by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Balling Up: How to get your self-respect back, improve your relationship with fear, and stop hesitating by embracing reality and being real.

Who is this article for?

This article is dedicated to anybody who lost their way because, somewhere along the line, they started listening to the world instead of themselves and so derailed the Train.  It’s dedicated to anybody who is drowning, anybody who lives in fear, anybody who spends their time hesitating instead of taking the action that they know they should be taking, and anybody who ‘forgot’ how to be spontaneous and filled with joy because the world told them they don’t deserve it.

Bullshit: being told that you don’t deserve joy or energy is the same as being told that you don’t deserve to be your real self – it doesn’t make sense. You’re always your real self, but you’re either facing it, or you’ve gone into hiding – in other words, you’re either living from your balls or you let the world remove them.

A lot of what you’re about to read is dedicated to the amazing men and women that I’ve had the pleasure of coaching who have found themselves on a crossroads. It’s for the people that have started to see that the life they’ve been living isn’t a real one, but that if they just get over their conditioning and learn to embrace their fear, then it’s not too late to start living out their own truth and growing through and into their edge.

This article is for anybody who is standing on the edge of the abyss and is ready to jump but can’t quite get their legs to work and send them hurtling in.

It’s for those who don’t quite believe in themselves yet or who have lost their self-belief but don’t quite understand what they can do about it.

It’s for those who are unconfident about their confidence because they’ve learned to be people pleasers and don’t want to seem arrogant or to rock the boat when all they wanna do is share something real with the world.

It’s for those that used to have a soul but sent it into hiding because they shared it with the world and didn’t get the feedback that they were hoping for (through their artistic projects or something similar).

It’s for the dreamers that keep getting told ‘No’.

It’s for the realists that keep getting told ‘Maybe’.

It’s for the deluded that keep getting told ‘Yes’.

It’s for anybody who knows that they can take themselves to the next level if they can just stop holding themselves back with ‘stuff’ that they know isn’t true but that they’ve become comfortable or familiar with, like a toxic friend who won’t leave your house when asked.

All of these people have one thing in common: Somewhere along the line, they lost their balls, or handed them over to somebody else.

This article is about getting them back.

Balls? What balls?

It’s 2019, maybe we’re not supposed to talk about people having balls and using that as something that defines them. The truth, though, is that we all have balls – the only problem is that for some of us, these balls are in the hands of another or have been so deeply pushed down beneath the surface of our ‘personality’ that we are unable to express anything real within ourselves.

Male or female, your balls are the fire in your belly that allow you to:

• Find the truth and turn it into action.
• Face your fears and lean into your edge.
• Set and maintain healthy boundaries so that you don’t have to take nonsense from people.
• Believe in yourself and give you faith in the fact that you can handle whatever happens to you.
• Live according to your values and not compromise because you lack abundance or fear losing things that aren’t serving you in the first place.
• Get on The Train and dedicate yourself to a purpose that will help you grow more real in yourself and make the world more real too as you ‘make your values more valuable to others’.
• Refuse to tolerate unnecessary drama and bullshit just because you’ve been conditioned to be a people pleaser.
• Keep moving forward no matter what and not allowing your unreal ‘feelings’ to get in the way of your realest desires.
• Stop giving unnecessary attention or emotional investment to things that aren’t worth it or don’t matter.
• Face life on its own terms –which means that it will be over one day – and using these terms to motivate you to do the best you can whilst you’re here.

Your ‘balls’ are the realest possible attitude that you can have as you go about your life and boil down to the difference between you either being active or being passive. To keep growing real and allowing yourself to reach your full potential, you have to be active. The good news is that the opposite of this, passivity, is always learned and so if you’ve lost your balls and become passive you can unlearn all the things that took them away from you.

This 101 Master Class in Ball Retrieval is gonna show you how.

Get Your Balls Back Today: Align Yourself with Reality

Just about everything that you will read on this website or in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is about aligning yourself with reality – in particular, by testing your assumptions at the levels of yourself, the world, and reality so you can take the best possible actions by acting on insight.

The idea behind this is really quite simple: if you want to make progress in life (or anywhere else) and to grow in the healthiest and most efficient way then you need to build on a foundation that is lasting and has the least amount of possible friction. This foundation is reality because reality is the strongest thing of all (actually the only thing of all – building on anything besides reality means that you’re building on nothing and so whatever you build is destined to eventually crumble and collapse).

If you lost touch with your balls and your experience of yourself, the world, and reality is primarily one that is motivated by fear, then it means for sure that, at some level, your understanding of these things is lapsing into unicorn territory and you’re living your life primarily at the conceptual level and not the experiential. It has to be this way because the only thing that can appear to take us away from reality is the interpretations of reality that our fear asks us to see everything through.

These fake interpretations seem real but they’re actually the things responsible for taking our balls away, making us make shitty choices about our actions and the things we choose to identify with – thus leading to friction between ourselves and reality that turns to frustration and then misery the longer we cling.

Real life is an experience; fear is a concept. If you have your balls intact, then your life is primarily about the flow of experience as you grow into yourself by moving towards your greatest vision; if your balls have gone, then life is just one reason to hesitate after another as you block your own path with unreal mental concepts.

Being aligned with reality feels good because we are connected to everything that surrounds us, moving forward towards the realisation of our greatest vision, smashing through our goals every day, and living in a state of self-directed spontaneity instead of only ever hesitating because our conditioning from the outside world is giving us things to fear that aren’t even real.

If you feel ‘bad’ more than you feel ‘good’, then there’s a real chance that it’s because you either lost your balls or handed them over to somebody who doesn’t respect them (how can they if you gave them up so easily?). Life is short. Take them back and stop screwing around. Take real action TODAY.

Passivity: The Ball Killer

The enemy of your real balls is anything that stops you from taking the action that can and should be taken for you to move forward with your purpose and in terms of growing real. Loosely, this kind of passivity can be rooted in two false assumptions about what reality is and how life should be lived:

1. The idea that your personality is ‘fixed’ and that you can’t change it, even if you want to (so you bullshit yourself with lies like “I’m just that kind of person”, “I’ve always done this”, “I never do that”, etc.).
2. The idea that you’re going to live forever and that you can therefore waste as much of your time as you like because you have an infinite supply of it. Wrong!

If you can’t be bothered to read the rest of this article then realise that the bare minimum you can do for yourself is to act in a way that would suggest these two assumptions are totally incorrect:

1. Keep learning and realise that your personality is totally unreal because it is just an idea and can be changed in whatever way you choose to grow (within the laws of physics).
2. Accept that you’re going to be dead one day and stop giving your time and attention to things that don’t deserve it, especially in a passive way.

The rest of this article will elaborate on a number of things that you can do to get your balls back but it all basically comes back to these two points.

Balls Back 101: Reclamation via Reality

You’re going to be dead one day:  If you lost your balls, then chances are that you either have an overwhelming fear of death that is making you hide out in the illusion of stasis that comes with the ego (and thus denying the fact that every passing day is a step closer towards your imminent demise) or you’ve handed over your balls to somebody else so you don’t have to face the fact that your life is ending one second at a time.

This isn’t the kind of thing that you can just ‘snap out’ of because it’s a pure illusion that has no grounding in reality whatsoever. You don’t need to snap out of it at all. You just need to accept it. Your life is literally ending, even as you read this. Body. Mind. Ego. All gone within the next 100 years, no question.

You have to accept this to get your balls back. Knowing that your life is going to end one day serves the double purpose of 1) making you value your time and attention because they’re limited, and 2) understanding that things change and so your ego (or personality) is not ‘fixed’ in the way that you like to believe it is to keep hiding from the truth.

You’re dying. It’s that simple. Take your balls back from your girlfriend or your boyfriend. Take them out of your husband or wife’s hands. Remove them from your employer and start making your own goddamned decisions. This is the only life you’re ever gonna get so take your balls back and live it, for heaven’s sake.

The clock is ticking. When you realise this, you will stop giving your time and attention to things that don’t deserve it. Refuse to waste your life on things that don’t matter. People who live from their balls are just people that know that life is precious; people who lose them undervalue their time and attention and give it away to unreal things that don’t deserve it (the only thing that deserves your time and attention is reality, that’s it). Ball up and live your real life.

Accept the reality that you are always enough, no matter what: People who lost their balls are just people that were conditioned somewhere along the way to accept and believe the possibility that they are not enough.  This is an insidious belief that always goes in the face of reality and leads people to the ball-sapping kind of passivity that we are trying to kill with this 101 Master Class.

No matter what you’ve been conditioned to believe about yourself (because of shame, trauma, or guilt that crept in from the outside world), make a promise to yourself right now to always believe at a bare minimum that you are always enough. You can only have your balls when you have no doubt in your heart that this is true. Ideally, you need to get to the stage where you know that you are awesome but this will come with time as you give yourself evidence of this by flowing and growing real as you get on your purpose (choo choo).

You are always enough because you’re a human being, a force of nature. You have the power to assess the situations that you find yourself in, test your assumptions about yourself, the world, and reality and to make choices that allow you to grow more real and push through your edge.

If you believe your conditioning that you’re not enough, then you’ll give up on your balls and passively wait around for things to just ‘change’ without taking any action  – or, even worse, give your balls to somebody that you mistakenly think will serve as your salvation. Getting your balls back comes from knowing that you are enough which means that you can be your own salvation.

Nobody can save you but yourself – don’ t see this as being a negative but as a liberation. Remember, though: you can’t save yourself unless you realise that you’re already enough (not that ‘enough’ is an excuse to stop growing or challenging yourself – those things are inherent to your ‘enough-ness’).  See your life as being your responsibility and a product of the choices you make – including the choices not about the actions you take but also the choices about your personality – get busy, grow real, stop bullshitting yourself.

If you’re reading this, you’re enough – anything that tells you otherwise is just the outer world trying to steal your balls from you.

Your passion, purpose, and values are the best expression of your balls: When you’re living from your balls, every day you are in the process of making manifest your passion, purpose, and values (see The Train for more details). When you’ve given your balls up and you’re living passively, then you end up living according to the passions, purpose, and values of people besides yourself – they use you as a pawn in the realisation of their own balls. Don’t let this happen.

If you’re stressed or you’re miserable or you’re frustrated, then the chances are that you’ve been choosing somebody else’s passion, purpose, and values over your own. This doesn’t mean that you can’t collaborate with people or partner up, but to do that you have to at least know your own passion, purpose, and values and find the balls to take action on them.

The short-version is this: When you have your balls you’re always acting; when you don’t you’re always reacting.  Ask yourself which one you’re doing and then make the switch to choose your own passion, purpose, and values over somebody else’s. You only have one life. Stop wasting it by giving your balls away.

You can figure out your passion by looking at what makes you most feel alive; you can figure out your purpose by setting a vision for yourself and dedicating yourself to making it real; you can figure out your values by looking at the highs and lows in your life and asking yourself what values were embodied in these situations (creativity, truth, freedom, etc.).  Stop  wasting time, though – your life is literally passing before your eyes.

Figure these things out today instead of waiting for somebody to tap you on the shoulder with all the ‘answers’. Use your balls to make these things a reality; stop hiding and making somebody else’s passion, purpose, and values a reality instead of your own. Always invest in yourself so you can make the world a better place – that’s what your balls are for.

Tests, Obstacles, Challenges and Conflict are just part of life – stop expecting anything else and becoming passive in your fear: Tests, obstacles, challenges, and conflict are all an unavoidable part of life – caring about them or getting upset when they show their face is being anti-reality, which means you’re being deluded at some level.

It is what it is – your balls accept this and work with things accordingly; your head hides your balls from you by trying to construct stories about how things could be different so you can ‘feel’ sorry for yourself. No. These things are life; they’re what fuels it and makes you stronger.

Ball up and grow real.

To get your balls back start accepting these things and expecting them. They are on the way as sure as the sky is blue or a storm brings rain or the sun is hotter than your microwave. Get ready to face it instead of letting your balls retract and creating more friction for yourself between you and reality.

In general, it comes back to having realistic expectations about yourself, the world, and reality:

Self: There is conflict between your ego and reality. Manage this conflict and you manage the rest of the conflict in your life more efficiently.

World: Other people will test you, either on purpose or otherwise; ultimately, they are always testing the same thing: to see how real you are. Get ready for it. It’s coming.

Reality: Reality will present obstacles and challenges, one after the other. It has to be this way because the map in your head of how things will unfold is different to the territory itself. The challenge is to find a way to keep moving forward towards your vision by overcoming these obstacles and growing more real from them.

Losing your balls is what happens when you passively ignore all of these things and expect the world to be a Disney Land without any conflict, tests, or obstacles to overcome. Get your head out of the clouds and get your balls back by preparing for these things and always using them to grow more real – not cowering in fear and trying to run back into the arms of all the things that stop you being real in the first place.

Constant life learning can only teach you one thing: your balls are yours and yours alone: Learn like you’re gonna live forever; live like you might die tomorrow. If you have this mind set then you won’t waste time on things that don’t matter and you’ll constantly be able to learn from the things that happen to you.

This means that whatever has happened to you in the past you can move on from without regret and whatever might happen in the future doesn’t scare you with its hypothetical ‘What ifs’ because you know that you’ll be able to handle it by learning, moving on, and growing real.

Having an attitude that you are constantly learning from whatever life throws at you means that you will learn to love your mistakes instead of fearing them. This is because you know every mistake you make provides you with the blessing of  moving forward if you handle it properly.  This means that you can face life with an ‘attitude of gratitude’ and see everything that comes as a gift (thanks, balls!).

Life learning also allows you to see the world in terms of long-term strategies and understanding, instead of just getting caught up in the short-term bullshit that happens to be in front of you right now. If you commit to learning, you commit to a future where your balls are still intact: those who keep their balls are those who know they can grow and change; those who lose them are the ones who think they have to stay the same forever. Keep learning, ball up, get real!

Stop trying to control everything; accept it and then make it real for you instead:  People who have lost their balls spend their whole lives fruitlessly trying to control everything in order to prevent the shame that led to their lack of balls in the first place from being triggered and reminding them who they really are.  Real people have their balls, know they can face the unexpected and keep moving forward with it, and so they don’t need to control others.

When you lose your balls, you constantly come from a place of fear and so you are unable to fully accept the other people in your life because people are unpredictable and you don’t want that unpredictability to remind you that your balls have gone.

To get your balls back, accept that you can’t control what other people do – no matter how much you might like to. All you can do is let them get on with their own lives (balls or otherwise) and continue to live yours in the realest way that you can do.

This means that you give up control and have the balls to let people do whatever they need to do and then decide whether to keep them in your life if what they do is acceptable or walk away if it isn’t  – this is the realest possible way to relate to people but you can’t do it if you’ve lost your balls and fear losing things that aren’t even real in the first place (this attitude is an abundance mentality).

Habits, health, and humour will set you on the path to getting your balls back: The main problem with losing your balls is that you end up giving too many Fs about things that don’t matter. Getting these three things right will allow you to get your balls back by putting you in the right process of aligning you with reality:

Habits: The basic foundation of getting your life in order. Every day, you should have a set of habits that serve as the foundation for building the rest of your life on – this might be things like refusing to waste time jerking off, reading, writing, working out, eating healthy food, etc. (your choice – make sure you choose habits that increase the size of your balls overtime, not diminish them).

Health: The bottom line is that healthier people are able to live with less fear than unhealthy people. Make sure you work out every week and get your body in optimum working order; stop eating shitty food too. All of this is ultimately about maximising your energy levels so you can be as active as possible. If you’ve got a gammy leg and you’re sluggish from too much sugar or whatever then you’re gonna end up being passive and saying goodbye to those balls.

Humour: Treat whatever happens to you as a joke (I have kidney failure and it’s hilarious – still healthy though: thanks, P90X) – humour allows you to align yourself with the truth and get out of your head. Don’t take yourself so seriously – that’s what people without balls do because they’re scared to face facts and accept that ultimately none of this really matters.

Your balls are your connection to your nature and the whole; it’s a ‘spiritual’ thing:  Living from your balls is a spiritual thing because it means loving yourself and not giving up, no matter what. It means that you understand your place in the world and reality and accept that things don’t always work out but that this doesn’t need to mean that you have to see yourself as being ‘not enough’.

At the end of the day, your balls are what allow you to live in a spontaneous way that makes you feel really alive, which means your balls have to be connected to the flow of the ‘Whole’, not the fragments in your head that severe this connection.

Know yourself enough to trust and believe that you can handle whatever happens – because when you have your balls you can. Reject anything that asks you to deny your human nature or to pretend that you’re not enough for the sake of somebody or something else and their unreal agendas. You’re nature is to be a part of nature and to bring the world into more wholeness with your mission and self-directed purpose.

People who have given up their balls have given up their nature as a whole and ‘happy’ human being that lives to become more of itself through real action. If you’ve lost your balls, then you’ve lost wholeness by buying into fragments that don’t need to exist – you’ve bought into the myth of trauma, shame, and guilt that have encroached upon you from the outside world.

Get in touch with yourself by losing touch with anything unreal. Your balls are the only real thing that matters because they’re the only part of you that’s inherently connected to the whole.

Every moment you’re either choosing your own balls or you’re choosing somebody else’s… Make the right choice and ball the F up!

Ball Up: Find the Truth and Live the Truth

At the end of the day, living your real life – not your idea about what life is based on your ego or somebody else’s agenda – is a simple two-step process:

1. Finding and uncovering the truth: by the continuous life learning that we discussed above – constantly testing your assumptions about yourself, the world, and reality and ensuring that the interpretations you use to make sense of these things point as closely towards reality as possible.
2. Acting on this truth by living it: by being active and not passive and by acting in the world instead of only ever reacting to it. This means knowing your purpose, setting a vision for yourself, and dedicating yourself to the habits and goals that will take you there.

Life is short. We’ve said it a couple of times throughout this article and the reason is that you need to keep reminding yourself that your time and attention are the most valuable things that you have.

When you value your time and attention instead of giving them away freely, you realise that the only thing really worthy of receiving them is the truth (in the form of anything real). When you lose your balls, you end up hiding the truth from yourself in all of the ways that we’ve discussed (and more) – to get them back start telling the truth with your words and actions and start to turn your world around.

Anything that stops you finding and then living the truth about yourself, the world, and reality is an outside attempt at stealing your balls from you. Live from the inside out, ball the f-up, and make the most of your time here by living your purpose and growing real every single day.

Your balls are only as big as your fear allows you to be – don’t let the world make you shrink away from yourself because you’ve failed its tests and seen it for something that it isn’t (because your ego needs you to believe in lies to keep its hold over you).

We all have more power than the world will often allow us to believe – take your balls back and use this power to grow real and lead others to do the same.

The clock is ticking and your balls are always waiting to take you where you need to go – get on the Train and take yourself there.

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