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.

How to Get Your Head Straight: Finding Clarity When You’re Stuck in a Mental Loop

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How to Get Your Head Straight

How to Get Your Head Straight When You Keep Going Around in Circles

Have you ever felt like your mind is running around in circles and there’s no way out – like you’re stuck on a kind of mental merry-go-round?

Maybe you’re overthinking a situation; maybe you’re worried about something; maybe you feel like something’s ‘wrong’ but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is; maybe you’re just dealing with uncertainty and desperately trying to find answers that simply aren’t available yet (if ever at all).

Whatever the reason, you can’t seem to switch off and so you go to bed thinking about it, wake up thinking about it, and replay conversations, imagine future scenarios, analyse every possibility, and somehow end up further away from clarity than when you first started.

If you’re stuck on the merry-go-round like this and don’t know how to get off, then this article is for you:

The ‘good’ news is that the solution is usually much simpler than most people realise – the only potential complication is that it’s probably the exact opposite of what you’ve been trying to do.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You get your head straight by facing the pain you've been avoiding.

The Real Reason You Can’t Think Straight

Most people assume that if they’re feeling confused, overwhelmed, or uncertain, then it’s a sign that they need to think harder in some way and so they analyse more, research more, plan more, and put as much mental effort as possible into trying to overcome whatever it is they’re dealing with.

The problem with this, though, is that – in most cases – confusion isn’t caused by a lack of thinking:

It’s actually caused by a conflict between the mind and the body because your mind is pulling you in one direction and your body is pulling you in another.

Until you find a way to resolve this tension then you’ll continue to feel stuck and will never be able to get off of that mental merry-go-round:

This is why so many people spend hours, days, weeks, or even years trying to “figure things out” without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion – it’s because they’re trying to solve a problem of feeling with thinking and that’s a battle you’ll literally never win.

You Can’t Think Your Way Out of Feeling

One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to override what their body is telling them – for example:

Something feels off or something something doesn’t sit right -> Fear shows up -> Anxiety appears -> A knot forms in the stomach -> The chest tightens up -> The throat dries up

This is just a random example so the symptoms might be different in your particular case but what usually happens once these symptoms show up is that the mind immediately gets to work trying to explain it away because RESISTANCE seems easier than ACCEPTANCE in the moment.

To lean into this state of resistance, we’ll tell ourselves all kinds of things to block the flow of emotion (“emotions are e-motion, energy in motion”):

  • “Don’t be ridiculous”.

  • “Everything is fine”.

  • “You’re overreacting”.

  • “Stop being paranoid”.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work like that because whether your body’s response is factually accurate or not is almost irrelevant in the beginning because you can’t think your way out of feeling:

You can only feel it to heal it (which means that you have to feel whatever you’re feeling so it can either be released or integrated).

That’s just a law of life and a reminder that the more you resist a feeling, the more power it tends to gain over you which just means that the more you try to suppress it, argue with it, or resist it, the louder it becomes.

Let’s look at a few examples so you can see what I mean:

Case Study #1: The Weird Boss

Imagine, one day at work, your boss starts acting differently:

Perhaps they’re quieter than usual, maybe they’re avoiding eye contact, or perhaps they’re suddenly scheduling meetings without explanation – either way, you have no idea what’s going on and, objectively speaking, there could be dozens of explanations:

  • Maybe they’re stressed.
  • Maybe something is happening at home.
  • Maybe they’re dealing with pressure from senior management.
  • Maybe they’ve got food poisoning.
  • Maybe [anything]

The fact is that you simply DON’T don’t know but that doesn’t stop your body from beginning to react as your nervous system starts to worry that there’s some kind of ‘threat’ about to come your way:

Fear starts creeping in, your stomach tightens, your heart rate increases, and your mind instantly jumps into creating all kinds of stories to support these emotions (“I’m getting fired”, “They’ve found someone better”, “I’m in trouble”, or “They’ve lost confidence in me”, etc.).

You spend the next three days running simulations in your head even though none of them solve anything (in fact, you probably just feel worse).

Case Study #2: The Suspicious Partner

Or maybe your partner doesn’t answer their phone, perhaps they disappear for a few hours, or maybe they’re acting differently in a way that you can’t quite put your finger on.

Again, our old friend uncertainty appears and so your body begins to react (which is always beyond your conscious control) and an uncomfortable sensation of ‘offness’ starts moving through you:

A heaviness in the chest, a knotted stomach, a sinking feeling, and – again – your mind instantly jumps into action and tells you to not feel what you’re starting to feel:

  • “Don’t be paranoid”.

  • “You’re being insecure”.

  • “Everything is probably fine”.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

That would be great if it worked but, despite telling yourself these things repeatedly, you keep thinking about it all anyway… .

Why?

Because the feeling hasn’t gone anywhere and you’ve simply tried to think your way out of it instead of feeling your way through it.

Case Study #3: Waiting for Medical Results

A final example – perhaps you’ve had a blood test and now you’ve started the endless waiting for the results:

Anyone who has ever waited for medical results knows how quickly the imagination can become creative and start leaping to the worst-case scenario and that’s exactly what happens as a sensation of fear appears in the body and the mind immediately starts its (now familiar) campaign:

  • “Everything will be fine”.

  • “Stop worrying”.

  • “Don’t be silly”.

Again, though, despite you’re best efforts to think your way out of it you somehow you still feel worried because of the simple fact that your body is experiencing fear and your mind is trying to argue with fear.

That won’t work because fear doesn’t respond to arguments – it only responds to acceptance.

The First Step: Get Into Your Body

If you want to get your head straight, then, the key is to stop trying to straighten your head first and to start with your body instead.

(This might sound a bit backwards but it’s actually the fastest route back to clarity).

Here’s how you can get started doing this:

When uncertainty appears, ask yourself “What am I physically feeling right now?” and forget about whatever story you’re telling yourself about what might happen tomorrow (or whenever) or what somebody else is thinking.

All you need to know is the answer to one question: What are you actually feeling?

It could be anything but the most common types of things that show up are:

  • Tightness in your chest.
  • Tension in your stomach.
  • A racing heart.
  • A dry throat.
  • Heat in your face.
  • Restlessness in your limbs.

Drop the stories, interpretations, and narratives – which only exist at the level of the mind – around these things and simply stay with the physical sensation itself:

  • The fear about your boss is ultimately a bodily experience.

  • The uncomfortable feeling about your partner is ultimately a bodily experience.

  • The anxiety about your blood test is ultimately a bodily experience.

  • The [emotion] about your [situation] is ultimately a bodily experience.

Until you’re willing to feel those sensations directly, your thoughts will remain disconnected from reality and you’ll be trapped on that mental merry-go-round with no way off (in fact, it will probably just speed up).

Acceptance Creates Alignment

Most people think acceptance means agreeing with something but it really doesn’t – it simply means acknowledging what’s already happening so you can make a CHOICE about what to ‘do’ with it.

It’s pretty simple, really (though not always easy):

  • If fear is present, accept that fear is present.

  • If anxiety is present, accept that anxiety is present.

  • If uncertainty is present, accept that uncertainty is present.

The moment you stop fighting your experience, the tension between mind and body starts to soften and your energy is no longer being wasted on resisting yourself and so, instead of fighting reality, you’re now standing on it.

This creates the foundation for clarity – not because your problems have disappeared but because you’re no longer adding a second layer of unnecessary suffering through resistance.

The Second Step: Regulate

Once you’ve stopped fighting the feeling, the next step is regulation – regulation means helping your nervous system return to balance.

This is really important because, when we’re dysregulated, uncertainty feels like a threat and so everything becomes urgent, feels ‘dangerous’ and demands an immediate answer (even when there isn’t one).

When we’re regulated, uncertainty becomes something we can embrace much more easily because we no longer need to know everything right now and so we can breathe, ride the period of uncertainty out, and learn to respond instead of react.

Some simple ways to regulate that are time-tested and work for most of us:

  • Slow breathing (especially through the nose).

  • Going for a walk.

  • Gentle exercise (cardio etc).

  • Spending time in nature.

  • Meditation.

  • Yoga (yin yoga is great).

  • Taking a break from screens.

  • Talking in a real way with somebody you trust.

The goal isn’t to make uncertainty disappear because uncertainty is just part of life (which is why we need to trust) but the goal is to create enough safety within yourself that uncertainty no longer controls you or sends you spiralling on that merry-go-round.

The Third Step: Integrate

Once you’ve regulated your nervous system, you can start looking at what you’re actually projecting into the uncertainty:

This is important because:

Uncertainty itself is usually neutral – it’s what we project onto it that create suffering.

The boss example above isn’t painful because you know you’re getting fired – it’s painful because you don’t know and the uncertainty has become a blank screen for your fear and shame to be projected on it.

The partner example works the same way:

You don’t know where they are and so the uncertainty becomes a blank screen for shame and insecurity (really, the same thing) to be projected onto and now the story becomes “I’m not enough“, “They’re betraying me“, or “They’ve found someone better” when – for all you know – they could be out buying you a present or something.

The blood test example is identical: You don’t know the results. Fear gets projected into the unknown. Suddenly you’ve convinced yourself that disaster is inevitable.

This is why perception is projection – we don’t simply see reality: we often see our own unresolved emotions reflected back at us.

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

If you want to go deeper into the flow of being real then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Becoming Comfortable with Not Knowing

One of the greatest signs of emotional maturity is becoming comfortable with uncertainty – not because uncertainty feels pleasant in itself but because uncertainty is unavoidable so if you wanna be REAL, you need to accept it.

Life is uncertain, relationships are uncertain, health is uncertain, business is uncertain, the future is uncertain (and the end is always near!) so the person who constantly demands certainty will constantly suffer.

The person who learns to remain grounded in uncertainty gains access to a much deeper sense of real peace:

This doesn’t mean becoming passive or ignoring the reality of your problems and just pretending everything is fine – it means learning to remain present with reality instead of escaping into stories.

When you resist the underlying emotions that make you feel like you need to get your head straight then you just stay on the merry-go-round of unreality.

Get Your Head Straight: The Final Word

Most people try to think their way back to clarity but the the truth is that clarity usually arrives when we stop fighting ourselves and reality.

We can do this by learning to stop resisting what we’re feeling, by allowing the body to communicate what it’s communicating, regulating the nervous system, and examining the projections we’re placing into uncertainty.

Ultimately, it’s about becoming willing to NOT know everything – paradoxically, that’s when the mind begins to straighten itself out because you’ve removed the inner conflict that was distorting your perception in the first place.

The next time you find yourself stuck in a mental loop, remember this, then:

  1. Don’t start with your thoughts but start with your body, feel what you’re feeling, and accept what’s actually there.

  2. Integrate the emotions you’re projecting into uncertainty and then allow reality to reveal itself rather than trying to force an answer.

Real clarity doesn’t come from thinking harder but from becoming present enough to stop arguing with reality because when you do that, your head tends to straighten itself out naturally anyway.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you could benefit from some help in straightening your own head out then book a free coaching call with me and I’ll help you move forward in a real way.

The Overbearing Father: Stepping Out of the Shadow of Your Father as a Man

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The Overbearing Father: Stepping Out of the Shadow

If You Grew Up with an Overbearing Father it Can Hold You Back as a Man Unless You Grow REAL

One thing I’ve seen a lot of men struggle with in their adult lives is a lack of real direction:

They know something isn’t ‘right’ and want to make changes but they can’t shake the feeling of being stuck and disconnected from their own energy, can’t seem to commit to a vision, make decisions confidently, or move forward with conviction.

Instead of feeling the buzz of actually being alive, life always seems to feel a little…flat – not because they’re lazy, incapable, or that they lack potential but that somewhere along the way they became disconnected from themselves and life and started to believe that this is just the way it’s ‘supposed’ to be (in other words, they started living in the Void).

When I coach men experiencing these kinds of problems, I often find myself looking into their relationship with their father and – whilst every family situation is different – there’s a pattern that appears often enough to be impossible to ignore:

Many of these men were raised by fathers who were overbearing, controlling, strict, or overly involved in making decisions on their behalf – as children, they weren’t really allowed to discover who they were and, instead, they were TOLD who they’re supposed to be as they were moulded into who somebody else thought they ‘should’ be.

The result is that many of these men reach adulthood without ever truly learning how to trust themselves and so their REALNESS remains hidden in the shadows.

This article is about reclaiming what was lost and putting yourself back on your own real path.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your overbearing father was trying to live his unlived life through you.

The ‘Good’ News

The good news is that none of this damage is permanent because human beings are remarkably adaptable and so no matter how old you are, it’s never too late to reconnect with yourself, reclaim your own authority over yourself and your life, and start growing real again.

You are not condemned to live out the patterns you inherited, you’re not trapped by your upbringing, and you’re not doomed to remain an “adult boy” waiting for somebody else to tell you what to do.

You can step out of the shadow of your father and become your own man…but first, you need to understand what happened in the first place:

It Was Never Really About You

One of the first things that needs to be said when talking about such a sensitive topic is this:

If your father was overbearing, controlling, or constantly making decisions for you, this was not a reflection of your worth – it was a reflection of his relationship with himself and life.

Many men carry around a hidden belief that they weren’t trusted because there was something ‘wrong’ with them and so they assume that their father had to take control because they weren’t capable in some way.

This is rarely if ever the truth and, actually – more often than not – an overbearing father is acting from his own unresolved struggles:

  • Perhaps he suffered through hardship and disappointment.

  • Perhaps he made mistakes he wishes he hadn’t.

  • Perhaps he carries regret, fear, shame, or anxiety about life.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Whatever the case, he unconsciously tries to protect his children from experiencing the same pain but, unfortunately, what begins as protection often turns into projection and so he just ends up imposing his own understanding of life onto his son.

You might have experienced the effects of this yourself:

  • He decides what success should look like.
  • He decides what choices should be made.
  • He decides what risks should be avoided.
  • He decides what kind of man his son should become.

In many cases, he’s trying to mould his son into the person he believes he himself should have been so that he wouldn’t feel whatever pain he’s currently feeling (whether he shows it to people or not).

This doesn’t make him evil or malicious – in his own mind, he may genuinely believe he is doing the right thing and think that he’s helping his son by saving him from suffering.

The problem is that his son isn’t him and actually has his own life with his own values, calling, and sense of realness but – when a father can’t recognise this – he ends up projecting his own unfinished business onto his child.

Understanding this is important because it allows you to stop personalising the experience and allows you to begin seeing that what happened wasn’t a statement about your worth but a reflection of your father’s relationship with reality.

Once you see that clearly, you can stop carrying a burden that was never yours to carry so you can actually get on with your own real life.

The Symptoms of Living in Your Father’s Shadow

When a man grows up under the influence of an overbearing father, certain symptoms tend to appear in adulthood – these symptoms can look different from person to person, but they all point back to the same root issue:

A disconnection from realness.

1. Waiting For Permission

Many men spend their entire lives waiting for certainty, approval, or for somebody to tell them that they’re finally ‘allowed’ to be themselves and do what they need to do.

The problem is that the “permission” they’re waiting for is never coming and so they just end up freezing up and wasting years of their lives.

Deep down, they’re still relating to life as though their father is standing over their shoulder and, as a result, they never fully commit to real action.

2. Disconnection From Self-Authority

These men often struggle to trust their own judgement which basically means that rather than making decisions from within, they default to familiar scripts and patterns:

  • They look outside themselves for answers.
  • They follow expectations.
  • They follow rules.
  • They follow the crowd.

What they don’t do is follow themselves!

3. An Inability To Be Present

Presence only really becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be who we really are.

On the other side of the coin, when our authentic self has been hidden away, we can’t fully show up and so instead we live through a mask in the form of a self-image built around pleasing others, a personality built around ‘blending’ with the world, and a version of ourselves designed for survival rather than truth.

The real self remains hidden in the shadows and there will always be the endless search for something ‘more’ until it’s reclaimed.

4. Control Freakery And Overplanning

Many men raised by controlling fathers become controlling themselves – not because they enjoy it per se but because uncertainty feels threatening (which is unfortunate because uncertainty is just part of life and so we need to learn to handle it if we want to be real).

  • They overthink.
  • They overanalyse.
  • They endlessly prepare.
  • They seek certainty before acting.
  • Spontaneity disappears.
  • Trust disappears.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

In short life becomes something to manage instead of something to live.

5. A Hidden Undercurrent Of Shame

At the root of all of this is usually shame:

  • A feeling that who they really are isn’t enough.

  • A feeling that they need to earn worthiness.

  • A feeling that they must become somebody else before they can deserve acceptance.

This develops because their realness was never fully welcomed and so instead of being valued for who they were, they were valued for how closely they matched someone else’s expectations.

The consequences can show up as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, people-pleasing, perfectionism, procrastination, or countless other symptoms but they all point back to the same fundamental problem:

That disconnection from REALNESS.

What Is Realness?

The short-version is that Realness is who we are when we accept ourselves without judgement and continue acting from that acceptance – it’s the ongoing process of moving deeper into wholeness through real action.

It isn’t about becoming somebody new but about removing everything we learned and picked up along the way that prevents us from being who we already are.

When an overbearing father dominates a son’s development, the son’s realness often ends up hidden beneath his father’s shadow and so – metaphorically speaking – his father’s identity becomes so large of a presence in his life that the son’s own identity never fully develops.

The solution is not rebellion, blame, or resentment but in stepping out of the shadow and becoming real again.

In the REALNESS framework, this happens through three stages: Awareness (Deconstruct Ego), Acceptance (Integrate Shadow), and Action (Trust Self & Life)

Let’s quickly look at each in a little more detail:

Stage One: Awareness (Deconstruct Ego)

The first step is becoming aware of where your father’s influence has shaped your identity.

You can start by asking yourself some simple but powerful questions:

  • What beliefs do I hold because I genuinely believe them?

  • What beliefs do I hold because they were imposed upon me?

  • What goals am I pursuing because I truly want them?

  • What goals am I pursuing because somebody else expected me to?

  • What parts of my personality are real?

  • What parts are unreal adaptations to my father’s unreality?

This process can feel uncomfortable because the ego (the identity you created to survive an overbearing father) wants the familiarity and uncertainty of your learned identity but awareness creates separation as you begin to see where you’ve been living somebody else’s script.

Once you can see it, though, you no longer have to remain trapped inside it.

Stage Two: Acceptance (Integrate Shadow)

The next stage is reclaiming what was pushed into your own shadow self (all of the parts you had to send into hiding in order to keep the ego in place).

This often includes your own masculinity – your capacity to make decisions, lead yourself, and trust your own judgement.

It also means reclaiming your own values, goals, beliefs, and desires which is ‘good’ news because men discover that they’ve spent decades living according to values they never consciously chose.

Acceptance means welcoming your real self back into consciousness – not judging it, suppressing it, or apologising for it but simply allowing it to exist.

The more acceptance grows, the more wholeness becomes available, and the more REAL life gets.

Stage Three: Action (Trust Yourself And Life)

Awareness without action changes nothing and Acceptance without action remains incomplete – eventually, you have to live, decide what you need next, and get moving again.

This means creating a vision that is genuinely yours – not your father’s, not society’s, and not your friends’. Yours.

Then, of course, you have to start acting on it – even when uncertainty and fear present themselves or when old patterns try to pull you back in (which they will).

Essentially, the man who has stepped out of his father’s shadow understands something important:

He no longer needs permission – he gives himself permission and he trusts himself (and when he doesn’t know what will happen next, he trusts life).

This isn’t because life is always easy but because he knows that reality can be worked with far more effectively than fear.

If you’re a man who wants to go deeper, then the Father Wound Workbook in the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can help you to integrate, let go, and move forward.

The Conversation You May Need To Have

As you grow real through this process, there may come a point where you need to have a difficult conversation with your father (not every situation requires this but many do).

The purpose is not to attack him or to blame him – the only purpose is to reset the relationship by establishing new boundaries and actually showing up as a man rather than an adult boy.

Different fathers will react differently and where some will respect it immediately others will struggle or become defensive.

Some may never fully understand at all and that’s okay too because the goal isn’t to control his response as much as it is to start honouring the truth in your own life.

Either way, you’re no longer asking for permission to be yourself – you’re simply informing the world that you have chosen to be yourself.

Your overbearing father will remain that way until you understand him.

Overbearing Fathers & Stepping Into The Light

At some point, every man faces a choice which is pretty simple:

Remain in the shadow of his father or step into the light of realness.

The shadow of your father might feel safe because it’s familiar but familiarity in itself isn’t freedom and living somebody else’s life never can be.

Suppressing your own nature can never lead you to realness and so real freedom begins when you stop waiting for permission and start trusting what is real.

Your father’s story is his story, his fears are his fears, his regrets are his regrets, and his unfinished business is his unfinished business so you don’t need to carry any of these things any longer.

Your task is not to become the man your father imagined but to step up and show up as the man that reality itself is asking you to be.

When you accept yourself, reclaim your authority, and take real action, you gradually step out of the shadow and into wholeness and so life can stop feeling like something that’s happening to you and start feeling like something you are actively participating in.

Well done, you found your REALNESS.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to step out of the shadow of your father and into the light of your own real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take real action.

Sadness Completes the Past & The Tears of the Way

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The Tears of the Way: Sadness Completes the Past

Sadness is Feedback From Your System that It’s Time to Complete the Past

Have you ever found yourself watching a movie and suddenly feeling your eyes well up for no obvious reason?

Perhaps somebody said something pretty simple and mundane, a character hugs their father, a couple reunites after years apart, or somebody finds the courage to start all over again – in other words, nothing particularly dramatic happens but something inside you stirs and you feel overcome with emotion?

Or maybe you’re standing outside watching a beautiful sunset as the colours spread across the sky…everything is peaceful and everything is fine but there it is again: the undercurrent of sadness and melancholy – the feeling that there’s something moving beneath the surface of your life:

You can’t quite explain it but it haunts you wherever you go – sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s overwhelming, but it’s always there – if you stop and pay attention – like it’s trying to ‘tell’ you something:

It can appear when you’re driving your car, listening to music, sitting in a café, spending time with people you love, or even during moments that should feel completely ‘happy’ – it’s almost as though a ghost from the past keeps showing up in the present.

This article is about the idea that sadness completes the past:

It’s about understanding that the tears we might shed along the way are not signs that something is ‘wrong’ with us and that they’re actually signs that something inside us is trying to come to the end of a cycle once and for all.

In fact, the tears that arise are often part of a cathartic process which means that they emerge when we finally stop resisting what needs to be felt and allow ourselves to move into a new season or cycle of our lives so we can walk our own path.

We’re going to look at where this sadness comes from, how to move beyond it, and how to step into the REALEST season of your life so far.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Tears are often a cathartic experience that return you to the way.

Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Depression

Before we go any further, we need to make an important distinction which is that sadness and depression are not the same thing:

They key distinction is that when we’re dealing with sadness, we can still MOVE – for example, we can still go to work, still train, still laugh, and still have meaningful goals.

Our lives may even look great from the outside and – in many cases – they genuinely are great but, despite, all of this we still have that undercurrent of haunting sadness that makes us unexpectedly emotional (in some of the ways mentioned above, for example).

Depression hits different because – in very simplified terms – depression is what happens when we stop moving:

It’s what ultimately occurs when we become disconnected from our real purpose and spend so much time in the Void that we lose contact with the flow of life altogether.

If you haven’t read about the Void already on this site, then it’s the state that we live in where we become disconnected from the truth about ourselves and end up creating a fragmented version of ourselves (the ego) to filter life through:

Instead of participating in life, we withdraw from it; instead of expressing ourselves, we shut down; instead of moving forward, we become stuck.

Sadness doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve stopped flowing to this extreme degree (though you may still be in the Void to some extent) – in fact, the very presence of sadness often suggests that some part of you is still alive and trying to move back into WHOLENESS over fragmentation.

The problem that you have is that that the past keeps interrupting the flow and so you’re attempting to step into life but you’re carrying yesterday on your back – in other words, you’re trying to move forward but something unfinished keeps pulling you backwards.

To break out of the cycle you have to listen to the signal and start completing the past so you can step into the current season of your life.

Sadness is a Signal – Not Reality Itself

What we can say, then, is that sadness is a signal – feedback that tells us that there’s something from the past that still needs to be completed.

  • Some old emotion.

  • Some old wound.

  • Some old belief.

  • Some old story.

  • Basically: Something that should have been left behind years ago is still being carried into the present.

The sadness itself is not the problem because it’s just the messenger – the real problem that needs to be resolved is whatever the sadness is pointing towards.

Everybody’s journey into completing the past will look different but there are some pretty common themes:

1. Letting Go of Old Beliefs About Who You Are

Many people are living according to the identities they were given rather than something that’s actually REAL:

  • Perhaps a parent told you that you were lazy.

  • Perhaps a teacher told you that you weren’t intelligent.

  • Perhaps the world convinced you that you were “too much” or “not enough”.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Whatever your own personal history is, the tragedy is that many people spend decades carrying these labels around as though they were facts when they’re anything but.

Sadness comes from constantly attempting to live in conflict with reality by continuing to give this ‘stuff’ from the past a weight and gravitas it doesn’t deserve.

The short version is that in your REALNESS you know who you really are but your ego is trying to live according to who you were TOLD you were.

The gap between these two creates sadness and will continue to do so until you let go and unlearn any of the unreal things you learned about yourself and life.

2. Healing an Old Broken Heart

Many people are still protecting themselves from relationships that ended years ago:

  • Somebody hurt them.

  • Somebody betrayed them.

  • Somebody left.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Instead of healing the wound, they built walls around it and close their hearts (which always creates more long-term suffering than having a broken heart and then learning to grow beyond it).

The problem is that walls don’t only keep pain out – they keep life out too and this holds you back from actually being present in yourself and your life.

Sadness remains in this case because the heart knows it was built to love, connect, and participate whereas closing the heart may feel ‘safe’ but it will never be able to feel real.

3. Releasing Shame from Childhood

For most people, shame sits at the centre of the story because shame keeps repeating the message that:

“Something is wrong with me“.

Or:

“I’m not enough“.

Or:

“If people really knew me, they wouldn’t love me“.

These beliefs become invisible operating systems that influence everything we do and so when driven by shame:

  • We play small.

  • We hide.

  • We doubt ourselves.

  • We settle.

  • We avoid our calling.

The sadness that follows is often the pain of abandoning ourselves and thinking that remaining in this state of abandonment is ‘normal’.

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The Cargo You Came Here to Deliver

There’s an old story that says every human being arrives carrying a kind of spiritual, creative, or purposeful ‘cargo’ that they’re supposed to ‘deliver’ to the world.

The ‘cargo’ is really just a metaphor for the gifts they came here to bring into the world:

  • Some people carry wisdom.

  • Some carry courage.

  • Some carry creativity.

  • Some carry compassion.

  • Some carry leadership.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

The details of the ‘cargo’ actually don’t matter that much – what matters is that each of us has something real that wants to be expressed and so when we refuse to deliver what we came here to deliver, life becomes heavier and filled with sadness.

The sadness emerges because we’re carrying a burden that was never meant to stay inside us because the whole point of the ‘cargo’ is that it was meant to be delivered.

In many cases, then, the sadness is simply feedback that you have weighed yourself down with old stories, old wounds, and old identities for so long that you can no longer fully express what is trying to emerge through you.

The lesson is that the sadness will remain with you until you catch up with yourself.

The short-version of how you catch up with yourself is that you learn to:

  1. Get in touch with your ESSENCE (your realness)

  2. Learn to EXPRESS this essence (through real action).

This is the journey back to realness.

Why Tears Are Necessary

Most people think tears are a weakness and though this can certainly be true in some cases tears are also often a form of completion which takes strength.

The thing to remember is that sadness is like any other emotion which means that it needs to be felt (“you gotta feel it to heal it”).

The word emotion literally points towards e-motion: energy in motion – this is pretty apt because emotions ‘want’ to move and flow so that they can complete themselves and either be released or integrated.

The problem is that the ego resists by telling us not to feel things or to project an image of being something or somebody we’re not in order to suppress the emotion but the only result of this is inner TENSION.

This goes against the simple law of Tension and Release which tells us that:

Tension always seeks Release.

In practical terms, all this means is that the more sadness we suppress, the more pressure builds until eventually something ‘happens’ like a song, a memory, a conversation, a sunset, or a random Tuesday afternoon and then…suddenly, the TEARS arrive as a release of tension.

This isn’t weakness or ‘failure’ – it’s literally just the RELEASE of the Tears of the Way – the tears that emerge when the tension of the unreal finally gives way to the truth of what we have been carrying in ourselves all this time.

The Tears of the Way are the tears that wash away resistance, dissolve old stories, and return us to the present moment.

In other words, they help us find the path again.

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

If you want to leave the Void and start living you real life then you might find my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace helpful.

How to Use Sadness to Complete the Past

Understanding sadness is one thing but working through it is another – fortunately, the process can be simplified into three stages:

1. Regulate

Before you can feel difficult emotions associated with sadness and whatever you’ve been holding onto (and creating TENSION for yourself with), then you need to feel safe to feel.

Many people try to process sadness while their nervous system is already overwhelmed but this hardly ever works because they start to see their own emotional ‘stuff’ as a threat.

This is why the first step is always regulation and creating a baseline of safety within yourself for yoursef:

  • Slow breathing.
  • Walking in nature.
  • Prayer.
  • Meditation.
  • Exercise.
  • Journalling.
  • Good sleep.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

Basically, anything that helps your body remember that you are safe is going to help you because you can’t force emotional integration – you can only create the conditions for it and the safer your system feels, the easier it becomes to experience what needs to be experienced.

2. Integrate

Once you feel safe enough, you can finally stop resisting!

This is where most people struggle because they’d rather analyse their sadness by explaining it, ‘fixing’ it, and learning to control it.

None of these things ‘work’ because they just keep you detached and separate from it which is why, instead, you need to allow yourself to feel it:

This basically means sitting with it, noticing where it lives in your body, noticing what memories arise, noticing what truth emerges, and letting the tears come if they need to come.

Remember that sadness isn’t permanent so you have nothing to worry about – like every emotional process, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end and it only lingers when you refuse to let it move.

Integration means allowing the movement whilst remembering that you aren’t trying to become the sadness – you’re simply allowing the sadness to complete itself.

(Sadness isn’t something you ARE but something you HAVE temporarily).

3. Accelerate

Once the past has been processed, then energy, clarity, and purpose return as life starts moving again.

This is the point where many people make a mistake because they stay focused on healing everything (which is impossible) and thinking it’s something they need to do forever (which is why many people get stuck in shadow work).

The thing to remember is that healing isn’t the destination – your REAL LIFE is the destination.

The purpose of processing the past is to free yourself to be present so you can make real choices about your future and this is why Accelerate means stepping into the next season of your life.

This is going to be different for everybody:

  • Start the business.
  • Write the book.
  • Have the conversation.
  • Open your heart again.
  • Share your gifts.
  • Take the risk.
  • Become who you are now instead of who you used to be.

The past has already taken enough from you – don’t let it take your future too.

Sadness is about the release of tension.

The Tears of the Way, Sadness, & the Real Path Forward

The deepest truth about sadness is that it isn’t trying to destroy you – it’s actually trying to guide you by showing you where the past remains unfinished by pointing towards the places where your life became fragmented.

It’s asking you to return to wholeness and any tears that arise along the way are not evidence that you’re broken but are evidence that something inside you is healing, that tension is becoming release, that resistance is shifting into acceptance, and – most important of all – that the unreal is becoming real.

When sadness is finally allowed to complete the past you stop carrying yesterday into today, stop being your own worst enemy and holding yourself back and stop tarnishing new opportunities with old stories.

Gradually, perhaps without even noticing, you find yourself standing fully in the present because you finally let go of what was keeping you from arriving.

That is the gift of the Tears of the Way – they don’t pull you backwards: they show you the way home.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to step away from the past and into your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you catch up with yourself.

Stuck in a Funk: The Real Reason So Many Men Feel Stuck

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The Funk: Why Men Get Stuck

The Funk and How to Get Out of It

There’s a very specific kind of existential misery that a lot of men deal with in this life of ours:

It doesn’t always look like crisis or a failure – in fact, from the outside looking in, things look fine but, underneath it all, there’s a persistent sense that something isn’t quite right because every day feels like a variation of the same day lived over and over again like a personal kind of Groundhog Day.

It might not be terrible or even dramatic, just kinda flat and repetitive with a slight grey hue to the edges as if life has narrowed into a corridor you can walk down with your eyes closed because you’ve done it all so many times before (even though you don’t really want to be doing it anymore).

This is the Funk:

The Funk isn’t just boredom or good ol’ fashioned laziness – it’s not even depression in the clinical sense (though it can certainly eventually slide into that for some people if they stay in the Funk for too long).

No, the Funk is something more subtle and more structural:

It’s what happens when a man is living a life that looks functional on the surface but internally has stopped moving in any meaningful kind of way because he disconnected himself from his own natural drive towards evolution and growth into deeper wholeness.

Over time, the friction of this disconnection creates frustration and – on an even longer timeline – this frustration hardens into misery; if nothing shifts, this misery slowly curdles into a low-level resentment that feels like life is slipping through your fingers while you’re still technically “in it” but fundamentally disconnected from it.

The real question isn’t just “Why do I feel stuck?“, then, but:

How does a man end up in the Funk in the first place and how does he get out of it?

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You can't get out of the Funk with the same thinking that put you in it in the first place - it's time to evolve and grow real.

The Funk is Feedback, Not Failure

The first thing to understand from the get-go is this:

The Funk is not a sign that something is ‘wrong’ with you – it’s a signal that something in your relationship with yourself and life is out of alignment with reality.

In other words, the Funk is feedback:

Think of it less like a psychological defect or problem with existence itself and see it as being more like a dashboard warning light showing that something in your system is being held too tightly, too rigidly, or too long beyond its natural lifespan.

At the surface level, there are obvious explanations:

  • You’ve got responsibilities.

  • You’ve got obligations.

  • You’ve got limited time, energy, and attention.

These might help explain why you STAY in the Funk but they’re not the root cause of it – just some of its visible conditions.

Underneath them is something more fundamental:

A disconnection from REALNESS.

What is Realness?

Realness isn’t a personality trait or about being radically honest or direct in a superficial sense – it’s about how you show up as a living human being in alignment with reality itself.

The (very) short version is that it’s the difference between:

  • Reacting from old conditioning.


    vs

  • Responding from what is actually true now and always.

A real human being doesn’t try to force life into staying the same because that’s impossible and so instead they CHOOSE to move with it, adjust when required, and to keep evolving.

This kind of fluidity in our approach to live is real because one of the most basic laws of reality is this:

The only constant in life is change.

What this means is that everything truly alive is in motion and that every living thing that maintains a sense of stability and equanimity is is actually stable because it is adapting continuously from moment-to-moment.

(Think about the old Taoist idea that a willow tree can survive the wind because its branches move with it but a more rigid tree is more likely to snap in the wind as it resists it).

All of this is to say that when a man starts feeling ‘stuck’ and lost to the Funk, what’s really happening is this:

He is unconsciously trying to maintain a version of himself that life has already moved past.

This is the heart of the Funk and the thing that keeps you in it – it’s not stagnation caused by life (because life is anti-stagnation by nature) – it’s the kind of stagnation caused by resistance to life itself.

This kind of resistance always creates friction, frustration, misery and then resentment.

How the Funk Forms: The Bubble of Forced Stability

At some point, every man – like every human being – builds a self-image or sense of identity that helps him survive in the world.

This identity might be anything but it will usually have some kind of label or role that can be neatly attached to it.

Here are some common examples:

  • The Responsible One

  • The Provider

  • The Easy-going Guy

  • The Strong Silent Type

  • The One Who Keeps It All Together

  • Etc. etc. etc.

There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with identities like this – we need them to function in the world and so they’re necessary at certain stages of life.

The problem is that the Funk begins to take a hold of us when identity stops being flexible and becomes something that we cling rigidly too because we feel like we can’t cope or survive without it.

Like we have seen, life doesn’t stop moving but the ego tries to stay the same in order to maintain it’s hold over us (and keep us ‘safe’ in a misinformed way).

This leads to a way of being where you start filtering experience through what fits your identity, and rejecting what doesn’t:

  • Opportunities that feel unfamiliar get avoided.

  • Emotions that don’t ‘fit’ get suppressed.

  • Impulses that could lead to meaningful change get ignored.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Over time, this creates a kind of sealed environment which we can see as the kind of psychological bubble which we have been calling The Funk:

Inside the bubble, things feel predictable and safe but they’re also disconnected from the living movement of reality.

The Funk is just over-control disguised as ‘stability’ (even when it’s the kind of stability you’re unsatisfied with).

The Identity Problem at the Core

At its root, the Funk is a problem of identity – not in the “Who am I and what does it all mean?” philosophical sense but in a much more practical way:

The Funk is just feedback showing you that you’re more attached to your current self-image than you are committed to your actual evolution into REALNESS.

This is where it can be important to understand the Shadow Self:

The abridged version is that the Shadow is everything in you that’s been pushed aside and sent into exile because it didn’t match the identity you built to survive whatever you went through in the past (the ego).

It contains:

  • Suppressed desires.

  • Avoided truths.

  • Unexpressed power.

  • Emotions you didn’t know how to handle at the time they first came up.

  • Instincts you labelled as “not me” (because they conflicted with the ego – not because they really weren’t “You”).

The Shadow doesn’t disappear just because you ignore it – instead, it waits beneath the surface until you’re ready to own it again and start being real with yourself and life.

In many ways, the Funk is often what it feels like when the Shadow starts pressing against the edges of your controlled identity and so you begin to sense that “I’m not fully present in my own life”, “I’m not expressing anything real”, or “There’s more potential in me than I’m currently living up to”.

The problem is that instead of acting on this awareness that’s swimming up from the Shadow Territory, most men tighten the grip on who they already think they are.

The Funk isn’t ignorance but awareness without movement.

You can feel the gap but you don’t cross it because crossing it would require becoming someone slightly different and that’s what the ego resists most.

Life Moves in Seasons (and You Can Get Stuck Between Them)

Another crucial piece of understanding the Funk is this:

Life doesn’t move in a straight line – it moves in cycles and seasons.

The practical implication of this is that there are phases where certain identities, relationships, environments, and goals are appropriate but there are also phases where they naturally come to an end.

Some classic examples from the human experience:

  • Boyhood → Manhood

  • Single Life → Committed Partnership

  • Exploration → Commitment

  • Chaos → Structure

  • Structure → Reinvention

Each transition requires something uncomfortable (from the point of view of the ego, at the very least):

A kind of death and rebirth of identity – in other words, you have to let go of who you were to fully enter who you’re becoming.

The Funk forms when instead of completing the transition, you try to keep the old season alive by creating an unreal sense of familiarity in the form of the same routines, the same emotional patterns, and the same internal story about yourself.

When you do this even though life has already moved on to a new cycle or season then you end up ‘stuck’ between worlds where you’re physically in a new season but psychologically still living in the old one.

That mismatch between worlds is where the Funk lives – it’s the sensation of being out of sync with your own life.

Two Core Causes of the Funk

We can simplify everything we’ve said so fare about the Funk into two interrelated causes that allow it to show up in our lives:

1. You’ve disconnected from your realness and started living from stasis instead of flow: You’re trying to preserve a version of yourself and life instead of participating in your own evolution.

2. You haven’t completed a cycle or season of life that’ s already ended: You’re still psychologically inhabiting a past structure of identity even though reality has moved forward.

These two reinforce each other because the more you cling to identity, the less you evolve, and the less you evolve, the more stuck you feel.

What’s ironic is that the more stuck you feel, the more you cling to the ‘familiar’ (even if you don’t really want it anymore) and this loop just leads to the Funk.

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

If you want to get flowing and grow real then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

How to Start Getting Out of the Funk

Getting out of the Funk is not about adding more motivation or forcing productivity but about restoring movement where movement has stopped so that you can step into present day reality.

Here are the real shifts that actually make a difference:

1. Start Treating Life as a Living Process Again

The first shift is simple but uncomfortable because it involves conscious evolution into who you already are in your realness (which means letting of the ‘familiar’ things that no longer serve you because they’ve become unreal).

Stop expecting to cling to a familiar identity and start expecting change in yourself.

Instead of asking “How do I get back to how I was?” start asking “What is life asking me to become next?” – this changes your relationship with experience so you’re no longer trying to preserve an ego that never really existed and can instead start participating in the process of actually living.

Even small actions taken from this mindset begin to break the stagnation so learn to do things slightly differently on purpose – not for productivity alone but to reintroduce movement into your system.

2. Rebuild Trust Through Action, Not Thought

The Funk feeds on overthinking and so the antidote isn’t more insight but taking a stance of movement before certainty.

What this means is that you don’t think your way out of stagnation – you act your way out of it but you don’t have to be fully certain before you act (instead you learn by doing).

Start with something small but nevertheless real:

  • Have a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding.

  • Change one daily habit that feels automatic.

  • Introduce physical challenge or discomfort deliberately.

  • Do something imperfect and unfinished.

The point is not achievement but re-entering flow with reality so you can learn to work with it.

3. Identify What Season You’re Actually In

Ask yourself the following brutally honest question:

“What part of my life am I pretending is still the same when it’s already changed or come to an end?“

There’s always an answer because life is always evolving (and our job is just to evolve with it).

Some examples of things that might come up:

  • An outdated ambition you no longer feel connected to.

  • An identity as a certain type of man.

  • A version of a relationship that no longer exists.

  • A lifestyle that no longer fits your energy

Name it clearly and see it for what it is because you can’t move into a new season while clinging to the old one.

4. Integrate the Shadow Instead of Controlling It

The Funk often contains suppressed energy in the form of unexpressed life – instead of pushing it down to stay in the ‘familiar’, start noticing it and allowing the light of your awareness to shine on it:

  • What do I keep wanting but not acting on?

  • What truth about myself am I avoiding?

  • What feels “too much” for my current identity?

The goal isn’t to become chaotic but to stop rejecting parts of yourself that are already asking to be lived so you can return to true order – integration restores energy but suppression creates the stagnation of the Funk.

Change is just part of life - the Funk occurs when we try and cling to things and keep them the same because of ego.

The Final Word: The Funk Is Not Your Enemy

The Funk is just feedback revealing that you’re out-of-sync with yourself and life by showing you where life has moved on and where you haven’t.

It’s essentially just feedback that your current self-image is too small for your current reality and – if you really listen – it becomes the beginning of something more REAL.

Underneath the Funk is always the same invitation:

Stop fighting to maintain who you were and start participating in who you are becoming.

The moment you shift from preservation to evolution, the system begins to move again and the Funk dissolves – not because life changed but because you did.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re stuck in a funk and ready to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get moving again.

Slaying Your Demons as a Man: Overcoming Emotional Blocks and Compulsion

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Slaying Your Demons as a Man

Slaying Your Demons as a Man By Regulating, Integrating, and Accelerating

Many men these days are struggling with their ‘demons’:

I don’t mean this in a theatrical, horror-movie sense necessarily but more in a very real and human sense in reference to patterns of behaviour that take over when self-control disappears, when compulsion takes the wheel, and when we stop acting like the men we know we could be.

The kind of demons that many of us are dealing with don’t show up in a vacuum – instead, they grow in the gaps between how we actually feel and how we think we’re ‘supposed’ to feel, between who we are and who we’re pretending to be, and between the truth about reality and a resistance of it.

The key to overcoming these demons once and for all is knowing that – while they can certainly feel powerful and even identity-defining – there’s a deeper truth at play which is that the demons are NOT you in a meaningful way: they’re actually just what happens when you stray from yourself in your REALNESS.

This article is about understanding your ‘demons’ properly, seeing where they come from, and finally breaking the cycle so you can start living your REAL life again (one that feels grounded, intentional, and free because you can actually be present in yourself and life instead of feeling compulsive pulls to be something else).

The truth is that most men don’t need more discipline – which is the most common strategy people try to implement when it comes to overcoming their demons – what they actually need clarity about what’s actually happening inside them.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You slay your demons by learning to master yourself and grow real.

What We Mean by “Demons” Anyway?

Before we go any further, let’s define our terms so we know what we’re talking about:

A “demon” in this context is a bad habit that has gone out of control and started causing real damage in your life – not just something you occasionally do but something that feels like it does you.

Demons can take many forms but some of the most common for men include:

  • Sexual depletion (porn addiction, compulsive masturbation, meaningless sex).

  • Alcohol and drug use.

  • Gambling.

  • Violence or aggressive outbursts (in more extreme cases)>

  • Endless scrolling, gaming, or distraction loops.

  • Any behaviour driven by the energy of compulsion.

“Compulsion” is really the key word here because it encapsulates the feeling that demons bring to our lives of “I don’t really have a choice” – i.e. those moments where something deep inside you screams no…and so you do it anyway.

You don’t do it because you actually WANYT to but because something stronger seems to be pulling you away from yourself.

That “something” is your demon.

What Actually Creates a Demon in the First Place

At the root of every compulsive behaviour, you’ll always find the same thing: unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ – usually some combination of:

This emotional ‘stuff’ doesn’t just disappear because we ignore it – instead, it creates a backlog that keeps accumulating (in our emotional reservoir) and when it accumulates beyond our awareness, it starts expressing itself as thoughts and then behaviour.

One way I like to break it down like this:

  • Demons = Unresolved emotional energy that’s gone out of control

  • Gremlins = The thoughts and beliefs that come out of that emotional state (even if it’s an unconscious state because the emotions are buried)

Here are some examples so you can see what I mean:

  • “I need this so I can feel okay about myself” (when you can feel okay about yourself whenever you choose)!

  • “I’ve already messed up so it doesn’t matter – I might as well quit” (when, actually, you could keep going and get the results you want)!

  • “This [addiction/compulsion] is the only way I can relax” (when, really, there are many healthier ways to relax)!

  • “I’ll start again tomorrow” (when you know you probably won’t)!

The demon is the emotional charge and the gremlins are the mental stories that justify it – think of it as the demons being the master and the gremlins going out there to do their bidding!

Together, the two of them form a loop that feels very real when you fear taking a good look at it (because fear is F.E.A.R: “False Evidence Appearing Real”) but isn’t rooted in truth.

Actually, that brings us to the most important and fundamental point:

Neither demons nor gremlins are real – they just FEEL that way because we identified with avoidance rather than presence.

When we’re not willing to feel our actual feelings so that we can return to a baseline of truth, then we just get lost in the inner tension that being unreal brings and so distraction becomes relief, compulsion becomes short-term regulation, and, slowly but surely, a simple ‘bad’ habit becomes a diabolical and demonic kind of prison.

The Key Principle Most Men Miss

The key principle that most guys who are trying to overcome their demons miss is as follows:

Demons have no power when you’re aligned with the truth and they can only dominate you when you’re disconnected from it.

When a man is grounded in reality – which essentially means that he’s present, aware, and embodied – then the compulsive pull of any ‘demons’ in his life weakens dramatically because the internal tension that fuels the compulsive ‘demonic’ behaviour is no longer building inside of him.

Really understanding this tension is key because all tension seeks a RELEASE and you can either choose to do this in either a real or an unreal way.

If it’s reached the stage where the demons have been overwhelming you, then you’ve been trying to gain a release in a way that’s unreal for you and it’s turned into a compulsion.

The way forward is to understand that there are two primary types of ‘food’ for the demons that feed them in this unreal way:

The Two Things That Feed Demons

1. Shame

Shame is not just “feeling bad about yourself” – it’s actually much deeper than that and can be seen as a state of disconnection from truth which leads to the creation of the Void.

When we find ourselves living in the Void then our internal state becomes overshadowed by the core belief that “There’s something wrong with me and life that I need to escape from“.

What this means is that when a man is driven by shame, he’s not in reality (because shame is a disconnection from truth) – he’s actually is in a distorted internal world where he feels incomplete, defective, or “not enough as I am” and this creates pressure and inner tension that continues to build.

This inner tension (which is really just the pain of being unreal) causes the system to look for some kind of release so that it doesn’t get totally overwhelmed – this is where compulsive behaviours enter the picture:

Porn, alcohol, gambling, unnecessary aggression – all of these things often begin as relief mechanisms because they temporarily dissolve the tension.

Unfortunately, because they don’t address the root cause – the disconnection from truth – the tension returns stronger and stronger after each cycle and so the dose (of porn, alcohol, whatever) increases and so what started as relief becomes dependency.

Underneath it all, shame is driving the search for escape, but all that ends up happening is that the SHAME FEEDS THE DEMON – not because the man is weak because he is disconnected from truth and keeps turning further and further away from it.

2. Boredom

Boredom is often misunderstood but it’s another thing that can end up feeding your demons and stopping you from living your real life as the man you know you can truly be.

It’s not just “having nothing to do” – it’s actually a disconnection from the meaning that comes as a by-product of having a real purpose in life.

The short-version is that a man without direction is vulnerable to his demons – not because he lacks intelligence or discipline but because there is no natural pull towards life and nature hates a vacuum (but the Void loves it).

As the ol’ saying goes:

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”.

When there’s no meaningful direction to move and evolve in then the nervous system seeks stimulation and distraction as a RELEASE from the TENSION of boredom and so anything that creates intensity becomes attractive regardless of consequence.

Here’s the important distinction, though:

I’m not talking about becoming a productivity machine because overworking is just another form of escape (a.k.a. being a workaholic) and busyness can be just as compulsive as addiction when we’re trying to avoid reality (because of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’).

The solution is not to distract yourself through your activities but to find a sense of real purpose which is a vision or direction to move in that aligns with who you actually are in your REALNESS – in other words, something that pulls you forward rather than something you use to (try and) outrun yourself.

When a man is engaged in something meaningful, boredom disappears because he is reconnects to reality and leaves the Void behind.

The Real Problem: Disconnection From Self & Life

At the deepest level, demons emerge when a man leaves himself behind for whatever reason:

  • Disconnected from truth
  • Identified with ego narratives
  • Avoiding emotional reality
  • Unintegrated in his body
  • Avoiding life and its call

In this state – of being a Void-dweller living in the Void – compulsive behaviour makes sense because it becomes a strange form of self-regulation in the absence of awareness.

This always comes at a cost, though, because every time you attempt escape yourself and life (which is impossible, really – you can only distort your view), you reinforce the belief that there’s something to escape from and this belief always eventually becomes a prison.

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

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

The Way Out (Demon Slaying): REGULATE, INTEGRATE, ACCELERATE

This is a practical framework for breaking the cycle and helping you to overcome your demons by shifting from suppression to a sense of alignment:

1. REGULATE = Stabilise the System

Before you can change your behaviour, you need to develop a nervous system that is not constantly in ‘threat’ mode – this means you can actually feel SAFE to show up in yourself and your life again.

The basics of regulation are that you start learning how to:

  • Slow down your internal state
  • Breathe consciously
  • Reduce overstimulation
  • Create basic physiological safety

When the system is dysregulated, everything feels urgent and so the compulsions of your ‘demons’ feels stronger and resisting them feels even harder.

Regulation brings you back into your body and – from there – you regain choice by learning to be present again instead of feeling like you have to force everything.

Even simple practices can help you to become more regulated:

  • Slow nasal breathing for 5–10 minutes.

  • Cold showers or short physical resets.

  • Walking without stimulation.

  • Turning off constant digital input.

You’re not trying to become calm forever – you’re just trying to create enough stability to see clearly again (and then the demons disappear because they lose their power).

(The reason you don’t try to become calm forever is that there’s a time and a place for everything and sometimes you need to jump into ‘action’ mode – regulated means you can do both when you need to either rest or get into gear)!

2. INTEGRATE = Feel What You’ve Been Avoiding

Integration is the part most men avoid which is unfortunate because it’s the work that actually dissolves demons more effectively than anything else (because they feed on shame first and foremost).

Integration means:

Feeling what you actually feel without running from it.

Pretty simple, right? Yeah, but for so many men it’s the hardest thing in the world.

If you want to slay your demons, though, then integration is essential because it’s where shame begins to lose its grip:

Shame only survives in an internal atmosphere of resistance and avoidance and so when you turn towards the emotional charge instead of away from it, the intensity rises…then falls.

This isn’t because you ‘fixed’ it but because you allowed it (emotions don’t need ‘fixing’ – they just need feeling so you can let them pass by).

That allowance reconnects you to truth and truth dissolves distortion so you can see your realness instead of your demons.

Practically, this can look like:

  • Sitting with discomfort instead of numbing it.

  • Naming emotions honestly (“this is shame”, “this is sadness”, “this is anger”, etc.)

  • Not acting on the urge immediately and learning to surf it.

  • Letting sensations move through the body instead of blocking them with the mind (“emotions are e-motion, energy in motion”).

This is not emotional indulgence – it’s emotional completion (and once the cycle is complete the truth returns and the demons lose their power – this doesn’t mean that your emotions are the truth (they’re not) but you have to feel them to return to truth).

3. ACCELERATE = Move Towards Real Direction

Once the system is regulated and emotions are being integrated, you need direction because – without it – old patterns return and you’ll just end up back at square one.

Acceleration basically means:

  • Creating a clear vision for your life.

  • Breaking it into goals.

  • Breaking goals into habits.

This gives your energy somewhere to go that’s real because it allows you to stay focused instead of getting pulled into compulsion and diabolical places that you’d rather not go.

Demons thrive in unused energy but when energy is directed into something REAL, they lose access to the system.

Ask yourself:

  • What kind of man am I becoming?

  • What does he do daily?

  • What does he stop doing?

  • What matters enough to build my life around?

Your answers are the seed of your vision and the death of your demons.

You slay your demons when you face your sorrow, complete the past, and return to truth.

The Final Word: Slaying Your Demons

You don’t overcome demons by fighting them but by becoming more real than the conditions that created them in the first place.

Demons aren’t independent forces – they’re fragments caused by a disconnection from your own wholeness:

When a man returns to truth – via Regulation, Integration, and Acceleration in the form of real action – then the structures that gave the demons their power starts to collapse.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to slay your demons and start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you sharpen your sword (metaphorically speaking, of course!).

Something is Missing: Why Success Won’t ‘Fix You’

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Something is Missing: Success Won't 'Fix' You

‘Success’ Can Always Feel Empty and Like Something is Missing When It’s Not Connected to Anything REAL

A lot of men come to me because they’re already ‘successful‘ but it still feels like something is missing:

They’ve done everything they were supposed to do, followed the script, worked hard, made sacrifices, and achieved goals that many people only dream about.

On paper, their lives look great:

Many of them have built successful businesses, they’re disciplined, driven, and capable, know how to set goals and achieve them, and – in many cases – have made money, earned respect, and created tangible results in their lives and businesses.

Many of them have been successful in relationships and so they’ve found a wife, built a life together, and created stability; many others have have had children and become fathers and so they’ve stepped into the responsibilities of family life and done everything they can to provide.

Sounds great, right?

Then why, despite all of this, do so many of them carry an unshakeable feeling that something is missing?

They can’t always explain it but it’s there:

  • Sometimes it appears as restlessness.

  • Sometimes it’s a low-level sense of disappointment.

  • Sometimes it’s just a feeling that life ‘should’ feel better than it does.

  • Sometimes it’s the sense that true intimacy is always just out of reach.

  • Sometimes it’s the feeling that they’re not really showing up as a father in the way they hoped they would.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

In almost every case, things look fantastic on the surface but internally their inner world feels like a Void and the kind of place where the feeling of actually being REAL seems forever out of reach.

If this sounds familiar, then this article will help you understand what’s going on and what you can start doing about it so that you can return back home to yourself.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The feeling that something is missing stems from chasing things you don't even really need.

The Feeling That Something Is Missing Is Just a Feeling

The first thing to understand is that the feeling that something is missing is exactly that: a feeling.

This might sound obvious but it’s important because our culture has a tendency to romanticise this feeling or just accept it as inevitable (when it really isn’t) and so we’re often told that the endless search is simply part of the human condition and that we’d be insane to think that the ache ever goes away.

Sometimes, it can almost seem like fulfilment is impossible and that life is just one endless pursuit after another and so – as a result of this conditioning – many people unconsciously believe that the answer is always “out there” somewhere:

  • The next promotion.

  • The next relationship.

  • The next business milestone.

  • The next adventure.

  • The next achievement.

  • The next win.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

I used to live this way myself and so I would only really feel ‘great’ when I was working towards a major goal or immediately after achieving one.

Of course, the feeling would inevitably fade, the excitement would disappear, and my mood would deflate as the presence of the Void would return and I’d be back at square one looking for the next thing to chase.

At the time, I thought this was ‘ambition’ but what I eventually realised was that it was actually outcome-dependence because I’d outsourced my self-worth to external achievements.

Living From the Outside-In Instead of the Inside-Out

When we depend on external ‘success’ and validation to feel good about ourselves then we’re living from the outside-in which means that our emotional state becomes dependent on what’s happening externally:

  • If business is growing, we feel good.

  • If our relationship is going well, we feel good.

  • If people approve of us, we feel good.

  • If we’re winning, we feel good.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

The problem with this as a strategy for feeling ‘good’ is that all of these things are unstable because life changes, markets change, people change, and circumstances change and so whenever the external conditions stop giving us validation, we come face to face with an uncomfortable truth:

We haven’t built a solid internal foundation of REALNESS.

This can help us to understand that the reason many successful men feel that something is missing isn’t because they need more success but because they’ve spent years building an external life while neglecting their internal one.

The feeling that something is missing isn’t a punishment – it’s feedback!

What’s Actually Missing?

What we can say, then, is that the thing that most successful men feel is “missing” isn’t another achievement:

It’s REALNESS – a connection to who they actually are beneath all of the roles, masks, and performances they’ve accumulated over the years and then an expression of this through real action.

The missing feeling is often one of the first signs that a man has become disconnected from himself because it serves as feedback that he’s drifted away from his own truth and that he’s been living in an externally sourced way rather than being grounded internally in his own presence.

Unfortunately, most men never learn how to interpret this feedback because nobody explains what it means and we’re told that the endless search and an inner ache is just “part of the human condition” (spoiler: it’s not).

What this means is that instead of listening to this feeling as FEEDBACK, they try to outrun it as being part of the problem:

  • They throw themselves into another business project.

  • They pursue another goal.

  • They buy another thing.

  • They seek another hit of validation.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

For a while, this works…until, of course, it doesn’t because the Void isn’t caused by a lack of achievement but by disconnection from reality.

Until that disconnection is ‘healed’ then the Void will always be something that’s experienced as will the feeling that “something is missing” which accompanies it.

The Trap of Self-Esteem

One of the biggest misunderstandings in personal development is the obsession with “self-esteem” and so most people spend their lives trying to increase their self-esteem like their lives depend on it.

The problem with this is that self-esteem is often based on external conditions (which – as we have seen – are part of the actual problem):

  • It’s how we feel about ourselves when we’re succeeding.

  • When we’re attractive.

  • When we’re admired.

  • When we’re achieving.

  • When we’re winning.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

There’s nothing inherently ‘wrong’ with self-esteem but the problems start when it becomes the foundation of our identity or self-image because if your worth depends on your performance over your presence then your sense of worth becomes shakeable and dependent.

This is why many successful men secretly feel anxious despite all their accomplishments:

They’ve built their identity on maintaining a certain image and images are exhausting to maintain – what they actually need isn’t more self-esteem but SELF-ACCEPTANCE because self-acceptance is internal, isn’t dependent on performance or outcomes, and isn’t affected by external sources of validation.

Instead, self-acceptance is rooted in the inner ability to recognise your inherent worth as you are – this is where the real work begins to leave the Void once and for all.

How Shame Creates the Ego

The reason so many men become trapped in external achievement begins much earlier than they realise – usually, it starts in childhood because, at some point along the line, the child received a message that they still carry within them even to this day as an adult:

“I am not good enough as I am”.

The message may not have been spoken directly in words – in fact, it can be picked up in all kinds of ways:

  • It may come through criticism.

  • Neglect.

  • Comparison.

  • Conditional love.

  • Pressure to perform.

  • Pressure to succeed.

  • Pressure to be someone other than who they naturally are.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

It doesn’t actually matter where it came from – all you really need to know if you’re dealing with the problem of the Void and the feeling that “something is missing” or not.

When people are driven by shame (“I am not good enough as I am”), then, over time, they learn to perform rather than simply be and so – instead of expressing themselves in a real way – they end up creating a version of themselves designed to earn approval and to stay ‘safe’.

This performance-based identity is what I call the Ego – it’s not evil or anything like that…it’s just a survival strategy and the version of ourselves we created because we believed our realness wasn’t acceptable.

In order to uphold the illusion of the ego, then the parts of ourselves that didn’t seem ‘safe’ or ‘acceptable’ get pushed into hiding and become the Shadow Self.

The only thing sitting underneath this this inner split is the force that created the whole situation in the first place:

Shame – the conditioned belief that “I am not good enough as I am”.

Once this belief takes hold, we stop identifying with our realness and start identifying with our Ego.

The result is disconnection and a life of living in the Void (which is why it always feels like “something is missing”).

Why Success Doesn’t Solve the Problem

If we haven’t done the inner work required to understand our Ego and to see that it’s just an unreal version of ourselves then we end up creating goals that are simply extensions of it.

The ego is constantly seeking:

  • Proof.

  • Validation.

  • Recognition.

  • Status.

  • Achievement.

  • Control.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

It’s because of the ego that we spend years chasing goals that seem important and may even achieve them but – no matter how much success we accumulate – the fundamental problem remains untouched.

This is because the problem was never about the absence of success but a disconnection from ourselves and life.

The Ego believes that fulfilment is waiting at the next destination but your Realness knows that fulfilment emerges from the quality of your relationship with your and life right now.

This is why the feeling that something is missing continues to appear – like we said, it’s feedback as life tries to show you that you’re looking in the wrong place.

When Good Things Become Ultimate Things

Another problem with living from Ego is that it causes us to confuse ‘good’ things with ULTIMATE things:

A career is a ‘good’ thing but, when it becomes the ultimate thing, it starts to consume us and we become workaholics, burn out, and sacrifice ourselves in pursuit of success.

Relationships are ‘good’ things but, when they become ultimate things, we stop seeing our partner clearly, place them on a pedestal, expect them to complete us, and make them responsible for filling our Void.

Children are wonderful but, when they become ultimate things, we stop seeing them as they are and they instead become extensions of our own unmet needs and expectations.

The pattern is always the same:

Whenever we lose touch with our realness, we start asking finite things to solve an infinite problem and they can’t because the only true ultimate is our relationship with life itself.

I don’t mean “life” as a concept but as the lived reality of showing up, being present, moving deeper into truth, growing into wholeness, becoming more integrated, and returning to what is real.

(That’s the ultimate that will feed into all the other ‘good’ areas of your life).

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

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

Returning Home from the Feeling that Something is Missing

The ‘good’ news is that the feeling that something is missing doesn’t mean you’re broken – it simply means that you’re receiving feedback and that a very real ‘part’ of you is calling you back home.

The way forward is not to chase harder or to accumulate more ‘success’ or to find a bigger distraction – it’s to overcome the Void by reconnecting with truth.

This is the journey of returning to realness and the process can be understood through three stages (which I use with my coaching clients when co-creating coaching containers):

1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step is to start questioning the shame-driven identity you’ve built over the years that’s keeping you in the Void:

Ask yourself some simple questions:

Who am I trying to impress?

What am I trying to prove?

Which goals genuinely matter to me because they’re aligned with my real values?

Which goals exist purely because I think they will make me feel worthy?

Awareness begins when you stop blindly obeying the Ego and start observing it so you can make real CHOICES instead.

2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

The next step is to begin reclaiming the ‘parts’ of yourself you’ve rejected and send into exile:

  • The vulnerable parts.

  • The emotional parts.

  • The imperfect parts.

  • The scared parts.

  • The human parts.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

None of these ‘parts’ make you weak – they’re just fragments of yourself waiting to be welcomed back into wholeness.

The more you accept yourself, the less you need the world to do it for you.

3. Action: Trust Yourself and Life

Once Awareness and Acceptance deepen, Action becomes simpler because you stop forcing, stop trying to manufacture certainty, and stop living from fear.

Instead, you start trusting which means that you’re free to:

You do your best and you let go of the rest.

This means that you do what you can do and slow down and let life do what you can’t do – it also means that you take real action from a real place so you can move forward without needing outcomes to define your worth.

If you live from the outside-in instead of the inside-out it will always feel like something is missing.

Something is Missing: The Real Answer

The feeling that something is missing isn’t a life sentence – it’s a feedback and an invitation back into your REAL life that’s showing you that external success can never replace internal alignment.

You can build a business, you can find a partner, you can become a parent, and you can achieve incredible things but none of these things will ever feel as fulfilling as they could if they’re built on top of a disconnection from yourself.

The answer isn’t less success but MORE REALNESS because when you return to your realness, success stops being something you use to escape yourself and instead becomes something you express through yourself.

This is when the Void finally starts to disappear – not because you found the missing piece but because you realised that the thing you were looking for was never missing in the first place.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re dealing with the feeling that “something is missing” and you’re ready to reconnect to something real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get back in the zone.

The 10-Minute Shadow Work Routine: A Daily Habit for Integration

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10-Minute Shadow Work Routine

Create a Personalised 10-Minute Shadow Work Routine for Daily Integration and Growth into REALNESS

There are already a lot of articles on shadow work floating around the internet (many of which are on this website):

Some are academic, some are mystical, and some are so complex and dressed in such flowery, Shakespearean language that they make it sound like you need a PhD in psychology, a candlelit ritual space, and three hours of uninterrupted silence just to meet a suppressed emotion.

What you’re about to read on this page definitely isn’t that:

This article is about something far simpler and far more usable: a 10-minute daily shadow work routine you can actually do in real life even if you’re busy, distracted, or not in the mood for a painful spiritual self-interrogation.

The only aim here is to strip shadow work back to its core essence and make it practical, repeatable, and grounded so that you can get started and be consistent in terms of becoming more integrated and whole in yourself (if you want to go deeper into the theory, there are other articles on the site – just search ‘shadow work’ – and you can also explore my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World if you want the full map).

What we’re focusing on here is the implementation and the idea that integration doesn’t happen through insight alone – it happens through repetition.

10 minutes a day is enough to start changing the way you relate to yourself no matter who you are.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The 10-Minute Shadow Work routine will help you to start overcoming your fears of yourself (and life by extension).

What Shadow Work Actually Is (Without the BS)

If you strip away the jargon (which in my opinion is often a form of obfuscation because the person using the jargon hasn’t actually been that deep into their own shadow), then we can say that:

Shadow work is just the process of reclaiming the ‘parts’ of yourself you’ve (unconsciously) exiled.

What we’re referring to here are all the parts that – at some point in your life – were met with judgment, rejection, or shame and so, instead of being expressed openly, they were pushed underground.

They key point to remember, though, is that they never really went anywhere and so they’re not ‘gone’ – they’re just hidden.

For most of us, the shadow self forms when we stop relating to ourselves with acceptance and start relating through judgement instead. This is the turning point because it’s when we make this shift that the ego is created.

For simplicity (and truth), we can say that the ego is simply:

A mask we build to be acceptable but, over time, we forget we’re wearing it.

It’s important to realise that the creation of the shadow self and ego doesn’t just cost us access to ‘bad’ (a common myth) ‘parts’ of ourselves – it means that lose access to REAL parts of ourselves.

This is important because it’s a reminder that the shadow isn’t just made of ‘negative’ traits – it also contains:

  • Our real feelings about things.

  • Our real beliefs (not the socially approved ones).

  • Emotions we were never allowed to fully express.

  • Our true vision, goals, and ideals.

  • Our actual values and personality traits.

Some of these may initially uncomfortable to face, some are powerful beyond measure, and some are deeply creative or alive but all of them are very REAL and anything real that gets suppressed doesn’t disappear – it just starts shaping your life indirectly (from beneath the surface of your life).

This is where people often feel stuck, lost, or disconnected from any sense of true meaning – not because something is missing but because ‘parts’ of them that are essential to feel a sense of wholeness have been split off.

Shadow work is simply the process of undoing that split – not intellectually (at the level of concepts alone) but experientially (at the level of the body and beyond).

We can do this by learning to become aware of the things we’ve sent into exile, accepting them for what they are and then, ultimately, through action in the world because expression without action is still incomplete integration.

(Awareness, Acceptance, and Action works every time which is why I build my coaching containers around it)!

Why a 10-Minute Practice Gets Results

The modern world tends to overcomplicate inner work because we assume that if something is deep, it must also be long, intense, and emotionally dramatic.

Actually, though, the truth is that integration doesn’t require intensity for the sake of intensity – instead, it requires consistency and direct experience.

(One phenomenon I’ve seen for sure is that some people get addicted to shadow work and spend their whole lives going to courses and retreats etc. but never actually making progress – in fact, they just end up being stuck in shadow work).

Ten minutes done consistently day-by-day (or most days, at least) is enough because:

  • It’s short enough to be done daily without resistance.

  • It prevents overthinking and spiritual procrastination.

  • It builds a consistent rhythm of direct experience of connecting with the shadow rather than occasional deep dives that never make any lasting changes.

  • It makes shadow work part of life instead of an escape from it (spiritual bypassing).

This is not about ‘fixing’ yourself (because you’re not ‘broken’) but about repeatedly returning to what is real inside you and letting it be seen.

This alone begins to reorganise your internal relationship with yourself and help you to start shifting from unreal (ego) to real (realness).

The Core Principle: Awareness → Acceptance → Action

The daily 10-minute shadow work practice follows the three transformational stages I mentioned above:

  1. Awareness: Noticing what is present.

  2. Acceptance: Allowing it without judgement.

  3. Action: Expressing it in some real-world form.

Most people get stuck at ‘Awareness’ which means that they notice or become conceptually and not experientially aware of something about themselves, analyse it, and stop there.

The problem with this is that insight without expression in the form of real action becomes inaction and intellectualisation whereas expression without awareness becomes unconscious repetition.

Integration requires all three so you can actually move forward in an aligned and real way.

The 10-Minute Shadow Exercise

Set a timer for 10 minutes (that’s literally it) – don’t worry about creating the perfect conditions for this…just work on being consistent with it so your results keep building and compounding over time.

Here is the structure you’ll be walking yourself through every day. If it helps to use a journal and write things down then definitely do this but it’s not required.

Here we go:

Minute 1-2: Arrival and Check-in

Start by checking in with yourself and asking some simple questions about what’s actually going on inside yourself:

  • What am I feeling right now, really?

  • What am I avoiding feeling?

  • What is most alive in me at this moment (even if it’s uncomfortable)?

Don’t try to change anything – just develop the skill of noticing. Even if nothing comes up, that’s still data because silence, numbness, or distraction are also shadow ‘stuff’.

If you do this every day, you will develop more awareness of your own emotions and body over time – this is a great strength to have in itself.

Minute 3–5: Identify the Hidden or Judged ‘Part’

Now gently explore any areas of resistance or inner friction a little more:

  • What part of me do I not want to admit is here?

  • If I removed judgement, what would I honestly be thinking or feeling?

  • What am I pretending not to care about when I really care about it a lot?

  • What reaction in me feels slightly “not acceptable”?

This is where the shadow starts to show itself and things will start to surface – it might be anger, jealousy, desire, ambition, fear, grief, or even positive traits like confidence or power that were once suppressed because it didn’t serve the world that you grew up in (or, more accurately, the authority figures in that world who told you who you’re supposed to be).

The general rule is simple:

If you feel resistance, you’re probably getting closer to excavating the shadow.

Minute 6–7: Name It Without Judgement

Now it’s time to name whatever is going on – not as a story (because that will most likely just reinforce the ego which is what keeps the shadow in hiding in the first place), just as recognition.

Some simple examples:

  • “There is anger here”.

  • “There is a part of me that wants recognition”.

  • “There is fear of being seen”.

  • “There is judgement towards other people’s success”.

(“There is” allows you to step back and just observe it without feeding into it or identifying with it).

Remember, you’re not ‘solving’ or ‘fixing’ anything – you’re simply starting to allow yourself to witness whatever has been exiled.

Naming reduces the fragmentation of that “inner split” between ego and shadow because it brings the unconscious into contact with awareness.

Minute 8–9: Allow Expression

Now choose whichever one of the following expression methods that feels the most ‘right’ to you:

  • Write unfiltered for 60–90 seconds.

  • Speak aloud privately (no censoring)>

  • Physical release (shake your hands, stretch, walk, breathe deeply, etc).

  • Journal a single sentence truth: “What I really want to say is…”

The aim is not elegance or perfection so don’t JUDGE yourself as you do this as that’s absolutely counterproductive

What you’re really seeking is a release of containment so that blocked energy can start to move again – shadow ‘stuff’ becomes less dense when it is expressed.

Minute 10: Translate into One Small Action

This is the most important step and what all the last 9-minutes have been building up to:

Ask yourself what you can DO:

  • What is one small real action that reflects what I just noticed?

  • How would this part of me want to express itself in life today?

  • What would honesty look like in behaviour and not just thought?

The next step is to choose something simple that you can actually DO:

  • Send a message you’ve been avoiding.

  • Admit something honestly in conversation.

  • Stop suppressing an opinion.

  • Take one step toward a real goal.

  • Set a boundary and maintain it.

  • Say “Yes” to something real you usually avoid.

  • Say “No” to something unreal you usually tolerate.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

This is where shadow work becomes realness because nothing is integrated until it is expressed in life via real action (not ego-based action).

If you’re a man who wants to go deeper into shadow work then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can help you to dig deep and find something REAL.

Bonus: Optional 10-Minute Shadow Work Routines “Modules”

To keep the practice alive, you can vary the approach each day by to keep thing fresh – here are some simple “modules” you can plug into your 10 minutes:

1. The Trigger Trace

Reflect on a moment recently where you felt emotionally triggered by something.

Ask yourself:

  • What exactly bothered me?

  • Where is that same quality in me?

This is one of the fastest ways into reverse engineering the situations that unfold in your life to start seeing your own shadow ‘stuff’.

2. The Projection Audit

Look at someone you strongly admire or dislike and then ask yourself some basic questions about projection:

  • What do I project onto them?

  • What does this say about what I need to release or integrate within myself?

Projection is shadow ‘stuff’ wearing another face and so if you can start to see yourself in it then you can start to free yourself.

3. The Forbidden Desire Scan

Get a little bit audacious and ask yourself straight up:

  • What do I secretly want but don’t admit?

  • What would I pursue if I knew I couldn’t fail or be judged?

Desire is often one of the most heavily exiled aspects of the self because when we start acting on what we really desire then the ego always comes under threat.

4. The Suppressed Emotion Release

Pick one emotion that might feel a little alien or risky to you (anger, sadness, fear, excitement, etc) and ask yourself:

  • When did I last fully allow this emotion to just be?

  • Where is it currently ‘stuck’ in my body as a physiological sensation?

After you’ve done this one allow 2–3 minutes of physical or written expression.

5. The Values Reclamation

Start to uncover you’re REAL values (instead of the values you just somewhere picked up from the world):

  • What actually matters to me beneath expectations?

  • Where am I living according to inherited values rather than real ones?

Then identify one action that aligns with your true values and go do it!

What to Expect If You Do This 10-Minute Shadow Work Routine Daily

At first, doing this 10-minute shadow work routine may almost feel too ‘simple’ but over time you’re gonna notice that:

  • You become more emotionally honest with yourself and others.

  • You stop over-identifying with your thoughts.

  • You feel less internally split.

  • You become more decisive.

  • You start recognising self-deception faster.

  • You begin acting from clarity instead of pressure.

  • You can actually feel your feelings and be aware of what’s going on in your body (so you’re not stuck in your head all the time).

  • Most importantly, you begin to feel more REAL.
The 10-Minute Shadow Work Routine will help you get back in touch with your real standards.

The Final Word: Your 10-Minute Shadow Work Routine

The shadow is not an ‘enemy’ or anything you need to fear – it’s simply everything in you that was once exiled but which holds the key to reclaiming yourself and your real life.

The thing to remember is that anything real can’t stay exiled forever without cost – it doesn’t just ‘disappear’ and instead it influences behaviour indirectly by leaking out in projection, self-sabotage, anxiety, numbness, and confusion.

Integration is not about becoming ‘better’ or ‘fixing yourself – it’s just about about becoming whole enough to finally stop fighting yourself.

Keep it simple. Ten minutes. Every day.

Awareness, Acceptance, Action and a slow return to realness.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you want to go deeper into Awareness, Acceptance, and Action and living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to take real action.

The Adult Boy: Are You a Man or a Boy (Without Realising)?

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The Adult Boy: Becoming a Man

The Adult Boy is a Boy in a Man’s Body Because He Hasn’t Completed His Childhood

There’s a strange thing can happen to a lot of men in modern times:

On paper, they’re ‘adults’ because they’ve got the age to be an ‘adult’, the job to be an ‘adult’, the responsibilities to be an ‘adult’, and maybe even a mortgage, a relationship, a business and/or a career that looks solid from the outside but inside…well, something just doesn’t line up.

Deep down they can’t shake off the feeling that “I feel like a boy pretending to be a man” (or something similar).

I don’t mean this in the sense that they’re being “immature” and acting like clowns or whatever but more in the unsettling sense that life has continued to roll forward over the years but something inside never quite caught up.

This is one of the most consistent patterns I’ve seen working with men over the years (which is why I’ve decided to write this article):

The external identity looks like an ‘adult’ but their inner world is still dominated by the feeling that they’re still operating from an older version of themselves – one that’s shaped by childhood over the adult consciousness that’s actually now available to them at all times.

This gap between these two states creates inner tension that you may be familiar with yourself:

  • Confusion.
  • Anxiety.
  • Restlessness.
  • The subtle sense of being stuck in life – even when things look fine on the surface.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

The ‘good’ news is that this isn’t a rare problem and so 1) you’re not alone, and 2) it can be sorted out.

Actually, it’s pretty common (as you may see if you look at the world around you) – it’s just that it usually goes unnoticed because most men assume “becoming a man” just happens automatically with age or that it’s about the externals more than any sense of real “inner work” or cultivation of a real relationships with themselves and life.

The truth is that so many of us can grow older without ever actually leaving boyhood behind – this article is about leaving that season behind once and for all and stepping over the threshold into manhood.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Adult Boy must die and be integrated into your rebirth as a man.

The Adult Boy: The Boy in the Man’s Body

A very common theme I see is men who have entered adulthood as nothing more than just a number – 18, 25, 40, 50, whatever – but internally still feel like a boy.

Like we said in the intro, sometimes they’re highly functional or even ‘successful‘ despite having this problem and so they can still perform, achieve, and hold things together in the world around them but – internally – they feel the mismatch: a sense that they’re simply performing adulthood rather than embodying it.

The end result of this is that it creates a split or fragmented sense of identity:

  • The outer self that functions in the world.

  • The inner self that still reacts like a child shaped by old conditioning and mental and emotional blocks.

This leads a subtle but draining experience of being unreal or inauthentic where they find themselves being incapable of being as fully present within themselves and their own lives as they’d like to be because part of them is still trying to become acceptable rather than simply being real.

Man or a Boy? The Common Symptoms of “Unfinished Boyhood”

From what I’ve seen looking at my own life and working with others, this “Adult Boy” or “Boy in a Man’s Body” pattern shows up in predictable ways because it’s always rooted in the same fundamental problem (which we’ll get onto).

Not all men have all of these symptoms going on in their lives but they do tend to cluster together:

1. Needing permission to live

A man who hasn’t fully stepped into adulthood often still feels like he needs permission from others to act – maybe not always literally but internally there’s a sense that they need this ‘permission’ before acting (normally because he had a strict or overbearing parent and lost touch with his own capacity for self-authority).

This means he wastes time waiting for validation before making decisions, looks for approval before trusting himself to act, and unconsciously asks: “Is it okay if I do this?”

The end result is that he often becomes passive and loses the capacity for spontaneity and real action.

2. Being ruled by feelings instead of being guided by them

The “Adult Boy” gets pulled in every emotional direction going because every time a feeling arises, it suddenly becomes the authority in his life in that moment and so he either follows it or tries to suppress it.

What this means is that instead of holding a stable centre or groundedness in himself from which he can respond, he gets lost in reactivity and so his day his day becomes a series of emotional detours instead of a unified and consistent flow towards any real purpose.

In short, the man who is stuck in the season of boyhood is unable to integrate is feelings and so instead he either suppresses them or obeys them blindly (both of which lead to a disconnection from his REALNESS).

3. A gap between inner truth and outer expression

More often than not, the “Adult Boy” knows who he is deep down – or at least senses it here and there – but doesn’t express it consistently and so his external life becomes an expression of his inauthenticity or unreality.

Ultimately, because there is no real expression or communication, life becomes a performance where he lives to maintain and defend a carefully managed version of himself that avoids rejection, conflict, or discomfort.

4. Trapped or restless energy

The gap between who he pretends to be (ego) and who he actually is (realness) creates trapped emotional energy that often shows up physically: leg rocking, fidgeting, overthinking, insomnia, agitation, etc. etc. etc.

This is really just the body expressing what the mind is suppressing – unprocessed emotion and unexpressed direction that needs an outlet that will carry him into the next season of his life: manhood.

The actual problem is that this energy is being resisted and unclaimed and so it starts to go primal and turn against the boy until he steps up and starts doing something REAL with it.

5. Avoidance of real direction

The “Adult Boy” keeps himself busy in worrying, thinking, planning, analysing and playing around with concepts and ideas but avoids decisive action.

This type of overthinking becomes a sophisticated form of self-protection for the ego that stops him finding out who he really is (which what he’s really craving deep down in most cases).

6. Fake Stoicism

One of the most deceptive patterns I’ve seen is using philosophy to suppress emotion:

For example, he tells himself that he’s “stoic”, “logical”, or “above emotion” (etc.) but what’s really happening is her is that he’s resisting reality for whatever reason (usually because he’ll have to face himself and life and he doesn’t think he’s ready).

Real stoicism includes feeling our feelings without being taken places we don’t want to go in the long-term – ‘fake’ (internet bro) stoicism is emotional disconnection dressed up as wisdom (in other words, it’s a type of spiritual bypassing).

7. Fear of risk and getting in ‘trouble’

Underneath the mask of everything looking oaky on the surface the “Adult Boy” is often driven by a sense of unconscious shame (a disconnection from truth in the form of a core assumption about oneself that “I am not good ‘enough’ as I am”).

Driven by this shame (and the fear of finding out it’s real), he avoids risk, avoids visibility, and avoids standing out – not because he’s lazy or weak but because part of him still feels like a child who might be punished for stepping out of line.

8. A distorted relationship with anger

Many men who are trapped in this state have buried their anger because it it was often shamed early in life – frequently by a father figure or a strict environment of origin (which is why they have “Daddy Issues“).

This is unfortunate because anger is a very healthy and real emotion that helps us to protect our boundaries and serves as rocket fuel for building the future we want.

When it’s trapped and denied, it just turns inward and becomes the kind of sadness, anxiety, or passive frustration that holds a man back as an “Adult Boy”.

9. Living inside an imaginary audience

Instead of acting from real intention and building a life that he actually wants to live from a place of presence, he unconsciously tries to impress a mental image of “mummy and daddy” and ends up playing it safe and holding back on himself and life.

Even as an adult, he is still trying to earn approval from an internalised authority system because he still thinks that they ways he learned to gain ‘love’ in childhood are the only ones available to him in manhood.

(Spoiler: they’re not – you can learn to love (accept) yourself first and foremost by living from the inside-out instead of the outside-in).

10. Deep shame

At the root of it all is that core assumption of shame mentioned above:

“I am not good enough as I am“.

Driven by this, life just becomes an attempt to manage perception, control outcomes, and avoid being “found out” – this always leads to life becoming more and more unreal and the Void becoming more and more persistent as one’s experience.

The Core Issue of the Adult Boy: Childhood Never Got Completed

All of these symptoms are variations of the same underlying issue which is that:

The man never fully left the psychological season of boyhood.

This isn’t because there’s something ‘wrong’ with him but simply because childhood conditioning was never fully released and so he’s ‘stuck’ in the same energy that it conditioned him to identify with and think of as being real (when it isn’t).

The kind of conditioning that we pick up in childhood is rarely neutral because it’s shaped by parents who were carrying their own unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ – usually the Unholy Trinity of shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

This doesn’t mean that we need to obsess and start blaming our parents, btw:

Most parents are simply passing on what they inherited themselves and so they did what they could with their own level of awareness.

What gets passed on is still conditioning, though, and that conditioning becomes the invisible structure of how a man sees himself in the world until he starts to wake up to the fact that the past is DONE and he can build from where he finds himself TODAY.

How the “Adult Boy” Pattern Forms

At birth, a human being is whole which basically means that there’s spontaneity, expression, and presence – in other words there’s no internal division or split from the self.

Of course, as the child grows, certain parts of them are met with disapproval, rejection, or misunderstanding and so the child learns things like:

  • “This part of me is not acceptable”.

  • “This version of me causes trouble”.

  • “If I want connection, I need to change”.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

All of this causes the child to split from these ‘parts’ but the rejected parts don’t simply disappear into thin air and never to be seen again – instead, they go into exile underground and collectively become the shadow self.

Meanwhile – in order to keep ‘hiding’ – a socially acceptable version of the child is created which is essentially a mask designed for safety and approval.

This mask becomes the ego but – over time – the mask becomes so familiar that the person forgets it’s a mask and starts to think that it’s “Me” (when, really is just a filter between them and reality).

Nevertheless, the real self – the unfiltered, spontaneous, alive self – remains hidden underneath and adulthood never fully arrives until this split is addressed.

The Emotional Core: Sadness

Most men that are stuck in the “Adult Boy” state are not primarily angry or anxious underneath everything – they’re SAD.

Sadness is what arises when there is disconnection from realness and can ultimately be seen as the emotional signature of fragmentation instead of wholeness.

It’s also a signal because sadness is not just something to ‘fix’ – it’s also something that points to what has been left behind.

It reminds us of things like:

“Something real was abandoned and has never been reclaimed“.

Or:

“There is something from the past that remains incomplete”.

Most men try to escape this sadness through distraction, over-achievement, overthinking, constant stimulation, or even addiction but sadness doesn’t disappear through avoidance – it only completes itself through being faced and felt (as the saying goes, “you have to feel it to heal it”).

When it’s fully felt felt the past can finally be accepted as being DONE and in this acceptance of completion, space opens where there was previously only tension.

Life Happens in Seasons

Human development isn’t random – it moves through cycles that are common to us all:

  • Birth
  • Childhood
  • Adulthood
  • Ripening
  • Decay
  • Death

The transition from boyhood to manhood is really just a very natural shift between seasons but modern life often removes the structure that used to support that shift because – for most men – there are no clear rites of passage anymore.

In other words, there’s no defined threshold that says:

“You are no longer a boy – it’s time to be a man”.

This just leads to so many men unconsciously remaining mentally and emotionally in the previous season while physically attempting to ‘live’ in the next.

All this means is that they attempt to cling to what’s familiar – even if it no longer fits or feels real (mainly because they don’t know what to replace the ‘familiar’ with).

Every transition requires a form of letting go, though, – this is just a part of the human experience for all of us: the psychological “death” of an old identity is required so a new one can emerge.

Without that, life becomes stuck repetition as many “Adult Boys” know all too well.

What Needs to Change: Three Levels of Work to Cross the Threshold from Boyhood to Manhood

Becoming a man – psychologically speaking – is not all about aggression, dominance, or suppressing emotion (though aggression has it’s time and place for sure) – it’s about integration.

This starts to happens on three main levels:

1. The Body

The first step is that the nervous system must learn safety in presence so that you can feel safe with your own emotional ‘stuff’ – this will allow unprocessed emotions to move through the body rather than stay trapped as tension or restlessness.

Without this, the mind will always be unstable.

2. The Mind

Limiting beliefs formed in childhood need to be identified and questioned so that you can replace them with something real that actually serves you as a man in the present – not intellectually but experientially.

What is true now is not what was true then so you might have to update the software you’re running.

3. Vision

A man needs direction so he can keep growing more real and expressing more truth in the world (not through words but through actions).

Without vision, energy just collapses into overthinking being ‘stuck’ again.

This free course I made can help you start creating a vision for yourself and your life: The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness & Life Purpose.

If you’re a man who wants to overcome the past and grow real then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can help you to start showing up for yourself and life.

The Real Shift: From Performance to Presence

At its core, this journey is not about becoming someone else but about unlearning whatever you picked up along the line that is keeping you from yourself and your life in reality.

It is the process of stepping out of performance and into presence because, ultimately, performance is what a boy does to stay safe in the world but presence is what a man embodies when he no longer needs to pretend.

Practical Steps: How to Begin the Shift from Adult Boy to Man

Here are a few more practical starting points for moving out of unconscious boyhood patterns and into being the man that it’s (possibly – if you read this far) time for you to become:

1. Notice where you’re still asking for permission

Throughout your day, learn to witness yourself and to pay attention:

  • Where are still you waiting for approval or permission?
  • Where are you hesitating unnecessarily?

Then take one small action daily without asking for validation before or after.

2. Stop obeying or suppressing every feeling

Feelings are something we all experience but not all are instructions or something we have to hide from:

Learn to pause when something arises and ask:

“Is this aligned with my vision and principles or is it just a temporary emotion?”

Act from realness – not reactivity!

3. Tell the truth more often

Start expressing what you actually think and feel in low-risk situations so that you can stop rehearsing a curated version of yourself and start replacing the unreal with the real.

4. Work with the body

Daily regulation is essential – in fact it’s so important it’s worth taking a “Regulation First” policy:

  • Walks without distraction
  • Breathwork or slow breathing (especially through the nose)
  • Strength training or movement
  • Allowing physical release of tension
  • Yin yoga
  • Whatever works for you

The body can’t be skipped in this process as ‘Boyhood’ is often just as trapped in the body and nervous system as it is the mind.

5. Identify the internal “audience”

When making decisions, check in and be honest with yourself:

“Who am I trying to impress right now?”

Then deliberately choose one action that contradicts that pattern (unless you really wanna spend the rest of your life impressing certain people).

6. Build a real vision

Start to become of aware of the specific direction you want to take yourself in – this is your Vision:

  • What kind of man do you want to be in 6–12 months?

  • How does he act when nobody is watching?

  • What does he stop tolerating?

Write it down, return to it daily, and go do it.

7. Allow sadness to complete itself

Instead of analysing or attempting to escape from it, stop putting of the inevitable and allow sadness to be felt in the body without any kind of narrative or stories.

Just realise that you’re ALREADY safe and you’re ALREADY enough and feel whatever you’re feeling.

This is often the turning point because it eventually completes the past and brings you into the present.

You become a man and stop being and Adult Boy when you give up your fear and grow real.

The Final Word: The Adult Boy and REALNESS

Becoming a man is not about becoming harder, louder, or more controlled – it’s about becoming REAL.

This is pretty ‘good’ news because reality has a simple requirement:

You stop living as a version of yourself created to survive the past and start living as the embodied presence that is here now.

The boy in you was never ‘wrong’ – he was just unfinished and what makes a man is not the rejection of that boy but the willingness to finally complete the story and step forward from it.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to leave the past behind and to become present in yourself and your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take real action.

The Divine Comedy: Are You in a Tragedy or the Divine Comedy?

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The Divine Comedy

Life is a Tragedy When You Cling to Ego and a Divine Comedy When You Learn to Let Go

Life can either be a tragedy or a comedy depending on how REAL or unreal you’re willing to be:

This isn’t just a ‘nice’ little poetic idea but a real phenomenon that I’ve started to notice as a pattern in the human experience – both in my own life and in the work I do with coaching clients.

The same external circumstances can unfold in radically different ways depending on whether someone is aligned with truth or whether they’re caught in resistance, performance, and ego.

When life feels like a tragedy, it’s rarely because life itself has changed but more because we’ve strayed from truth and started resisting whatever adventure we’re being asked to step into next; this is unfortunate because, when we resist like this, we stop being present and start performing instead and this is where the tragedy begins.

On the other side of the coin, when we let go – when we stop pushing against ourselves and life and trying to force outcomes – then the “Divine Comedy” begins to reveal itself.

Once this happens, life life doesn’t become something you control but instead becomes something you participate in and – strange as it may seem – the less you interfere, the more coherent and real it all becomes.

This isn’t always comfortable (but why should it be?) but it does lead to a more meaningful relationship with life itself.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

When you realise the world is a stage you can choose to live in the Divine Comedy.

Tragedy and Comedy: The Original Meaning

Before we get too deep into all this, it’s perhaps worth remembering that in ancient times, a tragedy didn’t just mean something sad – it meant a story that moves from a positive or stable state into a negative one.

A comedy, on the other hand, was just the opposite of this: a movement from difficulty into resolution or from fragmentation into wholeness.

Over time, “comedy” got reduced to meaning “funny” like it does to most of us today but, originally, it was more about the underlying structure than humour itself.

This had to be pointed out because when I talk about the Divine Comedy in this article, I’m not just talking about laughing at life (although that helps and is definitely a big piece of the puzzle) – I’m talking about something a little deeper:

Real life transcends both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ entirely.

In this sense, real life is not really a moral story of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes but more like a vast unfolding play that you’re a ‘part’ of but not directing – a kind of cosmic tension that you can choose to either resist or flow with.

When you stop taking it all personally, then you can start to see the BIG JOKE:

It doesn’t always a punchline and it’s more like a living sort of paradox – something that doesn’t need to be solved, only experienced as you move through the tension it keeps bringing your way as the reality waves wash over you.

Why So Serious?

A general ‘rule’ of life that’s worth remembering is that:

Whenever we take things too seriously, we exit the real flow of life.

Seriousness often feels like control but underneath our need to control ourselves and life is fear – this actually takes us out of life because when fear takes over, we stop responding to life and start forcing life instead.

This is always when the tragedy begins because instead of participating in reality, we start managing it and instead of expressing ourselves, we start performing versions of ourselves we think will be accepted, safe, or ‘successful‘.

The most tragic thing of all is being unreal when you actually have the opportunity to be real.

Most of us don’t realise that we’ve slipped into this controlled kind of performance because it feels so ‘normal’ and ‘familiar’ – sometimes even the ‘responsible’ thing to do (according to some indistinct outside source, of course).

Whyever it is that we decide to slip into performance mode like this it always eventually creates internal tension, a sense of disconnection, and eventually exhaustion because it just leads to a life of ‘living’ in the Void.

The Divine Comedy begins again at any moment we notice this and stop pretending.

Why We Drift Into Tragedy & Away From the Divine Comedy

There are two core drivers that pull us out of realness and into tragedy:

1. We don’t feel safe

This is not just psychological – it’s also physiological because when the nervous system is dysregulated, perception changes and so we no longer see reality clearly. Instead, we see threat, urgency, and distortion.

This shows up in two main ways:

Hyperarousal: Everything feels like a ‘threat’ and so you become reactive, anxious, and tightly wound. You overthink things, over-control things, and become even more attached to ego because ego feels like protection from all of the emotional discomfort that your nervous system is confusing for actual physical danger.

Hypoarousal: You have so much hyperarousal that you eventually shut down, numb out, and withdraw. In this state, life passes by while you feel disconnected from it and so the ‘tragedy’ becomes even more tragic.

In both of these states, you are no longer flowing with life but instead end up either defending against it or disappearing from it – either way, you’re not fully here and it’s in that absence is where the tragedy deepens and takes a bigger hold of you.

2. We don’t feel enough

The second driver is shame which is basically the core belief that: “I am not good enough as I am“.

This core belief doesn’t always show up as a loud thought and often shows up instead as habitual self-correction:

  • Editing yourself.
  • Performing competence.
  • Trying to be liked.
  • Trying to earn your place in existence.
  • Hiding who you really are.
  • Etc. etc. etc

When shame is running the show then actually being present in yourself and your own life becomes (perceived as) ‘unsafe’ and so, again, we perform instead of just being.

This kind of unreal performance, no matter how ‘successful’ in the short-term, eventually collapses into tragedy because it is disconnected from truth.

How “I Am Not Safe” and “I Am Not Enough” Feed Each Other

These two unreal patterns rarely exist separately and so “I am not safe” and “I am not enough” reinforce each other continuously:

When you don’t feel safe, you cling harder to identity.

When you don’t feel enough, you become more afraid of being ‘seen‘.

Together, they snowball in your life and generate resistance over acceptance which is ‘bad’ news because resistance is the engine of the tragedy.

This is because resistance isn’t just the simple act of saying “no” to life – it’s the deeper act of saying “no” to the next step of your own unfolding – the refusal of the call to adventure.

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The Call to Adventure You Keep Avoiding

At the core of every human experience is a subtle invitation which isn’t always dramatic, doesn’t always even look that ‘heroic’ (even though it actually is), but which is always there:

Be more REAL than you were yesterday.

This sounds simple but realness requires shadow work which is basically about meeting the ‘parts’ of ourselves we’ve avoided, denied, or projected.

Because we’d rather avoid this difficult work, we resist (which creates its own kind of difficulties):

This kind of resistance usually isn’t a conscious rebellion – more of a subtle avoidance that shows up day-after-day as delay, overthinking, emotional suppression, and the protection of one’s own self-image at any cost (even at the cost of one’s actual real life).

In other words:

Resistance to yourself and life is about defending the tragic mask of the ego because the ego ‘survives‘ by keeping the shadow at a distance.

Thankfully, life keeps inviting you back to integration anyway.

When Life Starts to Feel Too Serious

Here’s a simple diagnostic to help you determine if you’re in the ‘tragedy’ or the Divine Comedy:

If life starts to feel too serious, you’re probably on the tragic path.

This isn’t because seriousness is ‘wrong’ or anything like that but simply because seriousness often signals that you’ve lost touch with the lightness, perspective, and flow that comes from stepping into realness.

It’s also a sign that you’ve stopped participating in your life and started attempting to ‘manage’ it instead.

You’ll know you’ve stepped into ‘manage mode’ like this because everything begins to tighten and grow rigid:

  • Decisions feel heavy
  • Relationships feel loaded
  • Identity feels fragile
  • Life feels like pressure instead of movement

These are all symptoms that you’ve started asking for control instead of truth.

The only real way forward is to shift from resistance and into acceptance.

The Way Out: Regulation and Integration

There is a way back into the Divine Comedy that doesn’t require becoming someone new and simply returning to what’s already true (not that this is always ‘easy’ even if it’s ‘simple’).

The way back is to go through two movements at the level of your own relationship with yourself:

1. Regulate → “I am safe”

Regulation is about returning to the body and stabilising the nervous system so that you can return back to presence.

When the system settles back into regulation, then your perception also changes (because you’re not seeing ‘threat’s everywhere) and so life stops looking like it’s against you and starts looking like possibility again.

2. Integrate → “I am enough”

Integration is about meeting what you’ve rejected in yourself and reclaiming what’s real.

The shame, the fear, the parts of yourself you’ve hidden in order to belong or succeed – when these ‘parts’ are brought back into awareness without judgement, you stop performing yourself and start being yourself again.

The Moment the Tragedy Becomes a Joke

When you begin to accept the truth behind “I am already safe” and “I am already enough” then you start to loosen your (unreal) grip on life and – from that looseness – humour returns.

In some cases, you can actually laugh at yourself again – not in a dismissive way but in a liberating way because you begin to see that so much of what once felt like tragedy was actually just tension created by unreality.

Unreality always feels heavy but the truth feels lighter – laughter closes the gap between the two.

The Divine Comedy: No Punchline Required

The Divine Comedy isn’t about everything working out neatly or about a perfect resolution or a guaranteed happy ending – it’s really just about recognising that reality is bigger than your interpretations of it.

There isn’t always a punchline – sometimes there’s just a kind of ‘creative tension’ as life unfolds moment by moment without needing to be resolved into a story that flatters the ego – either way, when you stop demanding meaning to fit your expectations, you become part of the joke…not the victim of it, not the director of it, but an expression of it.

From here in the great interplay of the Divine Comedy, you can finally SHOW UP – not as a performance but as something REAL.

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

If you’re ready to start flowing instead of getting lost in the tragedy then check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Practical Steps: Moving from Tragedy to the Divine Comedy

If you want to apply this in real life then don’t overcomplicate it and start by simply shifting away from the tragedy and into something more real:

1. Catch the seriousness

Notice when life starts to feel heavy, tight, or overly important because this is the main signal from yourself that you’re leaning into tragedy.

Pause and ask yourself:

“Am I performing right now?”

If you are, then stop.

2. Regulate your system (“I am safe”)

Slow your breathing, feel your body, and be IN your environment.

You’re not solving the problem of life – you’re re-entering the mystery of it.

3. Name the shame (“I am enough”)

When you notice self-judgement creeping in then don’t argue with it – just label it.

“I am feeling not enough right now”.

That simple recognition reduces its power because it allows you to start observing it instead of identifying with it.

4. Identify resistance

Ask: “What am I avoiding doing right now that feels real?”

Doing whatever that is is usually the next step to take.

5. Take one real action

The Divine Comedy begins with sincerity, not certainty, so take whatever real action you’re being called to take (that will carry you into wholeness and not hold you back behind fragmentation).

6. Allow humour back in

Look for the absurdity in your own seriousness – not to dismiss yourself but to soften the grip.

The moment you can laugh, you’re no longer trapped in tragedy – you’re back in the flow of the Divine Comedy.

When you step away from the ego, the Divine Comedy begins.

The Final Word: The Divine Comedy & Leaving the Tragedy of Ego

Life isn’t asking you to become perfect (which is impossible) – it’s asking you to become real.

The more real you become, the more you realise that you were never really in control of the story anyway but that you can always choose how you meet it:

Are you gonna meet it with resistance or acceptance?

Are you gonna choose the Tragedy or the Divine Comedy?

The difference isn’t always in what ‘happens’ but in how real you’re willing to be whilst it happens.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re sick of the tragedy and you’re ready to grow real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you step into your real life.

Why You Feel Like You’re Wasting Your Life (Even When Nothing Is Wrong)

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Wasting Your Life (Even When Everything is Fine)

If You Feel Like You’re Wasting Your Life Even When Everything is ‘Fine’ On the Surface Then There’s Probably Something REAL Within You Waiting to be Expressed

This article is for anybody who’s being stalked by the feeling that they’re wasting their life in some way – even when everything might seem ‘fine’ on the surface:

Maybe you’ve done all of the things that society said you were “supposed” or “should” do and so you’ve got the partner, the successful career, and a nice house in the suburbs or whatever but still you can’t quite shake the feeling that something is…off – not catastrophically wrong or obviously broken. Just… off.

This uncertainty about what’s even specifically ‘off’ in the first place is what can make this “You’re wasting your life” feeling so unsettling because there’s nothing to ‘fix’ in the conventional sense – no crisis, no collapse, and obvious reason to feel this way but it persists nevertheless.

If you’re experiencing this then it will probably show up at the most random of moments:

  • You wash the dishes and you start to feel like you’re not who you were born to be.

  • You lay awake at night and it hits you that you’re going to be dead one day and you never even really showed up.

  • You’re stuck in traffic and you realise you’re driving a huge chunk of metal to some place you don’t even really want to be going.

You push it away, get back to the routine of the same old, same old. Work, scroll, sleep, repeat but – still – it comes back…not because something is ‘wrong‘ with you but because something REAL within you is trying to get your attention.

This article is about learning to listen.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Most men live lives of quiet desperation - if you feel like you're wasting your life you might be one of them.

It’s Not “Just Intrusive Thoughts”

It’s important to say first and foremost that it’s totally normal to have intrusive thoughts and that everybody experiences them at some point.

The truth is that the mind throws up random fear-based or existential content all the time but the thoughts we’re talking about here when it comes to the feeling of “You’re wasting your life” tend to feel different because they don’t feel random – they feel charged.

All this really means is that there’s a a kind of weight to them – a sort of sense that they might actually be pointing at something REAL rather than just passing noise.

It’s not just “What if [something bad] happens?” (intrusive thoughts) but more like “What if I’m not actually even living at all?”

This is a subtle distinction but it matters because when people feel like they’re wasting their life even though everything is ‘fine’ on the surface, it’s usually not a problem of ‘logic’ but a signal of disconnection.

In simpler terms:

It’s often a sign that you’re living in the Void instead of reality.

The Void: When Life is Functional but Unreal

The Void isn’t a mystical place but a psychological state that we can get trapped in if we’re not careful:

It’s what happens when you are functioning to some degree in life but still disconnected from truth about yourself.

This might look fine on paper – like everything is ‘working’ but you’ll still feel that inexplicable call back to yourself and life from time to time: You do the job. You maintain the relationship. You pay the bills. You perform your role. But internally, something is still missing: you.

The Void usually forms through an inner split that most people don’t consciously notice which comes when – somewhere along the line – you absorb the idea that the real version of you is not acceptable.

This is where shame enters your life as a disconnection from the truth about yourself and life:

Shame is just the deeply assumption of “I am not good enough as I am”.

Once this assumption gets internalised, – even partially – then you begin to construct a self that is ‘acceptable’, functional, impressive, safe.

This constructed self is THE EGO.

The Ego is Just a Survival Strategy – Not Who You Are in Your REALNESS

The ego is not a villain (though it can control you like one if you don’t see it for what it is) – it’s just a strategy that doesn’t work in the long-term:

It’s the personality you build to avoid feeling unworthy, exposed, or “not enough” and it helps you to to ‘succeed’ and ‘adapt’ yourself to life so you can fit into whatever system shamed you in the first place (remember: the ego is an unreal reaction to shame).

In many cases, it helps you thrive externally (within the shaming system) but there’s a cost because while the ego is running your life, your real self doesn’t disappear – it just goes into hiding (behind emotional and mental blocks).

All of the real ‘part’s of yourself that had to be hidden so that the ego could ‘survive’ become what is often called the shadow self – not because it is dark or ‘bad’ but simply because it is out of sight.

The short-version is that the shadow contains all of the ‘parts’ of you that weren’t allowed, not encouraged, or not safe to express:

  • Your genuine impulses.
  • Your creativity.
  • Your honesty.
  • Your instincts.
  • Your weirdness.
  • Your depth.
  • Your anger.
  • Your softness.
  • Your real desires.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

These things are all beyond ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and are just REAL and never of them ever go anywhere – they’re just UNLIVED which, over time, creates the friction of “You’re wasting your life”.

Why the “You’re Wasting Your Life” Feeling Keeps Coming Back

When you feel like you’re wasting your life even though everything is fine then what you’re most often actually experiencing is the gap between:

  • The life the ego has successfully built.


    And:

  • The life the real self is still trying to live

The ego’s plan is usually based on safety, approval, and avoidance of shame and so it says things like:

  • “Do what’s stable”.

  • “Don’t risk too much”.

  • “Keep people happy”.

  • “Stay in control”.

  • “Don’t show up as yourself”.

Externally, this can all keep you in a place that looks like ‘success’ but internally, it slowly drains vitality because you’re not living a life that is fully REAL.

Whenever we’re being UNREAL like this, the system starts sending signals so that we’ll course correct and put ourselves back on a path to REALNESS.

The feeling of wasting your life is often one of those signals because it’s basically the psyche’s way of saying:

Something real in you is not being expressed.

The Fear Underneath the “You’re Wasting Your Life” Feeling

Most people think they avoid showing up and growing more real because they’re lazy or unsure or distracted or something but underneath it is something deeper:

Fear that the original shame might be true.

Essentially, if the core belief is “I’m not good enough as I am” then stepping into your real self feels risky because what if you express yourself and just end up confirming that this is true?

What if all your fears about yourself not being good enough as you are actually turn out to be the truth about you?

Instead of answering this difficult question (which is a kind of ego ‘trick’ anyway because shame is just the disconnection from truth), the ego creates a clever solution: don’t find out.

This is why so many of us are constantly choosing distractions from reality instead of reality itself:

Stay busy, stay useful, stay impressive, and stay in control – anything to keep life filled with motion instead of meaning so we don’t have to face our fears about ourselves and life.

When we get caught up in ourselves like this, then we’re not just avoiding failure – we’re actively doing whatever we can to avoid the possibility that our deepest fear might be real: we’re not good enough as we are.

The ‘Good’ News: Shame is NOT the Truth but the Opposite of Truth

The crucial shift is this that can start to free you from all this is pretty simple:

Shame feels real but it’s NOT the truth – it’s just an emotional state, not an objective fact, and – like all emotional states – it dissolves when it’s finally met and faced head-on.

The ‘good’ news is that when shame is felt directly – without avoidance or identification (“I AM my shame”) – then it begins to lose its grip.

It doesn’t dissolves through ‘positive thinking’ but through simple, good ol’ fashioned contact with reality.

The problem is that the ego resists this process because if shame dissolves then the entire structure built around avoiding it has to change too and that means the ego loses control.

This is why the ego keeps distracting us and asks us to avoid stillness (just being with ourselves and allowing ourselves to heal the inner rift by actually feeling our own feelings).

Stillness is where truth is eventually felt again (once you ride through all the emotions that have been keeping you from it).

The Real Cause of the “Wasting Your Life” Feeling

When the “You’re wasting your life” feeling keeps returning, it’s usually pointing to three things:

  1. You are living inside a comfort zone designed by the ego – not your realness.

  2. You are out of contact with ‘parts’ of yourself that are asking to be expressed because they’re hidden in the shadow.

  3. You are beginning to become aware of that disconnection.

This awareness is incredibly important because it’s not random – in fact, it’s directional and is pointing towards integration.

The short-version is that until those disowned ‘parts’ of you begin to re-enter your life, the sense of wasting your life will persist -even if everything externally improves.

You can’t ‘think’ your way out of it, though – you have to live your way through it.

Let’s quickly explore how you can do just that:

The Way Forward: Awareness, Acceptance, & Action

If this feeling is a signal of disconnection then the response to dealing with the problem is reconnection.

That happens in three stages:

1. Awareness

You need to become aware of the ‘parts’ of you that are not being expressed – not just intellectually but at the level of your own actual, real experience.

You can figure out the path to this with the following questions:

  • What do I keep wanting to do but don’t allow myself to do?

  • What do I consistently suppress or postpone?

  • Where do I feel dull, numb, or overly “functional”?

  • What parts of me only appear when I’m alone?

This is not about dramatic life overhaul but simply about noticing what is already true because Awareness is simply seeing what is there without immediately ‘fixing’ it.

Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World

If you want to go deeper into uncovering the shadow self and living your real life then check out my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World.

2. Acceptance

If you’re gonna get ‘stuck’, you’ll probably get stuck at the Acceptance stage because it means actually accepting that those hidden parts of you are real.

It also means embracing the fact that they’re not going away just because you ignore them and that when they are not expressed, they don’t disappear but they do create friction.

Acceptance means stopping the internal argument with reality by really acknowledging: this is part of me too.

Even if it doesn’t fit the current identity, even if it complicates things, even if it challenges the life you’ve built, it’s who you REALLY are and you’ll always feel like you’re wasting your life until you embrace and embody the facts.

3. Action

The final step is to take real action based on the Awareness and Acceptance you’ve uncovered so that you begin to give expression to what has been suppressed.

(Awareness and Acceptance but you in touch with your ESSENCE and real action is an EXPRESSION of this).

That might look like:

  • Shanging how you spend your time
  • Starting something creative
  • Having an honest conversation you’ve avoided
  • Removing obligations that feel deadening
  • Raking space for what feels alive, even if it’s uncertain
  • Etc. etc. etc.

Action is what converts Awareness and Acceptance into realness but without action, Awareness becomes frustration and Acceptance becomes stagnation.

Are you busy doing something real or are you busy wasting you're life on being unreal?

You’re Wasting Your Life: Final Thought

If you feel like you’re wasting your life even though everything is ‘fine’ then it doesn’t necessarily mean you are doing anything wrong but that something in you is still real enough to refuse complete suppression.

That feeling is not an enemy or even a problem but a reminder that you’re not fully aligned with what is true for you.

Until those real ‘parts’ are brought back into expression, life will continue to feel like it is happening without you really being in it – not because life is wrong but because some part of you is still waiting to be lived.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re really ready to stop wasting your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you figure out where there’s more room for your own realness.

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