by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
The Quality of Your Life Always Comes Back To REAL Over Unreal
Most of us live caught between two currents in life:
One moves us forward, deeper into truth, growth, and wholeness whereas the other is constantly trying to pull us backwards into illusion, stagnation, and fragmentation – in short: realness vs. unreality.
At first glance this might sound overly simple – of course we’d all like to live our realest possible lives but the truth is most of us spend far more time in the unreal and fake than we realise.
Why?
Because our conditioning, fears, and ego-driven self-images constantly blur the line and distort our view of the path that we’re walking.
What all of this means in practical terms is that learning to discern the real from the unreal is one of the most powerful skills you can ever develop because it changes how you relate to yourself, the world, and to reality itself.
More importantly, it stops you from fighting life and allows you to flow with it.
In this article, we’ll unpack what “real” really means, why “unreal” causes so much unnecessary suffering, and how to spot the difference in your own life.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Realness vs. Unreal (Fake): What We Cover in This Article
- The Quality of Your Life Always Comes Back To REAL Over Unreal
- What Does It Mean to Be REAL?
- The Nature of the Unreal: Fragmentation and Resistance
- Friction: The Great Indicator
- Signs You’re Living in the REAL
- Signs You’re Living in the UNREAL
- Applying Realness to Everyday Life
- The Way Out: Awareness, Acceptance, Action
- Final Thoughts: Choosing Realness Over Unreality
What Does It Mean to Be REAL?
When I say “real” on this site or in my books, I don’t just mean “authentic” in the pop-psychology sense of being quirky or unfiltered all the time.
No, realness here means alignment with truth at the levels of yourself, the world, and reality itself.
That might sound complicated but it doesn’t have to be if we break it down into the basic building blocks of human experience:
We can understand it by seeing that reality, if you look closely, is a whole – it’s not just a collection of random fragments but a system of systems within systems, each interacting with and feeding into the others.
In fact, science consistently shows that human beings are not isolated units but parts of interconnected systems:
Biology reveals the body itself is a complex system of organs, cells, and microbes; psychology shows we exist within family and cultural systems; ecology demonstrates that we rely on ecosystems for air, food, and climate balance; and systems theory ties it all together by describing life as nested “wholes within wholes”.
In short, your body is a system within a family system, within a cultural system, within an ecosystem, and so on until everything is connected to everything else.
We can say that to be real, then, is to move towards wholeness which basically means to participate fully in this interconnected flow without adding unnecessary resistance. In a practical sense, this means constantly letting go of false ideas, outdated self-images, and inner blockages that stop us moving with life.
When you are real, you grow, you flow, you get results, and you feel alive.
The Nature of the Unreal: Fragmentation and Resistance
If being real means wholeness, then being unreal means fragmentation:
Unreal living is when your ego creates stories, masks, and illusions that cut you off from the flow of reality – these false identities promise safety, control, or validation, but they actually create more friction than freedom in our lives in the long term.
This unreal and unnecessary friction shows up in two major ways (which are becoming more prevalent in our societies by the day as the world becomes more unreal):
- Anxiety: Which shows up when your self-image (ego) is out-of-date and clashes with reality. It’s like trying to run new software on an obsolete operating system with error messages everywhere caused by constantly smashing up against the truth. The result is constant tension (which we call “anxiety”).
- Depression: Which shows up when you’ve stopped growing entirely because – instead of flowing with reality – you’ve dropped out of the current. In this state, stagnation sets in and with it the heavy weight of disconnection from life itself.
The ego might promise comfort but all it ever delivers friction and so – the more unreal you are with yourself – the more unnecessary resistance you create.
Friction: The Great Indicator
Here’s the good news: the difference between real and unreal is not abstract and so you can be actually feel it:
The simplest way to discern the real from the unreal is to pay attention to FRICTION in your life.
There are two types of friction to pay attention to:
- Necessary friction is growth friction. It’s like the resistance you feel in the gym that strengthens your muscles and feels challenging but also energising. With necessary friction, you’re stretched beyond your comfort zone in a way that expands you. This is the friction of flow.
- Unnecessary friction is resistance friction and it feels draining, suffocating, and pointless. It’s the inner war of ego fighting reality and nothing grows from it except frustration and eventual misery (if you keep resisting reality instead of growing through ego).
If you want to know whether something in your life is real or unreal then you can ask yourself:
- Am I growing into more of myself here or shrinking away from myself?
- Do I feel stretched in a way that energises me or stuck in a way that drains me?
- Am I seeing tangible results – in my wellbeing, relationships, or projects I’ m working on etc. – or just repeated cycles of disappointment?
When it’s real, growth, flow, and results will eventually follow but when it’s unreal, stagnation, misery, and emptiness are the default.
Signs You’re Living in the REAL
So how do you know you’re living real?
Well, three things tend to happen consistently over time:
- You’re Growing
Your relationship with yourself deepens as you keep learning, evolving, shedding old skin, and becoming more whole. - You’re Flowing
Life feels like it has a rhythm. You’re being stretched just beyond your comfort zone and there’s a natural high that comes from living in the “stretch zone”. - You’re Getting Results
Because you’re in touch with reality – the only place where results can ever actually exist – your actions bear fruit. Progress happens – even if gradually.
Signs You’re Living in the UNREAL
On the flip side, unreal living usually looks like this:
- You’re Stagnating
No growth, no expansion, just repetition of old cycles. The past weighs heavier than the future and you never take any steps forward. - You’re Low or Numb
Instead of the stretch of flow, you feel either anxious, depressed, or completely flat. Life feels like it’s happening elsewhere and to somebody else. - You’re Stuck Without Results
You either keep trying, but nothing shifts – or, even worse, you don’t even try because some part of you already ‘knows’ it’s pointless (that part of you is your ego…not the real you which is hidden in the shadows).
Applying Realness to Everyday Life
You can use this real-vs-unreal lens in every area of life and improve things for yourself (and by extension the people you care about):
- Business or Career: If you’re constantly exhausted, battling drama, and never moving forward, chances are you’re forcing something in an unreal way. If you’re energised by challenges and seeing results, then you’re in the real.
- Relationships: A real relationship will challenge you but also help you grow even more real as you go into deeper intimacy. An unreal one will trap you in cycles of anxiety, avoidance, or misery.
- Health: Real health practices bring gradual, sustainable results but the unreal ones promise quick fixes but create more imbalance. This is because the real ones are aligning you with the laws of nature (not the laws of the ego)
- Spirituality or Personal Growth: Real paths, purposes, and visions deepen your trust in life and expand your wholeness but the unreal ones inflate the ego with things like superiority or magical thinking.
In short: Wherever there’s unnecessary friction, there’s unreality. That’s just the way it is.
If you’re bold enough to start facing reality and growing into wholeness then check out Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness.
The Way Out: Awareness, Acceptance, Action
So how do you escape the unreal and return to the real?
The process is simple, though not always easy and unfolds in three stages (which I use with my coaching clients when working with them):
1. Awareness – Deconstruct Ego
You start by noticing where you’re being unreal:
Where’s the friction in your life?
Where are you lying to yourself?
What outdated masks are you clinging to?
Shine the light of awareness on the unreal and start to dissolve it.
2. Acceptance – Integrate Shadow
Once you’ve seen the unreal, don’t resist it but accept that it’s there for a reason:
Often, the unreal is rooted in fear, shame, or the unhealed parts of ourselves that we’ve disowned.
Facing the shadow self with compassion dissolves the unreal grip of ego and allows you to start becoming whole again.
3. Action – Trust Self and Life
Finally, you act in a more real way which means that you can trust the process of life, let go of control, and flow forward no matter what arises on the way to wherever you’re going.
Realness is not static (that’s ego again) – it’s lived through action.
Final Thoughts: Choosing Realness Over Unreality
Life is constantly inviting us to choose between the real and the unreal:
The real path asks for courage, honesty, and trust but it rewards us with growth, flow, and results; the unreal path offers comfort and control but delivers friction, stagnation, and misery.
The choice is always yours and it starts with the choices you make within yourself:
Start small by noticing where you feel alive versus where you feel unnecessary friction that leaves you feeling drained and then follow the aliveness, let go of the unreal, and step into the flow of wholeness.
Because the truth is simple:
Real always works.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to grow real and you’re ready for some structured guidance then book a free coaching call with me and I’ll help you to start changing your own life.
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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