Oli Anderson

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

Your Father’s Approval: Breaking the Need

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Breaking the Need for Your Father's Approval

You Don’t Need Your Father’s Approval As an Adult Man

A phenomenon that I’ve witnessed over the years (in my own life and in the lives of some of my coaching clients) is that there’s a particular kind of man who looks like an adult from the outside but – somewhere beneath the surface of things – is still waiting for his father to tell him that he is doing a ‘good’ job or to approve of him in some other way.

Maybe he’s forty years old, has a successful career with all the trimmings like a mortgage, a partner, children, responsibilities and a bank account. Maybe he even seems completely independent but, nevertheless, when it comes to the things that really matter, there’s still a little boy inside him asking a simple but powerful question:

“Will my Dad approve of this?”

This question can run an enormous amount of a man’s life from behind-the-scenes and can determine what he does, what he doesn’t do, who he becomes, what he believes, the risks he takes, the relationships he chooses, and even what he thinks he is ‘allowed’ to want so he can stay out of ‘trouble‘.

A way to describe this type of man is that he’s actually an ‘Adult Boy‘ which is basically just a man with a fully grown adult body but with a ‘boy’ inside him who is still acting and feeling according to old patterns and conditioning picked up during childhood:

This doesn’t mean there is anything ‘wrong’ with him – in many cases, these patterns are simply normal reactions to a messed-up situation because, as children, we adapt to whatever environment we grow up in and the various lessons we learned about what wins us approval, what gets us rejected, what keeps us safe and what we have to do to feel that we’re worthy ‘enough’ to receive love.

The problem, though, is that these types of adaptations can continue long after we no longer need them which results in unfinished business from the past that keeps us from showing up as the men we know we can be.

One of the most common ways men remain locked into the Adult Boy state is by continuing to seek approval and validation from their fathers which is exactly what this article is going to explore.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

It can take a lot of strength to overcome the conditioned need for our father's approval.

When Dad’s Opinion Becomes Your Life Compass

Looking up to your parents is completely normal in terms of how we grow and develop as human beings:

This is because – when you’re a child – your parents are effectively your entire universe as well as being bigger, stronger and more experienced than you; you depend on them for food, shelter, protection, guidance and emotional regulation and this is exactly how it’s supposed to be (children are literally incapable of meeting their own needs which is why their parents do it for them).

When you look at it like this then it makes total sense that you wanted their approval when you were a kid:

  • If Dad thinks you’re doing well at something then you feel good about yourself.

  • If Dad is disappointed in you you feel bad about yourself.

  • If Dad approves of something then it becomes safe.

  • If Dad disapproves then you learn to question yourself for wanting it in the first place.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

This is a perfectly ‘normal’ and understandable part of development and so the problem isn’t that you once-upon-a-time looked to your father for approval:

The problem is that you never stopped.

Even today – as an actual adult – you might still find yourself only taking action when you know your father will approve of it (or, on the other side of the coin, you might play everything incredibly safe because you don’t want to disappoint him and have to face is disapproval).

For example:

  • You might choose a career because it’s ‘respectable’ rather than because it’s actually REAL.

  • You might dedicate yourself to a particular version of ‘success‘ because you believe it’s a version your father will recognise and approve of.

  • You might constantly defer to him by asking what he thinks rather than developing your own opinions.

  • You might feel unable to express your real thoughts, feelings and goals because some part of you is still anticipating his judgement and can’t handle it.

  • You might even put him on a pedestal and unconsciously treat him as though he is something more than a man (which he isn’t even though “a man” is a very powerful thing to be).

Ultimately, the deeper this pattern affects you, the more disconnected you become from yourself and the more you begin to live from the outside-in rather than from the inside-out.

Instead of asking “What’s REAL here?” you default to asking “What will Dad think about this?” and this leads to a much more unreal way of living your life.

The Symptoms of Being an Adult Boy

A man who is still seeking his father’s approval can experience this pattern in all sorts of ways.

Here are some of the most common ‘symptoms’:

  • Only taking action when it’s been approved by his father.

  • Playing everything too safely because he is terrified of taking risks and getting it ‘wrong’.

  • Choosing a life vision that he thinks his father will approve of rather than one that is actually REAL.

  • Constantly deferring to his father rather than making his own decisions.

  • Struggling to develop his own opinions because he automatically assumes his father’s opinions are always more valuable than his for some reason (this doesn’t mean that some opinions aren’t more true than others)

  • Feeling driven by shame because he has spent years denying his own reality (shame is what we feel when we judge the truth about ourselves and reality instead of cultivating acceptance)

  • Putting his father on a pedestal and unconsciously treating him as though he is omniscient or all-powerful (when, again, he’s ‘just’ a man).

  • Clinging to childhood patterns that affect his relationships and romantic partnerships because they block intimacy.

  • Feeling scared to express his real thoughts, feelings, ambitions and desires.

  • Feeling trapped in a life that looks good from the outside but doesn’t feel right internally (because he’s lost in the Void).

  • Experiencing resentment towards his father while simultaneously craving his approval (because his father has become ‘false god’ in his life).

  • Constantly trying to prove himself through achievement and performance instead of presence.

  • Feel like he is never safe and enough regardless of how much he does.

This last point is especially important because when your sense of being safe and enough depends on someone else’s approval then you’re never going to reach the end of the line and you’ll always be running around in circles:

You can always do more, achieve more, earn more, prove more, or perform more and maybe Dad will even finally look at you and say “Well done, son” but it won’t change the fact that you’re trying to solve an internal problem with an external solution.

Your Father Is Just a Man

The first step towards breaking this pattern involves accepting a surprisingly simple truth about life.

Here it is:

Your father is just a man.

That doesn’t mean you have to disrespect him, hate him, or even mean that he was a ‘bad’ father – in fact, he might truly be be a very good man but – no matter which way you look at it – he’s still ‘just’ a man and not a god.

He’s not omniscient or omnipotent (because none of us are or ever will be) and so he’s not ultimate authority on reality.

Believe it or not, he has his own history, conditioning, fears, blind spots, strengths, weaknesses, opinions, and interpretations of reality…just like everybody else that ever has been, is, or ever will be!

This leads us to another important truth about life which is as follows:

His validation is always an interpretation of reality and never reality itself.

  • If your father thinks your career is useless then that doesn’t make it actually useless.

  • If he doesn’t understand your ambitions then it doesn’t mean your ambitions are ‘wrong’.

  • If he thinks you should live your life differently then it doesn’t mean you should blow your life up to make whatever changes he thinks you need to make.

  • Most importantly, if he doesn’t approve of something that’s REAL for you then his disapproval doesn’t magically turn it into something unreal.

As a man and not an “Adult Boy”, you need to be able to develop your own relationship with reality and not only experience it indirectly because you’re giving your father’s interpretations of reality a power they can never have.

External Regulation vs Internal Regulation

When you outsource validation or approval to your father then you also end up outsourcing your ability to regulate yourself.

In effect, you’ve internalised the core assumption that:

“I can only be okay if Dad thinks I’m okay”.

This creates a form of external regulation which means that you need someone outside yourself to tell you that you’re safe and enough before you can actually feel safe and enough.

This is unfortunate because “safe” and “enough” are two of the most important things necessary for us to have a real relationship with ourselves and life:

  • Safe means that your nervous system is regulated so you feel calm enough to be present and engage with life rather than constantly anticipating ‘threats’.

  • Enough means that you know (not believe) that you’re good enough as you are, regardless of results, outcomes, achievements, or performance (this doesn’t mean you have an excuse to stop growing and evolving – just that you have a real foundation on which to build).

If you believe your father’s approval means more than it actually does then you just end up stuck on a hamster wheel and never getting where you know you’re supposed to actually be going.

The hamster wheel basically works like this:

  • You take some kind of action.

  • You look for your father’s approval.

  • You get it and feel good for a little while.

  • Then the feeling starts to fade.

  • Now you need more approval.

  • You achieve something else.

  • You look for approval again.

  • Around and around you go.

This is the pattern most men who feed on their father’s approval as adults were conditioned with as boys (when such approval genuinely has a tangible impact on your sense of safety, ‘enoughness’, and belonging).

Nothing ‘wrong’ with that but – if you didn’t get the memo – you’re not that boy anymore:

You’re an adult man and the adult man’s job is not to keep asking the boy’s question but to answer a new one:

“What’s actually true now?”

Is it Time to Take Him Off the Pedestal?

The way back home to your realness begins by taking your father off the pedestal:

This doesn’t mean throwing him off it or smashing it to pieces – just recognising that he doesn’t belong on it in the first place.

(Like any ‘good’ thing that’s not the ‘ultimate’ thing which is your relationship with life itself).

All you need to do is to allow yourself to see him as a man – a perfectly imperfect human being who has lived his own life and made his own mistakes, whose opinions might sometimes be extremely useful, and – at other times – sometimes completely wrong.

You can listen to him without automatically obeying him, you can respect him without surrendering your own power over your life, and you can love him without needing his permission to exist.

If you can get to this place of acceptance then you can finally allow him to have his opinions an interpretations without making them your reality.

Alongside this, you also need to step up and start seeing yourself as a man:

  • A man who makes his own decisions.

  • A man who has his own opinions and knows that’s all they are (we have opinions but they’re not who we are).

  • A man who takes responsibility for his own life.

  • A man makes mistakes and learn from them.

  • A man disappoints people sometimes but is still safe and enough.

  • A man who might choose a path that other people don’t understand.

  • A man who can do what he needs to do without justifying his existence.

That isn’t rebellion against your father and his ‘approval’ – it’s being a fully functional adult human being who knows how to meet his own needs instead of externally regulating and outsourcing self-worth.

Learn to Meet Your Own Need for Validation

Another important distinction here is that you don’t need to pretend that you don’t have a need for validation if that’s actually what you still need.

If you currently need validation then you need validation.

There’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with this but trying to make your father responsible for meeting the need is just going to cause problem in the long-run and bring unnecessary friction and frustration to your life.

As a fully functional adult man, you can train yourself to meet your own needs and this is where self-validation comes into play:

Self-validation isn’t telling yourself that everything you do is brilliant or deluding yourself with toxic positivity – instead, it’s about developing an internal compass for success based on what is actually REAL for you.

The basic pathway for this is that you create a REAL VISION, break it into GOALS, and then dedicate yourself to HABITS that allow you to become the version of yourself capable of living up to the vision.

The most important ingredient here is that you do it for real reasons – not because Dad will be impressed, because society will applaud, or because it might impress the people on Instagram.

Not because you’re trying to finally prove that you’re ‘worthy’ but simply because it’s REAL.

If you’re a man who wants to create a real relationship with your father then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men contains a Father Wound Workbook and can help you dig deeper.

Practical Exercise: Follow Your Own Compass

Take a piece of paper and answer these questions in as real a way as you can (you don’t have to show what you say to anybody else):

1. What am I currently doing with my life because I truly want to do it?

Be brutal in aiming to discern what’s REAL from what you think you ‘should‘ want.

2. What am I doing only because I think my father would approve of it?

Look at your career, relationships, lifestyle, ambitions, appearance, money and, even your self-image (or anything else that seems relevant).

3. What would I choose to do if I knew my father couldn’t judge me?

This question can reveal a lot about your shadow self.

4. What opinions have I inherited from my father that I have never actually examined?

Write them down and then figure out WHY you believe what you believe instead of just WHAT you believe.

5. What would my life look like if I measured ‘success’ from the inside-out instead of from the outside-in?

Turn your answers into a REAL VISION, then identify the goals required to move towards it, followed by the daily and weekly habits that will make that vision inevitable.

Every time you act according to this inner compass then you reinforce your adult identity and teach yourself to trust yourself and life first and foremost

When you overcome the need for your father's approval, you can finally belong to life itself.

The Final Word: The Moment You Become the Man

It’s inevitable that you’ll come to a moment where your father doesn’t approve of you, even after having read all of this.

When the moment comes then CHOOSE not to collapse into old patterns and give up the scramble to change your mind (so you can externally regulate):

Instead of feeling like a little boy who’s been caught doing something ‘wrong’ and is about to get in ‘trouble‘ the CHOOSE to listen and to consider what he says.

Take whatever wisdom is useful and then make your own decision without justifying or explaining.

When you do this then you’re no longer trying to become the man your father wants you to be and instead you’re becoming yourself which what realness ultimately demands.

Your father is a man and so are you and the goal isn’t to defeat him, surpass him or rebel against him but to simply make the choice to become responsible for your own reality.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If it’s time for you to step up and start meeting your own needs in a real way then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.

Stop Trying to Be Special: Choose Realness Instead

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Stop Trying to Be Special: Choose Realness Instead

Trying to Be ‘Special’ Usually Just Has the Opposite Effect

Before we get into this too deeply I should probably start this article by saying that there’s absolutely nothing ‘wrong’ with being special:

You might have an unusual gift, for example, or you you might have developed a particular talent to an exceptional level and so you can see things that other people don’t see, create things that genuinely help people, or possess qualities that are relatively rare and bring more truth, light, and joy into to the world.

It kinda goes without saying that these are all ‘good’ things and that if you have something REAL like this to give then doing so will (probably) take you deeper into yourself and life.

This article isn’t about how being ‘special’ causes problems but about how trying to be special can cause all kinds of them:

There’s an important difference between allowing your uniqueness to emerge naturally and making ‘specialness’ your mission in life and these days we’re constantly being encouraged to do the latter.

If you don’t believe me then just take a quick minute to scroll through Instagram, TikTok or YouTube (*cough) and you’ll quickly encounter an endless parade of people trying to stand out so they can get more followers, more views, and more likes which, in turn, leads them to more controversy, more outrageous behaviour, more provocative opinions, more extreme transformations, and more dramatic lifestyles all in the service of getting more ‘clicks’.

The underlying message that gives is pretty simple:

Be different (just like everybody else), chase attention, and prove to the world that you ‘matter’.

This is an unfortunate message to internalise because what happens when attention becomes the metric by which you measure your worth is that you start to confuse being noticed with being ‘valuable’ and being exceptional with being ‘enough’.

Eventually, you can become so obsessed with constructing a ‘special’ edition of yourself that you lose touch with the real one.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Trying to be special separates you from your realness.

The Attention Economy Has Changed What ‘Special’ Means

Human beings have always wanted to stand out but the way that we do this and the nature of what it means to be ‘special’ have changed as the world has changed around us.

Historically, being ‘special’ could simply mean possessing a particular gift or talent:

For example, someone might have been an extraordinary musician, athlete, craftsman, storyteller, leader, or perhaps they were blessed with some other natural ability of some kind.

They might have had to work incredibly hard to develop this gift or talent and, in some cases, their gift might have just been seen as an expression of God’s grace and not something that meant that the person themselves was ‘special’ or better than everybody else – it basically just meant being able to do something that other people couldn’t do as well.

In short, it was your responsibility to do the hard work of levelling up whatever abilities you had and if you had been ‘blessed’ with some kind of a gift then you were supposed to CONTRIBUTE something with it.

The modern landscape has changed this equation because it’s taken out a lot of the ideas of talent or contribution of real gifts and replaced it with a new definition of ‘special’:

Getting more attention than everybody else.

The metric for being ‘special’ is no longer necessitated by WHAT you can do but by HOW MANY people are looking at you doing whatever you happen to be doing:

  • Views.

  • Likes.

  • Followers.

  • Shares.

  • Comments.

  • Subscribers.

  • Viral moments.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

All of these things are the new metrics for being ‘special’ and the end result has been the creation of an incredibly surreal situation where somebody can become ‘special’ without offering anything particularly valuable to anybody else (though, of course, a lot of value is subjective).

What this means is that you can become famous (and therefore ‘special’ if the algorithm deems you worthy) for dancing around in your underwear, for humiliating yourself, for violence disguised as a ‘prank’, and for saying something deliberately outrageous and stirring up a ruckus – it’s a pretty exciting time to be alive!

This partly explains the strange spectacle of clout-chasing that has emerged on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram and may even help explain the rise of platforms such as OnlyFans – though, of course, it’s also definitely possible to argue that some creators on these platforms really are using particular gifts, talents, and entrepreneurial abilities so I’m not dismissing every act of creation (I mean, you’re literally reading my content right now so it’s not like all content has to suck or be about chasing attention).

Anyway, the point isn’t to moralise about any of this but to notice what happens psychologically when attention becomes the measurement of specialness because if attention is the measurement, then a lack of attention starts to feel like evidence that you aren’t special….and that’s where things get start to get unreal for people.

“If Nobody Notices Me, Do I Matter?”

Here are some of the core psychological assumptions driving much of the modern world if we don’t consciously choose to step away from it:

  • If I’m not getting attention then something must be ‘wrong’ with me.

  • If my post didn’t get ‘likes’ then I’m a failure.

  • If my business isn’t growing exponentially then I’m not important.

  • If nobody is talking about me then I don’t matter.

  • If somebody else has more followers then they’re a better person than me.

  • If someone else’s life looks more impressive then mine must be inadequate.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Carrying these assumptions creates a perpetual chase for status as everybody who gets sucked into them starts trying to compete in the imaginary popularity contests that they think will actually define their lives.

In fairness, human beings have always had some version of this because – back in our evolutionary environment – being accepted by the tribe and ideally having a high social position mattered so that we could get access to resources and continue surviving.

The problem is that social media has taken this deeply ancient human tendency and put it on steroids and so now the entire planet can become your imaginary ‘tribe’ and you’re expected to perform for it to get whatever scraps of attention you can in order to keep ‘surviving’.

This creates a world full of shame-driven people desperately trying to convince everybody else – and themselves – that they’re ‘special’ even though attention isn’t acceptance and being noticed isn’t the same as being known or loved (which is what they’re all really looking for and ‘love’ and ‘acceptance’ are ultimately the same thing).

The Ego Loves Specialness

At this point, it’s useful to bring the ego into the equation:

There’s a lot of information about this side of things on this site (and in my books) but the abridged version is that the ego is the version of ourselves that we construct in reaction to deeper experiences of shame, guilt and/or trauma (The Unholy Trinity) – it tries to protect us from vulnerability by creating an identity that allows us to feel safe, significant, and ‘enough’ but in the process it disconnects us from our real life and actual sense of inner safety and ‘enoughness’.

The ego loves the idea of being ‘special’ because because specialness creates separation and this is what the ego is ultimately fuelled by (fragmentation and division instead of wholeness and connection – both internally and externally).

This is why the ego will commonly give you a bunch of shame-driven assumptions that keep you locked within yourself:

  • If I’m special then I’m different from you and everybody else (even though you’re a human being like the rest of us).

  • If I’m superior then I’m above you and so I can compensate for my shame (even though you’re not ‘above’ or ‘below’ anybody else in reality).

  • If I’m inferior then I’m below you (even though you’re not but you need to believe you are because it feels ‘special’ in a weird and mutated way).

  • If I’m broken in some unique way then nobody can understand me (even though they can if you be real with yourself first and foremost and communicate from that real place).

  • If I’m gifted then nobody can compare with me (even though they don’t have to if they’re REAL).

  • Etc. etc. etc.

On and on it goes but it all boils down to the same need of the ego which is to maintain the illusion that “I’m this separate thing over here and everybody else is over there” – this is just fragmentation and the more desperately we try to become special, the more attention we give to the differences between ourselves and other people which makes us even more fragmented and therefore unreal (because reality is a whole – the opposite of fragmentation).

In short, the more we focus on the differences between us, the easier it becomes to forget the real similarities which are actually the foundation for what makes us all REAL.

The Illusion of Separation

What we can say, then, is that the ego-driven need to be ‘special’ ultimately distances us from our own individual humanity and humanity as a whole because we start living according to the Illusion of Separation.

This is just the (unreal) idea that we’re all fundamentally independent and isolated entities rather than interdependent and connected beings and it can show up in some all kinds of ways that hold us back from actually living our lives in a real way – for example:

  1. “My problems are so unique that nobody could possibly understand them”.

  2. “Nobody has ever suffered in the way I’ve suffered”.

  3. “I’m uniquely superior (or uniquely inferior) to everyone else”.

  4. “My life story is completely unparalleled and different to every other human being in all ways”.

  5. “I understand things that nobody else could possibly understand and therefore nobody understands me”.

Of course, these statements might occasionally contain a grain of truth because none of our lives and experiences are literally the same but the psychological direction that these statements (and any like them) point towards is always towards difference and separation.

In other words, they encourage you to identify with what separates you from other people rather than what connects you to them despite the fact that human beings actually have way more similarities than differences (because we’re all the same species on the same planet dealing with the same psychospiritual journey from fragmentation to wholeness according to the same rules of reality).

This is why we all share certain universal needs and experiences:

You don’t have to be ‘special’ to be part of this journey – you’re already part of it because you’re living it right now because of the simple fact that you’re a human being!

Specialness Can’t Fill the VOID

The main reason that everything we’ve covered so far matters is because attention can temporarily soothe shame without actually releasing it:

This makes it feel like you’re leaving the Void (the fragmented world you live in when shame enters the picture and you become disconnected from the truth) but really all you’re doing is dancing around on the surface.

You know the script:

You post something -> People respond -> You feel good for a moment -> The the feeling fades -> You post again -> You get more attention and another little hit of validation -> It fades again -> Repeat for the rest of your life

Over time, the ego learns a lesson that keeps you on the hamster wheel indefinitely:

“I need more”.

This need for ‘more’ is one way the Void perpetuates itself because the ‘more’ in question becomes a sort of ‘substitute’ for the truth that you became disconnected from to open up the Void in the first place (though, unfortunately, it can never do what only the truth can do for you).

Chasing attention and validation simply distracts you from the truth, perpetuates the Void, and creates the conditions for the ego to become dominant and to make you more fragmented.

In short, trying to fill the Void with attention doesn’t work because attention only treats the symptom and not the fundamental problem.

This is why you see people become more visible without becoming more real or integrated or why they get fame and ‘success’ but still feel like something is missing.

It’s totally possible to become more admired by the world whilst secretly feeling more disconnected from yourself in reality – and, at the end of the day, that’s just a bad deal no matter how you look at it.

Give Up Trying to Be Special

The alternative to chasing ‘specialness’ and becoming more and more unreal and fragmented isn’t to become boring, suppress your talents, or to try and pretend that you’re exactly the same as everybody else and to refuse to stand out just for the sake of it but to do something much simpler:

Stop making ‘specialness‘ the goal and make REALNESS the goal instead.

What this looks like is like this:

  • If you’re genuinely talented, let the talent express itself.

  • If you have something valuable to say, say it.

  • If you have the opportunity to create something beautiful, create it.

The only difference is that you’re not being outcome-dependent and outsourcing your self-worth to the amount of attention you get – instead, you’re staying and growing real in the process which means that if people respond, great, and if they don’t, you keep going and growing real anyway.

The point isn’t to become invisible but to stop needing visibility in order to validate and justify your existence.

This creates a reversal in the way you relate to the world because when you’re actively trying to be ‘special’ then you’re primarily trying to take something from the world for the sake of your ego (like the Class A Drugs of applause, appreciation, and approval, and things like attention, status, or recognition).

On the other hand, when you’re actively growing real, then you naturally start asking “What do I actually have to give?” and this is where you start to receive genuine instead of forced attention.

Ironically, when you stop trying to be special, you may become far more “special” in the meaningful sense because you’re no longer performing uniqueness and instead you’re embodying your real gifts (not the ones your ego concocts to get attention).

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

If you’re ready and willing to step back from your ego and to overcome the Void then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Awareness, Acceptance, Action: The Way Back Home

The practical path back to realness can be understood through the process of Awareness → Acceptance → Action (which is what my coaching containers are designed around when working with clients).

Let’s see how it can help us here:

1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step out of this cycle is to start noticing where you’re trying to be ‘special’ in the first place.

Ask yourself:

“What am I doing because I genuinely want to do it and what am I doing just because I want people to notice me in some way?”

Notice how often you check your phone, how you feel when something gets lots of attention, and how you feel when it doesn’t.

Notice comparison, envy, and the urge to prove yourself.

Don’t judge these things – just become aware of them because the ego loses some of its power when you can see it operating instead of automatically obeying it.

2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

Underneath the need to be special there is often something we’re afraid to feel and it could be pretty much anything:

  • Shame.

  • Inadequacy.

  • Fear of being ordinary.

  • Fear of being forgotten.

  • Fear that without achievement, beauty, intelligence, success, or recognition, we won’t be ‘enough’.

  • Whatever.

This is where Shadow Work becomes important because it allows you to start turning towards the parts of yourself you’ve rejected instead of desperately trying to construct an impressive identity that makes you seem ‘special’ so you can get attention as a way of compensating.

Here are some journal prompts to get you started:

Can you accept the possibility that you might be ordinary in some ways?

Can you accept that somebody else might be better than you at something?

Can you accept being misunderstood?

Can you accept not being the centre of attention?

Can you accept yourself without requiring an audience?

3. Action: Trust Self and Life

Finally, you need to start taking action from a place that’s REAL instead of from the ego (which is not your amigo!):

  • Do the work.

  • Develop your gifts.

  • Tell the truth.

  • Create.

  • Serve.

  • Love.

  • Experiment.

  • Take risks.

Do whatever your realness requires of you but stop making the outcome a final judgement of your worth and the thing that gives you permission to accept yourself or not.

You don’t need to know whether something will make you famous, you don’t need to know whether people will applaud – you don’t even need to know whether anybody will notice: you simply need to know that the action is REAL.

And then you do it.

When you focus on becoming real instead of being special then you actually give something true.

The Final Word: REAL Is More Important Than SPECIAL

We don’t need more people desperately trying to prove that they’re ‘special’ – we need more people who aren’t trying to prove anything and that know how to show up in a way that’s REAL:

The Real Ones don’t have to manufacture uniqueness and perform their way through life because their uniqueness emerges naturally from their presence.

They also don’t have to separate themselves from humanity because they understand that their deepest individuality exists within their connection to everything else.

Essentially, the paradox is this:

The less you try to be special, the more unique you become in a real way.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to to step up and start being real with yourself and life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.

Mastering the Mind: How to Use Your Mind Without Being Used by It

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Mastering the Mind: How to Use Your Mind Without Being Used by It

Learning the Art of Mastering Your Mind Can Help You to Grow Real and Build Flow

One of the most important and beautiful things we can do for ourselves on the journey into REALNESS is learning how to master our minds.

This doesn’t mean treating the mind as something ‘evil’ that needs to be defeated or anything like that – actually, pretty much the opposite because the mind is an extraordinary tool that can help us understand, create, plan, communicate, solve problems and turn ideas into reality.

The problem isn’t having a mind but being mastered by it instead of getting it to work for us.

This is because when we don’t understand how the mind works then it tends to default to operating in the service of the ego which just uses our thoughts, memories, fantasies, fears, and desires to keep us locked inside outdated patterns and conditioning.

The ego can also hijack our goals so that we spend our lives chasing things we think will make us feel whole and REAL when all we’re really trying to do is fill the Void created by our disconnection from truth and going deeper and deeper into a state of fragmentation and unreality (i.e. we think we’re pursuing a meaningful goal but, really, we’re just trying to escape ourselves)

This is why mastering the mind is such an important part of becoming REAL and exactly what this article is going to help you understand.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your ability to start mastering your mind affects your relationship with life as a whole.

The Mind Is a Tool

The first thing that you need to understand on the journey to mastering your mind is pretty simple:

The mind is a tool that you HAVE – not a ‘thing’ that you ARE.

This is really important to know from the get-go because a tool can either be used to CREATE or to DESTROY – just like a hammer is a tool that can either be used to build a house or tear one down.

The hammer itself isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and what actually matters is how it is used – the mind is very similar because you can use it to either create something wonderful or to manufacture entire a whole world of fear, shame, resentment, fantasy and self-deception for yourself to live in.

The only real difference between one case or the other is how you CHOOSE to use the tools as your disposal.

When we don’t understand that the mind is a tool in this way, then we usually end up making the fundamental mistake of starting to identify with it:

An example of this kind of identification is that a thought like “I’m not good enough” appears and we treat is as being the actual truth instead of just an interpretation of the truth being filtered through the mind.

What’s happening here is that – because we think we ARE the thought instead of it just being something that we HAVE – then it becomes an identity which leads to beliefs that lead to our behaviour in the world (which in turn affects the results we get from life and how unreal or real those results are).

The whole thing can happen without us ever noticing because when we think we ‘ARE’ the mind we just end up getting carried away by it and being taken to places really don’t want to go to.

From the perspective of REALNESS, what we can say is that you’re not the ‘content’ of your mind or your mind itself but the Awareness in which the fluctuations of the mind appear.

A good way to imagine this is to envisage a blank piece of paper:

The paper represents Awareness and every thought, memory, image and mental story that passes through your mental experience is like a little black dot appearing on the paper that will eventually be erased as it passes and disappears.

The dot is an actual experience that you’re having but it isn’t the paper on which the experience unfolds.

Likewise, your thoughts are experiences occurring within Awareness but they’re not actual truth and they definitely aren’t the full picture about who you are in your realness.

Knowing this starts to create space between you and your mind and this space creates choice which puts you on the path to mastery.

Awareness Is the Beginning of Mastery

Normally, when we’re on a healing or transformational journey of finally working on ourselves and our inner ‘stuff’ then we eventually get to the point where we try to work on our thoughts and minds:

  • We analyse them.

  • We challenge them.

  • We try to replace ‘negative’ thoughts with ‘positive’ thoughts.

  • We read books.

  • We journal.

  • We meditate.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

All of these things can be useful but the journey becomes much effective and allows us to actually get real results when we understand the wider mechanics of what’s actually happening and know that the mind is just a tool.

(If we don’t know that it’s just a tool and think that the mind is who we are then it just becomes a case of rearranging the furniture on the Titanic whilst it sinks – in other words, we’re only dealing with the symptoms and not the fundamental problem).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the goal isn’t to stop having thoughts (which is literally impossible) but to stop being carried away by them and to passively get swept away to unreal places that we were never meant to go in the first place.

This is where Awareness becomes a vital piece of the puzzle again because it allows us to start making those real choices about what arises in the mind instead of just giving our power away and acting in an unreal way.

If you want to master your mind, then, one of the best things that you can do for yourself is to train yourself to stay in a state of Awareness as much as possible and the best to do this is to choose an ‘anchor’ that brings you back into the present over and over again.

An anchor in this case can literally be anything but it needs to be something that you can redirect your AWARENESS to and away from the fluctuations of the mind at pretty much any time (the breath is probably the simplest anchor and the one I use myself and recommend to others – usually, with one hand on the belly and one on the heart).

A Quick Daily Practice for Anchoring Your Awareness & Mastering the Mind

Here’s a quick daily process that you can use to start anchoring your awareness and learning to master the mind by consciously focusing on an anchor:

  • Sit quietly for ten minutes or however long you want to commit to this each day and focus on your breath (if that’s your chosen anchor – it can literally be any neutral sensation in your body).

  • You don’t need to make anything happen or to actively try and empty your mind – you just need to train your awareness to stay focused on your breath.

  • What’s most likely to happen is that your mind is going to wander – that’s totally fine and nothing to be judged or worried about (it’s just the nature of the mind).

  • All you need to do is to ‘catch’ the fact that the mind is wandering and then return your awareness back to you anchor (breath in this case).

  • You stay in this awareness a little longer until – once again – you notice that the mind has taken you away from the anchor.

  • Catch yourself again and then bring it back. Then again. And again. And again.

This might sound ridiculously simple but it’s actually really important because you’re literally training the ability to choose where your attention goes to keep it locked in on your awareness – over time, this becomes one of the most valuable skills you can develop because attention is one of the most important assets you have (along with time and energy).

Eventually, you’ll get to the point where the mind can produce whatever thought it needs to create but you can CHOOSE whether to follow it or not.

That’s mastery.

Nature of the Mind #1: The Mind Will Always Wander

All of this brings us to one of the biggest misunderstandings about meditation and mental mastery that people tend to face on their journeys into deeper realness which is that people sit down to meditate, catch their mind wandering after thirty seconds, and then tell themselves something like “I’m terrible at this” and then give up.

The truth here is that having your mind wander in meditation etc. doesn’t mean that you’re doing something ‘wrong’ but does mean that your mind did exactly what minds do which is WANDER.

In other words:

The mind’s nature is to wander and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

What this means is that the mind is a movement-generating machine that’s constantly fluctuating in some way (although we can actively think about things we want to think about so it’s not all random and spontaneous):

Thoughts will appear, memories will surface, plans will arise, old conversations will replay, imaginary conversations will begin, you’ll suddenly remember something you haven’t thought about for ten years, you’ll wonder what somebody thinks about you, you’ll imagine what you’ll say tomorrow, and then you’ll remember that you forgot to buy milk and start thinking about when you’ll remedy the situation.

The weird part is that all of this is totally NORMAL because it’s just a reflection of the wandering nature of the mind.

The mistake is believing that ‘successful‘ meditation or mastery of the mind means creating a completely silent mind and stopping the river of consciousness once and for all (that’s called “Death“)

Mastery isn’t stopping the river but simply learning how not to drown in it.

In other words, the thoughts can flow but you remain aware.

Nature of the Mind #2: The Mind Keeps Returning to What Matters

There is another fascinating feature of the mind which is that although our thoughts can appear random, they aren’t necessarily ‘random’ in the deeper sense.

This is because if we really take a look at the kind of things that we keep thinking about then we’re going to see that mostly we keep thinking about the same types of thing – i.e. there are clear patterns to what keeps showing up in our mental experience (in fact, some estimates state that 95% of our thoughts are pretty much focused on the same few things).

This gives us a powerful way of looking at our own minds where instead of asking “How do I get rid of these [negative / unhelpful / unreal] thoughts?” we can start to ask a more important question:

“Why does my mind keep returning to this same place?”

In general, the mind will keep returning to the same things to try and shine light on the things that remain unhealed and need some deeper attention.

For example:

  • If you repeatedly think about rejection, perhaps there is something around rejection that needs healing.

  • If you constantly rehearse arguments in your head, perhaps there’s some anger that hasn’t been integrated or something that you’re not currently expressing in a real way.

  • If your mind keeps returning how you can ‘prove’ yourself to the world, then perhaps there’s shame underneath it that needs resolving.

  • If you repeatedly fantasise or daydream about becoming ‘successful’, famous or admired, then perhaps you’re trying to fill the Void in some way.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

The mind in this sense becomes a kind of ‘map’ that you can read by looking at where it keeps trying to pull your attention so you can see where there’s still some work to do.

Nature of the Mind #3: A Lot of Mental Content Is Emotional Content in Disguise

This one is particularly important because it helps us to see that much of what we experience as ‘thinking’ is actually connected to deeper emotional ‘stuff’ that’s bubbling away beneath the surface of things.

To grasp what I mean then imagine somebody carrying unresolved shame (which is essentially just the core assumption that “I’m not good enough as I am“).

This person may experience an enormous amount of mental content that seems it’s only operating at the level of the mind – for example:

  • “I need to do more“.

  • “What if people don’t respect me?”

  • “I should be further ahead by now“.

  • “Why did I say that?”

  • “What will they think?”

  • “I need to prove myself“.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

On the surface, these all look like different thoughts but what’s actually more likely is that they’re all expressions of the same underlying emotional ‘stuff’ (in this case unresolved shame).

This is why trying to actively ‘think’ your way out of things usually doesn’t work (at least not in the long-term – maybe it distracts you for a little while but then the underlying ‘stuff’ just takes over again).

Basically, you can argue with your thoughts all day long but if the underlying emotional pattern remains unresolved then the mind is destined to eventually produce another variation on the same theme.

What this means, then, is that when we deal with the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ directly and focus on growing REAL rather than continuing to protect an outdated identity (ego) then many of the thoughts lose their energy naturally.

Nature of the Mind #4: The Mind Is a Problem-Solving Machine

The mind also has another aspect to it’s nature that explains an enormous amount of overthinking in our lives and that’s that it wants answers, certainty, and closure and will continue to seek these things even when they’re probably not coming.

The general rule is that:

If you give the mind an open loop then it will keep chewing away at it in an attempt to ‘close’ it.

For our purposes here, an open loop is just an unanswered question but it can be anything that causes tension in the mind that needs a release.

Here are some simple examples:

  • “Why did they do that?”

  • “What if I’d made a different decision?”

  • “What exactly do they think of me?”

  • “What is going to happen?”

  • “How can I guarantee this won’t happen again?”

  • “When is [x] going to happen?”

  • Etc. etc. etc.

In all of these cases and any like them the mind will keep searching until it finds an answer and sometimes this is useful because there actually is an answer and so we end up finding one or solving a specific problem (really, a ‘problem’ is just an open loop that hasn’t been closed yet).

The problem, though, is that some loops can’t be closed at the level of conceptual understanding which is why you can’t always know why somebody behaved the way they did, what exactly will happen in the future, go backwards and change the past, or ‘think’ your way into certainty in an uncertain life where you can never control the uncontrollable.

This is where overthinking becomes a trap that often causes us to get ‘stuck’ and stagnate – all because the mind keeps asking a question because it hasn’t realised that the answer isn’t available.

In cases like these, the REAL answer isn’t another thought but in learning to ACCEPT and LET GO so you can actually LIVE.

Nature of the Mind #5: The Chain: Emotion → Identity → Thought → Action → Result

There is a useful way of understanding all of this and summing up a lot of what we’ve talked about so far in this article.

It goes like this:

Emotions → Identity → Thoughts → Actions → Results.

This isn’t a rigid scientific law but it is a powerful practical model for understanding how we can shape our lives based on what’s going on inside us and how we learn to master it or not:

  • The EMOTIONS create a particular internal state based on how close to realness we are or not.

  • The state shapes our IDENITY and sense of who we are.

  • The MIND produces thoughts that are consistent with this identity.

  • Our THOUGHTS influence our actions.

  • Our actions create RESULTS.

  • Our results then reinforce the IDENTITY.

  • (And on and on it goes).

For example:

Shame → “I’m not good enough” → “I need to prove myself” → overwork → success → temporary relief → more pressure to prove myself.

The external result might even look impressive (which is why a lot of shame-driven people are relatively ‘successful’ on the outside) but internally we’re still trapped and in the Void.

We can change our lives at any of these levels but – in my experience, anyway – working with the emotional and mental layers is often one of the most powerful places to begin because when you change the underlying relationship with yourself, the thoughts begin to change and when you change your thoughts different choices become possible so you can show up in a more real way.

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

If want to go deeper into stepping away from the mind and into realness then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Practical Steps: How to Start Mastering Your Mind

You don’t need to disappear to a monastery and give up on life to start mastering your mind – you can actually just start right now wherever you happen to find yourself.

Here are some practical tips to build on what we’ve said here in this article:

1. Notice the mind

Several times a day, stop and ask yourself:

“What is my mind doing right now?”

Don’t judge it – just observe it and try to tune into that awareness instead of identifying with the ‘dot’ on the piece of paper.

2. Separate yourself from your thoughts

Instead of getting carried away with “I’m going to fail” try and actively replace it with something like “I’m aware of the thought that I’m going to fail“.

This might sound simple but tiny change creates distance so that you’re no longer completely inside the thought and can start making choices instead of getting swept away.

3. Return to the anchor

Use your breath or whatever else helps you to bring your attention back into immediate experience.

Like we said earlier, this is how you train your Awareness and learn to focus it on something real.

4. Look for the pattern underneath the thought

When the same mental ‘story ‘stuff’ keeps appearing, don’t fight it but ask yourself what it’s trying to show you.

Look underneath the thought for the emotion, fear, belief or unmet need that still needs ‘healing’ (which really just means bringing to awareness so you can integrate or release).

5. Stop demanding mental certainty

Learn to truly accept that some questions don’t have answers, some situations can’t be controlled, and some endings don’t provide satisfying closure.

In other words, learn to recognise when thinking has become an attempt to escape uncertainty rather than a genuine attempt to either solve a problem or to accept life if there is no solution.

Mastering the mind helps you to find freedom.

The Final Word: The Mind Can Either Serve Life or Destroy It

The ultimate goal of mastering the mind isn’t to become some emotionless person whose mind is permanently ’empty’ but to let the mind do its job without allowing it to run your life.

All you need to do is increase your awareness of the mind’s nature so that it becomes easier to use it as the tool it was always meant to be rather than becoming trapped inside its stories in the service of the ego.

You are not every thought that appears but the Awareness in which the thoughts appear.

When you learn to live from this Awareness, you don’t have to destroy the mind but simply stop letting it destroy your connection to your own REALNESS.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If your mind is holding you back from living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to take real action and build some flow.

The Shadow of Anger: Why the Emotion You Fear Might Be the One That Sets You Free

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The Shadow of Anger: Why the Emotion You Fear Might Be the One That Sets You Free

Your Anger isn’t the Problem (But Your Relationship With it Might Be)

This article is the first in a series exploring the active and passive shadow sides of our human emotions and qualities – the basic idea is that every emotion has a REAL expression but also has two UNREAL expressions that can take us away from ourselves, the world, and reality.

The REAL expression ultimately just means that we’re coming from a state of acceptance and ownership of whatever emotional energy is flowing through us whereas the two unreal expressions come from either trying to suppress it or becoming possessed by it.

When we have a REAL relationship with our emotional energy then it flows through us naturally and carries us deeper into becoming more balanced, more alive, and more whole.

On the other side of the coin, when our relationship becomes unreal, then we tend to lose this balance and instead of mastering the emotion, the emotion begins mastering us.

This first article will focus on anger because I’ve noticed over the years that so many people have a ‘complicated’ (to say the very least) relationship with it:

  • Some are terrified of it.

  • Others practically worship it.

  • Some pretend they never feel angry.

  • Others explode every time life doesn’t go exactly how they hoped.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

It seems that very of us simply own our anger which is unfortunate because healthy anger is one of the most powerful forces available to us as it protects our boundaries, dignity, and the things we love whilst also allowing us to find the fire to pursue meaningful goals and to transform our lives.

Without a REAL relationship with our anger, we’d tolerate abuse, abandon ourselves, and never have enough energy to challenge anything that needs changing in either ourselves or the world.

The goal in facing the shadow of anger, then, isn’t to become more or less angry but to become more REAL with your anger and how you use and express it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

If you don't integrate you're anger it will be transmitted in an unreal way.

Every Emotion is E-motion, Energy in Motion

One of the biggest mistakes people make is believing emotions are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because the truth is that – in themselves – they’re neither because they’re just energy.

This literally applies to all emotions at the most basic level and so we can say that fear is energy, love is energy, sadness is energy. joy is energy, and – of course – anger is energy.

When it comes to your relationship with your own emotions and the shadows of yourself, then the question isn’t whether the energy exists but whether your relationship with it all is REAL.

The key point to remember is that when we accept emotional energy, then we allow it to move through us naturally and when we don’t accept it (because we’re judging it as ‘meaning’ something that it doesn’t) then it becomes ‘stuck’ and gets trapped in our system which causes inner friction, frustration, and then eventual misery.

Sometimes it needs releasing, other times it needs integrating, occasionally it just needs to be listened to and learned from but – whatever the case – acceptance is the special ingredient that allows movement to keep moving and resistance is what creates stagnation.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere on this site, emotions don’t disappear simply because we decide we don’t want them and what we attempt to reject doesn’t just magically ‘vanish’ – instead they go underground and enter the Shadow Territory (the place where the Shadow Self resides).

The Shadow Dance

Before we get into the shadows of anger anger, we need to quickly give an overview of what I call the Shadow Dance.

It goes like this:

Every human being has a REAL self and this is the version of us that’s spontaneous, alive, connected and whole – unfortunately, many of us also pick up shame, guilt and trauma (the Unholy Trinity) as we go through life and these unresolved emotional wounds cause us to judge ourselves instead of accepting ourselves.

When we judge instead of embracing every part of who we are and accepting unconditionally, then we end up making the decision that certain qualities or parts are unacceptable – for example, perhaps we were told we were “too emotional”, “too loud”, “too sensitive”, or “too much” and picked up the lesson that expressing ourselves in a real way only leads to rejection, punishment or humiliation.

When we end up judging and holding back like this then we adapt to life and our need to be ‘accepted’ by creating an ego (which is just a mask we wear as a survival strategy – it’s not ‘evil’ or anything):

The job of the ego is to keep us away from whatever originally caused us pain and so it hides ‘parts’ of our REAL self behind the mask that we pretend to be instead.

These hidden parts become the shadow self (which also isn’t ‘bad’ but is just everything we’ve stopped identifying with) – the great irony is that these rejected ‘parts’ never actually disappear because WHAT’S REAL IS ALWAYS REAL.

Instead, they constantly work to return to the surface so that we can become whole again and return to the foundation of realness that we left behind – this creates the Shadow Dance which is just the back-and-forth as the ego pushes rejected parts away and the shadow continually pushes back towards consciousness.

Real growth begins the moment we stop fighting this dance and start participating in it consciously.

Why Anger Ends Up in the Shadow

Anger is one of the first emotions many children learn to reject and send into the Shadow Territory because a lot of parents have also been convinced that anger is a ‘bad’ thing (because of their own wounds and experience).

Some children are punished whenever they became angry, some see their parents fly into a rage which frightens them and so they become afraid of their own anger, and others are literally taught that expressing anger means being labelled difficult, aggressive or selfish.

Whatever the case, they end up reaching the unconscious conclusion that “Anger isn’t safe“. which is exactly when the ego steps in and says something like “If anger isn’t safe then I’ll make sure we never feel it again“.

Naturally, this doesn’t work because the energy is still there and so all that happens is that it loses its healthy expression and so now instead of becoming real, conscious anger that can serve the world it ends up becoming a shadow form of anger.

In general – like all emotions – shadow anger has two favourite disguises: Passive or Active.

The Passive Shadow of Anger

The passive shadow appears whenever we suppress anger instead of owning it:

This is incredibly common – especially amongst men because many carry some form of father wound or “Daddy issues” because of how their anger was received as children.

For example:

  • Perhaps anger led to punishment.

  • Perhaps standing up for themselves led to rejection.

  • Perhaps expressing themselves meant getting into ‘trouble’.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Eventually, most of these men learned that the safest option was to become a nice guy which perhaps looks admirable on the surface (helpful, easy-going, agreeable, etc.) but underneath something essential has been lost because suppressed anger often creates:

Ironically, these people often believe they’re peaceful but what they really are – when you dig a little deeper, anyway – is frightened.

Real peace comes from knowing you could become angry if necessary but choosing wisdom instead – false peace comes from believing you have no choice.

Healthy people aren’t incapable of conflict – they’re simply not controlled by the need for it but when you lose access to your anger because your relationship with it is defined by its passive shadow then you lose access to the energy that protects you and your life as a whol.

Another problem caused by relating with anger at the level of the passive shadow is that you begin sacrificing yourself just to avoid uncomfortable feelings and situations – eventually, this just causes resentment to build beneath the surface until, years later, you explode over some tiny and insignificant thing (not because the tiny insignificant thing really mattered but because twenty years of suppressed anger finally found a crack in your ego and so the shadow burst out all at once).

The Active Shadow of Anger

The opposite extreme looks completely different because – instead of suppressing anger – we become consumed by it and end up expressing it in completely unreal ways (which is still a form of resistance instead of acceptance).

This shadow expression usually develops through a cocktail of lasting fear and nervous system dysregulation – for example, someone was hurt, betrayed, rejected, abused, or humiliated and instead of processing those experiences and being able to move on, the nervous system remains permanently braced for dealing with ‘threats’.

The end result of this is the active shadow of anger which can show up in various forms like:

Interestingly, this isn’t usually just about anger at all because the majority of explosive anger is shame in disguise or emotional pain and anguish in a desperate attempt not to feel vulnerable or exposed in any way, shape, or form.

The person caught up in the active shadow of anger may appear to be powerful to some extent but, more often than not, they’re actually quite fearful inside and their nervous system has mistaken survival mode for strength.

This can even become addictive to some extent because when we only know how to release inner tension by exploding then it becomes our default mechanism for emptying ourselves of the build up of pressure that comes from bottling everything up.

Two Opposite Behaviours But The Same Core Problem

The Passive and Active shadows of real anger look completely different on the surface:

  • One apologises too much but the other never apologises.

  • One avoids conflict but the other creates it.

  • One disappears and melts into the background but the other dominates.

Despite these differences, though, they both share the same underlying issue which is that neither person actually OWNS their anger in a real way.

One suppresses it, the other expresses it in an unreal way, but neither of them ACCEPTS it.

This is ‘bad’ news for both because acceptance is that only thing that can transform and transmute energy in a real way whereas suppression freezes it and unreal expression just causes us to become identified with it (and can literally have harmful consequences, depending on exactly what that expression looks like).

Acceptance is the only thing that can actually integrate it which is why genuine healing isn’t about becoming more passive or more active but about becoming more REAL.

What Healthy and Integrated Anger Actually Looks Like

Healthy and integrated anger isn’t rage, violence, cruelty, or revenge – it’s actually something pretty simple and clean that reminds us that “This matters”, “This isn’t okay”, “I’m protecting something valuable that actually matters” (or, sometimes, even just “No” to the unreal and “Yes” to the real).

It doesn’t need to shout, intimidate, or manipulate – it just acts on what needs to be acted on:

  • Sometimes healthy anger walks away.

  • Sometimes it speaks firmly.

  • Sometimes it ends relationships.

  • Sometimes it starts revolutions.

  • Sometimes it builds businesses.

  • Sometimes it writes books.

  • Sometimes it transforms entire lives.

The point is that your integrated anger is rocket fuel whereas without it nothing significant ever changes (passive) or it changes significantly in ways that are unreal (active).

If you’re a man who wants to go deeper into owning your shadow self then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men could be exactly what you’re looking for to finally start growing real.

Returning to Realness by Integrating Anger

The ‘good’ news is that your anger isn’t lost or broken if you’re in either the passive or active shadows of its expression – it’s just your relationship with it that needs tweaking and this is something that’s totally fixable.

As almost always, the path forward follows the three pillars of REALNESS: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

1. Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego)

The first step is to begin giving some real attention your current relationship with anger by raising your awareness of what’s going on.

Ask yourself some simple questions to figure out if you’re in the passive or active shadow of anger:

  • Am I afraid of upsetting people?

  • Do I apologise when I’ve done nothing wrong?

  • Do I secretly resent others?

  • Do I explode unexpectedly?

  • What did my family teach me about anger?

  • When did I first decide anger wasn’t safe?

Awareness dismantles unconscious patterns so that you can finally start making conscious changes.

2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow)

The next step is to stop judging your anger and to actually allow yourself to accept it by FEELING it:

Notice where it lives in your body without suppression or immediately expressing it to get the energy out of your system – simply allow it to be (emotions are e-motion, energy in motion) and remember that feeling anger doesn’t make you dangerous. It makes you human.

As with all of our emotional ‘stuff’ it’s never the energy itself that’s a problem but our resistance to it and so – as you learn to sit with anger without judging it – you’ll see that it starts to change shape:

The heat becomes clarity, the tension becomes direction, and the chaos becomes wisdom.

That’s integration.

3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life)

Finally, it’s time to Act which means to move forward in a real way by responding instead of reacting:

  • Set boundaries you’ve been avoiding.

  • Speak truths you’ve been swallowing.

  • Say “No” to anything unreal.

  • Leave situations that continually violate your dignity.

  • Protect your time.

  • Protect your energy.

  • Protect your purpose.

Trust that every conscious action allows your anger to become what it was always designed to be: Life energy in service of reality.

When you disown your humanity and healthy emotions like anger you risk becoming a monster.

The Final Word: The Shadow Of Anger

Anger isn’t your enemy or something to identify with but it’s simply one expression of the energy of life moving through you:

Reject it and it becomes the passive shadow; become possessed by it and it becomes the active shadow – only if you actually OWN it will it become a source of real power – not over other people but over yourself.

As this ‘Shadow of’ series continues, we’ll explore many other emotions and human qualities through this same lens but the story is always the same in the sense that every one of them has a passive shadow and an active shadow but they both contain the same REAL expression waiting to be embodied.

Ultimately what growing REAL is all about:

Not eliminating ‘parts’ of yourself or becoming ‘perfect’ and trying to be ‘positive’ all the time but reclaiming every authentic ‘part’ of your humanity so that your energy flows instead of fighting itself.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start building your life on a foundation of real acceptance then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start showing up for yourself and life.

Emotional Release: Stop Carrying Yesterday Into Today

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Emotional Release: Stop Carrying Yesterday into Today

Learning to Release Emotions Properly Can Set You Free of Yourself and the Past

One thing that I’ve seen almost everybody struggle with is their emotional ‘stuff’ from the past (I guess it’s just a part of the human condition or something):

It doesn’t really matter whether they’re successful or struggling, loaded or broke, or in a relationship or single – most people are carrying emotions deep down beneath the surface that never got the chance to move all the way through them and that can end up causing inner friction, frustration, or even misery.

At the level of the rational mind, most people usually know these old emotions are holding them back and that they’re reacting instead of responding, repeating the same patterns, and struggling to show up as the realest version of themselves but the most frustrating part is that no matter how hard they try, they can’t think themselves into letting go.

This is because emotions don’t just exist at the level of thought – they’re experienced in the body and so trying to solve an emotional problem through ‘thinking’ alone is a bit like trying to clean your kitchen by rearranging the furniture in your living room – in other words, you’re working hard, but you’re operating in the wrong place.

Unfortunately, many of us have been taught from a young age that being “rational” is somehow better than being emotional and so we learn to explain our feelings away instead of actually just experiencing them – what this means is that we tend to analyse them, judge them, and intellectualise them, and then, eventually – because no amount of ‘thinking’ can ever actually release emotional energy – we usually end up doing one of two things:

  1. Suppressing our emotions.

  2. Expressing them in an unreal way.

Both seem helpful in the short-term but none of them actually work as part of a long-term strategy for growing real:

  1. Suppression just pushes emotions deeper into the body where they continue creating tension, anxiety, and fragmentation.

  2. Unreal expression turns into emotional dumping, blaming other people, exploding in anger, compulsive behaviours and addictions, or endlessly talking about feelings without actually feeling them.

What’s interesting is that even though these two approaches look completely different, they’re actually both a form of RESISTANCE which is ‘bad’ news because resistance always keeps us from reality (which is always what we need to build our lives on a lasting foundation).

This article is about an alternative to suppression or unreal expression which is actual RELEASE.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

When you release whatever you're holding on to you find you real strength.

The Three REAL Principles of Managing Your Emotions

Before we get to the practical part, there are three truths about emotions that make releasing them infinitely easier once you accept them:

1. Emotions Are Not The Truth

This might sound strange because emotions often feel incredibly convincing – for example:

  • Fear tells you catastrophe is coming (when it isn’t).

  • Shame tells you you’re fundamentally broken (when you’re not).

  • Anger tells you you’re completely ‘right’ (when nobody is).

  • Sadness tells you things will never improve (when there’s no reason they can’t).

  • Etc. etc. etc.

The problem with being ‘convinced’ by your emotions is that they constantly contradict each other which is why it’s possible to love somebody and hate them at the same time or to want one thing but also want something else that cancels it out.

Emotions also fluctuate and continue to change which is why yesterday you were excited, today you’re anxious, and tomorrow you’ll probably feel hopeful again.

How, then, can you possible know which emotion is ‘true’ when the truth is eternal and can’t be contradicted but your emotions are temporary and contradict each other from one day to the next (or, in some cases, one second to the next)?

The bottom line is that none of our emotions are the whole truth – they’re just waves rising and falling in an ocean of awareness which is why you’ll struggle if you try to build your identity around whatever emotion happens to be passing through you at a given time.

Respect your emotions, listen to them, but don’t worship them as being gospel truth – you’re the awareness experiencing the emotion and not the emotion itself.

2. Emotion Is “E-Motion, Energy in Motion”

In a way the word ‘Emotion’ gives the game away in itself:

“E-motion, Energy in motion”.

This is a good reminder that your emotions are literally just energy moving through your body in response to your internal state, your memories, your environment, and countless unconscious processes bubbling away beneath the surface of things.

The ‘good’ news is that when you allow this energy to move and complete its course through you then it completes itself just as naturally as a wave reaching the shore, a storm coming to a close, an exhalation after holding your breath, or the sun rising and falling without anybody having to ‘do’ anything.

The problems start when we ‘block’ this natural movement of energy because the ego has become frightened for some reason and so it attempts to protect its self-image and keep the shadow self at bay because movement has become a ‘threat’ and so it resists the flow of e-motion.

This resistance just causes the energy to get ‘stuck’ and so – instead of flowing through your experience and teaching you something about yourself and life on the way – it begins circulating endlessly inside your nervous system instead.

Over time, this often becomes chronic tension that we carry in the body in the form of things like tight shoulders, clenched jaws, involuntary movements like legs shaking (in some cases), and shallow breathing because the nervous system is permanently stuck in survival mode (known as Sympathetic Dominance).

3. You’ve Gotta Feel It To Heal It

Emotions aren’t the truth but they are an actual experience happening within you and so you have to give this experience some attention if you want to get through it.

Like I said in the intro to this article, though, ignoring them and suppressing them doesn’t make them magically disappear and neither does acting in an unreal way to try and shift the energy away from you (both of these strategies are a form of resistance).

The only way ‘out’ is through which means that you have to actually feel whatever arises within you – not forever but fully enough that it finishes doing what it came to do.

It’s a bit like you’re paddling in the ocean as the waves keep coming towards you:

You wouldn’t try and ‘stop’ the sea, scream at the waves, or pretend they’re not there – you’d simply let them wash over you and the thousands of emotional waves arising over the course of your lifetime are something that you can treat in exactly the same way.

(Some ‘waves’ are bigger than others, of course – you can handle them all, though, because they’re just emotional discomfort…not actual physical danger).

In fact, if you can learn to surf your emotions instead of fighting them, then you’ll discover a powerful sense of freedom as every wave leaves you a little bit lighter and more real (once it’s completed it’s journey of “e-motion, energy in motion“).

All you gotta do is feel it to heal it.

Why Most People Stay Stuck

Most unnecessary emotional suffering comes from ignoring one or more of these three principles:

  1. Some people confuse emotions with reality in truth and so they become completely and utterly identified with whatever they’re feeling:

    For example, instead of saying “I’m experiencing fear” they say something like “I am afraid” and the fear becomes a whole identity instead of just an experience (fear becomes something they permanently ARE instead of something they temporarily HAVE).

  2. Others block the movement of emotional energy (e-motion) and so every uncomfortable feeling is resisted and every sensation is tightened against to the extent that they eventually become dysregulated because the system is trying to carry years of unfinished emotional ‘stuff’.

  3. Others refuse to feel at all and so they either suppress or express in unreal ways – neither of which allow a healthy completion or release.

The REAL alternative to living in this unreal way is to remember the truth which is that:

Every emotion naturally rises, falls, and dissolves if you ALLOW it to do so.

Why We’re So Afraid To Feel Our Feelings

If emotions naturally dissolve then why don’t we just let them do so?

Well, usually it’s because we’re frightened of what they’ll say about us and what we think it ‘means’ to feel whatever it is that we’re feeling (even though a feeling is literally just a physiological sensation and doesn’t ‘mean’ anything in itself).

For example:

  • We think sadness means we’re weak.

  • We think anger means we’re dangerous.

  • We think fear means we’re incapable.

  • We think lust means we’re immoral.

  • We think shame means we’re fundamentally defective.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

None of these conclusions are true – they’re each just a story that we project onto our own emotions because of our resistance (which just opens up a vicious cycle which is why things get worse over time the more you resist).

A Simple Daily Practice For Emotional Release

Over the years, I’ve found the following approach for emotional release to have helped me personally (I do it most days) and also my coaching clients.

It follows a simple framework of Regulate, Integrate, and Accelerate.

Let’s take a quick look:

Step One: Regulate

Find somewhere comfortable, close your eyes, and place one hand on your heart and the other on your belly.

Begin breathing slowly through your nose and feel your belly going up and down (this means your diaphragm is engaged properly).

For the breath itself, I normally recommend ujjayi breathing which is a technique where you gently narrow the back of the throat to create a soft ocean-like sound (it’s kind of like you’re fogging up a window or mirror with your breath but you keep your mouth closed and inhale and exhale through your nose).

Keep breathing until your body begins settling and you move beyond relaxation and into a sense of safety (almost all emotional healing happens inside a nervous system that feels safe enough to experience what’s already there).

Enjoy being in this feeling of safety (which is literally always there assuming there’s no actual physical danger) for as long as you like.

Step Two: Integrate

When you’re ready, the next step is to invite the emotion that you want to work on releasing into awareness:

The important thing to remember here is that you’re not bringing a STORY into your awareness – you’re bringing the actual FEELING (as a purely physiological sensation in your body).

It could literally be anything:

  • Perhaps it’s sadness.

  • Perhaps it’s shame.

  • Perhaps it’s anxiety.

  • Perhaps it’s lust.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Notice I included lust here – this is because so many men spend years either suppressing it or expressing it in completely unreal ways because they secretly believe having sexual instincts ‘means’ that they’re morally inferior or whatever when it doesn’t.

Just like with your emotions, your instincts aren’t your identity because your biology isn’t your character (it’s just a bunch of automatic processes beyond your conscious control in most cases – you can only deal with what has arisen and not whether or not it will arise in the first place).

Anyway, whatever you’re working on then don’t ‘think’ about the emotion you’ve brought into the container of safety but allow yourself to feel it wherever it lives in your body:

  • Is it pressure?

  • Heat?

  • Tightness?

  • Movement?

  • Vibration?

  • Something else?

Stay with the raw physical sensation and leave the narrative behind because stories keep emotions ‘stuck’ in your system whereas the sensations themselves allow them to complete (the stories are often a form of ego resistance that keeps the shadow self at bay).

Step Three: Accelerate

The final step is to allow the feeling to expand in your awareness and to become as big as it wants (the direct opposite of resistance which tries to make it ‘small’ by either suppression or unreal expression):

Don’t force it, don’t analyse it, don’t push it away, and don’t perform how you ‘think’ you’re ‘supposed’ to react to it – just let it exist completely on it’s own terms.

If you can do this (which you definitely can if you make this a daily habit), then you’ll probably notice something remarkable which is that eventually the feeling just kind of…dissolves.

It RELEASES because the energy has completed its movement.

You’re still here and nothing terrible happened by facing whatever it was you needed to face – all you did was make space for reality.

Over time this changes your entire relationship with yourself and life because instead of fearing emotions you now trust your ability to experience them and to handle whatever arises from one wave to the next.

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

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

Five Minutes That Can Change Your Life

People often assume emotional healing requires hours of meditation or dramatic therapeutic breakthroughs – they can definitely help (especially meditation) but, more often than not, the only thing that’s missing from our lives is a sense of consistency when it comes to facing our own emotional ‘stuff’ head on and not letting it build up until we either explode or have a breakdown.

This is why I’d love to encourage you to spend five minutes every day practising emotional release (even if you think you feel ‘fine’ all the time).

This isn’t because you’re ‘broken’ or anything like that but because you’re human (I’m guessing!) and so there’s always going to be something to release because the waves just endlessly keep coming (that’s that “human condition” thing again):

Sometimes it will be tiny, sometimes it will surprise you, sometimes you’ll realise you’ve been carrying something for decades without even knowing it – that’s certainly been my experience, anyway, and I do this practice almost every single day.

The results have been pretty dramatic because hundreds of small releases gradually create more flow over time and so now I feel lighter, more present, less reactive, and less weighed down by things I didn’t even realise I was carrying.

I’m not saying this is the only thing I do – ultimately, it’s about your whole lifestyle but it’s a big piece of the puzzle and I know it can help you too because realness isn’t about becoming somebody new but about removing anything unreal.

No feeling is final and you can always make the choice to let it release into "e-motion, energy in motion".

The Final Word: The Freedom Waiting On The Other Side of RELEASE

Carl Jung famously said that “What you resist, persists” and I’ve found this to be universally true:

The irony, though, is that most of us don’t even realise we’re resisting because we’re acting on autopilot and following habits that we learned way back when for reasons that don’t really serve us any more and so we suppress, distract, explain, perform, control, and then continue to repeat what isn’t really working .

Learning to RELEASE is an opportunity to stop carrying yesterday into today and to actually start showing up in the present and to become so deeply rooted in awareness that emotions can come and go without taking you with them.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to release the unreal and start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you build some real flow.

Trouble vs. Consequences: You’re Not in Trouble Any More

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Trouble vs. Consequences: You're Not in Trouble Any More

You Might’ve Been in ‘Trouble’ as a Child but You’re Not as an Adult – It’s Time To Let Go and Grow REAL

One of the weirdest things about growing up is that we often leave childhood without actually leaving childhood:

We get older, we get jobs, we dress up like ‘adults’, pay taxes, buy houses, become fathers and mothers, and still somehow find ourselves living according to rules that were written when we were eight years old (whether we know it consciously or not).

Saying that our childhoods shape the rest of our lives isn’t exactly a ground-breaking thing to say:

Most of us know that we develop patterns, scripts, coping mechanisms, and survival strategies that make perfect sense when we’re small and dependent but become completely unnecessary once we’re adults but the problem isn’t that we learned these strategies but that we forget to update them to align with the reality we find ourselves in as adults.

One of the biggest patterns I’ve seen plague people – both in my own life and in the lives of the people I coach – is the unconscious belief that we’re still going to get into some kind of ‘trouble‘.

Not legal trouble, not financial trouble, and not even relationship trouble – more the vague kind of stomach-tightening, nervous-system-freezing feeling that someone is about to tell us – or worse – that we’ve done something ‘wrong’ (imagine the horror of being ‘wrong’ – ugh!).

It’s a bit like walking around waiting to be called into the headmaster’s office except the headmaster only exists inside your own mind.

Perhaps the strangest thing, though, is that many of us have absolutely no idea that they’re doing it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You're not in 'trouble' any more so you can allow yourself to be REAL.

The Hidden Scripts We All Carry

Every child develops strategies for survival – that’s just part and parcel of being a human being:

If your childhood was ‘healthy’ enough, then the strategies you developed gradually dissolve because they’re no longer needed as you go through the different seasons of life and keep evolving with reality.

On the other hand, if your childhood involved emotional instability, then those strategies often become your personality.

This is one of the reasons I’m always talking about the Unholy Trinity:

These are the three forces that most commonly cause us to disconnect from our REALNES and to start sending very real ‘parts’ of ourselves into hiding as part of the Shadow Self.

Meanwhile, the version of ourselves we create to stay ‘safe’ and to be accepted in the eye of the word becomes the Ego (which is basically a kind of ‘mask’ we wear to survive but then forget that we put on in the first place).

This is what I call the Shadow Dance because the ego and the shadow are in a constant conflict where the ego spends its whole life trying to keep us ‘safe’ in an unreal way but the shadow spends its whole life waiting and encouraging us to come back home to reality.

In common language, we talk about the ego as though it’s just ‘arrogance’ or something like that but it usually isn’t – deep down it’s juts a frightened reaction to life and attempt to keep surviving the best way we once knew how (though it can definitely make us arrogant if that’s how we learned to feel ‘safe’).

“Just Wait Until Your Dad Gets Home…”

I know exactly where my own “in trouble” pattern came from because as a kid, I got into trouble pretty much every day:

Some of it was deserved and some of it absolutely wasn’t because – like many families – our family unit unconsciously developed roles and somewhere along the line I became the black sheep.

Once you’ve stepped into this role, it’s pretty amazing how easily other people’s emotions get projected onto you and somehow everything becomes your ‘fault’.

Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a sob story or anything and I’m not ‘blaming’ anybody because everybody was doing the best they could with what they had – the thing that affected me most wasn’t the punishment itself, though…it was the waiting:

I’d get home from school, something would happen, and then I’d hear those unforgettable words:

“Just wait until your Dad gets home“.

Those hours felt endless and my nervous system would completely lock up:

I couldn’t relax, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t enjoy anything…I all I could do was do what I did which was to simply wait knowing that something ‘bad’ was coming and that no amount of explaining would get me out of it.

The whole point of sharing this with you is that this ‘waiting for trouble’ feeling became wired into my body and so – long after childhood was over – my nervous system kept expecting the next ‘punishment’ to arrive:

Nobody was threatening me any more but my body hadn’t received the memo.

Waiting for Something That Never Comes

Looking back now, I can see how much of my early adult life was spent waiting for imaginary consequences because I was still just a boy in an adult body (an Adult Boy):

  • I’d hesitate before making decisions (and then sometimes never act).

  • I’d second-guess myself (then second-guess my second guess).

  • I’d overthink conversations (then say something stupid anyway).

  • I’d worry I’d upset somebody (even when some people are just gonna be upset no matter what you do).

  • I’d prepare explanations nobody had asked for (because I felt like I needed to justify my existence and explain myself all the time).

  • I’d apologise for things that didn’t require an apology (tbh, that might’ve just been an ‘English’ thing as we love apologising a few thousand times day).

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Underneath all of it was one simple belief that had embedded itself in my body and nervous system:

“I’m about to get into trouble”.

Of course, the irony here was that nothing was actually happening and there wasn’t some authority figure waiting around the corner or some invisible judge keeping score so they could ‘get’ me later – there was just an old nervous system replaying an ancient prediction.

In other words, my body remembered childhood but reality had moved on.

Survival Skills Become Personality

Here’s where it gets interesting (or, at least, that’s what I think):

These childhood adaptations don’t just create problems like anxiety – they also create strengths:

For me, the fear of getting into trouble made me exceptionally observant and so I became very good at reading people and could sense moods and things like that with a pretty high degree of accuracy (based on conversations with the ‘moody’ people in question).

I learned how to adjust my personality depending on who I was around and could fit into most social situations that I found myself in:

I became careful, responsible, predictable, disciplined, and controlled and all of these skills have genuinely helped me because they’ve proven to be useful in coaching, relationships, and life and business as a whole.

They also came with a cost, though:

If your entire personality is organised around avoiding ‘trouble’ then you eventually stop living and become more interested in preventing pain than creating meaning.

That’s not freedom – it’s an emotional prison and so many of us still need to break out of it even though we’re now ‘adults’.

The Cost of Staying and Playing It ‘Safe’

The ego isn’t trying to ruin your life or anything and so you don’t need to ‘kill’ it – it’s just a filter that you’ve placed between yourself and reality to try and stop your life from becoming (even more) painful.

Unfortunately, safety isn’t the same thing as realness and so when avoiding trouble becomes your highest priority, you always end up sacrificing something else.

This “something else” is almost always YOURSELF:

  • The spontaneous ‘parts’ disappear.

  • The playful ‘parts’ disappear.

  • The expressive ‘parts’ disappear.

  • The emotional ‘parts’ disappear.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Eventually, the ego becomes a highly sophisticated prison guard whose main job is making sure the shadow never escapes but the tragedy with this is that the shadow isn’t dangerous – it’s just REAL.

What Getting Into Trouble Looks Like as an Adult

Most men aren’t walking around consciously thinking something like “Oh boy, I hope I don’t get into trouble today” – instead, it shows up in disguise:

-Maybe you’re terrified of promoting your business because you were accused of “showing off” as a child and so now you’re not getting anywhere with it.

-Maybe every time you became excited as a child you were told to “calm down” so now you struggle to express enthusiasm and everybody thinks you’re a robot.

-Maybe every time you got angry, you were punished instead of understood and so you’ve grown into a forty year old who can’t say “no” and has weak boundaries and harbours resentment towards everybody.

–Maybe joy itself became dangerous because your parents found it irritating and now your emotional range has narrowed so much that people describe you as “quiet” when really you’ve just become disconnected.

The specific stories differ for all of us but the pattern stays the same:

Some external experience taught you that expressing your real self leads to trouble and so your nervous system made the decision to hide first and live later.

Unfortunately, “later” never arrives…

The Shadow Self Isn’t the Problem

One of the biggest misunderstandings in personal development is that people think they need to become a “better” version of themselves when, usually, what they actually need is to become is a less disconnected version of themselves:

There’s a popular misconception that the shadow self must be full of ‘evil’ or something but it isn’t – it’s full of life (even Carl Jung who came up with the idea said that the shadow is 90% pure gold):

It’s your confidence.

The ‘parts’ that got hidden weren’t necessarily ‘bad’ – they were simply inconvenient for whatever reason in the emotional environment you grew up in.

Children don’t ask “Is this healthy?” – instead, they tend to ask “Will this help me belong?” and if the answer is “No” then they hide themselves so they can belong.

They way forward is to realise that you already belong because you can TAKE YOUR PLACE as a real, functional adult human being and the healthiest way to do this is to come out of hiding.

The ‘Good’ News

You’re not six years old any more which means that you’re (probably) not waiting in your bedroom for somebody to come home and give you a bollocking and you’re not dependent on emotionally immature adults for survival.

You’re not trapped, you’re not powerless, and – assuming you’re not breaking the law or deliberately harming other people – you’re not actually going to get into trouble.

This sounds almost laughably obvious but it’s something that you might need to actively remind yourself of until your nervous system catches up and that ‘trouble’ feeling leaves your body once and for all.

Your nervous system doesn’t respond to logic – it responds to experience which means reclaiming your life isn’t about convincing yourself that you’re safe by thinking your way into it but by repeatedly showing yourself that you are in experience:

Every honest conversation, every healthy boundary you set and maintain, every creative risk, every time you tell the truth instead of hold back, and every time you allow yourself to be ‘seen’, you teach your body something new which is that:

“Nothing bad happened and I’m not in trouble”.

Eventually the old prediction starts to weaken and you can start to be who you actually are right now in reality.

Trouble vs Consequences

A related and important point here is that one of the biggest shifts we need to make as adults is learning the difference between trouble and consequences.

Basically, it goes like this:

As children, we experience trouble – this usually means that there’s someone bigger, more powerful, and more emotionally significant than us who can decide whether we’ve done something ‘wrong and it carries the feeling that we’re being judged, rejected, punished, or made to feel ashamed.

When you’re a child, this makes sense because your survival genuinely depends on the people around you and so the threat of losing connection with your caregivers feels like a threat to your entire world.

The problem is that many of us carry this feeling of ‘trouble’ into adulthood which is why so many of us still feel like we’ve done something ‘wrong’, still expect someone to be disappointed with us, or sit agonising about the moment when somebody is going to tell us off, withdraw approval, or make us feel small.

Luckily, being an adulthood works differently:

Adults don’t generally get into ‘trouble’ in the same way children do but they do experience CONSEQUENCES:

Consequences are simply the natural results of our choices – sometimes, they’re uncomfortable and involve making mistakes, having people be upset with us or disagreeing with us, or just not having things work out in general.

The difference between ‘trouble’ and consequences, though, is that none of these things mean that we’re bad, unsafe, or about to be punished.

This is why a real functional adult human being can make a mistake and say “I need to learn from this“, whereas an adult child – a child in an adult’s body – will stat to panic because “I’m in trouble / Something terrible is about to happen“.

This distinction between trouble and consequences can help you to step into a more real frame of reality because when you stop seeing life through the lens of “getting into trouble”, you can start engaging with reality instead of constantly trying to avoid imagined punishment.

The goal isn’t to become reckless or ignore consequences, though – Realness isn’t about doing whatever you want without caring about other people but about no longer allowing an outdated fear of punishment to control your entire life.

You’re the adult who can handle what happens next.

If you’re a man who wants to go deeper into shadow work then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men could be exactly what you’re looking for.

The Path Forward into REALNESS

My coaching almost always back to the same three stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action – let’s use them here to keep you out of ‘trouble’ once and for all:

1. Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego)

You can’t change what you can’t see so the first-step is to start noticing where your life is organised around avoiding invisible ‘punishment’ and ‘trouble’.

Ask yourself some basic questions to raise Awareness:

  • What am I afraid will happen if I fully express myself?

  • Whose voice tells me I’ll get into trouble?

  • Is that voice actually mine?

  • How old do I feel when that fear appears?

Most fears lose much of their power once they’re seen clearly because they’re actually just F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).

2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow Self)

Instead of rejecting the ‘parts’ you’ve hidden then start to put strategies in place to welcome them back:

  • If you’ve hidden your anger, learn how to express it in a real way.

  • If you’ve hidden your confidence, practise taking up space.

  • If you’ve hidden your creativity, then create something.

  • If you’ve hidden your joy, let yourself belly-laugh without apologising for it or holding back.

Your shadow isn’t asking to take over – it’s just asking for you to return to yourself.

Wholeness isn’t achieved by becoming perfect but by allowing yourself to become integrated.

3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life)

Insight changes nothing unless behaviour changes too and so the final step is to pick one area where you’ve been holding back because of imagined consequences and to DO something about it:

  • Have the conversation.

  • Launch the project.

  • Say no instead of yes.

  • Say yes instead of no.

  • Speak up.

  • Stop explaining yourself.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Trust that your adult self can handle whatever happens next because it can (that’s kinda the whole point).

Be brave and face the consequences - don't let imaginary 'trouble' hold you back.

The Final Word: The Past is DONE and Now You’re Free

One of the most powerful and personal revolutions a man can experience is the moment he realises that the authority figure he’s been obeying for decades no longer exists:

The prison door has been open for years and the only thing keeping him inside is habit.

Realness begins when you stop asking yourself “Will I get into trouble?” and flip the script so you can start asking “What would the real me do?” – the answer doesn’t come from your ego but from the parts of you that have been waiting patiently in the shadows all along.

You’re safe enough now to stop pretending.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to get out of ‘trouble’ and to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to put yourself in the zone.

Your Beliefs & the Future: Your Beliefs Today Are Showing You Your Future

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Your Beliefs & the Future: Your Beliefs Today Are Showing You Your Future

Your Beliefs Today Show You The Life You’ll Be Living Further On Down the Line

This might sound a tad dramatic but I’ve really come to believe that you can often see (or, at least, predict) a person’s future by paying attention to the language they use and the beliefs that they hold today.

No, I’m not claiming this as some kind of scientific law or saying that human beings are trapped by an inescapable fate – life is far too complicated for that and people and circumstances change, miracles and tragedies happen and there are far too many variables beyond our control.

What I am saying is something much simpler, though:

If you listen carefully to what somebody repeatedly believes about themselves, the world, and reality itself then you can often make a surprisingly accurate ‘guess‘ about where they’re headed.

This article isn’t really about judging anybody else, though – it’s about helping you to notice where your own unconscious intentions might already be steering your life without you even realising it because, if your beliefs are rooted in shame and unreality, then you’ll probably spend years trying to force life to become something it isn’t.

On the other hand, if your beliefs become increasingly aligned with reality, then you’ll probably keep learning, growing, adapting, and becoming more whole.

That’s the difference between fighting reality and flowing with it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your beliefs won't make reality go away.

The Future Usually Doesn’t Arrive Overnight

I’m getting on a bit now (by some definitions, anyway) – I’m 44 years old and one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that some people can spend decades talking about the same future without ever actually moving towards it.

We’ve all met people like this but here are some examples from my own life:

  1. I know an “entrepreneur” who has never managed to build any lasting business success despite calling himself an entrepreneur for decades. He’s still skint and every year there’s another business idea, another scheme, and another shortcut.

    Gotta respect the man for trying but if nothing ever changes then something clearly needs changing.

  2. I also know a woman who’s constantly talking about starting an “intuitive healing business” and so she tweaks her Instagram bio every few weeks, redesigns her logo, and announces new beginnings but – five years later – she’s still essentially where she started.

  3. I know a bloke who can’t understand why he never finds genuine love yet every conversation revolves around all of the problems in his life, how he just can’t get a break, and how the modern world is going to hell, we can’t trust anybody, and there’s nothing we can do about it (he cold be right, I suppose, but the end result is that he’s chasing intimacy while proudly advertising the exact beliefs that make intimacy almost impossible).

  4. I also know someone who’s struggled with depression and mental health issues for over ten years – that genuinely breaks my heart and so I’m not making light of their suffering because mental illness is real and depression can be devastating and make even the smallest of tasks a massive mountain to overcome.

    The only problem is that alongside that suffering they’ve continued smoking huge amounts of weed, never exercising, avoiding responsibility, and finding new reasons why nothing can improve and why they’re a victim…when you look at it like that it’s not much of a surprise that nothing has changed a decade later.

On and on it goes….

Please don’t misunderstand me, though (unless it’s too late!) – I’m not sharing these examples to shame anyone or pretend I’m somehow better than them…actually, quite the opposite because it genuinely frustrates me that they’re still living the same lives they were living ten years ago because so much of their suffering is completely unnecessary.

What’s really interesting, though, is this:

If I’d spoken to each of these people ten years ago, it would’ve been pretty obvious where they were likely to end up – not because I can predict the future but because their beliefs were already pointing towards it.

The Missing Ingredient Is Reality

This might be controversial but I honestly think every one of those people had the same missing ingredient:

Reality.

When I talk about “reality”, I’m talking about the foundation of everything I teach on this site:

Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

In other words, working with what actually works over and over again instead of endlessly arguing with life about what we think should work because of what we ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ about it.

Perhaps the best definition of reality comes from Philip K. Dick who said that “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away“.

This is probably one of the most beautiful things about reality – it doesn’t care what we prefer, doesn’t ask for our opinion (or care about it), isn’t interested in our excuses, and doesn’t disappear because we want it to:

It simply IS.

The sooner we stop trying to bend reality around our ego and start aligning ourselves with reality instead then the more our lives begin to flow in a way that actually makes us feel truly alive and where we start getting results from life.

This is why I think one of the greatest predictors of success (whatever ‘success‘ means to you) is whether or not your beliefs are becoming more aligned with reality over time.

Real People Keep Growing More Real

One of the biggest signs that somebody is becoming more real is that they continue learning:

They don’t assume they’ve got life figured out, they don’t cling desperately to old identities, they don’t protect outdated beliefs simply because those beliefs make them feel safe – instead, they keep evolving, learning new skills, and developing the qualities they need to cultivate to become the person they know they can become in REALITY.

They change their minds, they become more flexible, they become more whole.

This is exactly why REALNESS is built upon Awareness, Acceptance, and Action:

  • Awareness lets us see reality by helping us to deconstruct the ego.

  • Acceptance stops us fighting it by learning to integrate the shadow self.

  • Action allows us to participate in it by trusting ourselves and life.

Together, they create growth which is diametrically opposed to unreal beliefs that do the opposite by telling us that we’re fixed in position, convince us that life should adapt to us rather than us adapting to life, encourage force instead of flow, and keep us locked in fantasy instead of feedback.

Eventually, these beliefs become prisons which is why we can see that if we don’t get real now then we’ll just be stuck ten years down the line.

Why Reality Feels So Threatening

Unfortunately there’s a catch and it goes like this:

Reality always threatens the ego.

In fact, that’s one of the easiest ways of recognising the difference between the two because reality asks us to become more whole (because reality is wholeness) whereas the ego asks us to become more fragmented and divided within ourselves over time.

Reality exposes what isn’t working whereas the ego explains why we shouldn’t have to change.

Reality invites humility whereas the ego demands certainty – this is uncomfortable (to say the least) because our unreal beliefs are usually extensions of the ego itself (i.e. they’re protective mechanisms to keep reality at bay).

This also applies to all of the stories we’ve created about ourselves, the world, and reality to stop ourselves confronting shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity) or the parts of ourselves we’ve pushed into the shadow.

Those beliefs help us avoid the Void but they also stop us moving through it and returning back to a foundation of TRUTH and our REAL lives.

The irony is painful because it means that beliefs that feel safest often create the very future we’re trying to avoid.

Four Examples of Beliefs Fighting Reality

Let’s go back to those people I callously used as examples at the start of this article – each one had a different story but underneath the individual stories was exactly the same problem:

They weren’t aligned with REALITY.

The ‘Entrepreneur’

The Entrepreneur’s biggest mistake wasn’t lacking ideas – it was in believing that business existed to get rather than to give.

He wanted customers, money, and recognition but he wasn’t obsessed with solving problems for other people and was in fact trying to use them (collectively) to solve his own problems (of trying to escape the Void and filling it with money and recognition).

He also wanted everything to be easy which is why he kept stopping and starting and jumping from one ship to another but this isn’t how it works.

Life can and does definitely FLOW when we build a sense of flow and put effort in to creating a sense of effortlessness but reality doesn’t promise ease – all it promises is FEEDBACK so you can keep learning, keep course correcting, and keep building something real instead of unreal.

The Intuitive Healer

The Intuitive Healer ultimately wanted something for nothing (one of the most common mistakes in the world in terms of going against reality) and so she believed that creating a business meant appearing online looking “authentic” and waiting for people to magically send money.

She confused visibility with value which is unfortunate because reality doesn’t reward intention – it rewards VALUE which means that if you’re genuinely helping people solve meaningful problems, and have an attitude of genuine SERVICE then you’ll probably get somewhere.

If you aren’t…well, let’s just say that no amount of tweaking your Instagram bio changes that and you’ll either have given up or be in the same place but more frustrated five years down the line.

The Lovelorn

The Lovelorn desperately wanted love but his beliefs about himself and life made genuine intimacy almost impossible:

Every conversation was another complaint about women from his past, every failed relationship became more evidence that women were broken, and his beliefs guaranteed he would keep seeing exactly what he expected to see.

Reality was trying to show him something about himself but his ego insisted everyone else was the problem and so he could never get close to anybody in a real way.

The Man Stuck in Depression

Again, I want to be careful here because depression is an incredibly complex topic and it’s never about just ‘one’ thing…

Saying that, reality still applies because reality is the one thing that applies to ALL of us (no matter what the postmodernists tell you) and so if someone continually avoids movement, numbs themselves with drugs, refuses support, rejects responsibility, and identifies completely with being a victim then…let’s just say their future probably isn’t going to look dramatically different from their present.

Reality doesn’t punish us – it simply amplifies whatever direction we’re already walking and helps you walk quicker and more effectively when you walk with it instead of against it.

The Direction Matters More Than The Destination

Again, none of this is a science – we live in a deterministic universe (apparently) but people can still surprise themselves and each other all the time because we can still make CHOICES.

Someone can wake up tomorrow and completely start to transform and change the trajectory of their whole life – I’ve seen it happen a bunch of times (and even done it myself).

The key word in all of this, though, is “CHOICE” because without making one (and your beliefs are a choice) then you’ll just keep moving in a direction you don’t want to be moving in.

On the other hand, if you make a keep making choices for the real over the unreal, then eventually you’ll wake up and discover you’ve spent ten years becoming more of whoever you already were.

That’s why beliefs matter so much – they’re not just ideas…they’re steering wheels to a either an unreal or real life.

The Hidden Chain

Of course, beliefs aren’t the whole story and all kind of things can affect your life and your future as a whole (luckily, there’s a difference between fate and destiny):

Here’s some ‘stuff’ that can ‘matter’ and affect your life and the choices you make:

  • Family matters.

  • Economics matter.

  • Health matters.

  • Luck matters.

  • Opportunity matters.

  • Social circumstances matter.

  • Geography matters.

  • Education matters.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

The truth is that some people genuinely start life with far greater obstacles than others and so ignoring that would be unrealistic but – all other things being equal – I’ve found this chain incredibly useful:

Our EMOTIONS shape our self-image, our SELF-IMAGE shapes our beliefs and attitudes, our BELIEFS AND ATTITUDES influence the actions we consistently take, and the ACTIONS we take influence the RESULTS we get.

This is why I spend so much time talking about shame, trauma, emotional regulation, and healing on this site – because if you only change your beliefs intellectually while your emotional foundation remains unchanged, your unconscious will usually drag you back towards familiar territory.

Real change happens from the inside out (which is why you need Awareness, Acceptance, and Action).

So…Where Are Your Beliefs Taking You?

So all of this has been leading up to this where I’d like you to sit with a question:

Don’t answer quickly and don’t answer from the point of view of who you’d like to become – just answer honestly based on where you find yourself right now.

Here we go:

If you don’t change anything…If your beliefs stay exactly as they are…If your habits remain the same…If your attitude towards reality doesn’t shift…Where will you be five years from now?

Will you still be talking about writing the book, launching that business, healing or finding a relationship, or finally getting fit?

Will you have found peace at last or will your current beliefs quietly create an even more extreme version of the life you’re already living but don’t want?

The uncomfortable truth is that, in many ways, your future is already visible – not because it’s fixed but because you’re already walking towards it.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

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

Five Ways to Change Your Trajectory Now

The good news is that beliefs can change because REAL human beings are capable of choice and are designed for learning, built for adaptation, and always capable of becoming more whole.

Here are five simple practices to begin aligning yourself with reality and growing real:

1. Listen to Your Own Language

Start by paying attention to the phrases you repeat and the language you use to describe yourself and your relationship with the world and reality:

  • “I always…”

  • “I never…”

  • “People like me…”

  • “They’re all…”

Those sentences often reveal unconscious beliefs that have quietly become identities:

Question them so you can grow beyond them if you choose to.

2. Ask One Brutal Question

Instead of asking “What do I want?” all the time start asking “What does reality require of me right now?” – the answers are usually much less glamorous but they’re also much more useful.

3. Follow Feedback Instead of Fantasy

Reality constantly gives feedback which means that if something isn’t working, don’t defend your identity (ego) but learn, adjust, experiment, grow, and go deeper.

4. Stop Protecting Your Ego

Whenever you feel defensive, ask yourself:

“Is my ego protecting me or is it actually imprisoning me?”

This single question can change your life.

5. Choose Growth Over Being Right

Every time reality proves you wrong, celebrate because it means that you’ve discovered something true which is what it’s all about because all we really need to do is:

  1. Uncover the truth.
  2. Live the truth.
The facts are true even when your beliefs aren't.

The Final Word: Your Future Isn’t Fixed

One final thought to finish things off:

This article isn’t about predicting doom but about recognising possibility.

Yes, your current beliefs are probably pointing towards your future but that’s only because your future is built from today’s choices.

Don’t forget what we said about the power of choice:

You can CHOOSE to change your beliefs, change your relationship with reality, and change your actions anytime you like and, eventually, you’ll change your life as a result.

This is why REALNESS matters so much:

Because reality is the only place where things actually happen.

If you look honestly enough, you can probably already see the trajectory you’re on and so the only remaining question is this:

Are you ready to change it?

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to change trajectory and grow real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you build some flow.

Do Nothing: Why Doing Less Might Be the Key to Becoming More Real

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Do Nothing

Sometimes, the Realest Thing You Can Do is…Nothing

One of the most valuable things that we can give ourselves these days is also be one of the things that we seem to be most afraid of:

Nothing.

That might sound a little strange or counterintuitive – after all, we live in a world that constantly tells us we need to be doing more, achieving more, becoming more, consuming more, learning more, and producing more in order to be upstanding and productive members of society (which is just a fancy name for “other people”, anyway).

Take a quick look around you and you’ll see variations of the same message everywhere:

  • Don’t waste time.

  • Don’t fall behind.

  • Don’t stop.

  • Keep moving.

  • Keep improving.

  • Keep chasing.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Sometimes, it can make sense to live in this way, but what if – at other times – the thing that we need the most isn’t another goal, another project, another strategy, or another thing to add to our already overflowing lives?

What if we need to learn how to appreciate the value of NOTHING?

If you feel like your life needs transforming or you constantly have that restless feeling that there’s ‘more’ to life, then I want to ask you a simple question:

Where has all that DOING got you?

Probably not where you wanted…because the truth is that many people spend years running, striving, and pushing themselves forward, only to eventually arrive at the same place which is to be exhausted, disconnected, confused, and still searching.

Sometimes, one of the best things we can do for ourselves is learn to appreciate the value of nothing so we can give ourselves a reset and find a solid foundation from which to start building again because before we can create something REAL, we often need to create some space.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Doing nothing sometimes is the best way to find your own real nature.

The Addiction to ‘Doing’ (Even When There’s Nothing REAL To Do)

The default state of being for most of us these days is to join the throngs of people running around like headless chickens constantly trying to DO things:

You know these types because they’re so common and the odds are pretty high that you’re one of them yourself:

Essentially, they’re busy from the moment they wake up until the moment they fall asleep and they fill their time by endlessly checking messages, scrolling, planning, working, consuming, learning, optimising, and improving.

It’s all so tiring but at least it’s important work.

When they’re not doing this kind of thing then you’ll find them trying to fix themselves, trying to fix their circumstances, and trying to get somewhere else.

They call this “life” even though they’re constantly moving a little further away from actually feeling alive from one day to the next.

Now, I suppose I should be clear before I go any further:

There is absolutely nothing ‘wrong’ with doing things – in fact, I do things every day so overall I recommend it:

I build things, write things, coach people, exercise, create, and take action pretty much every day (unless I’m taking a Wilderness Day) and I often tell my coaching clients that “Action is the only cure for anything” and genuinely believe it.

The caveat, however, is that this is only true when the following conditions are met:

When the things that we’re doing are REAL: Real action is action that‘s aligned with our true essence, our values, and our deeper purpose – it’s also an expression of who we really are and it flows from the inside-out instead of the outside-in.

The problem, then, is that so many of us are constantly DOING things simply for the sake of doing them:

  • We’re moving but we’re not actually going anywhere.

  • We’re filling our calendars but we’re not filling their lives.

  • We’re distracting ourselves instead of connecting to ourselves and life.

This is why it’s so common to see people who are incredibly busy but deeply unhappy – for example, the workaholics who sacrifice years of their lives climbing a ladder that is leaning against the wrong wall, the people people who spend decades working on the same project but never really move forward, or the people who achieve external success but still feel like something is missing.

The problem isn’t the action itself but that so much of the action we dedicate ourselves to has become disconnected from REALNESS.

The Two Reasons We Keep Doing When We Don’t Need to Do

There are two main reasons why so many people fall into unreal doing and busyiness:

1. We Believe Doing Something Is Better Than Doing Nothing

Most people have absorbed the belief that any action is better than no action so they think that stopping means failing, resting means being lazy., and that spending time in still means that they’re wasting their potential.

All of these beliefs combine to make them feel like they have to constantly try and force life to conform to their will (which is really the will of their ego, not their realness) and so they push, manipulate, chase, and attempt to control every outcome (even though this is impossible and real life doesn’t work like that).

All of this flies in the face of the actual truth itself which is that:

Sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do is stop interfering long enough to allow reality to reveal itself.

A seed does not grow because it constantly tries harder and a tree doesn’t become stronger because it spends all day comparing itself to other trees – in other words, nature (which we’re a part of) understands something that many humans have forgotten:

Growth requires periods of stillness. It’s part of the process.

2. Our Culture Worships Yang Energy

Another reason that we tend to overvalue busyness for the sake of it is that our culture is heavily tilted towards Yang energy:

Yang represents movement, activity, expansion, achievement, and outward expression which are all valuable, of course, but without the balancing opposite energy of Yin – which is the energy of stillness, receptivity, reflection, and allowing then Yang becomes imbalance and we eventually burnout.

In the ‘Yang’ world that we’ve found ourselves in people celebrate being busy and equate busyness with success (which is why so many people love to tell you how busy there are all the time.

They also tend to do things that are pretty unnatural if you step back and take a look at them like wear exhaustion like a badge of honour, proudly announce how little sleep they get, and compete over who has the most stressful schedule.

In other words, ‘busyness’ has somehow become associated with importance and status but this neglects a vital truth about life which is that:

Bing busy doesn’t necessarily mean being effective, movement doesn’t necessarily mean progress, and noise doesn’t necessarily mean meaning.

When people are constantly ‘busy’ without getting anywhere then all they’re really doing is just running around on the surface of the Void.

The Void, in this context, represents a disconnection from truth which leads to shame and a constant itch or feeling that something is ‘missing’ – it’s the uncomfortable emptiness that appears when we lose contact with ourselves.

Many people spend their entire lives trying to fill that emptiness of the Void by finding some external ‘thing’ that they treat as a substitute for the truth itself (the only ‘thing’ that can actually overcome the Void):

  • They chase money.

  • They chase status.

  • They chase relationships.

  • They chase experiences.

  • They chase approval.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

It’s all futile, though, because when the foundation is unreal then nothing is ever truly capable of satisfying them (though, not the kind of ‘nothing’ we’re talking about in this article).

Those who live in this state are destined to keep searching because they never stopped long enough to discover what was already there.

When Healing Becomes Another Form of Avoidance

One of the most interesting places where this endless ‘busyness’ can ruin people’s lives is within personal growth and healing and I have literally seen people apply the same busy doing attitude to their own healing journeys.

Here’s what this looks like:

  • They constantly need another retreat.

  • Another course.

  • Another workshop.

  • Another technique.

  • Another book.

  • Another trauma to uncover.

  • Another wound to excavate.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

They become addicted to the process of ‘fixing’ themselves and so the endless quest just continues whilst being dressed up in the sights and sounds of ‘healing’.

The truth is that sometimes healing doesn’t require more digging because you’ve already dug as far as you need to:

Sometimes healing requires integration, silence, and doing absolutely NOTHING to allow what’s already been brought up to settle into the nervous system.

There is a huge difference between conscious growth and compulsive self-improvement (or compulsive anything, tbh) – one comes from truth (reality) but the other comes from shame (the Void).

The Real Driver of All this Unnecessary Busyness: Shame

The main driver behind unreal doing is usually SHAME.

Shame is the fundamental belief that “I am not good enough as I am” and when we carry it we believe that there’s something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with us and act accordingly.

When we’re driven by shame in this way then we act like we need to earn our right to exist, we act like we need to prove ourselves, and we act like we need to become somebody else before we can finally allow ourselves to relax.

This happens because we’ve become disconnected from the truth about ourselves and life and have forgotten that our worth isn’t something we need to achieve but that it’s something we can simply receive by returning to what’s REAL.

Ultimately, shame is just a judgement against the self that says things like:

  • “I’m not acceptable”.

  • “I’m not enough”.

  • “I need to change before I can be whole”.

  • (Or any other variety of the same theme).

This is unfortunate because when we keep running around doing things because of this kind of judgement then we just end up reinforcing the very belief(s) we’re trying to escape.

This is because every action driven by shame sends the message:

“I can’t simply be”.

“I must earn my place”.

“I must keep running”.

“I have to DO SOMETHING”.

This is why the solution is often the opposite of what we think – not to put more effort into things but so start doing NOTHING.

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

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

Training Yourself to Do Nothing

Learning to appreciate nothing doesn’t mean becoming passive, abandoning important life goals, or refusing to take action and making excuses – it just means learning how to create space between who you truly are and all the things you do.

In other words, it means remembering that you’re a human BEING before you’re a human DOING.

Here are some practical ways to get started:

1. Create Sacred Empty Space

Start by deliberately creating moments where you have no agenda:

  • No phone.

  • No podcast.

  • No productivity goal.

  • No achievement.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Simply sit, go for a walk, look out the window, drink a cup of tea, and ALLOW yourself to actually just exist.

At first, this might feel uncomfortable but that discomfort is actually useful because it helps to reveal all of the noise that’s been covering up the signal of your realness.

Stay with it because the silence is where you begin to hear yourself and life again.

2. Notice Your Motivation Before Acting

Before you take action, ask yourself the following really simple questions:

“Is this coming from fragmentation or wholeness?”

“Am I expressing myself or escaping myself?”

“Would I still do this if nobody ever found out about it?”

These questions help separate real action from shame-driven action so that you can keep building flow.

3. Practise Non-Improvement

Give yourself periods where you are not trying to ‘improve’ yourself:

This might sound ridiculous to read something like this on a blog in the personal development world, but it’s incredibly powerful because the truth is that you don’t need to constantly upgrade yourself or level up and you don’t always need to be a project.

Sometimes you need to simply experience yourself because Realness isn’t something you have to create – it’s something you uncover.

(Most of my work with clients is about helping them unlearn all of the ‘stuff’ that’s covering their realness and keeping them in the Void).

4. Let Nothing Be a Foundation

The deepest value of nothing is that it gives you a real foundation to build on when you’re ready to take real action because when you stop running from yourself, you create the space to discover yourself and life.

From this real foundation, action becomes cleaner, focused and powerful and you stop doing things because you’re afraid and start doing them simply because they’re true.

This is the difference between movement and real growth.

Do nothing when you feel like you have a massive list of things to do right now (you don't).

The Final Word: Nothing Is Not Nothing

The great paradox is that nothing is not actually empty or meaningless – in fact, ‘nothing’ is full of possibility:

A blank page contains every possible story, a silent moment contains every possible insight, and an empty space contains every possible creation – in other words, before anything new can emerge, there needs to be room for it to arrive.

The problem is that many people are so afraid of emptiness that they constantly fill every available space and so they never allow themselves to listen or for life itself to speak to them.

The journey back to REALNESS often begins with a radical act of stopping, being still, and doing nothing – not because nothing matters but because nothing might be the place where everything begins.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start taking real action and building a life away from the Void then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.

Safe and Enough: The Two Shifts That Change Everything

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Safe and Enough

When You Know that You’re SAFE and ENOUGH Then Everything Else Falls into Place

After years of coaching people from all kinds of backgrounds, I’ve become convinced of one thing which goes like this:

The single biggest factor that determines how much somebody enjoys life is the relationship they have with themselves.

It’s not about their income, their career, their relationship status, their childhood, or even the specific circumstances they happen to be facing right now but it’s their relationship with themselves.

(Of course, income, career, and relationships are all ‘good’ things but they’re not the ULTIMATE things).

This matters quite a lot because your relationship with yourself becomes your relationship with life and reality:

If that relationship is based on truth, your experience of life becomes increasingly REAL but if it’s based on distortion, fear, shame, and illusion, then your experience becomes unreal.

Or, as I often like to say it:

Unreal in, unreal out; Real in, real out.

The bottom line is that most people spend years trying to improve their lives without improving the relationship they’re bringing to life itself which means that they focus on changing the scenery whilst carrying exactly the same emotional ‘stuff’ into every new situation.

The result of this is always the same:

Different circumstances but the same old (unnecessary) suffering.

This article is about how to improve your relationship with yourself when you strip everything back to the fundamentals:

When I look at myself and others then it becomes clear that there are two core assumptions that sit beneath almost every struggle people experience and they’re surprisingly simple:

  1. I am not safe.

  2. I am not enough.

Literally everything else is in your relationship with yourself and life is built on top of these two assumptions and so if you can begin shifting them, then you’ll often discover that your entire experience of yourself – and, therefore, your entire experience of life itself – starts getting a whole lot better.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your relationship with fear affects how safe and enough you allow yourself to show up as.

The First Core Belief: “I Am Not Safe”

When people hear the word “safe” they often think of a lack of physical danger but that’s rarely what we’re actually talking about in the modern world:

Most of us in modern society aren’t being chased by predators or living in active war zones but, nevertheless, millions of us are still living on edge as though danger is constantly just around the corner.

This is for one reason and one reason alone:

Because so many of us have dysregulated nervous systems and are ‘stuck ‘in fight-or-flight mode (i.e. we have Sympathetic Dominance)

Your nervous system basically monitors everything in relation to being either ‘safe’ or ‘threat’ and so when it’s not regulated then it starts threats where no genuine threats actually exist.

For example:

  • A delayed text message becomes rejection.

  • Constructive feedback becomes humiliation.

  • Silence becomes abandonment.

  • A difficult conversation becomes a whole catastrophe.

  • Your own emotions become something dangerous.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

In other words, your relationship with reality gets filtered through survival mode and so life stops being something REAL that you can experience and start building with and instead becomes something you have to constantly try and survive.

Performance Replaces Presence

One of the biggest consequences of feeling unsafe is that you stop being present within yourself and so you start performing instead (which means that you essentially start playing a character instead of just being real).

Performance Mode comes with a bunch of symptoms that you might recognise:

  • You monitor yourself constantly (so you don’t mess up and trigger a threat).

  • You rehearse conversations before they happen (so you don’t upset somebody and have to deal with the threat of emotional fallout).

  • You analyse conversations after they’ve finished (to make sure you did everything ‘right’ and there’s no threat looming on the horizon).

  • You second-guess your decisions (instead of just being spontaneous and flowing).

  • You wonder how people are judging you (because you’re projecting your own judgement of yourself).

  • You try to appear confident rather than actually feeling grounded (because you’re trying to protect your self-image which is really the mask that keeps you in the performance).

  • Your attention moves away from reality and becomes trapped inside your own mind (and so nothing ever changes because reality is the only place where you can get results).

In short, when you live in performance mode then life starts feeling exhausting because you’re not living it anymore because you’re wasting all your energy on constantly managing it.

(In fact, the more you ‘live’ like this, the more likely you are to eventually burn out).

Control Becomes an Addiction

Feeling unsafe also creates an obsession with the need to control everything:

Really, this makes sense because if everything feels dangerous and there are ‘threats’ all over the place then controlling everything seems sensible.

This is why when you have a dysregulated nervous system you may try to control things like:

  • Other people’s opinions.

  • Future outcomes.

  • Your self-image.

  • Conversations that are or are not ‘allowed’.

  • Your partner.

  • Your children.

  • Your colleagues.

  • Your emotions.

  • Yourself.

The problem with all of this ‘controlling’ is that the more you try controlling life, the less alive you become because reality in our experience is always moving and control just fruitlessly tries to freeze it (which is impossible).

The end result of all this controlling is that eventually it just creates and enormous amount of inner tension that seeks release and could explode at any time.

This is why so many of us living from a place of “I’m not safe” often seem permanently on edge – they’re kinda like a stretched elastic band which is why pretty much anything – like a comment, an inconvenience, or a misunderstanding – can cause them to snap.

It Changes the Way You Relate to Everyone

The saddest consequence of carrying the inner assumption of “I’m not safe” is most often found in relationships:

Basically, if you’re constantly scanning for ‘danger’ or ‘threat’, then you stop listening to others and instead start to defend instead of trying to understand, reacting instead of responding, and interrupting instead of becoming curious.

Even when someone loves you, your nervous system may interpret their behaviour as a threat and so eventually you stop relating to the actual person in front of you because you’re relating to the fears your nervous system projects onto them.

The Second Core Belief: “I Am Not Enough”

If “I am not safe” comes largely from nervous system dysregulation then “I am not enough” comes from shame.

Shame isn’t simply feeling guilty about something you’ve done but is about the deeper belief that you’re flawed at a fundamental level.

Ultimately, it’s the belief that:

“I’m not good enough as I am”.

This single belief shapes almost everything that you do and the way that you allow yourself to go about doing it because – instead of accepting yourself as you are and growing from there – you begin judging yourself into becoming somebody else.

This is where people disconnect from reality because instead of relating to who they actually are in a REAL way, they become obsessed with who they think they ‘should’ be.

This shift from acceptance into judgement is one of the biggest causes of suffering I’ve ever witnessed and it’s also the foundation of the Shadow Dance – the endless battle between the ego and the shadow self (the real ‘parts’ of ourselves that we’ve rejected because of judgement) that I’ve explored in many other articles on this site.

Shame Creates the Void

When shame becomes your operating system, your authenticity and realness start to disappear and so you hide, edit yourself, wear masks, become unnecessarily strategic (a form of unreal control), and perform identities instead of expressing something real.

All of this just leads to you becoming separated and disconnected from yourself and life and ending up living in the Void:

The Void isn’t emptiness (though it will certainly feel that way in many cases) – it’s, more accurately, a disconnection from truth and so the further you move away from who you really are, the more restless you become.

You might achieve goals, build businesses, find relationships, buy houses, win awards, and receive admiration but you’ll still like feel something is ‘missing’ because none of these external things are ever reaching the real you and are just landing on the image you’ve created to survive the Void instead.

We Start Using Life to Fill the Void

Once shame creates the Void, people usually try filling it with lots of ‘good’ things that they treat as the ULTIMATE thing (because they forgot that the only real ultimate is their relationship with life itself (and a relationship with themselves first and foremost that allows real life in)).

Here are some examples of the kinds of thing we try to fill it with:

  • Relationships.

  • Money.

  • Status.

  • Achievement.

  • Recognition.

  • Pleasure.

  • Productivity.

  • Spirituality.

  • Even ‘healing’ itself can become another attempt to avoid the deeper issue.

The problem isn’t wanting these things and again none of them are ‘bad’ things at all – the problem is needing them to prove you’re enough in order to fill the Void (which can only be ‘filled’ by returning to the truth about yourself and life).

Relationships Become Transactions

Shame also changes how we relate to other people because instead of simply connecting with people we have to spend all our time collecting evidence that we’re valuable and ‘good enough’.

Instead of just being we spend all our time trying to get:

  • Reassurance.

  • Approval.

  • Validation.

  • Recognition.

  • Attention.

  • Certainty.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

When we’re living in this way then our relationships become more about filling the Void rather than sharing reality and growing real together:

Naturally this creates friction because people start to feel used rather than ‘seen’ and they also feel the constant pressure of being forced to be responsible for regulating feelings that only we can truly work through ourselves.

Eventually, everyone just becomes frustrated – not because love isn’t present but because shame has made a relationship responsible for solving a problem it never created.

When Both Beliefs Come Together

Each of these beliefs creates suffering on its own but together…they become EXPLOSIVE:

Essentially, when your nervous system feels unsafe then your own emotions start feeling dangerous because you confuse emotional discomfort with physical danger.

Shame also adds ‘meaning’ to whatever it is that you’re feeling and causes you to try and resist them – the end result of all this is things like this:

  • Sadness becomes unbearable.

  • Anger becomes frightening.

  • Grief feels overwhelming.

  • Embarrassment feels life-threatening.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Instead of allowing emotions to move through you – which is all they need to do because emotions are “e-motion, energy in motion” – you usually do one of two things:

  1. You suppress them.

Or:

2. you express them in reactive ways.

Neither of these – suppression or expression – are real because suppression traps emotional energy inside the body and explosive expression throws it onto everyone else (and so both prevent genuine integration).

Whilst all this is going on, shame is in the background whispering away that “If people saw what you’re actually feeling, they’d reject you” (or something along those lines) and so you just end up creating another mask, another performance, or another layer of fragmentation between yourself and reality.

All of this fragmentation just leads to the gulf between who you are and who you’re pretending to be getting wider, the Void dominating your life even more, and the ego taking a stronger hold over you.

In other words, life becomes even more unreal.

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

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

The Way Forward: Regulate, Integrate, Accelerate

Fortunately, there is another way and that’s to stay REAL and to choose real acceptance over unreal judgment of whatever it is that you’re experiencing.

In my coaching work with clients, we usually simplify this into three movements:

Regulate. Integrate. Accelerate.

Each one builds on the previous (though you can hop back-and-forth, depending on your needs in a given moment):

1. Regulate

The first step isn’t attempting to change or transform your life completely but to learn how to calm your nervous system:

When your body no longer believes everything is dangerous, your mind naturally becomes clearer because you stop living in survival mode, stop confusing uncertainty with danger, and start responding to reality instead of reacting to imagined threats.

Regulation isn’t pretending everything is okay (that’s just resistance) – it’s teaching your body that emotional discomfort isn’t physical danger and that you can trust yourself to handle it (which you always can).

Practical ways to begin include:

  • Slowing down your breathing, extending your exhale all the way to completion, and learning to nose breathe in general.

  • Spending regular time in nature.

  • Prioritising sleep and other foundational health habits.

  • Moving your body daily.

  • Reducing unnecessary stimulation that just hijacks your brain.

  • Learning to pause before reacting.

  • Practising mindfulness without trying to force your thoughts to disappear.

The goal isn’t perfection but increasing your capacity to remain present within yourself and your life.

2. Integrate

Once your nervous system becomes calmer, you can finally begin feeling what you’ve spent years avoiding (your actual feelings).

Like we said, many people think emotions are problems but they’re not – they’re just a movement of energy:

Emotion = e-motion, energy in motion.

The healthiest thing we can usually do isn’t suppress emotions or to express them in some unreal way that doesn’t serve us, our principles, or our vision – it’s to jus allow them.

It’s pretty simple (but not always easy):

  • Feel them.

  • Notice them.

  • Stay with them.

  • Listen to what they’re pointing towards.

  • Let them continue moving.

  • Eventually, they’ll dissipate.

Integration means reclaiming the ‘parts’ of yourself that you’ve rejected because of shame, guilt, and/or trauma (The Unholy Trinity) and sent into exile as part of the shadow self.

What this means is recognising that your anger, sadness, fear, grief, vulnerability and longing aren’t evidence that something is ‘wrong’ with you – they’re just evidence that you’re human and that more you stop fighting yourself, the more whole you become.

3. Accelerate

Once you know you’re fundamentally safe and that you’re fundamentally enough then your relationship with action becomes very different:

  • You’re no longer acting to escape yourself but you’re acting to express yourself in your realness.

  • You no longer chase success to prove your worth and fill the Void but pursue meaningful goals because they’re aligned with who you are.

  • You stop forcing and start flowing.

  • You stop performing and start participating with presence.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

This all allows you to accelerate because instead of the frantic, unreal activity that comes with dysregulation and shame, you’re now creating sustainable momentum emerging from reality rather than fear.

In short, your whole life becomes lighter because you’re no longer carrying unnecessary physiological and psychological weight.

You're already safe and enough. The door is open.

The Final Word: You’re Already Safe and Enough

Most personal development focuses on changing behaviour – which is definitely an important part of the overall picture – but behaviour usually follows identity and identity follows the relationship you have with yourself which determines the relationship you have with life.

That’s why these two shifts are so powerful because when you finally embody the truth that I am safe and I am enough then everything starts reorganising itself:

  • Your nervous system relaxes.

  • Your shame loses its grip.

  • Your relationships become more real.

  • Your communication becomes clearer.

  • Your emotions become easier to handle (because you don’t resist)

  • Your goals become less ego-driven and an extension of your realness instead.

  • Your decisions become simpler.

In the end, you stop trying so hard to become somebody worthy of life and finally allow yourself to live it.

You see that you don’t need to ‘earn’ your place here but that reality has already ‘made’ room for you and you just need to take your true place.

Stay real out ther,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If it’s time to start acting like you’re already safe and enough then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start showing up.

Fear of the Unknown: Why Uncertainty Terrifies Us (And How to Learn to Trust Life Instead)

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The Fear of the Unknown

The Fear Of the Unknown is a Reflection of Your Capacity To Trust Yourself and Life (Do Your Best & Let Go of the Rest)

One of the biggest fears for most human beings is the fear of the unknown, the uncertain, and the unfamiliar (all really just different shades of the same thing: chaos):

This is ultimately because the things we can’t predict, control, or fit into the neat little mental boxes we’ve created to make ‘sense’ of reality represent everything that we don’t yet know and potentially don’t want to find out about – in other words, they represent the opportunity of some new truth that we’re not necessarily ready to face (and, as I like to say, the truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable)).

At the end of the day, human beings have evolved to survive and so our ancestors needed to pay attention to uncertainty because the unknown could represent literal threat and danger – for example, a strange sound in the bushes could mean a sabre-toothed tiger was on the prowl, an unfamiliar environment could mean risk, and a lack of information could genuinely be the difference between life and death.

In modern life, however this ancient survival mechanism – like many other instances of our obsolete biological wiring – often becomes something that limits us and stops our growth into REALNESS rather than protecting us.

When you boil it down to the raw basics, the truth about life as a human being is this:

Life ALWAYS contains an element of the unknown – as in, literally always. There will never be a moment where everything is completely predictable, controllable, or guaranteed.

What this means is that we can make plans, develop new skills, cultivate new personal qualities, and gather increasing amounts of information to be as ‘prepared’ as we possibly can be we can never remove uncertainty completely.

If we want to grow REAL and live the best lives we possibly can with the time that we have then we have to acknowledge this fundamental truth:

This article is about the idea that the unknown is not a problem to eliminate but a reality to embrace.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

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

The Strange Place Between Order and Chaos

The unknown reveals something pretty fascinating about the human experience which is that we’re always caught in a weird grey area between opposing forces (I guess those ancients were onto something when they started talking about yin and yang).

What this looks like for most of us on the average day is being in a place somewhere between order and chaos, between control and surrender, and between ego and realness.

The unknown exists at the border between these worlds which is why it can sometimes seem so threatening.

Let’s explore this a little more:

Order and Chaos

One reason we fear the unknown is because it represents everything outside of the little ‘box’ of order that we’ve created for ourselves.

We all create these boxes and use them to function in the world every day of our lives:

It goes without saying that these structures are useful and provide functional value because without some sense of order, we’d struggle to make our ways through life and to know what we were doing with our lives in any meaningful way.

The problem begins to arise, though, when we mistake our personal interpretation of ourselves, the world, and reality for reality itself.

The ego (which is really just the self-image we’ve created to deal with life) loves certainty and the illusion of everything making ‘sense’ and being understood because this false ‘order’ allows it to keep its hold over us (i.e. we won’t have to grow and let go of our cherished illusions about things).

This is a flawed strategy in the long term because life is always so much BIGGER than just one fragmented human being’s fragmented interpretation of things.

This is because we all live behind the Veiled Veil of fragmented perception (our bodies are incapable of perceiving everything in its wholeness) and we also have fragmented interpretations of what we perceive (because of our own emotional and mental blocks).

The long and short of all this is that there will always be something we can’t predict and that challenges the structures we’ve built for ourselves because there will always be a gap between our perceptions and interpretations and the TRUTH.

We don’t ‘like’ the unknown because it reminds us that our map of reality is not the territory itself and this causes a kind of cognitive (and emotional) dissonance.

Control and Surrender

The unknown also causes our flabbers to be gasted because it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that we don’t have complete control over ourselves and our lives.

Again, this is one of the deepest fears of the ego because the ego wants to believe that if it just thinks enough, plans enough, achieves enough, performs enough, or controls enough then it can finally create a permanent sense of safety.

Nice idea but – like we said – most ‘control’ is ultimately an illusion:

We can influence, we can respond, and we can participate in life but what we can never do is dominate life itself (no matter how much the ego wants to be omniscient and omnipotent so it can do so).

Life is always bigger than the ego and the control structures we create as extensions of the ego which is why the unknown asks us some potentially challenging questions:

Can you participate in life without trying to force life?

Can you take action without needing guarantees and being outcome-dependent?

Can you do your best and let go of the rest whilst staying emotionally stable?

It’s at this stage that surrender enters the picture – not as a form of passive resignation or giving up but and active form of ACCEPTANCE of how reality actually ‘works’ (and, trust me, real always works).

Real surrender is recognising that there is a force bigger than yourself (well, your ego, at least) and learning to move with it rather than constantly fighting against it.

Ego and Realness

Finally, the unknown represents a threat to the ego because the ego is always the opposite of reality and the unknown always has the potential to bring more reality into your life.

One way to look at the ego is that it’s built on the Illusion of Separation – in other words, it creates a fragmented identity based on what we think we ‘should’ be, what we believe we need to ‘prove’, and what we are afraid others might discover about us.

Reality, however, is always asking us to return to what is actually true and the truth threatens anything that has been built on illusion….this is why the unknown feels so uncomfortable – it’s because it represents the possibility that our carefully constructed identity might not be as solid as we believed.

The Shadow Dance: Why We Actually Fear Uncertainty

To understand this very human fear of the unknown, then, we need to understand the relationship between the ego and the shadow self:

The quickest way to talk about this is to say that the ego and the shadow are always engaged in a kind of “Shadow Dance” where the ego attempts to maintain a certain image of who we are and the shadow contains all of the ‘parts’ of ourselves that we’ve rejected, judged, or decided are unacceptable in order to allow the ego to uphold the illusion.

The ‘fuel’ that underpins this entire process is SHAME (the core belief/assumption that “I am not good enough as I am”).

Shame causes us to stop accepting ourselves and to start judging ourselves instead of looking at ourselves with compassion and curiosity and realising that life is a constant learning journey.

It has an army of ‘Gremlins’ that whisper things to us that sound like this:

  • “I shouldn’t be like this”.

  • “I shouldn’t feel this”.

  • “I shouldn’t want this”.

  • “I shouldn’t have this weakness”.

  • Etc. etc. etc. – anything that takes us away from the TRUTH which is that “It is what it is and I am what I am“).

When we judge ‘parts’ of ourselves and sent them into exile in the Shadow Territory then they don’t just disappear – instead they go into hiding and become part of the Shadow Self and the unlived life that an expression of this represents.

Over time – as we continue to suppress these parts – then this just creates more and more inner and outer fragmentation as we become disconnected from the truth and become increasingly divided against ourselves.

The end result of all this is that we’re no longer fully rooted in reality and instead find ourselves living in the Void.

Control Freakery: The Ego’s Attempt to Avoid Shame

When we become fragmented and divided in ourselves like this and our lives are beating to the drum of the Shadow Dance then we naturally become more shame-driven.

There are many ways this can show up but one of the most common – and most relevant to our relationship with uncertainty in this article – is Control Freakery:

Control freakery is the ego’s attempt to maintain power over the world (and the people within it) so that shame is never triggered because – if shame is triggered and we’re forced to actually face it – then we eventually discover and have to re-integrate the shadow self.

This is ‘bad’ news for the ego (which is really just a filter between ourselves and ourselves and ourselves and life) because we integrate the shadow self, we no longer need the ego in its current defensive form.

This is why in the face of the unknown, the ego fights to survive, tries to control everything, tries to predict everything, tries to remove every possible risk, and tries to guarantee outcomes – it’s all about keeping shame at bay so we can keep fuelling the ego (even though, paradoxically, this means that unresolved shame is driving us – if we could just face it, it would dissolve).

Ultimately, the ego’s strategy won’t work because every attempt to completely control life is destined to fail because life itself is always bigger than our strategies and systems:

The unknown always returns, the unexpected always arrives, and uncontrollable always reveals itself – not because life is against us but because life is REAL (and so are we when we accept it and take real action instead of trying to control it).

The Unknown Is Not What We Fear

All of this brings us to something that can help you to start overcoming your fear of the unknown and it goes like this:

When people fear the unknown, they’re not actually afraid of the unknown itself – after all, how could they possibly be if they don’t even ‘know’ what it is that they’re afraid of and the fear isn’t directed at anything specific?

Instead of being fearful of some specific ‘thing’, what actually happens when the ‘Unknown’ triggers our fear is that we’re projecting our own internal fragmentation into the empty space that the unknown represents.

In other words, the unknown becomes a blank canvas and the ego paints it’s fear onto it (and we wonder why we’re scared).

Examples of ‘painting’ onto the unknown like this are things like:

  • “This is going to go wrong”.

  • “I won’t be able to handle it”.

  • “I’m not enough”.

  • “Something terrible will happen”.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

None of these thoughts are not accurate predictions of what’s actually going on in reality – they’re just projections of what’s already going on inside us.

In short:

The unknown represents the truth that we can’t control everything and that the ego is not the centre of reality which is exactly why the ego fears it: the unknown represents the possible return to realness.

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

If you want to go deeper into embodying and living trust then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Moving From Fear to Trust

The way we overcome the fear of the unknown is not by trying to eliminate uncertainty (which is impossible) but by learning to reconnect with ourselves and life at the level of truth (which is how we overcome the Void).

This happens through the process of:

Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego), Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow), and Action.

(You can read more about this in some of my books or I can walk you through it in one of my coaching containers).

Let’s dig a little deeper (again):

Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step is to develop Awareness of where you’re trying to control the uncontrollable – for example:

Where are you forcing what can only flow?

Where are you demanding certainty before taking action?

Where are you creating elaborate and unreal stories about the future because you don’t trust yourself to be real in the present?

Awareness allows you to see the ego’s strategies instead of automatically obeying them – in other words, it starts to give you your CHOICE back.

Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

The second step is Acceptance which means learning to welcome back the parts of yourself that you’ve rejected and sent into the Shadow Territory:

These ‘parts’ can comprise of all kinds of things that are both ‘good’ and bad’ but nevertheless REAL and part of who you are in wholeness instead of fragmentation.

For example:

  • The emotions.

  • The fears.

  • The insecurities.

  • The wounds.

  • The parts of ourselves that we decided were unacceptable even though they’re strengths or ‘good’ qualities

    (Carl Jung himself said that 90% (or something like that) of the shadow is pure gold).

When we stop fighting ourselves and life then we stop needing the ego to constantly defend us from our imaginary battles against life – instead, we can focus on integration, integration creates wholeness, and wholeness creates trust.

Action: Trust Yourself and Trust Life

The final step is to take real Action:

At the end of the day, Realness requires us to move forward despite uncertainty – not because we know exactly what will happen but because we trust ourselves to handle whatever happens.

The formula is simple:

Do your best and let go of the rest – “doing your best” is self-trust and “letting go of the rest” is life-trust.

When you cultivate the muscle of trusting like this then you can trust yourself to show up and do what you CAN do and trust life to handle what is beyond your control to do what you CAN’T do.

When you put yourself in this state then the “Unknown” is no longer a problem to fear but an opportunity to LIVE.

You are made to face your fear of the unknown so you can find something real.

The Final Word: Trust the Unknown to Become Your Teacher

Ultimately, the less capable we are of trusting ourselves and life, the more we’ll fear the unknown – not because our fear is really about what might happen but because of our ingrained belief that we can’t trust ourselves to be able to handle what happens.

When we step up and work to (re)build a foundation of realness within ourselves then everything changes because we finally trust ourselves to do what we can do and trust life to do what we can’t.

The unknown, then, is no longer your enemy but your teacher and it can only ever ‘teach’ you something that makes you more REAL.

Every uncertain moment becomes an invitation to grow, every challenge becomes an opportunity to deepen trust, and every unknown becomes a doorway back to ourselves and life.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to step up and grow real so you can face yourself and life with trust then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you uncover your next moves.

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