coaching

“I Used To Be Creative” – How To Be REAL Again

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What Causes Loss of Creativity and HOW TO GET YOUR CREATIVITY BACK

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A problem that I find a lot of people struggling with when I’m coaching is that they “USED TO BE” a certain way – creative, joyful, confident, whatever – but for some inexplicable reason they’ve witnessed these REAL qualities fade away and they don’t know how to get them back.

When people find themselves having this particular problem they often start to believe that those qualities have slipped through their fingers forever and they just have to learn to live without them.

This article will show you that this way of thinking is actually part of the problem – as well as showing you how those qualities became clouded and hidden from you in the first place (and how you can get yourself back on the track to getting back in touch with them).

One thing you need to know before you start reading is something that’s been said on this site and in my books before:

What’s real about you is always real.

The kind of qualities that we’re talking about here – in particular, for the sake of this article, our CREATIVITY – aren’t something that are special or scarce but something that are vital, essential, and REAL to all human beings by virtue of being human in the first place.

They can’t go anywhere because they’re REAL – you can only distance yourself from them or prevent yourself from stretching the muscles you need to stretch to make the most of them.

We’re going to focus on the quality of ‘being creative’ as an example but what’s going to be said here applies to any real human quality that will allow us to keep growing, keep learning, and moving towards more WHOLENESS in our lives (i.e. a better connection to ourselves, the world, and reality).

We’ll start by looking at the main reasons you became DETACHED from your creativity – or, at least, started looking the other way – and then we’ll look at some things you can do to start tuning in again.

Here we go:

You started listening to the world more than yourself and you became conditioned to think the unreal things about you are real.

As the age old story goes, we’re born real but then the world starts to creep in and make us believe that we’re unreal.

It does this by giving a bunch of false beliefs and assumptions about ourselves, the world, and reality that we take on board as the truth about life and then hypnotise ourselves into believing.

As enough time passes, we forget that we’ve been hypnotising ourselves with these unreal beliefs and actually start to believe that we actually are whatever it is we’ve been telling ourselves we are.

Some people spend their whole lives believing this unreal story – always with a sense of restlessness never knowing why.

If you’re lucky then you can WAKE YOURSELF UP and start being real again – but only if you do the work required of diving into yourself and your belief systems and learning to flip the script by separating the real from the unreal.

In relation to why you “USED TO BE” creative but now hardly find yourself ALLOWING YOURSELF TO BE, it all starts with this unreal story and the effects of your conditioning and your capacity to resist and wake yourself up instead of hypnotising yourself.

Somewhere along the line, you’ve allowed the world to condition you into believing that your creativity is not important (or even existent in the extreme cases) and so you’ve started to value the world and CONCEPTS more than yourself and EXPERIENCE.

Unfortunately, because the world doesn’t generally want you to be ‘creative’ and instead wants us to be a productive, money-driven member of society you probably ended up valuing the cultural values and ideals of a results-driven uncreative world.

This could’ve been something that you picked up from your parents when you were younger – who perhaps didn’t value your creative work as much as they could’ve done (or simply didn’t ‘get it’ because they weren’t on the path that you were on).

Maybe it was your peers who valued video games or whatever else – usually some other distraction – over doing the creative work that you used to enjoy doing.

Maybe it was just the general culture you grew up in and the messages you picked up from movies or mainstream music or whatever about what you ‘should’ be doing with your life and the kind of person you ‘should’ be.

It might be something completely different but it’s always the case that something somewhere along the line gave you a bunch of ideas that at the very least made you see your creativity as being LESS IMPORTANT than it actually is and – in the worst cases – made you give up on it completely.

You ‘Grew Up’ and Stopped Growing

At the end of the day, creativity is something that we ALL have – even though it can express itself differently in all our lives – because it’s something that is ESSENTIAL for the process of human beings growing more real and becoming more WHOLE.

The short-version of this is that the creative process allows whatever is going on in your unconscious mind to come to the surface and to be processed in the light of your conscious understanding – this means that you’ll have a better grasp of who you really are, what you’re really thinking, feeling, and value, and will be able to make better decisions moving forward on account of whatever INSIGHT is revealed (because more insight leads to more REALITY).

See this article about creativity for more details about that process or listen to the Creative Status Podcast.

Because creativity is so vital to our growth, we can end up being a “used-to-be-creative” if we reach a stage where we trick ourselves into thinking that we’ve done all of the growing that we need to do and that we’re now a final product instead of a work in progress.

If you tell yourself that you’ve ‘grown up’ and that you know everything you need to know or that you’re ‘right’ about everything or any of the other UNREAL qualities that come with seeing yourself as ‘finalised’ and ‘done’ learning or growing then you just end up causing yourself to believe in what I call the ‘Illusion of Stasis’.

The Illusion of Stasis is just the irrational idea that you no longer need to move with life and that the ideas you carry about yourself, the world, and reality are the final word about these things.

When you start to believe this then you end up having EGO RESISTANCE to the natural flow of reality itself (aka THE REALITY WAVES) and so you end up living in a little box and trying to control everything instead of facing and growing through the CHAOS of life (because you’ve created a false sense of order with your EGO / self-image).

The solution here is to let go of who you think you are and to allow yourself to start GROWING and moving forward again. Your creativity will have to kick back into action if you do because that’s what it’s for: to help you navigate this process in the context of your own life.

You became outcome-dependent because you forgot how to play.

If we’re not careful then as we get older and ‘wiser’ (or not), we can become incredibly results-driven and obsessed with the outcomes of whatever it is that we happen to be doing.

There’s a longer article about outcome-independence here on this site, but the short version of what it means (if you don’t know) is that your feelings of self-worth and levels of self-acceptance are dependent on the outcomes of whatever goals you’ve set for yourself.

This is an irrational approach to living and a form of CONTROL FREAKERY because nobody can always achieve the outcomes that they want to achieve all of the time and so by putting your self-acceptance in the hands of outcomes you’re putting the way you feel about yourself at the mercy of chance and chaos (instead of being REAL and taking it as a given no matter what by practising UNCONDITIONAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE).

In relation to our creativity, outcome-dependence prevents us from setting out on a creative journey or by starting a creative project in the first place because we condition ourselves to believe that it’s simply not worth doing unless we can guarantee certain results.

The problem is that creativity – like life – is ultimately about facing UNCERTAINTY and the UNKNOWN and riding through the EDGE of our ideas about ourselves to be able to allow something new to emerge out of CHAOS.

In other words, if you try to get guarantees from the creative process then you’ll set yourself up for failure and be disappointed…

Creativity isn’t a one-way street – it’s a two-way exchange of information between you and reality itself. As you set out with an ‘idea’ about what you’re going to create – be it a book or a painting or whatever else – those ideas will guide you and serve as your map but you will have to learn and modify the original plan in the light of reality.

As the saying goes, “The map is not the territory”. Ever.

If you’re outcome-dependent then you won’t be able to ride out this chaotic pathway because you’ll need everything to be a certain way and try to control things to ‘protect’ your self-worth (which doesn’t even need to be protected because you’re always worthy no matter what outcomes you attain – what’s real is always real).

The opposite attitude here is to be outcome-independent which means that you set out on your creative journey knowing that all you need to really do is “do your best and forget the rest” because it’s the PROCESS that will help you the most to learn and grow real, not the end results or outcomes themselves.

If you find yourself being too ‘rigid’ about your creative goals and lapsing into outcome-dependence to the extent that you can’t even get started then you need to introduce a more PLAYFUL attitude to the way that you’re approaching things.

Ultimately, this just means staying curious, seeing what happens and taking some of the pressure off yourself to get certain results – when you were younger and “used to be” creative this is most likely the attitude that you had: it was FUN, not something serious that your whole life depends on (or at least your levels of feeling good about yourself).

In short, it’s not WHAT you do but HOW you do it.  If you create a piece of art (or whatever) in a ‘serious’, outcome-dependent way, it’s going to be a lot less real than one that’s created in a ‘playful’, outcome-independent way.

You Stopped Being Curious Because You Think You’ve Seen It All

As we get older, we can risk becoming jaded and feeling like we’ve seen it all, done it all, and been everything we will ever be.

This is, of course, a consequence of ‘growing up’ as we discussed above but there’s also a slightly deeper issue which is that our attitude becomes unreal and ends up blocking our ability to get outside of the hamster wheel of the same old thoughts and ideas we usually have and the same old things we do because of them.

Most of us will end up finding ourselves in some kind of a routine – in many ways, this is something that we need to bring a sense of structure and order to our lives and as long as this routine supports our growth without being too RIGID then it will add value to our lives.

Problems can arise, however, when we end up creating a routine at a time in our lives when we’re one version of ourselves and then life and who we ‘are’ changes around us but the routine doesn’t.

When this happens we end up just going through the motions and living on autopilot:

-Going the same way to work every day.

-Eating the same foods.

-Having the same conversations with the same people.

-Doing our hobbies at the same time each week.

-Etc.

You know what I’m talking about probably because we can all end up falling into this trap at some stage in our lives.

Having this problem of just going through the motions is a SYMPTOM of the FUNDAMENTAL problem of losing our curiosity.

We’re no longer curious about different ways of going to work, eating different things, talking about certain things, or doing our hobbies when we do – we just do it because that’s what we’ve identified with those things and so “It’s always been this way”.

The way out is to MIX THINGS UP by bringing some curiosity back into your life:

“What if I do it this way?”

It doesn’t have to be anything complicated but – ultimately – by being curious enough to at least ask yourself different questions you can start getting different results (if you act on the answers you get).

If you keep acting out on the answers you already think you have then you just end up putting yourself in an imaginary bubble and holding your back from the REAL LIFE you could be living as a consequence of your real creativity.

To be creative again, start asking yourself some new questions.

You learned to judge yourself and that held you back.

In short, the main reason why you “used to be” creative but no longer find it as easy to express yourself or to explore creative ideas and projects in the way that you used to is because you have picked up JUDGEMENTS.

Almost always these judgments are at three levels (the only three levels that exist): yourself, the world, and reality.

At the level of YOURSELF, you have learned to judge yourself if you express certain qualities that your creativity requires of you: taking RISKS, not being ‘good’ enough (because you’re being outcome-dependent), judging the version of yourself you see in the CHAOS of the creative process as it unfolds that your EGO isn’t ready for yet.

At the level of the WORLD, you have learned to judge what you think your work ‘means’ to others instead of just enjoying the process and learning what you can from it for YOURSELF (and then letting it just mean what it actually MEANS).

At the level of REALITY, you have learned to judge the way that things work and to BLOCK yourself from allowing your creativity to take you in the direction you need to go in so that you can make the unconscious conscious and grow more WHOLE.

All of these – and any other – judgements that you pick up and treat as being real take you out of REALITY because the only thing you can do with reality is accept it and judgement is the antithesis of acceptance.

When you have this attitude, you end up living in a way that is in direct contrast to the values and qualities required to be truly creative – in short, you have become CLOSED to life instead of being OPEN and seeing where life and creativity will take you (which is always where you need to go because your REAL creativity is the vehicle of your natural drive towards WHOLENESS).

How to Overcome Lack of Creativity: Get Out of Your Head and Into Reality

As always, the solution is to remember that “Real always works” and to start training yourself to be more open and real again.

This means stopping and catching yourself when you judge, embracing uncertainty and risk instead of running from it, and making sure that you’re on a journey of learning instead of ‘knowing’ everything.

If you spend too much time in your head then you can never be truly creative because you’re blocking your mind-body system from working together as a whole and fulfilling your natural drive to move towards more connection in yourself and life as a whole.

Like I just said, your creativity is the vehicle for allowing this natural drive to move forward – actually, whether you try to consciously direct it or not it will still do its thing (because what’s real is always real and never goes anywhere).

That’s a topic for another article but the short-version is that to live a life without friction,  you need to embrace and ride WITH this process instead of against it and that means opening to life instead of sticking in your head and trying to control everything from the closed parts of you.

You’ll know what this means in the context of your own life and where you’re holding yourself back (and if you don’t check out the 7-Day Course at personalitytransplant.info or read my books about it).

You “used to be” creative because you have temporarily bought into the illusion that you’re not. The way out of this temporary blip in your life is to get real again, see yourself as you are, and start living as whatever that is instead of the uncreative being you’ve allowed yourself to think yourself into being.


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:

Goal Setting for Creative People

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How To Get Results and Stay Creative

This is a relatively short but post but it will make a BIG difference to your life if you act on it.

It’s going to walk you through a simple but effective process of goal setting that will help you to get a big picture overview of your life or creative project, start to refine a VISION that keeps your passion ignited, and to make sure that the things you’re doing are actually REAL to you.

A lot of creative people hate setting goals because it makes them feel like they’re restricted in some way.  That can be true if we CHOOSE goals that are unreal to us or that we have to force ourselves to do but the bottom line is that – if you want to get RESULTS – then you need to find a way to FOCUS on the things that will take you where you need to be whilst also supporting and nurturing your creativity with DISCIPLINE and CONSISTENCY.

At the end of the day, the only thing standing between you and the life that you want to be living is the CHOICES that you make about how you spend your time right now in the present.  These choices will affect the ACTIONS that you take and the actions that you take (or don’t take) will close the gap between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.

Here’s a process for setting goals without feeling like you’re killing your creativity – you’ll start to see almost immediate results if you start making changes to your life based on what you learn here about the actions you need to take.

You’ll probably benefit from grabbing a piece of paper and a pen to help you make the most of this.

Here we go:

Stage 1: Open Up the Vision

The first step in this process is getting a big picture overview of all the things you want from your life/creative project/whatever you’re working on.

In other words, you can use this process to look at your life as a whole or you can use it in relation to something more specific (like writing a book or creating a new work of art etc.).

Either way, the first step is to OPEN UP THE VISION by coming up with as many ideas as possible for whatever it is that you’re trying to set goals around.

This means pushing your creativity to the LIMITS and seeing how many different ideas you can come up with.

Here’s what you need to do at this stage:

-If it’s something general like your life, then you can use Be/Do/Have. This is a pretty famous idea used in the coaching world but it simply means writing down three columns and listing as many things as possible that you want from life in each area.

For example:

Be: “I want to BE rich/famous/stronger/healthy/whatever”

Do: “I want play the piano/write a novel/start a business/whatever”

Have: “I want to have a new car/a partner/a killer body/a dog/whatever”

In this first stage, the idea is to not hold yourself back with your thoughts about what’s possible or not – you need to be AUDACIOUS and to just be honest with yourself about the things you INTEND to bring into your life if there’s nothing stopping you(including yourself).

-If it’s a specific creative project that you’re working on then you need to figure out as much as you can about what this project MEANS to you and what EFFECT you want it to eventually have on people.

For example, if you’re writing a novel or something then you need to figure out exactly what it means to you and how you might translate this meaning into the right story. You need to write down as many ideas as possible for using this creative project to become a vessel for the kind of meaning you want to put into it.

You also need to think about the EFFECT or IMPACT you want it to have on people – for example, maybe you want them to feel inspired,  connected to you, sad, happy, or whatever else.

Use your creativity to flesh out the VISION for your creative project but – either way – by the time you’re done you should have an understanding of what the project means to you and how this meaning can be translated into something that IMPACTS people in the way that you want it to.

In short, the first step to setting goals as a creative person at this stage is to let your imagination run wild and to create a BROAD VISION for yourself.

Don’t stop writing until you’ve run out of ideas.

Stage 2: Refine the Vision

You started with a BROAD vision for the things that you’re interested in doing. The next step is to start reducing the items on your list by finding out what’s actually aligned with your REAL values, beliefs, and intentions versus what’s just something that seems ‘nice’ but isn’t necessarily that real for you right now.

For each of the things you put on your Open Vision List from Stage 1 you need to answer the following questions:

-1: What are my reasons for wanting to DO this?

-2: Would the REAL ME do this?

If your reasons for wanting to do whatever you’ve listed are unreal then you need to either remove that ‘goal’ from your list or to try and find a way to make it more real.

‘Unreal’ in this context means that the goals are either there because you think they’re going to fill some kind of void inside yourself, because they came from ‘other’ people and aren’t actually your goals, or anything else that’s going to stop you from growing in a way that’s aligned with your highest values and intentions.

The second question is a little ‘intuitive’ but all it really means is that you ask yourself whether the most real or authentic version of you would do the thing in question – if you feel like it’s a ‘No’ then there’s no point doing it because the whole point of setting goals is so that you can move towards a more REAL version of yourself in the long-term.

By the end of this stage you should have list of goals that are DEFINITELY something that will benefit your life and make you more real because you know that you have GENUINE reasons for wanting to do them and that they’ll make you more REAL yourself as you move forward and take action.

Stage 3: Categorise Your Goals

At this stage, your list of goals should be a lot shorter than it was but you’ve still been able to go through a CREATIVE PROCESS of making sure that the goals you’ve chosen are something that will make a big difference in your life.

The next stage is to get some clarity about how you’ll start to carry out these goals.  What this means is that you need to CATEGORISE them so that you can start to make a strategy for dealing with them (and actually getting RESULTS).

There are four different categories that we’ll be working with: Ongoing Goals, Short-Term Goals, Medium-Term Goals, and Long-Term Goals. In each of these categories, you need to give yourself a goal that’s SPECIFIC and has a DEADLINE.

It works like this:

Ongoing Goals – things you will do every day (or most days). If you have something vague on your list like ‘get fit’ then you’ll need to probably create a SPECIFIC ongoing goal here (e.g. workout for 30 minutes every day).

Short-Term Goals – things that will take a week to a month. E.g sort out your website, reach out to a specific person on social media, etc.

Medium-Term Goals – things that will take between a month and a year. For example, reaching a target weight or making a certain amount of money etc.

Long-term Goals – things that take more than a year to complete. For example, moving to another country, writing a book (maybe – some people might take less than a year), etc.

If you’re working with a creative project, then you’ll need to look at how the overarching vision fits into these categories. For example, maybe your goal is to “write a book” it might look like:

Ongoing Goals: Write every day, edit, research.

Short-Term Goals: Finish the next chapter by next week, have three chapters written by the end of the month.

Medium-Term Goals: Finish the first-draft six months from now, find some beta readers, etc.

Long-Term Goal: Publish the book and become a bestseller, etc.

Whether it’s your life or your creative project, you’ll benefit from being aware of what goals you have at each of these levels and what you need to DO and WHEN in order to make your vision actually a reality.

Stage 4: Motivation Check

At this stage, it’s probably going to look like you have a LOT of stuff to do.

To stay motivated you might want to make sure to remind yourself of why these goals are important to you. All this means is that you do a final check-in about your overall vision and make sure that it SELLS ITSELF to you.

The main question to answer for each of your goals is “What does achieving this goal mean to me?”

By answering that question, you’ll be giving yourself a reminder of WHY you want to do this in the first place as well as all of the benefits, etc. that you’re going to get from moving towards and then achieving these goals overall.

Stage 5: Create a To-Do List

The final step is to get into the HABIT of keeping a To-Do List and then making sure you actually DO the things that are on it. How rigid you are about this depends on you, but I would personally recommend sitting down every morning (or whenever you start work) and writing down a list of tasks that you need to achieve each day.

Because you’ve already categorised your goals in Step 3 you’ll know what you need to be doing EVERY DAY but you’ll also know what you’re working towards as well.

Of course, as you move forward and start taking action you might uncover some new goals that are important to you and you might learn about yourself and realise that some of the things you’re chasing aren’t as important as you thought.

This is totally fine and healthy and just proves that your goals are there to SERVE YOU and your growth, not an end-in-themselves that you just chase blindly for the sake of it.

Either way, the To-Do List reminds you that the only way to get where you want to be – your REAL LIFE or to see that CREATIVE PROJECT become a real thing in the world – is to take ACTION.

Go get it.

 


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:

 

The Cost: Are You Prepared to Pay the Price for Your Real Life?

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If you’re trying to grow more REAL in an unreal world then you’re always going to have to pay a PRICE for your own REALNESS.

This is just the way that things are: if you want something then you have to pay the COST.  This is just a part of the human experience and it’s something that applies to ALL of us.

Our tendency of thinking about these things is that there’s only ever really a ‘cost’ for the ‘bad’ things that happen to us – actually, though, we often find ourselves paying a price just as much, if not more (as we initially perceive it), for the ‘good’ – or REAL – stuff too.

In other words: If you really want something then you’re going to have to pay for it. That’s “the Cost”.

This article will help you in two main ways:

  1. It’s going to help you understand this concept of THE COST so that you can pre-empt it and ready yourself to pay it without becoming disappointed or disillusioned.
  2. It’s going to help you stay motivated and COMMITTED to growing real by showing you that the cost is always worth it so you should always keep growing real no matter what(despite what the world might tell you along the way).

One of the greatest things you can do for yourself and the world is to know what’s REAL about you so that you can add more value to the world as an extension of acting on that AWARENESS (because the only thing that’s actually of any value is the REAL stuff and what you choose to DO with it).

Getting to the stage where you know enough about yourself, the world, and reality to be able to tap into this value and share it is a difficult road in itself – especially when the world is designed to condition us to be pliable and conformist so that we’ll be easier to control.

If you lack awareness of the extra COSTS of walking the REAL path then you might falter (which just means that the world has convinced you to be something and/or somebody that you’re not).

If you’re ready to pay the price and get something REAL then keep reading.

There’s always a price to pay. Especially when you’re shifting from unreal to real life.

“The best things in life are free”, that’s what we’re told but even these “best” things like ‘love’ or ‘kindness’ or ‘friendship’ almost always come with a COST of some kind. It might not be a monetary cost, but it’s always a cost nevertheless.

Maybe that sounds extreme but when you dig into it, you’ll see what I mean:

The COST of love is that you have to let go of your ego and learn not to at least think about other people and their needs(that’s a good thing once you learn how to do it but to the ego it’s a cost which is why so many people find it hard to fall and STAY in love).

The COST of being kind is that sometimes you’ll have to say “Yes” when it might have been easier to say “No” or that you might have to give up the time you could’ve spent on yourself to dedicate to somebody else (and your time, energy, and attention are the most precious things you have).

The COST of friendship is a combination of the two but also that you need to be able to at least offer some kind of VALUE to the relationship (in exchange for value as that’s how real friendship works).

That means that you can’t only TAKE from the relationship and that you have to GIVE something – whatever that is in the context of the relationship is the COST.

Sometimes the cost is worth it, sometimes it isn’t.  Either way, there’s always a cost and that’s just the way it is.

We can say that this is just a principle of being alive as a human being and it basically boils down to the fact that whenever we make a CHOICE then the cost of one thing is always something else (that’s just what a ‘choice’ is by definition).

Sometimes, we CHOOSE things that come with unexpected costs but there’s ALWAYS a cost. Always (just to drill the point home).

You need to understand this so you can get prepare yourself to pay when the time comes.

If you don’t understand this basic REALITY about life then when the costs of your CHOICES do creep in further down the line (as ‘consequences’) then you’ll be disappointed and disillusioned.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make the choices that have a risk of such negative emotions – it just means that you need to weigh the costs up before you get started (as much as is possible – nobody can predict the future with 100% accuracy).

As a simple example, let’s take two different paths that you might take in life: either stepping up and changing your life by doing that ‘thing’ you want to do (but are afraid of because doing so will disrupt your life), or NOT doing that thing and just leaving things as they are.

Two very different options – 1) doing that ‘thing’ and changing your life or 2) doing nothing and sweeping it under the carpet.

Different paths but both with a COST.

To decide which one to take you need to figure out the BENEFITS or PAYOFF of each one – maybe figuring out your true values and how aligned they are with the goals in question, figuring out how you might benefit financially, in terms of health, emotionally, etc.

A step that a lot of people tend to skip, though, is figuring out ‘THE COST’ (though they might think about their fears or reasons not to get started which are usually just EXCUSES – see below).

In the first case, of going out there and just doing that ‘thing’ whatever it is, the costs might be:

-Having to give up your ‘current’ thing.

-Having people be jealous of you or hate on you for being ‘successful’.

-Having to spend some time learning new skills instead of watching Netflix or whatever.

-Having people think that you’re crazy/weird/unusual or whatever because you’re doing something unconventional.

-Having to listen to people try and persuade you not to do that thing whatever it is.

-Having to RISK failure and the emotional ‘stuff’ that comes with it.

Etc.

Depending on whatever the ‘thing’ is in your own life you could probably come up with a list of costs that’s longer than your arm – and this is just for the ‘good’ things that you want to be doing with your life.

I guess the basic rule is that you can’t have the sweet without the sour – it probably all balances out in the end but you need to know it so you’re not just floating through life with your rose-tinted glasses on setting yourself up for disappointment and disillusionment.

Ask yourself about that ‘thing’ that you think you want: Can you pay the COST(s)? If you can’t then maybe you don’t really want it.

To complicate matters, there’s also the other option: doing NOTHING and trying to forget about that ‘thing’ and just going through the motions of living in the same old way and getting the same old results.

That might seem like a simple way of AVOIDING the costs of going to get that ‘thing’ (which you may have some fear about which has stopped you going for it in the first place), but because EVERYTHING in life comes with an OPPORTUNITY COST, inaction will cost you just as much – or even more – than just getting up and doing that ‘thing’ in the first place.

Let’s say you do decide to do nothing and just leave your life as it is, even though that ‘thing’ (whatever it is) is calling out to you and life will continue to change around you anyway.

The costs might be things like:

-Having to get to the end of your life and REGRETTING never stepping up and doing what you realise you were called for.

-Having to watch other people who have stepped up to do their ‘thing’ doing it and getting RESULTS that you can’t even get close  to (and having to live with jealousy because of it).

-Having to PUT UP with whatever you’re currently putting up with and forcing yourself to tolerate.

-Having to have the people in your life just see you as being somebody who never did that ‘thing’ and never will.

-Having to always wonder if there’s ‘more’ to life or wondering what your real potential might look like (hint: there is more and your real potential looks like freedom).

-Etc.

Again, in the case of your own ‘thing’ it might be a longer list or it might be a shorter one. The point is, though, that – whether you make changes or you don’t – then there’s a COST to pay.

If you’re undecided about taking some action in your life or stepping up and being more REAL or not then you need to ask yourself what the COST of each path is and if you can HANDLE it.

If you can’t handle it then you know that:

  • It’s either not YOUR path and so you can forget about it

Or:

  • You have some kind of mindset issue that needs tweaking because you don’t TRUST in yourself and your ability to handle whatever might arise (and, trust me, when you’re being REAL you’ll be able to handle just about anything).

Basically, it comes down to this: Whether you DO or you DON’T there’s gonna be a COST so the only question is which one do you wanna pay? Do you wanna pay the cost of being UNREAL or do you want to pay the cost of being REAL?

I know what I’d choose every time.

The cost of being unreal is that you’ll always wonder if there’s more, never know your true potential, and probably spend the end of your life regretting all the things you didn’t do but could’ve done if you got over yourself.

Assuming that the ‘thing’ you want to do is actually REAL – i.e. it’s aligned with your TRUE values and intentions and the process of moving towards it will make you more WHOLE, not FRAGMENTED – then the main cost of NOT making the choice and going for it is that you’ll never KNOW yourself, you’ll never know the world, and you’ll never know reality.

This is because the PAYOFF of taking the REAL path is that you will connect with what’s real about you and find a way (that ‘thing’) of expressing it in the world. As you’ll have to do the work to make it happen then you’ll have to BECOME a more real version of yourself to get there. If that payoff is worth more than the regret of not even trying then it’s worth it.

The cost of being real is that when you’re making changes to go from unreal to real you have to let go of a lot of things and when you’re real you’ll have to deal with being hated by unreal people that can’t (currently) do what you’ve done.

The COST of taking the real path is having to LET GO of your ego and the things that are asking you to keep living out an UNREAL version of yourself and your life.

More than that, you’ll also have to pay the price of having to deal with people who haven’t stepped onto the REAL path trying to pull you off course by causing drama, hating, or projecting their own ‘stuff’ onto you (though if other people are constantly causing problems in your life you need to ask yourself if you’re the ‘UNREAL’ one seeing as you’re the common denominator).

The point is that – no matter what you choose – you’re “darned if you do, darned if you don’t”.  That’s just LIFE.

If you want to be REAL, though, you might as well make a CHOICE about what that looks like and the PAYOFF you get rather than just passively letting life happen and paying the costs for something you don’t want instead of something you DO.

In general, as you grow real, you’ll see that ALL COSTS are unreal because what’s real about you can never be taken away from (we’ll talk about that a little further below).

If you’re on a crossroads in life then what that basically means is that your choice is between:

  • An UNREAL life with unreal costs you can’t do anything about because you’re unreal (e.g living a life that’s a consequence of you hiding and paying costs you CAN’T handle because you’re UNREAL).
  • A REAL life with unreal costs that you can do something about because you’re real(e.g. living a life that’s a consequence of you not hiding and paying the costs that you CAN handle because you’re REAL).

In both cases, the costs are ultimately unreal – because you’re always real no matter what and it’s just your perception and interpretations (filtered through your identity) stopping you from seeing it.

On your way into your REAL life, though, you’ll have to grow through the things that make the costs seem real – your choice about how you handle this will affect how far you get.

Examples of the kinds of price you’ll have to pay if you focus on your REAL intentions and values.

Though there are no hard and fast rules, these are the kind of costs that you can expect to pay as you step up and start moving towards that ‘thing’ and your REAL life.

In all cases you haven’t really lost anything ‘real’ – you just STOPPED BUYING INTO unreality:

Letting go of unreal relationships that are holding you back.

The real relationships in your life will support your growth and movement towards the goals that are real to you.  The unreal ones won’t.

As you wake up to your realness and start moving forwards then the COST will be to set healthy boundaries and say “No” to the people that need you to be unreal (for the protection of their own unreal ego ‘stuff’).

The reason that you don’t really lose anything real here despite the ‘cost’ is that the only thing keeping you in such relationships in the first place was your own UNREALITY.

Not being able to watch Netflix as much.

Committing to growing real comes with the ‘COST’ of having to say “No” to unreal activities and distractions like spending all night watching Netflix or playing video games or whatever (obviously, this is a matter of degree based on the context of your own life).

As you start to CHOOSE the real stuff over the unreal distractions like this then you probably won’t have time to waste on such things because you’ll have found your REAL purpose.

Again, the ‘cost’ isn’t really a cost because all that’s happened is you’ve stopped acting out an unreal story in your head and replaced it with a real one. You simply changed your focus and it changed your life.

Having people hate on you or be jealous because you’re doing your ‘thing’ and they’re not.

If you think that everybody around you is going to be happy for your ‘success’ as you step up and grow real then you’re going to have a bad time.

It’s a harsh reality about life but some of your closest friends and family don’t actually want you to be ‘more’ successful than them or to even just start doing things that are important to you (usually because they never had the balls to step up and do what’s important to themselves).

If you’re going to put yourself on a real path, then this is something that you need to prepare for – it’s a COST that you’ll be asked to pay and if you’re not real about it then it can make your life miserable.

Actually, even  though this may look like a COST, it’s actually not a REAL one. The reason for this is that the only reason these people are hating on you is because they’re being UNREAL (because when you’re being real you know your own capacity to succeed at your ‘thing’ and know that others can succeed at theirs too – what’s more you want them to!).

If something is UNREAL then you don’t need to worry about it or concern yourself with it – the only reason that you would is because there’s some unreal, emotional thing going on inside you that makes you interpret this unreal hate (etc.) as being real.

When you learn to say “Gimme something real or GTFO” then you can either walk away from these people or simply stay real and learn to ignore their BS. Either way, it nullifies the cost and you’ve grown REAL.

Having to work hard and change things.

Going out there and getting that ‘thing’ that you want comes with the COST of hard work.  That may seem like a lot of unnecessary effort when you haven’t even got started yet but look at it like this:

You can either work to get to where you want to be or you can work to have to try and live with yourself for never trying.

When you look at it like that the ‘hard work’ isn’t really a cost as much as it is an opportunity.

Having to let go of your current way of identifying as you grow real through experience.

No matter what you’re trying to do or where you’re trying to get to, as you grow more REAL, you will inevitably change as a person and the way that you see yourself will change too.

For some of us,  this is a price worth paying for our goals because we know that we’ve chosen to aim for something real and so – even though we may change – that change will be for the better (because we shaved away layers of unreality to reveal the REAL stuff).

The ‘problem’ for a lot of people is that they’re scared to change because the sense of identity they’ve created for themselves is actually a box that keeps a lot of their unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ at bay.

This is actually the main reason that certain people DON’T want to choose the real path – they’re not ready to pay the cost of letting go of their cherished ideas (and illusions, tbh) about themselves (and the world and reality by extension).

When you start growing REAL, however, you’ll see that this sense of identity is actually completely UNREAL – yes, we need it to function in the world and it acts as a representation of whatever we’ve been through and survived but it’s not who we really ‘are’ (just an interpretation we created).

When you realise this, you realise that losing one form of it is not really a COST, it’s another opportunity to replace it with something more real so you can go deeper into life.

Having to deal with the consequences of being real in an unreal world (i.e. dealing with people who are ‘asleep’, NPCs, etc.).

If you decide to grow real in an unreal world (i.e. a world that just needs you to conform so you can be controlled) then you’re going to have to pay the price of STANDING OUT which will bring unwanted attention and disagreement (if you let it).

The problem here is often caused by projection – if you’ve started to put yourself on the path of growing real then, eventually, you’re going to have to face some of your own ‘SHADOW’ stuff (the previously disowned parts of you that were deemed ‘unacceptable’ by your own shame and the guilt that society conditioned you with in the first place).

These can be both ‘good’ or ‘bad’ qualities but for whatever reason, society has decided that it would be better if they’re not part of the human experience.

An example might be ‘creativity’, for example, which may take you to some places that the majority of people aren’t willing to go (because they’ve disowned this side of themselves in order to be more productive employees or whatever).

If you become real and trigger some of the hidden ‘Shadow’ stuff of the people around you then it can lead to all kinds of drama and conflict.

You need to be ready for it because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll do the work of growing more real, doing more authentic things and expressing your true thoughts, feelings, etc. without upsetting somebody.

The costs here actually can be pretty high if you come across an actual nutcase who’s completely repressed and sees something in you that they’re trying to hide from themselves.

You can usually avoid such people as you start focusing on your own real ‘thing’ and start meeting other Real Ones but you need to know that this is a price you’ll possibly have to pay.

Again, even though it can be costly in some cases, the core source of the problem is still the same: whoever is getting triggered by your ‘Real’ stuff is only that way because they have an unreal relationship with themselves.

That makes it easier to ignore and move on (“Gimme something real or GTFO”) but you need to be real enough not to poke the fires and push these people over the edge (although that’s actually what they want deep down as by sabotaging themselves they can eventually destroy themselves and allow the real version of who they are to creep through).

Everybody is constantly moving towards wholeness – even those who are locked inside themselves – that’s just a natural drive we have but you don’t really need to get involved and ‘save’ anybody from themselves as the only person with that power is them.

The more real you become the more you’ll see how most people are unreal. You’ll have to learn not to JUDGE and slip back into unreality.

In short, the more real you become, you will have to live with the COST of being surrounded by people who are living unreal lives in an unreal relationship with themselves.

You need to be careful not to judge here as judgement is always unreal and will just cause you to end up back on the unreal path you’re trying to avoid.

The final cost to yourself is that you will have to work to cultivate better emotional control and self-regulation and to learn to be patient.

If people are ‘unreal’ it’s not their fault, it’s just a product of their conditioning and you basically just have to let them get on with it until the time comes for them to find something real to hold onto (assuming that time ever comes).

There’s always a choice. No excuses.

Sometimes, you convince yourself you don’t have a choice which stops you moving towards your goals.  The truth isn’t that you “don’t have a choice” but that you “don’t want to pay the cost”.  Ask yourself why because a lot of the time it’s just fear, pride, or other ego ‘stuff’ that you’ve CHOSEN to keep in place so you can hide from your unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

When you want to do something but you’re scared of the cost you make EXCUSES – this is just the ego’s way of trying to resist paying whatever cost needs to be paid.

If you find yourself stuck on a crossroads where you don’t know if you have the courage to move forward or not and you start making EXCUSES to explain away what you really want to do (that ‘thing’, whatever it is), then you need to remind yourself that you can only lose things that are UNREAL because reality never goes anywhere (and even then you don’t really ‘lose’ anything because it was never there in the first place – it was just a product of the way you chose to perceive things).

This means that the price you’re afraid to pay usually has something to do with your attachment to your illusions about yourself, the world, and reality and that you’ve DISTORTED your view of things through the lens of your ego in order to try and stay the ‘same’ and refuse to take action.

At the end of the day, there is no real cost – there’s just a process of deconditioning and learning to understand reality.

In short, the price never costs as much as your ego will try and convince you it does before you’ve paid it and when you understand the reality of life you’ll see that the costs are never as bad as you think (because it’s usually unreal).

You need to be ready to pay the price but you also need to be ready to see that in REALITY it’s always worth it:

You can either choose the unreal life you might already be living or step up and grow real?

There’s always a cost but there’s always a CHOICE. Which one are you going to make?

 

 


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The Label Trap: Is Attaching to Labels Holding You Back from Real Life and Your True Potential?

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Stop Holding Back

One of the biggest barriers to getting the life we want and becoming the person we need to be to get there is labelling ourselves.

This is for two simple reasons:

  1. In order to make the most of our own REAL lives, we need to step up and be the real version of ourselves.
  2. Labels cause us to identify as PART of a group instead of being the WHOLE of whoever it is that we really are.

Being part of a group is obviously an important part of being a human being – “no man is an island”, after all –  but if being part of a group effaces who we really are because the group is based around static limitations rather than GROWING REAL then it can do more harm than ‘good’.

In the way that we’re using it here, ‘labels’ are catch-all terms that we use to describe ourselves to others that just end up erasing our own individuality (and the strengths and weaknesses that come with that which is totally normal when we’re being REAL).

Examples of labels might be:

-Mental and physical health conditions that we’ve been labelled with.

For example in my own experience: I have some health problems and could easily use these as a reason to focus on what I can’t do instead of what I can (and, thus, never do anything) because I’ve labelled myself as an “X Patient”.

-Stuff to do with our cultural background that we think we need to adhere to rigidly.

For example in my own experience: I might decide to fall into the stereotype of a typical reserved ‘Englishman’ and never really express what I truly think, feel, or want to do in order to keep a “stiff upper lip” (not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with that if it’s what you want to do).

-Political or subcultural labels like identifying with a certain political party (and feeling cognitive dissonance when you go outside of the boundaries of what they say you’re ‘allowed’ to believe in) or even something as simple as overly-identifying with a certain subculture and being a ‘rocker’ or a ‘hippy’ (or whatever) and never experiencing life outside of what those kinds of people are ‘supposed’ to do.

For example, from my own experience: I really love rocking out and listening to rock and metal. If I needed a sense of identity then I could easily pluck an identify off  the shelf and start growing my hair out even more, wearing more black than I already do, and hating any sell-outs that listen to deep house (which I also love) or doing anything ‘mainstream’ (in order to strengthen my own sense of identity and the LABELS I’ve arbitrarily decided to attach to).

-Ideas about what it means to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ and how these things might limit us or mean we need to behave in certain ways.

For example from my own experience: I might decide that I’ll define myself by certain outcomes that are supposed to make life ‘meaningful’ for guys like how many women I sleep with every week, how many steaks I eat on the weekend, and how often I get in a fight when I go to the pub (not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with that if it’s what you want to do).

-Being obsessed with certain superficial qualities of our physical bodies like the colour of our skin or how much we might weigh etc.

For example from my own experience: I might think that being a ‘white’ guy instead of being a human being actually means anything or think that because I work out and can do however many push-ups means anything in the scheme of things as a whole (when it just ‘means’ I like working out and have enough energy to do the things I need to do from one-day-to-the-next).

Sometimes, these labels might help us feel a sense of belonging – which is part of their appeal – but they can also cause us to be distanced from ourselves and to take ourselves out of reality.

Taking ourselves out of reality might feel good in the short-term – especially if we have a lot of emotional ‘stuff’ or unanswered questions and confusion we want to avoid – but in the long-term it only screws our lives up and causes unnecessary problems.

This is why you need to be aware of how the labels you’re applying to yourself might be screwing your life up and why you should maybe think about flipping the script on some of them if you want to feel better about yourself and your life.

When we’re REAL, we keep growing and we’re always works in progress; giving ourselves labels can stop us growing by making us feel like we’ve reached the end of the line (even if we don’t even LIKE where that end of the line might be).

This is something that we’re not really ‘supposed’ to talk about because – even though the labels we attach our identities to can hold us back – labels are something that we become EMOTIONALLY INVESTED in and often need to be true (to protect our own insanity).

When people have an emotional need for something to be true about themselves, the world and reality – i.e. WANTING for something to be true, rather than actually figuring out if it’s true or not – then it just increases the odds of conflict and disagreement when we question these things or try to think outside of the box that such labelling has put us in.

If you look at much of the insanity around you in the world today, it can be attributed to the WARS people are fighting over the labels they’ve CHOSEN to give themselves (and others) and a battle with reality and the rest of the  world to try and prove to themselves and others that certain labels are true.

Actually, in reality, if something is TRUE, then you don’t need to fight or lapse into CONTROL FREAKERY to try and defend it – it will just speak for itself because that’s what the truth does: exist in self-evident way (it doesn’t need people to argue about it because it’s beyond conflict and just THE TRUTH regardless of any arguments).

If you find that you have a lot of UNNECESSARY conflict and dramatic BS in your life, then there’s a good chance that you’ve labelled yourself in some way and it’s causing you more harm than good.

This article will help you determine if that’s the case.

Labels are a map, not the territory (reality).

Like with many things at the level of our thoughts and beliefs about our lives, the labels we use to make ‘sense’ of ourselves, the world, and reality are not the TRUTH about any of these things themselves but our interpretations and points of view based on how ready we are to face the actual truth.

Because these labels are ultimately about trying to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent universe – where human beings are incapable of knowing and understanding everything because of our limited perception and then limited interpretations about what we perceive – then a good analogy is to see these ‘labels’ as maps that we’ve DECIDED to try and use to NAVIGATE life.

Like any tool, however, these ‘maps’ (labels) are always only ever a way of working with (or against, depending how much BS we’ve picked up) reality, not reality itself.

If you treat the map itself as the reality – which is what many of us do with the labels we’ve become attracted to – then we’ll never really get anywhere and we’ll never learn anything in our EXPERIENCE that can help us grow real in the way that we want to.

Treating the labels you’ve picked up as being the end of the line – instead of going out and EXPERIENCING LIFE and seeing what you’re capable of – is the same as looking at the Disney Land brochure online, familiarising yourself with the map of the theme park, and telling yourself that you now know everything there is to know about Disney Land.

Yes, maybe CONCEPTUALLY, you can tell yourself and others where certain things are in relation to other things at Disney Land – you might even have a loose understanding of what each ride is like because of the blurbs you read in that same brochure.

Here’s the rub, though: if you only have the MAP in your head, then you just have a BELIEF SYSTEM comprised of conceptual knowledge and information.  Unless you actually go to Disney Land and USE the map to get from one place to another and enjoy the rides (etc.) then you don’t actually KNOW anything real – you just have ideas that you picked up and CONDITIONED yourself with.

When you LABEL yourself without GOING OUT and actually finding out the truth about yourself for real – by taking action – then you’re just living in the COMFORT ZONE of your mind and stopping yourself from experiencing something that’s actually REAL.

This applies even if the ‘map’ you have does point to something that exists out there in ‘reality’ (like in the Disney Land example): if you don’t go out there and EXPERIENCE life for yourself then you’re just living in your own head and telling yourself it’s all life has to offer.

Labels help you to make sense of something difficult you’ve been through.

Essentially, the main attraction of labels is that they give us something to HOLD ONTO that gives us a feeling of certainty. Unfortunately, life itself is UNCERTAIN which means that clinging to labels just creates a sense of unnecessary friction between the way that we see ourselves and interact with the world and REALITY itself.

The appeal of labels, especially if we’ve been through a difficult period in our lives – or if we have a lot of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ like shame, guilt, or even trauma – is that the sense of ‘certainty’ they provide can give us a stepping stone towards finding a sense of direction or purpose again (in an uncertain reality they give us a taste of something certain).

In this sense, as a short-term solution to the problem of dealing with ‘life’, then it’s understandable why people find labelling themselves to be a useful COPING DEVICE for dealing with things.

In my opinion, this is why a lot of people who have a lot of emotional turbulence or who have been through difficult periods in their lives are more likely to attach to labels than people whose lives may have been a little ‘easier’ or where they have had less intense emotional ‘stuff’ to deal with.

When we have a lot of emotional ‘stuff’ to deal with, our natural tendency can be to try and hide from the uncertainty that comes with it by finding something to be certain about that can explain why we’ve found ourselves in whatever situation we’ve found ourselves in and explain away a lot of the associated negative emotions we have from being in a difficult situation.

A harsh fact about life that a lot of us try to avoid is that the current state of our lives is often a CONSEQUENCE of our relationship with ourselves and how much responsibility we’re willing to take for our own lives.

Even in situations that weren’t necessarily our ‘fault’, once things are done and dusted, it’s up to US and us alone to deal with the emotional fallout and to learn to forgive ourselves for whatever choices we might have made and  to learn to REGULATE our own emotional ‘stuff’ so we can MOTIVATE OURSELVES to move in the REAL direction we want to move towards here in the present moment.

Because facing this ‘stuff’ can be painful and may lead to us reconfiguring the way that we live our lives, it’s often easier to find a label that explains a lot of our own responsibility for our lives away and gives us a convenient excuse to keep wallowing in self-pity or to – at the very least – set us up for justifying the failure that will come from not acting to change our lives in the way that we really want.

When we have this kind of ‘stuff’ going on then labels can help us to make ‘sense’ of a past we can’t let go of, a present we don’t want to face, and a future we don’t want to take any ownership over.

The problem with making ‘sense’ is that a lot of things that aren’t REAL or even TRUE still ‘make sense’ to us if we want them to. That’s fine as a short-term way of avoiding some of our pain but – in the long-term – it’s only going to bring friction, frustration, and misery to our lives as we distance ourselves more and more from reality.

 

Labels are like armbands – eventually you need to swim without them.

All this is to say that labels are like armbands (stick with me here) – when we’re first learning to ‘swim’ in life’s great ocean of chaos and uncertainty then they can keep us afloat and stop us from drowning.

Maybe you get diagnosed with a physical or mental health condition, for example:

In those early stages of your relationship with your ‘illness’, then you probably don’t know that much about it or what to expect; your skills at dealing with the condition won’t have been refined yet, your conceptual and experiential knowledge of the condition will both be at low levels, and your confidence in your ability to ‘deal’ with it will be almost non-existent too because you’re probably scared (because you haven’t accepted things yet as you haven’t had a chance to learn) and you don’t know what you’re capable of.

A label in these early stages can actually help you learn to ‘swim’ within the context of whatever you’ve got going on because it will give you a frame of reference for how to deal with things and a direction to move in.

There’s nothing stopping you from living according to the label for the rest of your life – in this analogy we’ve got going though that would just be the same as never taking your armbands off.

If you’re afraid of drowning without them then maybe that’s a good idea; if you really want to know who you ARE and what you’re capable of then – when you’re ready – you need to learn to swim without the armbands so that your life is really yours, not just some idea that you picked up about it so that you could SURVIVE whatever you’re dealing with and not actually THRIVE in life.

People are scared they’ll drown without the label (because they only have the label to deal with shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

This fear of ‘drowning’ helps us to understand why some of us become so attached to the labels that have helped us stay afloat: we do it because we’re actually afraid of life and by fighting for our labels we’re actually fighting for the devices that have helped us to survive whatever we’ve been through.

Obviously, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with that – if something is helping us to stay afloat in life then it’s not up to anybody else to tell us whether or not what we’re doing makes sense or not.

The ironic thing, though, in my view, is that these labels may help us to survive in the short-term but the longer we cling to them and stop facing actual reality – i.e. looking at the ‘truth’ we may be blocking from view because of these labels – then the more harmful these labels become because they just cause us to be disconnected from ourselves, the world, and reality.

This is true of not just labels but our sense of identity as a whole: it’s a short-term survival mechanism that screws our lives up the more we keep trying to keep it in place without learning or growing through it.

In general, it seems as  though people are scared of drowning without their labels, comfortable points of view, ‘ego’, etc. etc., but actually what’s happening when they cling to these things is that they’re just scared of letting these things go because they’re attempting to keep their shame, guilt, and trauma at bay (which made them create a box for themselves to live in in the first place).

The actual fact is that when you let go of these COPING MECHANISMS then you realise that a lot of the emotional ‘stuff’ you’re trying to hide from is actually unreal and that when you hit the ocean of reality you can’t drown – you can only RIDE the reality waves to wherever it is that you want to be (as long as you choose a real vision for yourself and dedicate yourself to action with consistency, discipline, and focus).

Labels just erase our individuality which is actually what will ‘save’ us.

No real human being ever saved themselves or created a REAL life by trying to be just like everybody else.  Sure, we can learn from other people and see what’s worked for them in certain contexts, but – at the end of the day – no other human being has ever lived the life that we’re living and gone through the same things in the same way.

Sometimes, we might think that other people have the answers or can ‘save’ us but actually – even in the very best cases – all anybody else can really do is help us to better understand ourselves so that we can start listening to our OWN VOICE and then doing something with it as our ‘own’ man or woman.

This is because – no matter who you are – the only thing that will really help you to get where you want to be in life is your own INDIVIUALITY.

This doesn’t mean that you fall into the trap of trying to “THINK DIFFERENT” just for the sake of it (that’s EGO).

It just means that you walk your own path based on what you’ve learned for yourself by using your own CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE to weigh up all of the options and make a decision about what you need to do to be the real version of yourself.

Whenever you become overly-invested in a group (something you can only become overly-invested in as an attempt to hide from  yourself and reality) then you just end up erasing your true identity and all of the amazing things about you that will allow you to actually thrive in the way that will make you feel truly alive.

In my opinion (again), this is why so many people in the world get carried away with groups, causes, and movements without really caring what they stand for or are trying to change in the world – it’s not because they necessarily believe in the ‘cause’ but because it gives them a sense of identity that they don’t have to worry about choosing or creating for themselves (through the hard work of action and experience).

In other words, they might not know who they really are because they’re not willing to face their own emotional ‘stuff’ and so by getting carried away with a ‘movement’ it does two things for them: 1) it gives them a distraction from having to face anything real, 2) it gives them something to believe in that fills the void of not knowing themselves.

You’ll know if this makes sense to you or not when you think about the world and the various movements people are getting carried away over.

To get back to the main point, though, when people give themselves to ‘groups’ either directly or by applying labels to themselves, they just end up limiting their own options for growth and erasing their own individuality to become one of the faceless members of the group or label in question.

This might offer psychological comfort if you have a screwed up relationship with yourself but in the long-term it just prevents you from facing your ‘Shadow’ stuff and growing real.

By choosing a ‘label’ to give yourself you’re just lumping yourself with all of the other people that have that same label.  You’ll know how this applies in your own life or in the lives of people that you know but ask yourself this: “How am I different from everybody else with the label of [X]?”  – somewhere in the answer to that question is your way to true salvation (or whatever word you wanna use).

Labels give you a convenient excuse by telling you what you CAN’T do which stops you focusing on what you CAN do.

By labelling yourself in a certain way, you only end up holding yourself back because you just give yourself a bunch of reasons to focus on what you CAN’T do rather than what you CAN.

This gives you a sense of certainty (as we saw above) but the PRICE you pay for this feeling of certainty is that you can no longer express yourself because you’re locked behind a bunch of limitations and unhealthy beliefs at the same time.

Normally, when we focus on the “CAN’T DO” because of the label we either forget about or minimise the “CAN DO”. This is just the EGO’s way of stopping us from taking action and growing real.

For example:

You CAN’T climb a mountain because you’re a X PATIENT(but maybe you CAN still walk around the park and – actually – maybe you CAN climb that mountain but you don’t know unless you go find out).

You CAN’T listen to rock music you like because you’re a DEEP HOUSE HEAD (when actually you CAN listen to whatever you want).

You CAN’T wear a pink shirt because you’re a MANLY MAN (when actually you CAN).

You CAN’T express your true opinion because you don’t want to rock the boat as a RESERVED ENGLISH MAN (when actually you CAN say whatever you want if you’re willing to live with the consequences).

Etc.

The point is that most labels only focus your attention on the actions you “shouldn’t” take rather than the ones that you actually CAN and want to take to be authentic.

Labels keep you in the past when actually you can only find solutions in the present by moving towards the future.

Because labels are really just MENTAL CONCEPTS that you’ve picked up on your life journey, they’re just a summation of whatever STORY you’re telling yourself about where you think you’ve been.

This is fine as we all need to make ‘sense’ of our lives (understanding the limitations of ‘sense’ pointed out above) but the point needs to be made that every time you try and ACT OUT according to a label you’ve identified with then you’re just repeating the past.

In this sense, then, labels just reinforce the story you’re telling yourself about how you got where you currently happen to be.

If you’re HAPPY with where you are and you don’t have any desire to change or improve anything then that’s fine: keep telling yourself the same old story because it’s obviously working.

If you do have a desire to change or improve your life then that means you need to REWRITE the story and that means assessing your relationship with whatever ‘labels’ you’re giving yourself and identifying with.

Here’s something that can help you as you try to change and improve your life:

You can only find solutions in the PRESENT and they’re only really ‘solutions’ if they move you towards a FUTURE that you want to be living in.

In this context, the past isn’t really as impactful as you might have been led to believe. That doesn’t mean that you forget about the past or that you brush it aside – it just means that you need to work on ACCEPTING it so that you can focus on wherever you are now in a realistic way and then make a CHOICE about what you want to do with it.

If you’re too attached to labels that aren’t serving you and that are just reinforcing a story that’s holding you back, then you’re just DISTORTING your vision of what’s available to you here and now in the present; you’re also limiting your capacity to achieve something real and to ACT on the story of WHO YOU WANT TO BECOME IN THE FUTURE, not who your labels tell you that you’ve ‘been’ and still happen to ‘be’.

That might sound like an oversimplification but all it means is this: as long as you have a REAL VISION for the life you want to be living and the person you need to become to make that happen then the labels and stories you’ve told yourself about the past aren’t really that important.

Instead of labels you’re better off focusing on the skills and qualities you’re trying to develop to live the life you want to live.

A lot of people won’t like to read what I just said about the past not mattering that much in the scheme of things. It really doesn’t, though: what’s done is done and you either accept it and decide what you’re gonna do about it based on where you’ve currently found yourself or you just keep dwelling on it and don’t get anywhere.

When we ‘dwell’ on things it doesn’t mean that we’re actually growing, learning, or moving forward – it just means that we’re repeating the same old thoughts in our heads again and again like a hamster running around on a wheel.  Nothing ever changes and we never make ourselves any happier by doing this.

The main thing that keeps us on this ‘hamster wheel’ is the story we keep telling ourselves about who we are based on where we think we’ve been and the labels that we’ve attached to ourselves because of this. Every time we identify with those labels we’re just feeding into that BS story and greasing that hamster wheel so it can keep going.

To break free of the labels you need to ACCEPT where you’ve been and learn what you can from it and then follow this three-step process:

  1. Create a vision for where you want to be in the FUTURE.
  2. Be REAL with yourself about where you are in relation to that vision in the PRESENT.
  3. Start to become the person who can make that vision a reality by cultivating the SKILLS and QUALITIES you need to make it happen.

This process allows you to become the person you want to become whilst also embracing who you currently happen to be (based on the CHOICES you’ve made and what you’ve been through).

More importantly, it helps you to LEARN from the past without putting yourself in a box and limiting yourself because of the labels you’ve given yourself.

In this context, ‘Skills’ are just practical things you’ll need to be able to do to make your vision a reality (so let’s say you want to start a production company – you might need to learn videography, editing, marketing, etc.).

‘Qualities’ are just the personal traits you’ll need to tap into like ‘assertiveness’, ‘creativity’, ‘acceptance’, or whatever else.

In relation to your own life and vision these things will be unique to you alone and the experience you already have – what’s for sure though is that if you label yourself as just being whatever it is that you are right now then you won’t take the actions needed to grow REAL and you’ll just keep getting the same old story you already have.

Stop letting ‘labels’ hold you back and go and live the life you really want.

 


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 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:

  1. You can’t control what other people think about you and whether they ‘like’ you or not.
  2. 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:

  1. Create a false image of yourself that you hide behind to try and hide your shame from yourself and the world.
  2. 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:

  1. Reasons of the Self
  2. 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! 🙂

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:

How to know if you need a Personality Transplant (if you suffer these symptoms then here’s a guaranteed solution):

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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:

  1. 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.

     

  2. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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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7-Day Personality Transplant for Realness & Life Purpose

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

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.

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Refuse to Feel ‘Guilty’ for Growin Real.

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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.

 


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The Truth that is Written is Never the Real Truth.

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Words are just words but the truth is the TRUTH.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we’re GROWING REAL because we’re consuming information about personal development, spirituality, or whatever else but all of that stuff is just part of the problem unless we take it off the page and out into REAL LIFE.

This is deeper than just the distinction between theory and practice – it’s about IDENTITY versus EXPERIENCE.

When it comes to REALITY in truth, words, symbols, ideas and concepts only have the power to POINT YOU in the right direction – they are not the direction or destination in itself.

As we’ve said many times on this feed:

ALL CONCEPTS ARE UNREAL BUT SOME POINT YOU MORE CLOSELY TO THE TRUTH THAN OTHERS.

That means, of course, that there’s a Continuum of the Conceptual (sounds aight – just made it up):

At the extreme end is ‘BS’ – i.e concepts and ideas that point you away from truth instead of towards it.

In the middle is ‘Mediocrity’ – i.e. concepts and ideas that observe the truth to some extent but are only sourced in the MIND and so can never grasp it.

At the other extreme is the ‘Rooted’ – these are concepts and ideas that somebody has formulated after touching the TRUTH in their own lives and then doing the best they can to point you in the right direction (often having to use metaphors, stories, because the truth comes through pictures more than empty words).

BS——MEDIOCRITY—–ROOTED

Either way, even the most BEAUTIFULLY ROOTED words either written or uttered are useless in themselves until they TRIGGER something inside you that opens your mind to the moment and brings in a flood of new INSIGHT.

When people treat the words as the truth without the EXPERIENCE of the TRUTH then they just end up being machines that parrot pre-programmed scripts and dogmas – in other words, they have made an IDOL or UNICORN out of the emptiness and imbued it with qualities they have denied in themselves (in this case a connection to TRUTH).

To GROW REAL, you need to take the TRUTH off of the page and into your HEART.

Only then can you align your mind with your heart and ensure that the concepts you carry are pointing you HOME.

Get in touch for a reality check to find and see if my coaching can help you reach your goals.

 


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If Your ‘Confidence’ is Based On Feeling Superior It Can Always be Taken Away

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There’s a difference between REAL and unreal confidence.

REAL is about KNOWING you’re unshakeable because you’ve found a way to be ROOTED in yourself and reality and devoted yourself to some TRUTH about life that’s ‘higher’ than just your limited ideas about ‘You’.

When you’re rooted to the WHOLE in that way you understand who you are and what life is (and the connection between you and live itself) and nothing can ever take that away. Never.

It can’t be taken because it’s not DEPENDENT on anything – it’s just about acknowledging what’s already there, riding those REALITY WAVES, and trusting and believing (trust that life has your best interests at heart and belief in yourself and your ability to handle whatever happens).

This kind of real confidence, then, essentially comes from doing the INNER WORK, and cultivating UNCONDITIONAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE (see my book Shadow Life which is about this).

“Unconditional Self-Acceptance” just means that you accept yourself NO MATTER WHAT and that you commit to working with and growing through whatever life flings your way.

When you take the opposite path – i.e. the EGO PATH – then your confidence isn’t based on unconditional self-acceptance but CONDITIONAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE.

Whereas Unconditional Self-Acceptance comes from the INSIDE, Conditional Self-Acceptance comes from the outside.

Conditional Self-Acceptance (aka ‘Self-Esteem’) means that you’re feelings about yourself are DEPENDENT on the image you carry of yourself in the WORLD (even though the world isn’t real).

For most people, this shows up as feelings of ‘SUPERIORITY’ – for example, being able to see ourselves as being ‘better’ than other people in our group or surroundings because of some completely (usually) superficial and arbitrary quality or thing:

-Being the most handsome/beautiful/attractive

-Having more money/followers/likes

-Being the funniest/toughest/purest/whateverest

-Etc.

There’s nothing wrong with HEALTHY COMPETITION (Iron sharpens iron) but if you’re confidence only comes from external stuff it can NEVER last because CONDITIONS always change – somebody will always be more ‘superior’ eventually.

Step inside and stand on something REAL.

My coaching packages can help you find your real confidence.

 


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