by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Grow Real or Waste the Rest of Your Life
There usually comes a point in life – somewhere after the illusions of youth have burned off – when something inside starts to whisper “This isn’t it” (or something along those lines):
Maybe it’s on your morning commute to a job you secretly despise; maybe it’s during another hollow conversation in a relationship that long ago stopped feeling any fire; or maybe it’s just the familiar ache that creeps in during quiet moments…a sense that you’ve somehow built a life that doesn’t belong to you and that you’re living in a kind of void.
When this realisation hits, it can feel like a crisis but, really, it’s a calling:
It’s the moment your real self starts knocking on the door, asking whether you’re going to keep sleepwalking through an unreal life or finally wake up and grow real.
This article will help you to take this process to the next level so you can see it through to completion and get to a place where you feel like you’re living your real life instead of wasting it.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Stop Wasting Your Life: What We'll Cover in this Article
- Grow Real or Waste the Rest of Your Life
- Life's Great Wake-Up Call: Awareness
- Awareness: Seeing the Trap for What It Is
- Acceptance: Owning the Past Without Shame
- Action: Making Real Choices
- Fate vs Destiny: The Power of REAL Choice
- How to Start Making Real Choices
- The Unreal Alternative of Wasting Your Life
- Stop Wasting Your Life: The Final Word
Life’s Great Wake-Up Call: Awareness
Many people reach a point where they start to sense that they’re just wasting their lives.
All of the external boxes and socially accepted signs of ‘success‘ might all be ticked: the career, the mortgage, the relationship – maybe even a few holidays a year…but, deep inside, something still feels ‘off’.
The tragedy is that most people ignore this feeling and instead of using it as a SIGNAL that something needs changing they double down on the life they’ve built, convincing themselves that “this is just how it is” and so they better shut-up and put-up.
There are a few, though – those brave enough to listen to the feedback they’re getting from reality – who start to see the truth:
They realise that the unease they’re feeling isn’t a punishment; it’s feedback – in fact, it’s literally life showing them that the path they’re on is out of alignment with what’s real.
This is an uncomfortable but powerful place to be because once you become AWARE that the life you’re living doesn’t fit who you truly are, you can start to do something about it.
And as anyone who’s ever transformed their life knows:
Awareness is always the first step (followed by Acceptance and then real Action).
Awareness: Seeing the Trap for What It Is
People often think they’re ‘trapped’ by their circumstances – a job they hate, a relationship that’s lost its soul, a lifestyle that drains their energy.
But the uncomfortable but liberating truth is that we ‘trap’ ourselves because every unreal situation we find ourselves in is the result of a series of unreal choices – over time, these choices accumulate and solidify into a life that reflects them.
It’s like compounding interest, but in reverse: every small compromise, every avoidance of truth, every time we silence our intuition…it all adds up. One day, we look around and realise the compound effect of unreality has created a prison of our own making.
That’s why I often like to say:
If we put unreal in, we get unreal out. If we put real in, we get real out.
This simple maxim captures the essence of cause and effect in the human experience because our lives are nothing more than the sum of the choices we’ve made and those choices are either rooted in truth or illusion.
When we start to see how our unreal choices have shaped our current situation, the pain can be intense but this pain is also sacred because it’s the pain of waking up and the friction between who we’ve been pretending to be and who we really are.
Acceptance: Owning the Past Without Shame
After Awareness comes Acceptance:
This is the second stage in the model of life transformation that I talk about in my books and use with my coaching clients (following Awareness and preceding Action).
In this case, Acceptance means fully owning the fact that the life you’ve built is the product of your own choices but without falling into shame or blame.
It means recognising that you did the best you could with the level of Awareness you had at the time and so you made the choices you thought would keep you safe, accepted, or loved.
The only problem is that they weren’t real because you were filtering everything through the ego (the false identity we create to deal with underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma).
The moment you stop judging yourself for your past and start learning from it, something powerful happens: energy that was trapped in denial and resistance is freed up for growth as you transcend ego and start to integrate the Shadow Self.
Acceptance isn’t resignation – it’s liberation:
It’s the point where you stop fighting reality and start working with it.
Action: Making Real Choices
Once you’ve accepted where you are, the next step is to start making real choices – choices that align with truth rather than F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”):
This is where many people get stuck, because real choices rarely bring instant results and so you won’t start seeing results literally overnight.
Instead, when you start acting from truth, it takes time for the external world to catch up (just like it took time for all of those UNREAL choices to lead to you getting ‘trapped’).
I call this period the Reality Lag.
The Reality Lag is the gap between the moment you start living truthfully and the moment your outer reality begins to reflect it. It’s like turning a massive ship – momentum doesn’t shift instantly but once it does, the momentum can take you wherever you need to go.
It’s during this period of riding through the Reality Lag that trust becomes essential:
You have to keep taking real, aligned action even when it feels like nothing’s happening; you have to hold your nerve through uncertainty and resist the temptation to revert to your old unreal patterns.
Most people never make it through the Reality Lag because they panic halfway through and run back to the familiar but if you can stay grounded and keep choosing what’s real, reality will catch up.
It simply has to but trust is the bridge that carries you through that lag.
Fate vs Destiny: The Power of REAL Choice
There’s an important difference between fate and destiny that many people don’t know about:
Fate is what you’re born with and into – for example, your family, your genes, your circumstances. It’s the starting point but not the end of the game.
Destiny, on the other hand, is what you create through your choices – it’s the sum total of every real or unreal decision you make.
Most people spend their lives confusing the two and so they resign themselves to fate, telling themselves stories like, “I can’t change because this is just who I am” or “This is just how life works“.
Wrong!
Your destiny is flexible even if your fate isn’t:
It’s shaped by every choice you make today and so the more real your choices, the more real your destiny becomes.
(Though, like we said, you’ll have to ride through the Reality Lag whilst the external catches up with the internal).
How to Start Making Real Choices
If you’re at that crossroads – tired of living an unreal life but unsure where to start – then here are some practical steps to begin your journey of growing real:
1. Know Your Real Values
Most people never stop to define what truly matters to them.
Instead, they chase goals that don’t belong to them – money, status, validation – and wonder why they feel empty when they achieve them.
The way ‘out’ is to start by identifying your real values – the principles or qualities that make you feel alive, grounded, and in integrity with yourself (so things like ‘creativity’, ‘peace’, ‘freedom’ etc.).
Once you know them, turn them into a vision, break that vision into goals, and those goals into habits.
Real life builds itself through repetition of what’s real.
2. Value Your Time, Energy, and Attention
If your life is made of time, then wasting time is wasting life itself.
This means that you need to start treating your time, energy, and attention as the sacred currencies that they are:
Every minute you give to something unreal – mindless scrolling, gossip, people who drain you- is a minute stolen from what’s real and an attack on your own real destiny.
Invest these valuable assets instead:
Read things that expand you. Move your body. Create. Build something that matters.
The compounding effect of these real investments will change your life faster than you might think.
3. Learn to Regulate Your Nervous System
The reason most people can’t make real choices isn’t lack of willpower – it’s because they’re stuck in survival mode and so they see real life as a ‘threat’ (even though it’s what they really want).
When your nervous system is dysregulated, your mind defaults to fear-based thinking and so you choose comfort over truth, familiarity over growth.
Start learning how to regulate your body:
Breathe deeply. Move daily. Meditate. Journal. Rest.
When your nervous system is balanced, you become capable of staying grounded through the uncertainty of the Reality Lag instead of freaking out and running back to the old unreal life you don’t even want to be living.
4. Create a Vision of Who You Want to Become
Real growth isn’t about adding more to yourself – it’s about uncovering what’s already there beneath the ego’s defences.
Create a vision of your future self that reflects truth, not fantasy:
Who would you be if you stopped pretending?
This vision becomes a reference point when your old patterns try to pull you back and so you’ll start to separate your realness from the ego, and you’ll see that you have the power to rewrite the story.
As you integrate the parts of yourself you’ve rejected – the shadow – you’ll start to gather evidence that you’re not trapped and that you never were.
5. Trust the Process
You can’t rush realness – you can only live it and so growing real isn’t a one-time event but a lifelong commitment to truth.
It’s choosing to stay awake when the world tries to lull you back to sleep.
There will be days when you doubt yourself and when the Reality Lag feels endless but if you stay the course, one day you’ll look back and realise you’ve built a life that finally feels like you.
If you want to go deeper into understanding realness and living a real life then read my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
The Unreal Alternative of Wasting Your Life
If you don’t grow real, you waste your life – it’s really that simple:
Wasting your life doesn’t necessarily mean ending up homeless or destitute – in fact, it often looks like living a comfortable lie: a life that looks fine from the outside but leaves your soul malnourished and restless.
The comfort of unreality is temporary but the cost is permanent.
The alternative is to grow real and to take the path of alignment, freedom, and love.
This is the only way to live a life that ‘means’ something and that leaves you feeling fired up and in the flow.
Stop Wasting Your Life: The Final Word
There’s an old saying that goes something like “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now“.
It doesn’t matter how many unreal choices you’ve made in the past; what matters is the REAL choice you make next.
Every real choice plants a seed in the soil of your destiny and so if you keep planting, keep trusting, and keep growing real then you’ll get where you need to be.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to stop wasting your life and to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you clear the fog and start taking 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.
