How to Stop NEEDING to Be Liked by Others (Walking Away from Life’s Great Popularity Contest)

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Life doesn’t need to be a ‘popularity’ contest

This article will help you to deal with one of the most common but harmful problems in the world: needing to be ‘liked’.

The key word here is “NEED”.

Obviously, it’s better to be ‘likeable’ than not – there’s no need to purposely be unlikeable in life.

At the same time, we can make ourselves completely MISERABLE and take our lives of track by making being ‘liked’ our main motivation.

If we only focus on getting approval from other people then it just leads to us not spending time focusing on the REAL things we could be doing with ourselves and our lives, growing into a continuously more authentic version of ourselves, and finding a ‘tribe’ or community of people that actually like – or even LOVE – us for who we actually are (not some FAKE version of ourselves that we created because we crave validation).

If you have this problem (of needing to be liked) then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about and you’ll probably suffer from some – or all – of the following symptoms:

You’re often anxious, frustrated, or even depressed (even if you don’t show it).
You know that you’re being ‘fake’ or selling yourself out in order to make people ‘like’ you but the thought of being disliked is too unbearable or too much hassle – because it would mean rearranging parts of your life – to start being real.
When you’re in a group of people you constantly find yourself comparing yourself to others and trying to figure out where you stand in the social hierarchy. This just stops you from relaxing and having a good time.
It’s almost like you don’t really even know who you are anymore –you’re main motivation for doing things is to ‘fit in’ and be approved of by the herd.
You’re constantly trying to make it look like you think/feel/do what everybody else does. You just want to come across as being ‘normal’ but now you’re paying the price because you feel detached from yourself.
When you’re out-and-about in public or hanging out with people, everybody thinks you’re a cheerful person who’s got it all together. You know that’s just a MASK, though, because in private you struggle with emotional emptiness and question everything you’re doing with your life.
You often find yourself having problems with boundaries because you want to be liked by absolutely everybody and so you say “Yes” to their needs and “No” to your own (when a REAL approach is to say “Yes” to your own when you’re not hurting anybody and “Yes” to others when it suits you).
You’re obsessed with your own self-image and constantly need other people to help you reinforce it for you (because it’s on unstable foundations because it’s not REAL).
(if you can think of any other obvious symptoms then please leave a comment).

To make matters worse, having this unreal attitude towards ourselves and our lives can be made worse by drama and BS in your life.

This is because you’re probably not the only person in your life or social circle that has this problem; others in the world around you also have a tendency to crave being liked by everybody else (even people they don’t ‘like’ because of their own ego stuff) and this just leads to life turning into one big Popularity Contest.

This being the case, just leads to all kinds of unnecessarily stressful situations where everybody is in competition with each other for something they don’t need in reality in the first place: the approval and ‘liking’ of other people.

Depending on how much they secretly hate themselves and have a void to fill within themselves (because of unresolved shame, usually), people will put all of their efforts into trying to build themselves up (to mask how small they feel) and to put others down.

This Popularity Contest is completely unnecessary because it’s totally unreal in its primary reason for existence: helping people to convince themselves that things that aren’t important about them or anybody else are important.

The only winning strategy in this particular ‘contest’ is not to play.

This article will help you figure out how you can check out and be in competition with the only person that matters: YOURSELF.

The Irrationality of Needing to Be Liked

Just to be clear, this article isn’t about making yourself unlikeable but about making sure that you live in such a way that you’re not bothered if people don’t like you.

That’s a subtle distinction but it’s about embracing the reality of life which – in this case – means accepting two basic premises and learning to work with them:

You can’t control what other people think about you and whether they ‘like’ you or not.
What they think about you doesn’t need to affect the way that you think about yourself.

In the first case, it’s quite simple:

You can’t control what other people think about you and whether they ‘like’ you or not.

You could be the nicest, most wonderful human being on the planet and – still – somebody out there would find a reason to dislike you (no matter how hard you might try).

Maybe they’re just having a ‘bad’ day; maybe you remind them of somebody that once called them an offensive name; maybe they just don’t like the way you talk or something about the way you dress.

The point is, that people are just weird – they have likes and dislikes without even knowing their reasons behind these feelings and – because people are varied and opinions are many – there will always be somebody out there that simply doesn’t like YOU.

This kind of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ has nothing to do with rational reasons or logic and so it doesn’t even really reflect on ‘You’ as a person – it’s more just a ‘feeling’ that certain people have when they see you because of their own emotional ‘stuff’.

If you think about it, there are probably people that you dislike and can’t even really give a good reason as to why – there’s just something about them that speaks to your unconscious mind and makes it say “No, thanks.”

Because it’s an emotional thing and beyond any logical reasons or argument then you can’t bargain or reason with these people to make them ‘like’ you (and if you respect yourself you shouldn’t waste time doing that anyway): you just have to accept it and move on. It’s literally all you can do.

Maybe they’ll change their minds one day; maybe they won’t. It doesn’t matter. You can’t control it and so – like anything else in life that can’t be controlled – you just need to ACCEPT it.

Trying to make everybody like you is just as irrational as trying to convince yourself that the sky is usually green. It’s just the way it is and so you either accept it or make yourself miserable by going up against reality.

Trying to make everybody like you is just as irrational as trying to convince yourself that the blue sky is usually green; it’s just the way it is and so you either accept it or make yourself miserable by going up against reality.

What they think about you doesn’t need to affect the way that you think about yourself.

The second point to be made is that not only is what people think about you outside of your control (so you don’t need to worry) but, also, just because somebody thinks something about you doesn’t mean you need to believe it or change the way YOU think about yourself.

Let’s say that again for the people at the back:

What people think about you is just their OPINION; you don’t have to take it on board as a FACT about you.

In other words, what you’re dealing with is an INTERPRETATION, not REALITY.

Obviously, this isn’t always as easy to live as it is for me to write down in words – if somebody says something ‘negative’ about you then your initial instinct might be to feel a pang of shame or doubt or some other unhelpful emotion.

When this happens, you can get carried away to wherever that emotion wants to lead you, distort your own view of reality, and get sucked into the ILLUSION that another person’s words or opinion somehow have power over you.

This isn’t a sign that their opinion is valid (though of course it could be but that’s up to you to decide – it’s not true just because they said it); it’s a sign that you have some unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ that’s making you BELIEVE that what they said could be true.

This is a key point:

If you are fully aware of your own realness and are able to ACCEPT YOURSELF UNCONDITIONALLY then you will have a good opinion of yourself and the opinions of others won’t change this.

This is ultimately about a concept I’ve talked about before on this site and in my book Shadow Life: being Outcome-Independent.

What this basically means is that your sense of self-worth and levels of self-acceptance are not dependent on external outcomes – like how people might think or feel about you, for example.

The main thing that stops you from being outcome-independent and instead being dependent on outcomes (or external validation, ‘likes’, etc.) is that you have an unhealthy relationship with your own emotions, especially in the form of SHAME.

When you feel shame at some level of your ‘being’, then you’re more likely to do two things:

Create a false image of yourself that you hide behind to try and hide your shame from yourself and the world.
Try and get other people to help you keep this false image or mask in place by trying to control your relationships with them (in terms of what can be said/done/felt, for example).

Unfortunately, because this false image is completely untenable – because it’s not REAL – you can easily start to doubt yourself when people ‘dislike’ you in some way.

This is because, actually, they’re not doubting the real ‘You’ – which can’t be doubted because it’s real ; they’re doubting the false image which you also doubt because you KNOW it’s not true. Naturally, this triggers an internal conflict within you (and your normal coping mechanism for this conflict is to just try and be ‘liked’ so it goes away).

Quite simply, the reason that you doubt yourself is because you’re not being yourself – you have lost touch with what’s real about you and so you have started to yourself if the negative things they’re saying about you are true.

If you were being REAL then you would, of course, realise that these things are not true because you would be standing on a more solid foundation.

What is that foundation? The knowledge that when you’re being real you can’t be JUDGED in either ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ terms – you’re beyond either.

The problem, then, isn’t that you’re scared of being disliked but that you don’t know the truth about yourself and so seek it in other people (who probably don’t know themselves either).

The solution is to stop looking for answers about who you are in the OPINIONS and interpretations of other people and to instead ACCEPT who you are, CHOOSE who you want to become, and to DO the real work of becoming that person.

You can’t control what other people think about you and whatever that happens to be doesn’t need to affect your relationship with yourself anyway (unless you CHOOSE to let it). That being the case, you might as well figure out what you like about yourself and then keep doing it instead.

The Psychology of Needing to be Liked All the Time

So if needing to be liked all the time is irrational because you can’t control other people’s opinions and those opinions don’t matter anyway then why do some of you need to be liked?

The short answer is that there are two main reasons:

Reasons of the Self
Reasons of the World

Reasons of the Self

The reasons of the Self are just any of the reasons related to your own psychological relationships with yourself that make you DOUBT who you are and have to create a fake version to deal with this doubt.

Normally, this comes down to three emotions (or a cocktail of the three): shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

Shame: Makes you feel that there’s something inherently ‘wrong’ with who you are and so you try to make people like you to compensate.

There are millions of different ways to compensate here and if you look at the world around you (especially on social media, etc.) you’ll see shame-driven people everywhere.

Guilt: Makes you feel that there’s something inherently ‘wrong’ with the things you do, want to do, or have done. Whereas shame is always perpetuated internally, guilt always comes from some external source (that’s usually trying to control you).

When you have less shame and can see reality clearly then guilt is less likely to affect you – when it does affect you, it makes you dance around through hoops trying to be ‘liked’ again (by whoever is trying to make you feel guilty in the first place).

Trauma: Trauma is the most severe thing that can happen to a human being – it essentially means that something happens to you that makes us doubt – and even fear – your own power.

When that happens, it’s much more difficult to trust and believe in yourself and so you end up trying to outsource that trust and belief to others (which always fails because you can’t control what people will think about you and their opinions don’t really matter anyway).

Reasons of the World

When it comes to the psychological ‘Reasons of the World’ (aka SOCIAL reasons) for why you have a NEED to be liked, the short-version is that being ‘liked’ offers survival value.

Quite frankly, if nobody likes you then you’ll find it harder to have success in your career (because all business is ultimately about relationships), you’ll have no friends watching your back if things go sour somewhere, and people won’t really care what happens to you (in the most extreme cases) and so will leave you to die in the gutter (only a slight exaggeration).

If nobody likes you then that just means that – in the eyes of society – you’re lacking in status and that you’re not offering any value to the world (I know that’s harsh but it’s how it is).

We could probably say loads here about how this goes back to our “evolutionary past” and how human beings needed to hunt and live in tribes but all you need to know now is that being liked by the right people is a ‘good’ thing – living to make the wrong people try and like you to keep masking your own shame isn’t.

In terms of your own psychology, then, there are two things going on with a need to be liked:

The first is that you have unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ that’s preventing you from walking away from unhealthy relationships or causing you to outsource your ‘good’ feelings about yourself to others (which – as we saw above – is irrational because you can’t control what they think and their opinions about you are redundant anyway). Also, these ‘good’ feelings are really just a short-term high that comes from the release of tension of thinking you might not be ‘liked’.

The second is that you have all kinds of social instincts that are part of your biological makeup that make you feel like you have to be one of the herd/tribe/pack or you’re going to be cast aside to die in the (proverbial) gutter.

To give up the need to be liked you need to work on your relationship with yourself and listen to your own opinion more than others (and, for the record, if you have a ‘bad’ opinion of yourself then that means you’re being unreal and have picked up external standards or conditioning that you’re judging yourself in accordance with).

You also need to realise that your instincts to follow the herd and blend in are not reality – they’re just impulses that can help you survive but that you need to be selective with.

If you just follow any old crowd, then you’re going to end up being miserable because you will lose yourself in the crowd and no longer know who you are.

How needing to be liked all the time can hold you back

Just to drill the point home, here is a list of the symptoms you’ll face when you have the fundamental problem of NEEDING to be liked because of your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’.

I’ll also give you some quick tips so that you can actually start DOING something about this issue and moving towards a life that’s more REAL.

You’re never present because you’re always following an unreal agenda.

Problem: The first problem that arises from needing to be ‘liked’ all the time is that nobody really knows you because you’re always acting to come across in a certain light (that’s actually shadows), rather than being the REAL you.

As an example, maybe you need to be seen as being ‘nice’ (because your toxic shame can’t stand the idea of you being a ‘bad’ person or whatever) and so you have to constantly turn the volume up on how polite you are, hold back what you really think, never express your true feelings, etc.

This may help you to get what you want in the short-term, but in the long-term all you’re really doing is distancing yourself from other people and never truly being ‘seen’ (which is all any of us really want, at the end of the day).

Solution: The solution here? Start letting the REAL you out. You don’t have to go overboard especially if you’ve built a lot of the relationships in your life on an unreal foundation.

Stop being so AGREEABLE and start saying “No” – that’s always the first step to setting healthier boundaries and that’s what you’ve ultimately given yourself: a BOUNDARY PROBLEM.

Next time you catch yourself doing something purely because it will make you look ‘Nice’ (or whatever) then allow yourself to say “No” and be REAL instead. Overtime, this will definitely make you feel better about life in general.

You’re constantly comparing yourself to others

Problem: Another problem you’ll face if you need to be liked is that you’re going to constantly find yourself comparing yourself to others. This will be for two main reasons:

You want to compare to see how you’re ‘ranking’ in terms of whatever quality your ego has convinced you you’ll be liked for (being ‘nice’, ‘intelligent’, ‘alpha’, ‘beautiful’ whatever).
Your underlying SHAME (which is the main driver of needing to be liked) will want to make sure that nobody is ‘better’ than you because that will just make you catastrophise and act like there’s something WRONG with you (which is irrational but we’ll save that for another post).

In both of these cases, your need to be liked has caused you to create an ILLUSORY/BS standard to compare yourself and others to which is causing you to waste time in negative thinking and comparison.

This just stops you appreciating yourself and having REAL relationships with others (because you’re too busy comparing yourself to them to see them clearly).

Solution: First and foremost, you need to be AWARE of the fact and then ACCEPT the truth that human beings are incomparable – there will always be somebody that’s ‘better’ that you at some things but you’ll also always be better at some things than them.

Secondly, you need to try and develop an ABUNDANCE mindset – this just means realising that there’s enough goodwill in the world for everybody to be ‘liked’. Just because somebody else is likeable doesn’t mean you can’t also be likeable.

Thirdly, you need to stop worrying about other people and creating illusory competitions in your head by choosing a PURPOSE for yourself and your own life and focusing on that. When you’re busy GROWING REAL, you won’t have time to compare yourself to others: you’ll just be DOING YOU and getting things DONE.

You’re always criticising yourself

Problem: All this needing to be liked and comparison just sets you up for FAILURE. It sets you up for failure because you’re trying to do the impossible which is to change REALITY.

If you don’t realise that this is what you’re doing then you just end up living according to a bunch of EXPECTATIONS about yourself, the world, and reality that can never be met and you end up constantly criticising yourself.

This is because you keep telling yourself you ‘SHOULD’ get certain results but you never do (because you nobody can). In this particular case, the ‘SHOULDS’ in question are to be liked by everybody, to always be the best, to be perfect, etc. etc.

When you keep failing then your inner monologue (as an extension of your EGO) will keep chastising you and beating you up (or tell you you’re not good enough in the case of Imposter Syndrome).

Solution: You need to do the work to align your expectations with reality and to ACCEPT the realities of life that we’ve talked about here today in this article.

You never focus on your own goals because you’re wasting time on trying to impress people etc.

Problem: When you CHOOSE to live as though you’re only purpose here on earth is to be ‘liked’ then you make choices that reflect that – because most of these choices are UNREAL and our lives are just a consequence of the choices we’ve made then… it leads to your life being UNREAL too.

This is because in life the most important things we have – because we’re gonna be dead one day – are our time, energy, and attention.

Every time you CHOOSE to hide yourself behind some fake image of yourself, you’re wasting your LIFE.

Every time, you CHOOSE to not do that thing you really want to do because of shame or guilt, you’re wasting your POTENTIAL.

Every time, you CHOOSE to try and impress people or beg them to like you with desperate actions, you’re wasting the opportunity to be really KNOWN.

If the CHOICES you make are motivated by unreal, shame-driven, egotistical reasons then you’re not living YOUR life.

Solution: You need to start asking yourself what you really WANT from life, create a vision for it, and COMMIT to taking the actions that will help you realise it.

When you have a real vision then it makes it a lot easier to make CHOICES that are a reflection of you who really are, who you really want to become, and what you’re committed to do to get there.

Not being REAL to yourself or others.

Problem: In short, when you act like you need everybody to like you before you can like yourself then you stop being real.

This is a one-way ticket to misery because being unreal always leads to eventual frustration (see the symptoms we talked about above) and frustration always turns to misery if you don’t do something about it.

If you can’t be real with yourself (or others by extension) then you’ll never truly feel ALIVE – this means that one of the best and most urgent ways for you to improve your life is to start working on this stuff and actually moving towards self-acceptance and a life of ‘liking’ yourself first and foremost.

Solution: You CAN solve this problem but it will take a little patience with yourself and some time for you to readjust and reconfigure the shape of your life based on the CHOICES you’ve already made.

You do this by putting some thought into what you truly VALUE and INTEND to do with your life and then start dedicating yourself to that instead of the FALSE MISSION you’ve created for yourself (the mission that you think is to be LIKED more than anything REAL).

The Final Word

This has been a long article but I hope it’s helped you to see (if you had the problem we’ve been talking about) that focusing on being ‘liked’ only causes more problems in your life.

Not only does it distance you from yourself but it distances you from other people and wastes the precious time that you have here on planet earth.

If you want to start making changes in this area then you need to spend a little time becoming AWARE of who you really are and how this ‘likability’ problem is holding you back.

After you’ve gained this AWARENESS you need to ACCEPT the truth about yourself and the ways that you can express this truth in a real way through ACTION.

By dedicating yourself to that ACTION you’ll know what you want to say “YES” to (real life), that will make it easier to start saying “NO” to the unreal things we’ve been talking about, and you’ll increase your odds of meeting REAL people that actually like the REAL you for real reasons.

Don’t be liked; be real. The rest will fall into place.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

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The Secrets of Extreme Creativity (How to Unblock and then Nurture your Creativity Whilst Keeping it Real).

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Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology

If you find yourself suffering from creative ‘blocks’, lacking creative motivation, or wanting to reawaken a slumbering creative drive then this article is for you.

Perhaps you’re frustrated because your creative work has become stale? Or maybe it hasn’t become…anything because it simply hasn’t even got started?

Maybe you’re starting to doubt yourself and wonder if you’ve ‘lost’ whatever creative talent you might have had? Or maybe you’re just starting to get bored of your own work because it’s all the ‘same old, same old’ and nothing new ever seems to emerges (just the same old themes and patterns with a little variation here and there)?

Don’t worry! This is totally normal and is just what happens when your RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF has stagnated and starts to reflect itself back at you in your relationship with your creative work (because your work is an EXTENSION of the thoughts and beliefs you carried when you first set out making it).

If you have this problem then what you need to do is: 1) Reframe your views of ‘creativity’ itself and, 2) learn how to understand the mechanics of how your relationship with yourself affects what’s creatively possible for you in one moment to the next.

If you improve your relationship with yourself so that it’s more closely aligned with REALITY and then ‘tweak’ your perspective on creativity a little then you’ll probably be fine.

This article will help you to get a fresh perspective on what creativity is and how you can change your relationship with yourself to ensure that you don’t prevent yourself from accessing your own natural creative drive because of false assumptions or BS that you’ve picked up somewhere down the line.

If you can understand what’s said here and – more importantly – make changes to your life and ACT on what you read, then the quality and quantity of your creative output will quite likely increase because you will have removed the main obstacle to both: YOURSELF.

Here’s what you need to know:

Anybody can be creative

Perhaps the first thing that you need to know about creativity is that EVERYBODY is creative when they’re being REAL.

Creativity is the natural state of a real human being because it’s the state that we evolved over millions of years to help us solve problems and to handle limitations.

If you find yourself telling yourself that “I’m just not a creative person” or anything similar then you need to put a STOP to that right now and realise that this is a self-limiting belief that you’ve picked up from outside of yourself somewhere (probably because you’re being outcome-dependent because the work you’ve done in the past didn’t get whatever results your ego needed).

We are ALL creative because we’re all human (I assume if you’re reading this). The ‘part’ or side of yourself that might be telling you that you’re not creative is actually just a false idea that you have picked up and identified with because of your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and/or trauma almost always).

The first step to unblocking your creativity is to start reframing and embracing creativity as something that’s natural and refusing to pay attention to any thoughts you have that tell you that creativity is somehow ‘beyond’ whatever it is that you think you are.

If you can’t do that then you’re always going to have creative blocks because you’re blocking your ‘self’ from doing what it needs to do as part of your nature.

Creativity and growing real are inherently linked

In the language that I use on this site and in my books, GROWING REAL just means going through the process of removing some of your illusions about yourself, the world, and reality and developing a healthier relationship that is aligned with REALITY (not just your ideas or assumptions about it).

A lot of people out there tend to believe that ‘reality’ is somehow a ‘bad’ thing but actually uncovering and working with reality is one of the best things that can ever happen to you because it gives you a solid foundation to build your life on and to get better RESULTS (because at the end of the day the only thing that ‘works’ is reality and so if you don’t align with it you can’t get any results at all which just leads to friction, frustration, and then misery).

From this point of view, growing real (i.e. becoming a more authentic human being) and the creative process are inherently linked.

This is because – just as in life – in the creative process, you can’t get the results you want without getting out of your head (in terms of our assumptions, limiting beliefs, or distortions, etc.) and allowing something REAL to emerge as your ideas about your creative projects are refined in the furnace of creativity itself (the process of moving beyond ideas and actually doing the work).

Perhaps the most interesting thing in both cases – life and creative work – is that the main thing that stops us going with the process and allowing reality to take us where we need to go is our relationship with ourselves: in particular, our underlying emotional ‘stuff’ in the form of shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

When we have this unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ then we end up creating a FALSE relationship with ourselves so that we can try and distance ourselves from these emotions and to live without facing them. This might work as a short-term ‘solution’ but in the long-run it causes us to become further and further distanced from reality (and, thus, stop ourselves from getting the results that we want in life, creativity, or anywhere else).

The creative process, then, doesn’t just show us what reality is as we allow it to take us on a process of exploration; it also shows us who WE are.

If we’re not prepared to face ourselves and our emotional ‘stuff’ (and grow real) then we’ll be incapable of riding those creative waves all the way to shore in the form of whatever results our work is trying to bring us.

This is why we can say that growing real and creativity are inherently linked: if you’re not prepared to let your work show you your own blind spots or to help you work through your ‘stuff’ then you’ll always be creatively blocked.

The solution is to see your work as a testing ground for your own relationship with yourself and to be committed to learning about – and facing – the sides of yourself that your work may bring to the surface. This is your unconscious becoming conscious and taking you home. Go with it, not against it. You want to be REAL and your creative work is helping you get there (but only if you ‘let’ it).

Don’t block your natural drive to wholeness (this is creative synthesis)

The main difference between a REAL and UNREAL approach to life and creativity is that the real approach will always lead you towards WHOLENESS and the unreal approach will always lead you towards FRAGMENTATION.

The simplest way of understanding this is that ‘wholeness’ just means being involved in the process of moving towards CONNECTION in yourself, the world, and reality, whereas ‘fragmentation’ means moving towards DISCONNECTION or separation.

In PRACTICAL terms this shows up in the following ways:

At the level of the SELF wholeness (connection) means that we’re making choices that allows us to face and accept as many parts of ourselves as possible (embracing our Shadow ‘stuff’ that we might have been conditioned to disown or label as ‘unacceptable’ and try to hide).

This means that we’re attempting to be as honest with ourselves as possible at all times, embrace the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ things about ourselves, and to refuse to hide behind the mask of EGO or false personality because we have internalised shame or allowed the world to make us feel guilty for being whatever it is that we are.

At the level of the WORLD, wholeness means that we’re making choices that allow us to use our lives and creative work to SERVE others in a way that also serves our growth and our highest values.

This means that we are open to asking the world what it WANTS or NEEDS in relation to what we can OFFER when we’re being real with ourselves instead of only asking the world to want from us what we want it to want so we can keep our EGO in place (and keep hiding from ourselves and reality).

At the level of REALITY, wholeness means that we embrace the truth of life and creativity which is that both are VEHICLES FOR CHANGE. This means that we know we will go into a creative project or process as one thing and come out another. This is because ourselves and our work end up becoming a living system and we will GROW and learn from our work as we create it (if we’re being REAL about it and with it).

This process of change through the living system of creativity is called CREATIVE SYNTHESIS. It’s a ‘synthesis’ because the process takes all of the FRAGMENTED parts of us that we have at the start of the project and unifies them through the ebb of tension and release as we work our way through the project and carry ourselves to the finished results (whatever it is that we’re creating: a book, a business, a service, a life, whatever).

The most common way this process unfolds is as follows:

-We go into a project with certain ideas of who we are and what the finished project will look like.

-We start the work and face certain challenges because we realise that our expectations and assumptions are different to the reality (this means we’re finding our creative EDGE).

-We either RESIST learning and adapting because we want to keep our EGO in place (because we’re not ready to face our emotional and shadow ‘stuff’) or we ACCEPT and change and grow with the work until we get the final product.

If we take the path of RESISTANCE then we just end up being more fragmented in ourselves or staying the same. If we take the path of ACCEPTANCE then we grow more real and become more WHOLE (and our work is a reflection of this in the form of transmuting our emotional ‘stuff’ into insight and getting RESULTS).

Actually, this movement towards WHOLENESS is natural and we all have a constant drive towards wholeness unfolding inside ourselves at all times (because we are systems and all systems are constantly striving towards balance and HOMEOSTASIS).

The problem is that we put blocks in the way of this natural drive with unnatural fragmented thoughts and beliefs that we picked up or hypnotised ourselves with.

To allow your drive towards wholeness/creativity to take you where you need to go (so your unconscious and conscious minds can BALANCE out through Creative Synthesis) then you need to detach from your thoughts and expectations and let the WORK teach you what you need to learn about who you really are (“The truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable” – Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness).

Take yourself out of the equation.

In relation to what we’ve said so far, the biggest BLOCKAGE to letting the creative process take you where you need to go is your SELF-IMAGE or ideas about yourself.

If you’re suffering from creative blocks or you’re not being as ‘open’ as you need to be in order to get results and move forward with whatever you’re working on then your self-image is probably causing you to be more FRAGMENTED than you need to be (thus CLOSING the system that exists between you and your work and causing it to break down – i.e. not get results).

This is because your self-image/ego/whatever causes you to try and CONTROL your work instead of to COLLABORATE with it and to learn and GROW REAL as a result of this collaborative relationship.

This might show up in a number of ways but the most common are:

-Not being able to get started because of PERFECTIONISTIC ideas about the work because of how you want to see yourself(and so you keep deleting and starting again instead of letting the work be good enough and then refining).

-Needing the work to REFLECT ON you in a certain way (instead of being reflected IN your work) and so skewing or distorting the process in an attempt to uphold your ego (instead of helping you grow through it). The most obvious sign here is that your work seems PRETENTIOUS/too try hard to others.

-Your work being an attempt to JUSTIFY or uphold the points of view that you’ve created to keep hiding behind EGO (instead of being an exploration of these views so you can find out what’s actually true and GROW REAL). Work like this just ends up being a reflection of AGENDAS, not truth (because we’re attached to the premises those agendas are founded on because of ego ‘stuff’).

-Etc.

In all cases like this, using your work as an EXTENSION or AUGMENTATION of your self-image instead of a way to understand and grow through your self-image is holding you back.

The solution is to reframe the way that you see your creative work and the creative process so that it’s not about ‘You’ but about what you can BECOME if you stay on a REAL path by collaborating with the work instead of fruitlessly attempting to control it.

Learn to keep learning.

Like we’ve said, creativity is ultimately about GROWING REAL and you can’t grow real if you don’t keep LEARNING (because growing real means testing your assumptions (etc.) about yourself, your world, and reality in the light of TRUTH and you can’t do that if you think you already know everything).

If you find that your creativity is blocked, then it means that you have taken yourself out of the natural flow of learning by only ever acting on things that you already think you know or want to believe and not living in such a way where you’re constantly having new experiences and acquiring new INSIGHTS that help you to grow in yourself and have more to SHARE with your work.

What this means in practical terms is that you need to keep pushing through the EDGE of yourself (your ideas about what you already know) and to live in a way that constantly brings new insight into your life.

This might mean ‘learning’ in more traditional sense like reading, doing courses, picking up new skills and qualities, getting coaching and uncovering AWARENESS about yourself, etc. – or it might mean learning in an experiential sense where you get out of your COMFORT ZONE and STRETCH yourself every week and “LEARN BY DOING”: this might involve starting a new hobby, meeting new people, trying a new project in a totally new way, etc. etc.

The POINT is that if you only stay in your intellectual, emotional, and experiential comfort zones then you will just be living in a way that reinforces the self-image you already have instead of allowing you to get new INSIGHTS and have more to say in the creative work that you’re doing.

Short-version: If you’re struggling to express yourself creatively then you need to EXPAND your horizons and learn from life more.

Understand the natural flow of tension and release.

Real life works in natural cycles of tension and release (for example, the ebb and flow of the oceans, night and day, stress and relaxation, etc. etc. etc.).

In relation to our creativity, the tension is added by our attachment to CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE and IDEAS and release comes from EXPERIENTIAL UNDERSTANDING and ACTION.

This is clear in what we said earlier in this article about CREATIVE SYNTHESIS – our ideas about a project add the tension and this is released as we go through the creative process. The end result is something new – or at least some RESULT – because these CYCLES of tension and release always end with something being CREATED.

That might sound a bit airy-fairy, but what it means in PRACTICAL terms for your own creative work is that if you’re struggling to get off-the-ground or you’re not getting results then your relationship with tension and release is out of balance.

Here’s what this can look like:

-If you find yourself being too TENSE then you just end up being a CONTROL FREAK who is caught up in Ego. This just leads to a lack of REAL action and the problems of perfectionism (etc.) mentioned above. You might also ACT a lot in this tense state but it’s not REAL ACTION, it’s just EGO ACTION that doesn’t take you through the process of CREATIVE SYNTHESIS (being ‘busy’ but not getting anywhere because you’re acting to AVOID or RESIST, no LEARN and face yourself and life).

-If you find yourself trying to rid your life of all tension and resistance then end up being not TENSE ENOUGH and being “so open minded your brains fall out”. In this state, you might have a lot of creative ideas but you never ACT on them (and so don’t get results in reality or you only act on the ideas that are in your COMFORT ZONE (and so don’t grow more REAL through creative tension).

When you’re being REAL, you have a balance of TENSION and RELEASE.

This means that you have a VISION for your creative work (or whatever else you’re using your creativity towards) and this adds a kind of TENSION as it directs where you’re going from one moment to the next. As you release this tension, you grow through your IDEAS about yourself and your expectations by taking consistent, focused ACTION towards the vision.

This combination of the TENSION between your future vision and where you are now, plus the RELEASE of creative ACTION allows you to build CREATIVE MOMENTUM that will allow you to grow real and to allow the project to emerge in a balanced way.

You need to understand the mechanics of this so you can work with it, not against it.

Realise that originality just refers to anything that comes from within.

Sometimes, you might stop yourself from moving forward with the creative process because you want to create something that’s completely ‘new’ or that’s never been seen before.

This actually just ends up stopping you from moving forward in any way, shape, or form because it’s a form of EGO and perfectionism and is setting you up for a very difficult task.

As the old saying says: “There’s nothing new under the sun”

This is actually very true and just about everything that could’ve been said about life and the human experience has pretty much been said already.

On top of that, it’s quite hard to CREATE something new from scratch because most of the things that are ‘created’ are just various combinations of things that already exist in life or nature (and you can’t bring something new into being in that sense).

The solution here is to realise that TRUE ORIGINALITY isn’t about appeasing your ego but about taking yourself on the journey of REAL GROWTH and uncovering INTERNAL INSIGHT as a natural consequence of this process.

When you keep moving forward and pushing into your EDGE through your comfort zone then you will be able to uncover new INSIGHTS that are original to you.

They’re original to you because they came from within and this will allow you to put them in a context that nobody else can or to express them in a voice that belongs to YOU and you alone.

You need to understand this so you live for this kind of ORIGINALITY and become the original source of your own WORK and whatever it’s expressing (or, more accurately, the JOURNEY you’re on as you grow real is the source because you got out of your own head and allowed reality to show you something REAL).

Creativity is about working with our limitations, not being limitless (this is why it’s a very ‘human’ thing).

Another pitfall that a lot of people make – because of the ‘EGO’ stuff – is thinking that creativity somehow makes them LIMITLESS.

Actually, because creativity is just something that we evolved to be able to handle the challenges and limitations that come with being a human being on a FRAGMENTED PLANET, then having limitations is actually a way to make you MORE CREATIVE.

This is because having some kind of limits on what you’re doing prevents ‘Analysis Paralysis’ and FORCES your mind/brain to come up with new solutions that help you grow THROUGH the limits by using the limits as a way to get there (“What stands in the way becomes the way”, as Marcus Aurelius said).

As an example, imagine that somebody has got a gun to your head and they’re telling you to “write a book” – this is far too LIMITLESS of a command and your brain would probably struggle to know what to write. Bang! Now you’re dead!

Now imagine that somebody holds a gun to your head and tells you to “write a sci-fi/cowboy/comedy/self-help book”. Having those generic limitations in place would allow your brain to make CREATIVE DECISIONS much more quickly and to get better results because having a box to start with allows you to THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX (i.e. you can only do that if you have a box in the first place – the box adds TENSION that you can RELEASE).

It’s the same when you apply your creativity to your life and limit your choices to being aligned with your values and principles (for example).

What this means in a practical sense is that if you’re struggling to get off the ground with your creative work then you might not have enough (relevant) limitations that you’ve set to force your brain into action. Find a way to add some and your brain will figure out the rest for you.

You need to be outcome-independent to allow your creativity to keep coming.

There are two ways to go about life and creativity (as an extension of living): either being outcome-dependent or outcome-independent.

In short, being outcome-dependent means that our levels of self-worth and self-acceptance are DEPENDENT on the outcome (or results) we get. For example, setting ourselves the creative goal of writing a bestselling novel and telling ourselves our work (and we, by extension) are worthless if we don’t achieve that goal.

Being outcome-dependent in this way is UNREAL because it stops us from moving forward and adds UNNECESSARY friction or pressure to the creative process.

A better approach – in life and creativity – is to be outcome-independent. All this really means is that we know our own worth and accept ourselves regardless of whether or not we get certain results (so in the example given, we’d still feel AMAZING about ourselves and known we’d done our best work even if it wasn’t a bestseller).

Again, this goes back to our emotional ‘stuff’ and our relationships with ourselves: if we have a load of unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma then we’re more likely to be outcome-dependent and to outsource the good feelings we have about ourselves to the results we get.

This just means that the creative work we produce ends up being done in the service of the ego and not of our journey into GROWING REAL (which, ironically, means we’re more likely to produce work that less people relate to).

What you need to do to FREE and UNBLOCK yourself is to take an outcome-independent attitude to your work (and life).

In practical terms, this means that you have a general vision for where you’re going and what you’re trying to achieve but you allow yourself to EXPLORE and EXPERIMENT and to learn what you can as you go about attaining the vision.

Essentially, you allow yourself to “DO YOUR BEST AND FORGET THE REST” which actually opens you up to be MORE CREATIVE because you increase the odds of allowing your work to help you grow real.

If you’re outcome-dependent, you will have invested your feelings about yourself in the work (and the desires and beliefs that come with these feelings) and so you probably won’t even get started because you’ve distorted your view of the work and DISTANCED yourself from it from the outset.

If you have writer’s block (or any other creative block) it’s usually because you haven’t done your research (and the greatest research is always living).

Essentially, what we’re talking about here is that if you have a creative block then you’re not LIVING in a REAL way.

The only way you can live in an unreal way is to act like you’ve got it all figured out, have experienced all there is to experience, and decide that the version of yourself that currently exists is the ‘final’ version (when in reality we’re all works in progress our whole lives long – you can always go deeper into the truth about life).

If you have block then it means that you haven’t done enough ‘research’ and therefore haven’t collected enough INSIGHT to be able to make the kind of connections you need to make intellectually, emotionally, and (even) spiritually about your life and what it’s showing you.

You need to learn to see life as a RESEARCH project:

-If you’re writing a novel, life will teach you the lessons that can serve as its creative themes.

-If you’re painting a painting, life will show you the metaphors that need to be expressed.

-If you’re designing a business, life will show you what people NEED and how you can solve their problems.

-If you’re writing a piece of music, life will teach you about the context of your own FEELINGS and how you can make them move (emotions are energy in motion as somebody once said).

The point is that if you have a BLOCK then you’re probably not seeing life in the realest possible way (usually because of that ‘ego’ thing).

Instead of acting like you’ve got it all figured out and then staring at a blank screen/canvas/whatever go out and find out – life will always give you SOMETHING that you can work with.

Don’t be scared to find your edge (that’s just your ego blocking your creative drives).

In short, the ‘secret’ of extreme creativity is about knowing where your EDGE is. This means doing some of the things that scare you by stretching yourself and PUTTING YOURSELF in situations that show you the edge of your comfort zone and help you to play with TENSION and RELEASE in the momentum you can build there.

If you’re reading this and you have some kind of creative block then there’s a very high chance that there’s something in your life that you’re NOT FACING. This may seem like some ‘external’ thing but actually you’re not facing it because of whatever is going on INSIDE you.

In these kind of situations, you need to ask yourself what QUALITIES in yourself are begging to come to the light of your consciousness – almost always, these qualities will be something that you’ve been forced to hide in the Shadow of yourself because it somehow got labelled as ‘unacceptable’ (by others and then you).

Your EDGE is just the place where you’re close to finding and befriending these qualities again – your work is the perfect vessel for exploring them safely but your EGO won’t like it because what you learn in these explorations will change your ego forever.

Embrace this process and ride through the EDGE. There’s nothing to fear but it will help you to ride that natural drive towards wholeness and produce the work you need to produce in that moment.

Real creativity will always ‘change’ you by taking you deeper into yourself and life.

Essentially, what all of this boils down to is that REAL CREATIVITY WILL SHOW YOU YOUR REAL SELF AND WHAT REAL LIFE IS.

If you have consistent blocks that you just can’t seem to push through then you need to ask yourself what you’re RESISTING about who you really are and what life really is.

Your relationship to your own creativity is a microcosm of your relationship to LIFE as a whole. The real question isn’t how creative are you but how ALIVE can you be if you let yourself?

Whatever blocks you have are within you and you can clear them out of the way by using your work to do two things (this applies in life too):

Uncover the truth.
Live the truth.

These two things are intertwined as part of the same process and the only thing stopping you from working it is: ‘YOU’.

Once your work is ‘out there’ it will still have things to teach you. Listen (that’s how you know where the next project will be found).

Finally, once your work is out in the world, you relationship with it will continue to deepen and to develop.

This will be most clear in the way that the INTERPRETATIONS that the world makes of what you’ve created are different to your own interpretations.

For example, maybe you’ll write a novel and think it ‘means’ a certain thing – what you’ll find is that other people will read your novel and think it means something totally different (for example).

When this kind of thing happens, you need to resist the urge to CLING to your own meaning and to allow new meaning to emerge between all of the COLLECTIVE interpretations of the work.

This is how you find out what your next project will be and where you need to go in yourself next (because in the gap between expectation and result is reality). Learn to listen and you will see that the process never ends and you can always go deeper.

That’s just ‘life’ and your creativity is your way into it.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

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Coaching/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Shadow Life

Is it time for a Personality Transplant? Read on to find out!

The most important relationship in your life is your relationship with YOURSELF.

To some people reading this that sounds ‘selfish’ but, really, it’s just a matter of being REAL.

If your relationship with yourself is as good as it can possibly be then it has a number of incredible benefits that cascade into the rest of your life:

-You have better relationships with other people because accepting yourself makes it easier to accept them.

-You know what your true INTENTIONS and VALUES are and so you’re able to build a life with purpose that allows you to better SERVE other people.

-You’re happier because you’re getting authentic results from life and so you have less DRAMA with other people.

-You’re getting more DONE because when you improve your relationships with yourself you know what you really think and feel and know what to DO with this information.

-You’re more likely to take calculated RISKS that will allow you to get out of your comfort zone and actually reward yourself with experiences that you want (because you no longer allow a fear of failure to hold you back because you know that even if you do ‘fail’ your self-worth doesn’t need to be affected).

–Etc.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people in the world – and you may be one of them – we get CONDITIONED to stop trusting and believing in ourselves and to try and conform to standards, values, and intentions that have nothing to do with who we really are.

When this happens, we end up convincing ourselves that we need to change something that can never really be changed – the REAL version of ourselves – and this just ends up causing our lives to go into a state of disarray and for us to feel the chronic call of the VOID as we disown important parts of ourselves.

We disown these life-enhancing parts because society/the world/matrix/whatever makes us self-hypnotise ourselves into thinking that these ‘parts’ (really part of the WHOLE) are “unacceptable” and so we try to hide them in the Shadows of ourselves – see the book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World which you can get for free elsewhere on this site.

These collective, “unacceptable” parts are actually our key to salvation because they contain the TRUTH about us and will allow us to rise again and to live a REAL life instead of the life we’ve created as an extension of the cage we’ve caused ourselves to live in because of the denial of all this Shadow ‘stuff’ and who we really are and can become.

If what you’re reading here, makes sense to you, then don’t worry because there is something you can do – no matter what your situation – you have to ACT, though, and the price of inaction will just be the consequences of staying on whatever path you’re currently on and to keep building on whatever results you’re currently getting (you know what that means in the context of your own life – just ask yourself: “IF I don’t do anything now where will I be in five or ten years from now?”).

What you need to do is to start looking at how your relationship with yourself at present is HOLDING YOU BACK from the life you really want and how the way you IDENTIFY with yourself is keeping some of the real parts of you at bay (or attempting to – these ‘parts’ are always showing up in our lives but that’s a story for another day).

What you probably need to do is give yourself what I have recently been calling a PERSONALITY TRANSPLANT.

That might sound painful or difficult but it’s actually a relatively pain free procedure that can allow you to make a lot of ‘internal’ progress in a relatively short amount of time (usually 7-Days if you’re ready to commit and actually start changing your own life).

What a Personality Transplant involves is just looking at the personality (aka Ego in the language we use here) that you’ve CHOSEN and CREATED for yourself and seeing where it’s holding you back from taking the kind of ACTION that you need and want to be taking to get where you need to be in life.

Here’s a list of some of the most common symptoms that people suffer unnecessarily from (‘unnecessary’ because it’s quite ‘easy’ to do something about it) when they might be ready to go through the ‘Personality Transplant’ procedure for themselves:

You need a Personality Transplant because you never get anything real DONE.

The clearest sign that you might be ready for a Personality Transplant is that you never get anything REAL done.

Yeah, you might spend your days ‘doing’ things but this doesn’t necessarily mean that these activities are fulfilling or that they help you build any momentum or move forward in life in the way that you want to (like the REAL stuff you could be doing).

Normally, when this happens it’s because you have developed an unreal personality that is out-of-sync with both the nature of life and reality themselves but also the nature of who you are in your REALNESS.

This happens for a number of reasons:

You don’t appreciate life as what it really is and you think that you have all of the time in the world (hint: you don’t because you’re going to die one day).This leads to a problem where you don’t value your time, energy, and attention and so you give them to DISTRACTIONS that don’t deserve them.These distractions can be ANYTHING – depending on your underlying intention – but the most common distractions are things like:
Meaningless activities like video games, Netflix, dramatic relationships, pointless jobs, trying to escape from boredom (you’re only bored because you haven’t figured out your purpose), etc. etc.
You have been conditioned to become DETACHED from your true values and intentions and you are listening to EXTERNAL SOURCES of ‘authority’ about how you should live your life and what you should do with it.This external conditioning eventually turns into an internal monologue that we hypnotise ourselves with that causes us to feel shame or guilt around the actions we really want to be taking.Eventually, this shame and guilt turns into NEGATIVE THINKING or SELF-JUDGEMENT that causes us to start making excuses about why we can’t act in the way we want to act.

This way of RELATING TO OURSELVES just ends up turning into an unreal PASSIVE mindset that prevents us from acting in the world.

When we are operating and attempting to design our lives with these two driving forces in our lives – 1) giving into distraction because we don’t value our time, energy, and attention, and 2) hynotising ourselves to be passive – then we just end up ensuring that everything we do is motivated by something UNREAL.

A simple truth about life is this:

Unreal in, unreal out; real in, real out.

All that means is that if you are motivated to act (or not) from an unreal place (because of your conditioning, etc.) then then end result will also be unreal (and vice versa: a real intention leads to real actions and therefore real results).

If you’re not getting anything real ‘done’ then it means that you’re starting off from an unreal place and so you need to switch things up and change your relationship with yourself (with a ‘Personality Transplant’).

You need a Personality Transplant because you keep getting frustrated and that frustration will eventually turn into misery if you don’t do anything.

Naturally, if you keep failing to get the RESULTS that you want from life then you will eventually become frustrated. This is normal.

The problem for a lot of frustrated people is that they try and convince themselves that the source of their frustration is outside of themselves.

Instead of changing their approach to life – by changing the way they relate to themselves first and foremost – they will say things to themselves that attempt to deny reality and to keep their (unreal) personality in place.

Examples of what they might say:

“Life is so unfair.”

“I’m just not supposed to succeed.”

“I’m so unlucky.”

Or maybe – instead of changing themselves and their approach to life – they will start to try and trick themselves into thinking they have control over the uncontrollable (reality) with all kinds of magical devices or philosophies:

-Hororscopes and astrology

-Crystals or other things that can explain away PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for our lives.

-Trying to ‘manifest’ things instead of taking action and REALISING things.

The point is that when we have unreal beliefs or use unreal systems to try and control life (instead of working with it) then we just end up distancing ourselves more and more from reality and prevent ourselves from getting RESULTS.*

This just leads to more frustration because of the friction between what we want and what we get from life.

If we don’t change our approach at a FUNDAMENTAL level (the most fundamental being our relationship with ourselves) then we just fall into the INSANE trap of “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Unless we WAKE UP and see the truth – which means changing something – then we become more and more frustrated and then this frustration just turns to MISERY.

The SOLUTION is to start looking at where your relationship with yourself is BLOCKING your view and stopping you from ACCEPTING the reality of yourself – when you can do that you will start moving with reality again (instead of against it) and your levels of frustration (and potential misery) will dissipate.

*This is why so many ‘spiritual’ people (etc.) are actually quite miserable – because they’re not using their spirituality to face reality (which might mean changing) but to keep hiding and to try and force reality to their will (which is impossible and thus brings friction, frustration, and misery).

You have problems with yourself, the world, and reality that you just can’t seem to solve. You need a Personality Transplant.

When we have (unconsciously) CHOSEN a personality for ourselves that is designed to keep the truth about ourselves and the world at bay then we constantly find ourselves with ‘problems’ that can never be solved.

The variation and complexity of such problems is myriad but the thing that they all have in common is that they linger and NO SOLUTION can ever be found.

The reason for this is that these problems only exist in your head because you’re unconsciously trying to hide the TRUTH about reality and life behind your personality (which you don’t want to change).

If you could let the TRUTH in then one of two things would happen:

You’d realise that you didn’t have a problem – you just had something you needed to accept about life or were thinking in a way that caused you to DISTORT reality.
You’d find a solution to the problem and then you’d DO something about it (and so no longer have a problem).

The point here is that if you find yourself having a lot of existential or other problems that never go away then the actual ‘problem’ is with how you’re relating to yourself and how this is BLOCKING YOUR VIEW of things.

Normally, the only reason we want to block our view in this way is because we have some unresolved ‘emotional’ stuff (shame, guilt, trauma) that the view will involve looking at.

The ‘cure’ is to learn to look in such a way that it doesn’t hurt and you can grow through it and find a stronger foundation to stand on. This is the end result of the Personality Transplant.

You have a restless feeling that there’s ‘more’ to life.

When you’re being unreal with yourself you’ll constantly feel like there’s ‘more’ to life and that you can express more of your potential or do more with your life.

Some people feel like this for years and years (sometimes even their whole lives) because they never wake up and smell the coffee.

The reason you feel like there’s ‘more’ to life is because there is more to life – you’re just not experiencing it because you’re holding yourself back with an unreal personality and the cage of beliefs it’s locked you within.

When you have these unreal beliefs that make you PASSIVE, then you don’t go out and get the things that you want from life. This manifests as a feeling that there’s ‘more’.

Sometimes, we’ll try and trick ourselves into not GROWING REAL by saying that we should just be grateful for what we already have (which is often not very much if you have these mindset issues).

This is an example of ‘toxic gratitude’ and is just your ego’s way of ensuring you continue not to take action (and therefore grow in the process).

The other reason you might feel like there’s ‘more’ is because as well as denying yourself external experiences (etc.) you’re also hiding all those internal ‘parts’ of yourself in the ‘Shadow Territory. Your craving for ‘more’ is a craving to be RECONNECTED to your REAL SELF and to become whole again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you constantly judge or criticise yourself which stops you moving forward.

When you take onboard all of the external conditioning of the world that we talked about and start hypnotising yourself into believing it then you pick up a metric-f-ton of unreal standards according to which you can judge yourself by.

This shows up as:

-Negative self-talk

-Imposter syndrome

-Hypercritciality

-Outcome-dependence

-Etc.

This stops you from taking action and makes you feel ASHAMED to be/feel/think/do the things that you really want to be doing.

What you need to do in these kind of cases is realise that when you’re being REAL you can never judge yourself because reality is beyond the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of judgements.

You need to learn to stop listening to this unreal internalised voice and to start acting on a foundation of acceptance instead.

You can TRAIN yourself to do this and to start moving forward again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, just wasting your life doing the same old same old.

A clear symptom of having an unreal personality (that needs to be ‘transplanted’) is that you feel stuck in a rut, nothing ever changes, and you just keep going through the motions of doing the same old, same old.

You feel like you’re WASTING your life then the reason for this is that you are wasting your life because you don’t understand what life is (like we said above) and so you’re wasting your time, energy, and attention on distractions instead of DIRECTION.

Luckily, when you start getting back in touch with the real version of yourself by going through the Personality Transplant procedure then you will have a better understanding of your DIRECTION in the form of purpose and so things will start moving again.

Being stuck in a ‘rut’ just means that you have no VISION for the future or who you’re becoming on the way there.

Once you’ve started to look at what’s real about you, you will understand your true values and intentions, how you can create a vision around these things, and what skills and qualities you need to develop to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

When you’re armed with this information, it’s a lot easier to move – even if only a little every day – and to stop wasting your life on the same old, same old of the comfortable but familiar.

You need a Personality Transplant because you suffer from anxiety and depression that you can’t quite explain.

In many many cases, anxiety and depression are not fundamental problems but SYMPTOMS of the deeper issue of having an UNREAL relationship with yourself and allowing this relationship to remove you from reality.

Before you smash the REALITY RESET BUTTON and give yourself a Personality Transplant, you can just end up causing problems for yourself that lead to mental health issues:

Anxiety is often caused by engaging with yourself in an unreal way because you have created a false image of yourself based on false assumptions about who you are, what the world is, and how reality works.

When you interact with the world from the vantage point of this false image then you are constantly getting NEGATIVE FEEDBACK from reality in the form of unmet expectations and a lack of results. This constant friction would cause anybody to be anxious.

Depression is often caused by not listening to the FEEDBACK you get from your anxiety and so clinging to our false self-image instead of changing it: this just causes frustration that turns to misery (depression).

The other fundamental problem that causes depression is that you have lost touch with your PURPOSE because you have picked up a PASSIVE BELIEF SYSTEM that caused you to stop moving. All human beings need to keep moving to be fulfilled – if we lack purpose our emotional life reflects this.

If you suffer from anxiety and depression then it’s probably a result of the lifestyle choices you are making based on your relationship with yourself.

Medication (etc.) may mask these symptoms in the short-term but to solve the fundamental problem you might just need to give yourself a Personality Transplant and start moving again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you don’t trust and believe in yourself enough to build the relationships you want and get the results you need.

Our unreal personalities are always caused by underlying SHAME, GUILT, and/or TRAUMA that we are not prepared to face.

When you don’t face these emotions you end up blocking them behind an unreal version of yourself and spend your whole life engaged in CONTROL FREAKERY in order to support this false version.

Living in this manner stops you from building real relationship and getting real results.

This is because – at some level – you end up doubting yourself and failing to trust and believe in your CAPACITY to do the things you need to do and to relate to people in a way where you recognise your own VALUE and serve people in an appropriate way.

If you don’t have the kind of relationships in your life that you want to have then you need to learn to push through the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ and to learn to accept yourself UNCONDITIONALLY (which can be done).

When you can do that you’ll have a better relationship with the world and will get the results you want from life as an extension of that.

You want your life to change for the better but it never does.

In short, if you’ve been trying to change your life for a while but never get anywhere then you need to try and change your personality from an unreal one to a real one.

This means getting out of your comfort zone – which is an extension of your current identity, not reality – and to find your EDGE.

This means stepping up and giving yourself a Personality Transplant – if you don’t then things are going to continue to never change and before you know it your life will nearly be over and you’ll be battling regrets.

Giving yourself a Personality Transplant isn’t that ‘hard’ but takes a little commitment (to yourself and the life that you want).

It involves things like:

-Creating a REAL vision for yourself.

-Deconditioning yourself from all of the external things that have made you hide from yourself.

-Looking at your self-limiting beliefs.

-Seeing where you’re being too PASSIVE or NEGATIVE in your thinking.

-Exploring what parts of yourself you’re denying and what GIFTS they have to offer you.

-Looking at how you can STRETCH yourself and find your EDGE.

-Learning to understand how you might be causing yourself to be FRAGMENTED.

-What you’re not accepting about yourself and life.

-How you can use your time, energy, and attention more effectively.

-Plus a load more.

If you’ve already waited long enough to start making changes then you can get started right NOW by signing up below– this will give you access to a 7-Day course that will allow you to figure this stuff out in the context of your own life and to start getting results and moving again FAST (if you don’t want to leave this site, check out the Personality Transplant intro video below).

This is a donation-based course so anybody who is in the small group of people that are ACTUALLY ready to work on themselves can have access to these life changing ideas and be rewarded for their commitment to life itself (‘donation-based’ means pay what you want even nothing – this is an incredibly valuable course though so if this article resonates and you don’t take it then you need to ask yourself what’s blocking you).

Real life is just around the corner but you gotta step up and TAKE IT.

Many thanks for reading and I hope you get where you need to be,

————-

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Mistakes people make when they’re trying to solve their problems (Do you have an actual problem or do you ‘just’ have ego resistance?)

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Coaching/Life Philosophy/Mindset

Here’s how you can tell if you have an actual problem or if you just have some kind of ego resistance (because you’re afraid to change or accept reality at some level because of your unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

Working with people in mental health and coaching people over the years (just coaching these days as I left the mental health sector) has taught me that a lot of people out there often have ‘problems’ that linger way longer than they need to.

Is this because the ‘problems’ in question are just so insurmountable that they can’t be solved?

No, not if you look at it in a REAL way.

If you genuinely can’t do something about a problem then it often means you don’t actually have a problem ‘outside’ yourself: it means that you’re struggling to ACCEPT something that can’t be changed.

And…If all you can do with something is accept it, then it can never be a problem, it’s just the way life or reality works.

In these cases, you need to ask yourself exactly what it is that’s preventing you from doing what needs to be done to ACCEPT this reality.

In my experience, it’s usually a cocktail of shame, guilt, and/or trauma that’s caused us to CHOOSE a belief system for ourselves that’s aligned with what we WANT to believe about life, not reality itself (and, to go full circle, we usually WANT to believe something other than the truth so we don’t have to face our shame, guilt, and / or trauma).

Another FACT about human life is this:

If you understood the cause of your problem, then it would be in your NATURE to do something about it.

I.e. to find a SOLUTION and to act on this solution.

Then you wouldn’t ‘have’ a problem anymore (“have” in scare quotes because actually what’s going on in a lot of cases is we’re BEING a problem for ourselves).

That’s just common sense in a way: if you have a problem and then you discover a solution then you only have two options:

You’ll take the actions that lead to the solution. Problem solved (assuming you were right about the problem and the solution that goes with it).
You won’t take the action leading to the solution, either because you have IDENTIFIED with having the problem, because it’s not a REAL problem, or because you’re scared that the problem will lead to bigger problems (for example, maybe you’re scared of success because of the extra pressure or work you’ll bring yourself).

The ‘short-version’ of this then is simple:

1) You either have to accept a ‘problem’ as part of life, in which case it isn’t a problem.

or:

2) You understand what can be done about your problem and so you do it, in which case you no longer have a problem.

or:

3) You have some kind of ‘problem’ in your life that keeps lingering, either because you don’t ACT on it, or because you can’t find a solution (which means the problem is unreal).

In the first two cases, the solution to your problem is always being real:

Increasing your AWARENESS, ACCEPTING what has to be accepted about life, and then ACTING accordingly.

In the 3rd case, the only thing stopping you from moving forward is your own relationship with yourself that is BLOCKING you because you either:

Lack AWARENESS – in other words, you think a certain thing is a problem but it isn’t or you’re dealing with a SYMPTOM and not the fundamental cause.
Refuse to ACCEPT – in other words, you WANT to believe that yourself, the world, or reality work in a certain way, rather than accepting the truth about them (for example, this is the same as having a problem with the fact that the sky is blue because you feel better about the colour green).
Have a barrier to ACTION – in other words, you’re not DOING the things you need to DO in order to move yourself towards becoming aware of a solution or implementing one.

In all of these cases, the problem isn’t the ‘problem’ – the problem is that you are being RESISTANT to reality for some (usually emotional, like we said) reason that is blocking your view or reality (almost always because of your relationship with yourself).

Here are the most common causes of this kind of ego resistance (or whatever you wanna call it):

AWARENESS: You’re dealing with a symptom, not the fundamental problem.

A lot of the things that you might mistakenly believe to be your problems are actually just SYMPTOMS of a deeper problem. Normally, the deeper, fundamental problem has something to do with your relationship with yourself.

As a hypothetical example, maybe you’re somebody who suffers from headaches. You might believe that these headaches are the main problem and so you spend all your time trying out new medication, fancy new diets, etc. etc.

The mistake you’re making is not realising that these hypothetical headaches are just SYMPTOMATIC of something deeper:

-Maybe you’re STRESSED because you have shame that’s causing you to push yourself to be ‘better’ than everybody else.

-Maybe you’re not SLEEPING ENOUGH because you’re feeling guilty about all of the terrible things you did (as an example).

-Maybe you have unresolved trauma that’s caused you to become dissociated from yourself and so you have a lot of inner tension leading to the headaches.

These are just hypothetical but the POINT is that if you don’t dig deep enough then you’ll only be ‘rearranging the furniture on the Titanic’ and the ship will still sink when it doesn’t need to.

A lot of the time when I’m coaching people I’m just working with people to help them understand whether the problems they’re trying to solve are the FUNDAMENTAL problem.

Once they make the shift, they can put their energy into something that will actually make a difference.

ACCEPTANCE: You want reality to be something other than what it is (normally because of the way you want to see yourself).

When it comes to the way that life is and the way that human beings operate in reality, there are all kinds of models and ideas about how to live a ‘good life’ and to get results.

There are all kinds of religious texts, philosophies, ideologies, etc. that are TOOLS to help us make sense of life but – at the end of the day – life operates in the same way for ALL of us, regardless of which model we decide to follow.

Some of these unifying LIFE PRINCIPLES can be hard to swallow:

-We’re going to die one day

-We’re not special in the scheme of things as a whole

-We have to put in hard work and effort to get what we want from life

-We all fail

-We all have questions that can’t be answered

-Etc.

All of this stuff applies to all of us.

Sometimes, people find themselves having problems they don’t seem to be able to find a solution for. In my experience, this is because the problem ONLY EXISTS IN THEIR HEADS because they’re trying to deny something fundamentally true about life.

This is because they WANT life to be different to how it is (because of their underlying emotional ‘stuff’):

-They want to live forever because they can’t imagine life without their identity.

-They want to be seen as special and different to everybody else.

-They want to get things as soon as they want them without doing the work.

-They want to never fail (because failure triggers shame).

-They want to know everything (so they can control life and keep their ego where it is as the main thing that threatens ego is LEARNING).

-Etc.

The point here is that when you don’t ACCEPT life you just give yourself a bunch of problems that exist in your head alone.

You’ll be trying to solve your emotional pain or existential anguish or whatever else is going on by trying to change life (which is impossible).

What you need to do is ACCEPT and grow with life.

ACTION: You don’t want to do the actions that will help you move forward to a solution.

When people aren’t AWARE of life and they don’t ACCEPT life they don’t ACT on life – they either don’t act at all or they act on some BS that exists in their heads alone (so never get results).

If you think you know the solution to your problem but you don’t act then:

1) You either have ego resistance (i.e. you know the action will show you that your self-image is BS because you might fail or you’ll have to grow through your comfort zone or something).

2) You don’t want to solve the problem because there is some kind of ‘payoff’ that comes with it (for example, maybe people will feel sorry for you, you have an excuse not to try, etc.)

In both cases, this comes down to you avoiding yourself and trying to uphold some false version of yourself you became invested in.

If you have a problem that lingers, then probably some of this stuff is going on for you.

The solution is to:

Become AWARE of the actual problem, so you’re not running around like a headless chicken chasing phantoms.

ACCEPT what can’t be changed about life and whatever is inside you that is causing you to resist it.

To ACT on the solutions that you do have without letting your ideas about yourself talk you out of it.

When you live like this you realise that actually there are NO problems once you take your identity out of the equation:

You’re either ACCEPTING reality or you’re trying to DENY it.

That’s the biggest mistake any of us can make when it comes to our ‘problems’ as a whole.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

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How to be real no matter what.

Published on

Life Philosophy/Coaching/Mindset

“Real always works” – that’s what I’m always telling my clients and how I live my own life (really, “Real always works” is just a shortcut to circumventing all of the mind chatter that stops us taking action).

There’s only one problem: even though we may intend to be real, we’ve found ourselves in an unreal world where there’s more disinformation, BS, and confusion than probably any other time in history (really, not hyperbole or exaggeration: thanks to Internet algorithms and social media echo bubbles there’s more misinformation than ever before – we can all live in our own alternate (un)reality if we CHOOSE).

Here are ten things to keep in mind that can help us avoid the vortex of an unreal world and keep moving towards real life so we can be real no matter what.

1. Remember the times when you’ve felt most real.

I’m always reminding my clients (or readers of my books) to remember the times when they felt most real in the past. Almost always, these will be times when they have stepped outside of themselves (or more accurately, their IDEAS about themselves) and they are fully present and spontaneous in the moment.

In my own life, the examples I always tend to give are:

Bounding down Mt Fuji one morning with the clouds beneath me.
Making love with somebody I truly care about.
Riding a motorbike.
Being outside in storms.
Really good yoga sessions.
Etc.

All of these experiences were times were my mind-body connection was heightened, I felt ‘one’ with my surroundings because I wasn’t only perceiving or interpreting everything conceptually, and where I got into a flow state of some kind and moved towards WHOLENESS instead of just mere fragments of living.

The lesson here is that you can’t always feel like this because these moments need you to take yourself out of the day-to-day world and to put yourself in the realest place possible.

Once you’ve tasted these moments, however, they do show you what real life is and show you the direction you need to start aiming back towards once the world begins to creep in again (really this is just the process of returning from the fragmentation of the world to the wholeness of reality: see Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you want to build on these ideas).

2. Always keep the real vision in mind.

If your life feels unreal then there’s a good chance that it’s because you don’t have a vision for where you’re going or – if you do have one – it’s not compelling enough.

In my experience of coaching people, a ‘compelling’ vision just means that we choose something REAL to run towards instead of only trying to hide from the unreal stuff (for example, running towards something that is an expression of our true values – creativity, freedom, whatever – instead of trying to hide from our shame or guilt, etc.).

A lot of people set goals for themselves that are actually unreal and become outcome-dependent because they think they can fill the void inside themselves with external validation or other things that can never really save us. My view of why this happens is because they set goals from a foundation of not knowing themselves (because they haven’t gone through the process of raising Awareness and Accepting themselves before taking Action).

Chasing an unreal vision will only serve to make your life increasingly more unreal as you push yourself further away from yourself; chasing a real vision will eventually bring real results that compound on themselves and make life more real overall.

You can remember it by remembering this simple formula (from the Personality Transplant):

Unreal in, unreal out; Real in, real out.

Make sure you’re aiming for something real before you get there.

3. Set goals and habits that structure your day.

You don’t need so much structure that your life becomes a prison but – once you have that real vision – you need enough structure to support its forward momentum and to carry you where you need to be.

For most of us, this just involves breaking the vision down into goals and also dedicating ourselves to the (almost) daily habits that will take us there.

The reason that this works is because real life is about working with time and that the only way to get RESULTS is to use cause and effect to manipulate time.

For example, if you have a vision of being a creative consultant of some kind then a goal you might have to support that might be to write a book. The habit that will support that is writing every day.

You need to break down your vision into the necessary goals and then be disciplined, consistent, and focused with your actions as you get there.

If you don’t have this basic structure then you will likely just fall into the trap of being distracted with activities, relationships, and thoughts that just make your life more unreal.

4. Value the truth more than anything else.

I’ve said it loads of times before but – in order to live a real life- you only really need to commit to doing two things:

Uncovering the truth (cultivating Awareness and Acceptance)
Living the truth (Acting on it).

The only caveat here is that we often think we have the truth but all we really have is an interpretation of it. This is why you need to work on being constantly curious, constantly learning, and shifting yourself into having a growth mindset.

Sometimes, we think we’re doing this but actually we’re just tricking ourselves because of our EGO RESISTANCE and a desire to remain the same because of our unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ like shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

The ultimate barometer is how much FRICTION we feel in our lives – if we’re constantly coming up against obstacles or have problems that we just can’t find solutions to then these obstacles and problems are usually only lingering because we’re trying to hide the truth from ourselves at some level.

The cure is to look inside yourself and see what you’re not yet willing to accept – only if you uncover that can you find a solid foundation to build on and move forward. Without valuing the TRUTH above all else, though, you’ll never be able to do that work as you’ll always be judging what you find.

5. Remember that your time, energy, and attention are the most important things you have.

You’re going to be dead one day. That’s a real FACT that we can all agree upon.

This being the case, it means that the most precious and valuable things you have are your time, energy, and attention.

A lot of us end up being unreal because we forget this and we give our time, energy, and attention to distractions and BS that don’t deserve it (the short version of what these distractions and BS are is that it’s anything that causes us to deviate from that real vision and growing into who we need to be (with our goals and habits) to make the vision a reality).

To stay real, you need to condition yourself to keep checking in with yourself to make sure that you’re CHOOSING to give your life to the things that are real to you and will allow you to be more real.

All being real means, ultimately, is that you know WHY you’re doing what you do (because you have a real vision), you know HOW you’ll do it, and you choose to do WHAT you need to do to get there (the ‘What’ may sometimes be to do nothing so you don’t burn out).

6. Remember that the world isn’t real, it’s just other people and their ideas.

One of the biggest causes of unreality is that we IDENTIFY with the world and think it’s real – in other words, we allow ourselves to be conditioned from the outside-in thanks to the media, our parents, other people, the system, etc. etc. etc.

Really, the world is not real at all – it’s just a bunch of conceptual ideas and the end-result of our collective thoughts and interpretations about life and reality based on our collective emotional ‘stuff’ and how much light we’ll let it.

As we said above: unreal in, unreal out – if most people in the world are distanced from themselves then the world we build will be an unreal extension of that.

If you’re not aware of this, then you might try and FORCE yourself to fit into the world, but all you’ll be doing in that case is trying to deny all the real parts of yourself that can make the biggest difference to your life.

Flip the script and start with reality before the world.

7. Don’t be discouraged when things don’t go to plan – that’s just how life goes.

Even with the greatest vision and all of the consistency, discipline, and focus in the universe, you’re still just a human being in an imperfect reality and things can and will go wrong.

Being real just means that you don’t let this turn you off – you know that the map is not the territory and so you will have to adjust and adapt to get where you need to me.

The more unreal you are, the harder this will be because being unreal means that you try to control everything in an attempt to hide from your own unresolved emotional ‘stuff’.

If you find yourself lapsing into control freakery and being emotionally wounded every time you fail or get rejected or whatever then you need to work on accepting yourself and reality so you can see things clearly.

Being real means if you fall down 7 times, then you get back up 8.

8. Learn to listen to yourself and to act accordingly.

Your body and your mind will give you clear signals if you’re being unreal – learn to listen to yourself and to make changes as necessary.

When it comes to your body, it’s kinda obvious: if you feel burned out, depleted, or in pain then you need to rest.

If you feel lethargic, then you may need to exercise more as the more energy you use, the more energy you get (only you will know what you need to do but you need to DO something).

Anxiety and depression are often also signs that you need to listen to yourself:

In the case of anxiety, it often means that you’re living according to a FAKE/unreal version of yourself and so you’re constantly getting feedback from reality in the form of friction. This constant friction would make anybody anxious and will turn to frustration and misery if you don’t listen to yourself and make changes.

In the case of depression, it often means that you’ve developed a passive mindset and have lost touch with your purpose. When this happens you stop moving, have no vision for the future, and become miserable.

In all these cases – and others like them – listening to yourself at a real level and acting on it is the solution.

9. Make sure you’re living your real life and not somebody else’s unreal one.

A lot of the time, you might think your living ‘your’ life but if you feel restless or even miserable then there’s a 99% chance that you’re actually living somebody else’s life in the form of goals that aren’t yours.

Only you will know whose goals they really are? Maybe it’s your parents? Maybe it’s some Hollywood movie? Maybe it’s just ‘society’ as a whole?

If you want to be real, you need to learn to decondition yourself and make sure that what you invest your time, energy, and attention on actually comes from deep within yourself.

10. Embrace your weirdness.

When we’re being real, we might be judged by the world for being unconventional or deviating from standard paths and ways of doing things.

If you resist embracing this weirdness at some level, then it means that you’re still JUDGING yourself. All judgement is unreal because it brings in value judgements of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (whereas what is real is beyond duality).

If there’s something weird about you and you’re not hurting anybody then don’t hide from it, embrace it.

Your weirdness is one of your greatest gifts to the world as it allows you to express the truth and the truth allows others to learn and embrace themselves too.

Don’t give into the pressure to hide from yourself because of your unreal ideas about the world. Life is for the living and real life is always a bit weird.

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

If you want to find your own real life, start moving towards unconditional acceptance, and finding a sense of purpose then check out this 7-Day Course that you can start right now:

Too Much Analysing of the Self Kills Awareness of the Self, The World, and Reality.

Published on

Life Philosophy

Too much of ANYTHING is usually a ‘bad’ idea…This is particularly true when it comes to the approach we can take to figuring our ‘stuff’ out and the lack of balance we can sometimes bring to this process.

Though an important part of the journey of growing real is about asking questions and testing our assumptions about ourselves so that we can push through our limiting beliefs (etc), if we get ADDICTED to the thrill of chasing insight we just end up getting in our own way.

When this happens, we become even more STUCK because we TRICK ourselves into THINKING that we’re doing the work required but actually we’re just being SELF-INDULGENT.

As we’ve said, growing real is about walking a path of three parts:

1. AWARENESS – gaining INSIGHT that will show us the gap between ourselves and reality.

2. ACCEPTANCE – removing our JUDGEMENT about whatever it was that caused us to put a gap between ourselves and reality in the first place.

3. ACTION – doing whatever it takes to close that gap by UNBLOCKING ourselves and taking action.

Sometimes, when people set out on this journey they become so addicted to seeking out ‘awareness’ that they stop moving:

-Every little emotion that pops up is analysed for days and treated as being more significant or interesting than it actually is.

-Every little thought is treated with some kind of gravitas when it’s just a passing thing.

-Every problem from the past that is remembered is mythologised and made to be some seminal moment to fit in with the EGO’s narrative (that it created to avoid growing).

-Every new obstacle that arises is linked in a chain of storytelling to connect it to other obstacles to show how difficult life can be.

-New books and ideas are taken on board to support the analysis and strengthen the case against change.

This kind of ANALYSIS ADDICTION is just a TRAP that we fall into when we filter our whole journey through the EGO.

It’s not about analysing anything REAL but about rearranging the furniture on the TITANIC of the ego as it tries not to sink.

When you fall in this trap you get stuck in ‘Awareness’ but actually you’re not aware of anything REAL – you’re just adding complexity to EGO.

Book a call here.

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You Were Born Wild then Made Crazy.

Published on

Life Philosophy/Psychology/Shadow Life

There’s a wildness in you that can set you FREE if you unlearn to RECLAIM it.

This is because – no matter who you are or what you think your life is about – you were born to survive and THRIVE on the earth and the earth is a wild place.

It’s easy to forget about the WILDERNESS inside us all and the WILD CHILD that’s screaming for attention from deep down in the SHADOWS of ourselves.

It’s easy to forget about all of the PASSIONS, DRIVES, and INSTINCTS that have been buried down there in the depths.

It’s easy to forget who we are when we live in a ‘World’ that’s built only for the little ‘parts’ of who we are and never the WHOLE thing.

When you were born you came with EVERYTHING that you needed – yes, you needed the protection of your parents but the seeds of who you were had already been planted and just needed nuturing and nourishing so the FRUIT could RIPEN.

The problem is that a lot of the ‘WILD’ stuff that you need to channel and transmute to GROW REAL and get where you need to be was DENIED in the face of ‘The World’ and so you started to go a little CRAZY.

What is “crazy” when you think about it?

Crazy is just a lack of alignment with the TRUTH.

If the TRUTH is WHOLE and you begin to identify with just parts of yourself and deem the ‘socially unacceptable’ parts of yourself – like your joy, creativity, and spontaneity; like your anger, drive, and passion – just so you could fit in and identify with a limited interpration of the truth to be of ‘the world’ then tell me…

Is that not ‘crazy’?

Your craziness is ANYTHING that makes you believe that all of the WILDNESS and chaos within you is to be AVOIDED.

That’s just the LIES you’ve been told and then started to hypnotise yourself with so that you can be easier to CONTROL and so that the other crazy people in your world can keep up their own ILLUSIONS about things.

Growing REAL is about ACCEPTANCE of the TRUTH and if the truth is WHOLE that means accepting and embracing the whole of who you are.

There is so much POWER within you but you need to stop being CRAZY and embrace the fact that you were born of the EARTH and that means that you have the wildness within you.

Get ROOTED in the REAL.

Let me coach you and help you help yourself grow real.

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Excuses are a Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem: Unreality.

Published on

Life Philosophy

The REAL ONES don’t need excuses.

An excuse is really just a reality deflection device that we use when:

1) We don’t want to accept some sort of feedback from life and GROW through it.

2) We don’t want to accept some truth or RESPONSIBILITY about ourselves and face its consequences.

The thing about excuses is that people who make them are only FOOLING THEMSELVES.

In the short-term, it stops them from having to face the unresolved SHAME that the situation they’re making excuses about is triggering.

In the long-term, it only perpetuates and DEEPENS the hold that this shame has over them.

If you can’t remember, it goes like this:

1. Shame sends people into hiding because they get TRICKED into believing there’s something inherently ‘wrong’ with them.

2. They hide behind the mask of the ego and send certain ‘unacceptable’ parts of themselves down into the SHADOW TERRITORY.

3. When something happens that exposes the GAP between the unreality (ego) and the reality (the truth and the ‘hidden’ parts down in the shadow territory) then things get WEIRD.

Excuses are what happens when somebody is DESPERATE to avoid the truth about themselves and to defend all of the UNREAL ideas that stpp them accepting who they truly are.

The TRUTH is that in reality you don’t NEED excuses because when you’re being REAL you only have acceptance.

Why’s that important?

Because excuses are just the ego’s (futile) attempt to use unreality to defend unreality.

In other words, excuses are completely redundant – an attempt to uphold illusions with illusions to avoid short-term discomfort of EMBRACING and then DISSOLVING the shame that makes us want to hide in the first place.

Any time you find yourself or somebody caught up in an endless parade of:

“Yeah, but…”

“If only…”

“Cudda, wudda, shudda…”

Etc.

Then you can bet your bottom dollar it’s a form of RESISTANCE (to reality).

The REAL ONES don’t need excuses – they either ACCEPT the choices they made, EMBRACE the truth, or they OWN the screw up and take the lessons on board.

Step beyond JUDGEMENT (which is powerless without shame) and accept the truth:

WHAT’S REAL IS ALWAYS REAL.

My coaching can help you stop making excuses and push through to do something real.

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I’m trying to make sure my emails are REAL. Enter your email address below if you want to read them.

You’ll get a free PDF of my Lifestyle Design Canvas when you do (a tool for looking at your life and where you wanna go next):

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A Lot of Miserable People Are Just Looking for Love Instead of Giving It.

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Life Philosophy/Relationships

Everybody wants to be ‘seen’.

That’s just the way human beings are – they need to feel that they ‘belong’ and that the world understands them at some REAL level so that all of the pain and the BS of being born is WORTH IT.

What a lot of people don’t get, though, is that the easiest way to be ‘seen’ is to SHOW OTHERS that you SEE them…

When you can do that it shows that you can peek from behind all of the UNREAL ‘stuff’ or masks that most people are hiding behind and that you can take a place in the world that’s ROOTED in something REAL.

When people become lost and feel like they haven’t been ‘seen’ for a long time then they can start to lose their minds:

-They become bitter and malevolent, frustrated that the world is neglecting them.

-They start screaming out and acting out for ATTENTION because they think it’s the same as the love they feel is lacking.

-They put their walls up and turn their ego into a fortress to protect them from anything that goes against how they want to ‘see’ themselves.

-They start unnecessary DRAMA for the sake of pulling people into a vortex that might give them at least a glimpse of something real (buut rarely ever does because drama is always unreal).

The TRUTH is that any attempts to demand that the world ‘see’ you without opening your eyes and attempting to see it first are FUTILE.

“We don’t see the world as it is but as we ARE”

If you’re looking to be ‘seen’ without first seeing yourself then you’ll always be BLIND and the world will be filled with darkness.

To be REAL, you have to COMMIT to the TRUTH that what is WHOLE in one of us is whole in ALL of us because everything is connected and we share more similarities than differences.

If you want the world to ‘see’ you then you need to DEVOTE yourself to seeing what’s REAL about it – even when things get hard or when the world of ideas and fragmentation starts to SHAKE you from yourself.

Love and ACCEPTANCE are the same thing… Just because you don’t ‘see’ it or feel ‘seen’ doesn’t mean it’s not there.

The truth is the truth and is ALWAYS true.

Sometimes, you’ve just blocked yourself from seeing it but all you need to do is to open your eyes and GIVE it.

Work with me for four months and reach your goals.

I’m trying to make sure my emails are REAL. Enter your email address below if you want to read them.

You’ll get a free PDF of my Lifestyle Design Canvas when you do (a tool for looking at your life and where you wanna go next):

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Refuse to Feel ‘Guilty’ for Growin Real.

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Coaching/Life Philosophy/Relationships/Shadow Life

The only people who don’t want you to grow real are people that are UNREAL.

This is because being REAL is about unblocking ourselves from the matrix of our own BS – such as self-limiting beliefs, unreal expectations of ourselves and others, emotionally-distored perspectives, attachments to opinions blah blah – so that we can simply MOVE and grow through our own edge and go deeper into a relationship with the TRUTH.

Unreal people have FRAGMENTED and divided themselves within themselves and so they have attached to all this BS and even gone so far as to think that they ARE the BS.

When they see somebody doing the INNER WORK to flip the script and put their WHOLENESS out into the world – instead of allowing the world to suppress them and to EXTINGUISH the torch of the human spirit – a couple of things happen:

1. They start to lash out because the REAL QUALITIES that are being expressed in the REAL ONE trigger their ‘Shadow Stuff‘ and all of the real qualities they’re trying to hide from themselves for the sake of their EGOs start calling to them from beneath the surface of themselves.

2. They will try and TEST the REAL ONE to see if they’re as real as they seem to think they are… This is weird when it first starts happening but it’s a good sign as it means the unreal have seen your realness and can’t quite believe it.

These ‘tests’ will be about trying to SHAKE you in some way – just believe in your REALNESS and refuse to waver (there’s nothing to ‘worry’ about anyway as all they can give you is UNREALITY).

3. They will try and make you feel GUILTY and to force you into certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in the world (based on ROLES they want you to play so they can keep their unreality’s hold over them).

Here, they will tell you what you ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ think/feel/do based – usually – on how it’s making them ‘feel’ (normally because they’re playing the VICTIM and trying to make you and them believe that somebody else is responsible for their emotional ‘stuff’).

You need to remember that all of this is just the WORLD trying to suck you back into its unreality.

Guilt is a useless emotion but reality is FOREVER.

Be unshakeable.

I can help you reach your goals and grow real.

I’m trying to make sure my emails are REAL. Enter your email address below if you want to read them.

You’ll get a free PDF of my Lifestyle Design Canvas when you do (a tool for looking at your life and where you wanna go next):

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acceptance - Page 2

Life doesn’t need to be a ‘popularity’ contest

The Irrationality of Needing to Be Liked

The Psychology of Needing to be Liked All the Time

Reasons of the Self

Reasons of the World

How needing to be liked all the time can hold you back

You’re never present because you’re always following an unreal agenda.

You’re constantly comparing yourself to others

You’re always criticising yourself

You never focus on your own goals because you’re wasting time on trying to impress people etc.

Not being REAL to yourself or others.

The Final Word

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Anybody can be creative

Creativity and growing real are inherently linked

Don’t block your natural drive to wholeness (this is creative synthesis)

Take yourself out of the equation.

Learn to keep learning.

Understand the natural flow of tension and release.

Realise that originality just refers to anything that comes from within.

Creativity is about working with our limitations, not being limitless (this is why it’s a very ‘human’ thing).

You need to be outcome-independent to allow your creativity to keep coming.

If you have writer’s block (or any other creative block) it’s usually because you haven’t done your research (and the greatest research is always living).

Don’t be scared to find your edge (that’s just your ego blocking your creative drives).

Real creativity will always ‘change’ you by taking you deeper into yourself and life.

Once your work is ‘out there’ it will still have things to teach you. Listen (that’s how you know where the next project will be found).

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Is it time for a Personality Transplant? Read on to find out!

You need a Personality Transplant because you never get anything real DONE.

You need a Personality Transplant because you keep getting frustrated and that frustration will eventually turn into misery if you don’t do anything.

You have problems with yourself, the world, and reality that you just can’t seem to solve. You need a Personality Transplant.

The ‘cure’ is to learn to look in such a way that it doesn’t hurt and you can grow through it and find a stronger foundation to stand on. This is the end result of the Personality Transplant.

You need a Personality Transplant because you constantly judge or criticise yourself which stops you moving forward.

You need a Personality Transplant because you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, just wasting your life doing the same old same old.

You need a Personality Transplant because you suffer from anxiety and depression that you can’t quite explain.

You need a Personality Transplant because you don’t trust and believe in yourself enough to build the relationships you want and get the results you need.

You want your life to change for the better but it never does.

Thank you!

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AWARENESS: You’re dealing with a symptom, not the fundamental problem.

ACCEPTANCE: You want reality to be something other than what it is (normally because of the way you want to see yourself).

ACTION: You don’t want to do the actions that will help you move forward to a solution.

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1. Remember the times when you’ve felt most real.

2. Always keep the real vision in mind.

3. Set goals and habits that structure your day.

4. Value the truth more than anything else.

5. Remember that your time, energy, and attention are the most important things you have.

6. Remember that the world isn’t real, it’s just other people and their ideas.

7. Don’t be discouraged when things don’t go to plan – that’s just how life goes.

8. Learn to listen to yourself and to act accordingly.

9. Make sure you’re living your real life and not somebody else’s unreal one.

10. Embrace your weirdness.

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Thank you!