Shadow Life

Living the Shadow  Life means owning the WHOLE of yourself so you can grow real and live your best life.

People Think I’m Weird: What It Really Means and What to Do About It

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Understanding Your Own ‘Weirdness’ and What To Do About It

There’s a unique kind of pain that comes with hearing, sensing, or straight-up being told that other people think you’re weird:

For some, it might just be an occasional, offhand remark but for others out there, it becomes a lifelong echo that haunts them all their days – in classrooms, at work, in social circles, or even within families.

It might not be overt bullying, but the persistent suggestion that you don’t quite ‘fit’ can lodge itself deep in the psyche and start to make you question yourself and your life.

In many ways, the word “weird” has become a cultural shorthand for “other” and when that label is applied – especially repeatedly – it can trigger profound internal conflict and go against some of our deepest human needs and instincts.

You may start to question yourself:

“What the hell is wrong with me?”

“Why don’t I belong?“

But what if being called “weird” isn’t a problem at all and you’re just looking at things through a distorted lens?

What if “people think I’m weird” type thoughts are actually an invitation or even a signal that shows you that you’re on the cusp of something real?

Let’s explore what it really means when people think you’re weird by looking at it through the lens of the REALNESS philosophy.

By the time you’re done reading, you’ll understand what’s going on, what it means, and how to stop yourself from shrinking yourself just to fit into the cardboard box of ‘normal’.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

If you're suffering from a case of "People think I'm weird" then it might just mean that you're real.

People Think I’m Weird: What We Cover in This Article

The Shame Trigger: When ‘Weird’ Meets the Shadow

Being labelled as weird often awakens underlying, unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ like shame – not just a fleeting embarrassment, but a deeper, stickier sense that there is something inherently ‘wrong’ with who you are.

This happens because shame often drives us and our actions without us knowing – normally because there’s an inner split between who we think we need to be (the ego) and the real version of ourselves that gets sent into exile so that the illusion of the ego can be upheld.

This hidden REAL version of who we are is the Shadow Self – the ‘parts’ of you that were told, somewhere along the line, either directly or indirectly that you send them into hiding if you want to be accepted. That shadow might contain your creativity, your humour, your sensitivity, or your intensity and when someone calls you weird, it hits that buried shame like a tuning fork (because you feel that you can never be accepted).

Here’s the truth that will start to set you free of being worried that “people think I’m weird”:

You can only be ashamed of something if you’ve already rejected it yourself.

If the comment “you’re weird” makes you flinch, it’s because part of you flinched first – the judgement is just a mirror of what’s going on inside you and a sign that you need to let go of your current identity (ego), integrate the shadow ‘parts’ hidden behind it, and start taking real action.

This is why the first step isn’t about attempting to change how people see you – it’s about reclaiming what you’ve hidden.

Two Types of Weirdness: Neurotic and Real

Not all weirdness is the same. In fact, there are two fundamentally different types and confusing them can cause real problems.

Before we go deeper, you need to understand what these two types are:

1. Neurotic Weirdness

The first type is neurotic weirdness and it’s the kind of weird that disconnects you from reality.

It’s essentially a distortion caused by unresolved emotional pain, trauma, or a dysfunctional relationship with your own thoughts and body.

In this state, weirdness becomes a mask – a way of compensating for fear, shame, or social disconnection and because other people can always tell when we’re being unreal and wearing a mask it makes us come across as inauthentic and ‘weird’.

People caught up in neurotic weirdness like this might experience some of the following symptoms:

  • Overthinking and spiralling into self-obsession (which makes people think they’re weird because all they do is talk about themselves).
  • Judge others harshly for not matching their worldview (because they need everybody to conform with the worldview of their mask so they can keep hiding).
  • Use quirkiness as a shield or superiority complex (to self-inflate and compensate for feelings of shame but also to reject themselves before others reject them).
  • Cling to weirdness as an identity because they don’t trust they’re enough without it (and so they identify with the symptoms of their emotional problems instead of learning to regulate and heal themselves in a real way).

This kind of weirdness isolates:

It makes connection difficult because it operates from fear – fear of rejection, fear of being ordinary, and a fear of reality itself.

2. Authentic Weirdness

This is the kind of weird that connects you to life because you’re being REAL and facing the truth about yourself, the world, and reality:

It’s the beautiful, sometimes scruffy, sometimes inconvenient truth of who you really are – RAW and REAL:

It comes from not having let the world beat the uniqueness out of you and not closing your heart and giving up just because you lost touch with yourself.

This kind of weirdness is really just a by-product of being REAL and it can show up in many different ways.

Here are some examples:

  • Unusual hobbies or tastes (with genuine passion and interest, not just as a pretentious way of making the mask look more interesting).
  • A quirky sense of humour (because humour is really about recognising the TRUTH).
  • Deep values that don’t match societal norms (because when you’re being real you’re not a product of the world and its temporary values and norms but something more lasting and timelessly human).
  • The refusal to “play the game” if it compromises your integrity (because you know who you are and what you stand for – which makes you look ‘weird’ in a world fuelled by moral relativism).

This is the ‘weirdness’ of artists, visionaries, mavericks, and misfits… people who march to the beat of their own drum – not because they want to be different so their ego can feel good, but because they refuse to be unreal.

This is the weirdness that leads to growth, meaning, connection – and, sometimes, even greatness.

Why Being Thought of as Weird Hurts So Much

When someone thinks you’re weird – especially if they say it – you feel it.

But the real sting isn’t from the external judgement – it’s from the internal dissonance and the feeling that you’re caught between two needs: the need to be real and the need to be accepted.

This creates a kind of inner tension that can be resolved by understanding what’s best for you in the long-term versus what will bring a short-term release.

It essentially goes like this:

In a world that rewards conformity, choosing realness will often come at the cost of temporary acceptance but the price of abandoning your realness is lifelong regret.

So, really, it comes down to this:

Are you going to give up your ‘weirdness’ so that you can fit in temporarily or are you going to OWN IT and turn up the volume so you can live a life without regret?

If you abandon you’re realness, it will always catch up with you in the end.

“People Think I’m Weird” Means that You Judged Yourself First

To be perfectly honest with you:

If being called ‘weird’ upsets you, then you’ve already made that judgement of yourself.

If you didn’t believe that it was true at at least some small level then it wouldn’t bother you at all – in fact, it can only bother or upset you if you suspect it might be true in some way.

This goes the other way too because people’s perceptions are projections (to paraphrase Carl Jung):

If they mock or misunderstand you – labelling you as ‘weird’ – then they’re often reflecting their own discomfort with authenticity…especially if they have hidden parts of themselves buried in the Shadow Territory so that they can ‘fit’ in with the status quo.

But if you’ve done the same thing – if you’ve judged yourself for being different – their reaction confirms what you secretly fear: that you don’t belong.

This is why ownership is key and the only way out:

You need to choose to see your so-called ‘weirdness’ not as a flaw, but as a signal of realness that needs to be built upon, not hidden.

Finding Your People: Weirdness Is About Connection, Not Performance

The unreal, neurotic version of weirdness performs and wears the mask in order to belong – desperate for connection, but always on edge at the thought of being ‘found out’. This just breeds a kind of social desperation which comes across as neediness and, ironically, pushes others away.

In contrast, the real version of weirdness doesn’t need to perform or do a song-and-dance to get attention (often confused for love) – it just is.

The bottom-line is that friendship and connection don’t come from being liked by everyone – they come from sharing values and purpose. Real friends don’t just accept your weirdness – they recognise their own in it and encourage you to grow even deeper into it.

If your weirdness is rooted in something real, it will act like a homing beacon for others who are living real too – this is why there’s no point hiding it (you might need to let a few of the unreal people in your life fall by the wayside though and remember the sacred mantra: “Gimme something real or GTFO“).

What About Situations Where You Need to ‘Tone It Down’?

Of course, there are moments in life when expressing the full extent of your weirdness might not be appropriate:

Job interviews. Courtrooms. Dinner with your partner’s parents. Etc.

But there’s a massive difference here between toning down and disowning:

Basically, having social intelligence isn’t a betrayal of yourself – it’s a skill that allows you to adapt without self-abandonment.

You can stay true to who you are while modulating how you show up. That’s not selling out. That’s being savvy based on the RESULTS you wanna get from life.

Being Left Out Isn’t a Sign That You’re Losing

If you feel left out, it’s not necessarily because something’s ‘wrong’ with you – it might just be that you’re ahead of the game (not always, though, so be honest with yourself when reflecting on this).

Most people will do anything to be accepted – even if it means slicing off real parts of themselves and shoving them down into the Shadow Territory to fit in.

When you don’t do that – and hold onto the realness that makes you ‘weird’ in comparison – you remind them of what they gave up and that’s uncomfortable (because it reminds them that they’re being unreal with themselves).

What you need to remember is that you can’t lose anything real which means that if people reject you for being real, they were never truly with you in the first place.

Nothing of value was lost.

The feeling of loss is often just the ego reacting to a story of scarcity because it lost perspective and forgot the truth about things (which is what the ego always does because it’s unreal).

What is the ‘truth’ in this situation, I hear you ask?

It’s the fact that there are endless opportunities to meet, connect, and create with people who see and value you in a real way.

But to encounter these opportunities you have to be brave enough to show up as yourself first and foremost.

Being Weird Isn’t the Problem. Being Unreal Is.

‘Normal’ doesn’t really exist – it’s just a collection of social habits and agreements passed off as ‘truth’ (when really it’s just a bunch of interpretations of the truth that have been limited by the collective Shadow of a group or society).

Trying to be normal will kill your spirit and will make you anxious, resentful, and bitter – you’ll probably ‘survive’ but you’ll wonder why life feels hollow, even when it seems fine on the surface (the answer is because you’re living in the Void, not in reality).

The only other option is to start tapping into your realness – even if that makes you look ‘weird’ sometimes. You’ll feel more alive but that often does seem ‘weird’ – especially to those who are still playing it safe.

In short: If people think you’re weird, let them.

What matters is whether your weirdness is real or just a defence mechanism.

One will set you free. The other will keep you stuck.

Only you know what path you’re on.

Practical Steps: From “People Think I’m Weird” to Realness

Here’s how to get started on the journey from neurotic weirdness to the authentic power of your realness:

1. Start with Ownership

Acknowledge that you’re different and decide that’s a strength. Stop waiting for others to validate it and just go do what you need to do.

2. Reflect on Where You’ve Hidden

Ask yourself: what parts of me have I judged, rejected, or hidden to be accepted? Write them down. You’ll find your gift in there once you bring them out of the shadows.

3. Reclaim the Shadow

Use the Awareness–Acceptance–Action framework that I use with my coaching clients:

  • Awareness: Spot the patterns and internalised judgement.
  • Acceptance: Feel the underlying emotions (shame, fear, etc.) without resistance.
  • Action: Take one bold move to express your weirdness consciously and in a real way.

4. Tame the Neurotic Mind

If your weirdness comes with chaos, anxiety, or control issues – you need to work on mastering your mind (a good starting point is the Thought Log tool that you can download for free on this website).

Breathwork, journaling, daily habits, and developing a strong relationship with your body will help shift you out of ego loops and into flow too. This is because they all serve to regulate your nervous system (and a dysregulated nervous system is often the source of our neurotic thoughts because we see ‘threats’ everywhere).

5. Turn Up the Volume

If your weirdness is real, amplify it with purpose:

Use it to create, connect, contribute by creating a real vision for yourself, breaking it down into goals, and then cultivating daily habits to support your growth.

6. Find Your Weirdos

Real connection is built around shared value so go (or create a space) where people gather around something real – not where they cling to social games for the sake of hiding from themselves.

If "People think I'm weird" bothers you it means you're squeezing yourself into a false normal.

People Think I’m Weird: Own It or Regret It

You don’t need to stop being weird – you just need to stop being unreal and your so-called weirdness might be the most honest thing about you.

Never trade truth for approval and refuse to kill your gift to get invited to a table where everyone’s pretending anyway.

Choose the real table.

Set it yourself if you have to.

The right people will show up.

Because, in the end, what the world calls weird is often just the beginning of something real.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and you want to work on owning your weirdness and growing real, then book a free call with me and I’ll help you start taking real action.

Midlife Crisis or Finally Waking Up? The Truth About Your Midlife Crisis

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Midlife crisis or awakening?

What’s Real Is Always Real

Let’s not sugar-coat this one and get right into it:

Waking up in your late thirties or early forties and realising you’re not who you thought you might be at this time is one of the most jarring, destabilising, but sacred experiences you’ll ever go through.

Normally, when people talk about it, we like to call it a midlife crisis but what if it’s not a crisis at all?

What if it’s finally the beginning of something real after years – if not decades – of unreality?

What if it’s the first time you’ve actually started telling yourself the truth and so now you’re actually waking up?

What if it’s a sign that the mask is slipping and you’re stepping away from the dreamworld of the void and the false character that you’ve unconsciously being playing within it?

This article will help you to understand what your “midlife crisis” is really about and how you can start to turn it from a breakdown to a breakthrough and make sure that the rest of your life is one you actually want to be living.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your midlife crisis is a sign that the straight way was never yours in the first place.

Midlife Crisis or Breakthrough?: What We’ll Cover in this Article

Midlife Crisis: The Lie We’ve Been Living

Most of us are born into systems that reward conformity and comfort over the natural chaos and flow that comes with real life:

We learn how to be ‘liked’, how to be ‘safe’, and how to ‘succeed‘ by society’s standards and so we build a life on the foundations of what we’re told is right instead of what is actually REAL for us.

Many of the things that we end up chasing because of these social standards and promptings are actually ‘good’ things – a decent job, a partner, a mortgage, holidays abroad – but, unfortunately, we get conditioned to treat them as the ULTIMATE things and so they end up becoming nothing but distractions that keep the deeper answers we’re really seeking at bay.

When we put these things on a pedestal as being the ‘ultimate’ then we end up losing the only real foundation that can ultimately support us: the truth about ourselves, the world, and reality.

For a while – years, if not decades – chasing these ‘good’ things distracts us enough that we can feel like we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing and living a life that feels real and meaningful.

That’s until, somewhere along the way, the whisper begins:

It’s subtle at first – a vague sense of restlessness or a sense that something’s missing…but then it gets louder: the marriage begins to feels stale and lifeless; the job starts to feel like a cage; the body begins to ache with the tension of a life half-lived hunched over in front of a computer screen or slaving away in a place that only ever sucks your passion right out of you instead of lighting any new flames.

You look in the mirror and wonder:

“Is this it?”

“How did I get here?”

You already know the answers to these questions:

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“I gave up on myself”.

This is the moment many men fear and misunderstand – the so-called midlife crisis -but it’s not a crisis of old-age.

It’s a crisis of REALNESS.

The Real You Has Been Waiting in The Shadow Territory

Underneath the roles, titles, labels, and social masks, there’s a real version of you:

This version isn’t tied to your job title, your net worth, or even your family role – it’s the real you: the experience of being (not just an idea about it) driven by purpose, meaning, values, and a primal pull towards growth and wholeness.

You’ve always known what this version of you wants. You’ve felt it. In quiet moments it’s still there observing everything you do and – from time-to-time – you get hints or glimmers of what that awareness still looks like and then suppress it again because it doesn’t ‘conform’ to who you’re ‘supposed’ to be (even though, ironically, it’s the REALEST thing about you).

It’s right there alive in the passions you’ve ignored; in the relationships that never quite made sense; in the choices you didn’t make because they felt too risky, too uncertain (but that keep calling to you nevertheless).

This knowing is timeless…but it gets buried.

Why?

Because of two forces that govern most people’s lives without them really even noticing:

  1. Emotional entanglement: fear, shame, guilt, or even trauma that causes you to retreat from life and shrink yourself behind a mask instead of stepping into it.
  2. Social programming: expectations from culture, parents, peers, or institutions that shape your identity into something safe and palatable but, ultimately, false and unreal.

These two forces push you onto an unreal path and, to walk it, you need a mask (A.K.A ‘The Ego‘):

To keep the mask in place, you perform, you provide and you pretend. Meanwhile, the real parts of you -the artist, the lover, the adventurer, the man who wants to feel alive – get pushed into the Shadow Territory.

But reality has a way of reclaiming what’s real which is why wearing a mask will always eventually lead you to a midlife crisis.

What Is a Midlife Crisis Really?

A midlife crisis is what happens when the mask begins to crack – when you can no longer sustain the cost of the performance and the wasted time, energy, and attention that it drains from you…when the real self – buried in the shadow for decades – begins to scream instead of whisper and asks you to start ACTING LIKE YOURSELF instead of whatever it is you’ve been pretending to be.

It often starts slowly and creeps into your conscious awareness over time:

You feel the dull ache of discontent with yourself and the life you’ve build but you keep suppressing it hoping you can just maintain the status quo and nobody will notice.

You scroll more. Drink more. Work more. You try to buy your way out of the discomfort by buying things online that you don’t even need…but none of it works. In fact, the more you resist, the more vehemently the shadow self re-emerges and the harder it hits (because sometimes self-destruction is self-resurrection).

As the illusion of control begins to collapse, the identity you spent decades curating no longer fits and it begins to feel completely incompatible with who you can no longer deny yourself to be.

The ladder you’ve been climbing is on the wrong wall and so the existential dread starts to set in: you realise time is limited. Life is short. The pain of inauthenticity is no longer tolerable.

That’s the crisis.

But it’s also the invitation back home.

Crisis or Awakening?

The word crisis comes from the Greek krisis, meaning “decision” or “turning point” – that’s exactly what this is:

You’re being invited to decide – to either double down on the performance and risk implosion later or to wake up and start being and acting who you are in your realness.

Waking up means choosing truth over comfort; it means confronting the ways in which you’ve betrayed yourself. It means pulling the shadow parts of yourself – the longings, the disappointments, the grief – back into the light of conscious awareness so that you can start doing something real with them.

It means asking: What do I truly value? And am I living like it matters or just going through the motions?

The men who ignore this invitation usually ‘snap’ in the end as the pressure of being unreal becomes too much and so they have to release the tension by any means necessary:

They leave their wives overnight. Quit their jobs with no plan. Chase younger women. Blow their savings.

Why? Because they’ve suppressed the voice of their real self for so long that when it finally comes out, it does so with vengeance.

As the Old Chinese Proverb says: “Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are” – the more unreal you are under the weight of false expectations and ideas, the bigger the explosion when you release yourself back into relaxation.

It doesn’t have to come to an explosive end, though, as there’s another path: conscious integration and the cultivation of a strategy for putting yourself back on the right path.

Midlife Crisis: From Breakdown to Breakthrough

To move through a midlife crisis consciously, you need to follow three phases – the foundation of any transformational journey (I walk my coaching clients through these stages when we work together and they always get results): Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

Let’s break it down a little:

1. Awareness – Deconstruct the Ego

Start by recognising that much of your current life may be based on an identity you didn’t choose consciously because you’ve been identifying with the mask (ego) and not who you really are.

Look at the areas where you’ve been jumping through hoops to try and please others and perform instead of living in alignment with your own nature and the realness it has gifted you:

Where did you compromise truth for approval? Where did you settle? What are you holding onto that’s actually unreal? What realness is waiting to be expressed?

This stage is confronting because you’ll see your own cowardice and dishonesty but it’s also where your power begins because without facing these blind spots you’ll always be stuck on the same hamster wheel that’s keeping you where you don’t want to be.

2. Acceptance – Integrate the Shadow

The shadow isn’t evil – it’s just hidden so that you can feel safe and ‘acceptable’ in the eyes of the world around you.

It contains the parts of you that were deemed too wild, too passionate, or too ‘irrational’ to fit into the life you ended up constructing for yourself. These parts are both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but they’re the key to your wholeness because they’re all REAL.

Learn to accept them, befriend them, and to give them a seat at the table as you make decisions what to do moving forward.

This might mean grieving; it might mean letting some rage out; it might mean finally admitting that the life you built isn’t the life you want.

Good. That means you’re still alive and have something solid to build on.

3. Action – Trust Yourself and Life

Now it’s time to move – not recklessly or from a sense of panic, but from clarity.

This means that it’s time to pivot back onto your real path by taking calculated risks.

The simplest version of this is as follows:

Build a vision rooted in your real values, break it into goals, and then cultivate the habits that support growth and momentum day-after-day.

Take the actions that are yours and leave the rest to life by trusting that when you start showing up for reality, reality starts showing up for you.

This is where the flow begins and your midlife crisis starts to come to and end.

Chaos Comes Before Order

Make no mistake – this process will disrupt your life but that’s exactly what you want deep down (which is why you’re reading about your midlife crisis in the first place)

This disruption is just part of the process because when your ego shatters, so do the systems it built: your routines, your relationships, even your worldview and the identity it’s built upon.

Chaos in this case isn’t the enemy – it’s the threshold of your REAL life:

The sooner you learn to dance with it, the sooner you reclaim your power and allow your realness to break free of the false order you allowed the ego to create in your life.

Life will not give you back your comfort at this stage but it will offer you purpose and meaning (which is a by-product of having a real purpose).

And meaning is far more satisfying than safety ever was (because it’s way more real).

You Only Get One Life

No matter how long you ignore it, the question will return and keep returning until you give yourself a REAL answer:

What are you going to do with the rest of your life?

Will you stay asleep – numbing yourself with distractions, coping, and playing small – until death starts to creep up on you with a list of regrets?

Or will you wake up – take the risk of being real – and discover what you’re truly made of so you can go to the grave knowing that you learned the truth about things?

Practical Steps: Navigating Your Midlife Awakening

Here’s a roadmap based on everything we discussed in this article to help you move from breakdown to breakthrough:

1. Audit Your Life

  • Ask Yourself: What areas of my life feel fake or forced? Get rid of the ‘fake’ – as much as that’s possible – and focus on the hints of realness that you’ve already tasted.
  • Journal the difference between your current reality and what you truly want and start figuring out what action you need to take to make it happen.

2. Name the Shadow

  • List the parts of yourself you’ve suppressed to fit in: creativity, anger, sensuality, ambition, etc.
  • Explore what it would look like to integrate them healthily and in a way that lets you bring more of your values into your life.

3. Feel Before You Fix

  • Instead of rushing to ‘solve’ or ‘fix’ the crisis, sit with the discomfort and try to figure out what it’s teaching you about yourself and life.
  • Practice breathwork, meditation, or somatic therapy to reconnect with your nervous system so that you can relax and reduce unnecessary tension in your relationship with yourself and life.

4. Craft a Vision

  • What would your life look like if it was rooted in truth, not the need to pretend or where that mask?
  • Use your values as the compass, not the map: in other words, look for ways to bring your values to the forefront in whatever it is that you’re doing. The more your values are brought to light, the more real your life becomes.

5. Take Real Action

  • Break your vision into realistic goals that are aligned with your realness and not the mask.
  • Start small but stay consistent – action is the antidote to F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”) and the more you take small, real actions over time the bigger the results you eventually get.

6. Surround Yourself With Realness

  • Find people who reflect realness, not ego (your or theirs) – don’t hang out with people to fill the void inside yourself but to build something real together.
  • Get support – coaching, brotherhood, mentorship – from those who walk the talk and have gone as deep as you’d like to go yourself.

7. Trust the Process

  • Chaos is part of the transition and is a gift as the process of being shaken shows you what’s real and what’s unreal.
  • Every moment of discomfort is a step toward liberation if you stay rooted in your realness.
A midlife crisis means it's time to let go of the plan and to live life instead.

Conclusion: Midlife Crisis to Midlife Awakening

A midlife crisis is not the end of your story – it’s the moment the story gets interesting because it’s the point where the hero finally looks in the mirror and asks, “Who am I in my realness?”

You’re not your title; you’re not your past; you’re not what the world told you to be. You’re something far more real and it’s time you started living like it.

Your midlife crisis is a reminder that this is the truth and that it’s time to AWAKEN to yourself and life.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to navigate your own midlife crisis through the chaos of awakening and you’re interested in coaching then book a free coaching call with me and I’ll help you find some clarity and direction.

Craving Adventure: Reclaiming Realness in a World of Comfort

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How to Live as an Adventurous Spirit in a Spiritless World

Let’s be honest: a lot of people these days feel like something’s missing.

Sure, their lives are safe, predictable, and secure but deep down, there’s a dull ache that permeates everything they do – a quiet yearning, a craving that they might not always be able to name but that they can definitely feel (on this site, I often call this The Void).

In this article, we’re gong to talk about how this is often a hunger for adventure in a world that’s lost touch with the real human spirit.

Feeling this hunger is no accident – it’s not a midlife crisis, existential crisis, or any other label you might want to give to a crisis:

Instead, it’s the natural result of a life dulled by emotional suppression and social conditioning; when we cave in to shame, guilt, and unresolved trauma and buy into the cultural blueprint of safety at all costs and eventually end up building a life that looks stable but feels hollow.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The cave you fear to enter will give you what you need to stop craving adventure.

Craving Adventure: Table of Contents

The Comfortable Cage

Most people don’t even realise they’ve traded adventure for approval because it happens slowly – in increments, day-after-day over a number of years:

You get the job, you get the house, you follow the rules, and then – at some point – you stop questioning it because you’ve started to identify with it all (i.e. it becomes an extension of your ego and what feels ‘familiar’).

It’s the path of least resistance, and everyone applauds you for walking it.

As the years go by, though – and the spark fades – you start looking back on your youth like it was the “best time of your life”:

Your job doesn’t challenge you. Your relationships don’t inspire you. Your creativity is drying up. You begin to wonder if this is really all life is.

The answer is “no” – there’s definitely more to life than this but – in order to get it – you have to stop lying to yourself. What’s missing isn’t just excitement. It’s realness. You’ve become disconnected from the part of you that thrives on risk, stretch, growth, and meaning – the part that wants life to be an adventure.

Adventure Isn’t Optional – It’s Human

Adventure isn’t about jumping out of planes or quitting your job to live in a van (although it could be if that’s what you want):

At its core, adventure is about riding through uncertainty – it’s about leaning into life instead of only ever attempting to control it to try and make it conform to how you think things should be. It’s about staying open to possibility and being willing to change – not just your circumstances but your self as you surrender to the adventure and let it transform you by showing you what’s unreal and what’s REAL.

Here’s something really important to remember:

The ‘part’ of you that longs for adventure – the wild, risk-taking part – isn’t broken or reckless.

It’s an expression of who you REALLY are that’s been long buried in the shadow self – that part of you that got shamed, silenced, or pushed aside so you could fit in and be ‘acceptable’ in some way.

Until you reclaim it, you’ll keep craving adventure like a thirsty man craves water and your life will never feel like ‘yours’ because it won’t be…it’ll be your life according to whoever you let send you into hiding in the first place.

The Shadow and the Void

The reason you crave adventure is because you feel the Void – the sense that something is missing because you’ve become disconnected from the truth about yourself.

Most people attempt to try and fill this Void with external distractions:

They travel constantly, chase dopamine, sleep around, binge on cacao ceremonies (which, let’s face it, is really just hot chocolate), or spend thousands on spiritual retreats hoping to ‘find’ themselves (when, really, there’s nothing to find because it’s already there).

Some of these things can help temporarily but if they’re driven by ego – by the desire to keep hiding the shadow and to escape rather than integrate – they’re just more noise. When the distractions end, the Void gets louder and that’s when the dark night of the soul begins (when they reach the end of one version of themselves and lose it suddenly as reality crashes back in).

What you’re actually searching for isn’t out there: it’s within.

And the only way to stop feeling empty is to stop being fake – which, in this case, means to start living with more ADVENTURE.

The Real Adventure Is Within

You don’t need to do something wild to feel alive and to bring more adventure into your life – you need to do something real and real often feels like chaos at first because it goes against the script.

Even so, this kind of chaos is sacred because it’s the birthplace of change and growth:

You have to be willing to break the pattern if you want to feel whole again.

That could look like quitting your job but it could also look like telling the truth in a relationship, trying a new class, learning a new skill, or moving your body in ways it’s never moved before.

It could simply mean feeling your emotions instead of suppressing them.

Whatever it means to you, these are all adventures because they all push you beyond the safe and familiar identity of the ego and take you into territory you’ve never really explored before.

Remember this one:

Life doesn’t stop being uncertain just because you try to control it – it just stops being real.

Adventure as a Path to Realness

Your realness isn’t something you ‘find’ out there in the world (because the world is unreal) – it’s something you reclaim by letting go of everything that’s not authentic and aligned with the truth about yourself, the world, and reality..

Adventure is the vehicle that helps you do that:

It stretches you. Tests you. Forces you to adapt.

It exposes your fears and shows you who you really are underneath them and what potential you have to realise away from whatever BS and illusions this fear shows you (because most fear is F.E.A.R: “False Evidence Appearing Real”).

When you start living this way – when you let your natural sense of adventure become your teacher – you begin to feel something sacred stirring inside:

The purpose, joy, vivacity, and wholeness that comes from being REAL.

Practical Ways to Bring More Adventure Into Your Life

Here are some grounded, real-life ways to make your life more adventurous without running off to the jungle or blowing up your whole world overnight:

1. Do At Least One Thing That Scares You Every Week

Not recklessly but intentionally:

This could be anything from public speaking to posting something honest online to going on a solo walk somewhere new.

Adventure is a muscle and the more you train it, the more real your life becomes.

2. Stretch Your Body, Stretch Your Life

Your nervous system is the gateway to realness:

If you’re stuck in comfort, you’re probably stuck in a sympathetic (fight-flight-freeze) loop and so you might need to shake things up a little with cold showers, new movement patterns (like dance, martial arts, or trail walking), or anything else that gets your body into a regulated yet alert state.

In short, the more you learn to stretch your body and equip your nervous system for resilience, the more resilient you’ll be in life and the more of an adventure it will become as you start stretching yourself beyond the comfort zone.

3. Turn The Mundane Into Magic

Travel isn’t the only option you have when it comes to feeling adventurous – all you really need to do is to act like a tourist and try something new or to go ‘sightseeing’ where you already are:

Try something new today like a new café, a different route home, reading book outside your usual genre, or even just asking deeper questions in conversations in order to learn something NEW about the people you already know.

4. Face the Thing You’ve Been Avoiding

Real adventure starts when you stop running from the parts of yourself that you don’t want to look at and when you enter the unknown territory that’s been calling to you:

What conversation, decision, or truth have you been avoiding?

Go there and see what’s waiting for you.

As Joseph Campbell said: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek” (this applies to facing your shadow in general too).

5. Create Something Real

Write. Paint. Build. Speak. Design. Cook.

Use your hands and heart to make something that didn’t exist before – that’s real adventure:

Birthing form out of the formless and ideally learning about yourself and life in the process.

6. Ritualise Challenge

Challenge creates growth so make it a habit.

Monthly goal? Weekly stretch? Daily discomfort practice?

Choose your own adventure but make it intentional and keep it consistent so you keep growing daily and allowing the real you to keep emerging.

Craving Adventure: A Final Thought

If you feel like something is missing from your life, it’s probably is: YOU.

Not the superficial, surface-level you; not the socially acceptable version of you – the real you:

The one who’s unafraid to feel fully alive, to make bold choices, to lean into growth, and to embrace uncertainty as a sacred path to wholeness.

Don’t wait for an adventure to find you when you can live as one.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready for more adventure in your life and you’re interested in coaching then book a free call with me and I’ll help you figure out what your next real action to take is (and keep you accountable for taking it)

How to Find Yourself Without the BS: You Don’t Need to Give Yourself a Self

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Stop finding yourself, start being yourself.

Your Realness isn’t Achieved, It’s Received

Sometimes, in this strange life that we’re all living, we can feel confused and that we need clarity.

This is a totally ‘normal’ part of the human experience because we live in a chaotic universe and we’re order-seeking creatures who – unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it – can’t understand and control everything because we’re not omniscient and omnipotent.

When this confusion and lack of clarity gets a bit too much, though, then we can start to feel lost – like something’s missing, like life is happening around us but not with us.

Maybe you’re floating through your days on autopilot, or worse, sinking deep into the slow dread that you’re playing a character in someone else’s movie in a genre you’re simply not equipped for.

When you start to feel like this, I want you to know that it’s not the existential crisis that it’s often sold as:

Instead, it’s a calling back home to yourself and who you really are – it doesn’t mean that you’ve ‘lost’ anything (because you can’t lose anything real). It just means that you forgot about what was yours.

Here’s the thing that most people miss when they’re in this state:

You’re not supposed to ‘find’ yourself like the real you is a sock behind the washing machine or something – what you’re actually ‘supposed’ to do is to stop bullsh*tting yourself, get real, and become who you already are beneath all the the distraction and the noise.

You don’t need to give yourself a self – you just need to get out of the way and let it emerge so a true order can be restored in your life.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

To find yourself you simply need to stop running away and face what's real.

How: To Find Yourself Without the BS: What We Cover in This Article

Why You Feel Lost in the First Place

The idea of “finding yourself” has become a spiritual cliché that allows people to take action that doesn’t really change anything for them but gives them lots of ‘spiritual’ things to do so they can feel superior whilst they do it (in the worst cases it develops into spiritual narcissism and bypassing).

It’s sold in Instagram memes and wellness retreats alike: people spend days in the woods howling with each other and fingering their belly buttons; they gaze at the moon and lament; they bathe in sound to open up their ass chakras and they drink hot chocolate whilst sitting in circle and calling it “cacao”.

Not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with these things – in fact, they can be good if not even great things if seen in the right context. Unfortunately, they’re never going to be that ULTIMATE thing that finally gives you whatever it is that you think you’re looking for on that quest to find yourself.

You’ll still need one more course. You’ll still need one more book. You’ll still need one more cup of cacao (sorry, hot chocolate).

And on and on it goes.

Beneath all of fluff lies something much more real:

When you feel lost, it’s not because you’re broken – it’s simply because you’re disconnected from the truth about yourself, the world, and reality. From your realness.

This feeling – the aching sense that something is off and that you need to recalibrate and reconfigure in some way – is feedback from deep within:

It’s your nervous system and shadow self whispering (or screaming, the longer you leave it “this isn’t it”.

You’re not on the wrong path because you’re weak or lazy or ungrateful – you’re just out of alignment with what’s already right for you and real.

This is almost always because of:

  • Shame: Some part of you thinks you’re not ‘good’ enough to live according to what you know is true and so you feel increasingly bad about yourself.
  • Guilt: You feel like living authentically would let someone else down and that you’re somehow responsible for their emotional regulation (even though you’re not hurting them in any way, shape, or form) and so you feel bad about your real goals.
  • Trauma: Something happened that taught you the world isn’t safe and so you stopped trusting yourself and life.

When you have all this emotional ‘stuff’ going on beneath the surface you send your realness into hiding and start to wear a mask in order to cope with the pain.

Unfortunately, as time goes by, you forget that you’re wearing a mask and fail to realise that the life you build whilst wearing it – maybe even a successful one – it just a performance as you play a character within the dream world of the Void.

It works until it doesn’t – eventually, you can’t ignore the void inside anymore because what goes up must come down and you find yourself back at square one.

That’s when you start to feel like you need to find yourself.

Feeling the Void — and Misunderstanding It

When people feel disconnected, they usually feel The Void:

Normally, when I’m talking about it (on this site or in my books – mainly Trust) the Void is that empty, echoing sense that something’s missing from your life – the restlessness that won’t go away or the itch that can’t be scratched.

What’s important to note is something is missing – your capacity to face yourself in your realness and to accept life as it is in truth.

When we feel the presence of the Void like this, it’s not a sign of brokenness – it’s a just a signal: feedback from reality that something needs to change because we’re disconnected from truth, from the natural drive towards wholeness.

In other words, you’re being nudged – or course corrected – by life to realign with yourself and life.

Most people mistake this ‘nudge’ for a lack of identity so they go searching in an attempt to fill the Void with some new idea about themselves that they think will help to dissolve the shame that caused the void in the first place.

They sign up for ayahuasca retreats in the jungle; they drink ceremonial cacao (sorry, again – hot chocolate) and sleep with new lovers every full moon.

They pack a bag and travel the world hoping to find themselves somewhere (though, wherever you go, there you are).

And, again: there’s nothing inherently wrong with those things – they can be catalysts.

But on their own? Without understanding the deeper problem?

They’re distractions. Band-aids on a spiritual bullet wound.

Because, at the end of the day, truth is simple:

You don’t find yourself by escaping yourself; you see yourself by facing yourself.

The Myth of “Creating” an Identity

Another common trap is trying to create a new identity from scratch:

When people feel lost, they often try to invent a version of themselves that seems shinier, more spiritual, more socially acceptable – they become the ‘entrepreneur’ the ‘coach’ (*cough*), the ‘healer’, the ‘rebel’, or anything else that helps them to self-inflate and compensate for that unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ and the unreal secret thoughts it makes them harbour about themselves.

This might give a short-term self-esteem boost but -unless an identity is rooted in something REAL – your actual core values, your creative spark, your true intentions and goals – it’s just another ego mask that keeps you exactly where you don’t want to be: in the Void.

It might look good on paper but it still won’t feel right – you’ll know you’re faking it and the Void will persist because you’re only working at the level of the symptoms and not the fundamental problem itself (that disconnection from truth).

You don’t need to give yourself a self – you need to get real about the one that’s already inside, waiting to come through.

The ‘hard’ part is letting go of all the illusions that tell you this isn’t true.

What’s Actually Happening When You Want to Find Yourself: The Shadow Dance

Most people who feel lost are caught in what I call the Shadow Dance – the battle between the ego and the shadow self.

There’s a longer post on this site here (or read my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World) but here’s the abridged version of how it works:

  1. You’re born WHOLE until you inevitably experience pain or confusion at some point in life.
  2. To cope, you suppress aspects of your real self – your emotions, your desires, your creativity, your truth.
  3. The ego steps in to protect you and builds an identity to help you survive in the world. This is good in the short-term but it also means you’re now FRAGMENTED and split from your realness.
  4. Over time, you forget it’s a mask.
  5. Eventually, the suppressed parts of you start pushing back – this is your shadow self trying to be integrated so you can become whole again.
  6. The pressure builds and builds until you either break down or break through and back into realness.

As soon as you start telling yourself “I feel lost” or “I need to find myself”, it’s a signal that you’re feeling that pressure build up and need to do something about it.

It’s not a bug. It’s the beginning of your breakthrough – if you let it be and take REAL ACTION to uncover it.

Realness Isn’t Found. It’s Uncovered.

Here’s the simplest truth you need to hear:

You’re already who you’re ‘meant‘ to be (but that doesn’t mean you can’t become even ‘more’ of whatever that is).

If you feel like you need to find yourself, then it just means that you’re currently covered in cultural conditioning, trauma, shame, and other people’s expectations.

Finding yourself isn’t about discovering something new. It’s about returning to what’s been hidden – like a statue being carved out of a block of marble, your realness is revealed by chipping away the false layers.

This is a process and it follows three stages (the three stages I use over the duration of a coaching container when working with coaching clients):

  1. Awareness (Deconstruct Ego) – You realise you’re living a life that doesn’t feel fully yours because it’s not real. You start to spot the patterns, illusions, and identities you’ve outgrown.
  2. Acceptance (Integrate Shadow) – You stop resisting the truth and accept the ‘parts’ of yourself and life that you’ve been avoiding (especially the shadow).
  3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life) – You make new choices. Real ones. You start building a life based on truth instead of fear and start trusting yourself to live in a real way.

Practical Steps: How to Actually Find Yourself

If what you’ve read makes sense and you’re feeling lost or like you need to find yourself then here’s how to get real and start becoming who you already are:

1. Slow Down and Regulate Your Nervous System

Before you can even hear your real inner voice, you need to get out of survival mode and the constant threats that this shows you – both internally and externally.

This means slowing down, breathing, and getting in your body:

Breathwork, cold showers, walking in nature, yin yoga – whatever works for you.

When you regulate your nervous system, you allow yourself to move with the truth instead of against it and so your ego is less likely to take over to try and ‘protect’ you from all those ‘threats’.

2. Stop Distracting Yourself

The ego loves distractions because they help you avoid the truth:

Cut the noise with less scrolling, less numbing, and less stimulation.

Make space for silence and stillness as they’re often the doorway to insight (and insight always means that you’ve got a little closer to understanding the truth at some level).

3. Start Testing Your Thoughts

Most of the time, it’s not the world making us feel lost – it’s the stories we’re telling ourselves.

Challenge those stories by testing your assumptions about things:

  • Is this true?
  • Who told me this?
  • What happens when I believe this?

You’ll find that many of your ‘truths’ are actually just interpretations that are inherited or outdated.

When you test your assumptions you can make sure that you actually believe what you think you believe and that your beliefs serve you.

There’s a free tool on this site called the Thought Log that can help you to start managing your thoughts in a more real way: Hamster Wheel Thought Log

4. Name What’s Calling You

There are often clues about who you really are hidden in the shadow self in your longings, your creativity, your jealousy, and your grief so pay attention.

What pulls at you quietly but consistently? Write it down. Speak it out loud.

That’s your shadow trying to return to the light.

There are some shadow work exercises here to help you figure out this kind of ‘stuff’: 100 Shadow Work Exercises: Making the Unconscious Conscious & Growing Real

5. Create a Real Vision

Once you’ve cleared some of the noise, it’s time to get building.

To do this, you need to create a vision for yourself and your life that’s rooted in real values, not your ego’s values.

Ask yourself some basic values-elicitation questions to get started:

  • What kind of person do I want to be?
  • What values do I want to embody?
  • What do I want my daily life to actually feel like?

Then break this vision into goals and break those goals into habits – start small if you’re new to this but build momentum through real action.

This free 7-Day Course can take you deeper into figuring out your vision: 7-Day Personality Transplant for Realness & Life Purpose

6. Risk Being Seen

At the end of the day, you can’t become your real self in hiding or in isolation and so you have to risk actually showing up:

Tell the truth. Share your art. Change direction. Say no. Say yes. Be real.

The more you uncover the truth and keep living and expressing the truth, the more at home you’ll feel in your life.

Go live it.

To find yourself stop hiding from yourself.

Final Thought: You Don’t Need to Find Yourself – You Need to Become Yourself

You don’t need to go on a Himalayan pilgrimage to find yourself; you don’t need to quit your job and move to a commune; you don’t need to invent a new personality that you plucked out of thin air.

You just need to stop avoiding the truth.

The person you’re ‘meant’ to be is already here – buried under the BS.

Finding yourself isn’t about hunting something down or learning something new – it’s about dropping the mask, unlearning the thins that keep you from truth, facing the shadow, and taking real action from a real place.

You don’t need to give yourself a self; you need to be yourself.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and you’d like to figure out how to get in touch with your realness and start taking real action in your life then book a free call with me.

“I’m Wasting My Life”: What To Do When You Feel This Way

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If you feel like "I'm Wasting My Life" then read this...

Feel Like You’re Wasting Your Life? You Probably Are Then

If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking about how you’re wasting your life and the time keeps passing you by then you’re not alone and you’re (probably) not crazy.

Though this “I’m wasting my life” feeling might keep haunting you and driving you mad – especially if you’re not taking real ACTION to do something about it – it’s actually good news that you’re experiencing it because it’s a sign that things are changing for you and this makes it some of the most and helpful self-feedback you’ve had in years.

In other words, it’s a sign that the choices you’ve made so far in life have led you to a place that you no longer want to be.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth that can eventually change your life for the best:

If you feel like you’re wasting your life… you probably are because nobody who’s living their REAL life would ever feel this way or think any of the associated thoughts that the feeling engenders.

Not because you’re lazy or broken or missed some imaginary deadline but because there’s a deeper part of you – your realness – that knows you’re not living in alignment with who you are and what you’re really capable of (your true potential).

When you feel and start thinking along the lines of “I’m wasting my life”, it means that your realness is trying to wake you up and help you to course correct so you can start walking on a real path instead of an unreal one.

This isn’t some passing thought to brush off – this is your soul throwing a brick through the window because you stopped listening to the whispers it was throwing your way in an attempt to bring you back home to yourself and – if you finally start paying attention to it instead of numbing yourself and doing the same old things that got you where you don’t wanna be – you might just change everything.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

If you feel like "I'm wasting my life" then it's time to start using your time differently.

“I’m Wasting my Life”: What We’ll Cover in this Article

“I’m Wasting My Life”: Why You Feel Like This

There are usually two common reasons people end up in this place:

The first is that they’ve had real challenges in life – shame, guilt, trauma, failure, betrayal, burnout – and as a result, they’ve picked up excuses and limiting beliefs just to cope. Over time, these beliefs form an identity (ego) that says, “It’s too late” or “This is just the way I am” or “This is just the way it is” and so you stop growing because you think you can’t (not because it’s actually true – human beings are wired for continuous growth into wholeness over the course of their lifetimes).

The second reason is a bit more subtle but leads to the same place:

You’ve experienced a degree of success in your life – maybe even a lot – but it’s locked you into the comfort zone and so you’ve taken yourself out of the natural flow of life and any sense of personal (r)evolution.

In this state, you’re not truly fulfilled, but you’re comfortable enough that change feels risky (even though, again, change is the natural state of our lives) – you tell yourself you should be grateful, you convince yourself it’s selfish to want more, but something in you knows the truth: you’re just coasting and going through the motions (and, deep down, you hate it which is why you keep feeling like “I’m wasting my life”).

In both cases, what’s actually happening is the same:

You’ve disconnected from your realness – that internal compass that always points toward meaning and wholeness.

You’ve started living through an identity that’s no longer serving you.

And that inner tension – the feeling of wasted time, wasted energy, and wasted self – is the pressure building up as your realness fights to come back online so you can make the most of your life instead of “wasting” it.

Realness as Feedback

The feeling of wasting your life isn’t random or irrational and it definitely shouldn’t be ignored and swept under the carpet:

It’s feedback.

In other words, the mind-body system is working exactly as it should and your body, your emotions, your deeper mind, and very being are all screaming for your attention in unison:

“This isn’t it. Make some changes.”

And what’s not “it” is the version of you that’s trying to live without risk – the version that’s afraid to stretch; the version that’s stuck in outdated beliefs, emotional wounds, or just plain old-fashioned inertia.

Like we already said:

Human beings are wired to grow. We’re not meant to stay still (though, of course, we sometimes need stillness to recalibrate and regulate our nervous systems).

We’re built for endless evolution (because, as long as we’re alive, we’ll be a work in progress) – for stretching, reaching, diving deeper into wholeness.

Whenever this natural process process is blocked, whether by F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”), comfort, shame, or self-deception, you don’t just feel bored – you feel empty because you end up living your life in the Void instead of reality (which really is a waste of life, if you ask me).

This is why the solution is always the same – no matter how you ended up feeling like you’re wasting your life:

You’ve got to start moving again.

Not chaotically. Not in a desperate scramble to ‘fix’ your life but intentionally – in alignment with the truth that’s been trying to break through to you all along.

The Clock Is Ticking

Let’s not tiptoe around it: you’re going to die (don’t feel too bad – so am I):

So is everyone. And we know this – sort of…but most people keep this awareness buried deep in the unconscious because it’s too uncomfortable to face and makes life too difficult in the short-term if we’ve been making unreal choices and don’t want to face it.

We drown this out with distractions, busyness, and overthinking but, at some level, we all know: this is it. We only get one shot at this lifetime.

And this is exactly why the feeling of wasting your life is so powerful:

Because beneath all the ego stories and societal expectations is a simple, timeless truth:

Your life matters. It’s too precious to be wasted. We’re all limited edition (because, like we just said, death is inevitable).

It’s supposed to mean something and when it doesn’t – when you’re not living in a way that expresses the truth of who you are – your body and mind start a revolution against you to try and make you wake up.

You get depressed. You get anxious. You get restless. You feel dead inside.

This is not a malfunction, though – it’s a message.

Start Wasting Your Life by Breaking Your Old Identity

So we’ve explored how we end up feeling like our lives are being wasted and what it means but how do you change it?

Well the answer is pretty simple but not always ‘easy’ to execute (which is why coaches like me exist – to keep you on track):

You have to let go of the identity that brought you here.

You have to confront the ego that built its castle on fear and control; you have to face the shadow self – those parts of yourself you’ve hidden away because they didn’t feel safe, convenient, or ‘acceptable’ according to somebody else’s definition of ‘normal’.

Believe it or not, most people who feel like they’re wasting their lives already know what they want – at least to some basic extent:

They have intuitive nudges, creative ideas, longings, values, and even visions that often show up subtly, in dreams, passing thoughts, or pangs of jealousy when they see someone else living authentically.

Unfortunately, every time they try to bring them into the light, the ego steps in to protect the status quo and so they never act on these things and so that “I’m wasting my life” feeling just keeps haunting them.

The ego keeps our realness at bay by whispering illusions that cause fear, doubt, and hesitation:

  • “It’s too risky”
  • “What if you fail?”
  • “What will people think?”

And so the cycle continues and nothing ever changes:

Familiar patterns get lived out – days, months, years pass and that low-level ache – the one you try to numb – keeps becoming more painful until, eventually, it turns into a crisis.

But it doesn’t have to – you just need to stop wasting your life.

“I’m Wasting My Life” Means It’s Time To Make Changes and Real Change Requires Real Risk

Here’s a paradox:

Living your real life – your actual, truth-aligned life – isn’t about being heroic and taking control of everything…it’s about being humble. It means accepting that your ego doesn’t have all the answers and that growth comes from stepping into the unknown.

Risk is built into realness because dealing with reality always involves uncertainty (which always brings some degree of risk):

This means that to start living your real life and get over that “I’m wasting my life” feeling, then you’ll feel exposed and uncertain.

But you’ll also feel alive as soon as you start taking steps away from the old and towards the REAL because you’ll but realigning yourself with nature and your natural desire to flow with life and to build momentum (instead of being stuck in stasis because of the ego’s illusions).

The bottom line is that as long as you’re in the process of stretching towards something that matters to you, you will not feel like you’re wasting your life. You’ll feel engaged and lit up. Flowing, even.

Even if you’re tired and even if it’s hard.

Human beings are designed to thrive in the stretch zone – that sacred space between the comfort zone (where you feel bored and fed up) and the panic zone (where you’ve gone too far and feel terrified).

That’s where you grow and where you remember what you’re made of.

“I’m Wasting My Life”: You Already Know What to Do

Let’s be honest – there’s probably something you already know you need to do:

A step you’ve been avoiding; a decision you’ve been dancing around; something real ‘thing’ that keeps bubbling up from your shadow that your conscious mind keeps batting away for the sake of safety and familiarity.

You don’t need to know how it all ends (because that’s impossible anyway – you can have a loose idea of what things might look like at the very best but reality will always be slightly different) – you just need to start by taking the next obvious step and then waiting for the next one to appear after you’ve taken it.

Even if it’s one small act of courage, one honest conversation, one hour a day devoted to something real, one whatever – just get it done.

Because the fact is that, the longer you wait, the heavier it gets and nobody is coming to save you. No one else can take the risk for you.

You have to decide: will you keep reliving the old story, or will you start writing a new one?

That decision is the only thing standing between wasting your life and actually LIVING it.

“I’m Wasting My Life”: Practical Steps to Get Moving Again

Here’s a simple framework to help you shift from “I’m wasting my life” to “I’m living with purpose”:

  1. Start Facing The TRUTH About Yourself, The World, and Reality:

    Write down exactly what you’re avoiding in life that’s keeping you stuck and constantly feeling like you’re wasting your precious time. No filters. No edits.

    A prompt that can get you started is: “If I were being radically honest, I’d admit that…” (write in a “stream of consciousness” type way and see where it takes you).
  2. Create a Real Vision

    Imagine your life without fear: What would you do? Who would you let yourself become?

    A good prompt here: “If nothing were off-limits, my life would look like…”

    Create a vision for yourself that’s real instead of one that’s limited by all the assumptions of ego that have led to where you feel like time is being wasted.
  3. Set Stretch Goals

    Choose 1–3 goals related to your vision that scare you a little but excite you a lot.

    These are your stretch goals – big enough to grow you, not so big they paralyse you.

    Commit to them and get them DONE. This will give you evidence that the real you is rising and that you’re not “wasting” your life anymore.
  4. Build Daily Habits

    Anchor your vision and goals in daily actions that will help you to grow real day-by-day – small, consistent steps will carry you further than occasional bursts of inspiration.

    Ask yourself “What can I do today to prove I’m serious?” and then go do it. Daily until you’re where you want to be (or beyond).
  5. Get Accountability and Support to Speed Up Your Progress

    Don’t try to do it all alone (no man is an island, after all) – whether it’s a coach like me, a friend, or a group, let someone witness your commitment and to help you keep stretching yourself. Iron sharpens iron, after all.
It's not too late to stop feeling like "I'm wasting my life" and to rewrite your story.

Wasting Your Life: The Final Word

You don’t need to blow up your whole life overnight but you do need to stop pretending you have unlimited time and to acknowledge that you can only keep “wasting” your life if that’s what you CHOOSE to do at some level.

It doesn’t have to be this way:

You get one precious shot at this lifetime and if you feel like you’re wasting it, then something in you is ready for more. Based on everything we’ve said, the odds are that ‘more’ means something REAL.

So don’t ignore that ache – don’t dismiss the whispers or wait for for permission (that’s never coming) to live your REAL life.

Feel it, accept it as the feedback it is, and then act on it because as soon as you start moving towards something real…you stop wasting your life.

You can do that RIGHT NOW.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and you’re ready to stop wasting your life and grow real then book a free coaching call with me now and I’ll help you start taking the steps that matter to you (it’s an actual coaching call, not a sales call – I will just give you an experience of my coaching, no strings attached, and help you the best I can).

The Calling of the Void: Why Your Darkest Thoughts Might Be Whispering the Truth

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The calling of the void

Your Realness is ALWAYS Calling You Back Home to Wholeness.

You’re walking near a cliff edge and your brain suddenly blurts out “What if you just jumped?”; you’re driving on the motorway and for a split second you imagine swerving into oncoming traffic; you’re standing on a train platform and the thought pops up out of nowhere, “You could just step forward and see what happens“.

Are you losing your mind or are these impulsive and unusual moments just part of the human experience?

Though these moments may seem unsettling, strange, and wildly out-of-character, they’re also incredibly common.

Psychologists have often dubbed them “intrusive thoughts” but there’s another name for this phenomenon that’s much older and a lot more poetic:

The Call of the Void (or, in the original French, L’appel du vide).

In this article we’re going to explore the hypothesis that the call of the void isn’t always just a simple malfunction of the mind and that – more often than not – it’s a message from a ‘part’ of you that’s been silenced for too long.

If you start listening to this message and embracing this ‘part’ of yourself then you can finally grow REAL.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The calling of the void is often just the real you calling you back home.

The Call of the Void: What We Cover in This Article

What Is the Calling of the Void?

The calling of the void describes a sudden, strange impulse to do something risky, dangerous, or outright absurd from the point of view of who you’re currently identifying yourself as being (because of the mask of ‘ego’ that you wear – which we’ll get onto in a second).

The most famous example of the call of the void is when you’re standing in a high place and you feel the call of the void telling you to take a leap (often called “high-place phenomenon”).

This doesn’t mean that the call of the void is always about suicidal urges in the clinical sense, though – it’s more about the bizarre flashes of thought that seem completely disconnected from your day-to-day personality or values but, at the same time, still manage to carry a weird sense of truth or urgency with them (like you need to change your life…NOW!).

In the conventional psychological world, they’re often dismissed as random neurological misfiring or misunderstood anxieties but over here in the world of realness – where truth is about wholeness, not fragmented performance for the sake of conforming – these whispers from the edge can (and do) mean something more.

What the call of the void is really about is very simple:

It’s not trying to end your life – it’s trying to end the current version of your life by shocking you into waking up.

When You’re Living In the Void, You’ll Hear Its Call

It’s important at this point to make a distinction here between “The Call of the Void” and “The Void” itself:

In my writing on this site and in my books, The Void is the sense of disconnection we feel when we’ve built a life on ego-driven assumptions and performance, shame, and self-fragmentation – when we abandon the real in favour of what we think the world wants or what our ego believes is safe and so we drift into a state of restless disconnection from the truth about ourselves, the world, and reality.

It’s numb. It’s noisy. It’s unreal.

When we live our lives out in the void for too long – living what Thoreau called those “lives of quiet desperation” – then a very real part of us – often unconscious – begins to rattle the cage in order to bring some truth back into our lives and to reconnect us to ourselves and the natural drive towards wholeness that would always be unfolding if we didn’t block it mentally and emotionally.

Enter the Call of the Void that we’re focused on in this article:

These moments are like inner earthquakes – not the Big One that flattens the whole city, but those pre-tremors that shake the shelves and make you question your safety. They’re unsettling by design.

Because nothing disrupts ego like the raw, unfiltered invitation to face your Shadow and grow real again.

The Shadow’s Whisper: “Be Real Again”

Carl Jung famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.

The call of the void isn’t your fate but it is your unconscious trying to get your attention and until you give it this attention it will keep directing your life – sometimes in ways that don’t make any ‘sense’ whatsoever to who you think you are at the level of your conscious mind (which, again, we can call ego here for the sake of simplicity).

When we experience these surreal thoughts, it’s often because the identity we’ve crafted – the “character” we believe ourselves to be in the dreamworld of the void – no longer works for us in a way that feels bearable. The tension between the ego (the mask) and the Shadow (the disowned truth) has reached boiling point and so the great Shadow Dance is about to come to a culmination (if we don’t get in the way).

The call of the void isn’t just a bunch of intrusive thoughts because your brain has ‘misfired’ or had some kind of a problem – it’s what happens when your SHADOW SELF is whispering to you from beneath the surface of your life (it’s asking you to let your Shadow Life come to the surface).

It’s whispering to let you know that:

“You’re playing small”

“You’re out of alignment”

“It’s time to finally do something real before it all ends”

Of course, that whisper doesn’t always sound particularly poetic or even nice – in fact, the less you listen to it, the crazier some of things it says might seem and so it will often show up in crude or chaotic ways.

But it’s not the content of the thought that matters – it’s the message underneath it (which is always the same):

You’ve been asleep. Now it’s time to wake up.

The Call of the Void: Self-Destruction as Self-Resurrection

In Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World, we talked about how self-destruction is self-resurrection:

In other words, those moments where we ‘accidentally’ hit rock bottom or end up sabotaging our lives aren’t about bowing up our own lives recklessly but about recognising when something in us needs to die so that something real can take its place.

When we ignore this call for too long – when we suppress the Shadow and cling to outdated versions of ourselves (ego) – life will often do the demolition work for us:

Relationships fall apart. Careers lose meaning. We wake up and realise we’ve built a life that doesn’t even feel like our own.

Just like Carl Jung said up above: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.

The call of the void is the early warning system:

Ignore it, and the Shadow gets louder until you self-destruct and self-resurrect in the aftermath.

Listen to it and your rebirth into realness begins right away.

(But, of course, this doesn’t mean you have to jump off a building or do anything else fatally risky – it means you need to realise that the current version of yourself could probably be a lot more real and take the calculated risks to get there through real action).

The Calling of the Void as a Symptom of Misalignment

The calling of the void isn’t always dramatic or suicidal in tone – sometimes it’s more subtle but still very powerful when it comes to the transformation it can bring:

  • A desire to quit your job that ‘suddenly’ pops up out of nowhere (really it’s been going through the process of seeing the unconscious become conscious).
  • An urge to scream in the middle of a dinner party (because deep down you realised all along that these are not your ‘peeps’).
  • A feeling that something big has to change, or else (because you know down their in the shadows that you’re not being authentic or real with yourself and that we’re all going to be dead one day).

The common denominator in all these cases is that these thoughts are out of character.

But maybe that’s because the character itself is the problem:

When we live lives shaped and motivated by ego – trying to appear strong, successful, desirable, whatever – we suppress the parts of ourselves that don’t ‘fit’ so that we can be ACCEPTABLE to the world without ACCEPTING ourselves.

These suppressed ‘parts’ become Shadow aspects and – even though we may think that they’re hidden behind the mask of ‘character’ – they will try to re-emerge and the more you suppress them, the louder they get. It’s a bit like pushing a beach ball underneath the water only for it to eventually come surging up from beneath the surface.

In this sense, we can say that the calling of the void is not an anomaly, brain misfiring, or anything else that tries to explain away our realness – it’s the natural consequence of misalignment.

In other words, it’s just your system trying to rebalance and put your back on track with that natural drive towards wholeness.

Why Anxious People Hear the Call More Often

If you’re an “anxious person” you might have found that you experience the call of the void quite often -probably more than most people do (which may be why you’re even reading this article in the first place).

You’re not imagining this – it’s actually something that studies have verified:

For example, a 2012 study from Florida State University found that people with high anxiety sensitivity reported more frequent “high place phenomena” (those impulses to jump from heights, even when they had no suicidal intent).

Why?

Because anxiety pulls us out of the body and into the mind – into interpretations and identity rather than truth and realness. This aligns with everything we’ve said about the Shadow Dance between the ego and the shadow because, the more we live in the mind, the more fragmented we become and the more our Shadow self needs to intervene to course-correct.

In a very real way, anxiety is a by-product of disconnection from realness and the constant friction that this brings because of the negative feedback we keep getting from reality when we filter everything through the ego (which is unreal) yet still try to cling to it.

The call of the void is the Shadow’s way of trying to bring us back home to the present where the natural drive towards wholeness keeps unfolding, real life keeps flowing, and – most importantly – we feel safe, regulated (at the level of the nervous system), and connected.

So… What Do You Do About The Call of The Void?

Here’s the part where we get practical because this article isn’t just about glorifying chaos (although chaos can be pretty cool sometimes) – it’s about understanding the signal that the call of the void asks us to tap into and using it to grow real.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Don’t Panic. You’re Not Broken.

Almost everyone hears the call of the void at some point in their lives. It doesn’t mean you’re suicidal or mentally ill or even just plain-ol’ broken. Instead, it’s often a sign of deeper awareness trying to break through the noise and wake you back up to your REAL life.

2. Ask: What Part of Me Is Dying to Be Seen?

Instead of obsessing over the content of the thoughts that the call of the void brings, explore the context of your life a the time it happens: What in your life feels out of alignment? Where are you performing or pretending? What feels fake or forced? What is emerging that would allow you to be more real if you acted on it?

3. Take Calculated Risks

No, this doesn’t mean swerving into traffic or jumping off that bridge – but it does mean mixing things up:

Start a new project or finally finish that novel. Tell the truth to the people that need it but that you’ve been keeping it from. Change your routine. Get out of your comfort zone.

There’s a reason the void calls you toward risk and it’s because your life has gotten too safe, too small, too controlled, and too unreal.

That’s not how we’re made to live and it’s why you probably feel like you’re in the Void and so the call of the void (really, the call of TRUTH) is calling you back home.

4. Ground Yourself in the Body

Most of these “call of the void” thoughts are exacerbated when we’re overly cerebral and caught up in our head about things.

Come back to your breath, your sensations, and the body’s natural rhythms by trying to regulate your nervous system (so you’re not stuck in fight-or-flight which keeps us in the void and disconnected from truth).

Try grounding exercises, cold exposure, or breathwork, for example – anything that shifts you out of your head and into reality.

5. Do Shadow Work

Journal about your intrusive thoughts and look for patterns:

What values or ideas do they threaten? Who would you be if you acted on them (in metaphor, not literally)?

Often, these thoughts point directly to the parts of you that are longing to be integrated and that you have psychological barriers to facing.

The calling of the void is showing you that your not living your own life.

The Calling of the Void: The Final Truth

The calling of the void doesn’t mean you’re crazy – it means you’re being called back home to yourself and life and if you take the (metaphorical) leap by taking a risk on yourself then you’ll be rewarded with your real life.

Let’s be honest, in a world that rewards numbness and surface-level success, feeling anything real can be terrifying but it’s also the only way forward because when we start listening to the parts of us we’ve banished, we begin to live lives of substance rather than performance and the empty restlessness of the void.

The next time the void calls, don’t flinch – listen. Not to the command but to the cry beneath it.
Because the truth isn’t trying to destroy you.

It’s trying to set you free (although it might p*ss you off and make you miserable in the short-term as you battle to let go of your illusions in the face of it).

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start working on yourself and growing real then book a free coaching session with me to start moving forward right away.

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

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Repeating patterns in relationships.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s exactly what this article is about.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

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

Repeating Patterns: What We Cover in This Article

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

Your relationships are the curriculum.

The Ego vs. the Exiled Shadow Self

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

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

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

The cost is our REALNESS:

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

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

Why You Keep Repeating Patterns and Getting the Same Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repeating Patterns Have Purpose

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

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

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

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

Shadow Work Based on Past Relationships

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

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

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

Get started by asking yourself some questions to raise AWARENESS:

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

Then go deeper into a sense of ACCEPTANCE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Etc. Etc. Etc.

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

Becoming Real and Overcoming Repeating Patterns Always Means Integrating the Shadow

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

It’s about:

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

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

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

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

This simply isn’t true:

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

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

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

That’s what healing and wholeness feels like.

Real Change and Releasing Repeating Patterns Requires Real Action

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

1. Journal Your Patterns

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

2. Identify the Mirror

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

3. Name the Wound

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

4. Practice Shadow Integration

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

5. Choose Differently

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

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

6. Seek Support

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

Repeating patterns are a minor case of insanity.

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s when real love finds you.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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

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

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Trigger work and reverse engineering triggers

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

Let’s dig a little deeper:

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

What We’ll Cover in this Article

The Hidden Reservoir Inside You (Yes, You)

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

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

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

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

Pressure Doesn’t Create, It Reveals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s have a quick look:

Trigger Work: Reverse Engineering Your Reactions and Growing Real

Step 1: Awareness – Catching the Leak

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2: Acceptance – Owning the Reservoir

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

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

The brutal truth to remember is as follows:

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

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

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

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

Step 3: Action – Transmute the Energy

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

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

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

If it’s anger:

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

If it’s sadness:

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

If it’s shame:

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

If it’s fear:

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

If it’s guilt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practical Steps to Start Using Trigger Work Today

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

1. Pause, Breathe, and Observe

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

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

2. Name It to Tame It

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

3. Track It in the Body

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

4. Ask: What Does This Remind Me Of?

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

5. Accept That It’s Yours

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

6. Channel the Lesson

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

7. Take REAL Action

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

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

8. Rinse and Repeat

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

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

Final Word- Trigger Work: Your Pain is a Portal

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

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

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

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

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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

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

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Heartset versus mindset

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

For years, everybody has been talking about mindset:

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

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

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

Mindset is a tool but Heartset is the source.

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

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

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

Let’s dig a little deeper:

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

Table of Contents

Mindset is a Tool, Not the Master

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the truth, though:

Nothing real can come from the mind alone.

Why?

Because the mind deals in fragments but reality is whole:

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

It can model the future but it cannot live it.

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

The mind is downstream of truth.

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

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

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

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

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

This is why so many high-achievers burn out:

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

Let’s use a quick metaphor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s look at how you can do it:

7 heartset qualities

Qualities of a Real Heartset

So what is Heartset made of?

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

Here are some of the key ones:

1. Openness

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

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

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

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

2. Curiosity

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

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

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

3. Love

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

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

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

4. Creativity

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

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

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

5. Trust

Trust is the heartbeat of Heartset:

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

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

It’s how you grow and stay real.

6. Compassion

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

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

7. Abundance

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

Where scarcity shrinks you, abundance allows you to expand.

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

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

Avoiding the Void

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Develop Your Heartset (Practical Tools)

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

Here’s how to start tending to yours:

1. Daily Stillness Practice

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

2. Heart-Check Journalling

Each morning or evening, ask yourself:

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

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

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

3. Act from Wholeness, Not Fragmentation

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

4. Use the ‘REALNESS’ Lens

Before taking any major action, reflect:

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

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

5. Surround Yourself with Real Ones

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

6. Stretch Your Trust Muscle

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

7. Return to the Lake Daily

No matter how messy your day, always come home:

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

You are not the ripples. You never were.

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

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

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

Mindset is useful, but Heartset is essential.

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

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

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

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

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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

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

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A simple daily practice

A Consistent Daily Practice Leads to a Real Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your daily practice is about growing consistently more real.

Why a Daily Practice Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the REALNESS Basic Daily Practice?

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

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

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

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

The Practice: Choose-Your-Own-REALNESS

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

Choose whichever version suits your energy and needs:

Part 1: Breathe (3–5 minutes)

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

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

Daily Practice Options:

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

Why this daily practice helps you stay real:

Breath is essentially your remote control for the nervous system:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions to reflect on (choose 1–3):

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

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

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

Why it works:

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

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

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

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

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

These journal prompts will get you started:

Choose one prompt per day:

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

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

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

Why it works:

This is shadow work in motion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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

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