by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
You Don’t Have Commitment Issues – You Have Reality Issues
Commitment has a pretty bad reputation which is why the people often talk about it as though it’s some Herculean task that only the super-disciplined or the super-delusional can pull off.
Indeed, for many people, the very idea of ‘committing’ to a job, a relationship, a creative project, a daily practice, or even just some vague kind of long-term vision comes with a mixture of both excitement and dread:
The excitement is always obvious at the beginning because whatever ‘thing’ it is that they’re about to commit to looks shiny and new and they’ve no doubt convinced themselves that they’ve finally found the thing that changes everything once and for all.
It looks like it might give you what you want, make you who you want to be, or at least distract you from the internal noise long enough for you to feel like you’re finally making progress in life.
And then, as it always does, something happens…
The energy dips, the enthusiasm cracks, and the initial momentum that felt unstoppable suddenly feels very stoppable indeed and so the very thing you swore you were ‘committed’ to starts to feel heavy, pointless, or impossibly distant.
You “fall off”; you “lose steam”; you stop doing the ‘thing’ once and for all and create an elaborate justification for why it wasn’t the right time, or the right path, or the right situation.
In moments like these, people tend to conclude that they have a “commitment problem” or “commitment issues” and – on the surface, at least – that definitely seems true.
But if we look beneath the surface – beneath the bad habits, beneath the excuses, and beneath the cycles of self-sabotage – we find that the problem was never commitment…nor was it motivation, discipline, or even laziness despite what many people like to tell themselves.
The real problem is far simpler but also a bit deeper:
People struggle to commit because they haven’t committed to anything real.
And if it isn’t real, commitment isn’t just hard – it’s impossible.
This article will help you to understand where your “commitment issues” really come from so you can move on from them once and for all and start living your actual, real life.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Commitment Issues: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- You Don’t Have Commitment Issues – You Have Reality Issues
- You Will Always Commit to Something REAL
- Two Reasons People Fail to Commit (Both Caused by One Deeper Problem)
- The Fundamental Problem: They Haven’t Committed to Themselves First
- It’s Not a Commitment Problem – It’s a REALNESS Problem
- Why Commitment Eventually Becomes Effortless When It’s Real
- So What Happens If You Realise You’re Not Actually Committed to Something?
- How to Start Committing to Realness (Awareness → Acceptance → Action)
- 1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego
- 2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow
- 3. Action: Trust Yourself and Life
- Commitment Issues: The Final Word
You Will Always Commit to Something REAL
This may sound dramatic, but once you look at the mechanics of commitment through the lens of REALNESS – your natural drive towards deeper wholeness and your connection to truth rather than the ego’s scripts and fragmentation- it becomes obvious what’s going on:
What most people call a “commitment issue” is actually a reality issue.
What this means is that they’re trying to force themselves to commit to something that doesn’t come from truth, doesn’t reflect their wholeness, and doesn’t grow out of who they actually are.
In other words, they’re trying to commit to something that has nothing to do with their realness and so they’re they’re trying to commit from the outside-in rather than the inside-out (which literally never works in a sustainable way).
Let’s break down the two most common causes of “commitment issues” both of which stem from the same underlying problem: a disconnection from one’s own realness:
Two Reasons People Fail to Commit (Both Caused by One Deeper Problem)
1. Their conscious desires and unconscious intentions are at war.
On the surface, someone may swear they want the job, the relationship, the routine, the project, the ‘success‘ or [whatever else it is that people want] and they might actually even mean it.
What’s going on in this case is that their conscious mind has built a story about why this thing matters and how it will change their life and so they turned it into a desire.
Unfortunately, beneath the surface, their unconscious mind is playing an entirely different game and setting intentions that overwhelm the conscious desires:
If there is unhealed shame, unresolved fragmentation, or distorted beliefs about what’s ‘safe’ or not (because of the way the nervous system is regulated or not), then the unconscious intention will always override the conscious desire. Always.
This is what people describe usually describe as “self-sabotage” but sabotage is simply the unconscious trying to protect the person from confronting the truth they’ve been running from (because they’re caught up in the Shadow Dance between the ego and the shadow self).
In short, if your unconscious mind believes that stepping into something real will expose you, challenge you, or force you to give up a false identity of ego that you’re attached to, then the unconscious will kill your commitment long before the finish line.
It’s not personal – it’s simply the mechanical result of fragmentation.
2. They are attempting to commit to something unreal.
This second “commitment issue” is far more common than anyone wants to admit.
Basically, when someone is disconnected from their realness – from wholeness, from truth, and the deeper ground of being – they will chase things that look like solutions to the Void that they’re living in:
They’ll chase careers that give them status, relationships that soothe insecurity, creative projects that promise validation, lifestyle changes that will finally ‘fix’ them, and goals that exist only to patch over shame.
These are unreal goals are built on ego rather than real essence and always come from fragmentation over wholeness. They’re based on the ego’s illusion that something “out there” will complete something “missing in here” and fill the Void once and for all (even though the only thing that can is the return to truth instead of being disconnected from it because of shame, guilt, and/or trauma).
Because the foundation is unreal in cases like these then commitment simply can’t take root:
The person thinks they have a “commitment problem” but they’re simply trying to put a round peg in a square hole and attempting to force reality to bend around an unreal idea of who they should be (ego, the opposite of reality).
Unreal things always fall apart because they were never real enough to hold together.
Which brings us to the heart of all of this…
The Fundamental Problem: They Haven’t Committed to Themselves First
By “themselves”, I don’t mean their personality, preferences, or personal narrative – that’s all ego.
What I mean is their REALNESS – their wholeness, the part of them connected to truth, the part untouched by shame, and the part that naturally flows into even deeper wholeness when ego gets out of the way.
If someone hasn’t committed to this real relationships with themselves and life first, then every external commitment becomes an act of force and they end up trying to discipline themselves into alignment rather than living from alignment.
When you’re not committed to your realness, you live through fragmentation, and fragmentation turns every goal into a desperate attempt to fill the Void rather than an expression of your natural growth.
In this fragmented state, commitment is always fuelled by fear:
Fear of failure, fear of inadequacy, and fear of not being enough – but fear can’t sustain anything real, it can only sustain more fear.
When we reconnect with our realness and commit to truth instead of ego, then we stop trying to fill the Void and start living from fullness instead:
We stop chasing outcomes to escape shame and start taking real action that express who we already are as well as who we’re becoming.
The bottom line is that when an action expresses the truth of who you are, you don’t need ‘commitment’ – you simply do it because it would be harder not to and to choose unreality instead.
When something is real, commitment is automatic…you don’t have to force a tree to grow – you only have to stop choking its roots.
It’s Not a Commitment Problem – It’s a REALNESS Problem
The ‘good’ news is that people don’t “lack commitment” – they lack inner connection to truth and a foundation of acceptance (because the only thing you can accept is the truth).
They also lack the self-trust and life-trust that come from living as a whole being rather than a fragmented one.
This is why so many people run out of steam when pursuing a goal:
They’re using willpower – which always runs out – to drag their unreal idea of themselves towards an unreal idea of what their life should look like.
In other words, they’re disconnected from themselves and so their actions become mechanical, transactional, and unsustainable.
The way forward is not to force more discipline or create an even stricter routine (which is what most people commonly try).
The way forward is to return to realness.
Why Commitment Eventually Becomes Effortless When It’s Real
When you commit to your realness first, you don’t choose goals based on fantasy, fear, or ego – you choose them based on truth.
This means that you don’t push yourself through life and attempt to force everything – instead, you move through it as part of the flow:
You don’t run towards something hoping it will ‘fix’ the void – instead, you grow into something even more real because it’s the natural next expression of your wholeness.
When you understand this, commitment stops being about grit and becomes about congruence instead:
The beautiful truth is that – when you’re aligned with what is real for you – the idea of ‘committing’ barely even comes into it.
You don’t wake up and wonder if you’re committed to breathing – you breathe because that is simply what life does when it’s not being distorted by resistance.
The same applies to any path, goal, or relationship that grows out of truth and so it becomes a living thing, not a forced obligation.
This is why the most important commitment you can always make is the commitment to your realness – the commitment to coming home to wholeness, again and again, until the ego’s distortions dissolve and the path becomes clear.
So What Happens If You Realise You’re Not Actually Committed to Something?
If you realise that you’re struggling with ‘commitment’ then what it means is that you need to stop trying to force commitment.
This is often the most liberating part of the process because when you see clearly that you’re not committed to something because it’s not real for you, then you can let go of the self-punishment narrative and stop trying to bully yourself into a path that has nothing to do with your real life.
Instead, you can redirect that energy into exploring what is real.
Another part of the puzzle is accepting that when you’re not committed to something doesn’t make it a failure – it just means that you’re finally being honest with yourself again.
This is the first step back to alignment and your way of taking the round peg out of the square hole and admitting that perhaps the problem wasn’t you but the hole you were trying to force yourself into (because of underlying shame and social programming usually).
Once you’ve started to see all this then you can start giving yourself time to move differently through your life:
How to Start Committing to Realness (Awareness → Acceptance → Action)
Real commitment grows from the inside out and the process of finding it again always comes down to the transformational arc I use with my coaching clients:
Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.
These stages aren’t linear in a rigid sense; they’re a spiral that you can go deeper and deeper into each time you take a ride through the stages.
Together, they rebuild the capacity to commit to life in a real way.
1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego
Awareness begins with seeing what’s true about your current situation without judgement or distortion.
You can start by asking yourself:
- What am I trying to commit to and why?
- Is this goal or relationship or path an expression of my realness or an attempt to ‘fix’ something inside myself and fill the Void?
- What unconscious intentions might be driving my behaviour?
- Where am I trying to force commitment to something that doesn’t fit (a square peg in a round hole)?
Awareness is about revealing the ego’s scripts and all the stories of “I should”, “I must”, “I need to prove”, and “this will finally ‘complete’ me”.
Once these scripts are seen for what they are, they begin to lose their power and you’ll see that you can only commit to what’s real when you first see what’s unreal.
2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow
Once the ego’s distortions are visible, the next step is to accept the parts of yourself you’ve been rejecting or running from which are collectively called the Shadow Self:
This includes ‘bad’ things like shame, fear, unhealed wounds, and unmet needs, but also ‘good’ things like your hidden strengths, goals, and capacity to trust yourself and life.
Accepting ‘good’ and ‘bad’ makes them REAL which means you can start to do something with them instead of being driven by them without even knowing.
Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation – it means acknowledging the truth of your inner landscape with compassion so that you can have a solid foundation on which to build yourself and your life.
Start by asking yourself:
- What am I afraid will happen if I commit to something real?
- What part of me is trying to sabotage my progress and what does it need?
- What shame am I carrying that keeps me chasing unreal goals?
Integration is the dissolving of resistance and it’s the process that allows your unconscious intentions to align with your conscious desires. Without this alignment, no amount of discipline will help and you’ll never be able to ‘commit’ in a sustainable way.
Read my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to go deeper into finding your realness and overcoming the Void.
3. Action: Trust Yourself and Life
Once you’ve aligned internally, real action becomes possible:
Not forced action. Not ego-driven action. REAL action.
This stage is about creating a Vision, setting Goals, and establishing Habits that reflect your realness instead of your fragmentation.
When you do this, your actions become an expression of who you’re becoming – not who you’re trying to pretend to be.
At the end of the day, real action is grounded in trust – trust in yourself, trust in life, and trust in the flow that naturally emerges when you stop trying to control everything from ego.
When action comes from truth like this, then momentum builds organically and you don’t need to push yourself towards ‘commitment’ because you’re being pulled by reality itself.
Commitment Issues: The Final Word
People don’t fail because they’re “not committed enough” but because they’re trying to commit to things that aren’t real and using a fragmented sense of self (ego) that isn’t aligned with truth to filter real life instead of actually living it.
When you commit to your realness first, everything shifts:
You stop chasing, you stop forcing. you stop acting from shame, and you start flowing with life rather than fighting against it.
From this place of realness, commitment is effortless (though you might have to put some effort into growing real before you get there) and so commitment stops being something you try to do and becomes something that naturally happens as a by-product of living in alignment with who you really are.
Your realness creates more commitment and so it doesn’t ask you to force yourself – it simply asks you to return to what’s true.
Once you do that, you’ll realise that you were never “bad at commitment” – you were simply committed to the unreal things because you weren’t yet committed to your realness.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to commit to your realness instead of forcing yourself into unreality then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start taking real action.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
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