by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Learning How to Listen to Yourself So You Can Take Real Action
There comes a point in almost every life where we realise that the only real voice capable of guiding us is the one we’ve spent the longest amount of time ignoring.
It’s not the loudest voice in the room, the one with the most confidence, or even the one armed with the most compelling statistics and glossy advice.
Instead, it’s the quiet, steady signal beneath all of the noise that’s being emitted from our own REALNESS:
Many people never reach this point because the unreal world we’ve built is fuelled by distraction and noise-making and so it usually feels easier to buy into the noise rather than actually listening to what rests beyond it all.
There’s also the little issue of most people preferring being ‘told’ what to do rather than stopping to figure out what they actually want and so the noise tells us what to do, when to do it, and how to feel about it whereas stopping to actually listen requires responsibility which requires courage.
The truth, though, is that if we truly want to move forward in life in a way that is aligned, grounded, and real, then we must cultivate the capacity to listen to ourselves:
Listening to ourselves doesn’t mean that we believe we’re always ‘right’ or that we assume we know everything – in fact, it’s quite the opposite…it means we accept that when it comes to our own lives, our own real path, and our own risks and real action, then the only voice worth weighing above all others is the authentic voice of our own realness.
Anything else leaves us living someone else’s life – no matter how refined the advice or how well-intentioned the advice that might be thrown at us.
This article will help you to tune back into you’re own real signal so you can ignore the noise and put yourself back on a real path.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Listen to Yourself: What We’ll Cover In This Article
- Learning How to Listen to Yourself So You Can Take Real Action
- Real Listening vs. Open-Mindedness Gone Wrong: The Confusion of Open-Mindedness Without Real Boundaries
- When Other People Try to ‘Fix’You
- Awareness, Acceptance, Action: The REALEST Way Forward
- Listening to Life by Knowing Yourself
- The Baby on the Bridge
- Is Listening to Yourself Selfish?
- Practical Steps for Learning to Listen to Yourself
- Listening to Yourself: The Final Word
Real Listening vs. Open-Mindedness Gone Wrong: The Confusion of Open-Mindedness Without Real Boundaries
One of the great modern myths is that being ‘open-minded’ is a virtue that means endlessly listening to every voice, every opinion, every philosophy, and every piece of unsolicited advice that rolls into our lives as though they all hold the same weight (when the truth is that some opinions and ideas are more true or relevant than others).
The result of this, for most people, is not open-minded liberation but open-minded confusion.
What this basically means is that when every voice is granted equal weight, we lose the internal compass that helps us discern what is relevant and real.
Being open-minded in a real way is not about passively absorbing everything willy-nilly but instead about about having the power to listen and then choose what’s most real.
In other words, REAL open-mindedness always comes with the freedom to say, “I’ve heard you, I understand you, and I’m still going to do what I know I need to do”.
The alternative is open-mindedness without real discernment which simply becomes mental clutter and fragmentation dressed up as maturity.
Listening to ourselves in this real way that I’m talking about isn’t about shutting out the world completely or anything – it’s simply about giving ourselves a benchmark against which to measure everything the world presents.
If advice aligns with what is real in us, we can use it – if it doesn’t, we leave it behind and this allows us to move with clarity instead of confusion.
When Other People Try to ‘Fix’You
Another layer of noise that derails us comes from the people who care about us but do not understand us in the way that we understand ourselves:
This is where listening becomes especially difficult because love often arrives tangled with fear (because the people who love us don’t want us to get hurt) and so ,any people project their fears onto the lives of others without realising they are doing it.
What this means is that they start to believe they see danger where we see possibility and they define risk by how they would respond to it – not by how we personally are built to respond.
When someone tries to ‘fix’ you, it’s often because they can’t imagine walking your real path themselves, and therefore assume you can’t either (because they’re projecting their own limitations onto your situation).
Their attempt to fix you is rarely malicious and usually comes from a place of genuine care but it simply reflects their own conditioning and their own unresolved pain (usually underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma). Another element at play is that their nervous system doesn’t want you to take risks they were never able to take.
This is why even though they might call it protection or wisdom, the only thing you can hear when you’re being real with yourself is noise interference (from the pure signal of your own realness).
Of course, sometimes we genuinely do need guidance, feedback, or course correction and there are definitely times when we’re blind to our own patterns or naïve about our choices and so “listening to ourselves” doesn’t mean dismissing everyone automatically.
What it does mean is using our realness to discern why somebody is advising us:
Are they speaking from insight or from fear?
Are they seeing us or projecting themselves?
If we forget this, we allow the world’s unresolved fears to make our decisions for us which just keeps us from our own real path.
Awareness, Acceptance, Action: The REALEST Way Forward
Learning to listen to ourselves is a process of growing real – not just some motivational slogan that sounds nice.
It requires us to move through the three stages that underpin any true transformation: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.
(These are the three stages I use with my coaching clients when working with them).
Awareness is where we deconstruct the ego and the noise-making machinery inside of ourselves.
It’s the part of us that clings to approval, tries to fit in, and fears failure because of underlying shame.
Working at this level of Awareness reveals the beliefs, emotional blocks, and inherited expectations that prevent us from tapping into our realness and listening to ourselves.
In short, without awareness, we’re simply reacting to the world rather than responding from a foundation of truth.
Acceptance is where we integrate the shadow self rather than running from it.
It’s where we acknowledge all the things within us that are not going away because they are not mistakes or anything to be ashamed of but signals about what’s actually real.
This is things like our real values, real aspirations, and the real direction we know we should be moving into to go deeper into wholeness.
Acceptance essentially says, “This is who I am and it is time I worked with it rather than against it“.
Action is the practice of trust.
It’s where we move even though we can’t see the whole road ahead without letting this worry us.
Knowing everything before we act is impossible on this planet and so if we wait for certainty, we wait forever.
Realness is about acting to reveal the next step, not the entire map.
Taking that step earns us the right to see the next one so we can keep moving and flowing in the direction of our realest vision.
Listening to Life by Knowing Yourself
Ultimately, learning to listen to yourself isn’t a withdrawal from life but a way of entering into a deeper relationship with it:
Once we know ourselves enough to recognise the signal beneath the noise, we can listen to life itself and tune into the fact that life is always speaking but not to those who drown in distraction. Instead, we’ll see that it only speaks to those who move through real action.
Listening to yourself means trusting that if you take the next obvious step then life will reveal the one after that:
This means that if you don’t move then life has nothing to respond to and so the ‘best’ way to really listen to yourself is to keep moving with whatever real action makes the most sense to you.
When you trust yourself enough to act in this way, you create a dynamic relationship with life rather than a static one and so living becomes a back-and-forth dance rather than a negotiation or an assertion (which is always ego).
The Baby on the Bridge
The best metaphor I’ve found to capture all this is the “Baby on the Bridge” (from my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace).
It goes like this:
A baby is standing alone at the peak of a mountain and looking across the valley at another summit on the other side.
Even though the baby knows it must reach it, there’s no bridge, no visible path, and no assurance of safety about how to get there.
Despite this, the baby knows it must make a move and so it trusts itself to take a step forward.
As its foot descends towards the abyss, invisible hands suddenly start to build a section of the bridge beneath its feet.
The baby takes another step and another section of bridge appears with each step revealing just enough structure for the next step until the baby finally reaches its destination.
The whole point of this metaphor is that the bridge doesn’t pre-exist but becomes built by movement (not before movement). This is how real life unfolds when we listen to ourselves rather than the world’s fear.
Most adults never take the step because the world tells them “Wait until the bridge is built. Plan every plank before you move” but this just results in paralysis, anxiety, and regret.
Listening to ourselves is knowing that we have the internal capacity to find the next part of the bridge, and then the next one and the next one – as long as we move in REALNESS.
Is Listening to Yourself Selfish?
A final obstacle to listening to ourselves is the limiting belief that that listening to ourselves first and foremost is somehow ‘selfish’.
Actually, this idea of it being ‘selfish’ couldn’t be further from the truth:
This is because when we listen to ourselves and take real action, we build a grounded inner life rather than a reactive one and this inner grounding allows us to show up for others more genuinely, without resentment, performative approaches to showing up, or emotional blocks and all the problems they lead to..
If we are listening to the world because of fear, we become entangled in its projections but if we listen to ourselves out of realness, we become more capable of serving the world in a real way.
Dive into Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you’re ready to tune into your realness and start taking real action in your life.
Practical Steps for Learning to Listen to Yourself
- Create Internal Quiet: Reduce the constant intake of opinions, podcasts, advice streams, and endless motivational content and start to create some SPACE where you can tune into your own real, inner voice.
- Ask: “Is this voice mine?”: Whenever advice, criticism, or expectation arises, pause to ask whether it comes from your realness or someone else’s projection. Keep doing this and eventually you’ll be able to discern the real from the unreal.
- Journal without Performance: Write in a “stream of consciousness” type way and let yourself see your own unfiltered thoughts so you can make a decision about what you actually believe and want to listen to.
- Identify Any Fear Behind External Advice: Before absorbing someone’s concerns about your life or the ‘correction’ they might be trying to offer you, ask what fear might be motivating what they’re saying. A lot of the time, the (unwarranted) ‘advice’ we’re given is just a projection of fear-driven ideas stemming from the advice giver’s nervous system, not your calling.
- Take the Next Step Only: Stop trying to predict the next twenty steps and just focus on the next obvious one (knowing that the bridge will build itself through movement). Action builds clarity and clarity rarely precedes action (because action always puts us in touch with reality and so we can always learn from it).
- Practise the Bridge Metaphor Daily: Remind yourself that the path reveals itself under your feet, not in your thoughts or fantasies about taking action.
- Set Boundaries Around Noise: You do not need to explain why you are choosing a quieter, more internally guided life. You simply need to choose it and then say “No” to the distractions (“No” is the easiest way to set boundaries).
- Integrate the Shadow Rather Than Fleeing It: Your patterns, longings, and real values are not obstacles – they’re indicators of your own real path and they’re not going anywhere (even if your ego tries to send them into hiding).
- Trust Results Over Opinions: Realness produces outcomes but the noise produces paralysis. The only real way to know what’s true or not is to get results which is why listening to yourself and taking real action is the only thing that can really answer any questions about you and your life.
- Move Before You Feel Ready: ‘Ready’ is a myth constructed by fear. Realness only asks that you move honestly, not perfectly, but that you can keep listening to yourself and learning along the way.
Listening to Yourself: The Final Word
Listening to yourself is not a luxury – it’s the only roadmap that has the power to take you into your real life.
At the end of the day, the world will always be loud and advice will always be abundant but – underneath the real signal of your own realness remains.
This real signal is never frantic, panicked, or desperate and it’s always there waiting until you’re finally ready to start hearing, listening, and acting.
Once you do, the path you couldn’t see before becomes clear and you can start becoming the real version of yourself you were all along.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start listening to yourself and start walking your own real path then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you tap back into that real signal and take 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.
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.
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.
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