some either/or, black and white label).

When you learn to trust this process, you move beyond fear, beyond judgement, and into something deeper:

Reality itself (and REAL ALWAYS WORKS).

Practical Ways to Integrate This Mindset and GROW REAL

Challenge Extreme Thoughts: Whenever you catch yourself thinking in absolute judgements, pause and ask: “Is this really 100% true?”
Use the Scale Method: Rate situations, emotions, and people on a scale instead of labelling them.
Observe, Don’t Judge: When you notice a behaviour in yourself or others, see it as an observation, not a judgement.
Accept Your Contradictions: Remind yourself that being a mixture of strengths and weaknesses is natural and very REAL.
Practice Self-Compassion: Instead of beating yourself up for not being ‘good’ enough, recognise that wholeness includes imperfection when you’re made of fragments.

Final Thoughts: The Power of Seeing Clearly

When you let go of black-and-white thinking, you start to see reality for what it actually is – not a rigid set of rules or ‘labels’, but an ever-changing, dynamic process.

This makes you more open, more resilient, and more whole and allows you to stop resisting yourself and instead work with yourself.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty four in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Everybody is F’d Up (So Don’t Worry About It)

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Everybody is f’d up but love them anyway (including yourself)

One of the biggest and most life-affirming lessons I’ve learned in life over the last few years on planet earth is this:

Everybody is f*ed up but love them anyway (including yourself).

Let that sink in – really, take a second. We have all day.

The reason that this little sentence is so powerful is because when you get it, see it, and let it move through you, a whole lot of ‘stuff’ that might niggle, frustrate, or even keep you up at night stops mattering:

You stop worrying about whether you’re ‘good’ enough, ‘cool’ enough, or even ‘normal’ enough; you stop wasting time wondering if people ‘like’ you or if you’re doing life ‘right’ – on the other side of the coin, you stop worrying and wondering about all these little things when it comes to others. Instead, you can just let yourself and others BE whatever it is that they BE.

This is the HUMAN CONDITION, people – and nobody gets out alive: everyone is carrying their own baggage, their own quirks, their own madness, and that includes me and you.

Once you really start accept this something shifts:

You stop trying to FORCE yourself or others to be anything other than what they are and – paradoxically – that’s where real growth starts to happen (because human beings are always growing and the only thing that stops the natural flow towards wholeness is a lack of acceptance).

Let’s dive in and get a little deeper:

Embracing the Human Condition

We all have our little oddities, insecurities, fears, and battle scars – welcome to the human condition:

Nobody is exempt because humans are gonna human and we all share more similarities than differences. No matter how polished someone looks on the outside, there’s always something going on beneath the surface and there’s always something to contend with sooner or later.

The problem is, most people spend their lives trying to hide or compensate for the so-called ‘brokenness’ that comes from being a little rough around the edges after going through some of the things that we all go through (shame, guilt, and/or trauma, F.E.A.R, heartbreak, loss, etc. etc. etc.).

This is totally sad and ironic though because it’s those quirks, cracks, and ‘defects’ that make us who we are (or as Rumi said: “The cracks are where the light enters you“).

When we stop fighting ourselves and getting lost in the fragmented mask of ego because we’re scared of facing our SHADOW SELF – when we stop trying to ‘fix’ every little thing and just be whatever it is that we is – we move into a state of wholeness.

And – when we’re connected to this place of wholeness (aka REALNESS) – we naturally keep evolving and growing (which is why ‘acceptance’ isn’t just about remaining the same but about letting go of the things that stop you becoming a deeper expression of your potential and who you really are).

This brings us back to a paradox: accepting where you are is what allows you to change and grow in a REAL way.

It’s when you resist reality instead of accepting it that you stay ‘stuck’ (including the REALNESS of yourself and your relationship with others).

Seeing the Madness (and Laughing at It)

The older I get (but let’s not talk about that), the more I look around and realise a fundamental truth about the human race: we’re just a bunch of lunatics.

And I mean this with love (because love and acceptance are the same ‘thing’).

Just look around you:

We’re all just casually and not so casually walking around with our peculiar ways of thinking, odd habits, strange fears, and contradictory behaviours. Some people hoard rubber ducks; some have to triple-check if the door is locked; some sing to their plants; some can’t walk past a mirror without flexing or pouting at themselves (yeah, I do this too sometimes).

It’s just humans being human (because humans gonna human).

So why does it seem like we can waste so much time worrying about being ‘normal’? Really, all that means is that we’re JUDGING for some reason and judgement is the opposite of acceptance so something doesn’t add up.

Once you realise that everyone else is as ‘off’ as you are and that you’re as ‘off’ as they are, then you stop judging yourself and others so harshly. You stop trying to smooth out every rough edge to fit in or have somebody fit to your (arbitrary) standards of what’s ‘normal’ and that’s when you start living and relating with REALNESS.

Because if we’re all a bit mad, what’s the point of pretending otherwise?

Depersonalising Other People’s ‘Stuff’

Now, let’s be clear: accepting that everyone is at least a little bit ‘mad’ doesn’t mean tolerating bad behaviour.

It doesn’t mean making excuses for people who are disrespectful, dishonest, or ‘toxic’ – it simply means understanding that when someone acts out, it’s not about you but about how well they can accept the human condition themselves.

Most of the time, people are just projecting their own unhealed ‘stuff’ onto the people and the world around them:

The person who snaps at you in the shop? Probably dealing with their own stress.
The friend who suddenly ghosts you? Likely wrestling with their own fears of intimacy or commitment.
The colleague who undermines you? They’re likely insecure about their own value.

This is all caused by them NOT accepting the human condition and the way that things are, judging themselves, and then projecting that judgement onto you. It’s not yours though. You don’t have to take it.

(And this works vice versa when you don’t accept things and project judgement onto others).

When you depersonalise other people’s behaviour, you stop taking on their energy and can protect your own so that you can invest it in something REAL.

You stop internalising their issues as reflections of your worth (or stop asking others to internalise yours because of your own control freakery and need to keep your ego where it is). Instead, you can stay in your own lane, hold your boundaries, and only engage with what’s real.

Or, as I like to say (from my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World): “Gimme something real or GTFO.”

Wholeness: The Art of Just Being

So where does this all lead us and how can we make it practical?

It leads to a simple but profound shift towards the TRUTH: the realisation that you are already REAL because you’re already WHOLE.

You can take all of these ‘judgements’ out of it because judgements are about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but you and everybody else are REAL.

You don’t have to ‘fix’ yourself to be worthy – you don’t have to fit into some external mould to be valuable. Nor do you have to ‘fix’ anybody else or mould them into something that seems ‘valuable’ to you either (because they’re already ‘valuable’ – whatever the hell that means).

You just have to be what you is and allow others to be the same.

Because when you stop fighting yourself, you move into flow and – when you’re in flow – life starts aligning in ways you could never have predicted. The right people show up. The right opportunities arise. The ‘answers’ you were chasing seem to come out of nowhere. All because you started ACCEPTING and pulling things closer instead of RESISTING and pushing them away.

It’s not magic – it’s just realness.

Or, as I like to put it:

“I am that I am in wholeness and wholeness is in me” (from my new book Trust).

How to Apply This in Your Own Life

This all sounds great in theory (because it is lol) but how do you actually live it? How do you stop judging yourself and others, embrace all of the quirkiness of the human condition, and let life flow instead of forcing it to some made-up standard of ‘normal’?

Here are some practical ways to integrate this mindset and get more real about things:

1. Observe Without Judging

Next time you notice something ‘weird’ about yourself – an insecurity, a nervous habit, an old fear etc. –just observe it. Don’t label it as ‘bad’ or try to change it immediately but just see it for what it is.

The same applies to other people too – instead of reacting to their behaviour, try to see where it’s coming from. Most of the time, it has nothing to do with you and they’re just running on autopilot in reaction to their own ‘stuff’.

2. Catch Yourself Overthinking

If you ever catch yourself spiralling – worrying about how you’re perceived, what others think, or whether you’re doing life ‘right’ – then…pause.

Remind yourself: everyone is winging it and making it up as they go along (it has to be this way because none of our ‘plans’ ever fully align with reality itself – the map is not the territory).

Nobody has it all figured out so let yourself off the hook and just DO YOUR BEST AND LET GO OF THE REST.

3. Set Boundaries Without Guilt

Accepting that people have their own baggage and emotional ‘stuff’ doesn’t mean letting them dump it on you.

If someone disrespects you, step back; if a relationship drains you, reassess it; if someone isn’t giving you realness, don’t waste your time trying to decode them and just move on (“Gimme something real or GTFO”).

You can accept people as they are while also choosing who you allow into your life – everybody is weird but you don’t have to let everybody in.

4. Be Weird, Be Raw and Real

Stop suppressing the parts of you that don’t fit some imaginary idea of what’s ‘normal’ (if somebody makes a moral or value-based judgement of you always ask “According to who?” and the answer will almost always have to be “Me” which means you can probably ignore it – unless they’re an omnipotent and omniscient God).

Want to wear a ridiculous outfit? Get it done.

Have a bizarre passion? Turn the volume up and go crazy with it.

Like deep conversations more than small talk? Find people who get it and dive in (a real conversation can change your life).

When you stop filtering yourself, you attract the right people because you’re putting something real out there. You’ll find those who love you for who you really are rather than some mask you were wearing to try and be ‘normal’.

5. Trust That You’re Exactly Where You Need to Be

You don’t have to have it all together to be ‘worthy’ (whatever the f that means) nor do you have to be ‘healed’ to be whole.

Right now, exactly as you are, with all your quirks, flaws, and eccentricities – you are already REAL.

And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you start living a REAL life.

Final Thoughts: Stay Real

In conclusion, life is messy, people are complicated and none of us are ‘perfect’, ‘normal’, or anything else that sums up some arbitrary and subjective moral standard.

So stop overthinking it and just be what you is.

Embrace the madness. Love yourself and others, flaws and all.

Because everybody is f’d up (even you) but you can CHOOSE to love them anyway (and, yes, you could say that ‘love’ is an arbitrary moral standard but it’s just what’s there when you REMOVE the judgements – not add anything).

Stay real out there,

Semen Retention and the Nervous System: A Tool for Growing Real and Finding Purpose

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Creativity/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Shadow Life/Trust

Semen retention is the practice of choosing not to ejaculate for a period of time so that you can redirect that energy into your focus, confidence, and sense of purpose.

In my view it works by calming an overstimulated nervous system (moving you out of constant “fight-or-flight”), giving you a steadier reserve of energy to put into your vision, and building the kind of presence and confidence that comes from the inside rather than being faked.

Semen retention is a lifestyle choice and not a quick hack and this article is a coaching perspective, not medical advice.

Getting back into the unforced rhythms of REAL life.

Men these days are constantly and consistently bombarded with so many unreal distractions that pull them away from their natural rhythms and deeper sense of REAL purpose:

Whether it’s overstimulation through technology like social media and pornography, to a culture that promotes instant gratification and having every need ‘met’ as soon as it arises, it’s not really a massive surprise that so many men out there feel drained, fragmented, and disconnected from themselves.

But what if there was a way to reclaim your energy, focus, and presence – one that goes beyond superficial ‘self-improvement’ and taps into something deeper?

Oh, wait, there is – it’s called “Semen Retention” (stay with me if you haven’t heard of this before – talking about things like ‘semen’ is always a bit of a sensitive topic but it’s also one of the most powerful things you can learn about as a man).

Semen retention is not just about abstinence – it’s powerful tool for transformation:

It allows men to step out of unconscious patterns, regulate their nervous system, and channel their energy into something REAL. Much more than just a ‘practice’ it’s a LIFESTYLE CHOICE that serves as a means of moving from fragmentation to wholeness and from a reactionary and empty existence to a purposeful life.

This article explores why semen retention works and some of the benefits that it can bring to your life as a man.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Balancing the Nervous System: The Key to Real Success

A dysregulated nervous system is the hidden enemy of success and it’s one of the most common problems in the world (that most people don’t even know about).

The main problem when it comes to the nervous system is to have what’s known as sympathetic dominance – this means that the part of your nervous system responsible for putting you in fight-or-flight mode (your sympathetic nervous system) is overly-activated and stimulated so much so that the part of your nervous system responsible for helping you relax and enjoy life (the parasympathetic nervous system) doesn’t work when it needs to.

This kind of sympathetic dominance just keeps you in a state of ‘high-alert’ where you’re constantly on edge and filled with tension. This can bring all kinds of physical and mental symptoms that hold you back from your REAL life and also affect the way you identify with yourself and relate to others on a long enough timeline (because you start to think that these ‘symptoms’ – irritability, anxiety, depression, etc. etc. etc. – are just ‘You’).

The main downside is that when you’re constantly in a state of fight-or-flight, your body burns through its energy reserves, keeping you on edge, exhausted, and reactive. Most men don’t realise that their perpetual fatigue, stress, anxiety, or the tendency to see threats where none exist is linked to deeper issues with the nervous system and how we relate to ourselves at the level of the body.

Semen retention helps to restore balance to the whole mind-body system by reducing nervous system overstimulation:

Instead of depleting yourself through unconscious habits and identities, you allow your body to settle into a more relaxed state (because the parasympathetic nervous system is activated when it needs to be) – making it easier to focus, take action, and stay resilient in the face of challenges.

In short, when you’re not burning through your life force energy unnecessarily, you give yourself a greater chance of success – not just externally, but also internally.

Returning to Life’s Natural Rhythms

There’s an important difference between forcing life and flowing with it:

When you break free from the habit of ejaculation for its own sake – whether through mindless masturbation or meaningless sex – you stop manipulating and disturbing your body’s natural state and begin to move with reality instead of against it. This allows you to start TRUSTING your body to flow with life instead of forcing it to do things it doesn’t need to do because your mind is disturbed and needs an outlet.

This is what Jesus referred to as “the unforced rhythms of grace” (in a modern translation of the Bible called ‘The Message’): Your body and mind begin to align with something real rather than being hijacked by urges and conditioned behaviours (which are always caused by filtering your bodily instincts through the Ego instead of being present and acting on something REAL).

Instead, by training yourself to take control of your body and practise semen retention, you can learn to act from clarity instead of from compulsion. This puts you in a state where you can take REAL ACTION and become one with life rather than take UNREAL ACTION and take yourself out of life.

In short, when you stop feeding bodily habits through identity (ego), you create space for something higher and much more REAL:

You are no longer dictated by old programming and the habits and distractions that stem from this programming but are free to make conscious choices that serve your real self (your REALNESS), rather than a false version of EGO that is simply a collection of habits and conditioned reactions to unresolved, underlying emotional ‘stuff’ (usually SHAME which is what disconnects us from life and truth in the first place).

A Natural Reservoir of Energy for Your Vision

The bottom line is that every man on the planet has a limited amount of energy but, unfortunately, most spend it wastefully, scattering it in all directions, with no real purpose or intent.

Semen retention helps to create and maintain a natural reservoir of energy that you can tap into and use in order to move towards your purpose and to smash through your goals.

There is one caveat, however and it’s this:

Without direction, that reservoir of energy can become a source of frustration rather than power.

This is because if you do semen retention without a conscious awareness of your REAL purpose, you’ll likely feel restless, irritable, and ungrounded. This is because energy is meant to be transmuted – channelled into something that makes you more real whilst also making the world around you more real.

This is why it’s crucial to have a vision and purpose that you are actively working towards and that keeps challenging and stretching you to go deeper into your own REALNESS. When you direct your retained energy into meaningful pursuits, you cultivate strength, drive, and real momentum that allows you to keep growing and evolving.

Without this sense of purpose, however, your energy will likely turn against you and you’ll become filled with friction, frustration, and misery as you don’t have a creative outlet for what’s inside you.

This is why it’s important to remember that semen retention isn’t the end goal – it’s the tool that fuels your mission towards the realisation of your vision. Used correctly, it will give you the stamina, clarity, and willpower to build something meaningful but – without REAL vision – that same energy can turn against you, making you feel like a caged animal with nowhere to go.

(Writing this so you know what to expect should you take this path).

Semen Retention and the Nervous System free guide. — Click the image above to open up a free PDF guide to semen retention, the nervous system, and real purpose.

Confidence, Presence, and Nervous System Regulation

Semen retention can help you to increase your confidence but it’s also a reminder that confidence isn’t something you fake – it’s something that emerges naturally when your body, mind, and nervous system are fully aligned and you’re taking REAL ACTION (which is where confidence comes from: action, not thinking).

In polyvagal theory (PVT) – another theory about nervous system regulation that focuses on toning the vagal nerve – true confidence comes from being in the ventral vagal state – a calm, engaged, and responsive mode of being where you are fully present. When you stop unnaturally draining your energy because of ego ‘stuff’, your nervous system becomes more regulated, allowing you to respond to life instead of reacting impulsively. This creates a deep, unshakable sense of presence that people can feel (which is why so many people who practise semen retention talk about the kind of animal magnetism and attraction they feel from others).

This kind of deep confidence isn’t about external bravado – it’s about knowing that you can handle whatever life throws at you without being thrown off-centre because you can TRUST yourself and life (you can do your best (trust yourself to act) and let go of the rest (let life handle the rest)).

In short, when you stop seeking cheap dopamine hits and wasting your semen, you become grounded in real stability, making you more magnetic, more capable, and more real.

Dissolving Shame and Connecting to Something Higher

The main reason that men (or women) fall into addictive habits is because of a sense of underlying SHAME (the unreal belief that they’re not good enough which causes them to become disconnected from the TRUTH).

In relation to what we’re talking about in this article, shame is the invisible force that keeps men small; it’s what drives compulsive behaviours, fuels insecurities, and keeps people stuck in cycles of self-sabotage.

To make things even worse, most men don’t even realise they’re carrying it and being DRIVEN by it.

Semen retention acts as a mirror because it starts to reveal the hidden shame that may have been lurking beneath the surface so that some HEALING can begin and the fragmented self that was created by SHAME can be replaced by something WHOLE and REAL.

An unspoken truth is that many men feel, shame, guilt, or unease around wasting their semen, even if they can’t articulate why. This is because, on some level, they know they are leaking something valuable and precious – not just physically, but energetically.

By breaking free from compulsive sexual habits, you allow that shame to start dissolving:

As it does, you begin to transcend the ego and connect to something greater – whether you call it God, love, truth, or reality itself. When shame is no longer blocking the way (and the ego that you created because of this shame), you can experience a deeper flow state, where you move with life rather than against it in the presence of this higher TRUTH.

Semen retention isn’t just about holding back – it’s about reclaiming something that has been lost behind the web of unreal thoughts that blocked your view of life because of unresolved SHAME. It’s about stepping into a version of yourself that is free from unnecessary shame and fully alive in the present moment.

It’s about being REAL again.

Facing the Shadow Self: The Real Work

Many men use ejaculation as a coping device – a way to escape, numb, or distract themselves from the deeper issues caused by underlying shame. When that crutch is removed, something uncomfortable but ultimately beautiful happens: you are forced to confront yourself.

This is where shadow integration begins.

Your Shadow Self is the part of you that you’ve rejected, suppressed, or denied – usually because of shame (but also commonly because of guilt and/or trauma). It hides behind your EGO – the ‘false’ version of yourself that was created so you could handle yourself in the world despite whatever originally shamed you in the world and made you feel like you had to hide ‘parts’ of your own REALNESS.

When you remove the distraction of compulsive sexual habits that lead to wasted semen, you come face-to-face with two very important things:

Your hidden emotional baggage – unresolved pain, childhood wounds, or insecurities you’ve buried down in the Shadow Territory.
Your unreal beliefs and identities – false narratives you’ve told yourself to avoid the discomfort of facing the truth and to keep the Ego in place.

Semen retention forces you to wrestle with these things because it removes the coping mechanisms that kept you from facing the truth about yourself. At first, this will probably be incredibly uncomfortable and your mind will try to pull you back into old habits where you feel ‘safe’ (despite not wanting to be there because of all of the symptoms of nervous system dysregulation and ego) but – if you push through – you will eventually integrate the lost shadow ‘parts’ of yourself and become whole again.

When you face your shadow, you stop living through the Ego and start living through truth. This is why semen retention is not just about ‘discipline’ or even about just getting more ‘energy’ – it’s about becoming real.

If you’re a man who wants to go deeper into semen retention and shadow work then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can definitely help you make progress towards your goals.

Ancient Wisdom: Semen Retention in Spiritual Traditions

Semen retention is not a new concept (though it’s becoming more-and-more popular as people find out the benefits of this practice):

For thousands of years, spiritual traditions all around the planet have recognised the power of conserving and consciously directing sexual energy into something real – throughout the ages, sages, yogis, and mystics have all taught that retaining and transmuting sexual energy leads to greater vitality, mental clarity, and even spiritual awakening.

Here are some examples as food for thought:

Taoism: Cultivating Jing into Shen

In Taoist philosophy, semen is seen as Jing, the essential life force that fuels vitality, longevity, and the journey towards higher consciousness.

Taoist masters taught that frequent ejaculation depletes this energy, leading to weakness and premature ageing. However, when retained and transmuted through practices like Qi Gong and breathwork, Jing is refined into Qi (life energy) and eventually into Shen (spiritual energy) which allows for much higher states of awareness.

The Taoists didn’t advocate for complete celibacy but rather for conscious control over ejaculation, ensuring that sexual energy was preserved and channelled into creative and spiritual pursuits rather than being wasted and bringing friction, frustration, and misery into our lives.

Yoga & Tantra: Brahmacharya and Kundalini Awakening

In yogic traditions, semen retention is closely linked to Brahmacharya, one of the five Yamas (ethical disciplines) in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

Traditionally, Brahmacharya meant celibacy, but in a broader sense, it refers to self-mastery over sexual energy and connecting to the infinite – using it to fuel higher states of awareness rather than dissipating it through indulgence.

In Tantra and Kundalini Yoga, semen is seen as a concentrated form of life force (Ojas) that, when retained and properly harnessed, can awaken Kundalini energy – the dormant spiritual power within; this energy rises through the chakras, leading to heightened intuition, self-realisation, and enlightenment.

Many yogis claim that excessive ejaculation weakens the mind and body, whereas conservation leads to enhanced willpower, focus, and a deep inner radiance (which is why so many retainers are said to have an ‘inner glow’).

Christian Mysticism: The Power of Purity

In Christian monastic traditions, celibacy was often practised not as repression, but as a means to focus energy on devotion and divine connection:

Many mystics and saints spoke of the power of self-restraint, viewing sexual energy as something that, when mastered, could lead to higher states of grace and wisdom.

Jesus himself taught the importance of living in alignment with truth rather than being enslaved by the desires of the flesh. The idea was not to deny sexuality but to transform it into something greater – a force that could be channelled into service, love, and divine communion.

Sufism & Islamic Teachings: Energy as a Sacred Trust

In Islamic teachings, moderation in sexual activity is encouraged, and excessive indulgence is seen as something that weakens both body and soul:

Many Sufi mystics believed that sexual energy was a sacred trust from God, meant to be honoured and used wisely (everything has an OPPORTUNITY COST, after all); they saw the reckless release of this energy as something that could cloud the mind, weaken spiritual discipline, and disconnect a person from divine presence.

Some Sufi practices involve redirecting sexual energy through dhikr (spiritual remembrance), fasting, and meditation – ensuring that it fuels inner transformation that can lead to a taste of divinity, rather than worldly distractions.

Why These Traditions Were Right

These ancient teachings all point to the same core truth about the human experience (and also remind us that human beings haven’t changed in thousands of years – even if the world around us has):

Sexual energy is a powerful force that, when consciously retained and directed, can lead to profound personal transformation.

When men scatter their energy through excessive and pointless ejaculation, they weaken not only their physical vitality but also their mental clarity and spiritual receptiveness. On the other hand, when this energy is conserved and transmuted, it strengthens the nervous system, sharpens the mind, and deepens the connection to reality so that we can be in the world without being OF the world.

Modern science is beginning to confirm what these traditions have taught for millennia – that semen retention can increase testosterone, improve focus, and enhance overall well-being but – even beyond the physical benefits – it provides something far greater: a pathway to wholeness and growing REAL.

The goal with retaining semen retention is not repression of sexual energy – sex is awesome, after all – but realignment:

When practised with awareness and purpose, semen attention allows men to stop living as slaves to their urges and instead step into their true power as REAL HUMAN BEINGS. It is a tool for mastery – not just over sexual energy but also the self and anything else that requires discipline and focus in this life we’re living.

Practical Implementation: How to Use Semen Retention as a Tool for REALNESS

If you want to use semen retention for real transformation, here are some tips for doing it effectively:

Set a Real Goal – Don’t just retain semen for the sake of it – have a vision and actively work towards it.
Transmute the Energy – Put your retained energy into your work, fitness, creativity, or spiritual growth. Keep finding your EDGE so that the energy doesn’t turn against you.
Regulate Your Nervous System – Use tools like breathwork, cold exposure, and meditation to keep your energy balanced and to regulate your nervous system even more.
Face Your Shadow – Journal, reflect, and allow any suppressed emotions to come to the surface. Check out these exercises to get started: 100 Shadow Work Exercises: Making the Unconscious Conscious & Growing Real
Trust the Process – This isn’t about perfection; it’s about integration so don’t get caught in unrealistic expectations – just keep moving forward. If you ‘relapse’ then get back on the horse and keep riding towards that vision. Don’t look back.

The bottom line is that semen retention isn’t a magic bullet but it is a powerful tool.

Used correctly, it can help you dissolve shame, integrate your shadow, and grow into the man you were meant to be.

The key is not just to withhold – but to receive what is truly real by tuning back into your own natural rhythms.

Stay real out there,

F.E.A.R vs. Trust: Letting Go and Receiving Your Real Potential

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Coaching/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Relationships/Trust

Realness is received, not achieved.

There comes a point in nearly every human being’s life when they realise they are not who they think they are.:

That the version of themselves they’ve been clinging to and trying to make fit into the world their whole lives long – the one shaped by shame, fear, and external expectations – is not the REAL them; instead, it’s a mask, a distortion, a carefully curated illusion built from years of false beliefs, social conditioning and unreal self-hypnosis (usually as a reaction to unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ hidden in the Shadow Territory).

Once people start to become AWARE (which can happen for many reasons – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but all leading to REALNESS is the end) – they start to see that the Void they’ve been living in isn’t the way things actually are and that – beyond illusion, stories, and insecurities – there is something REAL waiting to emerge.

This article is about the key to unlocking this emerging REALNESS and embodying it by becoming WHOLE again instead of FRAGMENTED:

Trust.

Trust in this sense isn’t just about believing in something external but about loosening the grip of fear and allowing what is already real to reveal itself.

It’s about stretching the trust muscle so that we stop identifying with an unreal self (ego) and start recognising and receiving our true potential (realness).

Really, we’re going to be talking about one of the most important things you can learn as you go through life:

REALNESS is received, not achieved.

The bottom line is that when we LET GO (really, the heart of learning to trust), we stop chasing after a version of ourselves that isn’t real and instead receive what has been there all along – our deeper knowing, our inner wisdom, our genuine self, and our REALNESS.

Doing this requires a terrifying and necessary step: free fall.

Keep reading to see why it’s totally worth taking that leap:

F.E.A.R is False Evidence Appearing Real

Fear is a powerful force but most of it is an illusion because it’s not warning of any, actual or tangible physical danger (which some instinctual fear does which is a good thing because it protects us and keeps us going) – instead, it’s just a projection of unreal beliefs, past wounds (shame, guilt, and/or trauma, usually), and our social conditioning and self-hypnosis. It’s the Ego’s attempt to protect itself from discomfort, uncertainty, and perceived failure.

Here’s the truth, though:

Fear does not keep you safe; it makes you shrink.

Unreal F.E.A.R of this kind is responsible for that ‘inner critic’ in your mind that whispers that you’re not ‘good enough’, that you need more certainty, proof, or control before you can give yourself permission to live your REAL life and express yourself in a REAL way.

Any time we buy into that voice, we reinforce and strengthen the unreal version of ourselves – the one that is driven by shame, held back by doubt, and send on wild goose chases and timewasting and empty journeys because of the need to ‘prove’ something.

Here’s the thing, though: we don’t have to play by those rules – in fact, we can CHOOSE to let go any time we like. All we have to do is give up our F.E.A.R and start seeing reality clearly again.

This might sound harsh – or even impossible – to those who are deeply identified with their fears, but the reality is simple:

Most F.E.A.R is not real in the way we think it is – it’s just False Evidence Appearing Real (and that we CHOOSE to believe in because we ‘think’ we need to keep the outdated identity of the Ego in place, even though it’s bringing friction, frustration, and misery into our lives).

Most of the time, the things we fear never actually happen, and when they do, we adapt far better than we expected.

(Look back at your life and tell me this last sentence isn’t the truth).

This is where we come back to TRUST because trust is the opposite of F.E.A.R (you can’t trust if you feel afraid and you can’t feel afraid if you truly trust):

Imagine if, instead of clinging to fear, your surrendered to trusting yourself and life instead? What if you could LET GO of the need to micromanage life – even in times when you don’t really know what you’re doing – and allowed something bigger and more REAL to emerge instead?

Trust is the Freefall Into Something Greater

People can spend their whole lives long searching for purpose, for direction, for a sense of certainty about where they are going but the irony is that clarity doesn’t come from overthinking and controlling—it comes from surrender and LETTING GO (it’s ‘ironic’ because there is no search and you don’t need to ‘do’ anything in a forceful way).

Call it ‘God’, the ‘Tao’, ‘Fate’, ‘Chaos’ or whatever you like – the labels are irrelevant.

What matters most is the experience of letting go; the experience of freefalling into the unknown and realising that you are held, guided, and more capable than you ever thought.

The only thing keeping you from feeling and living like this is your F.E.A.R.

At first, letting go is terrifying – the Ego resists because it feels like death (and, it is, to the Ego which is just the illusion of control and certainty in a reality with neither):

It will try to convince you that if you loosen your grip, everything will fall apart but once you take that step, once you trust and flow instead of hold on and force (to try and make life conform to whatever you’re holding onto), something incredible happens:

You don’t crash.
You don’t break.
You don’t ‘lose’ anything (because what’s real is always real and so you can’t lose anything real).

You expand.

This is where something AMAZING happens because you’ll start to see that in that expansion, something REAL (re)emerges – the YOU that has been buried beneath layers of fear and false narratives.

In other words, you start to see that your REALNESS was there all along.

It never went anywhere and was always waiting for this moment of reunion.

Realness is Received, Not Achieved

Most of the lost people in the world are ‘lost’ because they approach personal growth and finding ‘success’ in life as something to be achieved. They believe that if they just work harder, push more, and prove themselves enough, they will eventually become ‘worthy’ of the life they (think they) want.

Getting caught in this drive is almost always a product of unresolved shame and being shame-driven instead of shame-dissolving.

The beautiful truth is that realness isn’t something you achieve:

REALNESS is something you receive when you stop blocking it with ego and all of the unreal beliefs that keep you from it.

You don’t have to fight to become something ‘greater’ – you already are something greater. The problem is that fear, conditioning, and shame filter your perception and keep you from recognising it.

Trusting means removing the filter and allowing truth to come through so that you can find the solid foundation of your REALNESS and then take REAL ACTION (trust doesn’t mean inaction as action is always what makes the difference); it means stopping the endless striving and starting to listen – to yourself, to life, to reality as it actually is rather than how you think it should be.

When you can do this, you see that most struggle and unnecessary suffering is just a result of fighting to keep your illusions and false beliefs in place to uphold an identity that you’re not even happy with (or have any real need of, for that matter).

Practical Steps to Strengthen Trust and Let Go of Fear

It’s one thing to understand this conceptually, but the real shift happens when you live it – here are a few ways to integrate trust into your daily life and allow your real potential to emerge:

1. Catch the F.E.A.R Narrative and Question It

Whenever F.E.A.R shows up, pause and ask yourself:

Is this real or is this just my conditioning?
Am I responding to what’s actually happening or to an imagined worst-case scenario?
Who would I be if I didn’t believe this fear?
How is this F.E.A.R keeping me in a place that’s familiar but where I, ultimately, don’t wanna be?

F.E.A.R thrives on unquestioned assumptions – if you start challenging them, they begin to dissolve, and life starts to get REAL again.

2. Take Small Leaps of Faith

Trust isn’t about reckless action but about stretching your trust muscle in small, consistent ways over time:

Always tell the truth, even when you’d normally hold back.
Say yes to something before you feel ‘ready and start taking REAL ACTION.
Follow intuitive nudges even if your mind doubts it (these nudges come from your realness, not your beliefs)

Each small leap reinforces that you are capable, that life supports you, and that you don’t need absolute certainty to move forward. This eventually all compounds to give you EVIDENCE that your F.E.A.R is unreal but your REALNESS remains.

3. Let Go of the Need to Control the Outcome

When you take action, do it from a place of trust, not force (for the sake of avoiding fear or controlling things because of ego):

Focus on what you can control (your effort, attitude, and presence, etc.).
Release attachment to what you can’t control (how others respond, external results, etc.).
Remember: Do your best and let go of the rest.

The less you grasp, the more life can flow and you can keep growing REAL (going deeper into wholeness).

4. Practice Stillness and Presence

Real trust isn’t about your thoughts or any other kind of mental activity – it’s an embodied experience of being fully present in life whilst also moving through life into a deeper connection to life:

Meditate.
Spend time in nature.
Do breathwork.
Slow down and actually feel what is real in the present moment.

When you are deeply present, fear loses its grip and you train your NERVOUS SYSTEM to be able to handle life more effectively and without unnecessary THREATS being shown to you (in other words, you calm down and feel SAFE in life which allows you to TRUST even more) .

5. Serve Something Bigger Than Yourself

One of the best ways to transcend F.E.A.R is to stop making everything about you:

Find a way to help someone without expecting anything in return
Contribute in a way that aligns with your real values.
Create something meaningful, not for validation, but because it’s real.

When you serve, you expand beyond the Ego and align with something bigger and – in that REAL space – clarity naturally arises.

Final Thoughts: Step Into the Free Fall

Trust is not passive – it’s the most active surrender you will ever experience and a conscious decision to let go of F.E.A.R so that your real potential can emerge.

At first, it feels like free falling but then you start to realise that you were never really falling at all.

You were being caught by something greater that was waiting to be received.

Stay real out there,

Finding Clarity: When You Don’t Know What to Do, Serve and Trust

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Creativity/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Relationships/Trust

The best way to find REAL clarity is to take REAL action by serving and trusting.

Life in the world can have a funny way of making us feel ‘stuck’:

Maybe it’s a career crossroads, a personal dilemma, or a just a deep sense of foreboding and uncertainty about the future as we try and move into it through the Void – whatever it is, we’ve all had those moments when we simply don’t know what to do and so we kinda…freeze up (humans are gonna human, I guess).

When this ‘stuckness’ lands on our plate, our natural tendency is to try and THINK our way through the confusion, but the more we think, the more clouded things become – especially because it’s usually our ‘thinking’ that got us in this situation in the first place.

The truth is that clarity doesn’t come from overthinking or trying to control every outcome because clarity isn’t a product of FORCING life but a product of responding to life’s FLOW.

Instead, clarity starts to dawn on us when we start to shift our focus away from ourselves and learn to take REAL ACTION – even when we don’t have all the answers.

Based on what I’ve seen and learned from my clients over the years, this essentially involves living to embody two simple principles:

Service
Trust

When you can live to serve others and trust the process of life as it moves towards wholeness, clarity emerges – not because everything falls into place perfectly, but because you stop focusing on your ego’s fear-driven ‘stuff’ and start moving in alignment with a deeper sense of purpose as you grow more REAL and help the world to become a little more real too.

This article will help you find CLARITY by breaking down how and why serving and trusting are the ultimate tools for finding real clarity in your life.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The best way to find clarity in your life is to start using your life to serve others (and trust the process on the way there).

Serving: Getting Out of Your Own Head

The Ego thrives on self-concern and self-obsession – it’s constantly asking questions like, “What do I want?” “What’s the right choice for ME?” or “Am I good enough?“

This leads to confusion, because the ego is UNREAL (and you can only get clarity from REALITY in truth) so it just creates series of mental loops that keeps us stuck in the hamster wheel of the “what’s in it for me?” or “what about me?” mentality.

The more you focus on yourself, the more trapped you become in uncertainty because you’re constantly filtering everything through unanswered questions about yourself and avoiding what’s actually going on in life as it unfolds around you.

Serving others is a powerful antidote to this:

When you focus on contributing to others – whether it’s offering your time, your expertise, your energy, or simply just LISTENING to them – then you move away from the noise of ego and start seeing things with fresh eyes as you tap into life’s pure signal again (without the distortion and resistance that comes from ego).

How Service Brings Clarity

Serving levels you up and brings a sense of real power and energy because it helps you to step outside the whirlpool of self-doubt and uncertainty.

This is because – by focusing on meeting the needs of others (without being needy or co-dependent) – you shift your attention from your own internal chaos to the real, tangible world:

In doing so, you allow clarity to emerge naturally, and you’ll find that you start acting from WHOLENESS instead of fragmentation.

This is when life starts to feel REAL:

You stop overthinking because serving gives you a practical, real-world task to focus on – instead of overanalysing and freezing up in being ‘stuck’ (which is basically just holding back and hesitating because of ego), you take action and get results that connect you to the world around you (i.e. the action you take is REAL).
You discover your strengths because as you GIVE (whereas the Ego just tries to TAKE), you realise your own strengths, virtues, and qualities in ways that abstract contemplation and theorising never can – you learn what you’re truly good at by doing it and having a real world impact, not by theorising or wondering who you might be (because you actually SHOW UP and find out instead).
You build real confidence because true confidence doesn’t come from endless introspection or seeking validation – it comes from making a difference in the world by taking ACTION.

In short, the more you serve, the clearer your path becomes because you begin to see yourself as part of something bigger than your own concerns and you find your real place in the world with the people that support you (and who you also support in return).

There’s a paradox of REAL GROWTH here but it’s very true and worth remembering:

You can’t grow into the ‘best’ version of yourself by only focusing on yourself.

Clarity doesn’t come from thinking about yourself constantly – it comes from putting your energy into something real and being REAL is about embracing wholeness and interdependence instead of the illusion that we’re all separate and independent.

When you serve, you put yourself into this reality instead of hovering on the threshold of it because your ego doesn’t want you to live a REAL LIFE (because then you won’t ‘need’ the Ego anymore).

Trust: Flowing Instead of Forcing

One of the most powerful ways to find clarity is to TRUST:

“Trusting life” is not the same as passively waiting for things to unfold; it’s about taking action in the direction of your purpose while releasing the need to control everything.

Or, as I like to say these days:

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

The reason we often feel uncertain is because we’re trying to force life to bend to our will due to the (mis)perceived needs of our Ego and the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ that drives it (shame, guilt, and/or trauma – the Unholy Trinity).

When we’re filtering everything through the ego and the need to sustain it (instead of growing real and reconfiguring our relationship with it by putting it in the backseat and our REALNESS in the driving seat) then we tend to want to control every outcome, obsess over every detail, and predict every step of the journey.

This just leads to friction and misery because, when we try to do this, we’re only met with frustration and confusion, because life is inherently uncertain and we can’t FORCE it – we can only work with it and then flow towards our vision by taking the REAL ACTION that’s available to us and then letting go of whatever is beyond our control.

Trust brings clarity because it allows us to flow with life, rather than forcing our way through it; flow always leads to next CLEAR step, but force always eventually CLOUDS the way.

How Trust Brings Clarity

When you trust, you act without attachment to outcomes and stay in the PROCESS of living your life instead of just conceptualising or thinking your way through it.

Trust helps you to live as a REAL human being because it shows you how to:

Do your best and let go of the rest: Instead of fixating on how things should turn out based on what you think (and that filter of ego), you focus on showing up with your best effort and finding out the truth (which means you accept life and build with it, not against it).
Stop waiting for the perfect time: The need for ‘perfect’ conditions often keeps us stuck in indecision but learning to TRUST means taking imperfect action anyway, knowing that life will reveal the next steps as you move. This gets us out of ego and into the only place where things can happen anyway: REAL life.
Embrace uncertainty as part of the process: Trust gives you the freedom to move forward despite the unknown, knowing that clarity often emerges only after action. ‘Certainty’ is an illusion anyway in many cases and so relying on it before we get started means that whatever we end up doing will be doomed to being unreal.

Just for the record, trusting doesn’t mean being passive or ‘letting go of control’ in a way that causes you to do nothing (unless you choose to do nothing for strategic reason – like biding your time or waiting for opportunities to arise); it means releasing the need to control everything because this is impossible.

When you stop forcing, you allow life’s natural flow to guide you and, as you move forward in this flow, clarity begins to show up – often in ways you never expected.

The Powerful Combination: Serving and Trusting

You may be wondering how all of this leads to clarity but here’s the thing:

Both principles help you get out of your own head and into real, purposeful action.

When you serve, you get out of the loop of self-absorption and overthinking. You stop obsessing over your own problems and start solving the problems that exist in the world around you. When you trust, you stop forcing and start flowing with the natural rhythm of life.

Together, these two practices help you:

Stop getting stuck in analysis paralysis. By focusing on others and trusting the process, you get moving, and movement creates clarity.
Develop confidence in your path. The more you serve and trust, the more you realise that you’re capable of navigating life’s uncertainties with grace and direction.
See the bigger picture. When you focus less on yourself and more on the impact you can have, you begin to see your place in the world, your purpose, and the answers to your biggest questions.

How to Serve and Trust for Clarity: Practical Steps

To help you get started, here are some simple actions you can take today to integrate the serve and trust principles into your life and grow real.

These practices will help you get out of your head, start moving, and, most importantly, gain real clarity from the momentum you start in your own life:

1. Start Serving Right Now

If you’re stuck, the best thing you can do is shift your focus to helping others – think about how you can contribute, even in small ways:

Can you volunteer your time or skills to someone in need?
Can you offer a kind word or lend a hand to a colleague or friend who needs some encouraging at the moment?
Can you solve a problem in your community, work, or for somebody close to you?

Real Action: Identify one small act of service that you can get started with and go get on with it – start getting out of your head and into action.

2. Trust Your Journey and Act Without F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).

One of the main reasons people get ‘stuck’ is that they wait for certainty before acting – as we’ve seen, this never really ‘works’ because nothing is really certain in life (except death, of course, and the universal laws).

Instead of waiting for everything to line up perfectly, trust the process and take action:

What is one thing you’ve been putting off because you’re unsure of the outcome?
What would happen if you just did it without waiting for all the answers?
Can you trust yourself to handle whatever arises on the way to where you’re going?

Real Action: Take one small, imperfect action today – trust that it will lead you to the next step, and the next, and the next (because it always will. Check this out for more: The Baby on the Bridge: Trust and Belief in Yourself, the World, and Reality).

3. Remember the Sacred Mantra: “Do Your Best and Let Go of the Rest”

When fear and doubt arise, remind yourself that you can only control your actions by engaging with the PROCESS – not the outcome.

Focus on doing your best in each moment, then release attachment to the result.
Trust that clarity will come with time as you keep taking those obvious steps towards where you’re headed (more REALNESS).

Real Action: Repeat the sacred mantra to yourself as you go about your day: “Do your best and let go of the rest.” See how it changes your approach to challenges by detaching you from overinvesting in outcomes and living your REAL life in the process instead.

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

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

Final Thoughts: You Can’t ‘Think’ Your Way to Clarity

Clarity isn’t something that you find by thinking harder or waiting for the ‘right’ answer but something that emerges when you get out of your head and start serving others while trusting the unfolding process of growing more real.

When you serve and trust, you’ll see that clarity comes naturally because you’ll start to move with purpose, build real confidence, and see answers that were always ‘there’, waiting to be uncovered (your REALNESS is received, not achieved).

In short, the more you focus on real action and let go of trying to control everything, the more the path ahead will reveal itself.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson

Breaking Free from the Opinions of Others and Growing into Your REAL Voice (Stop Caring What People Think and Do ‘You’).

The Fine Line Between Awareness and Over-Concern

The Problem with People-Pleasing

Choosing Whose Opinions Matter

You Can’t Control Others – Only Your Response

Context Matters: Not All Opinions Are Created Equal

Breaking Free: How to Stop Worrying About What People Think

1. Defining Your Core Values Helps You Stop Caring What People Think

2. Conduct a “Whose Opinions Matter?” Audit

3. Reframe Criticism as Information, Not a Verdict

4. Strengthen Your Inner Voice

5. Take Action Despite Fear

Final Thought: The Only Opinion That Truly Matters

An Abundance Mindset is the Key to Real Success in Relationships and Business

What is an Abundance Mindset?

The Power of Letting Go

Trusting That There Are Always More Opportunities

The Garden and the Butterflies

Staying Grounded No Matter What

Abundance in Business

Abundance in Relationships

Bringing Abundance into Your Life: Practical Steps

The Final Truth About Abundance

Your Anger as a Man is Fuel for Your Real Life

Anger as a Guardian of Realness, Dignity, and Values

Mastering Anger: From Destruction to Creation

Real (Healthy) Anger vs. Toxic (Unhealthy) Anger

Breaking Free from the ‘Nice Guy’ Identity

Practical Steps to Reconnect with Your Anger and Purpose

Final Thoughts: The World Needs More Healthy Anger

Shifting from a stance of “Me vs You” to “You vs Me” will give you more power.

Why We Get Defensive: The Fear of Change

The Power of “You vs Me” Thinking

Understanding Your Own Patterns: Think, Do, Feel

Shifting from “Me vs You” to “You vs Me” in Practice

1. Develop Awareness: Spot Your Own Triggers

2. Practise Acceptance: Let Go of Control

3. Take Conscious Action: Respond, Don’t React

The Real Goal: Growth, Not Perfection

You Can’t ‘Fix’ People – But You Can Grow REAL

The Illusion of ‘Fixing’ Others

The Sacred Mantra: Everyone is F’d Up—Love Them Anyway

Acceptance vs. Endurance

Flowing Instead of Forcing

Practical Steps: How to Integrate Deep Acceptance into Your Life

1. Stop Trying to ‘Rescue‘ People

2. Set Clear Boundaries

3. Focus on Your Own Growth

4. Love People Where They Are

5. Let Go of the Need for ‘Closure‘

6. Choose Flow Over Force

Final Thoughts

Beyond Black and White: Embracing the Shades of Grey Within Ourselves and Life

The Problem with Black-and-White Thinking

Perception Exists in a Spectrum

How to Shift into a ‘Shades of Grey’ Mindset

1. Stop Using Absolutes – Use a Scale Instead

2. Embrace Contradictions Within Yourself

3. Recognise That Growth Is a Process, Not a Destination

Moving from Fragmentation to Wholeness

Practical Ways to Integrate This Mindset and GROW REAL

Final Thoughts: The Power of Seeing Clearly

Everybody is f’d up but love them anyway (including yourself)

Embracing the Human Condition

Seeing the Madness (and Laughing at It)

Depersonalising Other People’s ‘Stuff’

Wholeness: The Art of Just Being

How to Apply This in Your Own Life

1. Observe Without Judging

2. Catch Yourself Overthinking

3. Set Boundaries Without Guilt

4. Be Weird, Be Raw and Real

5. Trust That You’re Exactly Where You Need to Be

Final Thoughts: Stay Real

Getting back into the unforced rhythms of REAL life.

Balancing the Nervous System: The Key to Real Success

Returning to Life’s Natural Rhythms

A Natural Reservoir of Energy for Your Vision

Confidence, Presence, and Nervous System Regulation