Stop Trying to Be Special: Choose Realness Instead

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

Trying to Be ‘Special’ Usually Just Has the Opposite Effect

Before we get into this too deeply I should probably start this article by saying that there’s absolutely nothing ‘wrong’ with being special:

You might have an unusual gift, for example, or you you might have developed a particular talent to an exceptional level and so you can see things that other people don’t see, create things that genuinely help people, or possess qualities that are relatively rare and bring more truth to the world.

It kinda goes without saying that these are all ‘good’ things and that if you have something REAL like this to give then doing so will (probably) take you deeper into yourself and life.

This article isn’t about how being ‘special’ causes problems but about how trying to be special can cause all kinds of them:

There’s an important difference between allowing your uniqueness to emerge naturally and making ‘specialness’ your mission in life and – in the modern world – we’re being encouraged to do the latter constantly.

If you don’t believe me then just take a quick minute to scroll through Instagram, TikTok or YouTube (*cough) and you’ll quickly encounter an endless parade of people trying to stand out so they can get more followers, more views, and more likes which, in turn, leads them to more controversy, more outrageous behaviour, more provocative opinions, more extreme transformations, and more dramatic lifestyles all in the service of getting more ‘clicks’.

The underlying message that gives is pretty simple:

Be different (just like everybody else), chase attention, and prove to the world that you ‘matter’.

This is an unfortunate message to internalise because what happens when attention becomes the metric by which you measure your worth is that you start to confuse being noticed with being valuable and being exceptional with being enough.

Eventually, you can become so obsessed with constructing a ‘special’ edition of yourself that you lose touch with the real one.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Trying to be special separates you from your realness.

Stop Trying to Be Special: What We'll Cover in This Article

Trying to Be 'Special' Usually Just Has the Opposite Effect
The Attention Economy Has Changed What 'Special' Means
"If Nobody Notices Me, Do I Matter?"
The Ego Loves Specialness
The Illusion of Separation
Specialness Can't Fill the VOID
Give Up Trying to Be Special
Awareness, Acceptance, Action: The Way Back Home
The Final Word: REAL Is More Important Than SPECIAL

The Attention Economy Has Changed What ‘Special’ Means

Human beings have always wanted to stand out but the way that we do this and the nature of what it means to be ‘special’ have changed as the world has changed around us.

Historically, being ‘special’ could simply mean possessing a particular gift or talent:

For example, someone might have been an extraordinary musician, athlete, craftsman, storyteller, leader, or perhaps they were blessed with some other natural ability of some kind.

They might have had to work incredibly hard to develop this gift or talent and, in some cases, their gift might have just been seen as an expression of God’s grace and not something that meant that the person themselves was ‘special’ or better than everybody else – it basically just meant being able to do something that other people couldn’t do as well.

In short, it was your responsibility to do the hard work of levelling up whatever abilities you had and if you had been ‘blessed’ with some kind of a gift then you were supposed to CONTRIBUTE something with it.

The modern landscape has changed this equation because it’s taken out a lot of the ideas of talent or contribution of real gifts and replaced it with a new definition of ‘special’:

Getting more attention than everybody else.

The metric for being ‘special’ is no longer necessitated by WHAT you can do but by HOW MANY people are looking at you doing whatever you happen to be doing:

Views.
Likes.
Followers.
Shares.
Comments.
Subscribers.
Viral moments.
Etc. etc. etc.

All of these things are the new metrics for being ‘special’ and the end result has been the creation of an incredibly surreal situation where somebody can become ‘special’ without offering anything particularly valuable to anybody else.

You can become famous (and therefore ‘special’ if the algorithm deems you worthy) for dancing around in your underwear, for humiliating yourself, for violence and disguised as a ‘prank’, and for saying something deliberately outrageous and stirring up a ruckus – it’s a pretty exciting time to be alive!

This partly explains the strange spectacle of clout-chasing that has emerged on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram and may even help explain the rise of platforms such as OnlyFans – though of course it’s also definitely possible to argue that some creators really are using particular gifts, talents, and entrepreneurial abilities so I’m not dismissing every act of creation (I mean, you’re literally reading my content right now so it’s not like all content has to suck or be about chasing attention).

Anyway, the point isn’t to moralise about any of this but to notice what happens psychologically when attention becomes the measurement of specialness because if attention is the measurement, then a lack of attention starts to feel like evidence that you aren’t special….and that’s where things get dangerous.

“If Nobody Notices Me, Do I Matter?”

Here are some of the core psychological assumptions driving much of the modern world if we don’t step away from it:

If I’m not getting attention then something must be ‘wrong’ with me.
If my post didn’t get ‘likes’ then I’m a failure.
If my business isn’t growing exponentially then I’m not important.
If nobody is talking about me then I don’t matter.
If somebody else has more followers then they’re a better person than me.
If someone else’s life looks more impressive then mine must be inadequate.
Etc. etc. etc.

Carrying these assumptions creates a perpetual chase for status as everybody who gets sucked into them starts trying to compete in the imaginary popularity contests that they think will actually define their lives.

In fairness, human beings have always had some version of this because – back in our evolutionary environment – being accepted by the tribe and ideally having a high social position mattered so that we could get access to resources and continue surviving.

The problem is that social media has taken a deeply ancient human tendency and put it on steroids and so now the entire planet can become your imaginary tribe and you’re expected to perform for it to get whatever scraps of attention you can in order to keep ‘surviving’.

This creates a world full of shame-driven people desperately trying to convince everybody else – and themselves – that they’re ‘special’ even though attention isn’t acceptance (which is what they’re really looking for) and being noticed isn’t the same as being known or loved.

The Ego Loves Specialness

At this point, it’s useful to bring the ego into the equation:

There’s a lot of information about this side of things on this site (and in my books) but abridged version is that the ego is the version of ourselves that we construct in reaction to deeper experiences of shame, guilt and/or trauma (The Unholy Trinity) – it tries to protect us from vulnerability by creating an identity that allows us to feel safe, significant, and enough but in the process is disconnects us from our real life and actual inner safety and ‘enoughness’.

The ego loves the idea of being ‘special’ because because specialness creates separation and this is what the ego is ultimately fuelled by (fragmentation and division instead of wholeness and connection – both internally and externally).

This is why the ego will commonly give you a bunch of shame-driven assumptions that keep you locked within yourself:

If I’m special then I’m different from you and everybody else (even though you’re a human being like the rest of us).
If I’m superior then I’m above you and so I can compensate for my shame (even though you’re not ‘above’ or ‘below’ in reality).
If I’m inferior then I’m below you (even though you’re not but you need to believe you are because it feels ‘special’ in a weird and mutated way).
If I’m broken in some unique way then nobody can understand me (even though they can if you be real with yourself first and foremost and communicate from that real place).
If I’m gifted then nobody can compare with me (even though they don’t have to if they’re REAL).
Etc. etc. etc.

On and on it goes but it all boils down to the same need of the ego which is to maintain the illusion that “I’m this separate thing over here and everybody else is over there” – this is just fragmentation and the more desperately we try to become special, the more attention we give to the differences between ourselves and other people which makes us even more fragmented and therefore unreal.

In short, the more we focus on the differences between us, the easier it becomes to forget the real similarities which are actually the foundation for what makes us all REAL.

The Illusion of Separation

What we can say then is that the ego-driven need to be ‘special’ ultimately distances us from our humanity and humanity as a whole because we start living according to the Illusion of Separation.

This is just the (unreal) idea that we’re all fundamentally independent and isolated entities rather than interdependent and connected beings and it can show up in some all kinds of ways that hold us back from actually living our lives in a real way – for example:

“My problems are so unique that nobody could possibly understand them”.
“Nobody has ever suffered in the way I’ve suffered”.
“I’m uniquely superior (or uniquely inferior) to everyone else”.
“My life story is completely unparalleled and different to every other human being in all ways”.
“I understand things that nobody else could possibly understand and therefore nobody understands me”.

Of course, these statements might occasionally contain a grain of truth because none of our lives and experiences are literally the same but the psychological direction that these statements (and any like them) point towards is always towards difference and separation.

In other words, they encourage you to identify with what separates you from other people rather than what connects you to them despite the fact that human beings actually have way more similarities than differences (because we’re all the same species on the same planet dealing with the same psychospiritual journey from fragmentation to wholeness according to the same rules of reality).

This is why we all share certain universal needs and experiences:

We want to be safe.
We want to belong.
We want to love and be loved.
We experience fear.
We experience grief.
We experience pain.
We experience pleasure.
We experience shame, guilt, and/or trauma.
We experience uncertainty and the unknown.
We create identities to survive life.
We lose ourselves inside those identities and become separated from the shadow self.
Eventually, if we’re willing, we begin the journey back towards something more whole, so we can learn to trust.

You don’t have to be ‘special’ to be part of this journey – you’re already part of it because you’re living it right now!

Specialness Can’t Fill the VOID

The main reason that everything we’ve covered so far matters is because attention can temporarily soothe shame without actually releasing it:

This makes it feel like you’re leaving the Void (the fragmented world you live in when shame enters the picture and you become disconnected from the truth) but really all you’re doing is dancing around on the surface.

You know the script:

You post something -> People respond -> You feel good for a moment -> The the feeling fades -> You post again -> You get more attention and another little hit of validation -> It fades again -> Repeat for the rest of your life

Over time, the ego learns a lesson that keeps you on the hamster wheel indefinitely:

“I need more”.

This need for ‘more’ is one way the Void perpetuates itself because the ‘more’ in question becomes a sort of ‘substitute’ for the truth that you became disconnected from to open up the Void in the first place (though, unfortunately, it can never do what only the truth can do for you).

Chasing attention and validation simply distracts you from the truth, perpetuates the Void, and creates the conditions for the ego to become dominant and to make you more fragmented.

In short, trying to fill the Void with attention doesn’t work because attention only treats the symptom and not the fundamental problem.

This is why you see people become more visible without becoming more real or integrated or why they get fame and ‘success’ but still feel like something is missing.

It’s totally possible to become more admired by the world whilst secretly feeling more disconnected from yourself in reality – at the end of the day, that’s just a bad deal no matter how you look at it.

Give Up Trying to Be Special

The alternative to chasing ‘specialness’ and becoming more and more unreal and fragmented isn’t to become boring, suppress your talents, or to try and pretend that you’re exactly the same as everybody else and to refuse to stand out when standing out is appropriate but to do something much simpler:

Stop making ‘specialness‘ the goal and make REALNESS the goal instead.

What this looks like is like this:

If you’re genuinely talented, let the talent express itself.
If you have something valuable to say, say it.
If you create something beautiful, create it.

The only difference is that you’re not being outcome-dependent and outsourcing your self-worth to the amount of attention you get – instead, you’re staying and growing real in the process which means that if people respond, great, and if they don’t, you keep going and growing real anyway.

The point isn’t to become invisible but to stop needing visibility in order to validate and justify your existence.

This creates a reversal in the way you relate to the world because when you’re actively trying to be ‘special’ then you’re primarily trying to take something from the world for the sake of your ego (like the Class A Drugs of applause, appreciation, and approval, and things like attention, status, or recognition).

On the other hand, when you’re actively growing real, then you naturally start asking “What do I actually have to give?” and this is where your genuine gifts often become available:

Ironically, when you stop trying to be special, you may become far more “special” in the meaningful sense because you’re no longer performing uniqueness and instead you’re embodying your real gifts (not the ones your ego concocts to get attention).

Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace

If you’re ready and willing to step back from your ego and to overcome the Void then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Awareness, Acceptance, Action: The Way Back Home

The practical path back to realness can be understood through the process of Awareness → Acceptance → Action (which is what my coaching containers are designed around when working with clients).

Let’s see how it can help us here:

1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego

The first step out of this cycle is to start noticing where you’re trying to be special in the first place.

Ask yourself:

“What am I doing because I genuinely want to do it and what am I doing just because I want people to notice me in some way?”

Notice how often you check your phone, how you feel when something gets lots of attention, how you feel when it doesn’t.

Notice comparison, envy, and the urge to prove yourself.

Don’t judge these things – just become aware of them because the ego loses some of its power when you can see it operating rather than automatically obeying it.

2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow

Underneath the need to be special there is often something we’re afraid to feel and it could be pretty much anything:

Shame.
Inadequacy.
Fear of being ordinary.
Fear of being forgotten.
Fear that without achievement, beauty, intelligence, success or recognition, we won’t be enough.
Whatever.

This is where Shadow Work becomes important because it allows you to start turning towards the parts of yourself you’ve rejected instead of desperately trying to construct an impressive identity that makes you seem ‘special’ so you can get attention as a way of compensating.

Here are some journal prompts to get you started:

Can you accept the possibility that you might be ordinary in some ways?

Can you accept that somebody else might be better than you at something?

Can you accept being misunderstood?

Can you accept not being the centre of attention?

Can you accept yourself without requiring an audience?

3. Action: Trust Self and Life

Finally, you need to start taking action from a place that’s REAL instead of from the ego (which is not your amigo!):

Do the work.
Develop your gifts.
Tell the truth.
Create.
Serve.
Love.
Experiment.
Take risks.

Do whatever your realness requires of you but stop making the outcome a final judgement of your worth and the thing that gives you permission to accept yourself or not.

You don’t need to know whether something will make you famous, you don’t need to know whether people will applaud – you don’t even need to know whether anybody will notice: you simply need to know that the action is REAL.

And then you do it.

When you focus on becoming real instead of being special then you actually give something true.

The Final Word: REAL Is More Important Than SPECIAL

We don’t need more people desperately trying to prove that they’re ‘special – we need more people who aren’t trying to prove anything and that know how to show up in a way that’s REAL:

The Real Ones don’t have to manufacture uniqueness and perform their way through life because their uniqueness emerges naturally from their presence.

They also don’t have to separate themselves from humanity because they understand that their deepest individuality exists within their connection to everything else.

Essentially, the paradox is this:

The less you try to be special, the more genuinely unique you become.

In an increasingly unreal world, being real might be the most powerful thing you can offer – not because it will make you special (though it might in a real way) but because REAL ALWAYS WORKS.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to to step up and start being real with yourself and life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.

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.

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.

Real Always Works