Mindset - Page 4

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

The Illusion of Success: Why Chasing Achievement Leaves Men Feeling Empty

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The Illusion of Success and What to Do About It

In a success-obsessed world it can be easy to define ourselves by our goals but, unfortunately, many men find themselves chasing goals that ultimately leave them feeling hollow and unreal – this suggests that something has gone ‘wrong’ somewhere.

This article explores the deeper psychological and spiritual reasons why ‘success’ in the form of ‘achievement’ alone rarely scratches that inner itch that calls us towards fulfilment:

We’ll look at how shame warps our desires, how society’s version of ‘success’ often disconnects us from our truth, and why realness – not reputation – is the only foundation that truly holds and gives us what we’re truly looking for.

You’ll discover how compensatory behaviours rooted in unresolved shadow aspects keep you stuck in cycles of overwork and under-fulfilment and – most importantly – you’ll learn how to reclaim your power by reconnecting with the truth of who you are and what really matters (your REALNESS).

With practical steps and real insight, this is a wake-up call for any man who’s tired of wearing masks and ready to live from purpose, not performance.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

the illusion of success comes from following the world and not your realness.

The Role of Shame: Twisted Desires, Twisted Direction

Before we even talk about success, we need to talk about shame because shame is the invisible hand that’s constantly steering the ship of our lives off course:

Most men don’t realise it, but shame distorts your desires:

It convinces you that you’re not ‘enough’ as you are in your realness and that success is the only way to earn your worth (because you fall into the trap of thinking that your realness is something you need to ‘achieve’ instead of simply ‘receive’).

It quietly implants the belief that if you can just achieve more, prove yourself more, get more validation, then maybe – just maybe – you’ll finally be able to say you’re okay.

This kind of striving is rooted in a lie because shame doesn’t just affect how you feel – it affects what you want. It makes you chase things that don’t actually fulfil you because you’re not chasing from a place of realness, you’re chasing from a place of ego and compensation.

This is why so many men climb the ladder of ‘success‘ only to eventually find it’s been leaning against the wrong wall.

When you don’t heal your shame by returning to the truth about yourself, then your ambitions are built on compensation, not conviction – you want power to make up for feeling powerless; you want validation to patch over self-doubt. You want attention because deep down, you don’t believe you’re worthy of love without it, and – with this emotional ‘stuff’ driving you – it all just feels so hollow, even if you ‘win’.

Before we talk about the illusion of success, then, we have to realise that most of us are under an illusion about our desires in the first place – we’re chasing things not because we actually want them but because we need them to keep the ego that we created in reaction to our own shame in place.

In other words, until you face your shame, you’re not choosing your path – you’re reacting to pain.

The Cult of Success

Success is one of the few socially acceptable obsessions for a man (even though obsession is often frowned upon as a weakness):

From childhood, we’re programmed to chase it – grades, trophies, money, girls, admiration, and status. We’re taught that to be a “real man” is to be a successful man.

And so begins the hamster wheel and all of the endless ‘chasing’ that comes with it.

What’s ironic however is that most men have no idea what success actually means to them because they’ve never really sat down to think about it or talked to anybody about figuring it out.

Instead, they’re chasing a vague image that was handed down by their parents, their peers, or society at large – a collage of cultural noise—status, wealth, muscles, women, reputation.

This collage might shiny on the surface but, for many, the more they achieve, the emptier they feel (because they’re chasing something that only seems meaningful on the surface and not that is actually aligned with their real values and deepest intentions).

When you think about it, the lesson here is pretty clear:

Success isn’t real unless it’s rooted in REALNESS.

Realness Over Reputation

Realness is your relationship with the truth and you’re ability to keep 1) uncovering the truth, and then, 2) living and breathing the truth.

It’s not about society’s truth. It’s not about your parents’ truth. It’s about THE truth and your ability to understand it from the point of view of your real relationship with you actually are.

This means that your real ‘success’ comes from the core of who you are underneath all the masks which is why shifting into a real gear can be so uncomfortable:

Most men have no idea who they are without those masks.

Part of the problem is that we’re constantly taught to measure ourselves by external results: for example, money, career, relationships, or how many people envy us on Instagram.

But those things aren’t real – they’re just symbols imbued with emotional and cultural meaning.

They only mean something REAL if they’re expressions of the truth – not substitutes for it.

When a man is disconnected from his truth, everything he builds is shaky and his life is on a tenuous and unreal foundation:

He might build a successful business, an impressive physique, or a polished reputation but if it’s not grounded in authenticity, it can never satisfy him.

At the end of the day, you can’t outsource your own wholeness and trying to do so just leads to a deeper and deeper sense of fragmentation.

The Shadow Dance: Compensating with Success

Enter the Shadow Dance – the ongoing tug-of-war between your Ego and your Shadow Self:

  • The Ego wants to be seen as powerful, smart, successful, capable but…
  • The Shadow contains everything you’ve rejected, buried, or refused to face – your shame, fear, insecurities, and the values, goals, and desires you’ve labelled as ‘unacceptable’ (even though they may bring you great joy or be totally healthy).

What most men don’t realise is a lot of the ‘success’ they chase is actually an unconscious attempt to compensate for what’s hidden in the shadow without giving up the ego they’ve become dependent on (to feel a false sense of ‘safety’ in the world).

Feel powerless? Chase dominance. Feel unloved? Chase validation. Feel unworthy? Chase achievements.

Absolutely nothing you gain externally will ever fix an internal fracture because what you’re really looking for isn’t success – it’s integration.

Wholeness.

And the bottom-line is that you can’t access that while parts of yourself are still living in the dark – no matter what you chase or try to find ‘success’ in.

Good Things Become Bad Gods

It’s not that achievement, money, women, or ambition are ‘bad’. Far from it. They’re good things. Very good things, in many cases.

The problem is that they become bad when you treat them as the only thing that matters (and become outcome-dependent which means investing your self-worth in these things because your shame has detached you from it).

Many men lose themselves not because they were chasing the wrong thing – but because they turned one good thing into everything:

They sacrifice their health, relationships, peace of mind, and self-respect on the altar of ‘success’ and then they wonder why they still feel empty and filled with shame when they reach the top.

When ‘success’ becomes a mask rather than an expression of something real, it leads to burnout, anxiety, and numbness.

You’re working hard, but you’re not working true, and so you take yourself out of life and put keep yourself locked in your head instead.

You Can’t Fill the Void with Trophies

There’s a Void inside every man who’s disconnected himself from the truth about himself, the world, and reality. It’s not depression, exactly, but something much deeper – the existential ache of being UNREAL.

And here’s the truth most men don’t want to hear: you can’t fill the Void with trophies because ‘success’ never has, never will, and simply doesn’t fill the Void.

What does fill it is a sense of purpose. Real purpose that reconnects you to yourself. The kind that strips away ego, heals shame, and brings your whole being into alignment and the natural drive towards wholeness that’s in every single one of us.

Purpose isn’t just about doing or even being – it’s about becoming. This means that it’s not so much about the goals (though they’re really important) but about the process of becoming more whole, more honest, more integrated.

It’s not something you achieve. It’s something you live by letting go of all the unreal ‘stuff’ you picked up and focusing on something REAL.

Practical Steps to Reclaim Your Realness

  1. Define Success for Yourself
    Stop using society’s scorecard:

    Sit down with yourself and ask: What actually matters to me? What kind of man do I want to be when no one’s watching? What values am I willing to suffer for as I bring more of them into the world?
  2. Identify Compensatory Goals
    Look at what you’re chasing and ask: Is this coming from truth or is this an attempt to compensate for shame, fear, or insecurity? Be honest with yourself. Most of your goals will have both. But the awareness changes everything and makes sure you know why you’re doing what you’re doing (so you’re not just acting on autopilot because of ego).
  3. Do Shadow Work
    Start a daily or weekly practice of self-inquiry:

    Journal about what you reject or judge in others – these things often points to ‘parts’ of yourself that you’ve disowned. Embrace what you’ve buried and unravel the threads that need pulling. There’s gold in the darkness that you can build into your life.
  4. Embrace REAL Purpose
    Choose purpose over performance:

    Real purpose connects you to others and requires service, integrity, and truth. It might not impress everyone – but it will fulfil you deeply more than any external idea of ‘success’ ever will.
  5. Deconstruct Shame
    Notice the voice in your head that says You’re not ‘enough’.

    Question where it came from: Whose standards are you really living by? Are they yours or are they inherited?
  6. Let Go of the Image
    Stop curating a brand and start becoming a man:

    The goal isn’t to look good but to become good from the inside-out.

    When you focus on realness, success becomes a by-product, not a burden that you’re endlessly carrying with all that chasing.
why lose what's most important just because you bought into the illusion of success?

Conclusion: Success Without Realness Is Just Another Costume

The world will keep telling you that ‘success’ is about metrics – money, followers, six-packs, and an endless grind of empty busyness.

The quiet truth is pretty different:

Real success is becoming the man you were designed to be, not the man the world expects you to be.

When your version of success is built on realness, it nourishes you, grounds you, and heals you (because it brings you back to wholeness).

When it’s built on shame, ego, and overcompensation, it becomes just another form of self-abandonment (because you become fragmented).

Next time you find yourself striving and not getting anywhere, take pause. Because success without realness isn’t success at all. It’s just a gilded cage.

Stay real out there,

If you’d like to overcome the illusion of success and grow real and you’re interested in coaching then book a call with me.

Why So Many Men Feel Empty (And What to Do About The Void)

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The Void: Why Do So Many Men Feel Empty?

There’s a gnawing emptiness that a lot of men feel but rarely talk about – a kind of Void that they seem to be constantly outrunning. It eats into their sense of presence and makes them suspect that there must be ‘more’ to life. Much more.

(Not that they ever know what this might be…they just know it must be ‘there’ somewhere).

The more that they try to ignore this sense that something is missing, the more the blackhole of the Void seems to consume them. It’s an endless itch that can’t be scratched, a bottomless pit that can’t quite be filled, and – no matter how much ‘success’, money, sex, or validation they chase (even if these things do give a little release here-and-there that soon fades away like a fine mist) – it never goes away, no matter how much they try to ‘think’ themselves out of it.

This is because they’re trying to fill the Void with things that don’t fit:

The Void isn’t just loneliness, boredom, or even existential dread and angst – it’s something much much deeper: a disconnection from truth.

When I say “Truth” here I mean the unfashionable, ‘absolute’ truth of wholeness – in other words, the real deal. Not just “my truth” or “your truth” – which are both really just interpretations – but “THE TRUTH”.

This isn’t just about conceptual facts and ideas but the unshakable core of who you are beneath all the layers of conditioning, labels, ego, and avoidance:

When a man is disconnected from this truth, he falls into shame, and shame opens up the Shadow Dance – the internal battle between the Ego (the mask he wears) and the Shadow Self (who he really is when he takes the mask off and integrates whatever he was hiding from himself).

Keeping this dance going – in an attempt to ‘protect’ the Void-identity/Ego that he has become identified with and attached to – is what keeps him stuck and keeps the Void having power over him.

The only way out is to face the truth about yourself, the world, and reality again:

You don’t escape the Void by numbing yourself to it or by trying to fill it with external things; you ‘fill’ it by becoming it – because it’s just a signal that your relationship with yourself and life is distorted – and by returning to reality, to purpose, and to a sense of something bigger than just ‘yourself’.

This article will put you on the path to becoming the Void and returning home – but, first, let’s look at why so many men fall into it in the first place:

Men feel empty because the have put themselves in the void

The Common (But Failing) Strategies Men Use to Fill the Void

When a man feels the emptiness of the Void inside himself, his first instinct is usually to reach for something external to fill the gap.

Unfortunately, external ‘solutions’ don’t actually work – they just provide temporary relief from the tension that’s been caused by being unreal with oneself. This temporary release of tension may seem helpful at first, but all it ends up doing is creating dependencies and compulsions because we think we ‘need’ these things to get a taste of being real (when we don’t because what’s real is always real).

Here are some of the most common ways men try (and fail) to solve their own emptiness:

1. Addiction (Drugs, Alcohol, Porn, Food, Work, etc.)

Addiction isn’t just about substance abuse – it’s about anything that gives the illusion that you can escape from yourself and then becoming dependent on this illusion to keep hiding (though the truth always comes out in the end).

It could be drinking to ‘relax’ (when really you know it’s to escape), vegging out in front of Netflix to avoid thinking about whatever you’re facing, or endlessly scrolling social media to avoid confronting real life. The problem is, these things don’t solve the emptiness. They just silence it for a while – until it comes back louder than before because it grew in the shadows whilst your attention was on something else.

2. Distraction (Mindless Entertainment, Video Games, Over-Socialising)

Distraction is the close cousin of addiction and is just about using unreal things or relationships to avoid facing the real things that need staring down in your life:

Instead of facing reality head one (which may suck in the short-term if you’ve been away from it for a while), many men fill every second with empty stimulation – background noise, social media, gaming, or mindless socialising.

The Void isn’t being filled in these cases – it’s just being ignored as you try to fill the emptiness with more emptiness (when it can only be filled with something and that means finding your own REALNESS).

Ignoring the Void doesn’t make it go away – it makes it worse.

3. Seeking External Validation (Women, Status, Achievement, Approval)

Some men try to fill the Void by chasing women, money, or status:

They tell themselves things like, “If I just had more women, more money, more respect, then I’d feel whole” -but this can and never will work because the only solution is the TRUTH and all of these external things are being treated as a substitute for the truth.

Many of these things can be ‘good’ and maybe even fulfilling, but ‘good’ doesn’t mean the ‘best’ and -when it comes to filling the Void – the only best thing is the truth.

It’s the only medicine for the malady of the Void – all these other medicines will eventually just become poison because you’re using them in an unreal way.

Start on a foundation of truth and then bring these things into your life. Not the other way round.

4. Over-Intellectualising (Philosophy, Self-Help Overload, Analysis Paralysis)

Some men don’t turn to addiction or distraction; they turn to thinking their way out of the problem:

They read every book, listen to every podcast, and theorise about life endlessly – but they never act. Why?

Because deep down, they know action requires confronting themselves, and that’s terrifying so they stay stuck in the loop of consuming information without ever integrating it.

This kind of information consumption is really just a form of worrying: it feels like you’re doing something to solve the problem but all you’re really doing is playing with ideas and concepts and not touching reality with anything that you DO (and that’s the only way back to the truth and away from the Void).

The Shadow Dance: Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out of the Void

The real reason men struggle to escape this emptiness is because of what I call the Shadow Dance – the constant push-pull between the Ego and the Shadow Self.

  • The Ego is the mask. The version of yourself that you present to the world, shaped by what you think will get you approval and success. You wear this mask because of shame – some unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ you picked up that made you fear the truth of who you actually are.
  • The Shadow is everything you reject, suppress, or disown about yourself. Your fears, weaknesses, and unhealed wounds along with some of the ‘good’ things that we’re acceptable to your ego like your joy or your love or your real purpose (again, because these things got shamed and so you sent them into hiding).

The Shadow Dance causes problems in our lives because of a simple fact of life as a human being:

Unconscious intentions always triumph over conscious desires.

If your unconscious mind (where your Shadow ‘lives’) believes that real growth will expose you to pain, rejection, or failure, it will sabotage your conscious efforts every time.

This is why many men stay stuck in cycles of self-sabotage and never get out of the Void and back into realness – they’re fighting themselves without even realising it.

No matter how you identify on the surface-level and no matter what you ‘tell’ yourself with your conscious mind, the hidden ‘stuff’ will always win.

You can reverse engineer what’s going on in your life to see what your intentions really are – check out this post to learn more: Hacking the Unconscious Mind: A Psychological Hack for REALNESS

Awareness, Acceptance, and Action: The Path to Wholeness

To truly move beyond the Void, you must engage in a three-step process (this is the process I use with my coaching clients – book a call if you want to go deeper): Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

This is the framework for real transformation (no matter who you are or where you’re trying to get to):

1. Awareness: See the Void for What It Is

The first step is recognising that the emptiness you feel isn’t random or unfixable -it’s always a symptom of disconnection from the truth about yourself (and identification with the Ego which is just a character we play within the dreamworld of the Void).

Start digging deeper into your relationship with yourself to see where you’re fragmented instead of whole:

  • Where am I living inauthentically instead of being real?
  • What emotions, fears, or truths am I avoiding?
  • What patterns keep repeating in my life and what does this say about my unconscious intentions?

Self-reflection and radical honesty are key here because until you see the problem, you can’t fix it – you’ll just be forever running around in the Void and rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic whilst it sinks.

2. Acceptance: Stop Resisting the Truth

Most men fight against reality even though real always works and reality always has something to teach them:

They suppress and resist emotions, deny their past wounds, and cling to false identities (ego) but healing always requires acceptance of your past, your emotions, and even your failures (because acceptance can only ever lead back to the truth and solve the problem of disconnection).

Start facing some of the facts:

  • Accept that the Void exists for a reason (you have lost touch with you’re realness).
  • Accept that suppressing emotions only keeps you ‘stuck’ (because emotions are e-motion, energy in motion and the only thing that stops them naturally being integrated and becoming whole is the mental blocks of ego and void-identity).
  • Accept that change is possible, but it starts with facing reality (so you’re building on something solid and not just empty ideas in the sky).

3. Action: Align with Truth and Purpose

Awareness and Acceptance mean nothing without real Action:

Action in this sense means moving towards what is real and away from false distractions.

You can change your life by:

  • Pursuing a purpose that aligns with the truth in relation to you and your life (after raising awareness and acceptance of what this is)
  • Practicing emotional integration instead of suppression (by acting on the real things that are calling for expression from your Shadow Self).
  • Facing fears head-on rather than avoiding them (because then you’ll see that most fear was actually just F.E.A.R: False Evidence Appearing Real).
  • Building relationships rooted in honesty, not validation (by understanding that the truth is the greatest foundation of all, not the things or people you try to fill the Void with).
  • Learning to regulate your nervous system so that you have the energy and presence to face life in a real way (without seeing threats where there are opportunities etc.) – check out this article for more on this: Nervous System Regulation for Realness: Finding Your Natural Rhythm

When you take consistent, real action, the Void begins to dissolve – not because you’re ‘filling’ it with distractions, but because you’re removing the layers of fragmentation that created it in the first place and becoming who you were meant to be.

The cure for the Void and when you feel empty is to face the void and the emptiness

Conclusion: The Path Back to Wholeness

The Void isn’t some mysterious curse that you have to live with – it’s just the consequence of living a life that is out of alignment with truth.

When you stop avoiding yourself, stop numbing yourself, and start becoming yourself, the emptiness fades because – at your core – you were never ’empty’ to begin with…you were just buried beneath layers of fragmentation, fear, and false identities (and thought this filter was the truth).

The world will tell you that you need more things to be happy but what you really need is more realness and this means LETTING GO of a lot of the unreal things you have been chasing.

When you can trust and let go like this then you’ll find more truth, more integration, more purpose.

Because – as the old Chinese proverb says – “Tension is who you think you should be but release is who you are.”

Stay real out there,

If you’d like some guidance on becoming the Void in your own life and you might be interested in coaching then book a free video call with me.

Emotional Suppression in Men: Why Hiding From Your Own Feelings is Destroying You

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Introduction: The Cost of Keeping It All Bottled Up

One tale as old as time is that men have been told to man up, suck it up, get some balls, and stay strong and – although these can all be great strategies when faced in a REAL way – this often leads to a lot of confusion about how to best ‘handle’ emotions as a man (despite emotions just being e-motion, energy in motion and so a very real and universal part of the human experience).

The message that often gets pumped out is clear: emotions are a sign of weakness.

But what if that very belief is the thing that’s making you weaker (because it’s unreal and the only ‘strength’ comes from being real)?

What if emotional suppression isn’t protecting you but slowly destroying you from the inside-out? What if it’s not emotions that are a sign of ‘weakness’ but resisting or suppressing our emotions because we FEAR them because we don’t understand them?

The truth is that emotions are not your enemy:

In fact, they hold the key to your power because they can lead you back to a more solid foundation of realness and presence (if you know how to handle them properly).

Unfortunately, a lot of men have no idea how to process their emotions at the most basic level – let alone express them in a way that strengthens them rather than saps their energy and making them weaker.

This article will explain why emotional suppression is a ticking time bomb, how it affects your mind and body, and what you can do to reclaim your emotional strength and grow real.

Let’s dig deeper:

Emotional suppression leads to many problems but only has one 'cure'.

The Reservoir of Unresolved Emotions

Every human being carries a reservoir of unresolved emotions inside themselves and men are no different (no matter how ‘tough’ or ‘stoic’ they might be):

Some have deeper reservoirs than others, but all men, without exception, have stored emotional baggage from their past because this is the human condition we’re dealing with here and humans are always gonna human, no matter who they think they are.

We’re not just taking about traumatic experiences here, btw – this ‘reservoir’ includes every suppressed frustration, every ignored disappointment, and every grief that was never fully processed.

It’s all just sat there….waiting to be released at some stage.

It would probably wait forever if it wasn’t for one simple and inevitable fact about life: life will squeeze you and when it does it will show you the ‘juice’ that’s inside the reservoir.

Whenever life applies pressure (and it always does in the end) – whether it’s through relationship problems, career setbacks, financial stress, or unexpected hardships – what’s inside that reservoir will come pouring out out of you in the way that you instinctively react to whatever it is that you’re going through.

Some men leak anger; others might collapse into apathy or depression. Some drown their emotions in alcohol, porn, or mindless distractions. But the juice that spills out when squeezed is only revealing what was already inside – not what’s ‘in’ the situation you’re reacting to in itself.

(This is why two totally different people can react to the exact same stimulus in totally different ways – their ‘reservoirs’ contain totally different emotions).

The question is to ask yourself at this stage is pretty simple:

What’s in your ‘reservoir‘ based on the juice that keeps coming out when you get squeezed?

Is the juice ‘sour’ because you’re carrying something like resentment, insecurity, shame, or rage? Or is it ‘sweet’ because you’re managing to cultivate resilience, clarity, and peace?

The more REAL you get, the more sweet it becomes (and it all starts by facing your emotional ‘stuff’ and not suppressing it).

Why Suppression Fails: The Truth About Emotions

The problem with suppressing emotions – i.e. sending them into hiding and avoiding them whenever they show themselves – is that they don’t disappear even if it looks like you’ve sent them deep underground.

All they do is stop being given the attention they need to be able to move in a healthy way and so they become blocked and stop flowing in the way they need to. All this ends up doing is creating resistance that turns to (inner) friction and when that happens it just builds pressure that will eventually explode.

Remember: Emotions are E-motion, Energy in Motion.

They are meant to move through you, not be trapped inside you (besides mental concepts and false identities). When you resist them, you create inner friction, and that friction leads to stress, anxiety, and eventual burnout (because, as Carl Jung said, “What you resist persists“).

Unchecked emotional suppression can lead to a bunch of systems that can mess your whole life up (and then make your emotional life even worse):

  • Chronic stress and burnout because of all the energy it takes to keep resisting.
  • Unexplained anger and mood swings because things keep leaking out of that reservoir.
  • Depression and apathy because you’re denying your real self.
  • A lack of real connection with others because the real you is always in hiding.
  • Health issues (high blood pressure, digestive problems, weakened immune system) because of the stress and pressure you put on your nervous system.
  • Addiction to substances, porn, workaholism, excessive gaming, etc. because you need a quick ‘release’ from all the tension you’re carrying.

The bottom line is that avoiding emotions does not free you from them at all – instead, it makes them control you in ways you don’t even realise.

The Role of Projection: How We Externalise Our Inner Conflict

To complicate things a little more, we can say that most men don’t even recognise they have an emotional suppression problem because they unconsciously project their unresolved emotions onto others.

Projection is when we attribute our own internal struggles onto people around us because we’re not emotionally ready to face ourselves.

This can affect the way that we see the whole world around us (because perception is projection).

For example:

  • A man who is deeply insecure about his worth may constantly judge others as weak or incompetent (to hide from his own perceived weakness).
  • A man who fears emotional intimacy might label his partner as “too emotional” while dismissing his own feelings (because he’s not ready to face his own ‘stuff’).
  • A man who harbours suppressed anger might pick fights over trivial things without realising it’s his internal resentment driving the behaviour (because he’s angry with himself for some reason).

Projection can derail our whole lives because it keeps men blind to their own issues and stops them from healing and growing real (because it takes the focus away from their relationship with themselves and shifts it ‘out there’ instead).

How to Break Free: Releasing Emotional Suppression

The alternative to this kind of emotional suppression is to stop hiding from your emotional ‘stuff’ and to start using it as a source of power.

Here’s some ways that you can do it:

  1. Acknowledge What You’re Feeling (Without Judgement)
    • Stop seeing emotions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and just see them as information about reality. If you feel anger, frustration, or sadness, for example, then don’t fight it and try to act like it’s not there. Just allow it to be whatever it is.
    • Ask yourself: What is this feeling trying to tell me?
  2. Stop Resisting Emotion – Let It Move Through You
    • Remember: Emotions are e-motion, energy in motion. The more you resist, the more they persist (so every time you act like it’s not ‘there’ you just make it worse).
    • Instead of bottling up anger, channel it into something constructive that’s aligned with your purpose or vision (exercise, deep breathing (4-7-8 breathing is always good), writing, movement, or even screaming into a pillow if needed).
    • If grief or sadness arises, allow yourself to feel it fully rather than suppressing it with distractions. Try to figure out what you’re going through the process of LETTING GO of and stop holding onto anything unreal (remembering that you can’t lose anything real).
  3. Regulate Your Nervous System
    • Most men are stuck in a constant state of fight-or-flight and have what is known as Sympathetic Dominance. Learning to calm your nervous system will help you process emotions without being overwhelmed because you won’t experience them as a threat (instead you can feel safe with them and let them and observe them).
    • Try breathwork, cold showers, yoga, meditation, or exercise to help you regulate your nervous system as a whole.
  4. Communicate Openly
    • Being real doesn’t mean dumping your emotions on others and being ‘needy’ or identifying them – it just means being honest. Instead of suppressing or exploding, learn to communicate with calm assertiveness and to own what’s yours without justification or unnecessary explanation.
    • Example: Instead of silently resenting your partner for something, say what you actually feel and need and set the boundary.
  5. Embrace Healthy Masculine Expression
    • Masculinity doesn’t mean emotional suppression – it means emotional mastery. Real men own their emotions and use them to fuel their actions and purpose, rather than being controlled by them. When you resist them with emotional suppression, it means that you’re NOT in control.
    • Anger, when harnessed correctly, becomes drive.
    • Fear, when understood, becomes wisdom.
    • Sadness, when accepted, becomes depth.
    • Always look for the lesson and lean into it. Every emotion is teaching you something so you can can be grateful for it instead of trying to resist it.
  6. Surround Yourself with Men in Touch With Their Realness
    • If you’re surrounded by men who only reinforce emotional suppression and keep their masks on, then it’s time to level up your circle. Find men who embody REALNESS and who own their emotions rather than run from them. Iron sharpens iron.
Emotional suppression just means that your body keeps the score anyway.

Conclusion: Emotions Are Not Your Enemy But Emotional Suppression Makes You Your Own Enemy

Hiding from your emotions doesn’t make you stronger – it makes you fragile and more easily controlled by the world around you (because you could lose your balance at any second).

Real strength comes from understanding, processing, and integrating your emotions so that they work for you, not against you.

Remember: the juice that comes out when life squeezes you is what was already inside – if you want to be a man who remains steady under pressure, start working on what’s in your reservoir today so that what comes out is more sweet than sour.

Stay real out there,

The Masculine Wound: Why So Many Men Feel Lost in Life

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Introduction: The Silent Struggle of Modern Men

There’s a deep, unspoken pain carried by many men in the world today – an invisible burden that leaves them feeling lost to the Void, disconnected, and uncertain of their place both within themselves and within the universe as a whole.

Some call it a “crisis of masculinity” or simply just a “sign of the times” but – at its core – it’s something much deeper: the masculine wound.

This ‘wound’, formed through shame, the absence of strong (i.e. REAL) male role models, and a cultural shift that fears and suppress natural masculine instincts has created a generation of men who don’t know who they are or what they stand for because it’s made them believe that they can’t choose to express what’s real about themselves.

This isn’t about nostalgia for outdated roles or some reactionary longing for the past but about realness and the truth is very simple:

When a man is disconnected from his real nature, he struggles; he second-guesses himself, avoids responsibility and real growth, and either becomes overly passive and listless and rolls over or overcompensates with aggression and by grandstanding as a kind of caricature of what it means to be ‘a man’.

This wound is why so many men feel lost and end up living those “lives of quiet desperation”…but like any wound, it can be healed if you have the courage to face it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The masculine wound means we didn't face our shadow.

What is the Masculine Wound?

The masculine wound isn’t just one thing; it’s a collection of unresolved pain, conditioning, and unmet needs that distort a man’s sense of self.

It can manifest in all kinds of symptoms (all of which are caused by the same fundamental problem: disconnection from the truth about oneself in one’s realness):

  • A lack of confidence in one’s own decisions and abilities and so lacking vision and discipline around REAL ACTION.
  • Fear of responsibility and commitment and so never seeing anything to completion and not being able to have REAL RELATIONSHIPS.
  • People-pleasing tendencies or excessive aggression and so not being able to cultivate REAL INTIMACY.
  • Disconnection from healthy masculine traits like strength, discipline, and purpose and so not being able to dedicate oneself to a REAL PURPOSE.
  • Shame around natural masculine energy, often reinforced by societal narratives so not being able to be REAL WITH ONESELF.
  • A deep sense of aimlessness or feeling like life lacks meaning and so not being able to live a REAL LIFE.

For many men, this wound is inflicted early:

They grow up without strong male role models (and so they end up with ‘Daddy’ Issues) or in environments that reject masculinity as something ‘toxic’ rather than something that needs to be developed.

Many fathers were absent – either physically or emotionally – and, as a result, many boys had no guidance on what it means to be a man and find themselves just kind of ‘wandering’ through life like lost sheep looking for a shepherd (and not realising that they can step up and be their own because there is always a leader inside them waiting to step up and shine light on the way forward).

The Root of the Masculine Wound: Shame and Suppression

At the heart of the masculine wound is always the enemy of realness: shame.

Shame is always that thing that keeps a man disconnected from the truth, forcing him into an identity that isn’t his own and that sends important and real parts about himself into hiding (in what I like to call the Shadow Territory).

In fact, we can go so far as to say that shame is just a disconnection from the truth.

This shame is often internalised in all kinds of ways but here are some common examples:

  • If a man was raised in an environment where expressing his strength was seen as aggressive or undesirable (often because his own father fears this), then he suppresses it (or has it suppressed through violence).
  • If he was made to feel inadequate by his father, teachers, or peers, he internalises that feeling and doubts himself in every area of life moving forwards.
  • If he grew up with no clear guidance on what it means to be a man, he wanders through life aimlessly, trying to figure it out on his own while battling an internal war of insecurity and doubt (especially in a world that fears and demonises masculinity – even though it was masculinity that built it).

This shame leads to a fragmented identity (the Ego) that serves as a mask for all of the hidden ‘parts’ of who we are in our realness (the Shadow Self):

When hiding behind the Ego like this, men become either passive, approval-seeking ‘nice’ guys who fear confrontation and suppress their own needs or they swing to the other extreme and become arrogant, overcompensating, and emotionally closed off – both of which are just different masks hiding the same deeper pain underneath: shame.

To heal the wound, you need to start taking you mask off (book a coaching call with me to get started).

The Father Wound and Its Impact

A major contributor to the masculine wound is the father wound (aka ‘Daddy’ Issues) – the pain caused by an absent, weak, or overly critical father figure.

This is because when a father is absent, weak, or overly-critical it signals to the child that they are ‘less’ than somehow. This signal turns to shame and the rest is history.

Of course, this isn’t about ‘blaming’ fathers – they were doing the best they could (usually) with what they had and according to their own wounds and emotional ‘stuff’ and so the bottom line is that many men simply didn’t have the tools to lead their sons properly.

But the result is still the same: a man without guidance struggles to find his path.

If a man’s father was absent or weak, he often:

  • Seeks external validation because he never internalised his own worth and so tries to ‘outsource’ it to other people.
  • Struggles with confidence because he never saw a model of strong, stable masculinity, and doesn’t know to act or be real in the world.
  • Fears failure and responsibility because no one taught him how to handle adversity and he constantly judges himself under the weight of the shame he carries.

The Consequences of the Masculine Wound

When a man doesn’t heal his masculine wound, he lives in a state of avoidance and frustration because he can’t ACCEPT life (because then he would have to face the truth about himself and dissolve the shame he’s unconsciously identified with). He knows, deep down, that something is ‘off’ – but he doesn’t know what.

The signs are everywhere:

  • Lack of drive and ambition – He becomes a man without a real vision or purpose and drifts through life never feeling any flow.
  • Struggles in relationships – Without a strong masculine core, relationships lack masculine-feminine polarity, leading to either resentment or co-dependency and a lack of real intimacy in romantic relationships.
  • Chronic indecision – Because he doubts himself, he can’t commit fully to anything and so he never gets anywhere real…just where the world TELLS him to go.
  • Addictions and distractions – He numbs himself with porn, video games, social media, or substances rather than face his pain and grow real again (by facing the truth and dissolving that shame – see my book Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace which talks about this in detail).
  • Fear of confrontation – He avoids difficult conversations and situations, weakening his presence and his capacity to grow in truth (instead of shrinking away from it and never changing anything).

This isn’t how men were meant to live – it’s completely UNREAL. And the worst part?

The longer a man avoids healing this wound, the more it controls him and drives everything that he does and all of the RESULTS he does or doesn’t get in his life.

How to Heal the Masculine Wound

1. Face the Truth Head-On
Healing starts with radical and unconditional acceptance:

Stop pretending the wound isn’t there and recognise the patterns in your life that stem from avoidance, fear, and shame.

What have you been running from? Where are you making excuses? Only by facing these questions can you start to change and start running towards something REAL instead.

2. Develop a Strong Relationship with Real Masculinity
This doesn’t mean playing a role – it means developing the skills and qualities that make men strong, grounded, and purpose-driven.

For example (there are many, many more):

  • Discipline – Show up every day and do what needs to be done.
  • Courage – Speak the truth and take action despite how you might ‘feel’ about it (focus on what you want instead).
  • Integrity – Align your words and actions and stick to your word and your principles.
  • Self-reliance – Build confidence by handling your own problems and taking responsibility for what’s yours (and learning to let go and trust life when need be).

3. Heal the Father Wound
If your father was absent, weak, or critical, recognise that you can reparent yourself by learning to master your mind and cultivate the kind of qualities the man you want to be embodies.

You can also find strong male mentors – whether in real life, through books, or communities – that embody what you want to become.

Stop waiting for the father you never had and become the man you need and want to be.

(Again, you can book a call with me if you want help with this).

4. Get Your Body and Mind Right
A simple fact about life is that a weak body leads to a weak mind:

One of the fastest ways to start healing is to strengthen your body and regulate your nervous system:

  • Lift weights and get lean – Strength training builds not just muscle, but resilience.
  • Get strong and flexible – Throw some power yoga in the mix too and stay mentally and physically strong and flexible.
  • Eat real food – Your diet affects your testosterone, energy, and mental clarity so eat for dominance of yourself and your goals.
  • Practice breathwork and meditation – These help regulate your nervous system and reduce anxiety which allows you to stay unshakeable as you move through life.
  • Get off porn and dopamine hijacks – Stop numbing yourself and start facing reality by getting into the natural rhythms of your life and body (semen retention is always a good starting point).

5. Cultivate Brotherhood
Men are not meant to go through life alone because we are tribal creatures:

Find a group of men who push you to be better – whether through a mentorship, a gym community, or a strong friend group, you need to be around other men who hold you accountable and challenge you so you don’t lapse into the BS that your wounds have been showing you (because your wound is not the real you).

The only way to heal yourself is to stop running away and face the masculine wound

Conclusion: Step Away From the Masculine Wound and Into Your Realness

Healing the masculine wound isn’t just about ‘fixing’ yourself – it’s about returning to your natural state of REALNESS.

Masculinity is never a problem but shame, suppression, and avoidance always are.

Stay real out there,

How Men Self-Sabotage Without Realising It (And How to Stop)

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How to Stop Self-Sabotage and Get on Track With Your REAL Life

Self-sabotage can be one of the most frustrating and insidious forces in a man’s life – it’s like constantly hitting your head against the same brick wall and expecting things to change but they never do.

The cycle always unfolds in the same way:

Just when you’re making progress, something drags you back into an ‘old’ way of being that you’re consciously trying to outgrow – an old habit, a bad decision, a ‘pull’ towards comfort and self-destruction instead of the drive towards stretching yourself and creating something real.

To make things even worse, most men don’t even realise they’re doing it because they identify with the symptoms of their sabotage instead of seeing that it’s something unreal in them pulling them off the path they really belong on.

This quick article will break down exactly how men sabotage themselves, why it happens, and – most importantly – how to stop it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your relationship with your unconscious mind affects your levels of self-sabotage

The Dance Between the Ego and the Shadow: Why Self-Sabotage Happens

To understand self-sabotage, we need to look at the unconscious battle happening within every man (and every human being, for that matter):

On the surface our relationship with ourselves and life is the Ego – the part of you that has goals, ambitions, and a self-image to uphold (though these goals, ambitions, and self-image are often unreal because they’re driven by shame and not as an expression of who you really are in truth).

Beneath this, lurking in the darkness of whatever you’ve disowned about yourself to ‘fit in’ and be ‘acceptable’ within the world, is the Shadow Self – the part of you that carries all the things you reject, fear, and repress about the truth of yourself, the world, and reality.

Most men think they’re making conscious choices in life, but the truth is something different (that’s worth remembering):

Unconscious intentions always triumph over conscious desires.

For example:

You might want to succeed, get fit, be disciplined, or build a great relationship, but if there’s an unresolved wound in your Shadow – one that believes you’re unworthy, weak, or destined to fail, for example – that deeper belief will override your conscious will every time and so you will never get the results you keep telling yourself you ‘want’ (because like we just said: unconscious intentions always triumph over conscious desires – write that down and remember it because it can change your life).

This is one of the main reasons why many men repeat toxic cycles, fall into destructive habits, and struggle to break free – they aren’t just fighting ‘bad’ habits; they’re fighting a hidden part of themselves that is actively working against them because they haven’t faced it and integrated it.

Knowing this can help you to see that self-sabotage isn’t random:

It’s the result of an internal war between the Ego (who you think you are) and the Shadow (who you really are but refuse to accept).

The more you ignore your Shadow, the more it controls you beyond your conscious control and you’ll wonder why this keeps happening (like Carl Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate/God”).

If you want to stop self-sabotage, you have to stop rejecting the parts of yourself that are creating it in the first place which means that you need to integrate the Shadow, bring your unconscious fears into awareness, and stop pretending they don’t exist.

Only then can you move forward without tripping over yourself.

The Ways Men Unknowingly Self-Sabotage

1. Procrastination: The Most Common Form of Self-Sabotage

Every time you put something off, you reinforce the idea to your unconscious mind that you are not capable – this just strengthens your unconscious intention regardless of what you ‘think’ or tell yourself at the conscious level. Procrastination is self-betrayal disguised as ‘waiting for the right moment.’ The truth, however, is that the ‘perfect’ time never comes. You act now or you don’t act at all (but it’s way easier when you know what’s going on at the level of your Shadow and not just your Ego).

2. Addictions and Escapism

Porn, junk food, video games, mindless scrolling – men destroy their potential by numbing themselves to life and avoiding reality (which is what we always need to face to get the best results in life). Escapism feels good in the moment, but it steals your energy, focus, and drive in the long-term. If you’re constantly escaping, ask yourself: What am I running from? and then start running towards something REAL instead.

3. Perfectionism: The Fear of Taking Imperfect Action

Many men think they need to ‘be ready’ before they start something, but that’s just unconscious fear talking and weighing them down. Perfectionism is procrastination in disguise – instead of aiming for ‘perfect,’ aim for ‘progress’ and start taking real action TODAY. Start with just one real thing and watch how quickly you can start to build momentum.

4. The Fear of Success is Self-Sabotage

It sounds ridiculous, but many men sabotage themselves because they’re actually afraid of what will happen if they succeed. Success comes with responsibility, expectations, and the unknown – all of which are a ‘threat’ to the Ego and the familiar ways of seeing ourselves, others, and life itself. Fear of stepping into that power keeps them small and causes them to keep shrinking away from what they really want (because their unconscious intention to stay the same outweighs their conscious desire to ‘succeed’).

5. Staying in Weak Social Circles

Who you spend time with will either elevate you or drag you down and many men sabotage their potential by surrounding themselves with people who reinforce their weaknesses instead of challenging them to grow. If your social circle normalises mediocrity, self-destruction, or avoidance, it’s only a matter of time before you follow suit. If you tell yourself that you want to be a stronger version of yourself but keep hanging around with people you don’t respect or that are weak then your unconscious intention is to not respect yourself and to treat your own weakness as the status quo.

6. Playing the Victim

Blaming your upbringing, past failures, or external circumstances keeps you powerless because it causes you to identify with a static image of yourself instead of tuning into the process of evolving and growing real. When you see yourself as a victim, you hand over control of your life to everything outside of you. Real men take ownership – of their choices, their mindset, and their destiny and know that this all starts by tuning into the power that’s within them (identifying as a victim usually means that we fear this inner power because we know it’s going to disrupt our lives….even though we really want to change them).

7. Ignoring Their Health

Your mind and body are connected as one system. If you don’t take care of yourself physically, you’ll struggle mentally. Many men sabotage themselves by eating garbage, avoiding exercise, and neglecting sleep – then wonder why they feel like failures. If you keep making poor choices like this then you’re literally signalling to your unconscious mind that you don’t care about yourself. Then you wonder why you’re not getting where you know deep down you want to be?

How to Stop Self-Sabotage and Get Out of Your Own Way

1. Face Your Shadow and Accept Your Flaws

Instead of pretending you don’t have insecurities, fears, or weaknesses, own them and start being REAL with yourself. Your Shadow only has power over you if you reject it (and there’s a lot of ‘good’ things about you down there too – it’s not just ‘bad’ qualities or wounds but your joy, your ability to trust life, and your real emotions). The moment you acknowledge your self-sabotaging tendencies, they lose their grip and you can start moving in a real way again.

2. Take Relentless Action (Even When You Don’t Feel Like It)

Real action is the antidote to sabotage – the more you act, the less room you give fear, doubt, and self-destruction to take over because when you take action you get EVIDENCE that all of your unreal beliefs about yourself are exactly that: unreal. Discipline isn’t about feeling ready – it’s about doing what needs to be done regardless of how you feel and reminding yourself what you really want.

3. Upgrade Your Environment

If you’re surrounded by people who reinforce self-sabotaging behaviours, you’ll never escape them. Level up your social circle and choose to be around men who hold you accountable and push you to be better. If you’re stuck with a bunch of ‘losers‘ then you’re just increasing the odds of becoming one yourself (by telling your unconscious mind that it’s okay to be one and then getting frustrated because – at the level of the conscious mind – you tell yourself you want the complete opposite). Do the work.

4. Develop a Non-Negotiable Routine

Structure is freedom. Having a strong daily routine – one that includes training, good nutrition, productive work, and time for self-reflection – creates momentum and keeps you on track. Figure out a set of habits that will support you to be the man you want to be daily and then stick to it (you’ll see your growth compound over time in all areas).

5. Get Comfortable with Discomfort

Growth is uncomfortable because it means letting go of ego and facing the shadow ‘stuff’ -if you avoid discomfort, you stay stagnant which is an unreal state (because real life keeps moving). The greatest men in history weren’t the most talented; they were the ones who leaned into difficulty and trusted themselves in life instead of running from it all and distracting themselves.

Self-sabotage is when the real self is battling the unreal self.

Conclusion

Self-sabotage is not random. It’s not bad luck. It’s not something that just ‘happens’ to you.

Instead, it’s a direct result of your relationship with your own Shadow and the unconscious intentions you hold about yourself. If you don’t address these intentions, you’ll just keep tripping over the same patterns, making the same mistakes, and watching your potential slip through your fingers whilst being bewildered and wondering why this keeps happening.

If you do the work – if you face the Shadow, take action, and start making decisions from a place of realness instead of fear – you’ll break free and start living a life that you can be proud of.

The choice is simple and it’s yours:

Keep sabotaging yourself or start taking responsibility for your future?

Stay real out there,

Overcoming Your Fear of Other Men: How to Stop Feeling Inferior and Stand Your Ground

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The Root of Fear: Why Other Men Intimidate You

If you’ve ever walked into a room and immediately felt ‘small’ (emotionally and maybe physically) in the presence of other men – whether due to their confidence, success, or physical dominance – you’re not the only one.

Many men silently battle this fear, but few ever confront it because they think it’s just ‘normal’ or just they way that they’re wired and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

If this applies to you, then what you need to know is that this fear isn’t real in the way you think it is – it’s a distortion created by shame, self-judgement, and an unresolved relationship with power (usually, because you have some kind of unresolved ‘Daddy’ Issues).

At heart, your fear of other men isn’t really about them – it’s about your own self-perception. You fear being seen as weak, incapable, or unworthy because you’ve lost touch with your own masculine core and so you’re projecting this out onto the men around you. This fear keeps you trapped in avoidance, submissiveness, or overcompensation and so you never show up in a real way (because you’re not being REAL with yourself first).

The only way to overcome this is to cultivate REALNESS.

That’s what this article is about:

To overcome your fear of other men, you need to free yourself from yourself

The Illusion of Intimidation: Most Men Are Just as Insecure as You

The first step to overcoming fear is understanding that most of the men who intimidate you are usually projecting their own insecurities. The extra macho guy who walks around acting like he owns the room? He’s usually covering up deep-seated self-doubt by self-inflating. The aggressive, overly dominant guy (who secretly cries when he watches romantic movies)? He’s afraid of being exposed as weak. The ultra-cool, aloof guy who acts like he doesn’t care? He’s terrified of rejection and so he just rejects people before the reject him (by keeping his ‘cool’ wall up so nobody gets a real shot).

When you realise that other men are just as fragile as you – even if they hide it better – the fear starts to dissolve. You’re not ‘less‘ than them – you’re just carrying your fear differently and you can flip the script any time you feel like it.

The Key to Confidence: Self-Respect Over Validation

Most men who struggle with social fear and anxiety are looking for external validation instead of being rooted in their realness – they want other men to affirm their worth because they don’t know how to do it themselves. This is just a losing game because it puts your confidence in the hands of others and ‘others’ are always changing and out of your control.

A more REAL strategy is to work on cultivating self-respect:

When you get to the place where you genuinely respect yourself, you stop looking for permission from other men to feel worthy and just do your ‘thing’ instead (because you have the wherewithal to stay present).

This doesn’t mean arrogance – it just means standing in your truth without needing approval.

To start living with this kind of self-respect you need to know yourself and how you operate in the world:

  • Do you live in alignment with your values?
  • Do you stand up for what you believe in, even when it’s uncomfortable?
  • Do you respect my own boundaries and time?
  • Do you lead yourself in life or do you only follow?

Self-respect eliminates the need for all the social posturing and allows you to stop fearing other men because you don’t ‘need’ anything from them and so can just be real instead.

Presence and Power: Regulating Your Nervous System

If your body is constantly in fight-or-flight, you’ll never feel grounded around other men:

Many guys stay stuck in hypervigilance (overreacting and trying to prove themselves) or freeze mode (shrinking and avoiding eye contact) because their nervous system is out of balance. Neither is real power because it means you’re acting on autopilot and not in control of yourself.

Real presence comes from nervous system regulation:

When your body is calm, your energy shifts and you can actually stay present in the situations you find yourself in. You radiate confidence without effort.

Here’s how to develop this:

  • Breathe deeply – Shallow breathing keeps you anxious; deep breathing signals safety.
  • Get strong – Strength training gives you a visceral sense of power and ability to feel grounded.
  • Slow down – Rushing and fidgeting show nervousness – own your space instead.
  • Eye contact – Not in a creepy way, but in a way that shows you’re present and unshaken.

When you regulate your nervous system, you stop feeling small – you become the guy that other men instinctively respect because they can sense that you’re at ‘home’ in yourself and are way less likely to be shaken.

The Truth About Hierarchy: Dominance, Submission, and Holding Your Own

Men instinctively sort themselves into hierarchies…this isn’t a bad thing – it’s just nature.

The problems start when you misunderstand hierarchy and either collapse into submission or try too hard to dominate (both of which are unreal and usually prompted by shame instead of presence).

Real confidence, on the other hand, isn’t about winning these imaginary competitions – it’s about holding your own.

  • If you’re trying to prove yourself all the time, you’re not really confident because you don’t really believe in yourself.
  • If you avoid all confrontation, you’re also not confident because you lack healthy boundaries and don’t stand up for what you believe in.
  • If you can hold your ground without needing to dominate or appease – that’s confidence because you found something REAL.

Your goal isn’t to be the ‘alpha’ or the ‘beta’ – it’s to be rooted in yourself in a real way so that other men’s energy doesn’t shake you.

Why Avoiding Confrontation Keeps You Weak and Makes You Fear Other Men

Most guys fear confrontation because they associate it with aggression or rejection but real confrontation isn’t about fighting – it’s about honest engagement and not being shy to speak the truth (or find it out even if that involves some kind of debate).

Avoiding confrontation makes you passive:

It teaches you to shrink and keep shrinking and to prioritise keeping the ‘peace’ – though it’s not actual peace but real peace involves the truth – over being real. The more you do this, the more you train yourself to feel weak.

Instead, get comfortable with tension and accept that it’s just emotional discomfort, not physical danger. When you can sit in uncomfortable moments without flinching or shrinking, you develop the unshakable presence that belongs to your realness anyway.

Practical Solutions to Conquer Your Fear

Now that you understand the root of your fear, here’s how to break free:

1. Get Physically Strong

Your body and mind are connected and what’s good for the body is good for the mind (your mind-body is one system). If you feel weak physically, you’ll feel weak socially. Lift weights. Get lean. Do yoga or something that will make you supple and flexible. Train your body to move with power and control. It changes everything (including your mind because getting to this point takes effort and the capacity to push through your comfort zone).

2. Master Your Nervous System and Watch Your Fear of Other Men Dissolve

  • Breathwork: Slow, deep breaths train your body to stay calm and activate your parasympathetic nervous system).
  • Cold exposure: Builds resilience and reduces anxiety.
  • Posture: Stand tall – shoulders back, chest open, relaxed stance (this signals to your body that you’re feeling good and present).

3. Develop Assertiveness

  • Speak your mind without fear of disapproval (and don’t be ‘worried’ if you offend people – just don’t offend them on purpose…sometimes the truth is ‘offensive’).
  • Set boundaries without guilt (just say “No” to anything unreal).
  • Hold eye contact without intimidation or avoidance (without being a creep).

4. Challenge Yourself Socially

  • Talk to strangers.
  • Speak up in uncomfortable situations.
  • Get used to minor confrontations – don’t avoid them.

5. Pursue a Bigger Purpose and Overcome Your Fear of Other Men

Nothing makes fear shrink faster than focusing on something bigger than yourself and having a real VISION for your life. When you have a vision, the opinions of other men become irrelevant.

Check out my free 7-day course with dedicated workbook to start figuring out yours and acting on it: The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose.

Final Thoughts: Be the Man You Respect

Overcoming your fear of other men isn’t about becoming aggressive or dominant – it’s about becoming whole and learning to be REAL.

When you stop looking for permission and start living in alignment with truth, you gain real power. Not power over others, but power over yourself – everything else stems from that as it’s the strongest foundation you can have.

The world doesn’t need more men chasing status or approval. It needs men who are real.

Stay real out there,

Nice Guy Syndrome: Why Pleasing Everyone is Making You Weak

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Nice Guys Finish Last for a Reason: They’re UNREAL

If you’ve ever felt like being a ‘nice guy’ is holding you back from living you’re real life, then you’re probably right:

Society tends to rewards ‘men ‘for being agreeable, easy-going, and accommodating – in other words, easy to control – but what if I told you that this behaviour isn’t always genuine kindness but is often (almost always) a persona picked up and identified with as a manipulative strategy?

The shocking truth is that Nice Guy Syndrome isn’t about being ‘too nice’ at all; it’s about being fake -about being driven by shame, fear, and a desperate need for approval, all of which weaken you as a man and affect your ability to respect yourself and to have meaningful relationships built around true intimacy (romantic or otherwise).

The source of the problem is that often when people don’t believe in themselves they simply try to wear a mask to hide the shame they feel instead of doing the inner work to grow real (which means there is no shame). The hope here is that it will somehow validate their worth. The problem, of course, is that this strategy doesn’t work because the truth always comes out in the end (what’s real is always real, after all).

What it does serve to do however is to make people weak, unattractive, and disconnected from their own power. This just creates a vicious cycle where the ‘mask’ that the Nice Guy Syndrome sufferer is wearing to deal with their shame just ends up making them feel increasingly bad over time (they also add an extra level of anxiety at the thought of being ‘found out’ somehow).

There’s only one way out: Realness – which means being honest, assertive, and standing in your truth even when it’s uncomfortable.

Let’s break it down and expose why being a people-pleasing ‘nice guy’ is the fastest route to not getting what you want in life, relationships, and personal growth.

Let’s dig deeper:

The Root of Nice Guy Syndrome: Shame and Self-Judgement

Nice Guy Syndrome doesn’t come from a place of genuine goodwill – it comes from shame.

Deep down, nice guys simply don’t believe in their own worth, so they build a persona they think will be more ‘acceptable’ to the world around them (and often the women in the world that they want to sleep with or whatever). Instead of addressing their insecurities by taking a look at themselves and trying to make some necessary changes, they instead opt to ‘buy’ approval by constantly accommodating others in an unreal way (not as an act of genuine service but as a way to get ego-strokes).

But there’s a slight problem: this strategy never works. No one respects a man who doesn’t respect himself and people can always pick up on when this is the case – no matter how good you think your mask might be. The more you prioritise pleasing people over being real, the less people will trust you and the more you’ll resent them for not giving you what you want in return.

Thus, the vicious cycle keeps getting more vicious.

No more Nice Guy Syndrome

Don’t Be ‘Nice’ When You Can Be Kind

Nice guys don’t show up as their real selves because they’re detached from their REALNESS. Instead, they hide behind a mask, believing that if they’re always agreeable, they’ll be rewarded with love, sex, friendship, career success, or whatever else they think is going to fill the Void for them.

The reality? People see through it. And they don’t like it.

Being ‘nice’ isn’t the same as being kind:

Kindness is real – it’s honest, direct, and comes from a place of strength. People-pleasing ‘niceness’, on the other hand, is manipulative – it’s about controlling how others see you because you’re too afraid to stand in your own truth.

And that’s exactly why it eventually leads to failure in every area of life.

Daddy Issues and Fear of Confrontation

Many nice guys have unresolved issues with their fathers or father figures:

If you grew up with a critical, absent, or weak father, you may have learned to suppress your real thoughts and emotions to avoid conflict which means that instead of speaking up, you became agreeable; instead of expressing anger, you buried it; instead of standing in your power, you learned to make yourself small and shrink away from yourself and life.

Again, this is unfortunate because conflict isn’t bad – in fact, it’s necessary for growth. If you can’t assert yourself and stand your ground, people won’t take you seriously, and you’ll keep getting steamrolled in life (which just exacerbates the core problem of shame).

Real strength comes from being able to hold your ground, not from avoiding confrontation at all costs.

Being ‘nice’ really just means that you’re not standing on anything REAL.

Nice Guys Don’t Get What They Want (Because They’re Dishonest About It)

When a man doesn’t believe in himself, he won’t communicate directly – instead, he’ll use ‘niceness’ to manipulate people into giving him what he wants – whether it’s love, sex, or recognition (amongst a zillion other things).

This usually backfires because, when people realise they’ve been tricked, they feel betrayed. That’s why nice guys often find themselves rejected, friend-zoned, or overlooked in their careers.

Nobody rewards fake ‘niceness’ – but people will always respect realness.

The Confidence Killer: Disconnection from Truth

The bottom-line is that confidence doesn’t come from faking it. It comes from knowing yourself and acting in alignment with your real values consistently over time.

Nice guys lack confidence because they’re disconnected from truth and so their entire identity is based on avoiding shame and discomfort (which means they never grow).

Real confidence isn’t about being ‘liked’ – it’s about being grounded in who you are and what you stand for.

If you’re afraid to say what you really think, ask for what you really want, or set real boundaries, your confidence will always be fragile. The solution?

Start: 1) Uncovering the Truth, and 2) Living the Truth – even when it’s uncomfortable or means facing your fear.

6. Relationships: The Downfall of the Nice Guy

Most ‘nice’ guys struggle in relationships because they lack masculine polarity – instead of leading, they defer; instead of being direct, they tiptoe around issues. Instead of creating real attraction, they try to ‘win’ love through obedience and obsequiousness.

This doesn’t create healthy relationships – it creates resentment. Healthy partners don’t want a man who’s trying to be a perfect ‘yes-man’ (though some unhealthy women may get off on this as they’re control freaks because of their own shame issues).

They want a man who is rooted in truth, can make decisions, and isn’t afraid to speak up unapologetically and without constantly seeking to justify. If you want respect in your relationships, stop playing small – take the ‘mask’ of and be real and direct.

Know what you want and go get it (this is why one ‘cure’ for Nice Guy Syndrome is to find and embody your real purpose).

The Fear of Conflict and Lack of Assertiveness

Like we said, nice guys hate conflict because they think standing up for themselves will make them ‘bad’ or ‘mean’ in some way. In reality, it’s the opposite: if you can’t be assertive, not only will you always be at the mercy of others but you’re also being deceptive because you’re avoiding the truth.

Assertiveness isn’t just aggression (though that can sure help) – it’s clarity:

It’s knowing what you want and expressing it without fear – if you struggle with this, start small. Practise saying ‘no’ without over-explaining (all healthy boundaries start by saying ‘yes’ to what’s real and ‘no’ to anything that’s not). Hold your ground in conversations; make decisions without seeking permission – the more you flex this muscle, the stronger it becomes.

The Repressed Anger Problem

Nice guys are often out of touch with their anger – they see it as ‘bad’, so they suppress it.

The problem with this is that suppressed anger doesn’t disappear – it festers. It turns into passive-aggressiveness, resentment, or even depression that can infect every area of your life.

The truth is that anger isn’t bad at all – it’s a healthy and beautiful emotion that protects what’s important in our lives and can be used as fuel for a sense of purpose. Used correctly, it can drive you to set boundaries, take action, and transform your life.

The key is to channel it, not suppress it. Train hard, express your truth, and use that fire to build a life you’re proud of because you know it’s real (not ‘nice’).

Sexual Energy and Purpose

A lot of nice guys have an unhealthy relationship with their sexual energy:

Instead of using it as a force for growth, they waste it on compulsive habits or empty relationships just for the sake of getting a ‘release’ (instead of growing in the build up and the controlling the release).

If you’re constantly chasing validation through sex or numbing yourself with distractions, you’re not in control – your attempting to escape (from your shame).

The real solution is to transmute that energy: Use it to build strength, focus, and purpose.

When you’re on a real mission in life, your energy radiates differently – you become attractive, powerful, and real – because you’re no longer leaking your strength for cheap dopamine hits and then being ‘nice’ because you lack the energy to stand up and do something TRUE.

The Power of Being Kind (Not Nice)

The opposite of ‘nice’ isn’t ‘mean’ – it’s real and realness is what allows you to be kind:

Kindness is honest. Kindness has boundaries. Kindness doesn’t seek approval – it acts from genuine care and strength, knowing it has the abundance to walk away from unhealthy and unreal situations and scenarios.

When you shift from fake niceness to real kindness, everything changes because it gets more real:

Your relationships improve, your confidence skyrockets, and most importantly, you start living your truth instead of moulding yourself to fit others’ expectations through the falsity of being ‘nice’ all the time.

Implementation: How to Break Free from Nice Guy Syndrome

  1. Stop Lying – Say what you actually mean and own what you’ve said. No more sugar-coating to try and get out of difficult or uncomfortable conversations (that will actually heal the relationship or move it forward if you speak the truth with love).
  2. Set Boundaries – If something doesn’t serve you, say “no”. You don’t have to justify this if asked why. You “No” is a full sentence.
  3. Get Comfortable with Conflict – Stand your ground, respect yourself, and make the moves to protect what you believe in whilst also challenging the beliefs of yourself and others.
  4. Face Your Shame – Recognise that avoiding discomfort is keeping you weak and that the only way to grow through shame is to take action that dissolves it (so you’re not forever driven by it).
  5. Express Your Anger – In a healthy way. Exercise to build resilience and energy. Speak up. Stop suppressing it and channel it into your purpose.
  6. Cultivate Purpose – Get clear on your mission. Direction breeds confidence and makes it easier to set boundaries and know what you want in truth (so you don’t have to wear that ‘nice’ guy mask).
  7. Embrace Masculinity – Lead, decide, and stop seeking approval. You’re a man. Not a ‘nice’ guy.
  8. Focus on Kindness, Not Niceness – Be real, not manipulative.

Conclusion

Being a nice guy isn’t nice – it’s weak, dishonest, and it’s keeping you from living in the power of your own realness.

If you’re ready to step up and take that mask off, then you need to stop playing small, embrace discomfort, and live your truth – no matter the cost (you can’t lose anything real, anyway, so chill).

Stay real out there,

How to Stop Being a Loser and Start Leaning into Your Realness

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You only ‘lose’ when you stop moving and give up.

Introduction: What Makes a Loser a Loser?

The term “loser” is one of the most casually thrown-around insults in modern culture but have you ever stopped to think about what it really means?

In reality, a loser isn’t just someone who fails (as the name suggests – they didn’t ‘win’ somehow) – because failure is part of growth (and so even ‘winners’ have to fail at some stage):

No, on a deeper level a ‘loser’ is somebody who has given up on becoming REAL, someone who has surrendered to an identity that isn’t truly theirs because they lack self-mastery and gave into social pressure, someone who has chosen avoidance over action and so STAGNATES because they have no real vision, no consistency, no discipline, and no focus.

(It’s brutal but true…folks).

At the core of this? Shame.

Shame is what keeps men (or anybody else, for that matter) from stepping into their PURPOSE:

It whispers that they’re not ‘enough’, that they don’t have what it takes, that it’s safer to stay small, numb, or distracted.

But if you’re reading this, you already feel the pull towards something ‘more’ – you already know that you’re not meant to live in avoidance, wasting time on distractions that keep you from your own realness and leave you living a life of quiet desperation (as Thoreau called it) because you gave up on yourself (the only real way to ‘lose’).

This article is your wake-up call and your map for moving forward. We’re going deep, and – by the end – you’ll not only understand what’s been holding you back, but you’ll also have a practical roadmap to lean into your realness and start winning again on your own terms.

Let’s dig deeper:

Stop being a loser and take action

The Root of the Problem: Shame and the Unreal Identity

Most men don’t realise that their avoidance of action isn’t because they’re lazy or because they have something ‘wrong’ with them but because they’re avoiding shame:

The modern world has conditioned men to associate risk with emotional pain and, when you take action, you expose yourself to failure, rejection, and judgment. If your self-image is fragile, you’d rather not risk it at all and so you lapse into passivity which leads to friction, frustration, and misery and then a negative spiral of never acting and always ‘losing’.

Living like this is just like living in a cycle of endless avoidance (which is why you keep feeling like a ‘loser’):

You tell yourself you’ll start tomorrow; you convince yourself that you don’t really want the things you secretly crave (because of your fear of triggering more shame); you numb yourself with distractions – video games, porn, junk food, social media – anything to avoid sitting with the uncomfortable truth: you’re not living in alignment with who you were meant to be and so you became UNREAL.

Here’s part of the truth that can set you free:

You’re only a “loser” if you accept this unreal identity and refuse to grow through it and back into your realness.

A man who is failing but still moving forward is not a loser; a man who is struggling but still trying is not a loser; a man who is willing to confront his weaknesses and work on them is never a loser.

A loser is simply a man who has stopped moving.

The Problem with Validation-Seeking

One of the biggest reasons men get stuck in “loser” mode is their unhealthy obsession with validation:

They want to be seen as winners before they’ve done anything to earn it – they want approval from women, from friends, from social media, from their parents. And because they’re constantly chasing external approval, they never actually act on the things that would make them strong, disciplined, and purpose-driven and give them an actual, REAL inner foundation on which to stand and start ‘winning’ life (on their own terms – not external standards).

Real men who aren’t ‘losers’ don’t act for validation; they act because it’s who they are – they do that workout for the sake of working out, chase that goal for the sake of chasing it and growing through the process, be for the sake of just…being.

If your actions are controlled by the fear of how others will perceive you, then you’re not living from realness; you’re living from an illusion – an unreal identity built on other people’s expectations and your attachment to filtering your life through the matrix that this shows you. That’s why you feel stuck and stay down instead of moving up.

Stop asking for permission to be real. Just decide and then BE.

Judgment is a Projection: Fix Your Self-Image

Most guys don’t realise that their fear of judgment is just a mirror of how they judge themselves:

When you feel like a loser inside, you assume everyone sees you that way but – the truth is – other people don’t think about you nearly as much as you think they do (because they’re too busy thinking about themselves).

The people who judge you the hardest are often those who are ‘stuck’ and being unreal with themselves:

They project their own insecurities onto you because your attempt at growth reminds them of their own stagnation. Haters hate themselves first and this is why.

Here’s the shift you need to make:

Instead of focusing on how others see you, focus on how you see yourself – real confidence doesn’t come from external validation; it comes from internal integrity which just means living in alignment with what you know is right for you and staying real about it.

The Lifestyle Shift: How to Stop Being a Loser Quickly

If you want to escape the loser mentality fast, change your lifestyle because your mind follows your body, and your body follows your habits.

Here’s how you upgrade yourself immediately:

1. Build a Routine

A man without structure is a man who drifts and finds himself at the mercy of his own fleshly whims and the dictates of an unreal world:

Wake up at the same time every day. Implement a morning routine and set non-negotiable habits. Structure creates stability, which gives you a foundation to build from and which keeps you MOVING day-after-day (so you won’t stagnate and fall into the unreality that leads to being a ‘loser’).

2. Regulate Your Nervous System

If you’re constantly anxious, overwhelmed, or exhausted, it’s because your nervous system is fried – when you’re in this state, then you’ll stay ‘stuck’ for much longer than you need to because change and the uncertainty it brings will be seen as threats.

You can fix this by:

  • Prioritising deep breathing (slow, controlled inhales and exhales through your nose is best).
  • Getting proper sleep (no screens before bed, having a consistent wake-up time).
  • Limiting stimulants (caffeine dependence wrecks regulation so try and just get into the natural rhythms of your body if you can).
  • Practising cold exposure (cold showers, ice baths etc. all helps to build resilience which means your nervous system can better handles stress).

3. Get Ripped (Lean, Strong, and Functional)

Your body is your first source of power – when you’re physically weak, you feel weak. Strength training and conditioning build resilience – not just in your muscles, but in your mind.

Focus on:

  • Heavy compound lifts (squat, deadlift, press, pull-ups).
  • Cardio (sprints, jump rope, hill runs for explosiveness).
  • Mobility work (yoga, stretching, managing joint health to prevent injury).

Try and find a balance of these each week so you can stay strong, flexible, and energised to get moving and do what you need to do for your PURPOSE.

4. Eat Like a Man on a Mission

Your energy, focus, and mood are dictated by what you fuel your body with – eliminate processed garbage and eat for performance instead:

  • Protein (steak, eggs, fish, quality sources only).
  • Healthy fats (butter, olive oil, avocados, nuts).
  • Carbs from whole foods (rice, potatoes, fruit – not sugar-loaded crap).

5. Semen Retention & Sexual Discipline

If you’re constantly draining your energy through meaningless pleasure, you’re sabotaging your drive:

Retaining your sexual energy doesn’t mean never releasing – it means doing it with intent and in alignment with your values instead of like one of the beasts in the field.

Stop mindlessly watching porn. Stop wasting your focus on chasing women. Channel that energy into building your mission and growing REAL.

Everything has an opportunity cost – do you want to reach the end of your life and look at how you wasted your sexual energy or how you built something with it? Semen retention might be the game-changer for you.

Integration: How to Stay Consistent and Build Momentum

Transformation isn’t about making one big change (though that can do it in the right circumstances) – it’s about small, consistent actions stacked over time.

Here’s how to integrate all of this into your life and shift into movement:

1. Start With a Vision

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll stay lost so the first step is to get more clarity on your purpose. What do you actually want? Not what society tells you to want. Not what your parents expect. What makes you feel alive?

Write it down. Make it real and then start DOING it.

2. Use the Awareness, Acceptance, Action Model (that I use with my coaching clients)

  • Awareness – Identify where you’ve been avoiding responsibility.
  • Acceptance – Own it without self-judgment.
  • Action – Take one real step today, no matter how small.

3. Track Progress and Eliminate Excuses

Measure your habits and hold yourself accountable (or find somebody to help if you need that initially – book a call with me if so as that’s one thing I help my clients with).

If you mess up, don’t spiral – just recalibrate and get back on track.

4. Surround Yourself with High-Value People

Cut out the losers in your life. Find men who are on their own real path.

Conclusion: Choose to Win

The difference between winners and losers isn’t talent, luck, or background – it’s the ‘simple’ decision to lean into realness rather than avoidance and to move forward despite fear whilst taking responsibility instead of making excuses.

You’re not your past; you’re not your worst habits, you’re not the shame that’s tried to keep you small.

You are whatever you decide to be so stop deciding to be a ‘loser’.

Stay real out there,

Trust Issues: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Them

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Trust Issues Usually Means You’re Missing Something About Reality

Trust is the foundation of every meaningful relationship – romantic, platonic, professional, and even the one you have with yourself and life itself.

Despite this many of us find trust to be fragile, easily broken, or seemingly impossible to establish in the first place and so – if you’ve ever found yourself thinking, I can’t trust anyone, or Why do I have trust issues? – you’re probably not alone.

It’s just part of being a human being and doing the human things that humans do (humans gonna human, after all).

The good news is that ‘trust issues’ aren’t a life sentence – they’re simply a signal that something needs to be addressed in your mindset, in your nervous system, or in the way you approach relationships.

And – as always – the best way to get over trust issue is the best way to do anything else: be REAL (because real always works).

When you learn to understand reality as much as possible and the way that you and other people show up in it, you’re better equipped to act in an authentic way and to remove doubt and fear from the equation.

Trust isn’t blind faith; it’s a strategic choice rooted in awareness and self-regulation.

Let’s dig a little deeper and see exactly what that means:

What Causes Trust Issues?

Most people who struggle to trust have been hurt before.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but it’s not just the betrayal or disappointment that lingers – it’s the loss of faith in their own power and realness.

The short-version is that, at some point, they stopped trusting themselves, which made it impossible to trust others. When this happens, the brain and nervous system shift into survival mode, constantly scanning for threats and then trust basically becomes impossible.

Common causes of trust issues include:

  • Betrayal or deception from a close friend, partner, or family member – anybody that we showed our realness to, only to be treated in an unreal way.
  • Childhood experiences, such as neglect or inconsistent parenting that causes us to pick up shame, guilt, and/or trauma that sends the real version of who we are into hiding.
  • Toxic relationships that eroded your ability to feel safe with others and left you with your guard up.
  • Repeated disappointments, making you feel like trusting is naïve and so you created a mask of cynicism to hide behind that stops you going out and living your real life (because in the heart of every cynic is a disappointed idealist who doesn’t want to get hurt again).
  • Self-betrayal, where you’ve ignored your gut instincts and paid the price and now you’re not quite sure how to trust your gut again because you’re still angry with yourself.

While these experiences can leave deep scars, trust issues aren’t just about the past – they persist because of how you relate to trust in the present and your fears about the future.

Why People With Trust Issues Struggle in Relationships

If you find it hard to trust, it’s likely affecting your relationships in ways you may not even realise:

1. You Fill in the Blanks with the Past

When trust issues are unresolved, the brain looks for patterns to confirm its fears and the identity we have created to feel safe in the world – this means that when uncertainty arises, you automatically assume the worst based on past experiences.

Instead of accepting that you don’t know and gathering more information, you react defensively, assuming betrayal where there may be none (because you don’t want to feel that old pain again).

2. You Struggle with Boundaries

Many people with trust issues either have too rigid or too weak boundaries:

Rigid boundaries push people away, making it impossible to form close bonds.

Weak boundaries lead to trusting the wrong people and then getting hurt all over again.

What you really need to develop is REAL boundaries that protect your peace and purpose and allow you to respond to life from one moment to the next in accordance with this.

3. You Choose Low-Trust Environments

Fear of being alone keeps many people stuck in low-trust relationships but trust doesn’t mean tolerating toxic behaviour.

It means being real about who deserves your trust and walking away when someone shows they can’t be trusted.

If you have a lot of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ – especially shame – then you can’t walk away because you feel like you don’t deserve it and so you just stick around in a place where you can’t trust anything (not because you have issues but because it’s a toxic environment filled with threats).

The REAL Way to Overcome Trust Issues

1. Give Everyone the Benefit of the Doubt – At Least Once

Aim to make trust your default setting until there’s evidence to suggest otherwise. This doesn’t mean being naïve; it means assuming people are decent unless proven otherwise.

Giving people one opportunity to prove themselves keeps your heart open while still protecting you.

2. Don’t Force Trust Where It Doesn’t Belong

If someone has shown they can’t be trusted, it’s not your job to fix it. Trust is rebuilt by the person who broke it – not by you bending over backwards to make it work.

A lot of anxiety and depression in relationships is caused because somebody already broke our trust and we’re forcing ourselves to go against the reality of what we’ve seen.

Again: it’s not your responsibility to rebuild but the responsibility of whoever broke the trust in the relationship first and foremost.

3. Learn to Trust Your Gut

Your gut often picks up on things before your conscious mind does.

While it’s not infallible, learning to listen to subtle cues in your body can help you navigate trust wisely.

Use it as a baseline, but always engage your rational mind as well.

4. Rebuild Trust in Yourself First

If you don’t trust others, it’s often because you’ve lost trust in yourself and so you can level yourself and your relationships up by working on yourself:

Rebuilding self-trust means:

  • Keeping the promises you make to yourself (let your ‘Yes’ be a Yes and your ‘No’ be a No, for example).
  • Listening to your intuition and acting on it until you get a sense of how you gut works and when it can be trusted.
  • Making decisions that align with your values and sticking to the things that bring you a sense of growth, purpose, and peace.
  • Prioritising looking after yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally so you can keep your nervous system regulated in times of uncertainty (see below for more).

5. Regulate Your Nervous System

If your nervous system is stuck in sympathetic dominance (fight-or-flight mode), you’ll see threats everywhere.

Simple practices like breathwork, yoga, and cold exposure can help you stay calm and present, making it easier to trust the right people.

6. Choose Trustworthy People

Trusting the right people is easier than trying to force trust with the wrong ones. If someone makes you feel unsafe on a deep level, there’s a reason. Trust that feeling because no amount of logic will override what your body knows.

If you find yourself around somebody who constantly leaves you feeling ‘icky’ or weird then you can take this as a clear sign that this person is bad for you and is probably playing games at some level.

7. It’s Better to Be Alone Than in Bad Company

Many people cling to untrustworthy relationships because they fear loneliness but all ‘settling; for low-trust environments does is reinforce your belief that the world is unsafe and can’t be trusted. Instead, choose real relationships that nourish and support you and watch how your ‘trust issues’ dissolve.

8. Communicate Boundaries Clearly

Trust isn’t just about assuming someone won’t hurt you. It’s also about having clear, spoken agreements. Many betrayals happen because people operate on unstated assumptions instead of clear conversations. If trust is important, talk about what it means in your relationships and then make sure you stick to agreements (and everybody else involved does too).

9. Trust Is a Choice

You don’t have to feel trust immediately; you can choose to trust based on all of the evidence available to you (including patterns of behaviour that you spot in people and the information that your ‘gut’ gives you).

In the early stages of relationships, you won’t immediately have enough information so stick to the ‘trust everybody at least once’ rule and trust until proven otherwise. This prevents paranoia and unnecessary conflict.

Trust issues are often a sign that you don't trust yourself.

Final Thoughts: Trust as a Path to Realness

Overcoming trust issues isn’t about becoming blind to reality and just blindly putting your faith in people – it’s about seeing things as they are and acting accordingly by making the right lifestyle choices over time.

Trust isn’t just about avoiding pain – it’s about living fully, without constant fear.

When you’re real with yourself and others, trust becomes second nature because you trust yourself to make good decisions, trust your gut to alert you to danger, and trust the right people to show up for you.

And if someone betrays your trust? You walk away, knowing it’s their loss, not yours.

Stay real out there,

For the Broken-Hearted: How to Get Over Someone You Love but Can’t Be With

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Realness for the Broken-hearted

Love vs. Relationship: Understanding the Key Difference

One little nugget of knowledge that can save you from your broken heart is knowing that love and relationships are not the same thing.

Love is a feeling and way of being and doing things – an unexplainable and often irrational connection to another person; a relationship, on the other hand, is a structure and agreement between two people on how to share their lives.

You can deeply love someone and still be completely incompatible with them in a relationship.

This is one of the most painful truths to accept, but it is also one of the most freeing – especially if you’re currently trying to make sense of your own heartbreak and what to do about any lingering feelings that you may be holding onto that are stopping you moving forward in life.

A brutal truth is that many of us grow up believing that love is enough – because, like the Beatles sang “Love is all you need” – and so fall into the trap of thinking that if we love someone fiercely or with enough passion then, eventually, everything else will fall into place.

As you get older and wiser, you start to see that ‘love’ is only one ingredient in the recipe for a successful relationship:

Without shared values, mutual respect, and the COMMITMENT to grow together through times that are both ‘good’ and ‘bad’, love alone cannot sustain a partnership – it’s a foundation to build on and so you still need it for the best relationships to do their ‘thing’ but – unless you’re ready to build together – it’s not ‘enough’ in itself.

Trying to force a relationship that isn’t meant to work will only lead to suffering and real love is about acceptance, not control.

This article will help you understand all this so you can move on if that’s what you’re being called to do.

Let’s dig deeper:

The Danger of Closing Your Heart After a Breakup

After a breakup, it’s tempting to shut down emotionally – this is a protective instinct that helps you to stop feeling painful feelings for a while and to avoid overwhelm and nervous system ‘freezing’:

When this happens, you can start to get used to being shutdown and resist opening up again (which you have to do eventually to be able to heal):

You might tell yourself that caring too much is what led to the pain in the first place and so the best defence is to harden yourself and avoid feeling anything at all. But this is a dangerous illusion. When you close your heart, you don’t just block out the person you lost – you block out life itself and your opportunity to grow real and move forward with an eventual smile on your face.

Healing for the broken-hearted always comes back to being REAL and REALNESS always requires facing reality, not hiding from it (“Real always works”, after all). The pain you’re feeling is real but temporary but so is the love (though it it was real it will always be there):

The bottom-line is that denying your emotions doesn’t make them disappear – it just forces them to go underground, festering into resentment, bitterness, and emotional numbness. Love doesn’t need to be suppressed just because it is ‘inconvenient’ – instead, you can still love someone and accept that they are not meant for you.

In fact, the healthiest thing you can do is acknowledge that love, honour it, and then let go of the attachment to what you think you lost or what could have been because that’s the only thing causing your problems and pains to linger unnecessarily.

You're broken-hearted because you're still holding on to a broken heart.

What’s Real Never Dies: The Power of Acceptance

If the love you feel is real, it cannot be erased, because what’s real is always real – it will always be a part of you, woven into your story and your growth as you move forwards (no matter how broken-hearted you are right now).

At first, accepting this might seem unbearable – after all, why should you have to carry this love when the person is no longer in your life? But love is never a burden; it is a gift, even when it doesn’t lead to the outcome you wanted. It’s a sign that you’re real and you’re capable of great things.

By trying to resist your emotions or force yourself to “get over” someone in an unnatural way, you’re actually just prolonging your suffering:

The real way to move on is to surrender to reality by accepting that love doesn’t always lead to partnership (because ‘love’ and ‘relationships’ are totally different beasts).

Accept that real love can exist without possession. Most importantly, accept that your life can still be full, beautiful, and meaningful even without this particular relationship – embracing this will also be the foundation for attracting a relationship that actually ‘works’ when the time comes.

The Myth of “Fighting for Love”

Movies, songs, and romantic novels all tell us the same sad story:

If you truly love someone, you should fight for them, that you should overcome any obstacle to be together because love conquers all.

It sounds nice and gets us all pumped up and motivated from time to time but, out here in the world, forcing a relationship that isn’t meant to be is one of the most destructive things you can do for yourself and the lives of other people.

Love isn’t a battlefield (despite what Pat Benatar says) – it’s a mirror that reflects back to you the truth of your connection with another person.

Sometimes, that truth is that you are not ‘meant’ to be together. Love should feel expansive and freeing – a place where your nervous system can relax and you feel safe and free from drama – not like an uphill battle where you have to constantly prove yourself or sacrifice your well-being to make it work.

If you find yourself trying to convince someone to be with you, or if they are making you compromise your core values, it is not love that is driving you – it is fear. Figure out what that fear is and you’ll be able to free yourself from holding on and go live your REAL life with somebody who is probably a better match.

Dealing with the Ego’s Reactions: Anger, Resentment, and Bitterness

Breakups don’t just bring sadness; they also stir up anger, resentment, and bitterness. These emotions don’t come from love; they come from the Ego:

The ego hates ‘losing’ – it hates not getting what it wants. It creates narratives about injustice, about being wronged, about how things ‘should’ have been and why the other person is to blame or you’re not good ‘enough’ or anything else that prevents you from facing reality and growing beyond the current version of the Ego that you identify with.

But here’s the truth: Nothing was ever supposed to be different because things can’t be different – things unfolded exactly as they needed to whether we ‘like’ it or not.

Your job is not to argue with reality but to learn from it so that you can become even more REAL. When you let go of the ego’s need to control the narrative, you can begin to see the breakup for what it truly is -a lesson and a redirection, not a punishment.

The Freedom of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is one of the most powerful tools for moving on from heartbreak but this doesn’t mean you have to keep the person in your life. In fact, if the emotions are still strong, it’s often best to take space but forgiveness allows you to release the emotional weight you’re carrying so you can take that space without filling it with baggage.

Forgiving yourself is just as important as forgiving the other person: Maybe you made mistakes. Maybe they did. Maybe you both did. None of that matters now. What’s done is done.

The past cannot be changed, but your perspective on it can – forgiveness isn’t about saying, “What happened was okay” but instead is about saying, “I refuse to let this pain define me any longer.”

It only defines you as long as you keep RESISTING IT (because, as Carl Jung said, “What you resist persists”). When you face it, you can accept it, and it allows you to get moving again (because emotions are e-motion, energy in motion).

Can You Ever Be Friends Again?

Some people can transition from lovers to friends, but this takes time…sometimes, A LOT of time:

If your feelings are still intense, forcing a friendship is a mistake as it will only create confusion on all sides and prevent you from fully healing (because you can’t feel ‘safe’ and have a regulated nervous system when you’re confused).

True friendship after love is only possible when both people have genuinely moved on – if one person is still holding on to hope (or anything else), the dynamic will always be uneven and painful.

Sometimes, the best way to honour the love you once had is to let go completely as this shows how much you respect it. In time, if both of you reach a place of neutrality, a friendship might naturally emerge. But it cannot be rushed and should never be FORCED as that just takes everybody out of the flow of being real.

If You Play with Fire, You Get Burned

There’s a good reason why people say you shouldn’t keep in touch with an ex when you’re trying to move on. If you keep dipping your toes back into the relationship – whether through messages, meet-ups, or social media stalking – you’re only keeping the wound open and it can’t heal.

Every time you engage with them, you reset the clock on your healing and you can’t expect to move forward while still living in the past. Set clear boundaries. Unfollow them or block then if YOU need to (and don’t feel guilty – this is YOUR healing we’re talking about. Create space and grow into it.

You’re not being dramatic – you’re protecting your peace (and that’s the only way you can truly start to heal and get real again).

Being Broken-Hearted is Better Than Having a Closed Heart

Pain is not the enemy:

A broken heart can heal, but a closed heart stays trapped in fear and ego which always stops you from growing, being real, and living your actual life.

If you allow yourself to feel, to grieve, and to process, you will come out the other side stronger and more open to real love when it finds you again. If you don’t allow these things to unfold, then when somebody does come along, then you’ll just bring all of your unresolved pain and problems into the relationship and probably lose out again.

Trust that the experience of having a broken heart is shaping you and refuse to close down. Trust and know that letting go is not the same as losing out and that, in the grand design of life, what is meant for you will never require force because – like we keep saying – what’s real is always real.

You can heal your broken-heartedness by learning to let go and get real again.

Practical Steps for Healing

  1. Give Yourself Space: Stop checking their social media, cut off unnecessary contact, don’t ask for information that you don’t really want, and focus on your own life and growing real.
  2. Acknowledge Your Feelings: Don’t suppress your love – accept it, but don’t let it control you by trying to do things with it that your ego wants but the real you doesn’t.
  3. Write a Letter (But Don’t Send It): Pour out everything you want to say, then let it go. Feelings are always better out than in so do something with them instead of freezing up and resisting.
  4. Focus on Your Growth: Use this time of isolation to strengthen yourself – emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Work on your ‘stuff’, go to the gym or find some other way to get healthier, and find ways to connect more deeply to the truth about yourself, the world, and reality (you’ll see that you haven’t lost anything real anyway).
  5. Engage in New Experiences: Travel, take up a new hobby, meet new people. Find yourself again.
  6. Practice Meditation and Breathwork: Regulate your nervous system so you don’t stay stuck in emotional loops and the threat that comes from confusion and uncertainty.
  7. Trust Life: Believe that what is meant for you is still ahead, and move forward with confidence. This is the realest way to love.

Letting go isn’t about forgetting – it’s about honouring what was real while making space for what’s next.

The pain will pass, but the lessons will remain and then, one day, without even realising it, you’ll wake up and realise that you’ve truly moved on.

Stay real out there,

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