Control vs. Spontaneity: The Path to Self-Acceptance

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Coaching/Creativity/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Relationships/Shadow Life

YouTube player — **This article is based on a transcript of this video from my Youtube channel.**

Reclaiming the ‘old’ you so that you can grow into the REAL you.

In this article, we’re diving into the delicate balance between control and spontaneity—a theme that frequently emerges in my coaching sessions. Many people, perhaps unknowingly, have silenced their spontaneous selves because past experiences taught them that letting loose could lead to ‘trouble’. This usually happens when spontaneity lacks balance, resulting in behaviours that are too extreme: overly hedonistic, excessively emotional, or even too innocent. Instead of recalibrating these traits, people often feel ashamed and go to great lengths to suppress them.

Over time, this suppression leads to a sense that something vital is missing. These qualities are real aspects of who we are, and the solution isn’t to bury them but to master and channel them toward our goals – by cutting off these parts of ourselves, we disconnect from our authentic selves, leading to feelings of shame, restlessness, and an unshakeable void.

This article explores the pattern of swinging from spontaneity to excessive control and the consequences of doing so. The goal here is to help you understand that the real parts of you are always real, and by balancing them instead of eliminating them, you can reclaim your path to being who you truly are in your REALNESS. At the core, this is about self-acceptance—acknowledging the parts of yourself that you’ve sent into hiding.

We all have aspects of ourselves that we’ve disowned, often due to external shame imposed by parents, teachers, or society. But when it comes to our own spontaneity, the dynamic is slightly different:

The fear of these qualities getting us into trouble is usually self-imposed, stemming from a lack of trust in ourselves. We’re afraid that if we continue to express these parts, we’ll lose control, so we build rigid structures to keep them at bay.

This fear creates a prison, locking away our true selves. The way out is to recognize that this fear is unfounded. We always have the ability to control and direct our actions in a healthy way. By embracing and accepting these spontaneous qualities, we can decide how to express them constructively.

This is a common struggle that many people face. They disown their real selves, create a false identity, and interact with the world in a controlled, rigid manner. This often leads to relationships where true intimacy is absent, as the relationship becomes more about maintaining control than genuine connection. The same applies to careers and other areas of life, where we may find ourselves in roles that don’t align with our true selves because we’re out-of-touch with our own realness.

Reconnecting to your SHADOW is the path to your REAL life.

Reconnecting with these disowned parts and finding a balance between control and spontaneity is essential for living a fulfilling and authentic life.

When we go out into the world in an inauthentic, unreal way, we inevitably attract inauthentic experiences. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle where life becomes increasingly disconnected from reality. Eventually, something snaps, forcing the real parts of us to surface—whether it’s through a midlife crisis, a breakup, an illness, or some other life-altering event. The real self always emerges, so it’s better to face it sooner rather than later.

This struggle is something I’ve experienced first-hand:

There was a time when I lived as an unrestrained, hedonistic version of myself—wild, reckless, and completely undisciplined. I partied excessively, engaged in risky behaviours, and lived without any regard for self-control or discipline. This lifestyle led to various problems, including health issues and a sense that my life was spiralling out of control. I saw myself as a comet, blazing through life with no clear direction—destined to burn out eventually. And that’s exactly what happened. When I crashed back to earth, I had to rebuild my life from the ground up.

In response, I swung to the opposite extreme, becoming highly disciplined and controlling. I adopted a strict routine, monitored everything I ate, and lived with rigid self-imposed rules. While this approach brought order to my life, it also drained the joy from it. I was driven by the fear that if I didn’t maintain this control, I’d revert to my old, chaotic ways and lose everything I’d worked to regain. The pendulum had swung from one extreme to the other.

This journey from extreme spontaneity to extreme control is not uncommon. Often, we need to experience both ends of the spectrum to find a balance. In my coaching practice, I see this frequently. Some people come to me in a state of total spontaneity—they lack discipline, structure, routine, goals, and vision. For them, the path to balance involves introducing more control into their lives, establishing routines, and setting clear goals.

On the flip side, others come to me exhausted from living a life of rigid control. They’ve become control freaks, suppressing their authentic selves and those around them to maintain order. For these individuals, the solution is to let go, embrace spontaneity, and allow themselves to experience life more freely.

Balancing control and spontaneity – tension and release – is the key to a fulfilling life.

Finding this balance between control and spontaneity is crucial for living an authentic, fulfilling life. It’s about recognizing where you are on this spectrum and taking the necessary steps to bring yourself back to centre.

Navigating the shift between spontaneity and control can be complex. In this article, we’re focusing on those moments when an overindulgence in spontaneity leads to a swing towards excessive control.

This was my own experience: I began with a wildly spontaneous lifestyle that was exhilarating but ultimately led to chaos. I was running away from unresolved issues from my childhood, driven by shame and a lack of direction. This period of unrestrained spontaneity eventually led to me crashing and burning, and I found myself transitioning into a phase of extreme control and rigidity.

Through this journey, I learned the importance of balancing these extremes. I discovered that true happiness and authenticity come from integrating the spontaneous parts of ourselves in a controlled manner, rather than suppressing them entirely. Many people end up stuck in this controlling phase because their spontaneity once caused problems, leading them to overcompensate. However, remaining in a state of rigid control can be equally stifling, preventing true self-expression and growth. It creates a bubble of the ego that keeps our genuine qualities at a distance.

Finding balance means bringing those real parts of ourselves back to the surface without letting them overpower us. Through periods of control, we learn self-mastery, which allows us to respond to our inner selves constructively rather than merely reacting or engaging in unchecked spontaneity.

This pattern is quite common. For example, many women who become controlling have a past of rebellious or hedonistic behaviour. They might now be living a quiet, domesticated life, trying to fit into a role like the perfect housewife. This role can act as a cage, suppressing the real qualities they previously expressed. Consequently, they may feel a sense of emptiness.

Conversely, some men who were once very violent or involved in risky behaviours may become overly reserved and controlling later in life. They fear reconnecting with their anger, worried it will lead to aggressive actions or trouble. This fear of their own anger can cause them to become excessively controlled, avoiding their true emotions.

Regardless of gender, it’s crucial to own and accept all aspects of ourselves—whether it’s anger, joy, spontaneity, or sexual energy. These qualities are essential for a healthy and authentic life. By learning to tame these qualities – much like one might tame a wild horse – we can direct them in a positive way. If we merely deny their existence, playing a passive role or adhering to a constrictive identity, we’ll remain trapped and unhappy.

In summary, embracing and balancing both spontaneity and control allows us to live more fully and authentically. It’s about integrating the diverse aspects of ourselves and finding a harmonious way to express them.

Many people feel stuck because they’ve built rigid control structures around themselves, which creates inner friction. This friction, if left unaddressed, often escalates into frustration and eventually misery. The root of this problem is the internal battle to keep genuine aspects of ourselves at bay rather than embracing and balancing them.

To move forward and align with your true self, it’s essential to address this friction by finding a balance between spontaneity and control. The goal is to express yourself authentically in a healthy, balanced way, rather than swinging between chaotic spontaneity and restrictive control.

Achieving this balance involves several steps (as does any transformational journey – all of these steps come into play whenever I’m coaching people):

Awareness: Start by becoming aware of the aspects of yourself that you’re avoiding out of fear. Recognise that you won’t lose control if you confront these qualities; in fact, you’re already in control of yourself. It’s the lack of direction and purpose that can make these qualities overpower you.
Acceptance: Accept these parts of yourself instead of hiding from them. By acknowledging them, you build a solid foundation upon which you can build a more authentic life.
Action: Take action based on a clear vision or purpose. Without direction, you risk becoming too spontaneous and disorganised, which can lead to a lack of focus and control. Conversely, without spontaneity, life can feel dull and overly rigid. Having a vision helps you channel these qualities constructively, using them as fuel for your goals rather than letting them control you.

The key to balancing control and spontaneity lies in developing what can be termed as “controlled spontaneity” (from my book Shadow Life).

This means integrating spontaneity within the framework of your vision and goals. You remain flexible and open to life’s unfolding events while ensuring that your actions are aligned with your larger objectives.

In essence, you want to embrace life’s spontaneity and the genuine qualities within you while steering them purposefully towards your vision. Think of it as surfing the waves of reality—maintaining a sense of direction while enjoying the ride. By achieving this balance, you create a fulfilling and dynamic life that honours both your spontaneous energy and your need for control.

Finding balance means embracing and channelling the qualities within you to support your goals. For instance, in my own journey, I spent years living a hedonistic and spontaneous lifestyle. It was exhilarating, but it also led to significant challenges. The key takeaway is that you don’t have to entirely abandon your spontaneity or the traits that make you who you are. In fact, spontaneity is a natural and vital part of being REAL.

To live authentically, you need both structure and spontaneity. It’s not about completely eliminating one in favour of the other but integrating them in a way that aligns with your vision.

Here’s how you can do that:

Maintain Spontaneity Within Structure: It’s essential to have routines and structure in your life, but this doesn’t mean you have to suppress your spontaneous side. For example, if you previously enjoyed partying or expressing strong sexual energy, you don’t need to give that up entirely. Instead, channel those energies within the context of your goals. If you’re in a stable relationship, find ways to express your sexuality more meaningfully within that relationship, for example.
Find Healthy Outlets: If you have strong emotions like anger, don’t shy away from them. Instead, find productive ways to channel them. This could mean engaging in physical activities like MMA or using anger as motivation to drive you towards your vision. Anger, when directed healthily, can be a powerful force for change and growth.
Embrace the Moment: Living spontaneously means engaging with life as it unfolds rather than merely theorising or planning. Practice being in the moment, allowing yourself to interact with life dynamically while maintaining your core structure and routines. Know what results you want but once you’ve figured that out stay outcome-independent and live by focusing on the PROCESS.

Ultimately, balance is about integrating spontaneity and structure in a way that enhances your journey toward your goals. By embracing and directing these qualities within a structured framework, you can live authentically and effectively.

Anger has been described as “the dignity emotion.” It serves as a protective force, helping you maintain boundaries, safeguard your peace, and defend those you care about. When you’re disconnected from this powerful emotion, it can hinder your ability to achieve your goals, particularly if your vision involves doing your best for yourself and your loved ones.

To achieve balance, you must first acknowledge and accept your emotions, including anger. Then, consider how these emotions fit within the context of who you want to be. The real issue arises when we lack a clear vision and allow our emotions to dictate our actions, rather than guiding them purposefully.

Balancing spontaneity and control is crucial. Excessive spontaneity can lead to instability and disruption, while excessive control can create a sense of emptiness. The key is to understand what balance looks like for you, given your true self and your aspirations.

To move forward in a REAL way:

Acknowledge Your True Self: Embrace all aspects of yourself without fear or suppression. Recognise that these qualities are part of who you are and can be harnessed constructively.
Define Your Vision: Establish a clear vision based on your core values. This vision should come from a place of wholeness and realness, rather than ego reinforcement and fragmentation. It will guide you in integrating your genuine qualities in a meaningful way.
Channel Your Qualities: Use your emotions and traits as fuel for your vision. By aligning your actions with your values and goals, you can ensure that your spontaneity and control work together harmoniously.

For further guidance, I offer resources on my website, olianderson.co.uk, including a free course designed to help you clarify your vision and values – the Personality Transplant. If you’d like to explore these concepts further, you can also book a free initial call with me. I’m passionate about helping individuals break through their obstacles and align with their own REALNESS.

Thank you for reading. I hope this article has provided clarity on balancing spontaneity and control. Remember, embracing your authentic self and integrating your emotions thoughtfully is key to personal growth and fulfilment.

Stay real, find your balance, and peace to you.

Understanding Exasperation and Disillusionment: A Path to Realisation

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Coaching/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

The world is not reality.

Welcome to this discussion about feelings of exasperation, disillusionment, and being jaded, stressed, or fed up—emotions that many people experience in today’s world. These feelings are not irrational; in fact, the world can often seem chaotic and overwhelming. Whether it’s the news or social media, there’s a great deal to feel exasperated about due to the constant presence of misinformation, tension, and chaos. It’s understandable why so many of us feel this way.

However, I want to suggest that these feelings of exasperation and disillusionment can actually be positive. They signify an awakening to some of life’s most fundamental truths, and offer an opportunity to realign ourselves with a more authentic path. This article explores the concept that the world, as we perceive it, is not reality. The feelings of disillusionment stem from the fact that we’ve bought into myths, conditioning, and propaganda that attempt to convince us that something unreal is, in fact, real.

When you begin to feel disillusioned, it’s your true self trying to resurface and reclaim its rightful place in your life. In this discussion, we will explore how we’ve reached this state of disillusionment and, more importantly, what we can do to regain a sense of freedom and wholeness, returning to a life aligned with our true selves.

The key takeaway here is that the world, as we experience it, is not reality. Reality is aligned with truth—it is fluid, constantly evolving, and inherently whole. The world, on the other hand, is made up of interpretations, systems, structures, and economic models that we have constructed in response to reality. Often, these constructs arise from a place of fear, scarcity, doubt, or shame, resulting from a lack of understanding of our true selves.

Consequently, the systems and beliefs we create are merely extensions of our disconnection from our true nature. This disconnection leads us to project an artificial world—a sort of matrix—over life itself. If we’re unaware of this, we end up mistaking this artificial world for the truth about life. When that happens, we construct an identity based on the world’s projections rather than on reality. This leads to a perpetual state of friction within ourselves.

Treating the world as reality means disowning our true nature, and this disconnection manifests in various forms of conflict. There are three main types of conflict that arise from this dissonance, which we will explore before delving into strategies for resolving them.

In essence, if the world is unreal because it’s an extension of our collective unreal relationship with ourselves and the beliefs that spring from this, we find ourselves in a challenging situation. However, it’s important to remember that while the world we’ve created may be unreal, what is truly real within us remains constant. By recognising this, we can begin to reconnect with our true nature and live in a way that is more aligned with reality itself.

The Impact of an Unreal World on Our Sense of Self

The way we are encouraged to interact with the world around us is increasingly detached from reality. This growing disconnection contributes to feelings of disillusionment, exasperation, and a sense of hopelessness. There are three main reasons why living in an unreal world causes these negative emotions.

1. Misalignment with Core Human Values

The first reason is that the constructed, unreal world often goes against our core human values. At their essence, these values are those that lead us towards wholeness—whether at the personal level, in our relationships with others, or in our connection to life itself. These values are about growth, evolution, and maintaining a sense of flow in our lives. However, the world as it is often demands that we halt this natural growth process. Once we finish our formal education and enter the workforce, we are frequently expected to fit into rigid economic models that do not allow for personal development in line with our true values.

As a result, when we feel disillusioned or exasperated, it is often because we are rebelling against this artificial relationship with life. We are not living in accordance with our values, nor are we expressing our creativity or experiencing a sense of freedom. Essential elements of human happiness, such as connecting with nature or engaging in meaningful work, are often not built into the structures of the world we’ve created. This misalignment between our values and the demands of an unreal world generates significant internal conflict.

2. Restriction by Ideological Boxes

The second reason is the world’s tendency to confine us within ideological boxes. These boxes are created by beliefs, linear thinking, and rigid ideologies. No human being can be fully defined by an ideology, as ideologies are merely tools for making sense of the chaos and complexity of real life. However, the more the world pressures us to conform to these ideologies, and the more we try to fit ourselves into them, the more friction and frustration we feel. This is because we are suppressing the vast depth, wisdom, and potential within us in order to fit into these artificial constructs.

While some ideologies might initially seem liberating or enlightening, the problem arises when we become overly attached to them. We begin to believe that our survival depends on adhering to these ideologies, which only deepens our disconnection from our true selves. If the world is driven by agendas that compel us to adopt unreal beliefs and identities, it’s inevitable that we will feel disillusioned, as we are being forced to live inauthentically.

3. Disregard for Our Moral Compass

The third reason is that the world does not align with our intrinsic moral compass. Deep down, we all have an innate sense of what is true, real, and whole. Morality, at its core, is about aligning ourselves with this sense of wholeness and connection. However, the world we live in is often fragmented, designed to keep people separated, to reduce individuals to economic units, and to prioritise profit over people. These aspects of the modern world conflict with our inner moral truth.

When we force ourselves to live in ways that contradict our moral compass, we experience a deep internal friction. This dissonance is not just a vague discomfort; it manifests as a persistent void or an inner itch that cannot be easily soothed. We carry this friction with us, and it haunts us because we are disconnected from our true selves.

The Consequences of Externalising Friction

This persistent friction often leads people to externalise their discomfort instead of looking inward to address the root cause. This tendency explains the increasing polarisation in the political landscape, particularly in the West. Many people are projecting their internal shame and disconnection onto others, rather than realigning with their true values, developing a genuine ideological understanding, and living in accordance with their moral truth.

Ultimately, when the world imposes constant friction on us, we eventually reach a breaking point. This is when we start to wake up and realise that something needs to change. The way forward is not about adapting to the world, but about making the world adapt to us, by living authentically and reconnecting with our true selves.

In my coaching practice, I encounter this scenario frequently. Many clients come to me because they’ve reached a breaking point—often due to the immense friction they feel from either going against their true selves or from the exasperation we’ve been discussing. This friction builds up to a point where they feel something has to change, or they fear they might snap in a way that could be damaging. Essentially, people are carrying around this internal conflict, but there’s an even more insidious layer to it.

The world is structured in a way that encourages people to keep others in this state of friction and unconsciousness. This might sound extreme, but it’s done subtly through mechanisms like shame and guilt. The world is designed to confine us within the ‘box’ or the ‘matrix’ we’ve discussed, and those whose identities are deeply tied to these constructs often use shame and guilt to prevent others from waking up. If you start to rebel—by living your own values or challenging the prevailing ideologies—the world responds by making you feel guilty or ashamed, as if there’s something wrong with you. This only adds to the sense of exasperation.

As a result, many people eventually run out of steam. Some give up, feeling they don’t have the energy to fight any longer, and they internalise the world’s values, ideologies, and moral codes. They trick themselves into believing the world is real, despite the inner conflict they feel. Others, however, recognise that the world is unreal but feel powerless to change it, so they go through the motions, acting as if it’s real to avoid the stress of confronting the truth. They do this to avoid the backlash from those who are still deeply entrenched in the illusion, fearing the shame and guilt that might be heaped upon them for stepping out of line.

Adapting to the world in an unreal way is ultimately a survival mechanism

This brings us back to the notion that while feeling disillusioned or exasperated is unpleasant, it’s also a positive sign of awareness. Once you start to awaken to these feelings, you’re faced with a choice: will you continue to succumb to the fragmentation of the world, or will you choose to align with what you know to be real?

In choosing the latter, something that has greatly helped me is understanding that what is real will always remain real. Just as a leopard cannot change its spots, the core of who you are cannot be altered. Often, when people find themselves overwhelmed by exasperation and friction, they seek an escape. The path of least resistance is usually to conform to the world—essentially, to ‘paint over’ their true selves in order to blend in with the world’s values, ideologies, and moral codes, thereby hiding what they know to be true about themselves. However, as we’ve discussed, a leopard cannot change its spots. You might temporarily disguise yourself to fit in, but your true nature remains unchanged.

Adapting to the world in this superficial way might seem like the easiest solution at first, but eventually, you will reach a point—perhaps five or ten years down the line—where you realise you’ve been living a facade. You’ve been playing a role within the constructed ‘matrix’ of the world to make life more manageable. This realisation often leads to what many refer to as a midlife crisis, where you understand that you’ve been living conceptually, not experientially; you’ve been existing in the world, but not in reality. At this point, you are faced with the task of undoing the false identity you’ve created under external pressures and the inner friction that has accumulated.

You can adapt to the world for a sense of short-term survival, or you can refuse to conform and instead, make the world adapt to you. This involves creating a vision for yourself that aligns with your true values, acting on it, and, most importantly, accepting the truth about who you are. This path leads to freedom rather than friction.

It’s important to note that adapting isn’t inherently negative. We can and should adapt in a real and healthy way as we navigate life, learning and evolving in response to our experiences. However, the type of adaptation we’re discussing here is different—it’s about hiding or cutting off parts of yourself to blend in with an unreal world.

There are two key things to understand about these survival mechanisms. First, when something hurts us, we often instinctively try to become more like it as a means of protection. For instance, a man hurt by a woman may adopt more feminine traits, while a woman hurt by a man may become more masculine. We adopt what we perceive as the strengths of those who have hurt us, believing it will make us stronger and more resilient in the future. But if we do this at the expense of our own nature, it only adds more friction between ourselves and reality, leading to further exasperation and disillusionment.

The second point is that these survival instincts only provide short-term relief. Adopting false values or ideologies might help you cope temporarily, as it removes the friction of resisting conformity. However, in the long term, this approach only deepens the gap between your true self and the life you’re living. Eventually, the unresolved truth about who you are will resurface, bringing with it a renewed sense of void, restlessness, and the feeling of something essential missing from your life.

In the end, while you can choose to adapt and conform to the world, this is only a temporary solution. The real you will eventually awaken, and you’ll find yourself needing to reconfigure your life to align with the truth you’ve been avoiding.

The best approach is to view disillusionment and exasperation as the beginning of a process of raising awareness. However, awareness alone isn’t enough. As I often say, the journey consists of three stages: awareness, acceptance, and action.

First, let the exasperation and disillusionment help you become more aware. Then, you need to accept the truth of what we’ve discussed here: you’re feeling this way because you’ve taken on things that aren’t truly yours—they’re not real for you. You can unlearn these false beliefs and recognise that the world, as it presents itself, is not reality.

Once you reach this point of acceptance, the next step is to start acting in alignment with what is genuinely real for you. This is where you’ll begin to reclaim your freedom. When you align with your true values and reality, the feelings of disillusionment and exasperation will no longer be burdensome. Instead, you’ll transform that inner friction into something meaningful, allowing you to move forward unencumbered by the weight of inauthenticity.

Awareness, Acceptance, & Action works every time.

So, what’s the way out of disillusionment and exasperation? It comes down to three key steps: awareness, acceptance, and action.

When you’re disillusioned, you’ve started to become aware of the gap between who you truly are and the external pressures and expectations the world imposes on you. This awareness can feel like tasting a bitter pill, but to move forward, you need to swallow it fully. By doing so, you move from mere awareness to acceptance.

Once you reach acceptance, the weight of the unreal things the world asks of you begins to lift. The illusions—this “matrix” or “veil” that separates you from life—start to dissolve. You realize that the only reason these illusions had power over you was because you had lost touch with your inner self, the real you. With acceptance comes freedom. You remember your true nature, reconnect with a sense of wholeness, and begin making decisions based on what’s real and true for you, rather than being driven by external, inauthentic influences.

From there, you can enter the third stage: action. With newfound clarity, you can act from a place of genuine values, creating a vision for your life that reflects your true self. You’ll start thinking independently, making decisions based on your own moral compass rather than being swayed by societal pressures or the latest trends. You’re no longer just reacting to the world, but living purposefully and authentically.

The lesson here is simple: the world isn’t reality, but you are. By focusing on what’s real—your real values, real connections, and real purpose—you can navigate away from disillusionment and find your true path. If you’re feeling that sense of disillusionment now, it’s a sign to shift your focus. Reconnect with what truly matters to you, find or build a community that resonates with your values, and stop living on autopilot. When you do this, the rest will fall into place.

In short, embrace your true self—your “leopard spots”—and don’t settle for living by the world’s illusions. If you feel disillusioned, it’s time to fully accept this and step into your real life. If you want to talk more about this, or need guidance, feel free to reach out to me at olianderson.co.uk/talk. Life can be amazing when we stay real and focused on what truly matters. Thanks for reading, and peace to you.

The SHADOW DANCE: The Uncomfortable Truth About Why You’re ‘Stuck’

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Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Shadow Life

Our inner relationship with ourselves and connection to truth either causes us to become stuck or to keep flowing.

Welcome to this article where we’re going to discuss the war against the self and how our inner relationship with ourselves and our connection to the truth either keeps us flowing with life or causes us to become stuck. I will ultimately address some uncomfortable truths about why we do become stuck. This stems from inner friction and fragmentation that split us from who we truly are.

When we become split from ourselves at the most fundamental level, we end up experiencing various symptoms that cause us to become stuck. The main problem is that we identify with these symptoms, and by doing so, we exacerbate the problem because we’re dealing with identity. There is a chance that this article might upset some people. That is not my intention. I am coming from a place of love and ultimately trying to help people get moving again.

I have truly found and believe that we are here to keep evolving, flowing, and moving towards wholeness. This sense of connection to ourselves, the world, and reality is crucial. If we’re not moving with that natural drive towards wholeness, then there is almost always a mental or conceptual issue we are identifying with that causes us to hesitate and hold back unnecessarily.

In this video, I want to go over some of those symptoms so that if you are dealing with this problem, you can clear the path, start moving again, and find your real life:

Understanding this little problem of being ‘stuck’ ultimately comes down to understanding the Shadow Dance.

As with almost everything in the human condition, understanding this problem of being stuck ultimately comes down to understanding the shadow dance. That’s what I call it. You might not have heard me talk about this before; it’s the dance between the ego and the shadow.

The ego is basically the fragmented conceptual version of ourselves that we have created as an image in response to whatever we’ve been through in the past. It’s a reaction to the shame, guilt, and trauma that we have ultimately not been able to face yet. The shadow consists of all the things that we have disowned, hidden, or sent into exile because of that aforementioned shame, guilt, and trauma. The shadow and the ego are constantly battling for dominance in our lives.

Most of us cling to the ego because it comes with the illusion of control and stasis—that is, the illusion of things staying the same and not moving, when actually life is always moving. So you can see there’s an inherent contradiction between the way we relate to ourselves and life itself: the illusion of separation and independence. The shadow is actually much more real. It’s all the real things that we’ve sent into hiding because the world and ourselves are not ready to face them yet.

If we become stuck, it’s almost always because we cling to the ego version of ourselves and we’re not allowing the shadow to move and resurface in the way that it needs to so we can become integrated. When we block the shadow from re-emerging, we just end up creating a barrier between ourselves and life. So we can’t move in the direction that we need to. All of the symptoms that we’re about to talk about ultimately come back to this idea: we have identified with the illusion of control, order, and stasis, instead of the reality of chaos, growth, flow, and the real version of who we are when we align with the truth as we uncover it, live it, and breathe it.

If you have any of the symptoms that we’re about to discuss, then there’s a very high chance that at some level, you are blocking yourself from facing yourself and some of that shadow stuff that is bubbling beneath the surface, trying to get your attention. The way to become unstuck is to figure out exactly what that might be and then give it a direction to move in by developing a vision for yourself. This vision should involve qualities, skills, goals, intentions, emotions, or whatever it is that is waiting to come up to the light of consciousness.

The key ingredient, or the thing that unifies all of these symptoms, is that they treat changeable things as static. Ultimately, they’ve all fallen for the illusion of stasis or are treating fragments as the whole. This is basically the biggest mistake human beings can make: taking a trivial thing and treating it as the whole of life itself, identifying with it as though it encompasses everything about us or is an obstacle that stops everything from moving in the way that it needs to.

You’re either moving with life because life is always moving, or you’ve created some conceptual idea that is causing you to stop moving in the way that you need to. It’s all about removing those conceptual blocks so you can experience yourself and life. Then you can feel good because you’ll be flowing instead of forcing and resisting.

Let’s move on to the symptoms:

The first symptom that keeps us attached to the ego is an unreal relationship with our own emotions.

If you recognise any of these, you ultimately need to raise awareness of yourself, accept yourself, and then take action.

The first symptom that keeps us attached to the ego, thereby keeping the shadow at bay, is treating fragments as the whole. Another way to say this is treating the impermanent as permanent. The most common example of this is our emotions. As the saying goes, emotions are “energy in motion.” They are supposed to keep flowing and moving. As long as you don’t block them, they will eventually pass, and you will learn whatever you need to learn from them.

The problem arises when we’re trying to keep the shadow at bay and don’t want anything to be moving. If things keep moving, the shadow will inevitably surface. If we’re not ready to face it because we know it will cause the ego to dissolve or change form, this will cause us problems. In such cases, we don’t treat emotions as temporary, impermanent things. Instead, we fall into the trap of identifying with them and treating them as permanent aspects that define us as a person.

We label ourselves with the emotions. We don’t just have anger; we are anger. “I am angry.” We don’t just feel depressed, sad, or happy and then let these emotions pass. We become that emotion and identify with it. By doing so, we don’t allow it to pass, and we become more entrenched in the ego and the illusion of stasis. This stops the natural flow, and we wonder why we’re stuck.

The solution is to not identify with the emotions. Step back from them and feel them. It’s very important to feel them. I’m not suggesting that you ignore your feelings. All emotions need to be felt—that’s the only way you’re going to get rid of them. But if you identify with them, put them on a pedestal, or treat the fragment as the whole, you’ll end up stuck and causing problems for yourself.

The second symptom of the Shadow Dance is that you don’t embrace power of CHOICE.

The second symptom of the Shadow Dance, and a sign that the ego is winning, is the reluctance to accept and embrace the power of choice. Ultimately, we are all responsible for our own lives. We can make choices that empower us to move in the direction we want. However, if we accept that we have this power and that our current situation is undesirable, it means we have to accept that our past choices led us to where we are now. Many people become more stuck because they don’t want to acknowledge that their choices brought them to their current situation. They resist making different choices that could change their trajectory, especially if they’ve been making choices that aren’t authentic or grounded in their true selves.

The key issue here is the interplay between the ego and the shadow. If our choices have led us to an undesirable place, it’s likely because those choices were made from an ego-driven foundation, not a place of authenticity. This results in making unreal choices that produce unreal outcomes, which is why we end up stuck. To move forward, we need to forgive ourselves for past choices. These choices were likely the best we could make at the time, given our knowledge and experiences. Forgiving ourselves allows us to face the shadow issues that influenced those choices, unblock our energy, and start moving again. Without self-forgiveness, we create a box for ourselves, avoiding emotions and staying stuck.

The third uncomfortable truth is that we are often so accustomed to having problems that we don’t know who we are without them. When things are okay and we could move forward by taking real action, we often look for more problems instead. This happens because we are used to identifying with the ego version of ourselves that deals with problems. This search for problems distracts us from doing the real work that would help us grow and integrate our shadow self, thereby dissolving our current ego and aligning more with reality.

If you find yourself feeling strange or not yourself when you don’t have a problem, it’s likely an automatic reaction based on past experiences. Stepping away from this pattern and focusing on the foundation of truth in your life can help you take actions that move you away from problems. This process brings the real you to the surface, allowing you to flow with life instead of creating unnecessary problems.

Another common symptom of being stuck in the shadow dance is seeking guidance from friends or professionals like coaches or therapists but not actually taking their advice. This behaviour reinforces the ego’s hold by validating the excuses and reasons for staying stuck. A typical manifestation of this is the “yeah, but” game. This involves dismissing every solution with a “yeah, but” response, which serves to reinforce the ego’s illusion of stasis and avoid confronting the shadow self.

If you find yourself frequently saying “yeah, but” and never actually making changes despite discussing your issues, it’s likely because you want your ego’s version of reality to remain true. This behaviour prevents you from becoming who you truly are.

Lastly, a common occurrence when we’re stuck is having flashes of insight or epiphanies about how things really are and what actions to take. However, instead of embracing these insights, emotional resistance and expectations about how life should be kick in, leading to sulking rather than action. This resistance to moving forward with newfound understanding is another way the ego keeps us stuck.

To overcome this, we need to act on our insights, accept the reality of cause and effect, and embrace the necessary steps to achieve our goals.

So you’re here, and you want to be there. This is the effect, and the journey there is just cause – cause and effect. That’s how things work in the deterministic universe we find ourselves in. If you understand that, you can actually work with it. However, a lot of people, when they realize these fundamental truths, do get the insight but then start to think about how unfair it is. They don’t think it’s fair that they have to do the work. They don’t think it’s fair that we’re responsible for our lives. They don’t think it’s fair that we can make choices. They don’t think it’s fair that the same universal laws apply to everybody. In a strange way, this means that life is kind of meaningless because the universe doesn’t really care about us, and so we’re all alone in the world and we’re all just going to die.

It doesn’t matter if you think it’s fair or not. Embracing these truths and working with them is how you are going to move forward. But actually, a lot of the time, people have inner child stuff going on. This means there’s a part of them that still wants life to be like it was when they were younger, where all their needs were met by their parents or the universe or some force bigger than them. Anytime they get reminded that it’s about them taking responsibility for themselves, making choices, and using these universal laws like cause and effect to move through life, they start sulking because they think it’s not fair.

If you keep finding yourself saying that it’s not fair, this is not fair, that’s not fair, and you’re stuck, it’s a good sign that you need to accept reality rather than resisting it or distorting it. Resistance and distortion always come back to the same thing: ego. If you find yourself saying that life is not fair when what you’re really talking about is just the way life is, it’s beyond fair and unfair. It just is what it is. The way forward is to accept it so you can move with it, dissolve that ego, or at least reconfigure it and go to the next level, allowing the shadow to come to the surface.

The final symptom that I want to talk about in this article is EMOTIONAL TURBULENCE.

The final symptom I want to discuss in this article is that when we’re locked in the shadow dance and overly attached to the ego, we’re blocking that natural flow. This results in a lot of emotional turbulence, with many highs and lows. From time to time, we find something that distracts us from being stuck, but it only distracts us at the level of the ego. This means we find something that allows us to feel like our ego is the truth. For that short period, while it lasts, we feel amazing. This is usually due to a short-term distraction that often becomes an addiction, which is a topic for another video.

While we’re distracting ourselves, we feel like everything is working out and the things we’re telling ourselves at the level of the ego are the truth. For example, we might find one thing we think is a panacea for all our problems. It could be anything: our business, a relationship, or even drugs. We find something to put our energy into, alleviating the tension of inner disconnection and blocking the shadow from resurfacing. While this tension is being released, it feels amazing. But what goes up must come down. Eventually, because we’re only rearranging the furniture on the Titanic while it sinks, reality comes crashing back in. When it does, we crash down from the temporary high of whatever we were chasing, back to reality, losing the illusions that kept us in that ego place.

If you find yourself going through cycles where something makes you feel amazing for a short time, and then you crash back down to square one, repeating the cycle, it’s a sign that you’re looking for things that allow you to stay stuck in the ego. To get out of this cycle of emotional turbulence, you need to start facing that shadow stuff, so you can bring the real you to the surface and build on a solid foundation instead of a castle in the sky destined to crash down to reality.

These were the main symptoms, or some of the most common symptoms, of being stuck because you’re blocking your shadow from resurfacing. If you have this problem, one thing that can crack things open for you is finding something bigger than just yourself or your idea of yourself (the ego) to start giving yourself to. This can be anything, but as long as it’s one thing you focus on, it will take you away from the complexity and confusion that the ego brings, giving you a singular focus that draws you out of yourself.

Some examples are a higher power, a cause, your family, or a set of values. Anything that causes you to give yourself in service allows the real you to surface. This involves asking yourself who you need to become to serve in the way you want to serve. If you figure out who you want to become, you can start acting in alignment with that version of yourself, bringing those qualities to the surface. There are many strengths, goals, intentions, values, and emotions within you waiting to come to the surface, making you unstuck.

If you can find a way to serve others while bringing these qualities up, you’ll kill two birds with one stone and live the real life you want to live. It will feel amazing because you’ll be flowing with life instead of against it, no longer locked in this box.

That was an article about freeing yourself from the war against the self—just a dramatic way of saying freeing yourself from blocking yourself at the level of the ego and the shadow. We all need an ego because it helps us survive, but if you become stuck, you become overly attached to a specific version of yourself, probably one you don’t even want to be that attached to. If you notice you’ve become stuck, the way forward is to stop treating the fragments as the whole, detach from the symptoms we discussed, and realize those symptoms are not you. They’re a by-product of a fundamental disconnection from yourself and the natural flow and drive towards wholeness always trying to express itself from within you.

If you can understand that, you can free yourself, start moving again, and there will be no war against the self. You’ll feel a sense of peace because the peace of realness is what happens when you uncover and live the truth.
So that was the video. I hope it helped you. If you are stuck, you can become unstuck by facing the reality of yourself, the world, and reality. If anyone wants to talk about this stuff, you can book a call on my website, Olianderson.co.uk. Talking is just a way of exploring things and figuring out if you can move forward, which of course you can. I hope that helps.

Peace to you and take care,

Emotional Manipulation & Blackmail: How to Stop Being Played & Stay REAL

Published on

Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Relationships

If you don’t read this article, then you’re a terrible human being.

Oh, hi there.

Before we get started with all this, I just want to say that if you don’t read this article, then you’re a terrible human being:

You’re holding back the human race. Your degeneracy and immoral attitude towards life is ultimately ruining society.

And it’s people like you that make life way more difficult than it needs to be.

For the rest of us – the ‘good’ people out here in the world – who are just going about our business being real and so on and so forth….

Oh, wait a second. All of the things I just said were complete horsesh*t. It was my attempt to emotionally manipulate or blackmail you, into reading the rest of this long ass article – that’s because this (emotional manipulation and blackmail) is the theme of what follows.

If you read it, you’re going to become more aware of all of the emotional manipulation going on in the world and in your life, and – more importantly – I’m going to help you to become immune to it by giving you an inoculation, metaphorically speaking, so that you can stop buying into all that bs, stop being manipulated, and live a real life without unnecessary drama and nonsense.

Let’s have at it.

Emotional manipulation involves taking total responsibility for someone else’s feelings.

So before we get into the heavier stuff, let’s begin with a really simple definition of what we mean by emotional manipulation and/or blackmail, which are basically the same thing:

Emotional manipulation and blackmail is any instance of somebody else trying to make you take total responsibility for their feelings, their choices, their expectations, and ideas by turning your feelings against you.

Normally the feelings they’re going to “turn against you” are most likely to be fear, guilt and shame, and they’ll control you by creating some unreal standard of how you should behave, of how you should be, how you should feel.

If you don’t act according to this unreal standard – which is just something that they pulled out of their ass so that they can maintain their ego and not have to change or grow in life – then they’re going to put you on a guilt trip, they’re going to punish you, they’re going to basically make your life a living hell because they want you to take their feelings as your own and be responsible for them, when actually that is total nonsense (because at the end of the day, we’re all responsible for our own feelings).

If you have some kind of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ inside you (again, usually SHAME) that makes you take on board that responsibility, then you’re going to get caught up in the cycle of being emotionally manipulated. And if you want to put an end to that, you need to ask yourself why you’re buying into it. That’s what we’re about to do.

So in this article, we’re really just going to explore why you would accept that responsibility for somebody else’s feelings and choices etc., and why you would live up or try to live up to their unrealistic standards that they have just created in order to control you in the first place (so that they can stay the same and they can watch you dance through hoops and do a whole song and dance, trying to please them so they can feel powerful).

Ultimately, that’s what this is all about: a power dynamic. And the only way that you end up giving away your power is by getting detached from your own realness, your own truth about yourself, and starting to believe some unreal nonsense that can only really belong to your ego.

And so if you can step back from your own ego ‘stuff’ and you can start to see clearly again, then you’re ultimately going to be able to stop feeding into other people’s egos, and that’s going to allow the whole house of cards to fall down.

The only reason that emotional manipulation works is because at some level, you’re choosing to be manipulated. And normally, that’s just so you don’t have to feel uncomfortable – i.e. it’s so you can feel the familiar buzz of being who you currently think you, are.

But if you’re being manipulated, then whatever it is that you think you are is unreal.

And so what you need to do is to flip the script, start being real again, and get your power back; when you do this, you remove the power over whoever it is in your life that’s manipulating you with all of this ‘stuff’.

Now, the bottom line, for the record, is that nobody is responsible for their own feelings and choices apart from themselves.

Except maybe in extreme cases, of course – if somebody’s holding a gun to your head, maybe they can coerce you and make you choose something that you don’t want.

But on a day to day basis, we are all responsible for our own feelings and our own choices.

And that means that anytime somebody tries to pass that ownership on to you, instead of owning their own feelings and choices, you have a choice to make:

You can either stop it in its tracks, or you can try and take it because of your own ego ‘stuff’ and your need to feel approval or love or whatever it is that you think you’re going to get by taking it on board.

In that moment – when you have that choice to make – that is where you have the opportunity to step into your power.

Accepting this fact of life – that we’re all responsible for our own choices and our own feelings – doesn’t mean that we should go around purposely trying to upset people or ruin their lives by upsetting them. It just means that if we’ve been real and we’re going about our lives the best way that we can, chasing our values and our true intentions and all that kind of stuff, we probably will upset at least one or two people along the way (purely because we all have different needs and agendas which is totally fine and healthy).

But as long as we’re not doing that intentionally, we don’t have to fall into the trap of being controlled when people are upset with us being on a real path whilst they’re getting worked up over something unreal in their minds – I’m just putting that out there because even though we’re not responsible for other people’s feelings, we don’t need to purposely annoy people.

But at the same time, we don’t need to get so worked up and upset if we do upset somebody that we allow ourselves to be manipulated.

Emotional manipulation is basically when people try to make you own things that aren’t yours.

So now I’m going to give you three examples of the most common types of emotional manipulation.

Once you’re aware of these, you’re going to see them all over the place because a lot of people are coming at life from a place of ego and they don’t even know that they’re manipulating other people – it’s just a survival mechanism that they’ve picked up to be able to cope in life and get the results that they think want.

And so a lot of the time it’s automatic. It’s not like people are just evil or anything like that. It’s just something that they do because they’ve always done it.

But anyway, as we already said, emotional manipulation is basically when people try and make you own things that aren’t yours, like their feelings and choices, or when they try and get you to be something that you’re not and that you can never be, because what they’re asking you to be is some unreal thing that they’ve concocted because of their own ego stuff and their desire to keep the ego where it is and to not have to face their own stuff and grow real.

So here’s the three examples:

Example #1: Feelings

The first example of emotional manipulation is the feelings thing. It shows up like this:

Somebody will say to you, “If you don’t watch read this article that I wrote, if you don’t walk my dog, if you don’t, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I’m going to be really upset, I’m going to be really angry, I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to jump off a bridge” or whatever it is.

This is their attempt to persuade you that you are responsible for their feelings and what they do with those feelings.

Now if you’re the kind of person who has been conditioned to please everybody, i.e. you’re a people pleaser or a nice guy, whatever you want to call it, this is going to work on you because the most horrifying thing that you can imagine is making somebody feel negative emotions.

Actually, if you put yourself in the position of being responsible for this person’s feelings, or, even worse, show them that you actually will take responsibility by walking their dog or reading their stupid articles so they don’t jump off a bridge, etc. then you’re actually showing them that they can control you in that way.

When you look around you’ll see that this type of manipulation is everywhere:

It comes from our parents, sometimes it comes from our siblings, it comes from our friends -but at the end of the day, you are not responsible for anybody’s feelings except your own.

So even if they do get upset, even if they’re angry, or whatever then it’s not because of something you could or couldn’t do differently, but because of the choices they’re making about their own feelings.

Even in the absolute worst possible case of them going to jump off a bridge, it’s not because you didn’t walk their dog or whatever; it’s because – at some level – they just wanted to do that, which I know sounds really harsh, but the point is that you’re not responsible for their feelings. And if they try and make you feel that way, well…you just got manipulated.

Example #2: Choices

The second example of how manipulation and blackmail of this type shows up is around choices.

It takes place when somebody makes a choice that’s maybe not the best choice, and instead of taking responsibility for it, they try and find a way to blame you.

So maybe, for example, you go for lunch with a friend and they’re on a diet or wherever it is, and during the lunch, they end up just eating loads of calories and going away from the diet plan that they’re on.

After the meal, they start blaming you:

“Oh, my God, I can’t believe you let me order that on the menu. Like, you know, I’m on a diet and blah, blah, blah.”

Or maybe you got another friend who is trying not to drink alcohol, and, you go out and they have a few pints, and then the next day, well, it’s your fault because you let it happen.

Now, maybe you could have tried to talk them out of it if you so desired, but ultimately, that choice was theirs. And as soon as you let them put you on a guilt trip for the choice that they made, well, again… you just got manipulated.

As soon as you start kind of trying to pacify these kinds of people – or put an argument forward as to why you let it happen or why you wish you didn’t let it happen or you show that you feel bad about it or whatever – well, congratulations…you’ve just been manipulated again.

Example #3: Being

The third form of this kind of emotional manipulation is sometimes quite subtle, but it’s also very common, and it happens all over the place.

This is the kind of manipulation I’ve already alluded to where somebody pulls an unrealistic standard out of their bee-hind and then they use that standard against you, even though it’s just something that they concocted because of their own ego.

Once they’ve conjured up this standard, they try and use it as a sort of box that they want you to live in so that they can keep you under control and so that they stay the same (they need the box to avoid facing their own ‘stuff’) – ultimately, what we’re talking about here is a kind of control freakery.

We can safely say that these people are control freaks because they’re filtering life through the ego and the only way that their ego can maintain its hold over them is if you voluntarily put yourself in this kind of a box so that they can stay in their comfort zone.

Ultimately, the way that this box takes shape by demanding that you be something that you’re not.

Three really common examples or, areas where this happens are in relationships, friendships and at work.

So, for example, in relationships, your partner might say, “Right, if you don’t remember every single little detail of my life, then you don’t love me” – and ultimately that’s impossible because nobody can remember every single little detail of somebody’s life (and doing so has nothing to do with love but how good your memory is).

As soon as you buy into this idea and trying living up to it as though it’s actual reality, well, you’re putting yourself up for all kinds of guilt trips. They’re going to be able to control you. They’re going to say, “Well, because you don’t remember every little detail of my life and you don’t love me, you’re going to have to walk my dog and you’re going to have to do this, you’re going to have to do that.”

It’s all bs though and it only maintains its hold over you because you choose to let it.

In friendships, they might say something like, “If you don’t lend me £1000 (or whatever) you’re not a real friend” – and the box, ultimately, is shaped by this definition of “a real friend”.

That’s what all of these kinds of thing are about in relation to how you should “be”:

They create a label that is ultimately a mask for all kinds of bs that you can never live up to but that you’re required to live up to in order to receive emotional validation. If you don’t know that you can give yourself this validation then you’ll be ensnared in the trap.

That’s really the whole point of these labels and ‘standard’ from the POV of the manipulator/blackmailer:

You’re not supposed to be able to live up to it because if you can, they’re not going to have anything to moan about and manipulate you with.

Anyway, so, in the ‘friendship’ thing, this kind of manipulation shows up like this:

“If you don’t call me every night and listen to me talk about all my problems nonstop, you’re not a real friend.”

“If you don’t drop all of your plans, you’re not a real friend.”

Basically, the box is the idea of a “real friend” and they can come up with all kinds of highfalutin ideas about what it means to live in that box. But actually, you don’t want to live in the box. That’s the whole point. You want to get out of it.

The third thing is, third example here is at work, your boss might say, “If you don’t work on a Saturday, then you’re not going to get that promotion. You’re not a good employee”, or “If you don’t stay and do overtime, even though it’s not in your contract, then you obviously don’t care about this place, and you’re not part of the family here in the workplace, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”.

It’s all nonsense. They’re saying that you should be a certain thing so that you can live up to their standards and climb into another one of those ‘boxes’.

As soon as you try to be whatever that is, instead of realising that it’s just pure nonsense and refusing to feed into it, then you’ve been manipulated.

In all of these cases, emotional manipulation only works if you let it – whether it’s about taking responsibility for their feelings, their choices, or trying to live up to being some unreal standard just so that their ego can maintain its hold over them, the solution in all cases is the same, and it’s very simple:

Don’t feed into it with your own ego.

The only reason you’d buy into this kind of manipulation is because your ego is causing you to believe something unreal, and so, the solution, as always – because “REAL ALWAYS WORKS” – is to step back, find your realness, and to ground yourself in something true.

And as soon as you do that, you’re no longer pouring gasoline on the fire by allowing your ego to meet their ego.

Now, often if you resist – in fact, usually if you resist – the next level after the initial manipulation is that they’re going to try and punish you:

They might make threats or they might give you the silent treatment. They might call you all kinds of names. They might constantly put you on a guilt trip and try to make you feel bad.

We could fill a whole thick book with examples of the kind of punishment that these manipulators are going to try and enforce upon you if you don’t buy into the manipulation… but in all cases, the solution is the same and it’s simply to just not feed into it.

As soon as somebody gives you the silent treatment, for example, and you start chasing after them and trying to beseech them and get down on your knees and beg that they start talking to you again, all you’ve done is managed to show them that the manipulation is working.

In other words, any attempts to appease them by giving them what they want is only going to make the situation worse.

So let’s take a quick look at how by just being REAL you can give yourself an immunization to the emotional manipulation and black by not feeding it.

Don’t feed the Gremlin.

“Do not feed the gremlin” – this is the lesson to remember next.

The solution to the problem of emotional manipulation is always to find your realness again.

I know that sounds simplistic, but the only way that you can be manipulated is because you had a moment of being unreal that taught whoever is manipulating you how to press your buttons – and if you have a button that can be pressed, it simply means that you have some unresolved shame or guilt – or even trauma (in the most extreme cases) – around something that whenever it’s pressed causes you to react in an unreal way.

The mechanics behind this are simple:

Every time that button is pressed, it’s ultimately just causing your emotions to send your ego kicking into gear – once this has been triggered you’re going to feed into the ego dance between yourself and the manipulator where you’re engaged in the power battle we talked about for being responsible for their feelings, their choices, and being whatever it is that they say you should be – so that they can finally approve of you and make you feel good (when if you focus on being REAL, you can naturally feel good about yourself anyway without them giving you the approval and validation and all that kind of stuff).

And so, what I’m saying is that you need to take the power back by realising that the only person who can press your buttons is you – and you can only do that by facing the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ that is causing those buttons to be ‘pressable’ in the first place.

There are a few strategies here that can help you in relation to these emotional manipulators and they’re all very simple:

The overarching strategy is what I’ve already said:

Don’t feed the Gremlin.

If you realise that somebody is emotionally manipulating you, then the best thing to do is to ignore them. If somebody is giving you the silent treatment, for example, ignore them right back until they cool off and come back.

Let them go off and be silent and brood and do whatever it is that they’re doing – just don’t chase after them. That’s the worst thing you can do.

If somebody is giving you the whole spiel about how if you don’t do a certain thing, then you’re not a “good friend” or a “good lover” or a “good employee” or whatever else, let them think that and don’t be shaken from yourself.

“So be it. Okay, then. I’m not a good lover. I’m not a good friend. I’m not a good employee. Oh, my God, the world is going to crumble around me.”

Not.

(Because the standard that they’re holding you accountable to is not real).

And so, ultimately, this is always the best policy: Just ignore them. Let them get on with it.

Don’t feed the Gremlin.

That will show you that they actually have no power over you – because by ignoring it, you’re kind of going to flip the script.

If they really do care about you, deep down, they’re going to have to come back to you and change the whole dynamic of the relationship by communicating in a different way and looking at how their behaviour is only serving their ego and not the relationship.

If they don’t? Well, remember the sacred mantra:

“Gimme something REAL or GTFO”.

So that’s the ultimate way to avoid the manipulation. Just ignore it and don’t feed that gremlin.

If you got some ego stuff going on, that’s going to be hard. You’re going to have a little voice in your head saying, “Oh, help me Lord, I can’t believe I’m ignoring this person. I’m a bad person”.

Or, you’ll have another niggling voice saying, “Oh, Heaven’s above, what if I am a bad lover? What if I am a bad friend?”

No. That voice is your conditioning but you’ve confused it for your conscience. It’s the ego.

If you’re coming from a place of wholeness and you care about that person and you’re there for them, but you still care about yourself and your own life, that doesn’t make you a bad anything – it means you have healthy boundaries (shock! horror!).

You’re a human being, and there’s no point trying to live up to these UNREAL standards that people create so that they can manipulate you for their own shame-driven reasons (don’t judge them, though, just ignore them and don’t feed the gremlin)!

You can set boundaries or walk away if someone is manipulating you.

The other two things that you can do are:

One, you can just say “No!” and set the boundaries.

Boundaries always begin by saying “No” to the unreal ‘stuff’ and “Yes” to the REAL.

You might have to say it a few times but eventually they’ll get the message…

There’s a famous technique in assertiveness training called the ‘Broken Record Technique’ where you literally just say the same line every time.

So if somebody says to you, for example, “Go walk my dog or I’m going to jump off a bridge”, you can say, “Well, look, I really don’t want you to jump off a bridge because I love you and I care about you, but I’m not going to walk your dog right now because I have to go focus on my own thing and do some yoga or whatever.”

Then they’ll come back at you with more manipulation, “Oh, you don’t love me, blah, blah, blah. You want me to jump off a bridge”.

Just say the same thing (like a broken record):

“Well, actually I really don’t want you to jump off a bridge because I really love you and I think you’re an amazing person. But I have to go do this other thing right now. Sorry about that.”

The other thing you can do is to remember the super ultimate mantra that comes into play in all relationships, which is the one I mentioned above:

“Gimme something real or GTFO”.

If somebody is only ever manipulating you and your attempts to not buy into it or to set boundaries don’t work, then you’re actually allowed to just walk away.

And maybe when you do walk away, they’ll reflect and they’ll realise that they need to change their way of doing things – or maybe you’ll never see them again, but it’s better to be alone than in unreal company.

If you know that and you have an abundance mindset – which means you can understand there are other opportunities out there and that you don’t have to put up with this kind of treatment – life gets way easier and more real as you’ll remove unnecessary drama from your life.

So in the face of manipulation and blackmail you can either:

Ignore it by remembering not to feed the gremlin and so it loses it’s power.
You can say “No” and set boundaries (which may make things worse depending on the person).
You can just GTFO and go find someone who actually appreciates you and isn’t going to manipulate you.

Three reasons why people may not step into their realness in the face of emotional manipulation:

So I want to finish this article with three main reasons why people may not step into their realness and end this cycle of manipulation that they may have found themselves in.

These are really common reasons, and if you understand them, it’s going to give you that awareness to be able to make that choice to step into something real and not keep going around in circles trying to please somebody who can never ever be pleased.

The bottom line with all this is that manipulators and blackmailers can’t be pleased – they’re a black hole of shame that has consumed them:

They don’t want to be pleased. They want to manipulate you so they can feel powerful – and if you understand that, it’s going to make it easier to step into your realness and be who you need to be.

The first reason that stops a lot of people ending this cycle of emotional manipulation is that they have unresolved shame and guilt themselves (they’re shame-driven people, ultimately, and so they don’t know how to be real because the opposite of realness is ego which is always fuelled by shame).

If you have guilt, you’re going to be really easy to control, because guilt is ultimately just a useless case of some external voice infiltrating our brains and telling us that there’s something wrong with us because we’re not doing this or we’re not doing that (shame, in contrast, is about there something ‘wrong’ with your being itself – always unreal!).

If you’re carrying guilt like this, then you’re ultimately going to have buttons that can be pressed.

And it’s the same with shame:

If you have feelings of worthlessness or that you’re not good enough, it means that you don’t accept yourself and that you’re avoiding something inside your experience of who you are that’s causing these buttons to be ‘pressable’ in the first place. And so actually, the solution is to face those unresolved emotions.

Normally, what happens when people face them, they finally (after years of avoidance) just look at them head on, is they dissolve. It’s the resistance that causes them to linger in the first place. And we resist them by hiding behind our own egos.

As soon as we take the ego out of the equation and we take a good long look at what’s going on inside us, those buttons can no longer be pressed, because the buttons mean that we’re resisting something.

When we turn inwards and we face the truth about who we are, we are going to be way less likely to be ‘manipulatable’, because people will still try and press the buttons, but – like I said earlier – we now realise that the power of the button is in our hands.

That’s the most important thing to remember:

You can only be manipulated if your buttons can be pressed; your buttons can only be pressed if you’re resisting something; the power to face things is always in your hands.

So you can avoid all kinds of external ‘button pressing’ by staying grounded in your realness and by understanding what’s making those buttons ‘pressable’ in the first place.

All you need to do is start finding ways to make whatever you’re resisting dissolve, which always means bringing the truth into our lives, allowing the unconscious to become conscious.

Once you do this, you’ll be free of your own inner fragmentation whilst also being free of the external fragmentation in the form of these relationships where you get endlessly manipulated until you reclaim your power.

The second thing that stops people from staying real – being grounded in their realness in the face of these emotional manipulators, and either ignoring what they’re doing (ignoring the silent treatment, for example, or walking away, or setting a boundary) – is a fear of conflict.

They’re worried that if they go back to being real, then the unreal person in this situation – the emotional manipulator – is going to do something that the real person, or the person trying to break the cycle, can’t tolerate – or is going to cause them to be in a situation where they feel lonely, or they feel bad about themselves, or whatever it is.

When this happens it’s actually just a sign that you (the person being manipulated/blackmailed in this scenario) don’t have an abundance mindset.

For example, maybe you’re in a relationship and somebody is constantly manipulating you and you’ve tried to set the boundary or whatever it is, and you’re ready to step up – to actually call them out on it – but you’re worried that they’re going to end the relationship if you do.

Well… that’s because you have a scarcity mindset.

An abundance mindset would show you that if they do end the relationship, maybe that’s for the best.

Because why would you want to be in a relationship with someone that’s manipulating you all the time, even after you set boundaries and expressed what’s REAL to you?

It’s the same with a friendship:

If you have a friend who’s always taking the p*ss and trying to send you on a guilt trip or whatever it is…

Maybe, for example, you call attention to it and they say, “Right, that’s it, F you, I’m not your friend anymore” and they disappear.

Is this a ‘bad’ thing or have they just done you a favour?

The same with a job:

Obviously, jobs and our ability to pay the bills and stuff are intertwined – but, at the end of the day, if you tell your boss that you’re sick of this emotional manipulation and he says, “Right, that’s it – you’re fired!”

Well, s/he’s just done you a favour as well – but if you have a scarcity mindset, you’re not going to realise that you can go replace these things – your unreal relationships, ‘friendships’, employment situations, or whatever they are – and because you’re probably replacing them with something better or more REAL, well…it’s nothing to worry about.

It just means some short term discomfort as you rearrange the fabric of your life and go from unreal to real.

The third main reason that stops people from breaking the cycle of emotional manipulation by being real is that they actually have empathy and compassion for the person manipulating them.

Now, empathy and compassion, we all like those things, right?

Obviously, it’s very important to have them.

But in this case of dealing with an emotional manipulator, empathy and compassion are actually your enemies. They just make the situation worse.

For example, if you start telling yourself a story like “this person is manipulating me because they had a difficult childhood”, or “they’re going through a lot of stress at the moment”, or whatever it is, you’re actually making your life more difficult, because by doing that, it’s going to change your thinking and feeling in that way is going to change your behaviour towards the person and you’re going to cave into the manipulations.

In a strange way, the empathy and compassion are just going to make you more easy to manipulate in this kind of scenario.

What you need to do is remind yourself that manipulators are human beings too:

We can have sympathy for them and understand that, “Okay, life is difficult and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”, but we need to remember that you can’t pour from an empty cup, and so if you’re putting them before yourself in this situation, you’re just going to keep being manipulated because you’re showing them that you are going to submit to them and their manipulations. In other words, the cycle is never going to end.

This doesn’t make you a ‘bad’ person. It just means you may have to be a little bit emotionally reserved so that you don’t give into their ego ‘stuff’ and whatever sob story comes with it because – the moment that you do – you’re giving your power over to them.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t be compassionate in life – it just means that in this particular case, if you’re too compassionate towards someone that’s manipulating you, you’re just giving them permission to keep doing it.

So that’s ultimately all I need to say for now:

Emotional manipulation is a power struggle. “Power” is the key word because the only way that you can give away your power is by giving into illusions, which means that your ego is in control instead of your realness.

As soon as you do that, you meet the ego of the manipulator with your own ego because of your own unconscious shame and guilt and trauma and all these kind of things, then you’re just going to keep this cycle, this dance of emotional manipulation going by feeding the gremlin.

You can end the cycle at any time by just being real and not feeding into it – but to do that, you have to really be grounded in your realness because the manipulator is going to challenge you:

They’re going to try and make things worse. They’re going to push those buttons more and more and more.

But if you just stay real and you stay grounded, it’s almost impossible to be manipulated.

After reading this (long ass) article you know that there’s people trying to make you responsible for their feelings and their choices – or that they’re trying to get you to be something you never can be.

You’re going to see this all over the place. And it’s not just between people in ‘real’ life:

You turn on the TV, someone’s going to be manipulating you; you’re scrolling through your social media, some influencer is going to be trying to manipulate you – it’s everywhere.

But no matter where you’re experiencing this, it’s always the same:

You’re either being unreal because your ego is feeding into it, or you’ve been real and you can just keep flowing and do your own thing without any of this bs holding you back – making you feel bad, or just getting in the way of living a real life and being who you really are – not who they’re demanding that you to be because of their own ‘stuff’.

Stay real out there,

If you want to grow into your REALNESS then either book a call with me or sign-up for my free 7-Day course in REALNESS and life purpose.

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Embracing WRONGNESS: How Being ‘Wrong’ Can Set You Right

Published on

Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

Being ‘wrong’ may be exactly what you’re looking for…this article will help you understand why.

Oh, hi there.

In this article, we’re going to explore how being ‘wrong’ is actually a good thing that can free you from the ideas you hold about yourself that are holding you back from life so that you can evolve into your REALNESS and the person that you were born to be

When you truly embrace being ‘wrong’ in this way, you can step into your potential, have better relationships with other people, and feel the sense of tranquillity and peace that comes from letting go of the need to control everything through being ‘right’ all the time.

When you embrace being ‘wrong’ in this way, you’ll find that you’re not constantly forcing life through control freakery and manipulation in an attempt to bend everything to your will, (which is probably wrong anyway) and you can just relax into you true humanity – in other words, you can just allow yourself to be a REAL human being who is limited in understanding and is humble enough to not attempt to be omniscient omnipotent (that’s EGO).

So the short-version of all this is that if you can just get over yourself – sorry to say – and start being ‘wrong’, I can pretty much guarantee that life is going to be way better because you’re going to be aligned with REALITY instead of forcing yourself against it and bringing unnecessary friction, frustration, and misery into your life.

Let’s go.

Socrates: “I know that I know nothing”.

So somebody like me popping up and saying that we should be wrong isn’t actually a new thing. That’s because “there is nothing new under the sun” and the human condition has always been the human condition as long as human beings have been around – and not one of us mortals – in the whole of human history – has ever been right about everything. Ever.

The most famous quote that sums this up is Socrates, the Greek philosopher. He said (quoted by Plato): “True wisdom is knowing that I know nothing.”

That’s a good way to say it. It might be a little bit extreme because we all know a little bit of something. Like, for example, I know that I need a haircut. I know that the weather outside is pretty ‘bad’ right now. So I do know something.

Either way, the point stands that if we think we know everything, then maybe we do know nothing, or we don’t know enough. Because only if you know that you don’t know everything can you truly know something and align yourself with the truth of our life. And so ultimately, I think Socrates was right: Wisdom is knowing that we don’t know everything. Let’s say it like that.

No matter who you are or what you’ve experienced, there’s always more to learn and the things you think you may know could eventually turn out to be wrong so the most REAL approach is to remain open-minded.

What we think we ‘know’ and happen to be ‘right’ about is usually just conceptual ideas and interpretations that we’ve created about life on the best judgments that we have according to the greatest understanding that we have – but because conceptual knowledge is just made of concepts and concepts are not reality itself there’s always going to be limits and we’re never going to be 100% ‘right about things. That’s just the human condition, I guess.

The thing about ‘concepts’ is that can either point you towards reality or away from it – they can never be reality itself (which we can only know through EXPERIENCE, not concepts).

For example, the concept ‘dog’ points to a thing that exists in the world; the concept ‘unicorn’ points to something that just isn’t real, although we can imagine them anyway. The point here is if we’re just trying to interpret life through our interpretations and conceptual knowledge, then we’re always going to be limited.

But for some reason, even though we all often like to believe that wisdom is one of the keys to happiness, we sometimes act in a way where we’re not being wise, according to Socrates’ definition, because we’re acting like we know everything, which is always going to cause problems.

So here’s why:

The bottom line is that human beings can’t know everything. It’s literally impossible because the truth itself is whole but we are fragmented. We’re in fragmented bodies on a fragmented planet, swimming through a fragmented relationship with time, space, and causality – if you want to get into all that.

That means that, by definition, we’re always going to be ‘wrong’ about something – we could even go so far as to say that it’s just our nature to be wrong (and that’s fine…it’s what makes life interesting and keeps us learning and evolving).

And, even if we do just grasp something that seems true through our conceptual understanding, then life just keeps moving anyway, and the STATIC concepts in our head are inherently conflicted with the way that reality is in FLUX all around us. In practical terms, this just means that there’s a very high chance that the concepts we’re using to make ‘sense’ of life are pretty much guaranteed to eventually be out of date, and then we’re just going to be back where we started: being ‘wrong’.

And so, actually, if you’re out there plodding through life like you’ve got everything figured out and that you’re ‘right’ about everything, like I often do, then something has gone horribly wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. And the reason it’s gone horribly wrong is because it is our nature to be wrong about things – and so if we think we’re right about everything, we are literally going against our own realness.

We’re not accepting who we are. We’re not accepting life. We’re not accepting the world. We’ve taken ourselves out of the natural, REAL flow of things – which means that we keep moving, we keep evolving, and, by extension, we have to keep learning. And, that means that we will realise we were wrong and that we can go deeper into understanding the things that we already think we know.

And so if we take ourselves out of that process, we’re actually removing ourselves or distancing ourselves from our humanity and from our realness. And actually, that’s what this is all about:

The best way for human beings to feel ‘good’ is to be aligned with our realness – with our natural flow of constant growth and evolution and movement towards WHOLENESS.

If we stop moving with that NATURAL DRIVE towards wholenes or we stunt our growth and stagnate because we keep putting these conceptual blocks in our own path and try to be ‘right’ about them and defend them, then we’re going to have a really ‘bad’ time.

And so, as per usual, it all comes down to the same old problem:

What is that same old problem?

Well, you guessed it, boys and girls, it’s the EGO.

The ego is the illusion of separation, the illusion of disconnection. And in relation to what we’re talking about, the illusion of stasis, the idea that for some bizarre reason, even though everything that’s real continues to move and ebb and flow and to keep changing, we fight to stay the same.

And the more we cling to that static picture of who we are, what we think the world is, what we think reality is – the more we cling to that – the harder things get for us, because we put in friction between ourselves and life.

But even though it’s hard, so many of us try and cling to this static picture because we don’t want to face all of the ‘stuff’ going on beneath the surface that the natural unfolding and changes in life are going to cause us to face as the unconscious becomes conscious and we have to take a good look at ourselves so we can become whole again.

As a kind of COPING MECHANISM, we create these points of view, these systems of thought – these ideologies – that are ultimately an extension of the ego. And that is actually the main (and perhaps only) problem.

When people are obsessed with being ‘right’, what they’re actually doing is trying to defend a point of view that they’ve created, which is an extension of the thing that’s causing them to be miserable in the first place (because they think they need for survival).

People always talk about how the ego is a survival thing that we evolved for protection and this is true – it helped us to survive whatever we’ve been through in the past and the emotional pain that we weren’t ready to face at that time. – in addition to this, though, the points of view that we attach to – like our political views and whatever else – are more often than not, if we’re obsessed and fixated with them being ‘right’, an extension of the same old ego.

A point of view ultimately, in this sense, is just the ego’s way of working its way through the world and interacting with the world so that it can maintain its hold over us. And so what I’m saying is that when people are so obsessed with being ‘right’, they’re not actually bothered about the truth; they’re bothered about protecting the ego so they don’t have to change.

This is why it’s important to be wrong and to be open to being wrong, because if you’re not – if you’re going around through life just trying to be ‘right’ about everything – you think that you’re protecting yourself, but actually all you’re doing is protecting the ego, which is the only thing making you miserable in the first place.

And so, paradoxically, perhaps, by being WRONG, you can have some short-term discomfort, sure, but you can also free yourself from this idea, this parasite that has wrapped itself around your psyche and that is holding you back from real life.

So the short version of all that is that the more you need your point of view to be ‘right’, or the more you need other people to believe that your point of view is right – and to come to your way of thinking – the more you’re basically trying to convince yourself that it’s true because, at some level, you don’t actually believe it because it only really exists because of the fundamental state of disconnection within yourself – because of fragmentation, because of the shame, guilt, and/or trauma that have caused you to create a little ego version of yourself and to put that out into the world.

If you understand that, you can realise that, “Okay, if I want to be happy, if I want to feel peace, if I want to be tranquil, blah, blah, blah, I can step back from all that bullshit.

I can be open to the fact that I might be wrong, and I can realise that, actually, all of my opinions and all of my points of view and so on and so forth, they’re not ME or that I am. They’re just something that I have.

And if I can see that, and I can get a better relationship to the truth, then I can solve a lot of problems in my life.”

Because most of the bullshit going on out there in the world, if you look around you, is just people arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong. But it’s all nonsense.

Here’s a little secret about life (if you want to use a dramatic word like secret):

It’s not really a secret, but anyway, this thing that I’m about to share is this: The truth is the truth.

Wow. That’s deep, right?

But what it means is that the truth doesn’t change. Nobody has ever argued about the truth. Nobody can argue about the truth. Throughout all of human history, the billions and billions of dead people – and there are more dead people than living people (just throwing that out there) – but anyway, throughout human history, nobody has ever argued about the truth.

Which may sound weird at first, but when you think about it, the only thing we can argue about is our interpretations of the truth. Our opinions of the truth, our understanding of the truth, none of those things are the truth itself.

None of our attempts to defend the truth have any effect on the truth itself

None of the arguments that we have, nor any of our attempts to defend what we think is the truth – or to shatter other people’s visions of the truth because we disagree with it – none of that stuff has any effect on the truth itself.

And so if you can understand that, the ‘secret’, it actually allows you to kind of step back and to relax because you realise there’s two different levels:

1) There’s the level of fragmentation and all the opinions and the arguments and etc. going on out there in the world. And then there’s: 2) just the truth itself – which is just there truthing along without anything impacting it or anything affecting it. The truth is just the truth – all of these circles we run around in trying to be ‘right’ and to make other people wrong, they have no effect on it whatsoever.

And even if you think you do have the truth, even if you did have the truth, you wouldn’t need to waste time defending it and trying to be ‘right’ about it, because it doesn’t need defending, because nothing can change it, nothing can hurt it, nothing can have any impact on it whatsoever.

You either accept it and you’re happy or you don’t accept it, and then you spend your life arguing about whatever you think is the substitute for it, and then you get miserable. And it’s really that simple.

The truth does not need defending. The truth does not need you going out there running around trying to be ‘right’ about it. All you’re doing is fighting for your interpretations and your ego. But the truth is the truth.

So that was very philosophical. But what does it mean? How do you use this information to be happier in life, to be more real?

Well, it’s really simple:

It just means that you have to stay aware – you have to monitor yourself, so to speak. And anytime you find yourself getting overly emotional and trying to be ‘right’ or trying to persuade other people, well, you’re not actually on about the truth; you’re not trying to bring more truth into the equation – you’re trying to defend your ego.

And if we’re real with ourselves, like we’ve already said, the ego is the main source of all the problems in our life anyway. And so whenever you think that you’re on some kind of a CRUSADE to defend the truth and you’re getting overly emotional about it, well, because the truth doesn’t need defending, and all of your emotional outbursts and so on and so forth have literally zero effect on it, you can step back and you can remind yourself, “Okay, it’s my ego here that I’m actually trying to defend”.

And – maybe, if you’re lucky – that will be enough to make you stfu. So you can actually just breathe again and remember that you’re not going to change anything anyway, because no one cares if you’re ‘right’ apart from you.

This also means that you don’t really need to invest energy in defending your opinions. That’s counterintuitive to some people, because we think the more vociferous we are about our opinions, the more other people are going to come on board and think that we’re ‘right’.

If we we’re driven by underlying shame – which is often what causes us to need the ego to be true in the first place – then we feel like if we can get others to just believe that we’re right, then some of that shame is going to be diminished and we’ll feel better about ourselves.

But, actually, it doesn’t need to be that way – because if you think about it, if you really believe that your opinions are true – if you truly, truly believe it – you don’t care what other people think.

That sounds a bit arrogant, maybe, but you just don’t. It doesn’t matter what other people think though: you’re aware that what you believe is true because you’ve had some experience beyond the conceptual. And so it doesn’t matter if other people say you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter if other people think you’re right. You just know the truth.

And so maybe you’ll put it out there in conversation, and you’ll share it with people, and you’ll have a dialogue and all that kind of stuff – normal human behaviour. But if somebody disagrees, you can either calmly say, “Well, actually, I think this”, or you can just smile and nod and then go about your life knowing that you’re aligned with the truth anyway, but also knowing that you might not be (and if you’re not, that’s fine, because maybe you’ll learn some other stuff, maybe you won’t).

Either way, there’s no point wasting time arguing about things when you can just be living the truth that you think you found to the greatest extent possible.

A quote that I love throwing out there is by the physicist David Bohm. He has this book called On Dialogue where he says something like, “Your opinions are not something that you are, they’re something that you have.”

They’re not something that you, are. They’re something that you have. And I think that’s a really great quote because it just reminds you to kind of step back.

If somebody is disagreeing with you or saying that your opinion is stupid or that it’s wrong or whatever else, well, that’s fine, because they’re saying it about your opinion, which is just a conceptual idea that you’ve picked up to make sense of life. They’re not saying it about YOU.

If you can remember this and you can take your ego out of the equation, once again, you realise that you actually don’t have to take disagreement or anything like that personally, because what’s real about you is always real: you can’t add to it, you can’t remove from it, because it’s a state of WHOLENESS – and so whether your opinions are aligned with the truth or not, well, it doesn’t matter because you’re still real.

If you need to be ‘right’ all the time, then you just have some kind of a block between you and life. And if you’re open to being ‘wrong’, you can ensure that that block diminishes in its power over you, and then things are just going to be better.

So I just want to put that out there: Your opinions are something that you have, not something that you are. And if you understand that, you can free yourself because you can be wrong, and then you’re going to be aligned with life.

3 ways to align yourself with REAL life by finding your own ‘wrongness’

Here are three things that you can do so that you can align yourself with your own realness by being wrong and using that wrongness to develop a closer relationship to the truth (which sounds weird and paradoxical and maybe like bullshit, but I promise that’s how it works):

The first thing you can do is exactly what we just said: Don’t take things personally.

The only reason you take things personally is because you, are lapsing into control freakery – because you need your ego to be the truth – and any disagreement is basically threatening the scaffolding that your whole ego rests upon and you’re terrified that it’s going to come falling down and you’ll just be like an empty husk of a human being.

But actually, if the ego disappears, you become more real. So anyway, don’t take it personally because it’s just an opinion.

The second thing is to remember that if you’re wrong in life, then it’s going to allow you to learn something new. And if you keep learning, well, ideally, unless you’re fooling yourself, the only thing that you can learn is more about the truth – you can go deeper into it, and then you’re going to have a solid foundation to grow real and it’s just better.

The third thing is just to remember that nothing really matters anyway. If you’re right with your opinions, okay, that’s cool. If you’re wrong, well, that’s fine as well.

But ultimately it’s all just ebb and flow, and we’re all going to die one day anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

So that’s ultimately all I need to say in this article – there is nothing wrong with being wrong.

In fact, there’s actually a lot right with being wrong because by being wrong, you can align yourself more closely with the truth and then – because you get out of the ego – you get into the flow of life, and you keep evolving and expanding in a real way that allows you to be more connected to yourself and have better relationships with other people because you’re not going around in circles arguing about things that they don’t really care about.

At the end of the day, most people are not interested in changing their opinions for all of the reasons we talked about – and so, you can ultimately just release yourself from a lot of the unnecessary friction and stress and nonsense that goes on out there in the world about people being obsessed with being ‘right’, because they think that being right somehow makes them a better person.

It doesn’t, which is weird to hear, perhaps because our whole lives we’ve been learning things in school by rote and things like that – thinking that we have to pass our tests and everything, picking up all these facts and stuff like that.

Obviously, it is better to be ‘right’ if you can be, because then you’ve got, the truth on your side to some extent. But what I’m saying is it doesn’t matter that much – or not as much as everyone makes out – because we can always learn more.

All I know is that I know nothing.

If You Argue With an Idiot, It Makes You an Idiot.

The final thing I suppose I want to say here is that there’s an old saying – I don’t know who said it.

They say “If you argue with an idiot, it makes you an idiot”.

This is just a reminder that if you find yourself out there and somebody comes up to you and they’re trying to be ‘right’ about everything, then don’t argue with them. Just let them think that they are right, because there’s no way you’re going to persuade them otherwise anyway and it’s just going to drive you mad.

It’s going to be a waste of time. And arguing with an idiot makes you an idiot, so it’s kind of a dumb thing to do.

And if you are the idiot – no offense – that’s going out there trying to be ‘right’ about everything….well, ask yourself “Why?”.

The answer is almost always going to come down to the same thing: ego ‘stuff’, underlying shame and a need to control life because you’re scared to leap into the great unknown of uncertainty and find out who you really are.

I hope that helps you if you needed it. I know it might be wrong in many ways. That’s cool. But, hope it helps. If anyone wants to talk to me about any of this stuff or anything else, book a call or click the WhatsApp button on this article and you can send me a message.

Let go and grow real!

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Sexual Transmutation and Vision: Harnessing Your Inner Fire

Published on

Creativity/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Relationships/Shadow Life

The transmutation of sexual creative energy for REALNESS in life and relationships.

Oh, hi there.

In this short article we’re going to explore the idea of sexual alchemisation or transmutation – what it is and what you can do to make the most of it.

Now, that might sound really pretentious, and quite grandiloquent, but all it really means is that you take your energy, which can be either ‘negative’ or ‘positive’, and you ultimately transmute or transform it so that the energy becomes something that is going to carry you where you need to be in life.

Now, you can actually do this with any kind of emotional, energetic thing that’s going on inside you, but it means that you have to work with it in a REAL way (surprise, surprise – REAL ALWAYS WORKS) – it also means that you need to know where you’re going to be directing those energetic impulses and instincts and so on in the first place.

I’ve seen a lot of people make the mistake of trying to be really mindful, shall we say, with their emotional ‘stuff’, but actually, they don’t have anywhere to send it – so it just ends up causing more problems, because it just ends up ricocheting within their experience of themselves, causing inner friction, and then stopping them from moving forward, because it just exacerbates all of the emotional problems and bullshit and stuff that they got going on inside.

In other words:

Unless we learn to control our creative/sexual energy by channelling it into something real, then it becomes DESTRUCTIVE.

Anyway, a really simple example of what I’m talking about is the idea of sexual transmutation.

Now, “sexual transmutation” really sounds kind of esoteric if you’re not familiar with the term, but all it means is that you hold your sexual energy and you learn to control your sexual energy and to direct your sexual energy so that it doesn’t end up ruining your life.

And all that means, ultimately, is that instead of reacting to it, instead of reacting to any horny impulse or urge that arises within you, you actually learn to kind of stop and to be mindful and, to respond to what’s going on inside of you in relation to how you want the outside of you to eventually look.

Now, I do this all the time in my own life. I’ve been doing this for about ten years. The way that it shows up for me just means that I don’t really jerk off – sorry if that’s too much information for some of you, but, basically, that just means I don’t jerk off, don’t look at porn, any of that stuff.

Instead, I just hold my energy until I’m actually having sex with another human being. Or – if I’m not – well, I’m using that energy as a kind of electric undercurrent, which I direct into all of the things that I’m doing in my life so that I can be more creative, more energetic, more buzzed up, and feel more alive as I’m moving forward and getting where I want to be.

I really think and have found that saving and working with our sexual energy allows us to live in alignment with the unforced rhythms of life itself and to work with it, instead of against it.

Because, actually, one mistake that I think a lot of people make when it comes to these ideas is that they try to control their energy, but they don’t really have a plan for where it’s going – and that makes it a lot harder for them, like I think said, because it just ends up causing you to have all this inner friction and this inner resistance, because you’re just holding all of this ‘stuff’ inside you and you don’t have an outlet for it (this is because we fear the energy and so we hold it without using it).

In other words, once again, without a creative outlet, your energy will destroy your life.

And so, eventually, you’re just going to drive yourself mad and probably fail in your endeavour to hold on to the sexual energy in the first place.

Of course, you can’t literally hold onto it because it’s always moving. And that’s why you need to do something with it. You need to create something.

And, ultimately, all I want to say here is that you can make life a million times easier and more REAL for yourself if you’re trying to transmute any of the energy inside you – and it doesn’t just have to be sexual stuff:

It can be your anger; it can be your aggression; it can be your drive – i.e. your natural drive to be alive and to experience things. All of these things and more are in there calling to you and trying to direct your life.

If you stop and pause and treat it as a kind of wild horse that needs to be tamed so you can then ride it wherever you need to be, if you can do that, then you will actually grow as a person exponentially.

Not only will you grow REAL but your life will be a lot better as well, because you’re not just a slave to your body and your drives. You’re taking them where you want to go.

Two Paths to Sexual Transmutation: Vision & Intimacy

There are two ways that you can direct the energy:

One is that you direct it into your life in the way that I was kind of talking about – that just means you do all the stuff I’ve talked about a million times already on this website and in my books, or in my free course, the Personality Transplant for Realness & Life Purpose, which is that you create a vision for yourself, then you break it down into goals, then you break it down into habits, and then – every day – you’re transmuting your energy into the structure that you build around this.

When you do this you’ll find yourself seeing things grow over time and the creative sexual energy is being used as something that serves your life, not just something that pops up in your life, randomly here and there, and which takes you off the path that you want to be on.

So that’s one way, right? You have a vision, and you move yourself towards it through inspired action day-after-day.

There is one little caveat which is this: you can’t just choose a random vision. You have to kind of go through a process of raising Awareness of who you are, what you truly value, and what you’re all about, how life works, all that stuff.

Accepting yourself unconditionally and then taking inspired Action are the next steps after this Awareness raising (Awareness, Acceptance, and Action works every time).

You don’t just want to take action for the sake of it, because that becomes a distraction – it needs to be inspired action, which means it’s real to you, and it’s going to allow you to move towards wholeness.

Another way of describing the process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action is that first you need to deconstruct your ego ‘stuff’ (Awareness).

This just means that you look at your identity and how it’s holding you back. If you want to do that, check out the course I just mentioned, the Personality Transplant. Or check out my book, Personal Revolutions, which is about deconstructing the ego in great detail.

The second step – after you’ve kind of looked at your ego stuff and how that is affecting you – is to see what parts of yourself the ego has been hiding from view.

What we’re talking about here is about Integrating the Shadow Self – the way that this works is you get shamed when you’re younger, or you may feel guilty or traumatised, whatever, and then you create this little box to live in as a reaction to that, the ego.

But when you do that, you disown so many parts of yourself, and you need to bring those parts up and start facing them and accepting them unconditionally before you create a vision for your life if you want that vision to be REAL.

The goals is to bring the Shadow Self to the surface as much as possible and start accepting yourself and life unconditionally – only then you can start designing and building and manifesting (if you want to do that), or creating, a vision for yourself about where you want to go.

If you create the vision before doing those other two steps (Deconstructing Ego/ Awareness & Integrating Shadow/Acceptance), you’re probably going to be chasing something that’s not real, that’s not authentic to you.

And so, they’re three really important steps: Deconstruct Ego, Integrate Shadow, Build a REAL Life.

Either way, you need some kind of a vision, some kind of a direction to move in so that when you’ve got all this creative sexual energy boiling beneath the surface and you’re trying to channel it into your life, you know where it’s going to go – that might be the habits, it might be the goals, might be creating the vision in the sense of refining it, all that kind of stuff.

If you’re a single person or you’re not interested in other people, in an intimate way, then that is basically all you need to do – create the vision, etc.

If you’re with another person or you have other people in your life that you are interested in and you’re doing things with, well, you can channel your energy, obviously, into growing more real and more intimate with those people.

And basically what that looks like is obviously having mind blowing, amazing sex where you become one and you’re getting closer to wholeness and all that kind of stuff.

But also it means that on a daily basis, or as often as possible, you and that other person are able to take the energy that’s there and to basically play with it.

Now, how that sense of play shows up is going to be different for everybody. But what that means is that there’s a kind of undercurrent to everything you’re doing that allows you to be spontaneous and the electric charge between you allows you to stay in this process of growing whole and not being held back by all of the fragmentation and bullshit that it’s going to cause the energy to direct you instead of allowing you to direct the energy.

If you’re doing the sexual transmutation thing or you’re trying to better control your energy in general, then if you have a direction to move in, or if you have a relationship to commit to, when it comes to growing in intimacy, it will make it 100 million times easier because you’re not going to create enough friction for yourself, life is going to be awesome, and you’re going to be charged up, pumped up, and electrified.

This is basically how you transmute your sexual energy so you can flow with the rhythms of life instead of forcing your own rhythm and bringing friction, frustration, and misery.

Go get it!

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Hacking the Unconscious Mind: A Psychological Hack for REALNESS

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Life Philosophy/Coaching/Mindset/Psychology

Changing Your Life by Using a Psychological Hack to Work With Your Unconscious Mind Instead of Against It.

Oh, hi there.

In this article, I’m going to give you a psychological hack that will change your life if you implement it.

Why would you need this hack?

Well, if you find yourself in a situation where you’re constantly running around like a blue arsed fly trying to get certain results in life, but those results are forever out of reach, then this hack is going to help you.

It’s going to help you to dig into your unconscious intentions and to step away from the surface level way of seeing and viewing things by helping you to DIG DEEPER so that you can reset or reconfigure what’s going on down in the depths of yourself and allow something real to surface.

Without using this ‘hack’, you’re just going to end up rearranging the furniture on the titanic whilst it still sinks because you’ll only be dealing with the SYMPTOMS, not the FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM (which is always a disconnection from your own realness).

In other words, without this hack you’ll feel like you’re chasing things and making progress but actually you’ll only running on the spot – because the things that you’re chasing are, not something that you want as much as you think you want. They’re just an extension of your ego as you attempt to fill the void (which is the illusion of disconnection).

So why would you want to implement this hack that I’m about to share with you?

It’s quite simple: A lot of people out there in the world – and you may be one of them – find themselves in situations where they’re constantly chasing something and they can never quite find it.

So, for example, maybe you’re chasing your dream relationship; maybe you’re trying to get more money; maybe you have some kind of a goal for your business or whatever it is, and…it just never happens.

A lot of the time we think that the core problem in attaining whatever it is that we want is that there’s some external thing, force or factor out there in the world that is preventing us and holding us back from acquiring or attaining whatever it is.

So, for example, in the case of relationships, we will just say to ourselves something like, “The world is going to hell, everyone’s a degenerate, and there’s only low quality men/women out there and it’s impossible to find a partner. Everyone’s so selfish and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

That’s an example of some externalised bullshit thing, and – if you externalise everything – you take your power out of your hands.

With the ‘money’ thing, maybe it’s the same thing, right?

You’ll say, “Well, there’s some external force out there in the world, the illuminati or whatever, and they’re holding me back from making money. And we live in an economy that’s fuelled by scarcity and yada, yada, yada. And I’m just always going to be poor.”

And so the externalisation of your goal basically puts you in a frame of mind where you’re never going to get it.

But here’s the truth:

Ultimately, the problem is not just the externalisation, but the fact that the externalisation is affecting the results that you get. And the results that you get are always showing you what you are actually choosing at an unconscious level.

This is where this ‘stuff’ gets a little bit offensive to some people but that’s what the truth often does (“The truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable”).

But ultimately, in these two examples that I just picked to pieces, if you can’t find your dream partner – even though you’re telling yourself that’s what you want – there is something going on inside you deep down where your actual, real intention is not to find your dream partner. And we’ll dig into that in a minute.

With the money thing, as, counterintuitive as it sounds – because obviously, we all love money, it makes life meaningful (joke) – if you can’t bring money into your life, well, for some reason, you are choosing not to, even though at the conscious level of the mind and the ego, you’re telling yourself that is your intention.

Actually, the reason these things keep staying out of grasp is because, when you dig into it, you’ll find at some level, you are choosing something else more than the relationship or the money.

The ‘hack’ that we’re about to talk about is about learning to understand that is that we can reverse engineer and figure out our REAL CHOICES that we’re making (unconsciously) by the results that we’re getting.

In other words, we’re going to learn to start looking inside ourselves and saying, “Hang on, what the hell is going on here to cause me to think and to tell myself one thing, but to choose the opposite?”

I’m going to give you some examples.

So, let’s start with some examples of imaginary people that sum up some kind of common ways this shows up in the world.

So let’s say, for example, the first person is an individual called Susie (just pulled that out of my ass):

For the last decade, Susie has either been single or in a bad relationship that didn’t last very long. And, on those long, lonely nights where she sat at home watching Netflix and eating Cheetos, she keeps telling herself that she does want a relationship.

The little hamster wheel in her head keeps thinking about relationships and how good life would be if she could get in a relationship. And then every so often, somebody comes along who seems like they might be a good fit. But as soon as they get involved with each other, Susie starts inexplicably becoming hypercritical and pushing these people away. Or, she can’t help but just focus on their flaws to the extent that she becomes totally turned off.

And then after a couple of weeks, couple of months, whatever is, the relationship kind of dwindles and dies. And poor Susie is back at home watching Netflix with all that Cheeto, dust over her mouth.

So that’s not good, is it?

Or maybe there’s another imaginary character called Bob who wants to start his own business. And he keeps telling himself that he’s going to be really successful. He’s going to do whatever it takes to get this business up and running so that he can make loads of money and support his family or wherever he wants to do.

And, he kind of knows the way forward: he’s created a business plan and a vision, and he’s done some market research and so on and so forth.

But, for some reason, when it’s time to go out there and start talking to potential clients or to communicating with people about his ideas, he always finds something else to do.

For example, maybe he just goes and spends time on social media telling himself that this is “research” or that he’s finding new ways to connect with people or some other BS story.

But ultimately, even though he keeps telling himself every morning when he wakes up that “today is the day” he’s going to actually fix his business and get where he needs to be, he just keeps procrastinating. He never gets anywhere. And even though he’s telling himself the same old story again and again and again, he starts to feel a bit insane because nothing ever changes.

Or what about this final example?

We have an imaginary woman or called Melissa and she’s a little bit overweigh and she doesn’t want to be because it’s taking too much energy – she can’t get up the stairs quite as fast as she used to without getting out of breath; she’s becoming insecure about the way that she looks, and she’s worried that people are secretly judging her as she walks down the street and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So she keeps telling herself that she’s going to go to the gym and she’s going to lose weight, she’s going to watch her diet, and that she’s making a choice for a healthier lifestyle so she can lose some weight and start to feel good about herself but – for some unknown reason -nothing ever changes:

She goes to the gym and she just kind of goes through the motions. She doesn’t really put any effort in or push herself to the edge, so her heart rate doesn’t go up, and she doesn’t burn any calories. And, when she does go home because she’s been to the gym, she ends up stuffing her face with whatever it is – some kind of a food reward that she feels she deserves.

And so six months into this exercise regime, despite this health and fitness program that she’s put herself on, nothing has changed – even though she’s been telling herself, keeps telling herself that she wants to make these changes, she’s just as overweight as she was and so she feels like banging her head against the wall.

What is going on in these examples?

A Mini Psychological Hack for Getting What You Want: Reverse Engineer Your Complaints

So, before we get onto the main ‘hack’, here’s a little ‘mini-hack’ that’s going to show you how to know if you have this kind of issue going on in your life:

The key here is to know that if you keep complaining about something, if you keep lamenting about something, then probably you have this kind of inner conflict that we’re talking about where you’re telling yourself you want something, but for some reason, there is something else going on inside you that is actually causing you to choose either the opposite or something else.

And the reason that complaining is a sign is because, ultimately, if you keep complaining about something, it means you’re keeping a problem in your life but you’re choosing not to solve it.

If you truly become aware of a problem and you truly accept what a problem is, then you will either do something about it and no longer have the problem, or you will just have to accept that it’s a fundamental part of life and reality. And so by going through the process of moving towards acceptance, you’ll no longer have anything to complain about (and, thus, the ‘problem’ dissolves).

And so complaining constantly about the same thing – not finding a relationship, not being able to lose weight, not being able to make money, or whatever it is – complaining constantly and chronically is a sign that your ego is invested in this story about a certain goal and a certain desire but – deep down beneath the surface of yourself – you have an inner conflict that is causing you to choose something else for some reason.

Stop and think about it now for a second: what are you always complaining about?

The odds are very high that if you’re always complaining about it, then in some weird, backwards way, you’re choosing it, and you need to figure out why, so that you can put yourself on a real path and actually either resolve whatever it is that you’re complaining about or to let it go, because you accept that you don’t really want to change things (which is totally fine, btw).

You Can Reverse Engineer Your Real Intentions for Yourself and Your Life by the Results that You Keep Getting.

So this is where we come on to a deeper exploration of the main psychological ‘hack’ that I promised you at the start of this article:

It’s very simple. And ultimately it’s this:

You can reverse engineer your real intentions for yourself and your life by the results that you keep getting.

Let’s look at the examples we already explored:

If you consistently can’t find a relationship – that’s the result that you’re getting – then it just means that your true, unconscious intention is NOT to be in a relationship at some level – no matter what you’re telling yourself at the level of the ego (your constructed identity and all of the stories that you feed through it about life).

And I know that’s going to piss some people off because, of course, if you’re telling yourself you want a relationship and you’re going out there and you’re getting involved in all kinds of, unsavoury situations with people because you’re “trying to get in a relationship”, then of course you want a relationship.

So I’m probably chatting BS, right?

But no…if you consistently get the result of not getting the relationship that you want, then you’re choosing this result deep down for some reason – and this psychological hack of reverse engineering from the results is going to allow you to free yourself because when you understand why you have that deeper intention for something else then you can flip the script and start changing things.

(This deeper intention could be anything, and there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with that because it’s unconscious so it’s not really your “fault” or anything, but it is still your desire, your true intention, even though it’s unconscious).

It’s the same with all of these results that I’ve given as example:

If you keep saying that you want to get more money from your business or whatever but it never happens and you’re just running around on the hamster wheel for years and years and years, then you don’t really want that (shock! Horror!) – at some level you have the intention for something else more and you need to dig inside yourself to figure out what that might be.

It’s the same with losing weight or anything (like literally anything):

If you keep telling yourself that you want a certain thing – you want to lose weight in this example now – and it doesn’t happen, then you need to ask yourself, “Okay, what do I really want? I’m telling myself I want to lose weight. But when I dig down into my shadow and to the parts of myself that I’m hiding from myself behind ego, what is actually going on?”

And that is the psychological hack again:

The results that you get consistently, no matter what you’re telling yourself, actually show you what you are choosing deep down, more than whatever it is that you ‘think’ you want.

And that doesn’t mean that these things are ‘bad’ or that you’re chasing things that you shouldn’t be chasing. It just means that you haven’t actually done any work around inner awareness and acceptance of yourself to see what is actually driving your motivation more than – and that’s the key “more than” – whatever it is that you think you want.

If you’re not getting the results that you want then you need to be increase Awareness, cultivate Acceptance, and then take inspired ACTION

So let’s talk quickly about what you need to do once, you become AWARE of this hack – that’s always the first step: Awareness.

I’m always talking about the same thing: Awareness, Acceptance and Action (any transformational journey will require that you walk through these three steps).

If you’re not getting the results that you want, then ultimately you need start by becoming more aware be aware – in this case, of not getting the results you want, it starts by becoming aware of the fact that this is because you are (deep down in the unconscious) choosing something else MORE.

And it doesn’t matter what you’re telling yourself – the little voice in our head is just our social programming, our self-hypnosis, our response to our own emotional bullshit and stuff going on deep down inside ourselves and it’s just a surface level relationship with ourselves…it’s not REAL (“the ego is the opposite of reality”).

But there is a deeper level relationship that we all have – the most real relationship – and it is always driving our lives.

And so if you want to know more about this real relationship, you need to go through that first step that I shared with you of flipping the script and saying to yourself, “Right, these are the results I keep getting. Why might I be choosing that at some level?”

To get to the next level and go through the process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action, you simply need to start asking yourself the right questions so that you can dive deep into yourself and really get a grasp of why you in particular – based on what you’ve been through, your life story, who you are, etc. – why you in particular would have some kind of unconscious intention for something else.

So let’s say, for example, in the examples I gave earlier, the first person I think was an imaginary human being called Susie or something like that, whatever her name was, kept telling herself that she wanted a relationship, but as soon as somebody came along, she would become hypercritical and she would push them away.

And so, just as an example, the story that she’s telling herself about what she thinks she wants, what she thinks she has chosen, is actually being overridden outside of her awareness with a deeper desire she has for freedom, let’s say – because when she was younger her parents were always arguing about little things and so on and so forth, and so she is paranoid about getting in a relationship, that’s also going to be fuelled by that kind of negativity (this is based on her imaginary life story).

So – as a protective barrier – she started getting critical and pushing people away so that she can maintain her freedom and not have to relive that experience from her childhood.

Maybe that’s all bullshit, right? I’ve just literally pulled that out of my ass. But the point is, there is some overriding desire that is driving you more than whatever it is that you keep telling yourself you desire but don’t get.

So in the case of Susie, she actually desires freedom more than a relationship, even though -for whatever reason (maybe because she just wants to fit into society and she thinks it’s what she’s supposed to do) – she keeps telling herself that’s what she wants.

In the example of, Bob, who is working on his business, he keeps telling himself that success is what he really wants:

“Okay, I want my business to succeed so I can provide for my family, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

But deep down, he doesn’t want his business to succeed:

There’s an overriding, desire for that because that’s his unconscious intention and it’s driving his life. And it might simply be because his dad, when he was a kid, was always away at work so Bob felt neglected and unloved and so he doesn’t actually want to replicate that relationship with his own kids.

And so, even though he feels like the best thing to do is to start his own business and to be successful, he actually has a stronger desire to just spend time with his kids. And, so ultimately there’s some kind of an inner conflict, but based on the results that he’s getting, that inner desire, the unconscious intention to simply just spend more time with his kids and not be so busy like a workaholic or whatever, that is actually overriding his choices and the things that he actually decides to do in life.

(Even though, ironically, if he could find a way – in this hypothetical example – to make his business work, then eventually he could spend more quality time with his kids because maybe they’ll have more money so he could pay people to work on his business or whatever)

The point is this (and it’s the same for anybody with this problem):

Even though he’s telling himself one story, there is something going on that is making him choose not to succeed in the way that he is telling himself he wants, and so he ends up writing a totally different story instead.

In the final example Melissa – who keeps telling herself she wants to lose weight and she just can’t do it – well, again, as offensive as it may seem to some people, there is something going on inside her where she is telling herself that she wants to lose weight, but deep down her real intention is not to.

It could be something really simple:

For example, maybe she’s worried that if she, does lose weight, then she’s suddenly going to be more attractive to the opposite sex. And then she’s just going to have loads of guys flinging themselves at her. And she’s actually insecure because she doesn’t know how to be vulnerable because she’s never really been in a relationship or whatever it is.

And so again (in this hypothetical example), her fear has has created an unconscious intention where she wants to be alone so that she actually can choose not to face her vulnerabilities and to grow towards intimacy in a relationship.

These are all just examples, but the point is that there will be something going on inside you exactly like this if you have this kind of problem.

If you’re constantly running around in circles, never getting anywhere and never making any changes in your life, then it’s purely because at some level there is something in you that is causing you to choose NOT to get whatever it is that you think you want – and all you need to do really, to start solving this problem and unblocking yourself, is to raise awareness of what this “something” might be.

If you raise awareness of it, you start to look at it head on. It’ll start to dissolve. But then – more importantly – once you go to awareness, you can accept it. And only if you accept it can you start to truly flip the script by replacing that intention with something real or, modifying the way that you go about ACTING on it.

When you get here, you can increase your odds of getting whatever it is that you think you want by upgrading it to something that you actually want.

Implementation: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action (It Works Every Time)

So, that was a lot of examples but let me quickly conclude and review by exploring a little more about the three-step process that is going to allow you to implement this psychological hack: Awareness, Acceptance and Action.

To raise AWARENESS, you need to use the hack that we’ve been talking about, which is, to reverse engineer the real intentions that are driving you and bubbling away beneath the surface of your ego and your relationship with yourself.

Like we said, you can reverse engineer by looking at the RESULTS you keep getting that you don’t want or that you keep complaining about.

If you do this then you can become more AWARE literally right now. That sounds very dramatic but it’s true: become aware that if you keep complaining about things, nothing is changing, then at some m level you are choosing it.

This awareness is the gateway to setting yourself free.

I may be painful in the short term, but – believe it or not (try it and find out!) – in the long term, it’s going to put you on this path to changing things.

So that’s the first step. Awareness: reverse engineer based on the results you keep getting.

The second step after raising this awareness is that you need to ACCEPT whatever that real intention is.

And so ultimately, all you need to do is to ask yourself the right questions:

“Why might I, me – based on my experience and the things that I’ve been through – why might I have this unconscious intention for not getting what I keep telling myself what I think I want? What do I want even more that I’m actually chasing?”

And the key thing to remember here when it comes to acceptance is that “acceptance” ultimately means you’re going to be uncovering some truth – some reality – about what’s going on inside you.

And, the thing with truth/reality is the only thing that you can do with it is ACCEPT it. You can’t judge it – if you start judging it, you’re taking yourself out of reality

The reason I’m saying this is because the only thing you need to do with your unconscious intention is to figure out what it is – based on reverse engineering those results – and then accept it without any judgment.

Like I said, an unconscious intention is still your intention, whether you’re initially aware of it or not. But it’s not something that you can judge or blame yourself for or you need to feel bad about.

If you have been saying yourself that you want a certain thing, but there’s something going on inside you that’s actually causing you to choose the opposite of that…well, it’s because of what you’ve been through; it’s because of the story that you’ve already lived and the way that you’re relating to it, based on your shame, guilt and trauma and all your underlying emotional ‘stuff’ that’s caused you to live in a little box (aka the ego).

And so the final point is this: just accept it. That’s all you need to do. Don’t judge yourself, accept it.

Once you have this ACCEPTANCE, then you have a solid foundation so that you can move on to the third stage, which is taking ACTION.

In this case, the action is twofold:

You either need to modify your relationship with the thing that you originally thought you wanted by realising that you’ve got this unconscious block getting in the way and then readjusting the plan that you’re going to implement as you move towards it.
You can replace the unconscious intention with a totally different intention. And all that means is that you ask yourself, “Okay, what do I really want? What is my vision for my life? What are my true values? What are my true intentions? And how do they conflict with what I have just uncovered about myself?”

And then basically what you need to do is to train yourself – and I’ve got some other articles etc. about that on this site or a free 7-Day Course here – train yourself to think in alignment with the higher intentions and to not let this unconscious ‘stuff’ hold you back when it doesn’t need to.

So that is basically we need to say about this hack and how you can use it:

You look at the results that you keep getting that you don’t want and you find yourself complaining about chronically and consistently with nothing ever changing.

Then you can say to yourself now, “Okay, this is actually a sign that at some level, for whatever reason – and whatever reason that may be is fine – I am choosing not to acquire or to achieve or to attain whatever it is that I keep telling myself I need to be bringing into my life.

On a day-to-day practical level, this hack will and can change the game for you and it’s very simple and will cut out a lot of wasted time and energy because you won’t be running around in circles trying to change things that are out of your control.

The only thing ultimately any of us have power over, is our relationship with ourselves and so if you go through the process of AWARENESS – of understanding, that you can reverse engineer the results to figure out what you’re really choosing – ACCEPTANCE (of whatever actually has caused you to choose something else or whatever it is that you are choosing instead more than what you think you want), and then ACTION in the sense of modifying your intentions and actions or replacing the unconscious intention with something else, you stand a much higher chance of getting where you want to be in life, feeling good, growing real and having a good time whilst you’re here.

Ultimately, we’re all going to die and so you might as well make sure that what you’re actually spending your time out there in the world running around chasing is something that you really want.

Join my mailing list if you want regular tips and insights about growing real and becoming more aligned with your creativity.

You’ll get access to my 7-Day Personality Transplant Video Course (with an exclusive 158-page workbook) when you sign up:

Law of Attraction / Manifestation Explained (An Introduction to the Law of Attraction for REALNESS)

Published on

Life Philosophy/Creativity/Mindset

Demystifying the Law of Attraction so you can get REAL results.

This mini-course is about how you can use the law of attraction to get REAL results.

Oh, hi there – Oli Anderson here. Welcome to this mini-course about The Law of Attraction for Realness.

Ultimately, what we’re going to be talking about here is how you can use the law of attraction to get results and to change your life in the way that you might want to.

We’re going to try and do this in a real way which means that we’re going to look at how reality actually works, how human beings actually work and we’re going to have a no bullshit policy basically so that we can avoid a lot of the misconceptions that people have about this stuff and ultimately just get to the nitty gritty – so you can start using this in a very quick way if you haven’t been using it, or to start using it in a real way if you’ve tried using it and haven’t got results yet.

By the end of this you’ll have a better understanding of what the law of attraction really is. You’ll understand how your relationship with yourself ultimately affects your life and you’ll be moving towards some kind of a vision for yourself and your life that gets you pumped up and excited because it’s going to be real and you’ll also know that you have a lot more control over that than you may have initially been led to believe.

This mini-course has six modules.

So I’m going to get right into it. This little mini-course has six modules. So this is just so you know what’s coming up.

We got: 1) An introduction to Law of Attraction. That’s what this article is. We’re going to talk about 2) Mindset and Beliefs that either allow you to get results from the law of attraction or not. We’re going to do some 3) Creative Visualization stuff. We’re going to talk about 4) Inspired Action and then we’re going to look at 5) Gratitude and Appreciation and then we’re going to look at 6) Maintaining Momentum.

It’s all leading up to this idea of maintaining momentum which ultimately just means that you’re going to make some lifestyle changes and you’re going to basically improve your relationship with yourself by improving your relationship with reality.

And then you’re going to get better results because you’re not creating friction or distortion and resistance, which is what we’re going to talk about in this course ultimately.

Your inner vibe will affect your outer world. No question.

So I’m going to get right into it. This is the first module. It’s basically just an introduction to the law of attraction. But it’s not an introduction to the law of attraction as it might have been sold to you before. It’s an introduction to it in a real way.

And ultimately – what that means – is that we’re looking at this definition, a real definition of the law of attraction.

People love to make things more complicated than they actually are. I believe that the reason we make things so complex is because of our egos and the ego needing complexity to be a thing so that we can basically maintain the ego in its current form and then avoid our, emotional, stuff and all this kind of thing.

The simplest definition of the law of attraction is ultimately this: It means that whatever vibe you put out into the world is what you’re going to get back. That’s it. There’s so many things out there that make this so complicated, and they’re all ultimately just metaphors about this same thing, which is, that your inner vibe will affect your outer world.

Now, to what extent that actually might be is up to you to decide. Like some people think your inner state will completely, 100 million% affect everything in your outer experience. Some people might think that it just affects it a little bit. Whatever.

Either way, this law is a natural law that is true and is real and applies to all of us. And so once you start working with it and embracing it – and you start seeing changes in your life because you’ve been using it – then you can decide to what extent you want to go with this. But ultimately, your vibe affects what you get. And, we can call this for simplicity, the Boomerang Effect.

What you throw out there is going to come back to you in some way, shape or form. This is just the natural law of life. Not everybody likes to accept it, because in my opinion, they’re filtering life through their ego and maybe their life sucks. And so they don’t want to take responsibility for their thoughts and say to themselves, “Oh, okay. This crappy situation that I have found myself in is actually a reflection of this crappy relationship inside my head that I have with myself”.

We’ll get into all that but, right now, this is what we are now defining the law of attraction as: “what you throw out there is what you’re going to get back”. And so if you want to improve your life, you need to start throwing out things that are more real, more true, more whole, and all of the other things that we’re about to talk about in this little mini-course.

The short version of understanding this is that if you put something real into life, you will get something real out of life. And conversely, if you put something unreal into life, you’ll get something unreal out of it.

If you’re familiar with my work – you’ve read my books or whatever – well, you’ll have heard me talk about everything ultimately boils down to wholeness or fragmentation. Wholeness means you are connected to yourself, you’re connected to the world, you’re connected to reality because you’ve raised your awareness and you accept things and blah, blah, blah. And so you’re putting the real version of you ultimately out into the world.

The opposite of that – the opposite of wholeness – is fragmentation. Fragmentation means you’ve created a little idea in your head that’s caused you to be disconnected from life itself. And that means that you’re being unreal because you’re always connected to life, whether you know it or you don’t know it. Whether you’re conscious of it or you’re unconscious of it.

And so when you’re fragmented in that way, you’re caught up in your ego, false identity. You put that out into the world, it motivates the things that you do, and your life ends up being unreal.

So in relation to the law of attraction, if you can be real with yourself, well, you’re going to put something real out into life and then you’re going to get something real back. Because of the Boomerang Effect: what you throw out there is always going to come back to you. That is a natural law.

The other thing about this law of attraction thing is because it’s a natural law, it’s always working beneath the surface of our lives, whether we know it or not. And so that means that all of us are always using the law of attraction; we’ve been using it our whole lives. And whatever we have right now in our lives ultimately is massively, massively, massively inspired by that inner relationship or impacted by the law of attraction is a natural law.

We all use it all the time – the only thing is that most of us have been using it unconsciously, without awareness. This course is about changing that so that you can use this natural law, the law of attraction, consciously.

That’s basically all you need to really pick up from this course. Most people are using it unconsciously. It applies to us all. If you want to improve your life, you need to accept it and be aware of it, of course, but then work with it instead of against it. That means making conscious choices, knowing that it’s a real thing and basically managing your inner relationship with yourself, then with life and everything else – so that when you throw these ‘boomerangs’ out, you’re throwing something real and then that is going to come back to you.

One thing that people don’t like about this is that it means – because the law of attraction is always working – that your life right now is a product of what you put out in the past.

So whatever is coming back to you, today, basically, at this particular period of your life where you’re doing this course, whatever is coming back to you is a product of the boomerangs that you’ve thrown out before.

Now, obviously not everybody wants to hear this, especially if their life sucks. And, I can understand that, I guess. But the thing is, this is actually a very powerful thing or empowering thing because it means that you have so much more choice over the future than you may initially have been led to believe.

If your life sucks and you keep focusing on that, well, you’re just going to keep putting out the same old BS and you’re going to keep getting the same BS back because of the boomerangs you’re throwing. I.e. the same boomerangs you’ve been throwing for however many years because of your conditioning and the voices in your head that you’re hypnotizing yourself with.

If you can understand that, if you start throwing out different boomerangs today, more real ones, then eventually the external world is going to catch up with that, and start throwing real stuff back at you, then you realise that we all have a lot of power over our lives. It’s a very amazing, very liberating thing.

A Quick History of The Law Of Attraction.

Here’s a quick history of the law of attraction. Just so you know what we’re talking about and the context that we found ourselves in:

It’s been around since ancient times. And, the reason it’s been around since ancient times is because it’s a natural law. Gravity has been around forever. We may have only discovered it when that apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head, but it was still there before that. It’s the same with the law of attraction. It’s a natural law. And so every human being in the history of human history has been using this law either unconsciously or consciously.

It got popular in the 19th century with the new thought movement: authors like Neville Goddard and Napoleon Hill popularized it. Napoleon Hill wrote that famous book, Think, And Grow Rich.

The Law of Attraction became even more popular with the release of the Secret in 2006 – based on, the work of Abraham Hicks. And then ever since then, there’s just been a load of bullshit and marketing nonsense: Online influencers on Instagram selling all these different techniques and offering it as a panacea to every problem in life.

And it can help you a lot. But ultimately, most of those people are just trying to sell things and it’s not complicated. People need things to be complicated for their own egos and so they can sell things to people that are confused. But basically, this is where we are.

It’s a very controversial concept. The reason it’s controversial is because you can’t prove it objectively. Like even me talking about it now, it might sound like bullshit to some people because I’m basically saying, “Okay, if you change your inner state, then your outer world is going to reflect that and everything can be hunky dory and amazing and beautiful”, but you can’t prove it scientifically because we’re dealing with the inner workings of the mind and our connection to everything else.

The only way you can really find out if the law of attraction works is to start using it.

Science likes to kind of isolate things and break them down and so on and so forth. And it works. It’s all about falsifying things and testing things. That’s awesome. But we’re dealing here with subjective experience and the only way you can really find out if this works is to start using it.

Personally, I didn’t used to believe in the law of attraction. I was very rationally minded individual. I thought that we needed peer reviewed studies for everything and blah, blah, blah. But then I actually started using it and getting results and having all these inexplicable things happen to me. And, now I will never doubt it ever.

But again, don’t just take my word for it. You need to basically start using these principles yourself and you will just see that reality is way more interesting and intricate and intense than we may have been led to believe – basically, reality is controversial.

That’s why I think a lot of people, have an issue with this: the law of attraction means that we can take full responsibility for our lives. Not everybody likes that.

So anyway, it’s controversial. I acknowledge that. I know that by talking about it, some people are going to have an issue. That’s fine. I’m just talking from personal experience and sharing what’s worked for me. And basically that’s that.

There’s a quote from Jesus in the Bible. I’m not like a religious fruitcake or anything like that, but ultimately it’s this:

“Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and you shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” – Matthew 7:7

Now that sounds very, dramatic. And of course, this can be taken completely out of context. You could think that the law of attraction just means that you have to ask for something and then basically that’s it. You don’t have to do anything else.

I believe this quote is true, but it’s not quite as, easy as some people might make it sound or seem. You still have to take action and you still have to do the inner work so that the things you are asking for, seeking and knocking on the door to find are real.

The reason that the law of attraction doesn’t work for a lot of people is because they’re coming from an egotistical place. And so it’s the thing that we just said: unreal in leads to unreal out and so they don’t get the results that they want or they end up miserable.

Some common misconceptions about the law of attraction.

We’re going to talk about this in more detail as we go through the course.

Like I just said, you still need to take action. There’s a lot of bullshit out there that just makes people believe they can just do nothing and all of their dreams will come true. Life doesn’t work like that. You still need to take action and show the world and reality and life and God or whatever it is that you believe in.

This is another misconception: You need to show that you’re serious and you need to take inspired action – which is what we’re going to talk about you have chosen most of the things in your life. But that doesn’t make you God.

There’s so much bullshit out there where people are telling themselves that they’re God, “I’m God, I can control everything”. No, you are the creation. The law of life is the creator. We have all been created by reality itself. And you can call that God or whatever you want to call it.

We did not create everything. We did not create the law of attraction. So if you were a God you would be able to use the law of attraction to get rid of the law of attraction. That isn’t ever going to happen. And so there’s so much bullshit out there which is just ego again because the ego is the illusion of control where people use this stuff to actually make their spiritual problems a lot worse. And so if you start to believe that you’re a God and all that, you’re just going to cause problems for yourself. So that’s a misconception.

Finally. You can only really use the law of attraction with things that are real. That’s why I already said “Real in, real out”.

If you try and get something unreal with the law of attraction you’ll either get it and you’ll be totally miserable because what goes up comes down or you just won’t get it. And then you’ll be frustrated and you’ll think that the law of attraction doesn’t work.

So a lot of this stuff is about going through the process of removing the unreal things inside yourself and unlearning those things so that you can be more real. We’re going to talk about this a lot: Distortion and Resistance – but ultimately the problem for most people is that they ask for things that they really want but then they distort their intentions and desires with ego resistance.

We’re going to talk about this more in the next module, but ultimately you need to know this:

People, think you can just ask and receive, but if you have distortion and resistance, which is always ego, then this stuff is not going to work. And so again, it’s about using the law of attraction to find something real, hold onto it and that’s it.

All we’re doing here is being real, as real as possible and ego resistance is just anything that causes to avoid awareness and acceptance and the natural laws of reality so we can take inspired action. That’s it.

The main thing that causes people to get into ego is shame, guilt and trauma. So this is going to come up a little bit, but basically this is why the inner work is so important.

If you have ego problems, then you have emotional problems and so you need to work on the inner stuff before you’re going to get the outer results. And a lot of people try this without doing the inner work and so they don’t get the results or things get worse for them and they just tell themselves that this is bullshit.

But the reason it seems like bullshit is because they’re coming at it from an unreal point of view. The inner state is the key.

That’s basically what we need to learn in this course: The main thing you need to do is manage your inner state so it’s aligned with the real things that you want. This just means unlearning a lot of the bullshit and conditioning you picked up in life and dissolving into your realness.

You also need to manage your relationship with yourself so you don’t distort your relationship with REALITY worry and fear and doubts.

What we’re trying to do here to make this work and the main point of this little course is you’re trying to get to an inner state where you have a sense of equanimity, you feel good, everything is amazing and then you can start trying to manifest and all that kind of stuff.

Write down a list of things you want to attract in your life.

So that is the end of this first little mini module. If you want an exercise to do so you can kind of integrate this, well, here it is:

Write down a list of things that you want to attract in your life. It could be anything: Material possessions, experiences, personal qualities. A classic way to do this in coaching is to think about what you want to be, what you want to do and what you want to have.

Once you’ve done that, reflect on why these things are either real to you or unreal. If they’re real you’ll know why. If they’re unreal then scrub them off the list and don’t even worry about it. You need to find something real that you want to move towards.

So that is the end of this first module. I will see you in the next one and I hope that has given you a good overview of where we’re going with this!

If you’re interested in the full mini-course then you can get more information by clicking here.

Click the button to go to the purchase page:

I’m Ready for REAL Life

Your problems aren’t your problems.

Published on

Creativity/Coaching/Life Philosophy/Mindset

The problem is NEVER the problem (but REAL ALWAYS WORKS)

This is a bold claim but one thing I’ve learned from my own journey and from coaching people is that the problems we think we have at the start of a transformational period in our lives are NEVER the actual problems.

(In other words: many of the issues we think we’re dealing with when we go into the process are revealed to have been unreal by the time we’re done – assuming the process has made us more REAL).

They sure might look like problems and may even be experienced as problems but actually they’re (almost) always SYMPTOMS of the same core issue in some way: a DISCONNECTION FROM OUR REALNESS.

This is especially true of problems that linger– any time they do you can be pretty sure that you’re clinging onto some kind of misperception or misinterpretation for the sake of keeping your ego/identity where it is (so you don’t have to face your emotional ‘stuff’ in dealing with things).

The problem (if you can even call it that) is an attachment to the unreal ‘stuff’ – for whatever reason – instead of a focus on the real.

Really, this is just a matter of ‘sense’ (whatever that is):

-If you really knew what a problem is then you would do something about it and no longer have a problem.

-If it lingers then it’s either just an inevitable facet of reality (“it is what it is, man”) and you’re actually just struggling to ACCEPT things or you want to cling to something unreal because it benefits you in some (usually emotional) way.

I know that sounds simplistic and complexity is very popular in relation to this personal growth ‘stuff’. It’s probably also offensive to some people too but I’m definitely not saying that when we’re in touch with our realness that it’s some sort of magical panacea – just that, when we unlearn the things keeping us from our realness, we can stop wasting time distracting ourselves trying to find ‘solutions’ to problems that really only exist in our minds alone.

Let’s break it down a little – here are the kind of things that people come to me with and the way these ‘problems’ show up for them with various SYMPTOMS.

Here’s a list of the symptoms people experience when disconnected from their realness and then the symptoms of these symptoms (just to add a little complexity for those of us that love such things):

Lack of Purpose: Feeling directionless, demotivated, and uncertain about life goals.

Unfulfillment: Lingering dissatisfaction, lack of enthusiasm, and emotional restlessness.

Disconnected Relationships: Feeling emotionally distant, struggling to communicate feelings, and experiencing loneliness.

Stagnation in Career: Lack of creativity, feeling unchallenged, and limited career growth.

Fear of Vulnerability: Avoiding sharing feelings, hesitating to express needs, and guarded interactions.

Emotional Restlessness: Mood swings, moments of anxiety, and difficulty finding emotional equilibrium.

Lack of Work-Life Balance: Constant stress, neglecting personal needs, and feeling overwhelmed.

Self-Doubt: Second-guessing decisions, feeling inadequate, and lacking confidence.

Relationship Struggles: Frequent arguments, difficulty understanding each other, and emotional distance.

Identity Crisis: Feeling lost, unsure of who he is, and questioning personal values.

Procrastination: Delaying important tasks, feeling guilty about productivity, and added stress.

Imposter Syndrome: Feeling like a fraud, attributing success to luck, and downplaying achievements.

Lack of Emotional Expression: Difficulty showing affection, bottling up feelings, and emotional detachment.

Limited Personal Growth: Fearing change, avoiding challenges, and missing out on learning opportunities.

Social Isolation: Few social interactions, feeling out of touch, and experiencing loneliness.

Regret and Guilt: Dwelling on past mistakes, feeling guilty about missed opportunities, and ruminating.

Unresolved Past Traumas: Triggered emotional responses, anxiety, and avoidance behaviours.

Comparison Trap: Constantly comparing to others, feeling inferior, and negatively affecting self-esteem.

Lack of Joy: Rare moments of happiness, feeling numb, and difficulty finding enjoyment.

Loss of Passion: Losing interest in hobbies, feeling uninspired, and lacking enthusiasm.

When you’re UNAWARE (and the first step to changing your life is always ‘Acceptance’) that the FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM is always a sense of disconnect from your realness then the standard way of trying to handle these challenges is to choose one of the symptoms and focus on it.

Not only does this ignore the fundamental law that “WHAT WE FOCUS ON GROWS” (thus making things worse in the long run) it also causes us to be distracted from reality itself.

Because reality is the only place where we can ever find any kind of solutions (again, just a matter of ‘sense’ – where else can we actually expect to get results besides reality?) this DISTRACTION just prevents us from getting what we really want (to be back in touch with our realness – even if we don’t know that consciously).

One way that I’ve seen this distraction show up for people (who become increasingly frustrated with themselves and life) is that they become SYMPTOM HOPPERS (just made that term up but it does the job).

Because they don’t get the RESULTS that they want (feeling good and like life is meaningful), they go through periods in their lives where they choose one of the above symptoms (or the symptoms of the symptom) and dedicate themselves to it for a short period (until they don’t get the results they want and so they move onto the next thing and then the next thing ad infinitum).

So, for example, maybe they’ll spend some time trying to get their creativity back (which they trick themselves into thinking is a cause of their career stagnation); or maybe they read some book about how ‘comparisons are odious’ and so they view their lives through a frame of not comparing themselves to others for a few weeks until it wears off and they move onto the next thing (because the frame was only CONCEPTUAL, not EXPERIENTIAL); maybe they’ll come up with a theory that if they can just stop procrastinating then all their problems will be solved and so they become extra disciplined for a few weeks (but don’t feel any better because they’re not DOING ANYTHING REAL because they didn’t get in touch with their realness FIRST).

All of these things are examples of “rearranging the furniture on the Titanic whilst it sinks” – they’re just ways of playing with the surface level details of our lives, externalising everything, and confusing ourselves by giving ourselves the illusion of growth and momentum whilst paradoxically staying the same at the same time.

You can save yourself years of friction, frustration, and misery by learning to focus on your REALNESS first and foremost.

When you do that all of these other symptoms take care of themselves because you’re not making the unreal CHOICES that lead to their perpetuation.

If this has spoken to you and you want some help with this ‘stuff’ then in touch by either booking a call or sending me an email or message. I’ve seen people get really fast results once they simply shift their focus to the REAL things instead of distracting themselves with SYMPTOM HOPPING and rearranging that furniture on the Titanic.

Join my mailing list if you want regular tips and insights about growing real and becoming more aligned with your creativity. You’ll get access to my 7-Day Personality Transplant Video Course (with an exclusive 158-page workbook) when you sign up:

Mind Traps: How to Stay REAL and RECLAIM Your Time

Published on

Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

(Originally written for my mailing list but it got a lot of good feedback so here we are on the site as well)!

Oh, hi there.

One of the most common ‘problems’ I hear from coaching clients (or people jumping in my DMs on social media) is struggling to manage time in a real way.

In this article, I want to share some practical tips for managing your PERCEPTION of time so that you can RECLAIM some of the time you’re wasting by thinking and acting in UNREAL ways.

Before that, some common themes that come up in these conversations about time:

-We all have the same 24hrs in a day and so sometimes when we say we don’t have time what we really mean is “it’s not a priority” (which is fine but let’s be real with ourselves and then start tweaking what we can).

-Ultimately, it all comes down to CHOICE; from one moment to the next what you CHOOSE to do with your time is up to you (yes, even when you think it isn’t).

-We all have obligations and demands on our time but if we have a vision and sense of purpose it’s easier to GRAB the moments of downtime and use them for growing real instead of distracting ourselves.

-Everything is about the Law of Cause and Effect and progress is always progress. If you take 7 small steps over the course of a week then that’s one big step by the end of the week.

-A lot of our time management issues are actually issues with our RELATIONSHP WITH OURSELVES and the way we trap and distract ourselves with our thinking (the rest of this article will break this down and give you some practical steps for reclaiming time at the level of your mindset).

Reclaim your time by reclaiming your mind

Mind Trap

Worrying about things that haven’t happened yet (and probably never will).

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Anxiety, fear of the unknown, lack of control.

Break the Pattern

Practice mindfulness and grounding techniques, challenge irrational thoughts, focus on the present moment.

TRUST that you can handle ANYTHING (because you’ve already handled everything that’s happened to you so far).

Mind Trap

Dwelling on things from the past that can’t be changed.

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Low self-esteem, self-criticism, perfectionism.

Mind Trap

Indulging in self-pity.

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Victim mentality, lack of resilience, avoidance of responsibility.

Break the Pattern

Cultivate resilience, seek short-term support from others if you need it (I can help), focus on solutions instead of problems.

Take the action that will help you BECOME who you CHOOSE to be.

Mind Trap

Worrying about others’ opinions.

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Insecurity, fear of judgment, people-pleasing tendencies.

Break the Pattern

Trust your own judgment, surround yourself with supportive people, prioritize your own values.

Gradually step out of your comfort zone and find your EDGE (by stretching just beyond your current ideas about yourself).

Focus on the potential rewards, seek support from trusted individuals.. Most importantly, learn to TRUST YOURSELF to handle what comes next no matter what.

Lots to be working with here (and I’ll keep adding to the list) but I wanted to show you how many opportunities we have to RECLAIM our time without reshuffling our life too much.

To get started CHOOSE one or two of these areas and start taking practical steps to changing things – that’ll be one step towards letting go of the UNREAL stuff and making space for the REAL.

I can help you with this ‘stuff’ if you need support – you can book a free discovery call here (or a ‘Virtual Coffee’ as I like to call it).

Thanks for reading and hope it helped!

Stay real,

Oli

If you want to go deeper into this ‘stuff’ then check out my free 7-day course for boosting your understanding of your own realness and helping you choose life purpose.

You can get more information here or you can sign up and get started by entering your name and email below:

Mindset

Reclaiming the ‘old’ you so that you can grow into the REAL you.

Reconnecting to your SHADOW is the path to your REAL life.

Balancing control and spontaneity – tension and release – is the key to a fulfilling life.

The world is not reality.

Adapting to the world in an unreal way is ultimately a survival mechanism

Awareness, Acceptance, & Action works every time.

Our inner relationship with ourselves and connection to truth either causes us to become stuck or to keep flowing.

Understanding this little problem of being ‘stuck’ ultimately comes down to understanding the Shadow Dance.

The first symptom that keeps us attached to the ego is an unreal relationship with our own emotions.

The second symptom of the Shadow Dance is that you don’t embrace power of CHOICE.

The final symptom that I want to talk about in this article is EMOTIONAL TURBULENCE.

If you don’t read this article, then you’re a terrible human being.

Emotional manipulation involves taking total responsibility for someone else’s feelings.

Emotional manipulation is basically when people try to make you own things that aren’t yours.

Don’t feed the Gremlin.

You can set boundaries or walk away if someone is manipulating you.

Three reasons why people may not step into their realness in the face of emotional manipulation:

Thank you!

Being ‘wrong’ may be exactly what you’re looking for…this article will help you understand why.

Socrates: “I know that I know nothing”.

None of our attempts to defend the truth have any effect on the truth itself

3 ways to align yourself with REAL life by finding your own ‘wrongness’

If You Argue With an Idiot, It Makes You an Idiot.

Thank you!

The transmutation of sexual creative energy for REALNESS in life and relationships.

Two Paths to Sexual Transmutation: Vision & Intimacy

Thank you!

Changing Your Life by Using a Psychological Hack to Work With Your Unconscious Mind Instead of Against It.

A Mini Psychological Hack for Getting What You Want: Reverse Engineer Your Complaints

You Can Reverse Engineer Your Real Intentions for Yourself and Your Life by the Results that You Keep Getting.

If you’re not getting the results that you want then you need to be increase Awareness, cultivate Acceptance, and then take inspired ACTION

Implementation: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action (It Works Every Time)

Thank you!

Demystifying the Law of Attraction so you can get REAL results.

This mini-course is about how you can use the law of attraction to get REAL results.

This mini-course has six modules.

Your inner vibe will affect your outer world. No question.

A Quick History of The Law Of Attraction.

The only way you can really find out if the law of attraction works is to start using it.

Some common misconceptions about the law of attraction.

Write down a list of things you want to attract in your life.

The problem is NEVER the problem (but REAL ALWAYS WORKS)

Thank you!

Reclaim your time by reclaiming your mind

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’

Break the Pattern

Mind Trap

Psychological ‘Stuff’