𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐯𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐛𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐠𝐨, 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐝𝐨𝐰 𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞.
𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐆𝐑𝐎𝐖 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐋 𝐛𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐛𝐲 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬.
In this solo episode, we delve into the final step of the transformational process: Action.
Building on previous discussions about Awareness and Acceptance, we examine how taking inspired action can lead to meaningful change and a more authentic life.
𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧:Discover how raising Awareness and cultivating Acceptance can lead to inspired action that stems from a place of wholeness.
This will help you to ensure your actions are not driven by fragmented parts of your ego but by a real connection to yourself.
𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐯𝐬. 𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠: Learn about the difference between forcing life and flowing with it. We discuss how to achieve a state of flow by trusting yourself and life, and how to avoid the stress and friction that come from trying to control everything.
𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬: Understand why initial effort is necessary to overcome old habits and outdated ways of thinking. The episode emphasises the importance of discipline and consistency in creating new habits that align with your true self, leading to an effortless flow state.
𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬: 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧
Join us in this episode as we explore the power of real action in transforming your life. This episode is a call to take inspired, flowing, and ultimately effortless action towards becoming the most authentic version of yourself.
Check it out on any podcast player or go to:
Stay real out there,
Oli
#94: Oli Anderson: Real Action & The Flow of Transformation (Show Transcript)
This podcast is about tapping into your creativity to become more real
Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status, a podcast about tapping into your creativity and using it as a vehicle for becoming more real. Ultimately, if you’re new to the podcast, what we explore here are the universal truths that are the building blocks of the human experience. These truths can be tapped into and utilized to live the most authentic lives possible. Being real ultimately means connecting to ourselves, others, and life itself.
This is the third episode in a series of solo episodes I’ll be doing every other week, focusing on the underlying transformational process that we all need to tap into if we want to change anything in our lives. This process is what I use in my coaching practice and is the foundation of the podcast itself. Traditionally, it consists of three steps: awareness, acceptance, and action.
Awareness is ultimately about deconstructing the ego and examining how it blocks your awareness of the truth about life. This blockage occurs due to old conditioning, limiting beliefs, and assumptions that you’ve picked up and internalized, which aren’t necessarily true but dictate your behaviors. The more aware you become of these factors, the better you can understand the gap between who you really are and who you think you are. So, the first step is awareness, which I covered in the first of these solo episodes.
The second step is acceptance, which involves allowing the shadow self to reemerge and reappear in our lives. At the start of these transformational journeys, we often filter life through a false identity that we call the ego. This results in disowning and suppressing various parts of ourselves because the ego is often a response to underlying shame, guilt, and trauma. When we aren’t ready to face these emotions, we feel ashamed of who we are and hide behind the mask of the ego. Over time, we wear this mask so much that we think it’s who we are.
When we begin to raise our awareness and return to the path of truth and realness, the hidden parts of ourselves inevitably reemerge from the shadow self. This includes our hidden goals, intentions, values, and real beliefs, some of which we may not have been ready to face, such as the inevitability of death and the necessity of using the law of cause and effect to achieve our goals.
These two steps, awareness and acceptance, are crucial. If you don’t go through the process of raising awareness and cultivating self-acceptance, any goals you set or attempts to build your life will simply reflect the unreal relationship you have with yourself at the start of your transformational journey. This results in a case of “unreal in, unreal out.” In other words, if you input something unreal into your life—such as false assumptions and a distorted relationship with yourself—you will get something unreal out, leading to an existential void. You’ll feel an itch you need to scratch but won’t know how to because of inner dissociation and disconnection from your true self. Therefore, awareness and acceptance are essential steps before you start taking action.
Action is ultimately the only thing that will change your life
And action is what we’re going to focus on in this short episode today because action is ultimately the only thing that will change your life. If you want to transform or improve your life, action is what will take you there.
There are three main takeaways I want to give you in this episode. The first is that when you go through the process of raising awareness and cultivating acceptance, the action you take is more likely to be inspired action. Inspired action comes from a place of wholeness or realness. Before we raise awareness and cultivate acceptance, we experience more fragmentation within ourselves. Our relationship with ourselves is fragmented because we’re holding on to various concepts and the image of the ego we’ve created to protect ourselves from underlying emotions.
Long story short, this leads to us feeling fragmented, which is why most of the time, when people want to change their lives and embark on transformational paths, they feel that void—something needs to change. Most people who come to me for coaching have reached a breaking point. They’re at a stage where they think, “Something has to change in my life. I need help. I need to figure out what to do.” They’re feeling that void and typically going through the motions of the famous, often overused quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.”
People keep taking action based on what their ego tells them to do, which only exacerbates and prolongs the problem. This is why raising awareness and cultivating acceptance are necessary steps before taking action.
First takeaway is that inspired action comes from a place of wholeness
So, the first takeaway is about inspired action coming from a place of wholeness. Next, I want to talk about the difference between forcing and flowing. In the earlier stages of these transformational journeys, the reason we’re not getting the results we want or feeling the way we want is often because we’re forcing life through the actions we take. We try to conform to the identity we’ve created due to that lack of awareness. When we live from that place in the early stages, we constantly stress ourselves out, adding friction, frustration, and misery that we don’t need or deserve. This happens because we can’t let go, surrender, and realize that even when we take action, we’re not totally in control of everything.
The realist approach is to avoid forcing things and instead reach a point of flow. This ultimately comes down to knowing that we can do our best and accept the rest. It’s about learning to trust ourselves to do what we need to do and trusting life to fill in the blanks when things out of our control have to be left to fate, destiny, the world, or even just time passing by until the next opportunity arises, and then we can trust ourselves to seize it. So, I want to discuss the concept of forcing versus flowing.
Finally, I want to talk about how, even though the ultimate goal is to get into a flow state where we navigate life by responding to events based on our vision and where we want to go, it does take effort until that becomes effortless. It will require a bit of force until we reach that flow point. In those early stages, when we’re fragmented, we have to force ourselves to overcome outdated ways of thinking. We must force ourselves to change habitual ways of identifying with the ego, which is ultimately a habit. We need to bring new habits into our lives that will allow us to let go of the structures that are holding us back.
Ultimately, what we’re going to talk about is how inspired action comes from a place of wholeness. However, to get to that place of wholeness, we must take actions that go against how we’re used to identifying, which will feel forceful at first. But by staying disciplined, consistent, and focused, this will eventually become effortless, allowing us to flow with life and get the results we want.
Before we break down these three takeaways, there is a framework for action that can help you in general, no matter what you’re doing. These takeaways fit within this framework. Whatever you’re trying to do, you can use this framework to achieve good results. I’ve talked about it before, but to summarize, it goes: vision, goals, and habits.
For anything you want to achieve in your life, you need to understand the vision first. To create the vision, be as audacious as possible. Most people hold themselves back from even creating the vision or moving forward because of limited, fragmented beliefs at the start of their transformational journeys. If you filter your vision through all the assumptions and identity issues of that early stage, you’ll ultimately incorporate those flawed assumptions into the vision. Start by asking yourself: what would you want for yourself if there were no limits? What would you do if you had unlimited time and money? Once you’ve created that vision, you can then start to assess its realism. But initially, the important thing is to figure out what you want.
When you’ve got that vision, you can then figure out the goals to take you there. Check out my free course, Personality Transplant, for help in figuring this stuff out at olianderson.co.uk/systemshock. But once you’ve figured out your vision, you then need to determine the goals that will get you there.
The goals are essentially the milestones that will lead you to your vision. For example, if part of your vision is writing a book, one of your goals will be getting it published, another goal will be creating the cover, and so on. You can reverse engineer or work backwards from your vision to set your goals. Once you’ve established your goals, you can then figure out the habits. Habits are the daily actions you need to take to achieve your goals. So, the framework is vision, goals, and habits.
If you design this framework correctly, the daily habits you invest in will compound and produce results. For example, if you’re writing a book, and you write 100 words a day, at the end of every week, you’ll have 700 words. Before you know it, you’ll have a whole book. Because these habits reflect the real vision you’re working towards, every day you’ll be stepping into the person you want to become, rather than being the version of yourself that’s stuck at the start of these transformational journeys, where you’re more fragmented. In other words, if the vision, goals, and habits are real, you’ll become more real every day.
This framework is crucial for understanding how to get results in life and take real, inspired action. Now, we’ll break down these three takeaways, but keep this framework in mind as we go through them. Without the vision, goals, and habits, all the other stuff is redundant because you won’t be moving forward in a consistent way.
We talked about inspired action coming from a place of wholeness
So, with that being said, let’s go over these three takeaways, which I want you to take away from this episode.
The first takeaway is about inspired action coming from a place of wholeness. The second one is about the concept of force versus flow. The third is the transition from effort to effortless, or the kind of “good force” that will tip us over the edge into living in a flowing manner.
Inspired Action
When it comes to inspired action, it ultimately comes down to creating a vision for ourselves. When we are in the process of uncovering that vision, we must ensure that we aren’t filtering it through self-limiting beliefs, the ego, societal conditioning, or outdated ideas from our past, such as what society, our parents, or teachers said we should do. These are all ways of living from the outside in. What we want is a vision that comes from the inside out. There is something within you waiting to be expressed in the world. If you haven’t gone through the process of awareness and acceptance, then that thing will remain hidden in the shadow self, screaming for your attention while you distract yourself from listening to it.
One of the most effective ways to reach a point of inspired action is to initially slow down. If you’re constantly busy and running around, even living a life of quiet desperation, you need to take time out from your current routine, which is based on old, outdated programming. You need to get into your body and out of your head. When we distract ourselves, we’re often coming from a very cerebral, cognitive, and conceptual place. We need to start tapping into our experience.
Force vs. Flow
The second takeaway is about the difference between forcing and flowing. In the earlier stages of transformational journeys, we often force our actions to conform to our created identity due to a lack of awareness. This causes stress, friction, and frustration. The realist approach is to avoid forcing things and instead reach a point of flow. This involves doing our best and accepting the rest, trusting ourselves to take necessary actions while also trusting life to fill in the blanks when things are out of our control.
Effort to Effortless
The third takeaway is about the transition from effort to effortless. Even though the ultimate goal is to reach a flow state where we navigate life by responding to events based on our vision, it does require effort until it becomes effortless. Initially, we must force ourselves to overcome outdated ways of thinking and change habitual ways of identifying with the ego. The ego is a habit, and we need to bring new habits into our lives that will allow us to let go of restrictive structures.
One way to slow down and start tapping into our experience is through practices like Yin yoga. Yin yoga forces you to slow down by holding poses for three to five minutes. This practice helps you get into your body and out of your head, aiding in the process of uncovering your vision and taking inspired action. In a past episode with Vera, we discussed the benefits of Yin yoga, which has been powerful for me personally as it forces me to slow down and connect with myself.
Framework for Action
Remember the framework of vision, goals, and habits. The vision should be audacious and not filtered through limiting beliefs. Once you have the vision, set goals as milestones to achieve it. Then, establish daily habits that will lead you to those goals. If you design this framework correctly, the habits you invest in daily will compound, leading to significant results. For example, writing 100 words a day can eventually lead to a completed book. These habits will help you step into the person you want to become, making you more real every day. Without this framework, moving forward in a consistent way is challenging.
You’re just there with your own experience of yourself. You can’t run away. This brings to mind a quote by Blaise Pascal, or Pascale—I’m not sure of the exact spelling. Anyway, he said that most problems in life would be solved if people could just spend time in solitude or alone in a room. That’s me paraphrasing and probably butchering the quote. Apologies to Blaise, but the point is: if you slow down, you’ll start getting the answers you need. These answers will prompt you in the direction you need to move.
If you’re in the earlier stages of awareness and acceptance, start by examining your identity. Ask yourself why you want certain things to be true, why you want to believe certain things. What are you hiding from yourself? What is trying to emerge from the shadow self? There’s likely some creative goal or aspect of the unconscious trying to become conscious. You can tap into this through journaling, meditation, or even just going for a walk—getting out of your head and into your body. This process will help you understand what your vision for your life looks like.
The trap is thinking the vision is too serious, leading to overthinking. What I’m saying is, don’t overthink it. Connect to yourself and allow your intuition to guide you. Intuition means you’ve connected to wholeness, a real connection to yourself that will show you the way forward. By doing this, you’ll start to sense what your vision is like. Initially, it may be broad and nebulous. When I coach people, we often start with a vague inkling of what’s emerging. That’s all you need from slowing down and finding stillness—a broad, vague picture forming in your mind.
Then, you can bring in the left brain to make it more specific. Starting with stillness and nebulousness gives you something real because you’re drawing it from the universal conscious, or at the very least, the unconscious mind. Making it conscious allows you to do something with it.
You can only achieve this by going through awareness, stepping back from your ego, and acceptance, unconditionally accepting whatever you find. Your true vision might scare you because it’s so different from your current path, influenced by social conditioning and other factors. But you’ll know it’s real because, despite the fear, it will excite and motivate you. You’ll want to make that vision clearer, which is when you bring in the habits and goals.
Keep checking in with yourself to see if you’re forcing life or flowing
Once you’ve reached that point, you can start thinking about the second takeaway from this episode: keep checking in with yourself to see if you’re forcing life or if you’re flowing with it. A caveat here is that in the early stages, a bit of effort will be required. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re forcing things; it means you’re forcing yourself to change the way you relate to yourself and how you interact with life. We’ll get into that in a second, but for now, the second takeaway is simple. We need to keep checking in with ourselves to see if we’re forcing or flowing.
Forcing means constantly feeling stressed and still feeling that void. We may have a real vision for our lives, but we still feel restless and are constantly trying to make things conform to our ways. Are we constantly reacting to life instead of responding to it? It’s ultimately about the energetic state we find ourselves in. Forcing comes down to friction and stress. If you feel too much friction and stress, odds are you’ve entered what is called the panic zone in coaching.
In coaching, there are three levels: the comfort zone, the stretch zone, and the panic zone. The comfort zone is familiar to us all. The stretch zone is where we really flow, where the ego meets reality and we find our edge. In this sweet spot, we feel alive due to a kind of creative tension in our lives instead of unhealthy tension. We meet life on its own terms while still navigating it. The panic zone is where you’ve gone too far beyond your edge, and you start to panic. Your nervous system kicks in, and you feel stressed. This almost always indicates you still have unreal beliefs.
For example, you might have become outcome-dependent. You’re so attached to the results of the vision you’ve created that you think your self-worth and your capacity to accept yourself as a human being depend on those results. As soon as you start focusing on the results more than the process of living life and being in the flow of moving from where you are now to where you want to go, you take yourself out of reality. You end up living according to some imagined future and some imaginary worth that it will bestow upon you.
The secret to maintaining equanimity amidst the flow as you move forward is to detach from the result and focus on the process. Once you know the result, that’s it. Keep your eye on it, obviously, but focus on the process. If you don’t, you’ll feel like you’re forcing things because you’ve become outcome-dependent, meaning your identity is still invested in the result, which makes it unreal. As you move towards your vision, your identity will change. You’ll let go of the unreal fragmentation you had at the start of your transformational journey and become more whole. This means letting go of unreal beliefs and unlearning things that make you feel like you need to force life in the first place.
Third takeaway from this episode is that getting to flow with life takes effort
So all of this brings us to the third takeaway from this episode, which is that even though we aim to flow with life and navigate it according to the process itself—living authentically rather than through ego filters or attachment to results—initially, it will require some force to reach that flow state. However, to avoid confusion, let’s call it putting in effort until it becomes effortless.
At the beginning of this journey, we carry various assumptions and ideas embedded in our unconscious mind, driving our behavior and identity. As we move from point A to point B towards our vision, we are also reconfiguring our unconscious relationship with ourselves. To keep it simple, at the start of the journey, people are fragmented, living according to old conditioning and emotional patterns. Most people I’ve worked with begin with unconscious fear—fear of pursuing their desires, fear of moving forward, fear of failure, fear of losing their identity, and a lack of trust in themselves and life. These unconscious fears affect their conscious relationship with themselves.
As we progress, it takes effort to overcome these unconscious habits, which are essentially habitual ways of thinking, doing things, and identifying. This ties back to the overused quote about insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. To make a change, we must establish new habits at every level, both externally and internally, to transform our lives from the inside out and become the person we want to be. This is why effort is necessary to reach a state of effortlessness.
Initially, being stuck requires no effort—it’s simply the result of the scripts and programs running in our unconscious minds, affecting everything we do. Achieving effortless success necessitates effort to confront and challenge our assumptions about ourselves, to scrutinize our thoughts and their impact, and to ensure they reflect the truth. All of these actions involve making an effort to change our relationship with ourselves.
If you can do that, eventually reaching a state of effortless flow becomes possible. By then, all those unconscious habits and ideas you carried unknowingly will have been replaced with ones aligned with the new version of you and your vision. At this point, you will consistently take real action in a flow state, unburdened by unconscious fears, and you will have developed trust.
Real action is about trust—trusting yourself to do your best and handle whatever comes your way as you venture into the unknown. Moving towards your vision means embracing uncertainty, but also trusting life. This means you don’t need to control everything and, thus, stop forcing things. You won’t need life to conform to your ego’s image of yourself. Instead, you trust life to bring you the opportunities you need because you know you can learn from every experience, using each challenge as a springboard towards your ultimate vision.
And so, if you can live this way—putting effort into changing your unconscious relationship with yourself and how you identify, to bring forth whatever vision is trying to emerge, and then breaking it down into the goals and habits that will get you there—you will ultimately transform your life. You will become the person you want to become, which is always the realest version of you, because you will be letting go of all the unreal things that have been causing you to take unreal actions.
I hope this helps you understand that action truly is the game changer. However, you need to ensure that the actions you are taking are real. This means they must come from a place of wholeness, allowing you to enter a state of flow. You should avoid stressing yourself out, feeling friction, frustration, and misery due to being overly identified with or attached to the results. You must also recognize that you will have to put in some effort until it becomes effortless.
Use journaling to identify what values are embodied in your life
If you’re looking for a practical starting point based on what we’ve discussed in this episode, I recommend sitting down and journaling. Start by reflecting on times in your life when you’ve felt that sense of wholeness. Maybe it was while climbing a mountain or just having fun with friends—whatever those moments were for you. Once you’ve identified those times, examine the values that were embodied in them. For example, in my own life, I often felt most alive and connected to wholeness when I was out in nature or climbing a mountain. From these experiences, I can identify values like nature, freedom, and health.
The more values you can unpack from these moments, the better. If you understand what values resonate with you, you can create a vision for your future that aligns with those values. For instance, if you value nature, health, and freedom, there are numerous ways to integrate these values into your life. This will give you a direction to move towards. From there, break it down into goals and habits, and you’ll start flowing with life, becoming the version of yourself you aspire to be.
I hope this has been helpful. If you want to discuss any of this further or need help unpacking your own vision, I offer free calls which you can book on my website at olianderson.co.uk/talk. There’s also a free course available, which includes a workbook and dives deep into many of the topics we covered today. You can access it at olianderson.co.uk/systemshock. This course is designed around the principles of awareness, acceptance, and action.
I really hope this helps you gain clarity on whether you’re moving in a real direction or an unreal one. Remember, it all comes down to action, but keep raising your awareness and working towards unconditional self-acceptance. Thanks for listening. Peace to you. Bye.
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