Personal Revolutions

10 Keys to Dialogue: A Real Conversation Can Change Your Life

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10 keys to dialogue: a real conversation can change your life

How to Shift From Debate to Dialogue and Change Your Life

In a world that prizes the loudest voice, the quickest clapback, and style over substance, real conversation has become something of a lost art (despite it being something that we all need and crave).

This has led to a culture where we’ve replaced dialogue with debate and – while debate might win arguments and followers – only dialogue can change your life can help you grow more real.

This is because real dialogue is about truth – about connecting rather than convincing and moving towards wholeness instead of fragmentation:

In other words, it’s about realness – showing up without pretence, performance, or the need to dominate just to get the ego-stroke of being ‘right. Debate, on the other hand, is rooted in the ego and ego doesn’t want to understand; it wants to win and maintain whatever is familiar so that we don’t have to grow through our emotional ‘stuff’.

This is an unfortunate situation because most – if not all – of us are starving for realness:

We crave connection that doesn’t feel transactional; we want to be ‘seen’, heard, and felt without being judged, labelled, or sized up.

This article explores the 10 keys to dialogue – adapted from Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness – with a focus on how realness changes lives and why we need to reclaim our ability to talk to each other in a real way if ever want to live our true lives.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

10 Keys to Dialogue: What We Cover in This Article

Real dialogue will change your life by helping you grow real.

1. Your opinions are something that you have, not something that you are.

(inspired by David Bohm)

This simple but powerful idea is the bedrock of real dialogue:

Ego makes us fuse with our beliefs and so when someone challenges what we think, we feel personally attacked because we’re under the illusion that our identity somehow depends on our interpretations being true.

But if you remember your opinions are things you have, not things you are, you free yourself from needing to defend them like they’re your life’s work because you know that’s what’s REAL about you is beyond your opinions, beliefs, and interpretations.

Realness isn’t fragile because what’s real is always real.

It doesn’t get defensive when questioned; it listens, because it knows that growth can’t happen in echo chambers and so if we want to go deeper then we need to DETACH from our opinions, not cling to them no matter what.

2. Human beings don’t possess facts, only interpretations.

(via Nietzsche)

We all like to believe we’ve got the ‘facts’ but most of what we call “fact” is actually filtered through our ego, its perspective, the conditioning that led to us identifying in a certain way in the first place, and the inner narrative that keeps the illusion in place.

This doesn’t mean truth doesn’t exist – far from it, the truth is as real as it gets because the truth just is what it is in wholeness (though we live in a society that promotes moral relativism so it often doesn’t seem this way – it means we must stay humble in its pursuit and realise that whatever ‘sense’ we’ve made can change at any time (depending on what new information or insight comes to light).

Real dialogue involves recognising our subjectivity and having the courage to update our view when truth asks us to.

Ego wants certainty but your realness wants clarity and isn’t scared to let go to receive it.

3. When people are ready to really talk, be ready to really listen.

We often say we want real conversations, but when someone actually starts to open up, we might miss the moment because we’re thinking about what we want to say next.

When someone drops the mask and speaks from the soul, don’t meet them with a script when you can meet them with silence, attention, and presence.

That’s where healing and real growth happens – when people feel heard without being ‘fixed’ or analysed.

When it starts flowing, let it (and don’t react from your mind but respond from your own best understanding of the flow).

4. Do not enter the circle to be served, but to serve.

This is about showing up to a conversation with an open heart instead of a shopping list:

Ego walks into dialogue thinking “What can I get from this?”

Realness walks in thinking “What can I give to the process?”

That might be attention, insight, presence, care or even ‘just’ the humility to be ‘wrong’.

Real conversations require the ability to hold space and to give yourself – not the kind of ‘giving’ that performs kindness but the kind that listens in presence with no agenda.

5. Engage in dialogue with the people in front of you, not your ideas about them.

We all carry stories about the people in our lives:

She’s always like this. He never listens. They’re not capable of changing.

When we engage with these mental constructs instead of the living, breathing person in front of us, we never give them or ourselves the space to grow.

Judgement closes the heart; curiosity opens it (and it’s always easier to judge than to understand).

Realness means meeting people as they are – not as we’ve decided they are because of what our ego needs them to be (so our ego can stay where it is and we can avoid facing the Shadow Self).

6. Try to respond to each other consciously, not automatically. Create, don’t just react.

Ego reacts but realness responds.

It’s easy to let our triggers speak for us but, most of the time, our reactions are just recycled stories, old wounds, and habitual loops.

To have a real conversation, you must slow down enough to notice what’s happening inside yourself so you can choose to engage with actual presence – not just recycling your past into the present and reliving the same old patterns.

Dialogue is a creative act.

7. Use more of your time to move towards wholeness and less towards fragmentation.

So many conversations fragment us and cause the ego to have a stronger hold over us:

Gossip, cynicism, projection, judgement – all these things divide us internally and externally.

Real dialogue does the opposite:

It integrates and heals the fracture between mind and heart, self and other. It makes you more of who you really are because it asks you to show up in a REAL way and helps you to see the barriers inside yourself that hold you back from this.

Wholeness isn’t found in being ‘right’ – it’s found in being real.

8. Think in terms of spectra and continua, not only in blacks and whites.

The ego loves absolute interpretations:

You’re either with me or against me. Good or bad. Right or wrong.

But real life in our experience as fragmented beings on a fragmented planet is way more nuanced because people are complex and our relationship with the truth (not the truth itself) exists exist on a spectrum, not a black and white line.

When we start thinking in shades instead of boxes, we leave room for empathy and so we can actually stop flattening people into categories and start seeing them in 3D with all the raw realness that this brings.

Realness is multidimensional; ego is binary.

9. Aim for presence, not distraction. Be in the circle. Stop thinking of things to say and wait to say what needs to be said.

(via Peter Senge)

This might be the most important skill of all:

Real conversations are born in presence because the more present you are, the more you’ll find that the right words arise naturally, without effort (because there will be less mental and emotional barriers or blockages stopping the unconscious from becoming conscious).

Instead of planning your next sentence like a TED talk, just be there. Sometimes, you can even let the silence do some of the talking and wait for truth to rise itself.

Presence is the birthplace of all transformation because the present is reality and real always works.

10. Do no harm.

Simple but essential:

This isn’t about being passive or agreeable but just acknowledging that humans are human and that they can be harmed.

Sometimes, truth challenges people but we can challenge others with compassion, not contempt.

We can be direct without being cruel.

If your honesty slices someone down, it’s not dialogue – it’s ego with a microphone and an audience.

Realness never weaponizes truth – it uses it to build bridges, not burn them.

Why Real Conversations Change Your Life

When you experience a real conversation – one where everybody involved drops the performance, suspends the ego, and shows up as they truly are…something in you shifts.

You feel seen, known, and less alone.

You realise you don’t have to fake it and that you can stop editing your words to fit someone else’s expectations. You can tell the truth for a change. You can admit you don’t know. You can laugh. Cry.

Be human.

Once you’ve tasted it, you can’t really go back to the unreal small talk that permeates most of our lives…

Real conversation is addictive in the best way because it doesn’t just feel better – it changes your neural wiring and heals old patterns as it brings light to places where shame once lived. This gives you the courage to start being real in other areas of your life, too.

It shows you how to stop needing to control every outcome, how to stop performing for acceptance and helps you to become a person who others feel safe with.

In doing so, you become more powerful – not in a domineering way, but in a quietly magnetic way.

People can feel when you’re real and, when you are, they start to become more real too.

Real dialogue is about being fully present and listening and speaking intently.

Final Thoughts: Bringing This Into Your Life

So how can you start having more real conversations?

Here’s a simple practice:

  1. Choose one of the ten keys above and reflect on how it shows up (or doesn’t) in your current conversations.
  2. Identify one relationship in your life where more dialogue (and less debate) could help and start trying to lean into your realness instead of your ego (this will encourage others to do the same).
  3. Initiate a conversation with presence, purpose, and curiosity (remember to breathe deeply through your nose as much as possible as this will regulate your nervous system and make you more present).
  4. Listen more than you speak and when you do speak, speak from your heart – not your script.
  5. Let go of the need to be right or to judge and aim to understand instead.
  6. Be present by turning your phones off (or putting them down) and just being with the person or people you’re getting real with.

Over time, you’ll notice a shift – not just in your relationships, but in yourself:

You’ll stop talking at people and start speaking with them.

You’ll stop performing and start showing up and you’ll live from realness, not ego.

And one real conversation at a time… you’ll change your life.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching so that you can grow more real in your own life, then book a free call with me and we’ll have one of the realest conversations you’ve ever had.

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

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Employee vs. entrepreneur

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

Let’s start this one with a hard truth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just before you, die, of course.

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

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

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

The entrepreneur mindset can help you break free.

What We Cover in This Article

What If You Were Never Meant to Be a Cog?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tale of Two Mindsets: Employee vs. Entrepreneur

Let’s break it down.

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

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

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

Because it gives you leverage:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Death Grip of Comfort

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

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

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

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

But suffering isn’t the only thing to fear:

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

Start Being an Entrepreneur Now. Wherever You Are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action is the Cure for Everything

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

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

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

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

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

You real life is unfolding right now.

Practical Steps to Cultivate the Entrepreneurial Mindset

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

Final Word: Realness of Spirit

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

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

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

Create something. Offer something. Become something.

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

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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

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

The Emptiness of Success: It’s Time to Get Real and Find Significance Instead

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Why Chasing Success Leaves You Empty (and What to Do Instead)

Well, it’s the 21st century and we’re all still playing a rigged game where there seems to only be one rule:

Chase success.

Get the car, get the house, get the perfect partner, get the clout, get the curated life, post it all online, wait for a few ‘likes’ to come in, and then repeat.

Maybe this feels good here-and-there – but only very briefly until the Void creeps back in – and then it’s back to the same old hamster wheel of rinsing and repeating because we don’t know any other way even though something feels… off.

Ever wondered why that is?

‘Success’, as it’s sold to us and we’re conditioned to believe in it, is usually just an endless ego-feeding loop (but, unfortunately, the ego is unreal and so are the results that we get when we’re motivated by it):

This loop promises meaning, fulfilment, happiness but more often than not it just delivers burnout, comparison, and a creeping sense of existential dread.

So let’s pause the hustle-and-bustle for a moment and ask ourselves a better question.

What if the problem isn’t that you haven’t succeeded yet but that you’re chasing the wrong thing?

What if there’s another way?

Let’s dig deeper because this article will show you that there is:

Real success comes from being significant.

Success vs. Significance

There’s a quote attributed to leadership coach John Maxwell that says:

“Success is when you add value to yourself. Significance is when you add value to others.”

And right there, ladies and gentlemen, we have a truth bomb:

Success can be satisfying in the short-term for sure – it feels good to hit goals, get the recognition, and check things off the vision board.

Sadly, this feeling rarely sticks:

The buzz fades. The bar shifts, and suddenly, you’re back on the treadmill wondering why you don’t feel better.

When we aim for significance, on the other hand, our goals, ambitions, and the outcomes we achieve are planted with much deeper roots because they emerge not from the ego’s hunger for applause, but from our REALNESS.

When you come from this place, you know that you’ve added something real to the lives of others and that – by doing so – added something real to your own.

It’s about the difference between a short-term shot of dopamine at having achieved some goal for the sake of itself versus a long-term flow of understanding that comes from doing that changes you and the world around you (by making yourself and the world a little bit more real).

Real Fulfilment Comes From Interdependence

There’s a reason volunteering boosts your mental health or why people often find joy not in buying something, but in building something that helps someone else.

Being significant to others makes us feel significant to ourselves.

Even Jesus said that it’s more blessed to give than to receive.

This is not the same as people-pleasing or approval-seeking – it’s a deeper truth about how we’re wired as social, relational, interdependent creatures.

The illusion of the isolated, hyper-successful lone wolf is just that – an illusion because nobody ‘succeeds’ without having other people involved in some way, shape, or form.

You are not a silo, you’re a system and the more aligned you are with the reality of this, the better your outcomes – not just materially, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

This idea sits at the heart of the REALNESS philosophy I coach and live by. It’s all about integration and the growth towards wholeness instead of the fragmentation that comes with ego.

We can’t be whole without embracing our connection to others at the deepest level – without acknowledging that we’re not independent but interdependent.

When you can understand that you can see the difference between ‘success’ and ‘significance’.

Significance Is Realness In Action

Significance is what happens when your values become valuable – not just to you, but to the people around you (as it says in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness: “Make your values valuable to others“).

When we consciously live like this and design a vision around making our values more valuable to the world around us, our gifts become an act of service. Your authenticity becomes impact, you stop trying to be ‘special’ and instead become useful by solving problems that only you can solve or helping people to grow based on whatever you might have been through in your own life.

This is when something strange might start to happen:

People start to notice. Because now, you’re relevant to them and their lives.

You’re significant because you’ve taken the focus of yourself and your ego.

Here’s an unfiltered truth that can change your life forever if you grasp it fully:

No one cares about your feelings, your ambitions, or your talents unless they connect to something they care about.

That’s not cynicism but the beautiful reality. Your inner world is valuable to you (to state the obvious) but its true value becomes real when it resonates outward, echoing through other people’s needs, struggles, and desires.

In other words, your ego doesn’t make you significant. Your impact does.

And, like we said, that comes from your realness.

Meaning Is Manufactured, Not Mined

Let’s go philosophical for a second and ask one of the timeless questions that human beings have been asking themselves forever:

“Is life inherently meaningful?”

Arthur Schopenhauer certainly didn’t think so. He argued that if life had intrinsic meaning, we wouldn’t feel boredom which is just an experience of life without anything going on.

When you think about it, boredom is a signal to remind us that without goals, connection, or direction, life can feel painfully empty. In other words, that without a purpose or vision then life will always seem meaningless.

(Unless we’re totally enlightened or something, of course – then we can transcend the mundane emptiness of living out our lives in duality and cause-and-effect).

This is because ‘meaning’ isn’t out there waiting to be discovered like some buried treasure – instead, it’s manufactured. It comes from how you relate to the world, how you engage with others, and what you CHOOSE to build with your time here.

The Mount Fuji Problem

Let me illustrate with a story:

When I lived in Japan, I used to be obsessed with Mount Fuji. From a distance, it’s absolutely stunning – literally iconic, symmetrical, snow-capped and mysterious. But the closer you get, the more you realise it’s… well, a pile of ash. An inspiring pile of ash, sure, but still. Ash is ash.

Once you climb it, you realise that the real beauty is no longer the mountain – it’s the view from either the distance or from the top.

This is an exact illustration of what happens with ego-driven goals:

From afar, they look perfect but the closer you get, the more you see the cracks and realise that they can never fill that Void inside you. In fact, by the time you reach them, you’re already thinking about what’s next. Meaning dissolves, the horizon moves, and you’re back on that hamster wheel.

It’s not the goal that gives life meaning but engaging in the process of building flow as you move towards the goal and the growth and giving embedded in the journey toward something bigger than you.

The Mona Lisa Principle

The same principle applies to art too:

The Mona Lisa is breath-taking until you stand nose-to-canvas and all you can see is cracked paint. The point isn’t to be the Mona Lisa. The point is to see the art in the broader picture. When you’re too close, you miss the real beauty.

That’s the trap of ego-led success: it’s a painting viewed from an inch away. You need perspective. You need connection.

And that’s why you need to aim for significance instead of just ‘success’.

Awareness → Acceptance → Action

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Okay, this hits… but now what?”, then my coaching framework might be able to help you take it up a notch or two.

These three steps will always take you deeper into whatever transformation you’re working on in your life (book a call with me if you’d like to see how you can apply this to whatever you’re working on right now):

1. Awareness (Deconstruct Ego)

Notice where your life is being driven by ego-based ideas of success:

What are you chasing and who told you it mattered?

Who are you trying to impress?

Are your goals an expression of your wholeness or an attempt to run away from some void?

2. Acceptance (Integrate Shadow)

Own the fact that success (as defined by others) may not fulfil you and that there’s probably something more REAL waiting inside you to be unleashed.

Having different standards to society isn’t ‘failure’ – it’s freedom. It means you’re waking up.

Accept that fulfilment requires a new orientation towards realness, service, and connection and start uncovering the emotional and mental blocks that might be keeping you from this.

3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life)

Shift your direction and start taking REAL action:

Ask yourself:

  • How can I add value to someone else today?
  • How can I make my values valuable to others?
  • Where can I contribute instead of only ever consuming?
  • .

You don’t need to be a monk or a messiah to live meaningfully. You just need to matter -to someone, somewhere, in some way that echoes beyond you and is real and authentic to who you truly are.

Why This Matters Now

We live in an age of disconnection and fragmentation:

Everyone’s “connected” but few feel really ‘seen‘ in their wholeness. We’re all surrounded by talk of success but starving for shared purpose. We celebrate influencers, but rarely ask what they’re influencing us towards (hint: it’s usually ego and spiritual bullsh*ttery).

What we really need is a recalibration and a return to realness.

The greatest leverage point we all have here is to let go of the self-importance of isolated success and to choose the realness of interdependence.

Practical Ways to Move from Success to Significance

Ready to take this from theory to practice? Here are five ways to start right now:

1. Audit Your Goals

Write down your top three goals. For each, ask:

  • Who does this benefit?
  • What need am I meeting for myself and others?
  • Would this still matter if no one praised me for it?
  • What values are embodied in this?

If your goals are mainly ego-driven, recalibrate and step into your realness.

2. Do One Significant Thing Each Day

This could be mentoring someone, solving a problem for a client, checking in deeply with a friend, or simply sharing something honest and helpful. Make it a habit to be there for others in some way.

3. Flip Your To-Do List

Instead of “What do I need to get done today?” ask:

“What value can I add today?”

The energy behind those questions is radically different and so are the results.

4. Spend Time With Real People Who You Can Be Real With

Avoid echo chambers of ego and insecurity and seek out people who hold you accountable to your real values and who remind you of who you are beneath the image.

Remember that iron sharpens iron and find ways to sharpen yourself for significance.

5. Work With Someone Who Can Guide You Back to Realness

This isn’t a solo journey and transformation doesn’t happen in isolation – we’re all interdependent, after all.

It happens in dialogue, in relationship, in commitment to change.

If you’re serious about rewiring your life towards significance and wholeness so that you can grow real, then you may initially need support.

That’s what I do. And if this article spoke to you, we should probably talk.

Significance will come to you when you make your values valuable to others.

Final Thoughts

Success might look good on paper but significance feels better in your bones.

Stop climbing mountains made of ash and start building bridges that last – the world doesn’t need another shiny version of success. It needs more people becoming real and – from that realness – creating a life that actually means something.

Stay real out there,

I can help you to build a life that feels real – book a call with me to get started.

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

Learning by Doing: The Path to Real Growth

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You’ve probably come across somebody at least once or twice (or a few thousand times) in this lifetime that acts like they ‘know’ everything or who needs to be ‘right’ all the time?

They have airtight opinions, immovable perspectives, and a catalogue of well-rehearsed arguments at their disposal to keep letting the world know how ‘right’ they are and how ‘wrong’ everybody else is.

On the surface, this might seem impressive and you may even be intimidated by their intellectual prowess…but – if you really stop and think about it – ‘knowing’ everything and being ‘right’ all the time just means that you’ve stopped LEARNING.

In other words, it’s unreal.

The moment you stop learning is the moment you stop growing and – when you stop growing – you become trapped in the same small box that you’ve been living in for God knows how long, mistaking its walls for the edges of reality itself.

Real growth isn’t about collecting conceptual knowledge like Pokémon cards – it’s about staying in motion, evolving deeper into wholeness, and constantly learning by doing – pushing at the edges of what you think you know, every single day (and finding out for sure).

The difference between those who evolve and those who stagnate is simple:

Some people attempt to learn before they do, or – worse – learn and never do. Whereas others (the REAL ONES) learn by doing.

If you want to break free from an unreal life, the way forward is clear: stop clinging to intellectual knowledge as if it’s reality itself and start treating learning as an ongoing, lived experience that shows you how to be REAL.

Let’s dive in and dig deeper:

The Trap of Conceptual Knowledge

There’s a seductive appeal to ‘knowing’ things:

We want certainty, we want to feel like we’ve got the world figured out, and, so, we construct tidy narratives – slotting new information into the framework of what we already believe because of our current sense of identity (ego).

But this is stasis, not growth because – like we said – when you seek only to confirm what you already ‘know’, then you’ve stopped learning: the mind becomes like a closed-loop system, feeding on its own recycled thoughts instead of expanding to accommodate something new.

This is why so many people end up trapped and ‘stuck’ in their own intellectual arrogance – because they’re so busy knowing that they forget to see what’s actually there.

True learning, on the other hand, is fluid and dynamic – it moves with life, constantly adapting and becoming more real as new insight is acquired that dissolves outdated and unreal beliefs – in other words, it’s a dance between what you know and what you don’t yet understand.

When we put it like this, the difference is pretty simple:

  • Stasis: You make up your mind, then look for evidence to confirm it.
  • Growth: You hold tentative opinions, then look for evidence to challenge them.

One leads to rigidity and unreality; the other leads to freedom and a deeper connection to realness.

Reality Can’t Be Conceptualised – Only Experienced

At its core, learning is experiential – it’s not about memorising information or stacking up abstract theories. It’s about living through things, adapting, and integrating new insight and experiences into your being.

Any ‘knowledge’ that doesn’t eventually lead you back to an experience of something real is just mental clutter that creates a barrier between you and life itself – concepts stacked upon concepts until reality itself becomes one step removed and you find yourself living in a theoretical abstraction rather than something you actually touch and be a ‘part’ of.

This is the danger of becoming too obsessed with ‘knowing’ and being ‘right’ about things:

You can be a walking encyclopaedia and still have no real understanding of the world or what it means to live a REAL life.

The way out of this trap?

Push the edges of the little box that you might be keeping yourself in.

  • Go to places you’ve never been before.
  • Surround yourself with people who challenge your assumptions.
  • Put yourself in situations that force you to rethink who you are.
  • Do things that feel out of character – because that’s just another illusion of the Ego anyway.

Realness isn’t found in conceptual frameworks (though we can use concepts as tools to understand things) – it’s found in action, in flow, and in participation with life itself.

Pushing the Edges of the Box

The only way to grow in any area of life is to continually push at the edges of what you think you know. Even if you never escape the box completely, you can keep making it bigger, because you’ll realise that we can always go deeper into the wholeness of reality and what it has to teach us.

It’s can be easy to believe you’ve got yourself all figured out:

“I’m not the kind of person who does X.” “That’s just not me.” “I could never do that” – these are all things that you might have thought about yourself somewhere along the line…

These are self-imposed limitations, though – fragments of identity that you’ve picked up along the way and mistaken for the wholeness of your realness.

REAL growth happens outside the boundaries of these fragments that you’ve become attached to and the more you experiment, the more you realise you are far less fixed than you ever imagined (we normally just want to be ‘fixed’ because of underlying emotional ‘stuff’ – usually shame).

When you embrace this attitude of continuous learning by doing, it becomes an organic process – an ongoing dialogue between yourself and reality from moment-to-moment. You start to live in alignment with the flow of life, rather than in resistance to it.

And that’s the key difference between those who are truly alive and those who are merely existing:

Some people are participants in reality; others are just observers.

Which one do you want to be?

Practical Integration: How to Live by Learning

So how do you take this from an idea into something tangible that you can actually use?

1. Challenge One Belief Every Week

Pick a belief you hold strongly – something about yourself, the world, or reality itself and actively seek out experiences or perspectives that challenge it.

You don’t have to change your mind, but you do have to be open to questioning it and making sure you really know why you think what you think (a lot of us have opinions but don’t know the reasons for these opinions…we just kinda picked them up).

2. Learn Through Action, Not Just Research

Instead of endlessly reading, watching videos, or listening to podcasts about something – go do it. You don’t need to “know everything” before you start (because that’s impossible anyway). The best learning happens in motion so go make some moves.

3. Put Yourself in Uncomfortable Situations

Growth happens at the edges of your comfort zone so make it a habit to deliberately put yourself in situations that stretch you and help you grow into your potential:

New social environments, new skills, new experiences – each one expands your world and shows you what’s real and what’s just a concept you had attached to.

4. Stay in Motion – Don’t Let Conceptual Knowledge Block Your Path

Ask yourself: Am I still learning, or have I just been stockpiling information?

If you’re stuck in the “preparation” phase, break the cycle by remembering that action breeds understanding far more than overthinking ever will.

5. Recognise That Your Mind Will Resist Change

Your ego wants certainty – it wants a clear map of reality that it can hold onto but real learning requires stepping into uncertainty which means that these “clear maps” don’t exist.

The more you resist uncertainty, the more you stay trapped in an unreal life.

The only way to GROW REAL is to face uncertainty, engage in the process, and learn by doing.

Final Thoughts: Learn Beyond Your Limits, Live Beyond Your Interpretations

The symbols in your head are always out-of-sync with reality itself. They are merely representations – useful, some pointing more closely to reality than others, but never the thing itself.

If you want to truly live your REAL life, you must go whatever concepts you’re currently attaching yourself to and experience what’s beyond them.

Keep learning and doing – not by clinging to concepts, but by continually engaging with what’s real. If you can do this, you don’t just accumulate knowledge – you become something greater than what you were before: more REAL.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty nine in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Living on Purpose: The Shift that Changes Everything

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Are you living by accident or on purpose?

There’s a common belief that destiny is written in stone – that we’re bound to a fate beyond our control, limited by circumstances, luck, or talent and that there’s nothing we can do about it.

Some of us take this as a call to resignation or passivity – believing we’re only capable of what our comfort zone currently dictates as being true and so never striving beyond the self-imposed borders of what we think is possible (which is always just an extension of the Ego and its fragmented, limiting beliefs).

Thankfully, the truth affords us far more opportunities:

Destiny isn’t something that happens to you (that’s FATE) – it’s the sum of your CHOICES, stacked one on top of the other.

The problems begin when you’re not conscious of those choices and so you risk drifting through life without purpose – pulled by the currents of other people’s expectations and an unreal world rather than the deep forces within you that are rooted in your own REALNESS.

The key to breaking free from this passive relationship with life is simple:

Start focusing on your real purpose.

Real purpose is active; it’s something you live day-after-day and that takes you deeper into reality and wholeness.

When you live with purpose, you’re riding the waves of reality – no matter what fate or destiny might have in store – and navigating towards something real.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Destiny vs Purpose: The Difference That Changes Everything

Many unreal people living lives of quiet desperation (to quote Thoreau) have confused destiny with purpose – they assume that their future is already mapped out and that their only job is to wait for fate to deliver them to the right place.

But here’s the truth:

  • Destiny is simply the consequences of your choices: The future isn’t some 100% preordained script – it’s what emerges from the way you think, act, and respond to the world around you.
  • Purpose is a conscious decision: It’s the guiding principle that determines the quality and direction of your life. When you live on purpose, you make choices that lead to meaningful outcomes.

People who feel lost and ‘stuck’ in life often aren’t suffering from a disconnection to their destiny (which is impossible) – they’re suffering from a lack of purpose and the direction and growth into realness that comes with it.

Without this sense of purpose, they don’t know what they stand for, what they truly value, or how to direct their energy.

And because of this, they live by accident rather than by design.

Your real purpose is always an act of service.

Purpose as the Anchor of a Meaningful Life

When you live with purpose, everything shifts and becomes more real:

  • Decisions become easier because you have a guiding compass and know where you’re heading overall.
  • You build continuous momentum instead of feeling stuck in cycles of doubt and hesitation.
  • You stay resilient when challenges arise because you know why you’re moving forward and continue to dissolve unhelpful or unreal emotions like lingering shame (because you get EVIDENCE that your realness presides).

Most people make decisions based on external pressures – what society expects, what seems ‘safe’, or what gets approval from others but purpose flips that process inside out:

Instead of looking to the world for direction, when you have a real purpose, you start from the core of who you are and shape your life from there. You start from the inside-out instead of the outside-in (and your connection to truth/god/wholeness isn’t ‘out there’ in the world).

So how do you find your purpose?

Step 1: Identify Your Core Values

Your purpose isn’t something you invent or ‘achieve’ – it’s something you receive by getting real about what already truly matters to you (so you don’t need to go to the Himalayas to ‘find yourself’ or whatever – you just need to stop running away).

Ask yourself:

  1. What are the values that define me when I feel most alive?
  2. What do I offer to the world that few others can or in a way that others can’t?
  3. How can I make my values valuable to others?

This is crucial because when you live and ACT in alignment with your REAL values (not the ones you picked up and identified with from the world alone), you naturally enter a state of flow. You feel energised, connected, and engaged with life.

Conversely, when you’re out-of-sync with your values, you feel lost, uninspired, and ‘stuck’.

Step 2: Stop Living from the Outside In

Most people are conditioned to build their lives from the outside in – they adopt values, goals, and identities based on what society, family, or culture expects from them but real purpose comes from the inside out.

  • Society tells you to build a career. Purpose asks: What actual impact do I want to have?
  • Society tells you to be successful in a certain way. Purpose asks: What does ‘success‘ mean to me?
  • Society tells you to be liked. Purpose asks: How do I need to show up in life so I actually respect myself?

The mistake many people make is chasing external validation rather than internal truth and building on a solid foundation:

They focus on developing ‘skills’ and ‘personality’ first and foremost rather than character and qualities (though we still need to develop skills to be good at what our vision requires of us) – which is why so many end up feeling empty and getting lost to the Void despite outward ‘success’.

Purpose doesn’t mean you do whatever you ‘feel’ like the time – it means you align your actions with what matters most, even when it’s difficult.

You stop living reactively and start living intentionally because you know that feelings are temporary fragments but what’s real is always real (see any of my books for more on this idea).

Step 3: Ride the Reality Waves

Life is unpredictable and even with a strong purpose, you will face obstacles – this is where most people get it wrong:

They see setbacks as signs that they’re ‘off track’ or that destiny is against them in some way. In reality, setbacks are just reality waves – the natural push-and-pull of existence.

All we need to do is keep riding the waves that come towards wherever it is that our purpose is asking us to take ourselves.

When you stay outcome-independent -focusing on showing up and doing the work rather than obsessing over specific results – you free yourself from disappointment and frustration because you stay alive in the process of real life, rather than getting caught up your ideas about your goals and what outcomes might ‘mean’ to you.

  • If things go your way, great – keep moving forward.
  • If they don’t, adjust your approach but stay committed to your path and learn to be more REAL in the process.

You’re not meant to control the waves; you’re meant to learn how to ride them.

Your real purpose will align you with reality.

Living on Purpose: Practical Implementation

To start bringing more purpose into your life, try these three steps to get started (book a call with me if you want to go deeper):

1. Define Your Non-Negotiables

What are the real values you will never compromise on? Write down the 3–5 principles that shape how you want to live.

For example:

  • Authenticity – I refuse to pretend to be someone I’m not.
  • Integrity – I do what I say I’ll do.
  • Courage – I make decisions based on what’s real, not what’s easy.

These non-negotiables become your personal code of conduct and guide your decisions and priorities moving forward.

2. Take Small but Meaningful Action Daily

Purpose isn’t just about knowing what matters – it’s about acting in alignment with it by DOING what matters.

  • If you value creativity, write, draw, or make something every day.
  • If you value connection, reach out to someone you care about.
  • If you value growth, challenge yourself with something new.

Your real identity isn’t what you think you are – it’s what you DO.

Even the smallest actions build momentum over time and will allow the results to compound on themselves to create a life that reflects your realness.

3. Commit to Process Over Perfection

Many people hesitate to pursue their purpose because they’re waiting for the perfect plan or the right moment before they get start. But purpose isn’t something you figure out in theory – it’s something you refine through action.

Learn to develop an attitude that allows you to LEARN BY DOING:

  • Take a step, then adjust.
  • Stay curious.
  • Allow yourself to evolve.
  • Rinse and repeat.

Perfection is an illusion – process is where growth happens.

Final Thoughts: The Power of Living on Purpose

Most people drift through life waiting for destiny to ‘happen’ to them – they let external forces dictate their path, never realising they’re capable of so much more.

When you CHOOSE to live with purpose, everything gets more REAL:

  • You move from passive to active.
  • You build a life that reflects your true values.
  • You learn to ride the waves rather than fear them.

Destiny isn’t a script you follow but something you create through the decisions you make every single day.

So the question isn’t “what is my fate?” – it’s “what am I choosing to do with my life?“

The answer to that determines everything.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty eight in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Apotheosis and Realness: The Path to Integration

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Apotheosis is the path to wholeness and trust.

What does it mean to achieve apotheosis?

The word itself is Greek in origin and means to become divine or to reach the highest possible state of being but it pops up in various schools of thought and throughout human history:

In the ancient myths, heroes like Hercules achieved apotheosis by ascending to godhood; in philosophy, apotheosis can be seen as the peak of human potential and growth; in spirituality, apotheosis is often framed as ‘enlightenment’, union with God, or ultimate self-realisation. I like to call it ‘Wholeness’ or ‘Realness’.

Despite all these ‘common’ usages of the word true apotheosis it’s often misunderstood in a world saturated with self-help quick fixes, magic bullets, and pseudo-spiritual fluff (aka Spiritual Bullsh*ttery) – it’s even less rarely attained (mainly because our culture encourages to get lost in the Ego instead of growing REAL).

But what if it wasn’t some unreachable, mythical state? What if apotheosis was simply the natural result of stripping away all that is unreal and returning to REALNESS?

In this article, we’ll break down what apotheosis really is, how it relates to trust, integration, and wholeness, and why most people never reach it. Most importantly, we’ll map out a practical framework for putting ourselves on a real path to apotheosis – not as a mystical fantasy, but as a real, lived experience.

Let’s dig deeper and climb a little higher:

Why We’re Not Already There: The Problem of Fragmentation

Apotheosis – just like your REALNESS – isn’t something you need to gain; it’s something you need to tune back into and remember.

In other words, it’s your natural state when you strip away everything that isn’t real.

The reason we don’t already live in this state is fragmentation – the core wound of the human condition which is caused by SHAME causing us to become disconnected from the TRUTH and, thus, to deny ourselves, the world, and reality (because of the great Shadow Dance between the Ego and the Shadow Self).

This fragmentation happens on multiple levels:

  1. Egoic Distortion – We don’t see reality as it is because we project fears, past wounds, and conditioned beliefs onto the world, distorting truth and taking us deeper into the Void.
  2. Emotional Resistance – We suppress, deny, identify with, or dissociate from emotions instead of integrating them, leading to psychological suffering (because we end up clinging to ego and taking ourselves out of the flow of life instead of remembering that emotions are e-motion, energy in motion and moving forward).
  3. Physical Disharmony – Our nervous system, posture, breath, and lifestyle keep us locked in stress and reactivity, rather than openness and trust.

Like I said, the root of all this is one thing and one thing only: Shame – the primal sense of being separate from wholeness/Truth/God.

This is the “Fall” that they speak of in the Bible, the original split, and the reason we seek but never find (because think that our realness is something that we have to ‘achieve’ when, really, it’s received).

Apotheosis, then, isn’t about ascending – getting to some imaginary ‘higher’ place or being ‘better’ or ‘more’ of something – it’s about integrating.

It’s about removing the emotional and mental blocks to realness so that trust, flow, and wholeness can be experienced fully in our REAL NATURE.

Let’s break down exactly how to start doing this:

Step 1: Dissolve Shame (The Original Source of Fragmentation)

To reach apotheosis, you must remove the fundamental distortion between you and yourself and between you and REAL life: the belief that you are inherently flawed, separate, or unworthy.

Shame isn’t just a feeling – it’s the source of the EGO and the Ego is just a lens or filter through which you interpret reality. When you carry shame, you don’t experience life as it is – you experience it through the filter of your own perceived defectiveness in an attempt to keep the Ego where it is (because you think it protects you from shame – when, actually, it’s the thing that sustains it – and keeps the Shadow Self at bay).

The key is to see shame for what it is: an illusion – it is learned, not fundamental to your nature or the way that you were born to be (whole). The truth is that you’re already whole. You’re already real.

You’ve just been conditioned to believe otherwise.

How to start dissolving shame instead of being driven by it:

  • Radical honesty: Notice where you hide, perform, or edit yourself to be ‘acceptable’ – that’s shame in action and it’s stopping you from growing and flowing with life.
  • Compassionate witnessing: Instead of running from painful emotions, sit with them. Let them be seen. Shame cannot survive exposure – as soon as you look at it, it starts to dissolve.
  • Return to the body: Shame is stored in the nervous system. Somatic work – yoga, breathwork, movement, shaking, vocal expression – helps to release it and puts your nervous system in a state where you can receive and embrace wholeness rather than perceive ‘threats’ everywhere – internally and externally – and remain ‘stuck’ in fragmentation.

Once shame is seen through, your foundation starts to shift: instead of operating from the identity you created to survive the dreamworld of the Void that your shame pulled you into, you begin operating from wholeness instead.

This is the first step towards apotheosis because the core problem is always shame.

Step 2: Trust Reality (Stop Resisting Life)

Apotheosis is not about controlling life but about fully participating in it and having a relationship with it.

Most people are trapped in a mindset of force – trying to manipulate outcomes, control the perceptions of others, and protect themselves from uncertainty (even though uncertainty is actually a gift that can lead you into your realness).

The truth is that our real power as human beings doesn’t come from force – which is always ego and the illusion of separation and stasis. It comes from flow.

Flow happens when you accept and trust reality instead of resisting it.

When you let go of the need to manipulate, control, or make things happen, you become an active participant in life’s natural interplay and can exist as your real, interdependent self.

How to start building trust in a real way:

  • Stop intellectualising everything. Reality isn’t something to figure out – it’s something to experience. Over-analysis blocks trust because it makes you act like you can figure everything out (which no real human being can – the idea that we can is just a belief of the Ego…which is unreal).
  • Release attachment to outcomes. When you trust, you no longer grip onto specific results. You act, but you don’t force. This is because you don’t need specific outcomes to fill the Void inside yourself – instead, you just want outcomes that allow you to express more of your realness or to take you deeper into acceptance.
  • Practice surrender. Surrender doesn’t mean inaction – it means letting go of resistance or trying to force actions that are purely motivated by ego. It means that you do your best and let go of the rest (leave it to life).

When you trust fully, you stop living in fear (because trust is the opposite of fear – see my book on the subject: Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace).

When fear dissolves, you start to feel something else: a deep, natural interconnection with everything.

This is a second step towards apotheosis.

Step 3: Transcend the Ego Without Denying It

The Ego itself is not the enemy because it’s totally unreal (it’s just an illusion that you buy into) – the problems start when you believe you ARE the Ego.

Thoughts, emotions, and sense of self are all part of your experience – but they are not you because you are the one experiencing them.

Apotheosis doesn’t mean destroying or ‘killing’ the Ego (an impossible task that many victims of ‘Spiritual Bullsh*ttery waste their lives trying to fulfil) – it means seeing its limits.

Once you realise that your thoughts, fears, and identity constructs are just mental formations, you no longer take them so seriously and can step back and experience life instead of just filtering it through concepts and interpretations.

How to put the Ego in the backseat and your REALNESS in the driving seat:

  • Observe your mind like a scientist. See your thoughts as clouds passing by then let them. Learn to step back and observe instead of react to everything.
  • Detach from identity roles. You are not your job, past, or labels. You are the awareness behind them.
  • Embody presence. Stop living in abstraction and conceptualisation. Get into your body, your breath, and direct experience.

Once the Ego stops running the show, something shifts:

Instead of being trapped in the FILTER – you begin experiencing life in an unfiltered and real way.

This is the third step towards apotheosis.

Step 4: Master the Mind-Body System

Apotheosis isn’t just an intellectual or spiritual pursuit – it’s physical because your nervous system determines whether you feel safe, present, and open, or reactive, anxious, and closed off.

Most people live in a sympathetic-dominant state – wired for survival, stuck in fight-or-flight mode most of the time, and unable to fully trust (because you can’t trust if you see ‘threats’ everywhere).

To reach apotheosis, you must shift into a balanced state where your body and mind work with you, not against you. This involves regulating your nervous system so that your parasympathetic nervous system can take over when it needs to (not all of the time, just so you can feel safe and relaxed when need be).

How to start balancing your nervous system:

  • Breathwork: Slow, deep breathing shifts your nervous system into trust because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Start with 4-7-8 breathing (inhale for 4-seconds, retain for 7, and exhale for 8). Always breathe through your nose as it releases nitric oxide which dilates your blood vessels and carries more oxygen through your body.
  • Somatic work: Stretch, shake, or move to release stored tension and to become more present in your body (yoga is also amazing for this – especially yin yoga if you’re trying to regulate your nervous system)
  • Exercise regularly: Strengthen resilience by teaching your system to regulate under stress.

Once your body stops signalling danger and threat where there is none (including in relation to your own inner emotional state because of shame), trust becomes effortless.

And when trust becomes effortless, we align ourselves with our REAL LIVES>

This is the fourth step towards apotheosis.

Step 5: Die Before You Die (The Ultimate Surrender)

The final step is the most difficult but also the most liberating:

To reach true apotheosis, you must surrender completely. You must die before you die – meaning, you must let go of everything you are clinging to, including your own identity (in the form of the Ego).

This is what Jesus demonstrated in his final moments: total, unshakeable trust in God, even in suffering – this is the moment the Ego fully dissolves, and what remains is pure, unfiltered reality.

And at this level, life is no longer something you do – it is something you are and you get a real taste of WHOLENESS.

We might not reach the state of apotheosis that Jesus reached, but we can take steps into deeper wholeness every day.

Final Thoughts: Apotheosis is Real

Apotheosis isn’t just a myth – it’s not an unattainable ideal: it’s simply the process of stripping away everything unreal until only REALNESS remains.

And the truth is that real always works.

Stay real out there,

Stop Caring What People Think: Finding Your Real Voice

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Breaking Free from the Opinions of Others and Growing into Your REAL Voice (Stop Caring What People Think and Do ‘You’).

If you’ve ever found yourself paralysed by what people might think about you or hesitated and held back from taking action because of potential whispers, side-eyes, or disapproving looks, then this article is for you – it’s going to help you stop caring what people think so you can grow REAL:

The ‘good’ news is that you’re probably not alone because many of us – often without realising – live in a state of unreal servitude to the perceived opinions of others (and so we become ‘People Pleasers’ etc.).

When we end up falling into this trap, we start shaping ourselves not by what’s real, but by the fleeting thoughts and judgments of people who may not even share our values or aspirations. This can send us on all kinds of wild goose chases as we take action that we shouldn’t ever be taking and walk paths that don’t belong to us.

This brings us to a key lesson of realness:

You need to listen to others in life, but you don’t have to listen to everyone.

When you stop caring what people think in an unhealthy way, you free yourself to go do something that’s true to you.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Fine Line Between Awareness and Over-Concern

“It doesn’t matter what other people think” is common advice that gets dished out all over the place but – if we step back and examine it a little – we see that it can be both empowering and dangerous to totally stop caring what people think, depending on the person and the circumstances:

On the one hand, if you blindly reject all external feedback and just STOMP through life doing everything your own way then you risk becoming out of touch with reality – acting purely on impulse without considering the impact of your actions and risking becoming reckless, selfish, or even a little delusional.

On the other hand, if you constantly shape your decisions around how you think others perceive you or might judge the choices you make, then you’ll end up in a psychological prison – never acting authentically, always filtering yourself through the imagined judgments of others, and never getting anywhere new or real.

As almost always, the truth lies somewhere in between:

The TRUTH is that when we’re being REAL, we’re not independent, but interdependent.

Your self-image isn’t formed in a vacuum but is built in response to interactions, feedback, and relationships that you share with the people in the world around you.

This doesn’t mean every opinion holds equal weight but it does mean that you need to CHOOSE which voices are gonna shape you and your relationship with yourself.

The Problem with People-Pleasing

This is really about finding a sweet spot because if you put the opinions of others on a pedestal then you just you spend your life trying to avoid criticism, rejection, or disapproval.

That might help you avoid short-term pain and discomfort but in the long-run, you’ll just end up:

  • Watering yourself down to be ‘acceptable’ to everyone (and end up resonating with no one because a ‘friend’ to all is a friend to nobody).
  • Avoid taking necessary risks, staying stuck in ‘safe’ but uninspiring patterns and then getting lost to the Void.
  • Be easily manipulated by the fears, insecurities, and unresolved issues of others that they project onto you.
  • Delay or even abandon your real purpose because you’re too concerned about external validation.

The bottom line is that you can’t find a real purpose and build a meaningful life by outsourcing your sense of self to the opinions of the crowd.

At some point, you have to stand for what’s real – no matter who disagrees – and just say to yourself “I am that I am” and “It is what it is”.

Stop caring what people think and listen to yourself instead.

Choosing Whose Opinions Matter

A simple but powerful rule that can help you keep things REAL:

If you wouldn’t want to be like someone, don’t let their opinions define you (or even take advice and/or criticism from them).

Think about it:

Would you take fitness advice from someone who’s never exercised a day in their life and eats donuts for breakfast? Or business advice from someone who’s never started anything? Or relationship advice from someone who’s never even been in a relationship? Probably not.

Yet many of us allow random strangers, bitter acquaintances, or deeply insecure people to influence how we see ourselves because of some random opinion that they’ve expressed and that we CHOOSE to hold onto (usually because we have unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma and their opinions get stuck in the brambles).

When we do this, we’re just letting the passing comments of those we wouldn’t trade places with dictate our choices. It’s mental.

A more productive and healthy alternative is to seek something REAL instead…

For example, you can seek out people who:

  • Share your real values and ambitions.
  • Are living in a way that inspires you and actually DOING things in a real way.
  • Have your best interests at heart (even if their feedback is sometimes hard to hear).
  • Push you to be better and to help you grow REAL rather than keeping you small and locked in unreality.

Iron sharpens iron: Surround yourself with people who challenge and refine you, not those who try to make you seem smaller or more unreal than you actually are.

You Can’t Control Others – Only Your Response

No matter what you do, people will always have something to say, so you might as well just do whatever it is that you want to do anyway (if it’s real).

You can’t control how people are and how they react and move through life according to their own emotional and ego ‘stuff’ but what you can control is how you respond:

If someone insults you, for example, you have two choices:

  1. You can hold on to it and get caught up in worrying about their opinion, replaying it over and over in your mind, letting it ruin your day, and trying to make it fit into your reality.
  2. You can pause, ask yourself what you think about yourself, and act in alignment with that instead.

Nothing is worth taking personally unless you CHOOSE to take it personally.

The truth is, most people don’t even know you well enough to make accurate judgments about you, and – even if they do – their perspective is filtered through their own biases, fears, and personal history. This means that the final decision is always with you anyway.

In short, there’s a difference between REALITY and INTERPRETATION and so not all feedback is truth.

Just because someone thinks something about you doesn’t mean it’s valid (though you might treat it that way if you’re caught up in your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ more than your REALNESS).

Context Matters: Not All Opinions Are Created Equal

Let’s say someone criticises you – before taking it to heart and treating it as gospel truth, ask yourself:

  • Who is this person? Do they know the real me or are they making assumptions?
  • What’s their motive? Are they offering constructive feedback or are they projecting their own issues because they have some unreal agenda?
  • What’s the emotional state behind their words? Are they speaking from a place of realness or from anger, envy, or insecurity in the moment?

Of course, the context can affect how you need to treat the message:

A random insult from an angry stranger? Not worth your time. A bit of hard truth from a close friend who cares? That might be worth considering.

Again, though, the burden of interpreting feedback is on you – don’t take everything on board straight away but don’t dismiss everything outright either (just know when to stop caring what people think when it really doesn’t matter).

Realness is always the key.

Breaking Free: How to Stop Worrying About What People Think

Here’s a practical strategy for breaking free of being overly-impacted and concerned with the opinions of others:

1. Defining Your Core Values Helps You Stop Caring What People Think

If you don’t know what you stand for, you’ll be swayed by every passing opinion.

It’s worth taking time to define:

  • What matters most to you.
  • What kind of person you want to be.
  • The kind of life you want to create and the values it will embody (for example, truth, freedom, creativity, etc.).

2. Conduct a “Whose Opinions Matter?” Audit

Make a list of people whose opinions you tend to worry about then ask yourself:

  • Would I trade places with them?
  • Do they share my values?
  • Do they genuinely have my best interests at heart?

If the answer is “No” at any level then you can start mentally detaching from their influence.

3. Reframe Criticism as Information, Not a Verdict

When someone criticises you, instead of reacting emotionally, view it as neutral data and then it’ll be much easier to stop caring what people think when that’s the right thing to do:

  • Is there any truth here?
  • Does this person’s perspective actually matter in my life?
  • Am I giving this more weight than it deserves?

4. Strengthen Your Inner Voice

Every morning, set your intentions and know your REAL VISION for where you’re headed in life:

What do I think about myself? What do I want to create today?

Then check-in with yourself at night: Did I live in alignment with my values and vision today?

When you regularly check in with yourself, the opinions of others lose their grip.

(Check out my Flow Builder Journal which has a morning and evening self-check-in for building flow and managing your thoughts to stay real).

5. Take Action Despite Fear

The fastest way to stop worrying about what others think is to do the ‘thing’ you’re afraid of.

  • Publish that post.
  • Have that difficult conversation.
  • Step into that spotlight.

Every time you push through your EDGE, you strengthen your resilience – over time, what once terrified you becomes second nature and you build evidence of your own REALNESS that makes you invulnerable to what other people might think anyway.

Final Thought: The Only Opinion That Truly Matters

At the end of the day, there’s only one person who has to live with your choices that you make in life – You.

You can either live life trying to satisfy the fleeting opinions of others or you can take charge and build a life that’s REAL.

The world will always have its critics – let them keep talking and go DO you.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty seven in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Conflict to Connection: How Self-Awareness Transforms Relationships

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Shifting from a stance of “Me vs You” to “You vs Me” will give you more power.

It’s a familiar scene and a classic episode within the human experience: a conversation escalates into an argument and suddenly it’s me vs you – two opposing forces locked in an unseen battle for validation and being ‘right’ and trying to ‘defend’ themselves no matter what.

Or, sometimes, maybe it’s a classic episode of me vs the world – life itself seemingly conspiring against us…leaving us defensive, reactive, and entrenched in our own narratives and projections as we slip into autopilot and no longer seem to have any control over ourselves.

Have you ever stopped to really think about these ‘battles’ that can just creep up on us out of nowhere? Have you ever wondered if the real battle isn’t against others at all?

What if it’s all within us?

As usual, the truth can be simple but brutal – in this case, it’s as follows:

The way we engage with conflict—whether in personal relationships, the workplace, or even online – is largely dictated by our own inner landscape and is a reflection of our relationship with ourselves (almost always because of underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

There are two general ‘rules’ or principles that come into play here:

  1. The more we operate from a place of defensiveness, the more we project our unresolved fears, insecurities, and wounds onto others.


  2. The more we believe that others must change for things to improve, the less power we actually have in shaping the quality of our relationships.

This article explores how self-awareness can break the cycle of conflict, shifting us from adversarial dynamics and fragmentation to deeper connection and wholeness:

By embracing the “You vs Me” approach rather than defaulting to “Me vs You”, we create space for understanding, growth, and real transformation – not just in our interactions with others, but also within ourselves.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Why We Get Defensive: The Fear of Change

At the heart of most human conflicts is one key issue: the fear of change and how it can ‘threaten’ our own ego ‘stuff’.

Change is difficult because, on a deep psychological level, it forces us to confront aspects of ourselves that may be uncomfortable – our mistakes, our flaws, our blind spots, and all of the things hidden behind the ‘security’ of the Ego in the Shadow Self.

When faced with disagreement, we instinctively protect our ego by doubling down on what we already think we believe – usually, as an extension of our ego – resisting the possibility that we might need to adjust.

This is where the “Me vs You” dynamic emerges:

We attempt to control the external world to preserve our internal stability, forcing others to see things our way, agree with our perspective, or validate our feelings.

This may give us the buzz of feeling like we’re winning but it also causes problems because, when we push, others push back (because of their attempts to preserve their own ego ‘stuff’).

This just opens up a vicious circle where our defensiveness breeds their defensiveness, their resistance fuels our frustration and – instead of communication – we get combat.

So what’s the alternative?

The Power of “You vs Me” Thinking

The “You vs Me” approach flips the script:

Instead of projecting our ‘stuff‘ onto others, we take responsibility for it.

We recognise that, just as we have our perspectives, so do others and their reactions are not always about us, just as ours aren’t always about them.

It asks us to ask ourselves:

  • What is it like for others to deal with me?
  • How does my way of thinking, feeling, or acting impact the dynamic?
  • Am I leading with my ego or am I actually listening and being present?

When we approach situations this way – i.e. with an awareness of our own ‘stuff’ and how it blocks communication – something powerful happens: we stop being reactive and start being proactive.

Instead of engaging in an emotional tug-of-war, we bring self-awareness and curiosity to the interaction.

In other words, we start to show up from our REALNESS and not just the Ego:

We don’t immediately assume bad intentions.

We don’t feel the need to ‘win’.

We don’t force our views on others – nor do we need them to validate these views because we know that the truth doesn’t need defending.

The irony is that by LETTING GO, we actually start to put ourselves in a stronger position and to have more influence, not less.

This is basically because people are more open to dialogue when they don’t feel attacked and because they’re more willing to listen when they feel heard.

When you stop being adversarial and putting your ego first, you give others the best possible chance to engage with you in a way that leads to mutual growth, rather than mutual destruction.

Instead of tearing things down in an unreal way, you can start to build something REAL together.

Understanding Your Own Patterns: Think, Do, Feel

One way to cultivate this self-awareness is by examining how you naturally process the world as you move through it.

Each of us tends to move through life in a pattern that prioritises one of three things – Thinking, Doing, and Feeling:

  1. Think-first people – tend to prioritise logic, structure, and analysis; they may struggle with emotional nuance and can come across as cold or dismissive in conflicts.
  2. Feel-first people – lean towards prioritising emotions and connection; they can sometimes misinterpret rational discussions as personal attacks (usually because they identify with their feelings and emotions instead of letting them pass).
  3. Do-first people – have a tendency to act before thinking or feeling, leading them to be impulsive or reactive.

Understanding your dominant mode helps you see how others might experience you in conflict so that you can come at it with more influence:

For instance, if you’re naturally a think-first person, you may believe you’re being logical in a discussion but a feel-first person may interpret your tone as uncaring or distant. On the other hand, if you’re a feel-first person, your emotional reactions may seem overwhelming or irrational to someone who leads with logic.

By recognising these dynamics, you can adapt your communication to better engage with others (based on whether they’re a think/feel/do type), rather than triggering unnecessary conflict.

Shifting from “Me vs You” to “You vs Me” in Practice

So how do we actually apply this to real-life situations?

Here are some practical steps to move from reaction to realness:

1. Develop Awareness: Spot Your Own Triggers

Before jumping into conflict, take a breath and ask yourself:

  • What is this really bringing up in me?
  • Am I reacting from some past ‘stuff’ or old wounds or from the present moment?
  • Am I trying to control, prove, or defend something?

Recognising your emotional triggers interrupts the automatic cycle of defensiveness and opens space for conscious response. It gets you out of ego and into your REALNESS.

2. Practise Acceptance: Let Go of Control

Accepting others as they are doesn’t mean agreeing with them – it just means acknowledging that you cannot control how they think, feel, or behave – only how you respond.

When faced with disagreement, remind yourself:

I don’t need to ‘win‘ this argument to be real (because what’s real is always real).

I can hold my perspective while respecting theirs (because perspectives are just interpretations of reality, not reality itself).

Their reaction is about them, not me (because it shows their projections).

This mental shift immediately de-escalates tension and allows for more meaningful engagement that actually allows you to keep building and moving forwards.

3. Take Conscious Action: Respond, Don’t React

Instead of launching into a defensive stance, try these alternative responses:

Instead of: “You’re wrong” → Try: “That’s interesting. Tell me more about how you reached these conclusions”

Instead of: “You always do this” → Try: “I notice that when this happens, I feel/think [x]. Can we talk about it?”

Instead of reacting impulsively, → Try: Pausing for 10 seconds and getting into your breath before responding.

By choosing how you respond, you redirect the energy of conflict into growth rather than destruction.

This keeps things flowing and keeps everybody involved REAL.

The Real Goal: Growth, Not Perfection

The point of all this isn’t to become some Zen master who never gets triggered or never argues – that’s unrealistic.

The real goal is to stay in the process of becoming more real – to work through our own limitations so we don’t unconsciously project them onto others and take ourselves away from the Natural Drive Towards Wholeness that is unfolding at all times.

When we can stay in the process and keep growing REAL:

We stop taking everything personally.
We stop forcing others to change before we’re willing to change ourselves.
We stop reacting to life and start consciously engaging with it.

Ultimately, this is what deepens our relationships, our self-awareness, and our experience of life itself.

So the next time you feel tension rising in a conversation, ask yourself:

“Am I making this Me vs You… or can I make it You vs Me?”

Because the moment we stop fighting against life and start engaging with it, we can actually start GROWING REAL.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty six in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Living Without Labels: Seeing Reality and Finding Your REALNESS

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Beyond Black and White: Embracing the Shades of Grey Within Ourselves and Life

Humans are gonna human and so we like to think we know who we ‘are’ and construct narratives, attach labels, and categorise everything into tidy little boxes like ‘good’ or ‘bad, ‘right‘ or ‘wrong‘ and ‘success‘ or ‘failure‘

This is a nice way to feel a sense of control in our lives but – the truth is – reality doesn’t work that way because the world isn’t made of rigid absolutes – instead, it’s an ever-shifting, ever-changing flux of different shades of grey.

What this basically means that if we want to live in a REAL way then we need to learn to see beyond black-and-white thinking and embrace the complexity of both ourselves and existence itself.

This applies to every single one of us – including YOU:

To your personality, your struggles, your growth. You are not just one ‘thing’ that makes perfect ‘sense’ all the time but a living contradiction, a paradox, a spectrum of seemingly opposing forces that coexist within the same being.

You need to know this because REAL growth doesn’t come from cutting yourself into neat, digestible fragments but from integrating your wholeness – from learning to accept, navigate, and work with all the different ‘parts’ of yourself (some of which may hide in the Shadow Territory) instead of forcing yourself into an illusion of simplicity and separation from the TRUTH (that’s just ego).

Let’s take a deeper dive:

The Problem with Black-and-White Thinking

Black-and-white thinking is a defence mechanism that simplifies reality so that we don’t have to confront its messiness. It allows us to judge ourselves and others quickly – without having to sit in the discomfort of complexity (which is often a threat to the ‘simplicity’ that comes through filtering everything through the familiarity of our own ego ‘stuff’).

We do this in all areas of life and for many of us it’s just our ‘default’ way of thinking, feeling, and being in life.

For example:

  • Relationships – We tend to label people as either ‘good’ or ‘toxic’ when, in reality, they are flawed and evolving, just like us.
  • Personal growth – We see ourselves as either ‘successful’ or ‘failing’ instead of understanding that REAL growth happens in seasons, always has setbacks, and unfolds in spirals – not straight lines (even if you take yourself through the transformational process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action – see my free guide here: Ego | Shadow | Trust: Build Flow & Become Unstuck).
  • Morality – We label actions as purely ‘right’ or purely ‘wrong‘, ignoring that context, intention, and perspective always play a role and a lot of the time our moral standards have nothing to do with ‘morality’ and everything to do with our own subjective interpretations.

Black-and-white thinking – boxing everything of neatly into either/or categories – is comfortable because it gives us a sense of control and prevents little to no threat to our ego (the identity we’ve created to keep uncomfortable truth at bay). It prevents us from having to wrestle with ambiguity.

That would be great if it wasn’t for the fact that real life isn’t comfortable and is instead dynamic, shifting, and full of contradictions.

To grow real, we have to stop seeing things in binary terms and see things as they are not as we need them to be.

Perception Exists in a Spectrum

In our experience of life as fragmented creatures in fragmented bodies on a fragmented planet then nothing is ever 100% ‘good’ or 100% ‘bad’.

If this were the case, life would be much simpler – but it would probably be very boring and definitely wouldn’t be real. Even history’s most infamous figures, like – dare I say Hitler, were not completely devoid of humanity (though he may have found it hard to get in touch with his humanity). This definitely doesn’t excuse their actions, but it reveals an important truth:

Everything contains the seeds of its opposite.

This applies to me and to you too:

You may be generous but there are moments when you act selfishly.

You may be disciplined but there are days when you procrastinate.

You may be kind but you’ve had moments of cruelty.

You may be a ‘good’ person overall but there are still ‘bad’ things that you’ve done (and vice versa for the ‘bad’ people overall like Adolf mentioned above).

Do these ‘seeds’ of opposition to your default way of being make you a bad person? No. They make you REAL.

This is why labelling ourselves (or others) too rigidly is a mistake that takes us away from our REAL LIVES:

When we say things like “I’m just an anxious person” or “I’m not a leader” we create an illusion of permanence and stasis. We trap ourselves in a narrow, fragmented identity based on concepts instead of recognising that we are a dynamic process that’s always evolving towards more wholeness that can be experienced.

This opens up a paradox:

To keep growing and evolving towards wholeness (which is ABSOLUTE because it’s the TRUTH) then -here in our life as fragmented creatures – we need to start stop thinking in terms of absolutes and to reflect on accept ourselves and others in terms of spectrums and continuums.

How to Shift into a ‘Shades of Grey’ Mindset

If you want to see reality more clearly, you need to learn to operate in the grey areas – here’s how:

1. Stop Using Absolutes – Use a Scale Instead

When you catch yourself thinking in black and white, reframe it:

Instead of: “I’m a failure”
Try: “On a scale from 1 to 100, how bad is this situation really?”

Instead of: “That person is toxic”
Try: “What percentage of their behaviour is difficult and what percentage is actually neutral or positive?”

Most of the time, things aren’t as extreme as they seem because when you shift from absolute labels to a spectrum-based mindset, your perspective expands and you release yourself from JUDGEMENTS that ‘belong’ to your ego and not reality.

2. Embrace Contradictions Within Yourself

In reality, you don’t have to be one thing or another – you can be both:

  • You can be confident and insecure, depending on the context.
  • You can be disciplined and lazy sometimes, depending on your energy levels.
  • You can be loving and struggle with resentment, depending on the situation and your own emotional ‘stuff’.

Trying to force yourself into a singular identity only creates inner conflict in the long run:

REALNESS comes from embracing yourself as a WHOLE and accepting all of it – from realising that you are made up of seemingly opposing forces that can coexist and even complement each other when you zoom out and see the bigger picture of yourself and your life.

3. Recognise That Growth Is a Process, Not a Destination

Black-and-white thinking makes us believe that growth is a one-time event – that we can suddenly “arrive” at a final, perfect version of ourselves and therefore ‘stop’ growing because there’s no longer any point.

The professional term for this way of thinking is ‘bullshit’:

REAL growth is messy and non-linear – it doesn’t follow a straight path from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ but it moves in cycles.

One day, you might feel like you’ve completely healed from something, and the next, you might find yourself struggling with it again as your unconscious releases something else for you to process (for example).

That doesn’t mean you’ve ‘failed‘ – it means you’re still alive, still growing, still in process because that’s just how life goes.

Moving from Fragmentation to Wholeness

When you stop splitting yourself into pieces, you start to integrate your Shadow Self and start to overcome the great Shadow Dance between the Ego and your hidden REAL self; you stop trying to eliminate your ‘bad’ parts and instead bring them into awareness, learning how to work with and accept them rather than go against them (which means you’ll be ready to take real ACTION).I

In short, wholeness isn’t about becoming perfect – it’s about embracing your REALNESS:

Realness means embracing the full spectrum of who you are and the TRUTH about what life is – the light and the dark, the order and the chaos, the certainty and the doubt. It means being fluid as you move through life rather than rigid, present rather than trapped in an identity/ego, and open to growth instead of fixated on control and futile attempts to stay the ‘same’ (the idea of which is always based on some either/or, black and white label).

When you learn to trust this process, you move beyond fear, beyond judgement, and into something deeper:

Reality itself (and REAL ALWAYS WORKS).

Practical Ways to Integrate This Mindset and GROW REAL

  1. Challenge Extreme Thoughts: Whenever you catch yourself thinking in absolute judgements, pause and ask: “Is this really 100% true?”
  2. Use the Scale Method: Rate situations, emotions, and people on a scale instead of labelling them.
  3. Observe, Don’t Judge: When you notice a behaviour in yourself or others, see it as an observation, not a judgement.
  4. Accept Your Contradictions: Remind yourself that being a mixture of strengths and weaknesses is natural and very REAL.
  5. Practice Self-Compassion: Instead of beating yourself up for not being ‘good’ enough, recognise that wholeness includes imperfection when you’re made of fragments.

Final Thoughts: The Power of Seeing Clearly

When you let go of black-and-white thinking, you start to see reality for what it actually is – not a rigid set of rules or ‘labels’, but an ever-changing, dynamic process.

This makes you more open, more resilient, and more whole and allows you to stop resisting yourself and instead work with yourself.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty four in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Influence: Are you a CAUSE or just an EFFECT?

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Making It: The Power of Happening Instead of Only Having Things Happen to You

To tell you something your probably already know: Life is unpredictable.

No matter how much we plan, prepare, or try to control things, there will always be circumstances forever beyond our reach – unexpected setbacks, other people’s choices, the sheer chaos of existence itself….there’s just so much UNCERTAINTY that comes from being a human being living a human life.

Within all of this uncertainty, though, lies something very powerful and very REAL: influence.

While we can’t control everything, we can always influence what happens in our lives in some way, shape, or form so that we can keep moving towards wholeness and our vision for REALNESS.

This quick article is about how understanding the distinction between what we can control, what we can influence, and what is out of our hands completely allows us to live as a cause in life rather than merely an effect in life.

This means driving our own bus rather than just being a passenger tossed around by life’s twists and turns and taking ourselves to the only place anybody wants to really be:

REAL LIFE.

Let’s dig deeper:

The Three Realms of Influence

To fully step into your power and start tapping into your realness, you need to understand these three realms of influence:

  1. No Control (What Happens To You / FATE)
    This realm includes things like the past, other people’s actions, and the fundamental laws of reality (gravity, time, mortality, cause and effect, etc.). You can’t change these things because they’re inescapable and inevitable and trying to will only drain your energy because these things just contribute to the fabric of reality itself.
  2. Some Control (What You Can Influence)
    This is where most of life unfolds – you may not control every outcome, but you can influence your relationships, opportunities, mindset, reactions and even how others perceive you through your actions, attitude, and decisions.
  3. Absolute Control (What You Do)
    Things like your thoughts, actions, choices, and levels of discipline, focus, and consistency – this is where your real power lies. No one can take these from you unless you hand them over (usually because of underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

Most people spend their lives reacting to the first category – which just causes them to get lost in fragmentation and EGO – and neglecting the third – which causes their lives to derail and end up becoming what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation”).

The key to growing REAL is shifting your focus and to stop reacting and start influencing whilst – at the same time – letting go of what you can’t control.

In other words:

Do your best and let go of the rest.

Are You Making Things Happen or Letting Things Happen to You?

Many people live in a passive and reactive state – they let life ‘happen’ to them rather than shaping it in alignment with their own will or creativity. They complain about their circumstances, blame external forces, and resign themselves to a fate they never truly chose.

(In other words, they identify as a VICTIM).

The ‘good’ news is that life is not defined by what happens to you – it’s defined by what you make happen (to paraphrase Carl Jung: “I’m not what happened to me; I’m what I choose to become“). And, even when we can’t control everything, we usually have far more influence than we initially believe because our lack of options is usually just a case of the Ego creating F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).

Consider these examples – you can be a CAUSE or an EFFECT in any situation:

  • You go through a breakup → You either spiral into bitterness (effect) or use it as fuel to grow and develop based on your vision (cause).
  • You lose your job → You either feel victimised by the system (effect) or use it as an opportunity to pivot to something better that’s more aligned with your values anyway (cause).
  • A challenge presents itself → You either crumble under pressure (effect) or use it as a stepping stone to greater strength and realness (cause).

Every situation, no matter how difficult, presents an opportunity to respond rather than just react – so, again, I ask you:

Are you a CAUSE or are you just an EFFECT?

The Uncontrollable Will ‘Happen’ – Act Anyway

At the end of the day, you’re a human being, and human beings are (partly) biological beings, which means things will happen to you whether you like it or not:

  • Your emotions will rise and fall constantly (because emotions are e-motion, energy in motion).
  • People will come and go.
  • Circumstances will unfold beyond your control.

This is not a ‘problem’ per se – it’s just reality and it is what it is.

Problems arise, though, when people allow these inevitable and unavoidable occurrences to define them instead of recognising their ability to shape their response.

You can’t control what you experience but you can influence your experience of your experience.

For example:

  • If you feel anxious, you can let that anxiety dictate your actions (effect) or you can take a deep breath, ground yourself, and move forward anyway (cause).
  • If someone disrespects you, you can react emotionally and escalate the situation (effect) or you can respond with composure and choose your next step strategically (cause)

Every moment offers a choice: Are you being pushed around by life or are you pushing back?

If you want to start living your REAL life then it’s going to take a little effort before it all becomes effortless and that might mean giving a little PUSH every once in a while (instead of just being pushed on and then getting crushed under the weight of your own unreal ideas about yourself, the world, and reality).

Refuse to Be a Passive Player in Your Own Life

You were not designed to drift aimlessly through life:

To live real, you must be an active participant in shaping your reality and constantly evolving from fragmentation to wholeness.

This doesn’t mean life will be easy all the time – it won’t. But it does mean you have a framework for becoming who you need to be, rather than settling for what the world tells you to be.

Plus, if you don’t do the work to change your life and reclaim your life it will still won’t be easy – just in a different kind of way:

Do you want it to be hard because you’re doing the work to move towards your potential or do you want it to be hard because you never lived up to that potential?

Most people go wrong when they either assume they have no power or they believe in the false idea that “anything is possible” if they just think positively (without taking REAL ACTION). Neither is true:

You don’t control everything, but you do control how you show up in reality and that makes all the difference from one moment to the next.

Here’s what this means practically:

  • You won’t just ‘find’ a great career – you create one by developing the skills and mindset necessary. Find = effect, Create = cause.
  • You won’t just ‘stumble into’ the perfect relationship – you become the kind of person worthy of the relationship you desire. Stumble = effect, Become = Cause.
  • You won’t just ‘wait’ for success – you take deliberate action every day to build it. Wait = effect, Take Action = cause.

Nothing will come to you by being an EFFECT alone. You make it happen by playing in a role in the active process of CAUSING it to happen.

There Is No “Out There” – Only What You Build

One of the biggest lies people believe is that the life they want is ‘out there’ waiting for them – as if it will magically appear if they just look hard enough or try to manifest and ‘attract’ without taking an action (that’s just spiritual bullsh*ttery).

Reality doesn’t work like that because reality is fuelled by CAUSE AND EFFECT:

The life you want exists in your head alone and it will stay there unless you take action to bring it into being by taking REAL ACTION (after going through the process of cultivating Awareness and integrating the Shadow – see this free guide for more details: Ego | Shadow | Trust: Build Flow & Become Unstuck. There’s also a quiz you can take here to find out what to focus on in your own life: Why Am I Stuck in Life? (QUIZ)).

The bottom line is that there’s nothing out there except what you create through your efforts to be a CAUSE and what you uncover in reality as it already exists.

If you want more:

  • Stop hoping for it (effect). Start building it (cause).
  • Stop waiting for permission (effect). Take real action (cause).
  • Stop complaining (effect). Create solutions (cause).
  • Etc. etc. etc.

The world does not ‘owe’ you anything; you do not ‘deserve’ everything you want simply for existing. But you have the power to shape something real from what’s available to you if you choose to.

What To Do To “Make It Happen” (Practical Steps)

If you want to start living as a cause, not an effect, you must put this into action.

Here’s how you can get started (book a call with me if you want to go deeper):

1. Shift Your Mindset from Effect to Cause

  • Recognise where you have power and where you don’t within the three realms of influence listed above.
  • Stop wasting energy on things you cannot control and realise that your time, energy, and attention are your most valuable assets.
  • Focus on solutions, not problems – ask yourself what you CAN do instead of being held back by what you think you can’t.

2. Take Ownership of Your Self and Situation

  • Accept full responsibility for your choices, actions, and outcomes.
  • If you don’t like your situation, change what you can and let go of the rest (trust yourself and trust life)
  • Don’t wait for someone to ‘fix’ things for you – nobody is coming to save you (and even if you’re waiting for God to save you, you still need to learn to manage your ego first).

3. Develop a Bias for Action

  • Thinking is good. Overthinking is paralysis that leads to passivity and stagnation (which leads to depression).
  • Once you commit, act. Stick with it unless something major requires you to shift.
  • Let your yes be yes, and your no be no.

4. Build the Qualities That Support Your Vision

  • Stop waiting for opportunities – become the kind of person who creates and attracts them by becoming the right person for the job.
  • Want to lead? Develop strength, wisdom, and clarity.
  • Want success? Cultivate discipline, consistency, and real skills aligned with your goals.

5. Control What You Can, Influence What You Can, LET GO of the Rest

  • Absolute control: Your thoughts, actions, and effort.
  • Some control: How you influence others, your reputation, and opportunities.
  • No control: Other people’s opinions, the past, external chaos, and reality itself.

When you grasp this, you stop reacting to life as an effect and start living as a cause in it.

That’s how you grow REAL.

Final Thought: The World Begins and Ends with You

Life is happening all around us – the question is: Are you only letting it happen to you or are you making things happen when you can?

You are not just a passenger in this existence – you’re in the driving seat.

Stay real out there,

*Based on ‘Revolution’ number twenty four in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

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