Mindset - Page 2

Posts about cultivating a REAL mindset so you can get better RESULTS from yourself and life.

Repeating Patterns: Why You Keep Attracting the Same Kind of Partner (and What to Do About It)

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Repeating patterns in relationships.

You Keep Repeating Patterns In Your Life Until You Heal Yourself by Growing REAL

Have you ever looked back at your dating history and started to feel like you’ve been dating the same person in different bodies? That you keep repeating patterns you’d rather not have even experienced in the first place?

I.e. no matter how much older, wiser, or more self-aware you become, your relationships end up following the same old script and getting you the same old results? If so, you’re not alone and it’s not just because you’re unlucky or because the dating pool is filled with low-quality people or whatever – it’s a pattern.

And the thing about repeating patterns is that they have roots:

What you need to know is that these patterns aren’t random – they come from the hidden places within us like the wounds we haven’t healed, the truths we haven’t faced, and ‘parts’ of ourselves we’ve been conditioned to disown.

We call these buried parts the Shadow Self and they’re usually lurking and waiting for real expression behind the Ego that we’ve created for ourselves to identify with as a reaction to being ashamed of them in the first place.

Until we meet them head-on, they’ll keep sneaking into our love lives, wearing different disguises.

That’s exactly what this article is about.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your relationship with your unconscious mind affects your levels of self-sabotage and causes you to get stuck in a loop of repeating patterns.

Repeating Patterns: What We Cover in This Article

You Don’t Attract What You Want – You Attract What You Are (or What You Deny About Yourself, the World, and Reality)

Let’s get one thing straight: attraction is not just about shared interests or physical chemistry – it’s something much more energetic, unconscious, and raw.

What this means in practical terms is that you don’t just attract people that you think you ‘like’ at the level of your conscious mind and identity but that you attract people who reflect your internal world – especially the bits you’ve not yet made peace with (because there is a natural drive towards wholeness always unfolding and the REAL you wants to be whole again).

For example:

That emotionally unavailable partner you keep ending up with? There’s likely a part of you that fears intimacy too.

That narcissist who constantly gaslights and dominates you? There may be an inner voice in you that believes you’re not enough without someone else’s approval or control.

This doesn’t mean that you’re cursed or doomed or anything – it means that you’re being called to grow and that you’ll keep repeating patterns like this until you learn the lessons required to set you free.

Your relationships are the curriculum.

The Ego vs. the Exiled Shadow Self

When we experience shame early on in our lives – whether from trauma, neglect, criticism, or simply not being mirrored properly as children – we begin to split from our realness and become fragmented. When this happens, we develop an ego: a false self designed to survive in the world without all of the ‘parts’ of ourselves that we’ve become ashamed of (and sent into the Shadow Territory).

The ego wears masks. It performs. It pleases. It rebels. It protects. But it’s completely unreal.

What is the cost of identifying with the ego and becoming attached to it in this way?

The cost is our REALNESS:

To protect ourselves from feeling unworthy or unlovable, we exile the parts of us that were shamed: our vulnerability, our anger, our neediness, our tenderness, our power. These exiled parts don’t disappear because they’re real and what’s real is always real – they just go underground, into what Carl Jung called the Shadow.

But – because it’s real and can’t go anywhere – the shadow doesn’t stay quiet for long…it finds a way to be seen and, more often than not, it does that by projecting itself onto the people we attract so we can finally look it in the eye and become whole again (instead of fragmented and split from ourselves and life).

Why You Keep Repeating Patterns and Getting the Same Results

Until you’ve faced what you’ve disowned in yourself, life will keep presenting it to you in others:

This is why people who haven’t faced their own feelings of abandonment are drawn to partners who disappear emotionally.

It’s why those who haven’t integrated their inner power are magnetised by dominating or controlling lovers.

It’s why the chronic ‘fixers’ and ‘rescuers’ of the world keep ending up with broken birds who never seem to heal.

Each relationship is a mirror of what’s really going on inside ourselves and the more intense the relationship, the deeper the mirror goes. We don’t see people as they are – we see them as we are.

And this goes on and on until we actually take a good look at ourselves for a change.

Repeating Patterns Have Purpose

If you’re someone who keeps finding themselves in drama-filled dynamics, it’s not because you’re doomed or because real relationships are actually just impossible and everybody who’s in a relationship is compromising – it’s because something in you wants to heal.

Your realness is trying to show you, over and over – until you pay attention, listen, and make changes – what needs to be integrated. That’s what this is really about.

Think of it this way: your shadow wants to come home to the light of consciousness (which is why we can say these repeating patterns are really just a case of the unconscious becoming conscious) but it can’t until you acknowledge it, accept it, and take responsibility for it.

Not blame: responsibility – that’s the path to real freedom.

Shadow Work Based on Past Relationships

Here’s a truth bomb: your past relationships are a goldmine of self-awareness if you’re willing to mine them for the insight that can set you free of the repeating patterns you’ve noticed are holding you back.

By looking back at the kind of people you’ve attracted and the kind of drama you’ve tolerated, you can reverse-engineer your own shadow material.

In this sense, you can think of each ex as a clue, not a curse.

Get started by asking yourself some questions to raise AWARENESS:

  • What traits did they have that deeply triggered me?
  • What emotional needs of mine were constantly unmet?
  • What role did I play in the dynamic (rescuer, victim, pursuer, distancer)?
  • What did I try to get from them that I wasn’t giving to myself?

Then go deeper into a sense of ACCEPTANCE:

  • What part of me was attracted to this person?
  • What was I really chasing?
  • What was I avoiding within myself by focusing on them?
  • How was I using this relationship to avoid the TRUTH?

Then start to take ACTION by doing things differently as you move forward.

(Awareness, Acceptance, and Action work every time when it comes to transforming your life – book a call with me to find out how it can help you change yours).

The key point to remember is that repeating patterns don’t lie:

If you’ve had three relationships in a row where you ended up begging for emotional presence, there’s something in you that fears being emotionally present with yourself and so you’re attempting to outsource it to others.

If you keep attracting narcissists, you may need to look at how your identity has been built around external validation.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

This isn’t about blame – it’s about liberation from whatever inside yourself is stopping you from healing yourself.

Becoming Real and Overcoming Repeating Patterns Always Means Integrating the Shadow

The only way to break the cycle is to go inward and reclaim the ‘parts’ of you that you sent into exile down in the Shadow Territory. This is what shadow work is all about: not some abstract mystical practice, but the gritty, powerful work of getting honest with yourself and shining light on your own darkness.

It’s about:

  • Owning your anger instead of denying it.
  • Allowing your vulnerability to be ‘seen’.
  • Speaking the truth even if it’s uncomfortable to do so.
  • Meeting your unmet needs with compassion instead of outsourcing them to others.

When you become whole, you stop chasing fragments, and those repeating patterns stop because you’ve freed yourself. Forever.

But Isn’t Love Meant to Be a Bit Chaotic?

A common myth in our culture is that love is supposed to be a battle and to be embodied by chaos and even a bit of push-pull here and there.

This simply isn’t true:

Real love isn’t chaotic – it’s not a rollercoaster of anxiety, drama, and dopamine…that’s trauma bonding (which is really just ego meeting ego as too fragmented people try and squeeze love – which is about wholeness – into a mutually beneficial fragmented box).

The TRUTH is that real love is stable, grounded, and safe. It supports your growth, not your addiction.

If you’ve only ever known intensity and drama, stability will feel boring at first but that’s not actually boredom – it’s nervous system regulation.

That’s what healing and wholeness feels like.

Real Change and Releasing Repeating Patterns Requires Real Action

Here are a few practical steps to begin transforming your love life and its repeating patterns:

1. Journal Your Patterns

Write down the qualities of the last 3–5 people you’ve dated or been romantically involved with. Look for patterns and be brutally honest.

2. Identify the Mirror

Next to each trait or dynamic, write down what that reflects in you (and, again, be brutally honest). Don’t just say something like “She was controlling” but ask, “Where did I give up my power?” or “Why did I allow that in the first place?”.

3. Name the Wound

Every repeating pattern is rooted in some old wound (usually from childhood). Ask yourself what early experience might have created that wound (e.g., childhood neglect, parental abandonment, conditional love, etc. etc. etc.).

4. Practice Shadow Integration

When you notice yourself judging others harshly because of certain qualities that they embody, pause and ask yourself “Is this something I haven’t owned in myself?” Be curious, not critical. If the quality is something that you haven’t owned then you need to accept that it’s not ‘them’, it’s ‘you’ that’s causing your irritation and judgement.

5. Choose Differently

When you meet someone new that you might end up romantically involved with, pay attention to your nervous system:

Are you calm and at peace or anxious and alert? Don’t chase the high when you choose the steady. That’s where the gold is and where you’ll find something real, lasting, and that allows you to experience actual intimacy (without the masks and the drama).

6. Seek Support

Shadow work is deep. Doing it alone is possible, but having a coach like me who understands this work can accelerate your growth immensely. You don’t need to do it all on your own. Book a call if you want to explore this stuff and you’re interested in going deeper.

Repeating patterns are a minor case of insanity.

Repeating Patterns Final Thoughts: Healing Is Remembering Who You Really Are

The relationships we attract are never mistakes – they’re invitations, portals, and even teachers.

What’s interesting is that they’ll keep repeating until the lesson is learned – not because life is cruel, but because life is committed to your evolution into realness.

If you’re tired of the same old story, it’s time to write a new one – not by finding a different person, but by becoming a different version of yourself: a more whole, integrated, real one.

This is because when you’re real, you don’t settle for fragments, you don’t chase drama, you don’t repeat the past. You keep evolving and growing whole into more realness.

And that’s when real love finds you.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and you’d like to go deeper into your repeating patterns and what to replace them with then book a free call with me and start taking real action.

Trigger Work: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Emotional Pain for Growth

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Trigger work and reverse engineering triggers

The Emotional Reservoir: Using Trigger Work to Get Your Emotions Moving Again and Grow Real

Imagine for a second that you’re going about your day, feeling relatively balanced and pretty real about things, but – all of a sudden – someone cuts you off in traffic, and within an instant, you’re red-faced, raging, and hurling obscenities that even a sailor would be ashamed of…

Or maybe you’re watching Netflix with your partner and they say something that seems innocent on the surface but suddenly – and involuntarily – you find yourself spiralling into a pit of insecurity.

Sound familiar?

Welcome to being human in a world where humans are gonna human.

This article is about trigger work and exploring how these kinds of reactions don’t come out of nowhere but about how they come from within – not because of some random mood swing or chemical imbalance but from something very real inside you: an emotional reservoir that most of us carry around inside the deepest recesses of our being.

Understanding this reservoir could be the key to transforming not just your emotional life, but your whole sense of who you are because it’s the difference between living from a fragmented ego and growing into your realness.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Trigger work is about feeling what you really feel - not just what you think you feel.

What We’ll Cover in this Article

The Hidden Reservoir Inside You (Yes, You)

Unless you’re completely enlightened like Jesus or the Buddha (in which case, congratulations but you might as well stop reading), chances are you’re lugging around a hefty load of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ as you go through life.

This emotional backlog – your ‘reservoir’ – is made up of old pain, disappointments, shame, grief, rage, and other sticky bits of experience that weren’t fully processed at the time.

Instead of moving through us like energy should (because “emotions are e-motion, energy in motion” to quote John Bradshaw) they got blocked, suppressed, and locked behind the ego: our carefully constructed identity which is dependent on us not facing these things so we can continue to identify in a way that feels ‘familiar’ (no matter how satisfying or unsatisfying that might be).

Unfortunately (to the ego, at least), emotional energy doesn’t stay quietly tucked away forever – it keeps leaking…especially when life turns up the heat or the pressure gets too much.

Pressure Doesn’t Create, It Reveals

When life squeezes us – through stress, conflict, or emotional discomfort – it doesn’t insert something new into us. Instead, it just reveals what was already there.

When we’re ‘triggered’ or ‘activated’ in this way, the pressure pushes the ‘juice’ out of the reservoir and what comes out might not be pretty but it’s powerful because it tells us exactly what we need to work with.

In other words, whatever ‘juice’ comes out when you get ‘squeezed’ shows you what’s really going on inside yourself.

Let’s say, for example, that you get criticised at work and immediately feel defensive and tearful:

Is the feedback itself really the issue? Or did it just poke a wound that’s been there since childhood when love was conditional and based on your ‘performance’ according to certain unrealistic standards?

Or perhaps you find yourself consumed by jealousy when your friend shares their latest win:

Is it their success that causes you to feel pain or is their success shining a spotlight on your buried insecurity and unacknowledged potential?

In all these cases (and any like them), it’s never the ‘thing’ or ‘event’ outside of you that’s making you feel whatever you feel – those feelings are already there but outside of your conscious awareness because they’ve been shoved down into your unconscious reservoir. All these external ‘things’ or ‘event’ really do is remind you of what you’ve been hiding from.

This is not abstract theory – it’s given evidence every day:

Two people can experience the exact same external event – being cut off in traffic, for example – and have wildly different internal responses. One shrugs it off, the other goes ballistic.

The only difference is what’s already in their reservoir.

Trigger Work and Reality: You Can’t Flow If You Don’t Let Go

Your REALNESS isn’t some magical state of bliss – it’s the process of becoming whole by facing what’s real within yourself, the world, and reality.

To grow real at the level of your emotional life, you have to stop pretending the reservoir doesn’t exist and start being honest with yourself about whatever you’re carrying so you can start letting it move.

The only thing stopping you from doing this is the ego which always resists the stirring of unconscious ‘stuff’ because it wants control, an ordered self-image, and self-protection – all of the things that facing your reservoir will be a threat to (because allowing the reservoir to get ‘moving’ again will cause your shadow self to surface which is the biggest threat to the ego of all).

To make matters worse, when you deny the ‘stuff’ in your reservoir, it doesn’t disappear – it festers and it tends to explode when you least want it to. This is exactly what happens when we get ‘squeezed’ and that ‘juice’ comes out that we’re not ready for.

A strategy that we can use here is becoming proactive instead of waiting for a trigger to knock us off course. In other words, we can consciously turn towards the contents of our reservoir, rather than letting life pull the cork and send us flying when we least expect it.

This is the gift of “trigger work” which we’ll explore briefly in a second – it teaches us to reverse-engineer our reactions so that we can see what’s really going on inside us, stop blaming the world, and start facing the truth.

Let’s have a quick look:

Trigger Work: Reverse Engineering Your Reactions and Growing Real

Step 1: Awareness – Catching the Leak

The first step is simply becoming aware that something in you has been activated when you get ‘squeezed’ and that ‘juice’ starts to leak out of the reservoir.

You don’t have to psychoanalyse it to death and drive yourself made or anything – just notice:

  • What emotion is present?
  • Where do you feel it in the body?
  • What story is your mind telling you about the situation?

Awareness is simply about witnessing, not ‘fixing’ or even trying to find solutions – it’s simply about pulling your attention back from the trigger and placing it on the reaction it produced in you.

That reaction is your clue and will show you the way back to realness so see it for what it is and learn what you can from it without any sort of attachment or identification (filtering it through ego and its projections).

Step 2: Acceptance – Owning the Reservoir

This is where most people bail because it’s confronting. You realise something that maybe you would prefer not to realise like, “Oh. That rage was already in me” or “I’ve been holding onto this shame for years“.

This is uncomfortable because it means taking radical responsibility and realising that there’s nobody to blame for “making” you feel in a certain way.

The brutal truth to remember is as follows:

You can’t heal what you don’t accept and what you deny just becomes your prison.

Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation or surrender – it means being strong enough to acknowledge that this emotion is a part of your current relationship with yourself and reality. It’s yours because it’s in the reservoir. Pretending it’s not won’t make it go away.

Accepting the emotion without judging yourself (or the emotion itself) is what starts to drain the reservoir because it means you’re not reacting from ego anymore – you’re relating from truth.

(And the ego is always a reaction to unaccepted emotional ‘stuff’ so you’re growing real and becoming free).

Step 3: Action – Transmute the Energy

Here’s where we get tactical and a bit more strategic because – once you’ve felt it – you have a choice: suppress it, explode with it, or transmute it.

Emotions are e-motion, energy in motion, as John Bradshaw said – they’re meant to move and if we stop them from moving because of mental and physical blocks then we just end up causing problems for ourselves (and others by extension, tbh).

Different emotions require different outlets – here are some basic examples to help you create a strategy in your own life:

If it’s anger:

  • Channel it into physical movement like boxing, lifting, or even shouting into a pillow.
  • Use it to get clear about your boundaries and your sense of purpose. Anger points to power so let it fuel you and serve as energy for action instead of breaking you down and holding you back.

If it’s sadness:

  • Don’t intellectualise it and explain it away – just mourn what needs mourning as you let go of what needs letting go of. Allow yourself to cry if need be – that’s a catharsis in itself.
  • Reflect with music, journaling, or a real conversation. Sadness is cleansing and is about shedding old skin.

If it’s shame:

  • Look for the origin: Whose voice is it that you’re judging yourself with, for example? Where did you learn to judge yourself and hold back like this? It’s NOT your real state, that’s for sure
  • Bring light to it by speaking it aloud to someone safe – shame dissolves in connection and expression (seriously, just sharing it with somebody can make it disappear sometimes as you’ll see you were holding on for totally unreal reasons).

If it’s fear:

  • Challenge the story behind the fear. Is it real or an echo of the past? Often fear is just F.E.A.R (“false evidence appearing real”). Go find out for sure (if there’s no physical danger then it’s just emotional discomfort which means there’s room to grow).
  • Breathe deeply and re-enter your body and your awareness. Fear lives in the hypothetical future – stop worrying and come back to now.

If it’s guilt:

  • If it’s healthy guilt (a short-term pang until you accept that you did something wrong), make amends.
  • If it’s toxic guilt (you feel responsible for someone else’s emotions and it LINGERS), release it.

The goal is to let the emotion move through you and transform by either being released or allowing you to integrate parts of yourself you may have been hiding from.

When you do this enough, something amazing happens: your energy shifts and the reservoir becomes a canal.

From Reservoir to Canal: The Energy Shift Trigger Work Can Bring

A reservoir stores water. A canal channels it – that’s the evolution of your emotional life when you start living in your realness.

In this state, you’re no longer just storing up emotional pain and hoping not to erupt – you’re letting it flow and you’re using it in alignment with your values: the energy that once caused destruction every time you got ‘squeezed’ now fuels your vision, your habits, your purpose and the ‘juice’ tastes so much sweeter.

Rage becomes clarity. Grief becomes depth. Shame becomes humility. Fear becomes focus.

When you have a reservoir you become stagnant and nothing ever changes; if you have a river then your emotions consume you and take you wherever they want to go; when you have a canal, you CHOOSE to direct your energy where it needs to go so you can live your REAL life.

This is what it means to be emotionally intelligent in the truest sense – you don’t block, you don’t explode. You realise.

Practical Steps to Start Using Trigger Work Today

Here’s a step-by-step you can use to implement some “trigger work” principles the next time you get emotionally activated:

1. Pause, Breathe, and Observe

As soon as you feel triggered, stop, and take three deep breaths – this creates a gap between stimulus and response so that you can just observe instead of reacting on autopilot (based on what’s in that reservoir).

Remind yourself that you are not your emotions – they are just something you have (not that you are). Many problems with emotions come about because people identify with them (which stops them moving).

2. Name It to Tame It

Say out loud (or write in a journal): “I’m feeling [emotion] because [story/thought]” – this builds awareness and starts to separate truth from projections of old reservoir ‘stuff’ and the narratives that come from it instead of reality.

3. Track It in the Body

Where is it sitting? Chest, gut, throat? Somewhere else? Bring your attention there and stay present with it without trying to push it away. If you’ve had your reservoir for a long time then the odds are that some of the emotional ‘stuff’ will be showing up as tension in your body (which is why yin yoga and other somatic practices can be so valuable at building resilience overall).

4. Ask: What Does This Remind Me Of?

Does the emotion feel familiar? Old? What past experience or belief might be fuelling it? What do you still need to let go of or process that’s keeping that reservoir full and that you keep reliving?

5. Accept That It’s Yours

Like we said, this isn’t about blame – it’s about responsibility. The emotion lives in your reservoir so own it without judgement (which means that the emotion isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it just is what it is).

6. Channel the Lesson

Every trigger contains truth. Ask: What is this emotion teaching me about myself, my needs, my values, or my past?

7. Take REAL Action

Once you’ve learned the lesson: DO something with the knowledge you’ve acquired. As the old saying goes the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

Do something that takes the energy in that reservoir and directs it into your purpose instead of just going around in the same old circles again and again (i.e. start to build a canal).

8. Rinse and Repeat

This isn’t a one-off trick – it’s a practice, and – like anything worthwhile – it gets easier and more powerful over time as you go deeper and deeper into wholeness.

Trigger work is about bringing forth what needs facing so it doesn't destroy you.

Final Word- Trigger Work: Your Pain is a Portal

The aim of facing all of this ‘stuff’ isn’t to become emotionless like a robot – the aim is to stop being emotionally hijacked so that you can turn your emotional pain into emotional power and move from reacting unconsciously (reservoir) to responding wisely (canal).

Every trigger is an invitation back into the truth and so a portal into something real – if you follow that path, what waits on the other side isn’t more chaos but clarity and calm.

If the ‘juice’ that comes out when you get ‘squeezed’ isn’t what you want it to be, then maybe it’s time to do something different?

Stop running away from yourself and start running towards something REAL.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and you’re ready to grow real and start changing your life then book a free call with me today and start moving fast.

Heartset: The Missing Piece of the ‘Good’ Life Puzzle

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Heartset versus mindset

Mindset Will Take You Far but Your Heartset Will Make You REAL

For years, everybody has been talking about mindset:

Bookshelves creak and heave under the weight of titles promising to transform your life through a better mindset; podcasts, influencers, CEOs, and ‘spiritual‘ gurus all harp on about the power of mindset and how if you can just start thinking in the ‘right’ way then you’re whole life will sort itself out.

And, in a way, a lot of these guys are right – your mindset matters. A lot.

Unfortunately, a lot of people fall into the trap of reading or hearing all of this and thinking that they’re mindset is the only thing that matters. But it really isn’t. In fact, if you believe that (see what I did there?), then you’re really missing out on the full story which goes a little like this:

Mindset is a tool but Heartset is the source.

Focusing on mindset alone is like trying to build a cathedral with just a hammer – you can whack things into place, sure, but without the blueprint, the vision, and the artistry – it’ll never be more than a pile of bricks that have been misshaped and distorted by all that hammering.

What’s even more important is that, if you’re using your hammer to build according to the wrong plans – in this case, according to the plans of your ego instead of your realness – you’ll just end up further from where you truly want to be and things will become increasingly unreal.

This article is about exploring this missing piece – Heartset – and diving into why it’s the difference between chasing your tail or living in harmony with something much more powerful: the truth.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your heartset will keep you flowing with truth instead of forcing yourself to think about it.

Table of Contents

Mindset is a Tool, Not the Master

At the most basic level, the mind is like a computer:

It rearranges fragments, stores symbols, compares memories, and tries to make sense of the past, filter the present, and simulate future possibilities based on all of this. It’s brilliant, useful, but also dangerous if we don’t learn to master it.

Left untrained, the mind becomes a traitor that hands itself over to the service of the ego and then keeps us running around in loops of fear, shame, and comparison. This puts us on a repetitive hamster wheel that becomes a prison of overthinking, sending us spiralling into either analysis paralysis (leading to passivity and a lack of action) or frantic action with no clear purpose (which means most of what you do ends up being unreal).

All of this is why mindset training is important – we need to train the mind to be our servant and not our master if we want to stand any chance of living a real life.

This is why all those books and podcasts about mindset have become so popular…working on your mindset will get you amazing results because, when your mindset is in shape, your thoughts are more empowering and they don’t hold you back from life. Instead, you start thinking in terms of growth, purpose, and resilience; you learn to pause before reacting; you learn to redirect attention and choose focus instead of just running around like a headless chicken. These are powerful skills for sure.

Here’s the truth, though:

Nothing real can come from the mind alone.

Why?

Because the mind deals in fragments but reality is whole:

The mind can conceptualise a tree but it cannot be the tree.

It can model the future but it cannot live it.

It can remember pain but it cannot feel it unless the body is involved.

The mind is downstream of truth.

Which is what brings us to the deeper current: your heartset.

Heartset is the Real You (It’s Your REALNESS)

Heartset is the deeper layer of who you are in truth that connects directly to what’s real.

We can say that if the mind is the navigator, heartset is the compass; it’s your inner orientation, the seat of your values, qualities, and a deep experience of being connected to the truth in wholeness. It is who you are beneath all the noise of identity and the world and the things that keep you stuck in the Void.

When you understand your heartset and work to cultivate your connection to it, your mindset naturally becomes powerful by extension. When you’re close to your own real heartset, you become fractured and closed and so your mindset – no matter how “positive” you try to be – becomes a performance instead of anything that can actually get you real results in your life.

This is why so many high-achievers burn out:

They build empires with their mindset but feel empty inside because they’re constantly forcing everything (themselves, the world, and reality) to conform to whatever mindset they’ve concocted for themselves. They forget the source which means that they override the whispers of their own realness and so they stop flowing with life and burn out.

Let’s use a quick metaphor:

In our natural state – what I call our REALNESS – we are like a still, glass-smooth lake. In this state, we’re aware of our own wholeness and the wholeness of everything else; we’re also deeply accepting of life as it is and we act from this stillness with clarity, love, and precision.

But then – as is often the case – life happens:

The wind blow, stones are thrown at us, sometimes the storms rage, and so the lake starts to ripple. When this happens – instead of resting in the stillness beneath the ripples -, our mind begins to panic and look for ‘sense’ and so we start identifying with the ripples themselves (forgetting that we are the lake itself).

We become the anxiety. The story. The shame. The defensiveness. The constant reactivity. In other words, we begin to treat the fragments (ripples) as the whole (lake).

Yoga understood this thousands of years ago – in fact, the first four verses of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali lay it out like this:

  1. Yoga (union) is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.
  2. Then the Seer rests in their own true nature.
  3. Otherwise, the Seer identifies with the fluctuations.
  4. Those fluctuations are born of memory, imagination, senses, and ego.

That’s really what it’s all about – if you can understand this and stop identifying with those ripples (which is what all real spiritual traditions are systems designed to help you do), then you can return to your realness and change your life forever.

In relation to what we’re talking about in this article, your heartset is what keeps us from drowning in the ripples.

It’s what helps us return to the still lake beneath.

Let’s look at how you can do it:

7 heartset qualities

Qualities of a Real Heartset

So what is Heartset made of?

Well, not fluff or ‘vibes’ but real, grounded qualities that hold you steady in the storm and keep you flowing with life no matter what it brings your way.

Here are some of the key ones:

1. Openness

Life can be painful, people let us down, things go wrong. Welcome to Planet Earth.

It’s tempting to close our hearts in self-protection when things don’t go as we ‘like’ or expect them to but an open heart is what allows life to flow through us without getting stuck.

Openness doesn’t mean naïve vulnerability – it means courage (appropriately the word courage comes from the Latin “cor” which means “heart”).

It means choosing to keep feeling even when it hurts because you know that real strength just means never closing your heart and closing down because your ego doesn’t want to take the lesson.

2. Curiosity

Curiosity keeps us from freezing in our assumptions and then become ‘fixed’ which always leads to stagnation.

When you’re curious, you’re not stuck in certainty – you’re in discovery mode and so you can keep going deeper into life and learning more and more about it.

This kind of curiosity keeps your mind and heart flexible and helps you uncover deeper truth rather than staying fixated on the surface of what you think life might be.

3. Love

Not just romantic love – not even just love for others ,but love as a way of being.

Love for life when it’s ‘good’, love for life when it’s ‘bad’ (it’s all going to be over one day, after all); a love of the mystery, a love for the growth, and for beauty.

Love is the energy that dissolves fragmentation and restores unity because love is about acceptance and acceptance always leads to the truth (which restores unity because the truth is wholeness).

4. Creativity

The ability to build, to shape, and to co-create something real with life.

Creativity isn’t just painting a pretty picture or taking a photograph or whatever – it’s how you make meaning, solve problems, and write your story by taking real action.

A creative heart sees possibility even when the world feels stuck and so you can keep moving and not be held down by the world that the mind might initially show you.

5. Trust

Trust is the heartbeat of Heartset:

It’s the inner knowing that even when you don’t have all the answers, life is working with you, not against you.

Trust lets you take action when things are uncertain because you know you can do your best and let go of the rest (see my book: Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace).

It’s how you grow and stay real.

6. Compassion

Without compassion, your heart hardens and you only see your mental ideas and projections of yourself and the people in the world around you. You become judgemental, bitter, or cold.

Compassion for others keeps you human; compassion for yourself keeps you sane.

7. Abundance

An abundant heart knows there is enough – time, love, ideas, money, miracles.

Where scarcity shrinks you, abundance allows you to expand.

When you live from this heartset, you know you are connected to a source that never runs dry, and so you stop clinging to things that aren’t yours and stop chasing things that are unreal.

None of these heartsets are just ‘nice-to-haves’ – they are the very qualities that stop you from falling into the Void. If you work on cultivating them, your life will become more real.

Avoiding the Void

The Void is what happens when we live from the ripples and become disconnected from the truth – usually because we identify with the ego, and the fear, shame, and stories it keeps us glued to.

It’s a cold, hollow place; a place of numbness, confusion, overthinking, and reactivity.

In other words, the Void is the absence of real connection.

When people say they feel lost, stuck, disconnected, restless, or like they have an itch that can’t be scratched then they’re in the Void.

What you need to know here is that trying to mindset your way out of the Void without real heartset is like trying to start a car with no fuel. You’ll just burn out.

You’ll go around in endless circles ‘thinking’ about ways to change things but you’ll never get anywhere because the mind is the thing that led you to be stuck in the mud in the first place.

When your heartset is online, however, your mindset starts to align with reality; your thoughts, choices, and actions become grounded in truth and you move with life instead of against it.

That’s the difference and why your heartset can make the difference between unreal and real.

How To Develop Your Heartset (Practical Tools)

Heartset isn’t a magical switch that you flip – it’s a garden you cultivate and you can start right now.

Here’s how to start tending to yours:

1. Daily Stillness Practice

Take 10–20 minutes a day to sit in silence without any particular agenda. Just breathe and become aware of the ‘lake’ of awareness within yourself. This reconnects you to wholeness which is the source of anything real.

2. Heart-Check Journalling

Each morning or evening, ask yourself:

  • What am I feeling right now?
  • Am I open or closed?
  • What does my heartset need today?

This builds emotional awareness and attunes you to your deeper self.

You can also rate yourself in terms of the 7-qualities laid out above and figure out how to take daily steps to grow into them (openness, curiosity, love, creativity, trust, compassion, and abundance).

3. Act from Wholeness, Not Fragmentation

When faced with a choice, ask: Am I doing this from fragmentation or wholeness? Choose the latter every time. It might feel uncomfortable in the short-term, but it will always lead to realness.

4. Use the ‘REALNESS’ Lens

Before taking any major action, reflect:

  • Is this aligned with wholeness?
  • Am I aware or acting from autopilot?
  • Am I in acceptance or trying to force control?
  • Am I acting from truth or reacting from a ripple?

This will help you spot when you’re slipping into the Void and acting from the mind alone instead of who you really are.

5. Surround Yourself with Real Ones

Spend time with people who value truth, depth, and growth. Heartset is contagious and so if your circle is all about ego games and drama, you’ll get sucked back into the ripples.

6. Stretch Your Trust Muscle

Do one thing each week that stretches your ability to trust yourself and life – starting a project, having a real conversation, taking a leap. Trust grows through action and so do you.

7. Return to the Lake Daily

No matter how messy your day, always come home:

Back to your breath, your body, your being – back to that glass-smooth lake beneath it all.

You are not the ripples. You never were.

Your heartset will take you were your mindset simply can't.

Conclusion: Mindset Will Take You Far but Heartset Will Take You All the Way

In order to transform your life, you don’t need to become something new – you just need to return to what’s real and that starts with your heartset.

Mindset is useful, but Heartset is essential.

Train your mind, yes – but orient your heart towards something REAL. When you do, your life becomes an extension of the realness within you:

Less resistance. More flow. Less proving. More being. Less Void. More connection.

This is not hype. It’s not theory. It’s a way of living.

Live from your heart and you’ll be surprised how clear your mind becomes.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you want to work on improving your hearset and improving your life once and for all then book a free call with me and get moving today.

Personal Practical Philosophy and Code of Conduct: The Return to Truth

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Philosophy and code of conduct

How to Create Your Own Practical Philosophy and Code of Conduct

Modern life is plagued by two silent but deadly forces that most men rarely talk about but feel every day:

  1. The Void – that lingering sense of emptiness, fragmentation, and of not being whole that shows up as restlessness or a chronic itch that can’t quite ever be scratched. It comes from being split from the truth – almost always due to underlying shame and having built an identity around things that aren’t real as a reaction to this shame.
  2. Moral Relativism – the idea that anything goes, as long as it feels ‘good’ or fits the identity that we’ve created to play a role in the dreamworld of the Void. Moral relativism exists because there’s no agreed-upon standard anymore – just a swamp of opinions, trends, and personal preferences because we fell into the trap of thinking that all ideas are as valid as any other (when that’s simply not true because some ideas point more closely to reality than others).

Based on what I’ve seen coaching people over the years, then if you’re man between 35 and 44, then it’s highly likely that you’ve likely hit a point where these two forces have shown up; you might not have had fancy names for them, but you’ve felt their pull and you’ve been questioning yourself and life trying to figure out what to do about it.

What I can tell you from the get-go is that the answer isn’t to numb out, chase distractions, or pretend that everything’s fine – instead of running away like that you need to start moving in the opposite direction and start running towards something real:

Both of these problems are caused by an unreal and unhealthy relationship with the truth itself and so the solution is to start finding a way to heal this relationship and repairing the damage of fragmentation that a disconnection from truth causes.

One way to start doing this is to become conscious of your own personal philosophy and, by extension, your code of conduct – a practical, living system that grounds you in truth, gives you clarity, and helps you live in a REAL way.

This helps you to overcome the Void because it returns you to the truth about yourself and it helps you to overcome moral relativism because it helps you see the truth about the world and reality.

Your philosophy doesn’t need to be original to be valid – it just needs to be real to you. You might borrow from Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, or something your grandfather once said – as long as it holds weight and has been tested in your life, it’s valid.

As for your code, that doesn’t have to impress anyone else either – it just has to stand strong when life throws storms your way.

That’s how you’ll know it’s working.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your personal practical philosophy begins with knowing yourself, the world, and reality.

What We’ll Cover in This Article

Why Philosophy Matters More Than Ever

Most people think philosophy is abstract, academic, or too fluffy for real life and that can definitely be true of those ‘philosophers’ in ivory towers playing mind games with symbols and language or whatever it is that they’re doing.

Practical philosophy, on the other hand, is just this: a quest for truth. And truth always matters – especially when you ACT on it.

When we commit to the truth, something radical starts to happen:

  • The Void begins to dissolve because truth restores wholeness and brings the fragmented parts of ourselves back into alignment. This allows us to be what we were supposed to be before we picked up shame (which is what leads to the Void in the first place).
  • Moral relativism loses its grip and we can stand on a solid foundation instead of always feeling like our life could crumble at any second. This is because truth – by its nature – is not subjective: our interpretations may vary, but truth itself doesn’t bend to opinion.

As an example, maybe you realise that constantly chasing short-term pleasure (booze, status, porn, ‘likes’) in an attempt to fill the Void has left you feeling more lost. What you start to realise as you dig into it is that the truth is that these things don’t lead to fulfilment. This being the case, your personal practical philosophy might include a code like: “I choose depth over distraction”.

Making Philosophy Practical

Philosophy only ‘matters’ if it can be lived (otherwise it really is just abstract and empty):

Life moves and circumstances change and so your philosophy can’t be rigid dogma – it has to be a living system that helps you navigate change while staying true to your values. At the same time, though, it will probably need to comprise certain principles that never change like the law of cause and effect, for example, or the idea that “the only constant in life is change“.

This means aligning your philosophy with principles about how life actually works – for example:

  • Everything moves: Life is in constant flux.
  • You don’t control everything: Your plans are only ever a best guess.
  • But you can still aim: You can walk the path with direction, grounded in your core values.

Your philosophy might include something like: “I embrace what I can’t control and focus only on what’s mine to act upon” – this stops you from spiralling when life throws you curveballs (illness, redundancy, heartbreak) and keeps you grounded.

It accepts the underlying principles but allows room for the surface of life to keep changing and evolving so you don’t lapse into dogma (that eventually would just hold you back because it’s static and real life keeps moving).

Trust in Something Higher

Every strong philosophy or theology has to acknowledge one basic truth: you are not the centre of the universe.

You can’t white-knuckle your way through life and expect peace – you need to trust in something beyond your ego:

  • God
  • Nature
  • A set of sacred principles or values (like courage, truth, humility)
  • Even chaos and uncertainty as long as it’s real to you and you know your reasons for trusting in these things

This trust reminds you that life is bigger than your own mind and helps you adapt with grace when things go off-script (which they always will because the map is not the territory).

As an example, your code might include something like: “I trust that life gives me what I need even when it contradicts what I want“.

The reasons it’s important to build something ‘higher’ than just yourself into the philosophy is because doing this embraces the fact that you can’t control everything in your life and that you don’t know everything in your life – sure, you know a lot, but in the gaps in your knowledge there’s always space for more reality.

A Path from Fragmentation to Wholeness

The point of a personal philosophy isn’t just to have better ideas – it’s to become whole again and to overcome the symptoms of the Void and the moral relativism that supports it.

Wholeness means integrating all parts of yourself:

  • The ego and the shadow.
  • The pain and the possibility.
  • The confusion and the clarity.

This is what all great religions and workable spiritual systems aim at: not perfection, but alignment, flow, and integrity.

For example, your code might include: “I welcome discomfort if it brings me closer to wholeness“.

This one simple sentence can radically change how you show up in conflict, work, relationships, and in whatever inner work you need to do on yourself: if you know that it’s all carrying you towards wholeness, then you can come from a stance of acceptance instead of resistance.

Questions to Build Your Philosophy

To build your own philosophy, you need to wrestle with deep questions so that you can really dig deep into the knowledge that you already have and weed out any unrealistic assumptions that are holding you back from truth.

Don’t rush this. Let it unfold. But keep coming back to it so that you can keep refining your relationship with the truth and going deeper into it:

Some questions to ask (sit down when you have some time and journal out your answers to some of these):

  1. What does it mean to be a human being? Are we here to consume, to love, to grow, to serve, or something else entirely?
  2. What do all humans have in common? Mortality, pain, joy, dreams? The journey that we’re on? Our nature? What makes sense to you based on what you’ve seen of this life?
  3. How do I make moral choices? Is it about consequences? Integrity? A compass deeper than reason? Wholeness? Relativism? What do you think?
  4. What values do I want to live by no matter what? Honour, truth, courage, compassion, discipline? Freedom, creativity, humour, flow? If you know your values you can take action on them and change your own life (and the lives of other people by extension).
  5. What assumptions am I carrying that might not be true? E.g. “I have to be successful to be worthy”, “I have to be beautiful to be loved”, etc. Weed out your limiting beliefs and the assumptions that they’re rooted in because they dictate your whole life.

These questions are your trail markers as you answer them, you begin to build a clear map of your own realness and the philosophy that stems from it.

Uncover and Live the Truth (At Every Level)

The good life isn’t about being right – it’s about being real. That means doing two things every day:

  1. Uncover the truth – Let go of illusions, lies, conditioning and go deeper into wholeness.
  2. Live the truth – Act in alignment with it (and then go even deeper into wholeness).

You need to do this at all levels and your philosophy will (probably – it’s your philosophy, after all) need to reflect them:

  • Physical truth: What’s really going on with your body? Are you tired, inflamed, addicted? How do you see your relationship with your body and what do you need to do to improve it?
  • Mental truth: Are your thoughts clear or distorted by ego/fear? How are your beliefs holding you back? What mental gremlins do you need to bash? Are you identified with the fragments of the mind instead of who you really are in wholeness?
  • Emotional truth: Are you feeling your feelings, or suppressing them? Do you have a healthy relationship with your own emotions? Do you identify with them and stay stuck in them? Do you ignore them and pretend you’re a robot?
  • Spiritual truth: Are you living as if life is sacred or are you just passing time? What does ‘spiritual’ even mean to you? Why does it matter? How does it help you to deal with the Void and moral relativism?

For example, if your body is screaming for rest but your ego is chasing hustle because of some underlying emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, usually), the truth is clear: you’re out of sync with your own spiritual truth and you’re trying to find meaning in places you never can. In this case, your code might include something like “I honour the signals of my body before the demands of my ego“.

Break Free from Two Major Enemies of Truth: Social Programming and Biological Wiring

There are two forces that try to pull you away from reality every single day:

  1. Social programming – the web of messages that say: “You’re only worthy if you look a certain way, earn a certain amount, or follow a certain script”.
  2. Your own flesh/biological wiring – the part of you that craves ease, comfort, instant gratification. It isn’t evil, but it must be tamed like a wild horse and led in the direction of your vision.

You must train yourself to recognise these forces and reject their ill effects in your life when necessary – your personal practical philosophy will need to have a basic way of discerning between when these things are holding you back or not.

For example, your code could include “I am not here to be liked. I am here to live true” to help you overcome social programming and something like “I do what’s right, not what’s easy” to help you overcome the weakness of the flesh.

Writing Your Code of Conduct

Once you’ve spent some time exploring the ‘big; questions and peeled back some of the illusions that are stopping you seeing yourself, the world, and reality clearly, it’s time to distil your insights into something practical and real.

Your Code of Conduct = Philosophy in Action

Ideally, this needs to be:

  • Personal (true to you)
  • Clear (no fluff)
  • Grounded in truth (not just preference or opinion)
  • Revisited often (as life changes around you and you change with it)

Your philosophy may be endless but try and keep your code of conduct to about 5 basic points that you commit to memory:

Example Code (5 simple points):

  1. I tell the truth, even when it costs me.
  2. I treat my body like a sacred vessel.
  3. I take responsibility for everything in my life.
  4. I embrace discomfort as a teacher.
  5. I trust that life is unfolding as it should.

If your practical philosophy is based in truth then your code of conduct will keep you REAL.

Your practical philosophy and code of conduct allow you to program yourself instead of being programmed by the world.

Conclusion: Your Practical Philosophy Leads to A Real Life

Most men drift but a few decide to step up, face facts, and anchor themselves to something real.

Creating your own philosophy and code of conduct won’t make life easier – but it will make your life yours (instead of either the world’s or the product of living on autopilot to nowhere).

With it, you’ll stop outsourcing your meaning to society, trends, or your past; you’ll start walking a path that’s honest, rooted, and real, and that – in the end – is what makes a man unshakable.

Start today – not with the perfect answers (which is impossible) but with the willingness to seek and live the truth.

When you build a life around that… you’ll never go back to the Void.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

The Daily Practice: 15 Minutes to Reconnect with Truth and Wholeness

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A simple daily practice

A Consistent Daily Practice Leads to a Real Life

The world is filled with all kinds of unreality which means that the TRUTH is your compass (if you want to grow real, at least):

We live in a time where it’s all too easy to lose ourselves in performance and to get caught up in our own bullsh*t: social media snapshots, people-pleasing, productivity for productivity’s sake…but amidst all that noise, there is something quietly powerful that’s always available: your realness.

This isn’t just some vague spiritual fluff – realness is your unfiltered wholeness.

It’s the ‘You’ beneath the all the F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”), the facades, and the conditioning – the part of you that knows, breathes, and flows without force.

It’s the part that doesn’t need validation because it is validation.

And the good news is that you can reconnect with it every day by implementing a daily practice in your life.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your daily practice is about growing consistently more real.

Why a Daily Practice Matters

You don’t grow into your potential by accident. You build a real relationship with yourself by continually raising awareness, cultivating acceptance, and taking real action.

Just like brushing your teeth keeps plaque off your molars, a consistent inner practice to support the building of flow and growth keeps resistance and distortion out of your mind, body, and spirit so that you can align yourself with the process of actually growing and not stagnating (like so many people end up doing because they think growth is just something that ‘happens’ and not that they make happen).

This is where having at least some kind of daily practice comes in:

  1. It creates a sacred pause in your day – a space where truth can speak louder than all of the noise and the chaos.
  2. It reprogrammes your nervous system to trust rather than force and control.

If you’re not consciously choosing to reconnect with reality, chances are you’re unconsciously reacting from your conditioning and becoming more and more unreal.

Let’s flip that script and put forward some ideas for simple things that you can do to put and then keep yourself on a REAL path.

What is the REALNESS Basic Daily Practice?

This is a simple 15-minute daily practice designed to help you:

  • Regulate your nervous system through breathwork.
  • Reconnect with yourself through a simple self-check.
  • Reveal unconscious patterns through simple shadow journaling.

Think of it like a tuning fork: you align to truth before the world has a chance to pull you off key – the more you tune in the easier it is to stay in harmony.

(Which is why doing this daily will get you increasingly ‘better’ results over time).

The Practice: Choose-Your-Own-REALNESS

You don’t need to do everything that follows perfectly…this is not another to-do list – it’s a tool for: 1) uncovering the truth, and, then 2) living and breathing the truth.

Choose whichever version suits your energy and needs:

Part 1: Breathe (3–5 minutes)

When you own your breath, nobody can steal your peace – as the old saying goes (in yoga circles), the quality of your life is directly linked to the quality of your breath. This being the case it makes sense to learn how to regulate your breathing (and then to keep going throughout the day).

For the following exercises, unless otherwise stated, I recommend nose breathing which has a metric-f-ton of benefits (which you can read about here).

Daily Practice Options:

  • Box Breathing: Inhale for 4, retain for 4, exhale for 4, hold for (all through the nose!).
  • Physiological Sigh: Inhale through the nose, then sip in a second breath, exhale slowly through the mouth.
  • Coherent Breathing: Breathe in for 5 seconds, out for 5, syncing with your heart rhythm.

Why this daily practice helps you stay real:

Breath is essentially your remote control for the nervous system:

When you slow and deepen your breath, you signal to your body that you’re safe which calms the stress response (sympathetic nervous system) and activates your parasympathetic state – also known as rest and digest.

In terms of connecting to your realness, your nervous system needs to be regulated in this way so that you can trust yourself (do your best) and then trust life (let go of the rest).

If your nervous system doesn’t feel safe and perceives threats everywhere, then you’ll always get lost to the fragmented ego version of yourself that arises as a reaction to these threats.

I really can’t state how important learning to regulate the breath (and by extension, nervous system) really is.

Part 2: A Self-Check for Realness (5 minutes)

Most people live reactively but a healthy self-check allows you to be responsive and to show up in life as who you want to be – not just who your old patterns and conditioning tell you to be.

By actively raising awareness of who you are in your realness every day, you can show up with intention instead of just acting on autopilot.

It all begins my spending some time reflecting on questions that can help you see your realness more clearly.

Some examples (though you could just meditate on anything relevant to what you’re going through or facing at this time in your life):

Questions to reflect on (choose 1–3):

  • Am I operating from truth or fear right now?
  • What part of me is trying to control something uncontrollable today?
  • Where am I not being fully honest with myself or others?
  • How’s my energy: real or performative?
  • What would the real me choose to do in this in this situation?
  • Who am I becoming by acting like I’m acting?

You can sit with these silently, speak them aloud, or write brief answers – the only goal is alignment, not analysis for the sake of itself.

Alignment usually just means letting go of anything unreal and holding onto whatever real ‘thing’ remains.

Why it works:

This builds self-awareness, the first pillar of transformation in my coaching philosophy and in the containers I create with my coaching clients.

In short, realness starts when you’re honest enough to see yourself clearly.

Most people avoid this because it threatens their ego but for you in your daily practice it’s the beginning of freedom and the thing that sustains it once you’ve unlocked it.

Part 3: Journal to Reveal the Shadow (5 minutes)

If you can let go and just write what you need to write in your journal, it will show you what’s ready to be healed. This because when you write in a stream of consciousness type way, it allows the shadow self to peek between the cracks of the ego and show you what’s really going on for you. The more aware of this kind of ‘stuff’ you become, the more you can become whole (which is REAL).

These journal prompts will get you started:

Choose one prompt per day:

  • What uncomfortable emotion is trying to get my attention these days?
  • Where do I feel disconnected from myself and why?
  • What is one pattern that keeps surfacing this week?
  • What truth have I been avoiding?
  • If I really trusted life, what would I do differently today?

Don’t censor yourself – remember, this is for you so that you can keep growing daily.

If you want to go even deeper, use the free Thought Log tool available on this site to separate real thoughts from unreal ones and re-focus in purpose.

Why it works:

This is shadow work in motion:

You’re gently pulling unconscious material into the light without judgement.

Journaling about it in this way gives your inner world a voice and allows vague to make itself more specific and visible (and only what’s visible can be healed).

The Daily Practice Effect: What You’ll Notice Over Time

Stick with this daily practice for even just a week and you’ll begin to feel:

  • More emotionally grounded – even when life throws curveballs (because your nervous system will be regulated and you’ll know who you really are).
  • Less addicted to external validation and more attuned to your inner compass (because you’ll be rooted in awareness of your realness and what you’re all about).
  • A stronger ability to spot ego-patterns before they hijack your day (because you’re becoming more aware of those patterns so can stop them in their tracks instead of automatically reacting).
  • A deeper sense of peace because you’re not running from yourself anymore.
A simple daily practice that can help you to keep growing real and flowing with life.

Final Word: Your Relationship with the Truth is a Muscle – Strengthen It Daily

Your realness isn’t a destination but an energy of wholeness that you return to – day by day and moment by moment.

Your daily practice is your tuning fork so spend at least fifteen minutes a day working on not hiding behind a mask, trusting yourself and life, and reconnecting with the only thing that never lies: truth.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and you want to change your life by implementing systems and structures like this, then book a free call with me and start opening your life up even more.

Non-Duality for Men: Dissolving the Ego Without Losing Drive and Ambition

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Non-duality and drive

Non-duality and Real Growth: Letting Go and Staying in the Flow

If you’re a man who feels pulled between the hunger to achieve and the whisper of something deeper, then keep reading:

This is a totally ‘normal’ conflict that many men feel inside themselves in a world that often feels like it’s going ‘mad’ or has somehow become too far removed from what it really means to be a real human being in the first place.

When many of us become aware of this inner restlessness or the call of the Void, we start to ask questions and to determine what we really want from life. This raising of awareness is always the first step to any transformational journey but without any clear experience of something REAL along the way, we can just end up stuck in a kind of strange middle ground – craving stillness and peace but also craving ‘success‘ and dynamism.

When we’re ‘stuck’ between these poles we start to wonder if we’re losing our minds – especially as we start to become aware of the gap between who we think we are (ego) and who we actually are in our realness. This can often lead to us a decision-point where we’re faced with either letting go of the familiar identity that we’ve been filtering life through up until this point and taking a leap of faith or simply holding on and pretending that everything is fine (even though these old identities will just bring more friction, frustration, and misery the more we cling).

What holds a lot of people back at this stage – from taking that leap of faith into a deeper relationship with reality – is being aware of the ego and the possible benefits of ‘transcending’ it but fearing that if they do they’ll somehow become soft, passive, or irrelevant and lose all of the things that make them ‘them’.

This article is about the twist that a lot of us can miss: true non-duality doesn’t kill your drive. It purifies it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Non-duality is about stepping away from the fragments and experiencing the whole.

What We Cover in This Article

What Is Non-Duality and Why Does It Matter?

At its simplest, non-duality simply means “not two” – at its core, it points to the idea that everything is already whole even though it often appears to be fragmented and populated with entities and objects that are separate and independent from one another.

In other words, everything is whole (even if we don’t perceive or interpret things that way because of our fragmented bodies and brains:

Even though it might ‘look’ like it, reality isn’t split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘me’ and ‘you’, ‘success’ and ‘failure’ or any other judgements we might ascribe to things. Those are all just mental distinctions that we use to function in the world and relate to it.

Instead of these ‘default’ approach, non-duality is the recognition that behind the labels, the posturing, and the inner battles, there is only this – life itself, unfolding. Always. In one big relationship having a relationship with itself as a set of interconnected systems within systems within systems.

For a lot of men, this can be a radical and uncomfortable idea because it goes against the way we’re both biologically wired and socially conditioned to define ourselves by opposition and assertion: be strong, not weak; win, don’t lose; dominate, never submit.

Non-duality says that all of that this is just an egoic structure – a house built on sand as we project our own fragmentation out into the world around us and experience something that isn’t really even ‘there’.

So… What Is the Ego Then?

The ego isn’t some evil entity you need to “kill” (as people like to say they’re going to do). You can’t kill it, anyway, because it’s not real in that way – it’s just a set of fragmented ideas and sensations that we bought into for a little while based on whatever it is that we think we’ve been through.

Think of it like a filter between you and reality:

It’s your conditioning, your beliefs, your biological programming, and your emotional scars – all wrapped up in a story about who you are, what the world is, and what life is.

It’s not inherently ‘bad’ (that would be a dualistic judgement) – in fact, it’s a useful operating system for helping us to survive and to navigate life. The problems arise when you mistake the filter for the whole view – when you look at the windscreen and get confused, instead of looking through it at the road ahead.

In short, the more identified you become with this filter, the more fragmented your experience becomes.

This is why the ego leads to suffering:

Not because it’s wicked but because it’s blocks our view of life and causes us to attach to the fragments of ourselves instead of growing through them into wholeness.

At the end of the day, life itself is whole and so – when you move through life from a place of ego-attachment – you’re trying to live a whole life through a fragmented lens which is impossible and just inevitably leads to unnecessary friction.

This friction starts as irritation, builds into frustration, and eventually collapses into misery.

The Trap of the Spiritual Bypass

Many men try to dissolve the ego by simply trying to convince themselves that they don’t have one:

They watch some ‘spiritual‘ videos online, read a few books, and then attach the concepts that they’ve picked up to their identity – instead of actually experiencing them – and start speaking in non-dual jargon and hope it fixes the inner tension that comes from not taking that leap into the unknown.

They churn out the catchphrases like “there is no self” and that “everything is just awareness” while secretly still raging at their ex, feeding addictions to validation, or numbing out on porn in an attempt to fill the Void that’s still defining their relationship with themselves and life.

The bottom-line with this kind of thing is that spiritual bypassing is just ego in disguise.

Real spirituality doesn’t avoid the world (or anything else, for that matter) – it’s about facing the truth head on and then riding through the mess that comes from whatever was stopping us from facing it in the first place. It’s about integrating every shadow, every pattern, every wound – not denying them.

And the only way you can start to integrate like this is by accepting that you have an ego in the first place (and that there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with that because it’s not about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ but REAL).

Realness: A Path Through the Middle and into Non-Duality

The philosophy I explore in my books and use in my coaching containers with clients is REALNESS and realness is about truth. It’s also about recognising the tension between the ego and the shadow – the part of you you’ve pushed away and sent into hiding in order to maintain an image (ego) that’s ‘acceptable’ to the world around you.

Most men try to project a strong ego in order to avoid facing their shadow (even though facing it is what will set them free) but this just creates a deeper split and an increased sense of fragmentation.

The way back to wholeness is always through Awareness, Acceptance, and Action:

  • Awareness (Deconstruct Ego): See the pattern. Name the filter. Notice when you’re trying to control the uncontrollable, hide from yourself, or win some imaginary competition that really doesn’t matter.
  • Acceptance (Integrate Shadow): Let what is, be. Don’t resist reality because you’ll only lose. Own your flaws, your desires, your mess. Embrace your real opinions and the ways of the world that may initially be uncomfortable (because they don’t align with the ideals that your ego rests upon).
  • Action (Trust Yourself and Life): From this clarity, act. Let your action come from alignment with the whole, not the scramble of ego. Learn to take action that’s yours to take and let go and trust life to handle the rest in times of uncertainty.

Non-Duality Isn’t Passivity – It’s Power

One of the biggest myths men carry is that dissolving the ego will make them weak but the complete opposite is true: the ego is weakness because it’s illusory and the only power we can ever have comes from what’s REAL.

When you stop reacting from ego, you stop wasting energy because you stop resisting life and start accepting it (which alleviates the friction, frustration, and misery that ego eventually brings).

When you’re not fragmented inside, your actions become clean, clear, and impactful because they’re inspired by something whole.

In this state, drive becomes devotion:

You don’t hustle to be seen; you create because it’s real. You lead not to dominate, but to serve. You train your body not out of fear, but love, respect, and the intention to express more life and feel more alive. You set goals not to feel worthy, but because you already are and you want to revel in it.

This is what it means to be in the world but not of it.

From Vision to Wholeness: Non-Duality Made Actionable

The danger of goal-setting from the ego is that it always moves the finish line because it’s caught up in outcome-independence and so you’ll never feel like you’re ‘enough’.

When you act from that place of REALNESS, beyond duality, your vision shifts:

You aim not to fill a hole, but to express wholeness.

Here’s how you can start to do that:

  • Vision: What would your life look like if it flowed from truth and wholeness instead fear and fragmentation? Real vision arises when you start to ask yourself “What wants to come through me?“
  • Goals: Make them real, measurable, and rooted in contribution. They should stretch you but not enslave you as they carry you towards your vision.
  • Habits: These are your anchor to reality: Choose habits that bring you back into presence, back into the now, back into your body, and that help you to grow into the version of yourself that’s aligned with your vision.

The Discipline of Presence

Most men think discipline is about ‘forcing’ things but real discipline is about presence:

It’s about being here and to remain unshaken, no matter what arises. From this place, you can choose aligned action – not because you’re ‘proving’ something but because you already are something: a man plugged into the whole.

The world will still throw fragmentation at you and so your nervous system will still get triggered here-and-there but, every time you return to realness, you dissolve a bit more ego. You reclaim a bit more energy. You start flowing with life instead of fighting it.

And that? That’s non-dual.

It’s REAL.

Practical Integration: A Roadmap for Non-Duality and Realness

Here’s how to bring this down from the clouds and into your real, day-to-day life:

1. Daily Awareness Practice

Spend at least 10 minutes a day in stillness:

Ask yourself: What am I believing right now that is creating resistance?

Breathe. Observe. No ‘fixing’. Just notice that ego filter and how your identity is distorting your life.

2. Shadow Work Journal

Every week, write about what ‘triggered’ or activated you in some way: Go deep.

What fear or unmet need is behind it? What part of your ego was being defended? What is it time to let go of? What is it time to accept?

3. Choose Real Goals

Check your goals and figure out if they’re motivated in ego or in something real. Essentially, you wanna make sure that your goals serve growth, not approval (or any other unreal strategy for filling the Void).

4. Create Flow Habits

Build 3 daily habits that anchor you into presence:

  • Breathwork or cold showers to reset your nervous system.
  • Resistance training to stay grounded.
  • Time in nature to remind you of the whole.

5. Commit to the Dance

You’re not trying to be perfect; you’re not trying to become enlightened by next Tuesday; you’re just dancing with life and observing it as it unfolds.

Sometimes you’ll flow, sometimes you’ll fall but realness is always in the return so commit to it.

As the old Japanese proverb says: “Nanakorobi yaoki” (七転び八起き) “If you fall down seven times, get up eight”.

Non-duality is about giving up the ego so you can grow real.

Final Word: Truth Dissolves Ego and Non-Duality is Reality

There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with wanting to build, achieve, or impact the world – in fact, the world probably needs more men who do that from wholeness.

But you can’t bypass your way there:

You have to face your filters, you have to stop fighting reality, and you have to let go of the image of the man you think you should be so you can finally be the one you are.

That’s non-duality: not an escape but a return.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in tapping into your real drive and taking action and you think that coaching might be for you, then book a free call with me and get moving.

The Storm: Sometimes Life Shakes You to See If There’s Anything REAL There

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Riding the storm

You Can Never Lose Anything Real

There will always be storms in life and they come in many different flavours and forms:

Breakups, illness, job loss, financial stress, unexpected change, etc. etc. etc. – they tend to show up when we least expect or want them to but they’re never mistakes…they’re just part of the unfolding design of our lives.

When they roll in, you can either see them as something that came to destroy you or things that came to wash away what’s not real.

And that’s exactly what they do if you let them: shake away and dissolve any unnecessary fragmentation that you’ve become attached to so that you can see clearly and become whole again.

What this means in short is that the storms never enter our lives to ‘punish’ us but to strip us back to the truth:

The truth of who we are, what we actually value, and what matters.

In other words, what’s REAL.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The storm will either make you more real or cause you to cling to anything unreal you've become identified with.

What We’ll Cover In This Article

Storms Come. Storms Go.

Everything in life has its season:

Some seasons bring sunshine, others bring the storm, but none of them last forever.

Time keeps ticking, life keeps moving, and you don’t get to control what season comes next – only how you meet it and choose to grow with it.

If you expect things to always go smoothly – if you think life should just be good vibes and good weather all the time – then the storm will knock your socks off because you’ll have an extra level of friction caused by having your expectations of life being shattered.

You’ll start asking the usual questions that people ask when they expect life to be something other than whatever it is (and it always is what it is):

Why me? What did I do to deserve this? What’s going wrong? How is this fair?

If, on the other hand, you can accept that the storm is just a very real part of life – that it’s not a breakdown or the end of the road but part of the journey – then something starts to shift:

You stop resisting and move into acceptance…and when you do that, the storm starts to work for you instead of against you.

It starts clearing the away the detritus and the debris – the old stories, attachments, and habits that aren’t serving you. It doesn’t always feel good but it starts to feel REAL.

And that’s really the whole point.

Realness is What Remains

The work I do with people is all about helping them come back to REALNESS.

That means getting real with your mind, your body, and your choices and letting go of the illusions and distortions we’ve picked up along the way to wherever we currently find ourselves.

“Illusions” in this context are just the beliefs that tell you that you have pretend, perform, or push just to be okay with yourself, the world, and life.

This is why the storm can actually help you: because it doesn’t care about your mask.

When the wind picks up and the ground starts shaking, anything unreal gets uprooted and exposed. and anything you’ve been holding onto that’s not built on a foundation of truth starts falling away.

This might SUCK in the short-term but it leads to freedom in the long-term:

You’re not losing anything real. You’re just losing what never was.

God (or life or reality — whatever word works for you) will sometimes shake us to see if there’s anything true in the foundations of our lives.

That’s what storms are for: to see whether we’re rooted in our realness or just in the ego.

Trust is the Key to Surviving the Storm

In every storm, you have two choices:

  1. You can try and cling to whatever unreal thing is being taken (which means that you’re clinging to old identities/ego).
  2. You can let go of what’s not meant to stay and make space for something real instead (which means you’re ready to grow through one version of yourself and into a more real one).

The first option leads to more suffering because it’s about resistance and force; the second leads to growth because it’s about acceptance and flow.

But to let go, you have to trust.

You have to trust that even if you don’t know what’s on the other side of this, you’ll land somewhere real.

You don’t have to figure it all out:

You just have to do your best and let go of the rest.

Trust yourself (“do your best”) and trust life (“let go of the rest”).

That’s trust.

Trusting in this way isn’t passive – it doesn’t mean you lie down and just let things fall apart.

It means you stay engaged without needing to control everything and that you take responsibility for what’s yours without trying to manage the whole universe (because you’re not omniscient or omnipotent so that’s not your job).

It means that you keep moving forward, despite the storm, from a place realness – not F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).

Whatever You Lose is Never What You Need

A lot of people think losing something means they’ve ‘failed’ but loss is part of life (another it is what it is) – it’s how we shed our skin and keep making space.

The more you cling, the more painful it feels when something falls away but – if you can trust that the storm is only removing what’s not real (because what’s real is always real) – then you stop taking it personally and a lot of the unnecessary pain dissolves.

That relationship that ended? It may have been holding you back from being as real as you deserve to be.

That job that didn’t work out? Maybe it wasn’t aligned with who you’re becoming in your realness.

That belief that cracked under pressure? It might have been false all along and just something that the unreal ‘parts’ of you needed to keep their hold over you.

You can’t lose what’s real because what’s real is always real.

(Write that down and stick it on your fridge or something).

What’s real either sticks around or it comes back stronger in a more real form.

The only thing storms remove are the illusions we’ve mistaken for truth.

And that’s the point of them – they refine you and everything you think you ‘know’ about yourself, the world, and reality itself.

Use the Storm to Grow Real (Don’t Fight It)

So what do you do when you’re in the thick of the storm and all you can see is those dark clouds?

Here’s a simple, practical process you can come back to whenever life feels like it’s falling apart (because life is shaking you to see what’s real and what’s unreal):

1. AWARENESS: NAME IT

What’s really going on?

Where are you trying to control the uncontrollable?

What are you afraid of losing that’s either real (so you don’t need to worry) or unreal (so it doesn’t matter)?

When you get clear about what the storm is stirring up in you, you stop making it about punishment and start seeing it as an invitation to grow.

You shift from “Why is this happening to me?” to “What’s this showing me about me?”

In short, the storm will SHOW you and GROW you:

Ask yourself what it’s showing you and how it’s asking you to grow – this awareness will make it much easier to ride it out.

2. ACCEPTANCE: STOP RESISTING

Shout it for the people at the back (if they haven’t been blown away already):

“This is happening and I don’t need to ‘like’ it to accept it“.

That’s not giving up – it’s just stepping into the present moment and acknowledging that – when it comes to reality – it doesn’t matter what we ‘like’ or ‘dislike’…just that it is what it is.

When you stop resisting what is, you free up the energy to respond to it in a real way.

Ask yourself:

What do I need to let go of right now?

What is life asking me to release?

Sometimes it’s an old identity. Sometimes it’s an unrealistic expectation. Sometimes it’s just the idea that you should be somebody, something, or somewhere else.

Acceptance lets the storm do its job so you can do yours (grow real).

3. ACTION: MOVE FROM TRUST

Once you’ve stopped resisting, you can take real action.

Not from fear; not from panic. But from trust.

What’s the next obvious step to take that you maybe keep talking yourself out of?

What would the REAL you do if those Gremlins didn’t keep taking you off track?

Take that obvious step, then take the next one (when it appears – which it will).

You don’t need the whole plan. Just the next step.

Trust isn’t about having guarantees but about showing up anyway – open, grounded, and willing to stay real no matter what life throws your way.

The storm is a dark place that's getting you ready to break out into the light.

It Is What It Is and You Are What You Are

Life will keep moving, the weather will keep turning, the seasons will keep changing, and the storms will keep coming.

That’s life.

But if you meet them with realness – if you let them strip back what’s false and bring you back to centre – you’ll come out stronger every time.

In short, you can’t avoid the storm but you can use it:

You can let it shake loose anything you’ve been carrying that doesn’t reflect the truth of who you are or what life is.

You can trust that what’s real will remain and that anything you lose was never yours to keep.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. Want to go deeper? Read the Storm chapter in my new book Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace – it’ll help you face anything life throws at you without losing who you are.

Book a free call with me now if you’re interested in coaching and want to start using the storms in your life to grow real.

Intimacy Struggles: How Shame Hides Behind Ego

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The Only Barrier to Real Intimacy is Shame but Lingering Shame is Always Unreal

Most people think that struggles with intimacy are about communication skills or finding the ‘right person but they’re not:

The real obstacle is shame and how shame hides itself behind the mask of ego.

When shame isn’t dealt with, it doesn’t just sit quietly in the background – instead, it builds an entire false self around it (the ego). This false self is a version of you that doesn’t show too much, doesn’t risk too much, and certainly doesn’t let anyone in too close because it’s worried that if any of these things happen then the ‘real’ you will be seen and the shame will become too much to bear.

This is why we can say that the ego is the main block to intimacy:

Because intimacy – real intimacy -demands being seen but the ego keeps blocking the view.

Really, it’s not rocket science: you can’t be seen if you’re too busy putting on a show.

In this article, we’ll unpack how shame works, how it hides behind ego, and what to do if you want real intimacy instead of just playing relationships on ‘easy’ mode but never really being satisfied (because the only thing that can satisfy us in relationships is real intimacy).

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Intimacy is always more difficult when shame is involved.

Shame: Disconnection From the Truth

When you’re in your realness – connected to the truth about who you are, what the world is, and how reality works – shame has no power over you.

This is because shame can only exist when there’s a break between you and the truth itself.

This is exactly what the story of Adam and Eve is really about:

They weren’t ashamed until they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – until they became self-conscious, divided and stuck in the judgement that comes from stepping away from wholeness and entering the unreal realm of fragmentation.

The shame didn’t come from being inherently ‘bad’ – it came from being disconnected from the truth of who they were and their true nature.

In many ways, the same thing happens today:

  • We disconnect from our realness (by buying into unreal ideas).
  • We judge ourselves based on some external standard (aka ‘The world’ which is never reality).
  • We feel not ‘enough’ because we have ‘knowledge’ that we don’t need.
  • We create a persona to cover it up (just like Adam and Eve did with their fig leaves).

This persona is the ego and all of the goals that we end up chasing because of it – i.e. the things we pursue because we think they’ll somehow be able to fill the Void that only the truth itself can fill (because the disconnection from truth it’s what’s causing the void in the first place).

Once we’re locked into this persona system and begin to attach to and identify with it, it becomes very difficult to let people get close because they would have to meet you, not the persona.

And that feels risky and we don’t think we can handle such risk (again, because we became disconnected from the truth).

The Illusion That Keeps Shame Alive: Judgement

Shame doesn’t survive on its own – it relies on judgement to keep reminding it why it’s ‘supposed’ to exist in the first place.

This is because judgement creates the illusion of duality – right/wrong, worthy/unworthy, acceptable/unacceptable, etc.

Without this illusion, shame has no oxygen and so it can’t keep it’s hold over us.

The irony, of course, is that most of the time, the harshest judge against you is yourself:

You’re the one keeping shame alive by measuring yourself against impossible standards and then going back into hiding when you fall short.

When you get stuck in shame cycles like this, you believe there’s something about you that disqualifies you from being truly loved and so you cling even more vehemently to ego in order to compensate.

The problem is, ego doesn’t want real connection – it wants control.

Two Types of People: Shame-Driven vs Shame-Dissolving

If you zoom out and look at human behaviour, you can pretty much divide people into two groups (based on how the react or respond to their own shame):

  • Shame-Driven People:

    These people built their personalities around avoiding shame:

    Every decision – relationships, careers, image, conversations, whatever -is filtered through ego.They don’t want to be seen; they want to be approved of.

    Shame-driven people might seem confident, successful, even charming but underneath it’s all about maintaining the mask.
  • Shame-Dissolving People:

    These people are in the process of coming back to realness:

    They’re integrating the shadow, letting go of false images, and learning to live in the truth.

    They aren’t perfect – no one is – but they are willing to be seen as they really are, without filtering every move through the question: “How will this make me look?”

The difference is whether a person is reacting to shame or starting to take the mask of and dissolve it.
Unfortunately, most of the world is still reacting to it which is why things just seem to get weirder and weirder and become increasingly unreal.

Why Most Relationships Feel Shallow

A lot of modern relationships aren’t built on real connection – they’re built on an unspoken agreement:

“I’ll pretend to be what you want if you pretend to be what I want.”

That’s why:

  • People feel lonely even when they’re in relationships.
  • People get bored and restless even when nothing is ‘wrong’.
  • People keep chasing ‘better’ – a better partner, better spark, better communication – but can’t explain why it still feels hollow.

The problem isn’t the relationship:

The problem is that the real you and the real them never showed up.

When ego is driving the bus, no matter how good things look on paper, intimacy is impossible because intimacy requires realness and the ego is allergic to being seen.

Practical Signs You’re Still Letting Shame and Ego Run the Show

Let’s be specific:

If shame and ego are still running your life (even subtly), it often shows up like this:

  • You edit yourself in conversations, trying to say the ‘right’ thing (instead of expressing whatever it is that you really think).
  • You’re scared to bring up real feelings because you might seem too much or that you’ll be rejected in some way (and that you won’t be able to handle this rejection because your ego depends on approval and acceptance).
  • You’re more focused on whether people like you than whether you actually like them (and you even want people you don’t like to like you).
  • You chase people who validate the image you want to believe about yourself (and find those who tell you the truth or offer you opportunities to grow offensive and/or repulsive).
  • You feel exhausted after socialising because maintaining the mask is tiring (because it always takes energy to be unreal whereas our realness charges us up).

None of this makes you a bad person – it just means you’re still operating from the belief that you have to earn love by performing instead of just being real.

The good news is that you can shift it because you can always come back to your realness.

How To Actually Build Real Intimacy (Without Forcing It)

Step 1: Get Honest With Yourself First

You can’t expect other people to see the real you if you’re still hiding from yourself so start asking:

  • Where am I pretending or hiding?
  • What am I afraid people would see if I stopped performing?
  • What’s the real story behind the way I show up?

Step 2: Choose to Lead With the Truth

This doesn’t mean oversharing or turning every conversation into a therapy session – it simply means showing up as you are, not the polished version you think people want to see.

For example:

  • If you don’t know something, admit it.
  • If you’re nervous, say so.
  • If you’re upset, be willing to talk about it instead of pretending you’re fine.

Step 3: Stop Chasing Approval

Real intimacy can’t be achieved – it can only be received:

If you have to perform for someone’s affection, that’s not intimacy – it’s a transaction and it’s totally unreal.

Instead of chasing validation, focus on building relationships where you can be real from the start. They’re the relationships that will last (because what’s real is always real).

Step 4: Let People Reveal Themselves

Remember that not everyone deserves access to your real self:

Trust is earned — not in grand gestures, but in small consistent moments where it’s safe to be seen.

If someone judges, mocks, or manipulates when you’re real, that’s feedback to move on and find something real instead.

(The sacred mantra will always serve you: “Gimme something real or GTFO“).

Intimacy is about being known and knowing in return.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, shame isn’t some mysterious force that randomly infects people – it’s simply what happens when we disconnect from the truth and build a life around hiding instead of being real.

The ego was built to protect you in the short-term but it’s not who you are in the long-term.

The way home is always the same:

  • Uncover the truth.
  • Live and breathe the truth.
  • Choose realness over performance – even when it feels uncomfortable.

When you do, intimacy stops being a battlefield and starts being what it was always meant to be:

A meeting of two real people in wholeness, without shame, without masks, and without fear.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Entrepreneur vs Employee: Why You Must Think Like a Creator to Live Your Real Life

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Employee vs. entrepreneur

The Entrepreneur Mindset Can Change Your Life…No Matter Who You Are

Let’s start this one with a hard truth:

If you want to live real, you probably need to stop thinking like an employee.

That might sound a tad extreme, especially if you’re already quite content in your job, but this article isn’t just about whether you’re self-employed or on someone else’s payroll – it’s about how you see yourself in a way that’s either unreal or REAL.

It’s about whether you’re passive or active in your own life; whether you wait for instructions before moving ahead or forging your own path; whether you’re following a script or writing one.

The employee mindset is everywhere and it most often leads to what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation”:

It’s pumped into our brains at school, made part of our identity at university, and embedded deep in our collective psyche by the time we’re scanning the job boards with sweaty palms and a tidy CV.

We’re told that the meaning of life is to seek ‘security’ (even though they can fire you at any time), stay ‘safe’ (even though your pay cheque is dependent on somebody else’s success), and delay our dreams until we’ve earned the ‘right’ to chase them by being ‘sensible’ first – maybe once the mortgage is paid or after the kids have left home or when retirement finally rolls around.

Just before you, die, of course.

The truth about this standard path is that the script it follows isn’t written with your freedom or realness in mind – it’s written to make sure the machine keeps turning.

And you – if you’re not paying attention – just end up becoming another cog.

If that’s not what you want to be, then keep reading:

The entrepreneur mindset can help you break free.

What We Cover in This Article

What If You Were Never Meant to Be a Cog?

The majority of ‘normal’ people are conditioned to see themselves as ‘employees’. Though there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with this way of living, when we don’t think real for ourselves we hand our lives over to somebody else.

And, if you wanna live free, you gotta think free.

The moment we internalise the employee mindset, we become psychologically dependent which goes against our natural state of realness:

Dependent on authority figures to tell us what to do. Dependent on structure to give our days meaning. Dependent on external permission to feel like we ‘matter’ or that we’re worthy in some way (because we’re getting results for somebody else).

Over time, this dependency is just a death by a thousand slow cuts that eats away at what it means to be truly alive.

The entrepreneurial mindset, in contrast, is not about being the boss or chasing money – it’s about being the author of your own real life.

It’s about asking yourself “How can I offer something of value to the world?” and then building your a real purpose for yourself around the answer to that question.

In terms of your REALNESS, it’s about being real enough to think for yourself and being active enough to shape your circumstances instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Essentially, it boils down to two different ways of seeing yourself, the world, and reality:

A Tale of Two Mindsets: Employee vs. Entrepreneur

Let’s break it down.

Employee MindsetEntrepreneurial Mindset
Works for moneyBuilds systems that make money
Waits for permissionCreates opportunities
Follows ordersSolves problems
Avoids riskEmbraces calculated risk
Values security over freedomValues freedom over comfort
Lives for weekends and holidaysDesigns a life they don’t need to escape from
Does what they’re toldAsks why and how it could be done better
Lives reactivelyLives proactively

This isn’t just about business – it’s about character. It’s about choosing to see yourself as a creative force in your own life, no matter what you’re doing (whether you’re building a start-up, leading a team, freelancing, working in retail, or currently doing anything else).

In fact, if you have a job that you’re currently ‘stuck’ in, then the entrepreneurial mindset might help you more than anyone else. Why?

Because it gives you leverage:

You stop showing up just to get paid and start showing up to grow real, to learn, and to become more valuable to yourself and others.

That shift alone can be the difference between a life of quiet resentment and one of quiet confidence.

You Don’t Need to Quit Your Job – You Need to Flip the Script

Let’s be real (the whole point of this blog, after all):

Not everyone can drop everything and launch a business and not everyone should but everyone can benefit from cultivating the mindset of a creator.

Seeing yourself as an active entrepreneur, instead of just a passive employee, will help you regardless of your situation. Any ‘job’ you take should be one that can teach you something that benefits your real life goals and values.

This is the key: see every experience as training for the real life you’re creating – not the one you’ve settled for. Not the one you were handed. But the one you’re shaping.

Even your worst job can be used to refine your vision, toughen your character, and teach you skills that will serve you later – if you’re willing to look at it through the eyes of someone who’s building something and constantly engaged in the process of bringing that vision to life.

The Death Grip of Comfort

I totally understand how seductive the idea of ‘security’ is but here’s the irony: the safety we chase is mostly an illusion.

You can lose your job. You can lose your savings. You can even lose your health. The only real security lies in your ability to adapt, to grow, and to continually offer value to the world.

You can’t have happiness without freedom and you can’t have freedom until you fight for influence over your own life.

Comfort is the enemy of growth because it tells you that stagnation is okay as long as you’re not suffering.

But suffering isn’t the only thing to fear:

Regret is worse and it comes when you realise you gave up your life for the illusion of safety and now there’s no time to change it.

Start Being an Entrepreneur Now. Wherever You Are.

You don’t need to change your career overnight, but – if this article resonates with you – you do need to change your perspective:

You need to see yourself as someone who creates value and find ways to start doing that instead of just being somebody who trades time for money.

Your time is your LIFE (because death is coming and time, energy, and attention are the most important assets you have). When you trade you’re time, you’re literally giving your life away so make sure you’re trading it for something real.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking like an entrepreneur – regardless of your job title:

  1. What value do I currently bring to the people I work with or serve?
  2. What problems do I notice that I could help solve at work, at home, or in my community?
  3. What skills do I need to develop to become more real?
  4. What would I create if I stopped waiting for permission?
  5. What am I doing right now that feels passive and how could I flip the script and turn it into action?

These are all questions that move you out of stasis and into growth – that move you out of the realm of ideas and into the world of action.

Action is the Cure for Everything

To grow in REALNESS, we don’t deal in empty abstractions:

If it isn’t actionable or experiential, it isn’t real; if it doesn’t eventually take root in your behaviour, it doesn’t matter.

And here’s one of the most important truths of all: no one’s going to do it for you.

Most people think that the way things are is the way they will always be; if you see the world as unchangeable, then you will most likely end up stuck in a job that you hate for the rest of your life.

So stop waiting and start building. Whether it’s a side hustle, a product, a community, or simply a new way of thinking – start.

You real life is unfolding right now.

Practical Steps to Cultivate the Entrepreneurial Mindset

  1. Audit your week: Where are you spending time on things that don’t serve your bigger purpose? Where can you reclaim time? If it’s not real, then don’t do it (as much as that’s possible in an unreal world).
  2. Start a ‘value log’: Each day, write down something you did that created value for someone else -even if it’s small. Keep your focus on the problems that you’re solving for people and how you’re actually improving the world around you.
  3. Learn something that will help you grow real: Read a book on creativity, persuasion, systems thinking or marketing – not for trivia, but to get better at whatever it is you’re already doing and what you want to eventually be doing.
  4. Create an offer: This could be offering to help a colleague solve a problem, or pitching a service, or creating a resource to share online. Start packaging up what you can do for people and find people that want you to do it.
  5. Speak to people who are doing what you want to do alrady: Find your tribe and let their example pull you forward. Iron sharpens iron.
  6. Create before you consume. Each morning, spend 10–30 minutes making something – writing, drawing, planning, building – before checking social media or emails. Make this part of your morning routine and commit to it daily. You’ll see your results compound over time (if you write a few hundred words a day, you’ll have the first draft of a book by the end of a year, for example).
  7. Reflect weekly: What did you do this week that moved you closer to the life you actually want? Keep checking in with yourself and refining the path you’re walking on.
The entrepreneur mindset is about taking calculated risk and living a real life.

Final Word: Realness of Spirit

Entrepreneurship isn’t a job description – it’s a spirit:

It’s the attitude of someone who knows that life is not a rehearsal and that the only security worth chasing is the kind you build as an expression of what’s already with you.

Whether you’re working a 9–5, running your own gig, or somewhere in between, choose to be real by choosing to be active:

Create something. Offer something. Become something.

You don’t need to have all the answers – you just need to stop waiting for someone else to give them to you.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number thirty one in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and want to work on changing your life, then book a free call with me and get started right away.

Realness and Dementia: How Facing Reality Might Prevent Dementia

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Realness and Dementia

How the Fragmentation of the Self May Lead to Issues in Later Life

What if dementia isn’t just a neurological condition but also the psyche’s last-ditch attempt to return to wholeness after a lifetime of fragmentation?

That might sound a little dramatic and I know it’s a sensitive topic but stay with me.

In my work as a coach, I serve people around the practical philosophy of REALNESS which can be summarised here as a process of shedding illusion and living in relationship with reality. It’s about being radically present, brutally honest, and deeply trusting.

Recently, after realising that a lot of older people (70s/80s/90s) start to feel like prisoners in their own bodies, I’ve been exploring a provocative theory: that dementia may be a final form of dissociation from a life – and body – that became too painful to stay present in.

If this could be a valid theory then what if the path to prevention isn’t just biomedical but something a little more holistic? What if it starts with embracing reality and consistently following the real path of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action?

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Could it be that dementia is on the rise because we're becoming more fragmented?

The Psyche’s Escape Hatch

We already know and have a lot of evidence that dissociation is a psychological response to trauma: it’s a way for the mind to distance itself from unbearable reality.

But what if that same mechanism plays out over a lifetime and culminates – in some cases – as dementia?

Please note: this isn’t to say that dementia is only psychological or spiritual.

There are well-documented physiological causes: Alzheimer’s disease, vascular degeneration, plaques and tangles, etc. But research also shows that chronic stress, unresolved trauma, and emotional suppression correlate strongly with cognitive decline.

In one study published in Neurology, higher levels of midlife stress were associated with increased risk of dementia later in life (Johansson et al., 2010). Another study in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry found that individuals with a history of trauma were more likely to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms (Peavy et al., 2009).

On top of this evidence is the lived observations: for example, how many people with dementia seem to ‘revert’ to earlier versions of themselves – forgetting their current partner but remembering a previous one, for instance? It’s as if the psyche is retreating to the last place it felt safe and most REAL.

It seems to me that cases like this aren’t ‘random’ (i.e. the psyche isn’t just randomly choosing a point in time to return to):

What’s taking place is a regression – a return to the most stable self-concept (ego) before life became too painful to process and deal with. When we view this through the lens of realness, this looks a lot like a soul attempting to find home in its past, because it couldn’t find peace in its present (because the decline of the body and the inevitability of death as old age takes its toll are too much to bear).

When the Body Becomes a Prison

Many of us already live lives divorced from our bodies – even if they haven’t turned against us yet as we go through the stages of being born, ripening, decaying, and then dying:

We push through pain, suppress emotion, live in denial of death and do all kinds of conscious and unconscious mental gymnastics to keep the ego where it is (so we can avoid facing the shadow self and becoming whole).

The abridged version is that we construct egos to help us perform, achieve, and survive and, sometimes, those identities get so calcified that by the time we find that we’ve reached old age, we don’t know how to let them go.

That’s unfortunate because – more than most things – aging demands surrender (which means facing reality):

It demands we surrender youth, image, control, roles, bodily functions and mobility, and even memory but – if we never learned how to grieve – how to process loss – then aging feels like torture and the body, once a tool of expression, now becomes a prison.

In order to try and escape this prison (instead of accepting reality), the mind begins to break its own rules and starts to show us what we need to see rather than what’s actually there.

REALNESS teaches us that there’s a natural drive toward wholeness that’s literally always calling us into more wholeness. But if we’re too entrenched in ego, too identified with form, we can’t hear this call and life starts to slip between our fingers.

Eventually, the psyche may resort to dementia as its final act of self-liberation – an unconscious retreat into forgetfulness, because presence has become too painful for somebody locked in a body that doesn’t suit the self-concept or image that has traditionally been used to interact with the present and filter life through it.

The Real Risk: Refusing to Change

This brings us to a hard truth: dementia may not always be about physical decay as much as it is about our mental and emotional reactions to this decay.

Sometimes, dementia might be about disconnection from what’s most REAL about ourselves, the world, and reality itself.

If we go our entire lives without updating our identity and clinging to the unreal in order to avoid facing what’s real… if we keep rejecting change, denying grief, avoiding truth… then the self becomes more-and-more fragmented and our lives become more-and-more unreal.

In other words, the more we cling and refuse to let go, the harder it gets to integrate reality and actually work with it. Later in life, when the present becomes too unfamiliar to hold, the mind might regress to the last stable identity it remembers as a way of dissociating and not being completely overwhelmed.

This, of course, begs a question or two:

What if we never let it get to that point?

What if we lived in a way that made change sacred instead of something to be feared?

This brings us back to our REALNESS and using it as a preventative measure:

REALNESS as Preventative Soul Care

REALNESS is more than just a mindset – it’s a process of continuous integration, rooted in three stages:

1. Awareness

Learning to become conscious of your assumptions, patterns, stories, identities, and the emotional ‘stuff’ that guides your thoughts (without you knowing, usually).

This means training to notice when you’re living in resistance – i.e. when you’re clinging to a version of yourself that no longer fits what’s actually real. It’s about seeing reality without distortion and then acting from a place of wholeness instead of mental fragmentation projected out into the world.

2. Acceptance

Getting to a place where you can feel what’s actually there, let go of what’s passing or passed, and stop pretending things are okay when they’re not. This is the core of emotional health – it’s how we process loss instead of suppressing it.

Without acceptance, we also avoid the TRUTH about things with the cost of our emotions getting buried instead of faced. The longer we go without facing the truth, the more our emotional ‘stuff’ becomes the very fragmentation that fuels dissociation and separates us from our realness.

3. Action

Taking aligned steps based on truth, not F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”):

This includes adapting your self-concept to fit the current season of our life and evolving consciously rather than waiting for crisis to force your hand.

When you live from these three pillars, you’re doing more than managing stress – you’re creating spiritual resilience. You’re strengthening the muscle that lets you stay here, no matter what changes.

Practical Ways to Stay Whole and Avoid Unnecessary Fragmentation

Here are some practical steps you can take now to build a life that resists dissociation and supports cognitive and emotional wholeness:

1. Practice Daily Reality Check-Ins

Take 5 minutes each day to ask yourself questions that raise awareness and increase acceptance:

  • What am I resisting right now?
  • What feels true that I don’t want to accept?
  • Where am I pretending?

Write it down and let your answers guide your realignment into wholeness and then REAL ACTION.

2. Process Grief Regularly

You don’t need a funeral to grieve – you just need to learn the art of LETTING GO (read my new book Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace to go deep into this):

Grieve the job you left, the body that’s changing, the relationships that shifted, and anything else that’s been and gone.

Unprocessed grief is one of the biggest contributors to emotional fragmentation and refusing to face emotions is what makes us more fragmented than anything else (because it increases dissociation and causes a wider gulf between our ego and our realness).

3. Ritualise Changes in Your Life

One of the reasons so many of us cling on to outdated images of ourselves and then get a massive shock in old age is because our culture has lost its traditions and rites of passage.

This being the case, you can start to create your own:

Mark birthdays not just with parties, but with reflection. Celebrate endings and beginnings.

Aging shouldn’t be a shock – it should be a sacred unfolding into more truth and wholeness (with death being the ultimate release when the time comes).

4. Stretch the Trust Muscle

Trust doesn’t mean blind hope – it means surrendering to what is, and taking action in flow rather than force.

Meditation, breathwork, and somatic practices help regulate your nervous system and build trust in the now.

If your nervous system feels safe you will fear reality less and become less dissociated overall.

5. Update Your Identity Often

Every season of life asks you to become someone new and to let go of what’s unreal:

Don’t cling to who you were at 25 – let your self-image evolve and let go of outdated pride.

Grow into the ‘You’ that reality is asking you to be now.

Dementia is possibly what happens when we cling to life instead of letting go.

The Bigger Picture: Living and Dying Whole

If, in some cases, dementia is the soul’s retreat from a life it couldn’t bear to stay in, then REALNESS is about creating a life worth staying present for and reducing the risk (plus, it just feels good to be real and to flow with life instead of forcing everything).

Of course, we can’t control everything about our biology but we can control how we relate to the truth:

We can choose to meet reality with grace instead of resistance.

REALNESS isn’t just how you live. It’s how you die.

Fragmented or whole?

There’s a difference between ego memory and real memory:

Ego memory says, “This is who I used to be”.

Real memory says, “This is who I’ve always been beneath the form life takes”.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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