by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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

Your Realness isn’t Achieved, It’s Received

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:

You’re born WHOLE until you inevitably experience pain or confusion at some point in life.
To cope, you suppress aspects of your real self – your emotions, your desires, your creativity, your truth.
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.
Over time, you forget it’s a mask.
Eventually, the suppressed parts of you start pushing back – this is your shadow self trying to be integrated so you can become whole again.
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):

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.
Acceptance (Integrate Shadow) – You stop resisting the truth and accept the ‘parts’ of yourself and life that you’ve been avoiding (especially the shadow).
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.

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).

Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.

Join the 7-Day Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) Challenge and start to implement foundational health habits and a powerful life vision only a week from now.

Real Always Works

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