Relationships

Discussions and explorations about relationships so you can improve your quality of life.

Nice Guy Syndrome: Why Pleasing Everyone is Making You Weak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s dig deeper:

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

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

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

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

Thus, the vicious cycle keeps getting more vicious.

No more Nice Guy Syndrome

Don’t Be ‘Nice’ When You Can Be Kind

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

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

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

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

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

Daddy Issues and Fear of Confrontation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Confidence Killer: Disconnection from Truth

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

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

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

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

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

6. Relationships: The Downfall of the Nice Guy

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

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

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

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

The Fear of Conflict and Lack of Assertiveness

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

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

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

The Repressed Anger Problem

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

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

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

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

Sexual Energy and Purpose

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Being Kind (Not Nice)

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

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

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

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

Implementation: How to Break Free from Nice Guy Syndrome

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

Conclusion

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

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

Stay real out there,

Trust Issues: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Them

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Trust Issues Usually Means You’re Missing Something About Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Causes Trust Issues?

Most people who struggle to trust have been hurt before.

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

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

Common causes of trust issues include:

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

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

Why People With Trust Issues Struggle in Relationships

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

1. You Fill in the Blanks with the Past

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

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

2. You Struggle with Boundaries

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

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

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

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

3. You Choose Low-Trust Environments

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

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

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

The REAL Way to Overcome Trust Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Learn to Trust Your Gut

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

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

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

4. Rebuild Trust in Yourself First

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

Rebuilding self-trust means:

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

5. Regulate Your Nervous System

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

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

6. Choose Trustworthy People

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

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

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

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

8. Communicate Boundaries Clearly

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

9. Trust Is a Choice

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

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

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

Final Thoughts: Trust as a Path to Realness

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

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

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

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

Stay real out there,

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

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Realness for the Broken-hearted

Love vs. Relationship: Understanding the Key Difference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s dig deeper:

The Danger of Closing Your Heart After a Breakup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Real Never Dies: The Power of Acceptance

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

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

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

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

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

The Myth of “Fighting for Love”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Freedom of Forgiveness

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

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

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

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

Can You Ever Be Friends Again?

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

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

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

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

If You Play with Fire, You Get Burned

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

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

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

Being Broken-Hearted is Better Than Having a Closed Heart

Pain is not the enemy:

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

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

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

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

Practical Steps for Healing

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

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

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

Stay real out there,

Spiritual Coaching: The Ultimate Guide to Reconnecting with Wholeness

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Real Always Works

What is Spiritual Coaching?

Spiritual coaching is an art form that helps people unblock themselves from the fragmented limitations of the conscious mind so they can align with wholeness and get into the flow of life (rather than having to force it to conform to whatever limitations they’ve identified with).

When you really think about it, at core, all spirituality is about unblocking resistance and distortion to perceiving and moving with reality as wholeness – it’s not about accumulating knowledge or following dogma; it’s about uncovering the truth and living it. This is what makes coaching such a powerful tool when it comes to growing real and returning to the truth about oneself, the world, and reality.

The only ‘thing’ that usually stops people from aligning themselves with the truth in the way that coaching can help them to do is that they’ve picked up a false identity (EGO) that they end up filtering life through.

When they ‘filter’ life in this way then end up resisting and distorting the truth and putting themselves an unreal path to a place they don’t want to be (and feel the constant call of the Void on the way there):

  1. Ego Resistance: Means that we’re denying the truth and refusing to accept it because it threatens our ego in some ways. This means we don’t BE, FEEL, or DO the things that re REAL to us and open up a spiral of negativity.
  2. Ego Distortion: Means that we distort our view of reality to keep the illusion going. This means we live in a world of misperceptions (because of unconscious fear of facing the truth) and so we don’t hold believes that truly serve us and our growth.

All coaching ends up being ‘spiritual’ coaching in this sense as we have to uncover anything that is blocking the truth (as these blocks are usually what cause all of the symptoms that make us feel like we want to change and transform our lives in the first place: being ‘stuck’, anxiety, depression, frustration, etc. etc. etc.).

Spiritual Coaching is About Creating Space, Not Giving Answers

Many people mistakenly believe coaching is about receiving answers from a mentor or guide but this is a simplification and forgets a fundamental truth: that we all have access to the truth and the answers we need to nurture the seeds of our potential and live the life we’re supposed to be living.

In reality, spiritual coaching is about creating the space for you to do the two things mentioned above:

  1. Uncover the truth – Deconstructing the ego and false narratives you’ve absorbed.
  2. Start living the truth – Integrating what you’ve discovered into everyday life by facing your Shadow Self (the real version of you hidden behind the false identity of ego) and taking REAL action.

A good spiritual coach doesn’t impose their views or give pre-packaged solutions because they understand that the context of everybody’s life is different and that we’re all walking our own unique path from fragmentation to wholeness.

Instead, they help you dissolve the barriers preventing you from experiencing reality as it truly is so that you can ‘become’ who you really are. This ultimately means unlearning a lot of the UNREAL beliefs and patterns you’ve picked up so that you can start being REAL again.

This may initially take effort as you battle yourself to let go of old beliefs and illusions but eventually the effort becomes effortless as you get back into the flow and start taking the real actions that are yours.

Spiritual coaching can help you to learn humility and to build flow.

Why People Feel Disconnected From Their Spiritual Side

Most people are out-of-touch with their realness due to deep-seated emotional burdens that distort their self-perception.

These burdens most commonly include the emotional ‘stuff’ listed below:

  • Shame – The belief that something is inherently wrong with you, causing self-rejection, and either taking the ‘wrong’ (unreal) actions or no action at all.
  • Guilt – A distorted sense of responsibility that keeps you trapped in unworthiness and motivates you to do things for the ‘wrong’ reasons.
  • Trauma – Emotional wounds that reinforce a rigid false sense of identity and a feeling of separation and disconnection from the world and life.

These factors, combined with social conditioning – the cultural narratives and stories designed to make you deny yourself rather than express yourself – create an identity based on limited opportunity and fragmentation rather than abundant possibilities and wholeness.

Society often reinforces the idea that life is about control, status, and external validation, which further disconnects people from their real nature and causes them to use broken strategies to try and ‘fix’ themselves (this never works though for obvious reasons).

The Void: Why People Feel Lost and What to Do About It

Those who are out of touch with their realness and their ‘spiritual’ side often feel a presence of the Void—an inner emptiness or sense of ‘restlessness’ caused by a fundamental disconnection from truth.

Many attempt to fill this void with distractions and externalities that can never fill it: success, relationships, spiritual bypassing, or even excessive self-improvement (when the cure isn’t to ‘improve’ yourself but to ACCEPT yourself, your potential, and the work you need to do to make it real).

Again, this is all a broken strategy, because the only real solution is to become the Void – meaning you must fully embrace yourself, including your fears, doubts, and shadows, rather than running from them.

Spiritual coaching helps facilitate this process by guiding you through the necessary stages of transformation: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

The Three Stages of (Spiritual) Transformation in Spiritual Coaching

  1. Awareness (Deconstructing the Ego) – Recognising the false narratives, emotional blocks, and conditioning that shape your perception of reality.
  2. Acceptance (Integrating the Shadow) – Embracing all parts of yourself without resistance, including the parts you’ve rejected in order to keep the Ego in place.
  3. Action (Learning to Trust) – Taking steps to live in alignment with wholeness, doing your best, and letting go of the rest.

Misconceptions About Spirituality and Spiritual Coaching

A major reason people struggle with spirituality is due to misconceptions and unrealistic expectations of what it means to be ‘spiritual’ in the first place.

For example, many fall into the trap of believing that spirituality should grant them instant wisdom, instant peace, and the instant ability to control their destiny.

This couldn’t be further from the truth because all of these things are just the Ego’s illusion of control and its desire to be omnipotent and omniscient whilst wearing a ‘spiritual’ mask (usually to self-inflate and compensate for underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

Some common misconceptions include:

  • “Spirituality is about manifesting whatever I want instantly.”
    • Many misuse the Law of Attraction as a means to control life rather than surrendering to its natural flow – it’s like they’re using the truth to serve their material needs instead of serving the truth to become what they really need.
  • “If I think positive thoughts, bad things won’t happen to me.”
    • Life is full of challenges and so true spirituality and spiritual coaching is about learning to trust and navigate reality, not escape from it it (which is impossible, anyway, because what’s real is always real and can’t be escaped from).
  • “I can become spiritually enlightened without taking action.”
    • Growth requires movement and real action – you can’t just meditate on a mountain forever and expect to evolve. You have to get up and do things but make sure that what you’re doing is motivated by your realness, not your ego.
  • “If I do everything right, life will go exactly as I plan.”
    • Reality doesn’t conform to our desires – instead, we must let life refine us and course-correct our path as we let go of the unreal fragments and go deeper into a real sense of wholeness.

Mike Tyson once said: “Man wasn’t made to be humble but to be humbled.”

This sums it up perfectly if you ask me – spirituality isn’t about inflating the Ego with mystical powers or false certainty but about allowing life to shape you, accepting what is, and surrendering to the truth of wholeness.

There’s nothing wrong with setting big goals for ourselves or having a powerful vision – in fact, we need this to be able to grow as real as possible. On the way there, though, we will be humbled because the truth will always prevail and show us where we need to accept some limits and grow through others.

Humility is just a healthy acceptance of our limits and it comes from putting ourselves in the furnace of real action. The unreal will be burned away and all that remains is the gold of what’s real.

Spirituality is a Personal Relationship with Life

In short, then spirituality isn’t about following external rules or receiving pre-packaged truths and so neither is spiritual coaching – it’s about cultivating a direct and personal relationship with life itself.

Nobody can tell you what’s “right” or “wrong” in an absolute sense – only the feedback from life and your inner experience can guide you. Spiritual coaching can help you to acquire that feedback by raising awareness, accepting yourself and life, and taking real action.

If you feel disconnected, lost, or stuck, it’s not because you haven’t found the right guru or philosophy 0 it’s most likely because you haven’t tuned into the truth that life is already showing you.

The more you align with reality, the more any sense of the Void disappears. True spiritual growth comes from refining yourself through real-life experiences, adjusting your path as you go, and staying open to what life is revealing to you moment by moment.

It’s about taking yourself out of your mind and putting yourself in the process of wholeness moving towards more wholeness.

Spiritual coaching is about finding your real life.

Embracing the Mystery of Life through Spiritual Coaching

Life is a great mystery, and embracing this mystery requires both courage and humility:

Awareness, Acceptance, and Action provide a framework for navigating uncertainty and learning to trust yourself and life itself.

True spirituality isn’t about certainty or control – it’s about surrendering to the reality of existence while acting in alignment with truth.

Practical Steps to Implement Spiritual Coaching in Your Life

If you want to start integrating this approach into your life, try the following:

  1. Cultivate Awareness – Journal daily about your thoughts, beliefs, and emotional patterns. Try to notice where you resist reality (usually there will be some friction, frustration, or misery to show you that this is what’s happening).
  2. Practice Acceptance – Spend time sitting with discomfort instead of escaping it. Let go of the need to ‘fix’ everything and to just allow things to be. Sit in meditation and run towards whatever is really going on inside you, not away from it.
  3. Take Aligned Action – Set one small action each day that aligns with truth, rather than which is motivated by fear or is a distraction because of avoidance.

How My Spiritual Coaching Can Help You

My spiritual coaching program is designed to support your transformation through an 8-Session container over 4 months, with daily accountability (Monday–Friday and weekends to reflect and process).

This structure ensures that you not only understand the concepts that get discussed in Sessions but also implement them in your life with real, tangible results.

If you’re ready to stop seeking and start living your truth, book a call to begin your journey towards realness.

In the meantime, remember that spirituality is about cultivating a relationship with the TRUTH – keep uncovering it to the best of your ability and then living it and you will find that connection to wholeness!

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

The Abundance Mindset: Don’t Chase It, Attract it

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An Abundance Mindset is the Key to Real Success in Relationships and Business

We live in an ego-driven world and the Ego is obsessed with scarcity – this means that many of us are running around filtering everything through the ‘scarcity’ lens and missing out on REAL opportunities in life:

Maybe you’re one of these people yourself – constantly worrying about losing opportunities, feeling like you’re missing out, or even that – at some fundamental level – you’re not ‘enough’.

In this article, I want to help you understand that this way of thinking is just an illusion, a trick of the fragmented mind, and your own emotional ‘stuff’ projected out into the world around you (perception is projection, after all).

The truth is that abundance is real and an abundance mindset is not just about positive thinking or deluding yourself – it’s about aligning with the deep reality of wholeness and the way that things actually are.

When you understand that what’s real is always real, everything changes and you open up the door to your real life.

Let’s dig a little deeper to see what all of this means for you and your life:

Abundance comes when you start to see things as they are

What is an Abundance Mindset?

People love to talk about “Abundance” these days but what does it actually mean when we’re being REAL about it?

Let’s start with what an abundance mindset isn’t:

An abundance mindset is not about wishful thinking, nor is it about pretending everything is fine when it isn’t. It’s not about deluding yourself into thinking you can just have whatever you want without working for it or putting in any effort; nor is it about “faking it until you make it” or doing anything else that involves pretending to be something that you’re not or that the world you live in isn’t what it actually is.

Instead – when we’re REAL – an abundance mindset is about recognising that you’re already connected to everything you need and that you already have the power to create and make the most of the opportunities that are available to you. It means trusting in the natural flow of life, rather than grasping for external validation or forcing things to happen, and moving towards your goals with an open-mind instead of a closed one and with REALNESS instead of ego.

Abundance means knowing that what is real cannot be lost because, like I said above (and in my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World), what’s real is always real:

If something is ‘meant’ for you, it will either come (if you take action) or it will stay with you; if something never arrives or leaves, it wasn’t truly yours to begin with.

This is about connecting to and staying rooted in a sense of wholeness – the foundation of an abundance mindset (and also the foundation of being REAL because everything comes back to being whole).

If you can learn to operate from this place, both your relationships and your business thrive because you no longer operate from fear or lack – instead you’re just grounded in what’s real about yourself, the world, and reality.

To get to this place, you may first need to learn to LET GO:

The Power of Letting Go

One of the greatest barriers to success in any area of life is attachment to the unreal and treating the FRAGMENTS of life as the WHOLE of life:

When we become obsessed with a particular outcome, we unknowingly push it away, because we’re putting it on a pedestal and treating it as something that is disconnected from us. This just takes us out of the process of moving towards it and causes us to see it as being way more important than it actually is (we think that it will fill the Void inside ourselves without realising that this is just because we think it can give us what only wholeness can give us…despite our already being whole).

Getting ‘obsessed’ in this way just makes us desperate and desperation repels things (“if you chase it, it runs away). The opposite of this is the confidence that comes from being grounded in the REALNESS of WHOLENESS – important here because confidence attracts.

In short, then, an abundance mindset allows you to be outcome-independent, meaning you are not enslaved to external results for your self-worth (because you know that what’s real is always real and so you don’t need to outsource your self-acceptance to your goals – instead, you can just enjoy your goals as an expression of your realness).

When you operate from abundance like this, you can also LET GO of needing something to happen in a particular way. Instead, you focus on the process of moving towards things by taking real action. Ironically, this detachment makes success more likely because when you are too fixated on results, you are not present or engaged with reality.

Instead, when you stay rooted in the process, the results take care of themselves.

Trusting That There Are Always More Opportunities

The truth about life is that it’s filled with opportunities, but only if you are open to them:

The scarcity mindset tells you that every ‘failure’ is the end of the road; the abundance mindset tells you that ‘failure‘ is just another step towards what is real. Scarcity makes you more fragmented but abundance leads towards wholeness.

Even if something doesn’t work out, it serves you in the end because every experience that brings you closer to acceptance also brings you closer to wholeness.

This applies to everything: jobs, relationships, sales, personal goals. The moment you realise that life will always provide new doors to walk through, you stop chasing.

And when you stop chasing, you start receiving.

The Garden and the Butterflies

Imagine your life as a garden:

If you spend your time frantically running around, trying to catch butterflies, they will always flutter just out of reach as they fly away from you. But if you tend to your garden, instead – if you cultivate yourself, your skills, your mindset, and grow REAL – the butterflies come to you naturally.

People, opportunities, and success are no different – when you focus on growing real, instead of grasping for things to fill the Void, life moves in your favour because you’re moving with life instead of against it.

This is the essence of abundance – not just taking but creating.

Staying Grounded No Matter What

The key to true abundance is staying grounded and rooted in your REALNESS:

The world will test you whether you have a scarcity or an abundance mindset (that’s just how life goes) – you will face setbacks, losses, and moments of doubt – but an abundance mindset is about giving up the unnecessary struggle that comes from resisting life and instead trusting that even the inevitable struggles serve a higher purpose.

Staying grounded means:

  • Trusting in the process instead of panicking about results
  • Detaching from external validation and knowing your worth is intrinsic
  • Letting go of control and allowing things to unfold naturally
  • Taking real action instead of forcing things out of F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”).

Abundance in Business

Many people think that in order to succeed in business, they must be aggressive, chase clients, and push for results but this approach often backfires.

This is because people unconsciously pick up on desperation – they recoil from those who try too hard (just like those butterflies in the garden that fly beyond your grasp).

A business rooted in abundance, however, thrives on service:

Instead of forcing things, you focus on creating value; you trust that by showing up in a real way, the right clients, opportunities, and growth will follow.

Even in high-stakes environments where results are necessary (e.g. sales targets, commission-based work), staying indifferent to the outcome leads to better performance. This is because it keeps you focused on the process, rather than the pressure and the desperation that comes from caving into it.

Abundance in Relationships

An abundance mindset transforms relationships because it allows you to show up as you are, without needing others to validate you. In this sense, you’re no longer trying to ‘prove’ your worth or manipulate situations to get what you want. Instead, you trust that the right connections will naturally align with you because you’re being real (and if people don’t align you get let them go without drama or taking things personally).

This makes you more attractive, not just romantically but in all areas of life – whether in friendships, partnerships, or networking, people are drawn to those who exude the real confidence that abundance brings.

In short, real confidence comes from knowing you have nothing to lose – because what is real is always real and so are you.

Bringing Abundance into Your Life: Practical Steps

Understanding abundance is one thing but how do you live it?

Here are some key ways to integrate an abundance mindset into your daily life:

  1. Shift Your Focus to Process Over Outcomes
    • Set clear goals, but don’t obsess over them because you think they will fill the Void.
    • Stay engaged with the present moment.
    • Let go of needing things to happen a certain way.
  2. Practise Trust
    • Remind yourself that life always provides what you need in the end (if you don’t believe me, look back at your life)
    • Reflect on past situations where things worked out unexpectedly.
    • When something doesn’t go your way, say, “This is a lesson, not a loss.”
  3. Detach From External Validation
    • Stop outsourcing your self-worth or levels of self-acceptance to achievements or approval.
    • Recognise that you are already whole and that you can express from this wholeness instead of chasing things to make you feel whole (because you already are – it’s just our ego and its mental blocks that stops us seeing this sometimes)
    • Take actions because they align with your values and what you want to express in a real way, not because you need validation.
  4. Cultivate Realness
    • Focus on growing real in yourself instead of chasing results.
    • Take action from a place of authenticity, not fear.
    • Trust that the right people and opportunities will align with you when you are real (and then watch it happen).
  5. Stay Grounded
    • Develop a daily practice that keeps you centred (e.g. meditation, journalling, getting into your body with breathwork or yoga etc.).
    • When things don’t go as planned, pause and remind yourself of the bigger picture and KEEP TRUSTING ANYWAY.
    • Surround yourself with people who reinforce abundance thinking (i.e not haters or people who never take action but complain about everything etc.).

The Final Truth About Abundance

An abundance mindset serves you because it aligns with reality -it allows you to move through life with confidence, trust, and presence and makes you more effective in business, more fulfilled in relationships, and more at peace with yourself.

The world is full of opportunities, connections, and resources but you’ll only see them when you stop chasing and start trusting.

Tend to that garden, stay grounded, and remember: what is real is always real.

Stay real out there,

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

Deep Acceptance: On ‘Fixing’ Others and Their Personality Defects

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You Can’t ‘Fix’ People – But You Can Grow REAL

One of the hardest lessons to learn in this wonderful life is that you can’t change people (which also means that people can’t change you either):

No matter how much your might try or how much you might like to, you can’t ‘fix’ somebody’s personality defects, reshape their minds, or make them see reality in exactly the same way that you do.

This is because people change and transform from the inside-out, not from the outside-in:

No amount of ‘logic’ (or what seems logical to you, at least), persuasion, or even love will work unless they’re ready – unless something within them cracks open and allows truth to seep in from the inside-out.

To make things even more complicated and infuriating, the more you try to fix someone, the more they resist and cling to the things that you want to ‘change’ in the first place.

Human beings are funny old creatures but it’s just the way that things go (humans are gonna human, after all):

If you’ve ever tried (but no doubt failed) to help a stubborn friend, a ‘toxic’ family member, or a self-sabotaging partner, you’ll know exactly what this means – instead of hearing your ‘wisdom’ (you might be wrong, of course) and taking it on board, they double down on their flaws; they hold on even tighter to the very things that are holding them back, as if protecting some fragile part of themselves that isn’t yet ready to dissolve (i.e. the Ego).

So what does that leave us with? How do we deal with the difficult, stubborn, or destructive people in our lives?

The answer is simpler than you might think: acceptance – but not the weak, passive kind: this is about Deep Acceptance – the kind that allows you to keep flowing instead of forcing and to stay real instead of getting caught up in the unreal and lost to your own ego ‘stuff’.

Let’s break it down and dig a little deeper:

The Illusion of ‘Fixing’ Others

There’s a deep-seated belief that if we care enough, try hard enough, or say the ‘right’ things, then we can somehow save people from themselves.

Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), real transformation doesn’t work like that.

Think about the biggest changes you’ve ever made in your own life:

Did changes take place because someone nagged, guilt-tripped, or pressured you into them? Or did they happen because something inside of you ‘clicked‘ – a realisation, a moment of deep truth, a rock-bottom experience that forced you to wake up and become more AWARE in some way (so you could then go more deeply into Acceptance and then Action)?

(Check out this free guide to Awareness, Acceptance, and Action if you want to transform yourself and your life even more: Ego | Shadow | Trust: Build Flow & Become Unstuck).

For change to be real and lasting, it has to come from within and, so, until someone is ready to face themselves, no amount of external force or pressure will make any difference whatsoever – if anything, it will just push them further into their defences, reinforcing their current state instead of dissolving it and making whatever ‘problems’ you perceive way worse.

That’s why trying to change people is not only exhausting but counterproductive – it creates resistance instead of transformation and just takes everybody involved in the change process further and further away from their own REAL path and sense of timing.

The Sacred Mantra: Everyone is F’d Up—Love Them Anyway

So, this all being the case, what are we supposed to do with the troublesome or ‘difficult’ people in our lives? How do we help people to change – if they’re genuinely ready to do so – without losing ourselves in frustration, resentment, or endless battles at the same time?

The answer is found in a simple yet powerful lesson I’ve shared before:

EVERYBODY IS F’D UP BUT LEARN TO LOVE THEM ANYWAY (INCLUDING OURSELVES) .

This doesn’t mean you excuse bad behaviour or tolerate mistreatment; it doesn’t mean you lower your standards or accept things that go against your values. What it does mean is that you stop wasting energy trying to force change where it isn’t ready to happen and, instead, focus on your own growth and the things that you can actually control.

Ultimately, this comes down to letting go – not in a way that makes you passive, but in a way that makes you free and helps you find the strength of your own REALNESS.

Acceptance vs. Endurance

“Acceptance” doesn’t mean being a doormat and having the world and its ‘difficult’ people walk all over you – nor is it about tolerating toxic behaviour or letting people take advantage of you or disrespect you.

It simply means recognising reality for what it is and accepting some of the things that mean it is what it is:

  • Some people will never change and that’s not your problem.
  • Some people will grow but only when they are ready (and some people never will be, depending on how much ego ‘stuff’ they have going on).
  • Your job is not to ‘fix’ anyone – it’s to be real and to let others walk their own path whilst you walk yours.

There’s a huge difference between acceptance and endurance (and extreme version of tolerance):

  • Endurance is gritting your teeth and suffering through something because you feel you have no choice (when you always have a choice).
  • Acceptance is seeing things as they are and making a conscious decision about how to move forward with what’s actually there.

If someone in your life is toxic or harmful, you don’t have to endure them – you can walk away; you can set boundaries; you can protect your peace.

But you don’t have to waste time and energy trying to force them to be different than they are or to ‘fix’ the qualities that are testing you in the first place..

Let them be who they are and allow yourself to be who you are.

Flowing Instead of Forcing

When you accept people as they are – without trying to control them, change them, or ‘fix’ them – something powerful happens:

You stop resisting reality and start to ACCEPT it (acceptance is the opposite of resistance).

When this happens, you start FLOWING:

Instead of getting tangled up in the drama of other people’s dysfunctions and defects, you actually move forward with your own life; instead of exhausting yourself trying to ‘help’ people who don’t want to be helped, you channel your energy into your own growth and your own realness.

This is how you grow real instead of getting caught up in the unreal and getting lost to the Void and those “lives of quiet desperation” (as Thoreau called them).

Practical Steps: How to Integrate Deep Acceptance into Your Life

Here are some key ways to live and breathe the kind of Deep Acceptance we’re talking about:

1. Stop Trying to ‘Rescue‘ People

Recognise when your desire to help is actually a desire to control and is, therefore, linked to your own ego ‘stuff’ (and not reality). If someone isn’t open to change, let them be (even if that means you might have to walk away for at least a while).

2. Set Clear Boundaries

Deep Acceptance doesn’t mean allowing people to mistreat you. It means setting firm, healthy boundaries and sticking to them to protect your own peace.

3. Focus on Your Own Growth

Every time you feel the urge to ‘fix’ someone, turn that energy inward and see if there’s some Shadow Self ‘stuff’ going on: What parts of yourself still need healing? What areas of your life could benefit from deeper self-awareness? How might you be projecting and what does this tell you about your own journey?

4. Love People Where They Are

Not where you wish they’d be…. Love them as they are, while maintaining your own integrity and living with your own values, goals, and principles.

5. Let Go of the Need for ‘Closure‘

Some people will never give you an apology or the answers that your ego might feel you ‘need’ to be able to move forward. The brutal truth is that some people will never change and there’s nothing you can do about it because some of us are just ‘stuck’ in certain (unreal) patterns our whole lives long. Make peace with that and move on – it is what it is.

6. Choose Flow Over Force

Instead of fighting reality – which is impossible – flow with it. Work with what is, rather than what you wish was and build with that foundation of DEEP ACCEPTANCE instead of resistance (you can only build on a solid foundation, anyway, and the most solid foundation is REALITY).

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, the only person you can change is yourself.

The more you focus on ‘fixing’ others, the more you disconnect from your own growth.

When you shift your attention inward and stop trying to control what isn’t yours to control you become lighter, freer, and more real.

Stay real out there,

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

Everybody is F’d Up (So Don’t Worry About It)

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Everybody is f’d up but love them anyway (including yourself)

One of the biggest and most life-affirming lessons I’ve learned in life over the last few years on planet earth is this:

Everybody is f*ed up but love them anyway (including yourself).

Let that sink in – really, take a second. We have all day.

The reason that this little sentence is so powerful is because when you get it, see it, and let it move through you, a whole lot of ‘stuff’ that might niggle, frustrate, or even keep you up at night stops mattering:

You stop worrying about whether you’re ‘good’ enough, ‘cool’ enough, or even ‘normal’ enough; you stop wasting time wondering if people ‘like’ you or if you’re doing life ‘right’ – on the other side of the coin, you stop worrying and wondering about all these little things when it comes to others. Instead, you can just let yourself and others BE whatever it is that they BE.

This is the HUMAN CONDITION, people – and nobody gets out alive: everyone is carrying their own baggage, their own quirks, their own madness, and that includes me and you.

Once you really start accept this something shifts:

You stop trying to FORCE yourself or others to be anything other than what they are and – paradoxically – that’s where real growth starts to happen (because human beings are always growing and the only thing that stops the natural flow towards wholeness is a lack of acceptance).

Let’s dive in and get a little deeper:

Embracing the Human Condition

We all have our little oddities, insecurities, fears, and battle scars – welcome to the human condition:

Nobody is exempt because humans are gonna human and we all share more similarities than differences. No matter how polished someone looks on the outside, there’s always something going on beneath the surface and there’s always something to contend with sooner or later.

The problem is, most people spend their lives trying to hide or compensate for the so-called ‘brokenness’ that comes from being a little rough around the edges after going through some of the things that we all go through (shame, guilt, and/or trauma, F.E.A.R, heartbreak, loss, etc. etc. etc.).

This is totally sad and ironic though because it’s those quirks, cracks, and ‘defects’ that make us who we are (or as Rumi said: “The cracks are where the light enters you“).

When we stop fighting ourselves and getting lost in the fragmented mask of ego because we’re scared of facing our SHADOW SELF – when we stop trying to ‘fix’ every little thing and just be whatever it is that we is – we move into a state of wholeness.

And – when we’re connected to this place of wholeness (aka REALNESS) – we naturally keep evolving and growing (which is why ‘acceptance’ isn’t just about remaining the same but about letting go of the things that stop you becoming a deeper expression of your potential and who you really are).

This brings us back to a paradox: accepting where you are is what allows you to change and grow in a REAL way.

It’s when you resist reality instead of accepting it that you stay ‘stuck’ (including the REALNESS of yourself and your relationship with others).

Seeing the Madness (and Laughing at It)

The older I get (but let’s not talk about that), the more I look around and realise a fundamental truth about the human race: we’re just a bunch of lunatics.

And I mean this with love (because love and acceptance are the same ‘thing’).

Just look around you:

We’re all just casually and not so casually walking around with our peculiar ways of thinking, odd habits, strange fears, and contradictory behaviours. Some people hoard rubber ducks; some have to triple-check if the door is locked; some sing to their plants; some can’t walk past a mirror without flexing or pouting at themselves (yeah, I do this too sometimes).

It’s just humans being human (because humans gonna human).

So why does it seem like we can waste so much time worrying about being ‘normal’? Really, all that means is that we’re JUDGING for some reason and judgement is the opposite of acceptance so something doesn’t add up.

Once you realise that everyone else is as ‘off’ as you are and that you’re as ‘off’ as they are, then you stop judging yourself and others so harshly. You stop trying to smooth out every rough edge to fit in or have somebody fit to your (arbitrary) standards of what’s ‘normal’ and that’s when you start living and relating with REALNESS.

Because if we’re all a bit mad, what’s the point of pretending otherwise?

Depersonalising Other People’s ‘Stuff’

Now, let’s be clear: accepting that everyone is at least a little bit ‘mad’ doesn’t mean tolerating bad behaviour.

It doesn’t mean making excuses for people who are disrespectful, dishonest, or ‘toxic’ – it simply means understanding that when someone acts out, it’s not about you but about how well they can accept the human condition themselves.

Most of the time, people are just projecting their own unhealed ‘stuff’ onto the people and the world around them:

  • The person who snaps at you in the shop? Probably dealing with their own stress.
  • The friend who suddenly ghosts you? Likely wrestling with their own fears of intimacy or commitment.
  • The colleague who undermines you? They’re likely insecure about their own value.

This is all caused by them NOT accepting the human condition and the way that things are, judging themselves, and then projecting that judgement onto you. It’s not yours though. You don’t have to take it.

(And this works vice versa when you don’t accept things and project judgement onto others).

When you depersonalise other people’s behaviour, you stop taking on their energy and can protect your own so that you can invest it in something REAL.

You stop internalising their issues as reflections of your worth (or stop asking others to internalise yours because of your own control freakery and need to keep your ego where it is). Instead, you can stay in your own lane, hold your boundaries, and only engage with what’s real.

Or, as I like to say (from my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World): “Gimme something real or GTFO.”

Wholeness: The Art of Just Being

So where does this all lead us and how can we make it practical?

It leads to a simple but profound shift towards the TRUTH: the realisation that you are already REAL because you’re already WHOLE.

You can take all of these ‘judgements’ out of it because judgements are about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but you and everybody else are REAL.

You don’t have to ‘fix’ yourself to be worthy – you don’t have to fit into some external mould to be valuable. Nor do you have to ‘fix’ anybody else or mould them into something that seems ‘valuable’ to you either (because they’re already ‘valuable’ – whatever the hell that means).

You just have to be what you is and allow others to be the same.

Because when you stop fighting yourself, you move into flow and – when you’re in flow – life starts aligning in ways you could never have predicted. The right people show up. The right opportunities arise. The ‘answers’ you were chasing seem to come out of nowhere. All because you started ACCEPTING and pulling things closer instead of RESISTING and pushing them away.

It’s not magic – it’s just realness.

Or, as I like to put it:

“I am that I am in wholeness and wholeness is in me” (from my new book Trust).

How to Apply This in Your Own Life

This all sounds great in theory (because it is lol) but how do you actually live it? How do you stop judging yourself and others, embrace all of the quirkiness of the human condition, and let life flow instead of forcing it to some made-up standard of ‘normal’?

Here are some practical ways to integrate this mindset and get more real about things:

1. Observe Without Judging

Next time you notice something ‘weird’ about yourself – an insecurity, a nervous habit, an old fear etc. –just observe it. Don’t label it as ‘bad’ or try to change it immediately but just see it for what it is.

The same applies to other people too – instead of reacting to their behaviour, try to see where it’s coming from. Most of the time, it has nothing to do with you and they’re just running on autopilot in reaction to their own ‘stuff’.

2. Catch Yourself Overthinking

If you ever catch yourself spiralling – worrying about how you’re perceived, what others think, or whether you’re doing life ‘right’ – then…pause.

Remind yourself: everyone is winging it and making it up as they go along (it has to be this way because none of our ‘plans’ ever fully align with reality itself – the map is not the territory).

Nobody has it all figured out so let yourself off the hook and just DO YOUR BEST AND LET GO OF THE REST.

3. Set Boundaries Without Guilt

Accepting that people have their own baggage and emotional ‘stuff’ doesn’t mean letting them dump it on you.

If someone disrespects you, step back; if a relationship drains you, reassess it; if someone isn’t giving you realness, don’t waste your time trying to decode them and just move on (“Gimme something real or GTFO”).

You can accept people as they are while also choosing who you allow into your life – everybody is weird but you don’t have to let everybody in.

4. Be Weird, Be Raw and Real

Stop suppressing the parts of you that don’t fit some imaginary idea of what’s ‘normal’ (if somebody makes a moral or value-based judgement of you always ask “According to who?” and the answer will almost always have to be “Me” which means you can probably ignore it – unless they’re an omnipotent and omniscient God).

Want to wear a ridiculous outfit? Get it done.

Have a bizarre passion? Turn the volume up and go crazy with it.

Like deep conversations more than small talk? Find people who get it and dive in (a real conversation can change your life).

When you stop filtering yourself, you attract the right people because you’re putting something real out there. You’ll find those who love you for who you really are rather than some mask you were wearing to try and be ‘normal’.

5. Trust That You’re Exactly Where You Need to Be

You don’t have to have it all together to be ‘worthy’ (whatever the f that means) nor do you have to be ‘healed’ to be whole.

Right now, exactly as you are, with all your quirks, flaws, and eccentricities – you are already REAL.

And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you start living a REAL life.

Final Thoughts: Stay Real

In conclusion, life is messy, people are complicated and none of us are ‘perfect’, ‘normal’, or anything else that sums up some arbitrary and subjective moral standard.

So stop overthinking it and just be what you is.

Embrace the madness. Love yourself and others, flaws and all.

Because everybody is f’d up (even you) but you can CHOOSE to love them anyway (and, yes, you could say that ‘love’ is an arbitrary moral standard but it’s just what’s there when you REMOVE the judgements – not add anything).

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Stay real out there,

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