Real Life Transformation Comes from Changing What You Love, Not What You Believe
Most of the people who come to me for coaching initially think they need to change their mindset, and to be fair, they usually do.
Here’s the thing that they all eventually learn in the end, though:
Mindset alone won’t change your life.
You can read all the self-help books in the world, recite affirmations until your voice box falls out, or try to hypnotise yourself into being more positive but if your heart still craves the ‘wrong’ things, nothing will truly change for you and your life will just become more-and-more unreal.
It’s a bit like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic whilst it keeps getting flooded with water – sure, it might look a little bit neater or whatever, but you’re still sinking and haven’t addressed the deeper ‘stuff’.
In the case of transformation, that deeper ‘stuff’ is not just in your head (like your mindset) – it’s in your body:
It’s in your nervous system and its state of regulation; it’s in the old shame you’ve never quite faced, the guilt that lingers in the background, and the trauma that fills you with fear and doubt every time something good happens.
This all goes to show that transformation isn’t a purely mental game of rearranging beliefs and being more ‘positive’ (though those things are part of the journey) – it’s a whole-being shift, and it starts with learning to love the real instead of the unreal.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Problem With Mindset-Only Transformation
Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with working on your beliefs – it’s a great entry point and something that I always work on with my coaching clients in the earlier stages of a coaching container (usually with the help of the ‘Thought Log’ that you can download on this site).
Our beliefs shape perception and perception shapes action but if those beliefs are sitting on top of a foundation of shame, trauma, and fragmented desires, then you’re building a house on sand that’s eventually destined to collapse.
When people fall into the trap of thinking that tweaking their ‘mindset’ is all they need to do to transform their lives, they often try to change their beliefs without doing the emotional excavation required to see where those beliefs came from in the first place.
What’s interesting is that 9 times out of 10, unreal and unhelpful beliefs are rooted in unresolved pain (shame, guilt, and/or trauma, usually) – they came from ego strategies designed to protect you when you felt unsafe, unloved, or unworthy.
If you can start to deal with these unresolved emotions, then the beliefs usually take care of themselves.
The problem is that the ego is a clever master and so it ‘knows’ how to keep hiding this unresolved ‘stuff’ from us so we can resist reality and growth and keep identifying with what’s familiar (and all the problems that come with this familiarity):
It knows how to dress up its fears as ambition; it knows how to make you chase things – jobs, relationships, money, whatever – that look shiny on the surface but are really just distractions and compensations from and for deeper wounds.
Even worse, it knows especially well how to convince you that these things are what you need and ‘LOVE’.
If you want to really transform your life then you need to come to terms with the fact that you don’t really love these things at all. Not in the way that matters.
You desire them because they promise relief and allow you to keep identifying in a way that keeps that unresolved ‘pain’ at bay.
What’s ironic is that the ‘relief’ these things promise is just the relief from the unbearable feeling of disconnection from something real. If you stop chasing them and learn to love something real instead then you’re life will be transformed from the inside-out and things will start to fall into place.
Let’s see how you can start flipping the script and growing REAL:
Love and the Fragmented Self
When we talk about love in the context of transformation, we have to get clear on one thing from the get-go:
Most people don’t know what real love feels like.
That’s not a judgement, just an observation – it’s just the natural consequence of living in a world that teaches us to chase illusions and where so many of us are lost to the Void.
Unreal love is conditional – it’s based on scarcity, performance, and outcome. It says: “If I get this, then I’ll be worthy” or “If they love me, then I’ll feel whole”. This attitude just teaches us to be outcome-dependent (to outsource our levels of self-worth and self-acceptance onto external goals).
It’s means that realness always appears to be outside of you, just out of reach, and never can never last (which flies in the face of the truth because what’s real is always real).
Real love, on the other hand, is a returning to wholeness (instead of the fragmentation of conditions):
It’s a homecoming – what you feel when you let go of all the lies and brick walls that the ego has built around your heart (your ‘heart’ being your key intentions and assumptions – not just your ‘feelings’).
In other words, real love the natural state of someone who has integrated their shadow and is no longer running from themselves.
The Shadow, the Ego, and the Illusion of Salvation
Your shadow is the ‘part’ of you that holds all the stuff you learned to hide in order to be ‘acceptable’ in the eyes of the world and to avoid shame, guilt, and/or trauma – it’s the emotional baggage that didn’t fit your image of who you were “supposed” to be.
When the shadow is unintegrated, it controls you from the beneath the surface of your life and dictates many of the things that you attract and experience in your life (by guiding your unconscious intentions).
The Ego is in a constant battle with the Shadow and wants to keep it at bay (because the ego is made of fragments but the shadow is whole):
It uses strategies like people-pleasing, perfectionism, aggression, withdrawal, addiction, and overachievement to try and escape the tension that comes from keeping the shadow in hiding and the threat of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ resurfacing.
To this aim, it sends you on a wild goose chase and tells you to start trying to fill the Void with something other than the truth:
“If I can just get this one thing – this job, this lover, this lifestyle – I’ll finally be okay.”
Whatever that one thing is, it can never save you because it’s not about the thing – it’s about the parts of you that still feel unworthy of love unless you have it.
This is how we end up loving the wrong things:
We don’t even know we’re doing it. We confuse addiction with affection, attachment with alignment, and chasing with choosing.
And this is why transformation doesn’t happen until we change what we love.
Where Your Treasure Is…
Jesus summed it all up when he said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”.
If your treasure is in the ego’s promises, your heart will always be anxious and you’ll always be grasping, striving, chasing – and, even if you ‘win’, it won’t feel like enough.
But if your treasure is in something real – truth, wholeness, God, whatever word works for you – then your heart finds peace. Not because life becomes easy or perfect, but because your love is rooted in something that doesn’t change when circumstances do.
Loving the real aligns every part of you:
Your mind stops spinning, your emotions start to flow, your body starts to regulate. Your nervous system learns that it’s safe to be here now and from that place, transformation isn’t something you force – it’s something that you flow with instead of having to force.
The Nervous System and the Transformation Trap
Here’s a vital truth that most people overlook: your nervous system will not let you take real action if it still thinks you’re in danger. And guess what? Most people are living in a state of constant low-grade emergency.
Their sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) is dominating their whole experience of life and so they’re wired to survive, not to thrive.
This means that while the mind might be trying to “think positively” or “set goals” and work on all that other ‘mindset’ stuff, the body is screaming and holding them back by saying that nothing is safe but that everything is a threat.
Real transformation requires nervous system regulation because only then can you let go and actually trust yourself and life to do what’s required. This means learning to come out of survival mode and into presence and feeling your feelings, instead of intellectualising them.
It requires breathing, grounding, moving, and integrating.
And perhaps most importantly (in the context of this article), it requires stopping the chase for external salvation and starting to fall in love with the reality of your own existence – messy, beautiful, and whole.
So What Do You Love?
This is the question at the heart of everything we’re talking about:
What do you really love?
Not what do you want, or what do you think you need to be okay – but what do you love so deeply that you’d give your whole life to it without needing it to ‘fix’ you or to fill the Void?
If the answer is something real – truth, growth, wholeness, God, or love itself (“Love is God is Truth”) – then you’re on the right path. If the answer is something unreal and that only ‘means’ anything to the ego’ – status, validation, control, perfection – then it’s time to reconfigure your relationship with your own heart and to point it at something real (“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”).
This isn’t about becoming an ascetic or rejecting worldly things. You can still have the job, the lover, the house, the car – all of these things are good things, after all (if we don’t put them on a pedestal they don’t belong on). Just love them for what they are, not for what you hope they’ll prove about you because you’re driven by that underlying shame (etc.).
When your love is real, your actions become real. When your actions become real, your life becomes real.
The REAL Work: Where is Your Treasure?
So how do we begin this process of changing what we love?
- Awareness – Notice what you currently love and how it’s guiding your life and the decisions you make:
What do you chase? What do you obsess over? What hurts when you don’t have it? - Acceptance – Get honest about the shadow motivations behind these loves:
Are you trying to be seen? To be enough? To escape? What are you really looking for for the sake of filling a Void that doesn’t even need to have a hold over you? - Action – Start turning your heart towards something real:
Begin practices that reconnect you with your body and the truth:
This might include breathwork, meditation, somatic therapy, shadow journaling, or simply telling the truth more often.
This is the process of real transformation: aligning your love with what is actually real – not what you’ve been told is real because of social conditioning or what you think is real because of what your ego wants to be real.
When you love something real and allow your emotions to do what they need to do, your beliefs take care of themselves:
You no longer need to convince or motivate yourself to change – you just want to because the false falls away naturally when the truth is finally seen.
When that happens, you’re no longer rearranging those deckchairs.
You’re building a new ship entirely.
Stay real out there,
If you’re ready to start transforming your life in a deep way and you’re interested in coaching then book a free call with me and get started right away.
