by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
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:
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:
- It creates a sacred pause in your day – a space where truth can speak louder than all of the noise and the chaos.
- 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.
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,
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.
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.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
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