realness

Routine: Building a Real Life

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Your routine shapes your whole life.

A lot of people have an aversion to routine because they think that it’s going to restrict their creativity or simply just cause them to be boring.

Actually, if you do it right, a routine can NOURISH your creativity as well as make your life more interesting.

This is because the RIGHT kind of routine (and the right attitude towards it) will make your life better by allowing your real self to emerge, ensuring that you get the RESULTs you want from life, and helping you to live a life that you actually want to live.

This quick article is going to help you raise your awareness of the benefits of having a routine to fall back upon so you can start making practical changes to either implement a new routine or tweak an existing one to make it more REAL.

Before we get started you need to be aware of the fact that a REAL routine isn’t just about doing things for the sake of it or because somebody else told you to (that’s what leads to an unreal routine and is why a lot of people think routine is ‘boring’).

No, a real routine is built around three core principles:

It supports your GROWTH: in other words, it helps you to keep moving towards your highest vision for your life as well as supporting you to BECOME the person you need to become in order to make that happen.

It gives you ENERGY: a real routine is designed to energise you and to allow you to keep building positive momentum in your life that carries you on the creative tension between where you are now and where you want to be.

If you do it right, a real routine will support your physical, mental, and emotional energy levels because you’ll be CHOOSING to nurture these things and doing things that increase your positive energy in these areas.

It involves having FUN: a real routine involves doing things that you actually enjoy doing regularly. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be some WORK to do in order to get the results that you want but it does mean that you need to make sure you choose the most ‘fun’ way of getting where you want to be if you have the option.

Nothing is worth taking so seriously that you can’t find a way to enjoy it and that applies especially to your routine.  ‘Fun’ also means that you actually schedule times to be NOT WORKING – for example, taking days off to vegetate and recharge, going hiking, hanging out with friends or whatever else ‘fun’ means to you.

If you’re ‘On’ all the time, you won’t get results so build in ‘fun’ time (or whatever you wanna call it) to give yourself ACTIVE recovery, relaxation, and restoration.

If you can build a routine for yourself around these three areas – Growth, Energy, and Fun – then you’re probably going to enjoy life a lot more and feel that you’re making the kind of progress you want to make.

We’ll discuss some practical examples of what you can do in these areas in the ‘Habits’ section below but keep these three things in mind as you go through this article as a whole.

The main benefit of implementing a routine in your life is that it allows you to live in an ACTIVE way instead of a PASSIVE way.  This is empowering because it means that your life is a product of something you have chosen yourself instead of just being something that happens to you.

In other words, if you want to claim your own life as your own then you NEED a routine.  As long as it’s aligned with your true values and intentions and you’re not so rigid about it that you never have any fun or lose your mind being obsessed with results then it will improve your life for good.

The other incredibly powerful thing about having a routine is that due to the LAW OF CAUSE & EFFECT (see this article), it will allow you to carry yourself through time in a way that continues to COMPOUND and BUILD ON the results that you keep getting.

A simple example here is that if your routine involves working out regularly (which it ‘should’ if you want to increase and maintain your energy levels – see below), then the benefits of the work out you do will build on themselves and you’ll get better results over time.

Another simple example is writing a book (or some other creative project) – if your routine involves space for writing then every week the number of words you write will build on each other and as time passes you will definitely have written that book (or at least a first draft).

The combination of choosing a routine that focuses on consistent Growth, Energy, and Fun – as well as involving tasks that support your vision and goals in this area – leads to your life becoming a POSITIVE SPIRAL where things keep getting better.

Let’s talk about this in a little more detail:

 

Positive and Negative Spirals: The CHOICE is Yours

Really, a routine is just a set of CHOICES that you’ve made about your life and what you want to do with it.  If you choose to do something real with it, then you’ll get something real out of it (if you take the actions); if you choose to do nothing or choose something unreal, then you’ll get something unreal out of it.

I’ve said it a load of times before but the general rule is simple:

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

The interesting thing is that as we continue to make real choices and to do what serves our lives then we start to create a Positive Spiral – all this really means is that the results we get start to build on themselves and the more good we bring into our life brings more good.

This works in the opposite direction as well: if we don’t CHOOSE to focus on our growth, manage our energy, and let ourselves have fun then we open up a Negative Spiral and things will continue to get worse (until we either wake up or hit rock bottom and have no choice but to wake up).

If you want to open a Positive Spiral in your life then you need a routine and you need to be committed to it.  It really is that simple.

Here’s some ‘stuff’ you need to know to get in the flow by using your routine as a vehicle for positivity.

Vision

The first thing you need to know is that everything starts with a vision: you either have one or you don’t but if you don’t then you’re gonna open up a Negative Spiral because you’ll be living in a passive way.

There are thousands of ways (probably) to figure out what you want from your future but the most simple one is to do the ‘classic’ coaching exercise: BE/DO/HAVE.

This really is simple and just involves asking yourself what you want to be, do, and have in your life.

You can get started by just grabbing a bit of paper and splitting it into three columns, one for each of the areas.

Be: is all the things you want to be – healthy, happy, rich, whatever.

Do: is all the things you want to do – work for yourself, travel the world, win a medal as an athlete, whatever.

Have: is all the things you want to have – a Lamborghini, a new house, a dog, whatever.

The only real caveat here is that you need to check-in with yourself to make sure that what you’re aiming for is actually REAL.

All ‘real’ means in this context is that you don’t want to bring these things into your life to fill some emotional ‘void’ or whatever but because they’re actually aligned with your real values etc. (if you wanna figure out your values in detail do my free course – the 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose).

When you’re writing down what you want in the Be/Do/Have columns, don’t hold back – the goal with your vision is to be AUDACIOUS so don’t refuse to put things down because you have thoughts pop up about why things aren’t possible (etc.).  What you need in your vision is a clear picture of what you want, that’s it.  Worry about the possibilities as you take ACTION and move forward.

Goals

Once you’ve figured out your Vision, you need to start breaking it down into goals. These are simply steps that you take to start moving towards making the vision a reality.

The key here is that you need to break down the things in your vision into clear STEPS or MILESTONES.

For example, if you want that Lamborghini the milestones along the way might be to figure out a business idea, implement it, get to a certain level of wealth, and then buy that Lamborghini.

These are obviously simplified steps in the process but – in relation to your routine – you need to know these steps so that one week to the next you’re doing the things that need to be DONE in order to move forward to where you need to be.

There’s a more detailed version of this process in the Personality Transplant course I mentioned but all you need to know in this article is you need to figure out a real vision and then understand the SPECIFIC goals that will lead you there.

Your routine will need to support these goals so you actually get the results you want from one week to the next and build a Positive Spiral to wherever you happen to be headed by building from one week to the next.

Habits

Your vision and your goals set the context of your routine but your habits are the thing that make or break it.

The short version is that you need to dedicate time to your vision and goals but also need to ensure that your routine meets the three criteria we set out above: supporting GROWTH, giving ENERGY, and ensuring there’s space for FUN.

If you can ensure that you build all of these things into your routine whilst moving towards your vision then you’ll be living in an active way that opens up a Positive Spiral and ensures you get the most out of your life.

What you need to do week-by-week for your VISION and the GOALS that support it will be different for everybody but the important point is that your routine needs to allow you to MAKE time to do it.

Here are some other habits to keep the positive spiral going in the other areas of your life:

Growth Habits: Anything that helps you grow more REAL (i.e. whole and connected).

-Doing the ‘stuff’ that moves you towards your vision  (goals from week to week).

-Making space to reflect and raise awareness of who you are and what you’re doing (true values, etc).

-Making time to nourish the relationships you already have and to make new relationships and extend your network.

-Journaling or similar activities that help you to reflect and make sense of whatever you’re experiencing so you can process your emotions.

-Working to cultivate the QUALITIES you need to become the person you want to be (maybe this will mean working to be more trusting, patient, assertive, boundaried, whatever).

-Making time to work through any emotional ‘stuff’ you have going on or channelling it into activities that help you move through it.

-Create some kind of ‘Vision Board’ or other tool to make it easier to remind yourself of where you’re going and keep you FOCUSED.

-Etc.

Energy Habits: Anything that helps you to stay energised and to increase your energy levels.

-Making sure that you exercise at least a couple of times a week (ideally more, imo).  Exercise is the BEST thing you can do to ensure you have consistently high energy levels.

-Making sure you sleep enough.

-Making sure you eat food that makes you feel good and is healthy.

-Talking to or meeting with people that energise you and help you to focus on positive things instead of drama and negativity (get rid of negative people).

-Finding activities that PUMP YOU UP like listening to music, meditating, hiking, etc. (just examples, will be different for everybody).

-Learn to be grateful: gratitude increases your energy levels because it removes friction from your life – maybe start a journal or just make time to reflect.

-Make a habit of not complaining all the time or being negative. This just brings you down and stops you focusing on solutions and moving forward (so you can open a Positive Spiral).

-Etc.

Fun Habits: Anything that makes you feel like you’re having fun and ensures that you’re not going to burn out.

-Give yourself one day a week/afternoon/whatever a week to do absolutely nothing or to just follow your feelings.

-Give yourself time to go to the movies, hang out with people without an agenda, explore somewhere new, etc.

-Basically: ANYTHING FUN that makes your life enjoyable – follow the positive energy to keep the spiral going and ensure you’re relaxed when you’re focusing on the other ‘stuff’ (vision and goals).

The final thing to be said about ‘fun’ is that you need to find ways to make sure that the other things you’re doing are as enjoyable as possible.  It’s not about WHAT you do but HOW you do it so if you have a good time you’re more likely to keep the routine in place and keep getting all of the benefits that come from the positive spiral.

A simple example: if you don’t enjoy lifting weights (for example) then don’t do it – find something that’s fun to you like yoga or going to a spin class.

A Real Routine Frees You to be Yourself

Your routine frees you to be yourself because it carries you from where you are now to where you’re going and it ensures that you have fun on the way there.

If you take the building blocks shared in this article and build a routine for yourself around them then you WILL get results and start opening up Positive Spiral as those results compound and build on each other.

The final thing to say is that a routine is something to take seriously but not so seriously that you become ATTACHED to it to the extent that it starts holding you back.

Whatever routine you build and start implementing in your life is a product of the ASSUMPTIONS you carry about yourself right now – those assumptions will be as closely aligned with the truth as possible if you dig into yourself and your vision but  – as things change and you learn and grow – you may need to change or tweak your routine to support new insight.

Also: don’t forget to take a detour once in a while – maybe your routine will tell you that you’re ‘supposed’ to be working out on Tuesday nights (or whenever) but you get invited to a party or something. Sometimes, you’ll need to go to the party rather than do that work out – life is for the LIVING after all.

In general, though, your routine will provide a skeleton for the structure of your life that will help you to keep growing, increase your energy levels, and enjoy the journey because you’ve chosen things that are aligned with your true values and the sense of joy that comes from growing REAL.

If this has made sense to you then spend a little time figuring out your vision, goals, and the habits that will support your growth, energy and sense of FUN on the way to making it happen.

Peace,

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:

You might be interested in

Show Up: How to Get Over Your Fear of Being Real Online and On Social Media

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Real Always Works

A common problem that I’ve seen a lot of creatives and business owners ‘suffer’ from when they come to me for advice is that they’re SCARED to show up online.

This is different to not wanting to show up – if you’re not interested in being online then that’s a different story but if you’re actually interested or – even worse – have a NEED to show up (for your business/brand/whatever) then this problem is actually pretty serious because it holds you back from getting actual RESULTS.

This isn’t to say that the internet and social media are magical panaceas and that they’re going to guarantee you riches and fame (if only) but if you want to raise awareness of your creative work, business, or whatever else then the internet is an essential tool for getting ‘out there’ and connecting you with the RIGHT people.

This article is going to give you some practical steps for getting over your fear of sharing the REAL version of yourself on the internet.

It’s going to cover some of the most common obstacles people face as well as looking at some of the PRACTICAL steps you can take to start getting out there.

Before we get going, we need to make the point that the MAIN thing stopping you from getting out there in a REAL way is the imaginary JUDGEMENTS of imaginary people out there in the world.

From what I’ve seen with some of my clients, the main reason they don’t get started is because they create a phantom in their minds that projects forward into a future where they’re being mocked or ostracised by society as a whole for sharing the ‘wrong’ thing online.

This is just two things projected out into the world and stopping you from taking ACTION:

  • It’s your own judgement of yourself and your unresolved feelings that you’re not good enough (so you assume others will see you in the same way).
  • It’s your belief (maybe unconscious) that you can’t handle the consequences of being disagreed with (when if what you’re sharing is TRUE you definitely can).

Most of what we’ll be talking about in this article is about getting you to a place where you can deal with both of these things but you need to be committed from the outset to being on YOUR OWN TEAM – if you’re not, then you’re just gonna make life difficult for yourself because you’ll stop yourself doing the real stuff and “real always works”.

Here we go:

Figure out who you are, what you’re saying, and why you’re saying it.

The main reason that people find themselves unable to show up online and say something real is because they lack AWARENESS of what’s real about them, what they need to EXPRESS because of this realness, and why it’s worth sharing in the first place.

If you don’t spend some time figuring out this kind of thing then you end up getting ANALYSIS PARALYSIS which is just a fancy way of saying that you have so many potential options that your brain becomes overwhelmed and so you freeze up and do nothing.

When you start to figure out who you are and what stems from this then you narrow down your options a little but you do this in a way that refines your message and makes it easier to share.

Figuring out who you are: Just means that you do a little work to DIG INTO your true values, your true intentions, your true opinions and points of view, your own STORY (without any BS), or anything else that helps you understand yourself.

All of these things can be translated into messages – i.e. what you’re saying – for example, if you value creativity but your story has been that you’ve grown up in a world that doesn’t value the same thing then you can share stories about how you fought to nurture your creativity in a soulless world (for example).

The point is this:

When you figure out the real ‘stuff’, it makes it easier to EXPRESS it.

The first step to showing up online, then – or anywhere else, really – is to be diligent in setting the scene of your life by uncovering this kind of awareness.

The short version is this:

  1. Uncover something real.
  2. Live something real.
  3. Share something real.

To make life even easier for yourself you can ask yourself why share what you’re sharing – if you understand, for example, that by sharing your story you’re helping other people to become stronger in their own lives (or whatever) then that makes it easier to stay motivated and consistent in producing content in the first place.

It also makes it easier to keep riding through the rocky terrain of the internet in general when you don’t get the results you want or people disagree with you (etc.).

If you have CONVICTION in what you’re doing because you know your ‘why’ then the judgements of others and – more importantly – the judgements of YOURSELF are way less likely to hold you back from the real stuff.

Figure out who you‘re saying what you’re saying to.

You don’t need to appeal to EVERYBODY – that’s a mistake that a lot of people try and make in life and online but it just holds you back from being real and it prevents the right people from connecting with you at the DEEPEST possible level.

As the old saying goes: “A friend to all is a friend to none” (or something like that).

Showing up online is a lot easier when you do the work laid out above (figuring out your values, etc.) and then being strategic about reaching out to other people that are on your wavelength or – at a bare minimum – will benefit in a REAL way from your message.

You’ve probably read about figuring out your ‘Ideal Customer Persona’ or working on your ‘niche’ – both of these things are great advice because they help you to get an understanding of the kinda person you’re ‘speaking’ to with your content.

Spend some time reflecting on these things. If you want to figure out your niche (and a lot more related to this kind of thing) then check out this free video workshop I made:

YouTube player

The point is that you don’t need to appeal to everybody and so you don’t need to aim your content to everybody either. Figure out who you’re talking to, make sure it’s somebody you actually WANT to talk to because you share things like values and aspirations, and then direct all of your online content at them in a way they can relate to…

Don’t be scared to polarise.

A consequence of not appealing to everybody is that not everybody will agree with you – that’s fine and dandy but if you have some emotional ‘stuff’ going on (like SHAME) then disagreement will make you feel like there’s something ‘wrong’ with you when there isn’t and so you’ll start holding back or stop sharing your message.

Here’s a little mantra that will serve you well here (stolen from the physicist David Bohm):

“Your opinions are something that you have, not that you are”.

In other words, your opinions don’t DEFINE ‘you’ as a human being – they’re not the real essence of what it means to be you.

If you forget that then when somebody disagrees with you online then you can fall into the trap of thinking that they’re disagreeing with you fundamentally as a human being.

Of course, some other shame-driven people actually might think that about you if your opinions trigger their ‘stuff’ but – even so – the bottom line is that an opinion is just an opinion so you can remain outcome-independent and not let it affect your self-worth.

Actually, because this is just something that is going to happen to you when you share things online – i.e. people disagreeing with your opinions – then you might as well USE IT to your advantage by turning up the VOLUME on some of your more ‘controversial’ or real opinions (without trying to be CONTRIVED and creating controversy for the sake of it – just not holding back what’s TRUE).

This might seem ‘scary’ at first if you’re not used to it but because you’re not trying to appeal to everybody (see the point we made above) your polarising opinions serve to do two really important things:

  • They act as a SIGNAL to call the people that you DO want to communicate with to you (because they’ll likely either share these opinions already and respect you for sharing them or they will learn something new from what you’re saying and respect you for that).
  • They serve to help you RISE ABOVE the noise online and help you to get attention that you need (for the sake of your business, etc. – not for the sake of filling an emotional void or whatever by seeking empty attention as an end in itself).

There is so much noise online and most of it is just people sharing the same old boring, safe opinions and ideas because most people are scared to leave their comfort zones and be REAL.

Being polarising cuts through the noise and allows you to rise as a signal instead. The payoff is that this will connect you to others and help you build confidence as you handle whatever disagreement arises and connect with those that actually matter to you and what you’re doing.

Don’t try to be something or somebody that you’re not.

The biggest mistake that a lot of people seem to make online with their content is that they attempt to come across as something they’re NOT.  This might make them feel good in the short-term but if the whole point is to build REAL connections then it’s just setting them up for failure.

The most simple example of people trying to be something they’re not is when they present themselves as being a ‘guru’ or ‘expert’ in some area and so attempt to come across as though they have ALL the answers, are completely INFALLIBLE, and can solve absolutely every problem that you might have in a given area.

This is an example of somebody being a CONTROL FREAK and trying to control the way that their online audience sees them so that they can feel a certain way about themselves and feed into their ego ‘stuff’. It’s also completely UNREAL because NOBODY has all the answers, everybody is fallible, and nobody can solve all of your problems.

Trying to be something that you’re not – on and offline – is something that we do when we have an emotional need to play it safe and to try and control situations because of insecurity and lack of confidence in our abilities.

When we have true confidence in our abilities then we are able to do two really important things:

  1. Admit where we don’t have answers or have room to grow – because we’re not trying to be an ‘expert’, just somebody who has learned certain thing in our own lives and continues to grow and evolve.
  2. We are able to be spontaneous and therefore REAL – because we’re not trying to control the moment but we’re being in it and just sharing from the REAL place of where we actually already are in TRUTH (not where we want to make it look like we are for our own ego or attachment to certain outcomes).

The short-version of all this is that you obviously need to be able to DELIVER whatever it is that you’re telling your audience you can give them but you don’t need to be ‘perfect’.

Being perfect is BORING and it makes you harder to be humanised and to build an actual connection with people.

For example, if you’re trying to come across as some perfect ‘guru’ type creature you might think that you need to present yourself as being impeccably moral, successful, and never making mistakes.  Only sharing that side of yourself – i.e. your successes – might seem interesting to you and make you feel like you’re showing yourself off to the world in the way that you want to be seen but… it’s not real.

EVERYBODY has failure. Everybody has made mistakes. Everybody has screwed up. Everybody has a dark side to their nature.

You can only really CONNECT with people by sharing your stories and if your story is just “I won and everything is great” then nobody is going to find that engaging or – more importantly – relate to it.

It’s the failures, lessons, obstacles, and challenges that make you interesting so don’t be scared to share that stuff. Even more importantly, it’s not just about the past – even right now, we’re all learning things and facing challenges.  Don’t try and be something other than the perfectly imperfect human being you are in truth.

If you find yourself trying to overinflate your image of yourself with the things you share online then ask yourself ‘Why?’ – more than likely it’s because you’re JUDGING yourself and so you’re using your content as a vehicle to try and hide from your judgements. Actually, by hiding in that way you’re just exacerbating the problem as it’s a form of avoidance.

If you wanna be real, then share the real stuff. It will get you better results anyway because it will stop you being BORING.

Work on being spontaneous and consistent.

Spontaneous and consistent might not sound like they go together but if you want to show up more online that’s what you need to work on.

In this sense, ‘spontaneous’ means that you’re not over planning every little detail and you can actually enjoy the process whilst consistent means that you’re posting or showing up wherever you’ve decided to be REGULARLY.

Only if you’re spontaneous in your approach to producing your content can you allow your REALNESS to shine through in it – that might mean making a video and just following prompts or bullet points instead of robotically reading a script or it might even just mean opening your mouth and going for it raw (that’s my favourite approach – have a look at my YouTube channel).

If you’re writing content then being spontaneous might just mean that you don’t choose the topic you’re going to write about until it’s time to do so. That means that when you start writing you’re writing about something that’s FRESH to you and your experience at present (that’s what I’m doing with this article right now – reflecting on thoughts I’ve had about this area over the last few days).

This approach is REAL because it connects whatever you’re putting out to the learning journey that you’re currently on and it keeps you growing REAL (which is what it’s all about). You can still do things like add SEO strategy or hashtags or whatever but as long as it fits within the wider context of who you are, what you have to say, and why you’re saying it (like we said above) then it should resonate.

The ‘Consistency’ part means that you set yourself some kind of structure of when you release your content.  That basically means having some kind of Rolling Content Calendar that you’ll stick to from one week to the next – for example, on my calendar (email if you want the template and I’ll send you it) I post on this blog/site on Mondays and Fridays.

That consistency is good for my own creative process because I know what I’m doing but it’s also good for my readers who know what to expect.  Knowing why you’re doing things on what day is obviously important (I chose twice a week because it’s good for SEO) and it depends on the platform you use but the point is that having structure keeps you ACCOUNTABLE and being spontaneous keeps you REAL and you need BOTH to get RESULTS.

Add Value: Entertain, Educate, Elevate & Tell Stories

All this talk of content and sharing things is fine but you need to make sure that you’re ADDING VALUE to the people that you’re communicating with. This means – first and foremost – that your content isn’t just about ‘You’ but it’s about ‘Them’ and their own lives: the problems they’re facing, the values they share, the lessons they want to learn, and their own experiences (etc.).

This means your content has to actually be ‘good’ otherwise you’re only showing up in a way that benefits you (and that’s ego).

I think the best content does all four of these things but if you can do just one or a couple, you’ll increase the odds of adding value which makes it easier to really SHOW UP:

Entertain: Basically means, don’t be BORING. Don’t just be a humourless ‘guru’ or whatever but put your actual personality into things and make people laugh. If you’re not funny, share something novel or that grabs attention.

Educate: People read and share content online because it educates them in ways that solves their problems or gives them valuable information that can help them in their lives.

Elevate: This is the BIG one in my opinion: it means that you’re helping people to GROW MORE REAL by sharing things that help them on their own life journey to become more WHOLE. It means sharing valuable insights and ideas that make life better.

Tell Stories: Finally, you need to at least give access to your story somewhere. Stories are how human beings really CONNECT and get to understand each other and that’s what it’s all about.  You can also weave stories into the things that you share in general so that it’s more engaging and relatable. That’s why I share my story on my site so people can understand where I’m coming from.

Practice makes imperfect

When you first set out – especially with video – you’ll try and be perfect and to play whatever ‘role’ you think you need to play to come across successfully. Eventually, you’ll feel comfortable enough to be imperfect and to show the REAL human side of yourself to the world (which is what they want you to GIVE anyway).

This is why you need to just practice.  You can start making videos on your phone or whatever – just choose a random topic – and  then watch it back and delete it.   Do this a few dozen times (or whatever) until it doesn’t feel ‘weird’ and then share it with a select bunch of people and build in increments before you’re ready to share with the world at large (unless you’re feeling brave then just dive in and post it somewhere).

Like most things in life, the more you do it, the easier it’ll get – even with things like having people disagree with you or even troll you and say horrible things to you (you’ll realise it really doesn’t matter and having trolls is kind of a compliment in a strange way).

Ultimately, the reason to practice isn’t so that it becomes perfect but so that it FLOWS and, ultimately, this comes down to being CONSISTENT and focusing on the things that are real to you and that are worth sharing with the world even if you share them imperfectly.

The more you talk about certain things (or write about them) the easier it will become (trust me). You’ll start to notice connections between things and certain themes will keep arising that become the ‘building blocks’ of whatever content you’re working with (for example: one of my ‘building blocks’ is REALNESS: I’ve talked and written about it so many times now I could do it with my eyes closed).

Set yourself a routine and then stick to it. Don’t try to be ‘good’ at first – in fact, don’t try to be anything. Just let what needs to come out come out and then keep building by continuing to be consistent.

Conclusion: Show Up by Showing Up

If you want to start showing up more online then start by SHOWING UP for yourself first and foremost. Figure out who you are and what you’re all about and be ready to stand for the TRUTH of whatever that might be in the face of the world’s judgements.

The biggest gift you can give the world is your REAL self and there has never been a better time to do it.  Figure out where you want to share your message, learn the technical stuff required to do so, and then just get out there and show the world what you’re made of – you only get one life so you might as well SHOW UP in it.

 

 

 

 

Book a call with me here.

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:

 

You might be interested in

Health, Wealth, and Relationships: Real Always Works

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Improving Your Life by Accepting Reality No Matter What

This is going to be a pretty quick post but it’s also going to be a really important one.

It’s going to break down some of the PRACTICAL BENEFITS of using your creativity to become more REAL and how this can help you to improve your life as a whole.

In particular, we’re going to look at three areas that are important to all of us:

Health, Wealth, and Relationships.

Before we get started, you need to understand some really basic things about life as a human being:

1:- We all have a drive towards WHOLENESS because wholeness is REAL. All  that really means is that there is something inside us that constantly wants us to feel more CONNECTED to ourselves, the world, and reality itself.

2:- Because of the way that we have been conditioned by life, many – if not all – of us are more DISCONNECTED and FRAGMENTED from ourselves than we would be if we followed this natural drive.

Sometimes, we don’t follow this drive because we’ve brainwashed ourselves with shame, guilt, and/or trauma – other times, we’ve been conditioned by the world to IDENTIFY as something other than what we are (so we create an EGO that hides our SHADOW).

3:- We can move WITH this natural drive towards wholeness instead of against it by CHOOSING(not ‘finding’) a sense of PURPOSE for our lives that will allow us to keep moving and growing with reality instead of against it.

The process of choosing a purpose is:

-1) AWARENESS: uncover the truth about ourselves (STOP BRAINWASHING OURSELVES & DECONDITION OURSELVES FROM THE WORLD),

-2) ACCEPTANCE: integrate the ‘parts’ of ourselves that we disowned or tried to hide from ourselves because of this brainwashing and conditioning (the ‘Shadow Self’),

– 3) ACTION: share something with the world that offers REAL VALUE as a result of the lessons learned going through this process.

(You will go through this process many times over the course of your lifetime because you can always go deeper).

‘Realness’ just means that we accept reality NO MATTER WHAT, use what it has to teach us to grow more real (i.e. towards wholeness), and then sharing something of value with others as a result of this.

When you live in this REAL way it has a number of practical benefits in the three levels that all of us NEED to make progress in so we can feel ‘good’ about life: health, wealth, and relationships.

In other words, focusing on your REALNESS isn’t  just some self-indulgent thing to do because it feels ‘nice’ – it benefits EVERY level of your life.

Here’s  the short version of why your realness can change your life for the better in these three areas:

Health

Physical Health: Accepting and working with reality means that you know you’re going to be DEAD one day, that you’re moving towards old age (if you’re lucky), and so you better look after your body whilst you can.

It also means that you understand the difference between WHOLENESS and FRAGMENTATION and both of these things will affect the choices you make about what you do with your body as well as what you put in your body.

The short version of this is that you can’t be real if you don’t respect your body. That means you’ll find a way to exercise, eat healthy food, sleep properly, and other foundational health habits to increase your energy levels and protect and nurture your health.

As the old saying goes, “HEALTH IS WEALTH” and so  – actually – this is the most foundational of all steps in relation to “health, wealth, and relationships”: if you don’t have good health, you won’t be around to increase your wealth or have good relationships.

Mental Health: A lot of mental health problems come from being UNREAL. The two most common ones are anxiety and depression.

Realness helps you in this area because it keeps you MOVING and it keeps you GROWING.

The connection here is that if you stop moving then you become DEPRESSED because you have no connection with a sense of purpose and so life seems meaningless.

If you suffer from ANXIETY then – a lot of the time – it’s because you’ve brainwashed yourself or been conditioned into thinking you’re something UNREAL and this just gives you constant negative feedback between yourself and life (which would make anybody anxious).

Emotional Health: Because your realness means you’re not HIDING yourself from yourself you will experience better emotional health overall and be less neurotic.

This is essentially because instead of trying to hide from whatever emotions pop up and causing inner friction that comes from AVOIDANCE you face them head on and let them do their thing.

What this means is that we don’t JUDGE what we’re experiencing but we actually EXPERIENCE OUR EXPERIENCES. Once they’ve been ‘felt’ then we can integrate the lessons we need to learn from them and become more whole as a result.

Another reason that realness will improve your emotional health is because you will free yourself from your judgements and interpretations of life:

Instead of trying to be ‘right’ about everything and holding yourself back, you’ll be on a learning journey (because you’re not blocking the natural drive towards wholeness) and so you will be less likely to attach to negative thoughts and BS that stop you going out there, doing things, and feeling good about yourself.

Wealth

Working to become more real means that you will be more purpose-driven and – more importantly – that you be will adding more VALUE to the world because you will be a more authentic version of yourself (the greatest thing you can GIVE the world).

This value will be translated in most cases to some CREATIVE project or act that allows you to share your true values and intentions with the world – this might be a creative project/business, side hustle, or simply a set of skills and qualities that allow you to be better equipped to find a job or career that you like.

It’s not often talked about in our society but we’re not actually valued for having a good CV (or whatever) but because of our STATUS – if you work on being REAL, then your status will increase because you will be more CREATIVE (you have to be in order to grow real in the first place) and because you have skills and qualities that many others do not.

We’re going to talk about relationships in a second but relationships are linked to your ability to increase your WEALTH:

If you’re stuck in the UNREAL ideas of your ego then you’ll buy into the illusions of INDEPENDENCE that stem from fragmentation. If you take this to an extreme then you will be less likely to work on building a NETWORK of people that you support and who support you back and so you will miss out on OPPORTUNITIES to do creative, fulfilling, and/or profitable work.

Furthermore, if you can’t be real enough with yourself to have real relationships with others then you will limit your capacity to grow or SCALE whatever projects you’re working on if you want to do your own thing because you won’t delegate things to others or work with them on a team.

If you don’t want to be self-employed or an entrepreneur (both of which are eventually essential for maximising realness and taking control of one’s destiny, imo), then working to be real will still make you more employable because you will have the stronger network that we just talked about but also increase the “know, like, and trust” factor that’s’ vital to success in the business world (as either an employee or a solo agent).

Relationships

All that really needs to be said here is that if you work on being real then you will have a better relationship with yourself. By extension, this will allow you to have a better relationship with others.

Most problems in relationships come from people not accepting themselves and so this causes them to either judge themselves and then project this judgement out on to others.  When this happens it just causes unnecessary friction which eventually turns to conflict.

Another consequence of not having a REAL relationship with ourselves is that we end up trying to outsource the things we can only give ourselves to others. By trying to get people to meet our needs in this way then it just causes more friction (…and resentment in the most extreme cases).

Finally, like I already said, being UNREAL causes you to believe that you’re independent (instead of interdependent) and separate from the world as a whole and so you’ll be less likely to go out and BUILD meaningful relationships in the first place (‘build’ in capitals because it takes work… Real is active whereas unreal is passive and just waits for things to happen).

In short, being real will allow you to have a better relationship with yourself and this will allow you to have less barriers between yourself and others. This creates a DEEPER connection that lets you get more out of life as well as GIVING more in return.

Conclusion

Real always works.

 

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

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Creative Status Episode 3: Anthony Trahair: Play, Risk, and Humanity

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Creative Status is a podcast about using your creativity to increase your status and improve your health, wealth, and relationships.

To be truly alive you need to SHOW UP in life 👇

Many of the problems in our lives stem from spending too much time in our heads and trying to ‘force’ everything through conceptual ideas, plans, and ego.

Of course, we need ideas and plans to get places but – if we’re not careful – we can get so caught up in our heads that it stops us showing up as our REAL, human selves.

This is where the concept of PLAY comes in…

When you (re)learn to play you learn a lot of important skills for REAL LIFE:

-You can respond to the moment and be spontaneous.

-You can learn to TRUST yourself and life.

-You can handle the UNCERTAINTY that comes with ‘being’.

-You can get a grip of your BODY and what it’s capable of.

-You can learn to take RISKS which are essential for life and creativity.

Anthony Trahair (@meeting.life.freedom) is an author, life coach, and juggler who specialises in helping people and communities to reconnect to their humanity via playfulness.

He runs workshops and events designed to help people get out of their heads, into their bodies, and back into life by rediscovering creative human values like trust, connection, and presence.

In latest episode of Creative Status, we explore the nature of ‘play’ itself, how you can implement a play philosophy in your daily life to improve your wellbeing, the importance of being able to take risks and ride through uncertainty in order to grow more real, and many other things along the way.

This is an empowering conversation that will inspire you to get out there and do that ‘thing’ you’ve been meaning to do or – at the very least – start looking for new ways to play with life instead of taking it so seriously.

Listen at anchor.fm/creativestatus or on your favourite podcast platform.

Go BE in the world, don’t just DO or HAVE.

Peace,

Oli

Episode Links:

Visit Anthony’s website: anthonytrahair.com/

Connect with Anthony on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-trahair-bbab98224/

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Why I Haven’t Killed Myself Yet (and You Probably Shouldn’t Kill Yourself Either)

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The Existential Question of Suicide

There’s a famous quote by Albert Camus where he says something like “If you haven’t killed yourself yet then you’re an existentialist”.

I think about that quote a lot.

Camus is also the guy who summed up the modern existential state by asking, “Should I have another cup of coffee or should I kill myself?”

It really helps put things in perspective: ultimately, if you’re here and you’re reading this right now then things have never got so bad that you’ve made the CHOICE to end it all.

That’s good news. Probably somebody out there likes having you around (and even if it feels like they don’t you’re probably just not looking hard enough or need to buy a dog or something).

Being a human being is kinda weird: Every morning we wake up and we keep making the choices to just keep going through the motions and ploughing on with our lives – even though we know they’re going to end anyway one day and that there’s nothing we can do about it (and maybe you could make an argument that a lot of what goes on in the world is a distraction from that inescapable reality).

This ceaseless, inexorable ‘ploughing on’ happens despite us constantly having to deal with problems and obstacles, having to deal with the dramas and derangements of other people, and having things creep up on us out of the blue every so often and knock us sideways or derail the train of our lives and whatever plans we might have had (“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”, as Mike Tyson said).

There’s a deeper sense of despair in the world than any time since I remember in my long ass lifetime (40 years young now, wtf) but despite all the absurdity and clownish chaos of the extremities of political ideologies and all of the weirdness, drama, and bullshit that permeates the world (and the subtle and not-so-subtle threats to OBVLIVION), most of us just keep ploughing and plodding along, doing the same old things we’ve always done.

I think we’ve all had that thought pop into our heads at least once or twice in our lives – even if it hasn’t really been ‘serious’:

“Why don’t I kill myself?”

Sometimes it just creeps in there when you’re washing the dishes, driving down the Bingley bypass, or making love.

Life is fragile, after all – it would be so easy to do any of the romanticised suicide rituals that we’ve all heard about and to end it all with relative ‘ease’:

-Go to Paris and jump off the Eifel Tower.

-Overdose on some drug of choice.

-Take a toaster in the bath (and plug it in, of course).

-Get a razorblade and slit one’s wrists (everybody knows that you need to go ‘down’ and not ‘across’ for whatever reason).

-Steal a car or commit some other crime and get the police to chase and shoot you (depending on your country or the severity of your crime, of course).

The options for leaving this hellhole are only limited by your creativity (which is ironic in a way seeing as the world you might be trying to escape is trying to quash your creativity anyway).

So why do we stick around? Maybe there’s some ‘stuff’ to be learned here?

I can’t really speak for others but here’s why I haven’t killed myself yet:

I’m going to die anyway.

Maybe it’s laziness but I really don’t see the point in killing myself when I’m going to die one day anyway.

Maybe it’s because I’m an optimist but I know that anything could happen between now and whenever that happens to be (within the realm of possibility, of course).

That could include things that are ‘bad’ and so maybe things will get worse than they’ve ever been but ‘possiblity’ also means that things could get ‘good’ or even better as well so I might as well stick around and find out.

I suppose knowing that death is inevitably coming anyway gives me a kind of peace because it makes me more present (when I’m reflecting on it) but it also serves to remind me that THIS IS IT – as far as I know, this is the only life I’m ever going to live and so I might as well squeeze every drop of life I can get out of it.

I know that things won’t always be perfect but nor do I want – or even need – them to be.  Being ‘me’ is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and so I might as well accept it as it ‘is’ (whilst still trying to change what I can change and move towards my vision) and ‘enjoy’ the full spectrum of human emotions and experiences – misery, confusion, conflict; joy, exultation, love – all of these things are just part of the overall cocktail of life and make it what it is: a rich tapestry of colours and sensations that all come together in one hideously beautiful abstract painting that kinda makes sense if you look at it in the right way.

There’s loads more to do.

The thing about life is that there’s always more to ‘do’.  Some might say that this is actually one of the ‘bad’ things about life – the fact that we constantly have to be bumbling around like blue-arsed flies ‘doing’ things instead of ‘being’ them.

It’s like the Myth of Sisyphus (popularised and given context by Albert Camus again) – pushing the rock up the mountain only for it to roll back down again and for him to have to repeat the process and struggle up-and-down for eternity.

I was speaking to somebody recently who was struggling with the endless ‘doing’ and struggle of the human condition:

They were saying that every time you think you’ve got to the top of the mountain you end up realising that it’s not the actual peak – it’s just a ridge.

And when you get to the top of the next ridge you realise you’re still not at the top (and on and on it goes).

I don’t mind ‘doing’ things as long as my  ‘being’ is injected into that ‘doing’ – for example, by aligning it with my REAL VALUES (not the values that the world has tried to ingrain or condition me with).

In my own life, I’ve really found that by getting to the top of one ‘ridge’ I might not have made it all the way to the ‘top’ – to some perfect state of absolute completion and power – but I’ve still grown a lot more real (i.e. whole and integrated in myself, the world, and reality) and have got a better VIEW of life and what it all means along the way.

I think all this ‘doing’ is only really a problem if you either don’t KNOW what you’re doing (because you’ve been told by others) or because you’re FORCING yourself to do things that are taking you away from yourself rather than doing anything actually real or true to you (and that’s when you’re most likely to end up being like Sisyphus and doing something ABSURD).

I dunno, I think it comes down to our expectations. If we expect life to be life then it’s a lot ‘easier’ – or at least more SIMPLE – and so we’re less likely to kill ourselves. I think if my expectations were different maybe I would’ve been disappointed by now and jumped off the Eifel Tower or taken my plugged-in toaster in the bath.

Personally, I like the journey but I’ve learned to trust the process and it’s taken me out of my head and into life a little more… I think if we resist life then we resist life (if you know what I mean). I’m trying to be open.

The other thing about all these things to ‘do’ that’s stopped me from killing myself is that doing brings a lot of amazing MOMENTS and EXPERIENCES that allow me to dangle a future over my head like a golden suicide-prevention carrot that keeps me plodding along.

Like we said, despite all this empty ‘doing’ in the world (going to work in the wage cage, filling in spread sheets, queuing in the supermarket whilst the self-checkouts blurt out error messages), there’s a lot of BEING that creeps into our lives that makes it worth living.

This ‘being’ doesn’t necessarily have to come from anything grandiose or extravagant – it can just be small things that turn all your senses on and remind you exactly who the fuck you are:

-Sitting in a garden with your eyes closed and the sun on your face.

-Kicking those autumn leaves or watching your breath condensate as you go for a walk.

-Seeing a full moon from on top of a hill.

-Listening to the waves wash up against the shore or the ripples and whirls forming and fading away in a river.

Maybe these are clichés but those moments are FREE and – more importantly – they’re REAL.

I haven’t killed myself yet because of all the moments like that I’ve had previously – or that I’m having now as I write this and look outside every so often at a tree blowing in the wind – but also because of all the moments that I know will come.

I know that they will come because life is nothing but a series of moments that we try and thread together with the narratives and stories that we tell ourselves… None of those stories will last, though, but if the moments are real they’ll last forever (because those moments are about being connected to the whole and so they’re real and what’s real is always real).

That doesn’t mean that I’m going to be ‘passive’ about it and just let these moments happen to me (that’s ego) – I’ve learned now that the way to SPEED UP and experience life more fully is to create a vision for life and to go out there and LIVE THE VISION.

Obviously, there are no guarantees in life and I could get run over by a bus tomorrow and taste oblivion but if I don’t then there are things I’m pretty much certain I’ll do one day (unless something goes seriously wrong and then I can either learn to accept it or then kill myself lol).

I think without the vision it’s much harder to find reasons to keep living – the vision doesn’t need to be big but it needs to be something and it needs to be real:

I haven’t killed myself because I want to grow my business and help more people not kill themselves too.

I haven’t killed myself because I want to go to Norway and climb some mountains.

I haven’t killed myself because I want to go to Italy again.

I haven’t killed myself because I want to hold ‘The One’ in my  arms and know that life is for the living (yeah, I know that it’s never the ‘One’ and just one of the ones but it’s still an amazing part of the human experience – just like with all the ones that were already the one).

You get the picture.

I suppose it doesn’t even really matter that much if the vision even materialises in reality or not (though if you ACT on it there’s no reason why it won’t –  though maybe not exactly as you envisioned given the way the reality waves work and the inevitable gap between expectation and result).

No, what matters is HAVING the vision.  I think as long as there’s some kind of picture in your heart then you’ll probably be okay. If you don’t have one just CHOOSE one – it’s not that complicated (though we like complications, especially when we’re already feeling down or depressed because they give us reasons not to move and grow through the FEELINGS that are holding us back and the IDEAS we created and attached to as a response to them).

Maybe that oversimplifies things or sounds delusional – I think that’s only  the case if you choose something and then you don’t ACT on it.  Without the action you’re deluding yourself; if you choose and then act then you’re really living (so why would you kill yourself?).

There’s loads more real human beings to meet.

Other people can be annoying (an understatement) and it can be easy to become disheartened by some of the time-wasting and drama that they can suck us into if we’re not careful.

Even worse than that, you see the news and it’s easy to lose faith in ‘people’ as a whole: they’re starting wars, stabbing each other, chopping each other’s genitalia off, arguing about politics, and generally causing all kinds of unwholesome havoc wherever they go.

Despite this being the case, this is just ‘people’ in general – it’s not humanity (which involves a little wholeness or soul).

People are just ‘ideas’.

People are just acting out their self-images and the points of view of their ego and causing all kinds of bother because of it.

One reason I haven’t killed myself yet is that, despite all this HORROR, there are still REAL HUMAN BEINGS out there that you can create memories and moments with and more importantly LAUGH YOUR ASS OFF with.

Even in the worst-case scenario – those periods in life when you feel totally disconnected or isolated from ‘The World’ at large – it doesn’t change the fact that there are nearly 8billion (or whatever it is today) people on the planet and that some of them out there are gonna be on your wavelength.

Just because you feel alone doesn’t mean that you are alone – even if you do have to do a little work of not being PASSIVE and actually reaching out or reconnecting to people.

I have family and friends that I think would miss me if I killed myself – actually, I’m pretty sure that some of them definitely would (even some of the ones I might not have spoken to in a while).

It sounds kinda funny when I put it like this but one reason I haven’t killed myself is because I don’t wanna DEPRIVE people of my presence. I’m saying that slightly tongue-in-cheek but it’s true: I’m funny and I have good things to say and I can cheer people up in general or make their lives better with the ‘value’ (overused word) I bring to the relationship.

Why deprive people of that? With great power comes great responsibility and – in some relationships, not necessarily always – I’m awesome.

Of course, on some levels, it’s not just about ‘being awesome’ – some people love you regardless of how awesome you are. In my case I think my Mum and my Gran actually love me unconditionally – despite whatever flaws I have or the stupid things I’ve done and been through that have made them worry in life.

I think if I killed myself now it would just cause them too much pain and even though I wouldn’t be around to feel guilty about it I don’t want to be responsible for that.  I suppose this is why a lot of people don’t kill themselves – because they don’t wanna hurt the people they love and that love them. Life is life but we’re all in it together – there’s some comfort in that whether you want it or not.

The way I look at people these days is that every single one of them is an EXPERIENCE (or at least a couple of moments here and there).

Some of them are REAL experiences and some of them are UNREAL experiences – if you’ve read my ‘stuff’ before then you’ll be able to figure out the distinction between the two but the short version is that the real ones bring a spiral of energy as they take you deeper into wholeness and the unreal ones just block things with their own bullshit and there’s no real connection.

One reason I haven’t killed myself yet is because there’s already some real ones in my life that bring the ENERGY – I suppose you could say that energy is life-enhancing and so as long as it’s there and it’s taking me where I need to go then I suppose there’s something to live for.

Yeah, there’s the unreal ‘stuff’ and relationships too but that’s all part of the human experience like we said earlier – you can’t have the sweet without the sour. All of these things just make being ‘human’ human and as long as we have that basic panoply of experiences and the real stuff keeps coming or is around the corner then you might as well keep going.

Human beings are ‘tribal’ creatures (at least that’s what they tell us) and so people (or humans) need people (or humans).

Yeah, you can do it on your own if you really want – it’s not impossible.  Overall, though, we need each other to be mirrors of each other and it’s just a lot more ‘fun’ to go out there and share the path with people and share battle stories and get scars together.

There have been times in my life when I’ve been alienated – even from the real ones – because of how things have just worked out or because I’ve had a period of downtime because of illness or whatever else. The real ones are always real, though – you can reach out or they will and then you’ll pick up where you left off like time, space, and causality aren’t even things we have to deal with. Real life is amazing like that.

I guess what I’m saying is that I haven’t killed myself yet because it’s always there – even if sometimes you have to reach out for it. I suppose when I was younger I might’ve fallen into the unhealthy pattern that if it’s real then you don’t need to reach out (and, tbh, in many cases you don’t) – people just get caught up their own lives, though, and sometimes reaching out is just a reminder of what’s real, not a reflection on who you are (that’s ego).

What about those cases where there is nobody to reach out to? What happens when I’m old, for example, and all my friends have dropped dead? Or what if I’m simply a different person now – because I was once unreal and now I’m not – and so I’ve distanced myself from the people and things that once seemed real in order to be true to myself?

Maybe that’s a tad dramatic but you know what I mean – not everybody is connected to people even though everything is connected.

In cases like that I always think that “It’s better alone than in bad company” (or unreal company – even worse).

If I ended up like that then I still wouldn’t kill myself – because there’s always the chance that there’s another real one out there somewhere or – if not – then there’s still gonna be those moments that we talked about up above.

There’s always something or the promise of something REAL and I suppose – at the end of the end of the day – that’s all it really takes to make a life: a taste here and there, the lingering sensations, and then the promise of something more.

You never know what’s around the corner but if you reach around you’ll probably find something and if you don’t you can still be real. Something like that, anyway.

It’s why I’m still here.

 

 

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:

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Creative Status Episode 1: Flow, Freedom, Chaos, and Creativity With Sabrina Lindner

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Creative Status is a podcast about using your creativity to increase your status and improve your health, wealth, and relationships.

In this episode of Creative Status,  life coach Sabrina Lindner and I discuss the ins-and-outs of the creative FREE FLOW state and how we can tweak our lives and mindsets to spend more time in this amazingly creative place to improve our lives and get the kind of results we really want.

Along the way, we also explore creative ways to figure out our real values, how to walk the fine line between order and chaos, how people have misconceptions that give reality a ‘bad’ reputation and hold themselves back from life, the relationship between creativity and the shadow self and a load more insights that you can start implementing right away.

If you want to understand the practical side of ‘unblocking’ yourself creatively then this episode will definitely get you on the right track.

———

Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus 

Episode Links:

To learn more about Sabrina Linder visit her website

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Free one hour creative workshop to take you brand or project to the next level.

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‘Why Do People Play Mind Games?’ – The Truth About POWER, SCARCITY, and EGO

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why do people play mind games

Intro: What Does It Mean To Play Mind Games?

This article is about the UNREAL mind games that people play, why they play them in the first place, and what you can do if you find yourself involved with somebody who’s trying to pull you into this kind of mental bullshittery.

Before you read the main bulk of the article you need to know that these games are simply a form of DRAMA and that all drama is simply an unreal attempt of one person – or parties if you look at it culturally – to drag another person into the narratives and ideas that their EGO depends on for existence.

If you’re a rational adult human being and you find yourself engaging with somebody that plays ‘mind games’ with you then you need to realise that the only REAL way to ‘win’ is to simply walk away (or as I’ve said a million and three times on this website and elsewhere: “Gimme something real or GTFO”).

Mind games always stem from somebody being INSECURE about their position in life and the way that they see themselves because of a PERCEIVED lack of power or status (because they’re insecure and they’re comparing themselves to others based on ILLUSORY standards and ideals that exist in their MINDS alone – hence these games being called ‘Mind’ Games).

If you engage with the ‘game’ then it just means that you’re being insecure at some level too and you probably have some work to do in terms of RESPECTING yourself and setting the real, healthy boundaries that having such self-respect entails.

A general ‘rule’ of life is that you get what you tolerate and so if you put up with these kind of mind games or even find yourself playing back then you’re just inviting more unnecessary drama and more BS into your life.

This is always a distraction from the fact that you’ve lost touch with your own PURPOSE at some level and so you find solace in engaging in the pettiness and prickliness that comes from mind games.

This article will help you understand why people play these games in the first place, some of the most common and basic games that get played, and what you can do to WORK ON YOURSELF and disengage from this kind of nonsense whilst keeping your sanity intact and growing REAL.

Here we go:

What Type Of Person Plays Mind Games? – Ego, Scarcity, And Control

The first thing you need to know about mind games is that – like DRAMA – they are played by people who are insecure and have an emotional need to CONTROL things in order to keep their insecurity at bay.

In other words, playing MIND GAMES is a form of CONTROL FREAKERY which means that it’s an attempt by somebody to control their external surroundings – and the people in it – in such a way that it allows them to keep their self-image in place and to keep unwanted emotional ‘stuff’ at bay.

If you haven’t read much of my writing before then you might need to know here that when people are being unreal in this way their SELF-IMAGE/EGO is actually an UNREAL construct that has been created by the person in question (unconsciously and consciously) to help them hide certain underlying emotions from themselves.

Almost always, these emotions are ‘negative’ – like shame, guilt, and/or trauma – but it’s also possible that they’re trying to hide positive emotions from themselves because these emotions have caused them to get in trouble in the past.

An example here is that maybe they had a situation somewhere in their history where they freely expressed their ‘joy’ or ‘love’ but this just ended up getting them HURT and so now they disowned these positive feelings behind a self-image that helps them convince themselves they don’t have these feelings anymore (so they won’t get hurt again).

Whatever the case may be, ‘Game Players’ are using the games that they play in an attempt to manipulate people into acting in such a way that they can tell themselves the STORY THEY WANT TO BELIEVE ABOUT THEMESELVES IS TRUE (when it isn’t – because if it was they wouldn’t be playing games as THE TRUTH SPEAKS FOR ITSELF).

They WANT TO BELIEVE this story not because it’s true but because it allows them to keep hiding from themselves and not have to do the difficult work of facing or re-integrating their emotional ‘stuff’ (and the point should probably be made that what we ‘want’ doesn’t have any impact on the truth at all).

In short, then, the type of person who plays mind games is almost always an INSECURE CONTROL FREAK (though they might not and probably don’t identify as that).

Along with control freakery, there are also a few other characteristic emotional and thought patterns that game players also embody:

The first is that they almost always have a SCARCITY MINDSET and see life as a zero-sum game.

That might sound a bit ‘technical’ but all it means is that they see the REAL and IMPORTANT things in life (like ‘acceptance’, ‘truth’,  ‘feeling good’, etc.) as being SCARCE instead of ABUNDANT (which the real things are because reality applies to EVERYBODY) and so they believe that if somebody else feels good then it somehow means they won’t be able to (that’s the Zero-sum game part: if I have X then you can’t have X whereas in reality it’s possible for us to both have X at the same time (A Non-Zero Sum Game)).

Because of their underlying insecurity, seeing life in this way just causes them to constantly be comparing themselves to others and to assess themselves according to BULLSHIT STANDARDS that they’ve created for themselves about what it ‘means’ to be ‘winning’ in the context of the game (which they also made up).

This feeds back into their control freakery and so not only do they attempt to play games to control situations and to mask their insecurity from themselves and others but also at this extra level of being able to convince themselves that they’re ‘winning’ some illusory competition that only exists in their heads because of their INABILITY to face and perceive REALITY accurately.

In short, then, these GAME PLAYERS are ultimately detached from their real selves, created a FAKE IMAGE of themselves to try and act out as a response to this, and then end up trying to use games as a way of controlling the world around them in order to keep hiding and to convince themselves that their FALSE PERCEPTION of reality is the truth about things.

How To Tell If Someone Is Playing Mind Games With You: Mental Tension, Anxiety, and Addiction to Dramatic Situations

To understand if somebody is actually playing mind games with you, it’s essential that you understand one of the ‘simplest’ and most common mind games known to humanity (in fact, this is probably the most common mind game on the planet and you’ve probably been dragged into it at some stage in your life).

This game is known as THE CHASE (or, at least, that’s what I’m calling it) and it exists because of a simple law of human psychology that pervades all of our minds when we’re running on instinctual autopilot and letting our EGOs operate for us instead of being real.

This law of human nature is one you’ll have heard in some way, shape, or form before probably:

People want what they can’t have and don’t want what they can have.

Again, this comes back to something that was mentioned above: a SCARCITY MINDSET.

When we PERCEIVE things as being ‘scarce’ – whether they actually are in reality or not (hence it being about ‘perception’) – then our human instinct is to treat them as being VALUABLE.

If we perceive something as being abundant or something that absolutely anybody can ‘have’ then our tendency is to think that it’s not valuable and to no longer want it.

This is just a weird ‘bug’ in human psychology but it’s something that we all instinctively ‘know’ and are driven by – if we live on instinctual autopilot – and is why Game Players use this quirk of human nature as the foundation of the majority of the games they play.

The Chase – i.e. making ourselves seem more ‘scarce’ than we actually are in order to control situations – is something that you will see playing out time and time again in many different areas of life:

-In the world of dating, you might run into a game player who purposely ignores your texts or makes themselves otherwise unavailable.

-In the world of business, you might bump into a marketer that will tell you they only have a limited number of their products/services available.

-In your social circle, somebody might attempt to give themselves the PERCEPTION of higher status by making themselves hard to get hold of or making their time more scarce than it actually is.

-Etc.

I’m sure you can think of examples in your own life.

Of course, not everybody that’s unavailable is playing a game – maybe they’re just busy or they actually have a life. With GAME PLAYERS, however, they are purposely manipulating situations so that you will think they’re more ‘valuable’ than they actually are.

If you’re not aware of this then you’ll end up doing exactly what the game is designed to make you do: CHASE THEM.

This is the easiest way to know if you’ve been dragged into a mind game (and happen to be ‘losing’):

-You constantly find yourself ‘chasing’ another person.

-You constantly feel anxiety or mental TENSION because you’re always on the ‘lookout’ for signs that they’re going to give you valuable attention (or whatever).

-You don’t feel like the relationship is ‘balanced’ in terms of the respect you’re giving each other but for some reason you can’t stop yourself from engaging in this UNREAL way.

-Etc.

Another common trick that GAME PLAYERS play is that they will initially bombard you with the kind of attention you want (which they’re normally good at figuring out on a person-to-person basis because they’re master manipulators).

For example, they might – at the start of a relationship – spend all night texting you or whatever and making you feel like they understand you (assuming that’s what they think you want and what you respond well to).

Once they’ve got you ‘hooked’ then they’ll withdraw this attention and then try to get you sucked into the CHASE.  This is how they increase the odds of getting you to play the game – they get you addicted (because of your own insecurity, tbh) then they play with that in order to enjoy the thrill of the chase.

Ultimately, like all mind games – the ‘thrill’ that Game Players get from playing with you in this way is that they feel POWERFUL.

This ‘powerful’ feeling comes from the perception that the person doing the chasing is less valuable than the person being chased (because of the law of human nature shared above that we want what we can’t have and that we don’t want what we can have).

This is a very ‘animalistic’ thing and ultimately comes down to the way that human beings have a natural tendency to assess social situations in relation to POWER.

All of the games that people play are ultimately about attempting to see oneself – for the sake of one’s EGO ‘stuff’ – as the most ‘powerful’ one in a given dynamic.

Here are some other simple games that are commonly played that evolve around the same BS way of thinking:

Common Games That People Play (To Increase  Self-Perception in Terms of ‘Power’).

Most mind games are some sort of variation of ‘The Chase’ and all have the idea of ‘power’ over another person at their heart.

Some of the most common games that people play on a daily basis and that you can get sucked into if you’re not careful are:

“Yeah, but” – This is a game named by the Transactional Analyst Eric Berne and basically involves the Game Player asking you for some advice about a ‘problem’ that they have in life only for them to shut down every suggestion you make with “Yeah, but (and then an excuse for not doing it)”.

The ‘game’ here is that – if you’re not careful – you will end up trying to ‘chase’ them by coming up with more and more suggestions as to how they can solve their problems.

Because they have no desire whatsoever to solve the problem – which might not even exist in the first place – or to let you know that the advice you’re giving is ‘good’ enough or effective they’ll just keep deflecting anything you suggest.

An insecure person will keep playing the game which just allows the game player to feel ‘powerful’ or ‘superior’ (really a mask for their own insecurity).  If you’re secure (i.e. REAL with yourself) then you’ll snap out of it and just let them get on with it by themselves.

Talking over you/ Not listening – This is a game that some insecure Game Players will play in a group of people.  Because they have convinced themselves that the person who talks the most is the most powerful or important then they will  make a conscious effort to speak over anybody else who talks in the group.

In their minds, they tell themselves that this must mean they’re the most important or powerful because they’re doing the most talking (even if they’re chatting nonsense!). Again, they’ve fallen into the Zero-sum trap (mentioned above) and have convinced themselves that attention is ‘scarce’ and so they need to try and ‘take’ it from others using these kind of games.

If you’re not careful/real, then you can get caught up in this game and either end up being subdued and hiding in yourself or even turning up the volume yourself and talking over others. Both of these approaches are actually unreal and mean that the game BEAT YOU –  the best thing to do is simply to not play by only talking when you actually want to talk or WALKING AWAY if the game becomes too insane.

Ignoring – Another game that is obviously related to the chase is that Game Players will ignore you on purpose (in social situations, texts, whatever) hoping that they will lure you into a CHASE for their attention.

Again – as a reminder – people who play these kind of games are only doing it because they’re INSECURE but if you’re not careful you can take it as a ‘personal’ thing and end up getting caught up in the chase or even questioning them about why they ignored you in the first place.

If somebody does ignore you for whatever reason then you need to remember that it says more about THEM than you.  As soon as it starts to ‘bother’ you, then you’ve lost the game.

Teasing – Sometimes, people will ‘tease’ you to see if they can get a rise out of you or to make you lose control of yourself emotionally.

Of course, some ‘teasing’ is done in good spirits and is just ‘banter’ between friends (so there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with it).

On other occasions, this kind of unreal teasing is just a GAME that people are playing in an attempt to see if you’ll lose your cool, take it personally, or try and defend yourself in some way.

In all of these cases, the GAME is about making you lose control of yourself and to see if you will DOUBT your own self-image (which if you’re insecure and unreal you will).

When you do give the Game Player a sign that you’ve been shaken or bothered by the ‘teasing’ then they feel that you’ve lost control because of them and so – by extension – they have some kind of POWER over you (because you lost it over yourself).

Etc. – These are just simple examples of the common mind games that people will play with you and there are many other variations but they all have the same thing in common: they’re about somebody wanting to feel POWERFUL and in CONTROL of somebody in order to mask their own insecurity and feel like they’re ‘winning’ the game.

The Perception of Power: The Source of All Game Playing

The short answer to ‘WHY’ people want to play games with you in the first place is because they’re insecure (i.e. they have underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma) and so they attempt to pacify these feelings of insecurity by doing things that make them PERCEIVE themselves as powerful (and perception is not reality).

This means that they become skilled in looking for other people that may be insecure and luring them into the dance of the CHASE in order to feel that they have power over people (and if they have ‘power’ then they can’t be as weak or insecure as they sometimes feel – at least that’s what they tell themselves).

Really, this just boils down to human beings being ANIMALS and animals being wired – in many cases – to think of life in terms of DOMINANCE and SUBMISSION.

If somebody lures you into their game and you give into it then, ultimately, they have dominance over you (because they’re controlling your relationship with REALITY and the actions you take in it) and you have become SUBMISSIVE to their will.

In short, that’s what all of these ‘mind games’ are actually about: testing you to see if you can be made submissive for whatever reason and give up your own REAL relationship with REALITY for somebody’s unreal relationship with BULLSHIT.

If you can, then they’ve beaten you in the ‘game’ and have used you as a vehicle for flipping the script on their own self-perceived submissiveness and allowing themselves to feel DOMINANT.

Whether you like it or not, that’s what mind games are always about – attempting to increase one’s sense of POWER within the social hierarchy and masking the shame (etc.) that comes from being unreal.

How To Outsmart Someone Who Plays Mind Games: Abundance Mindset and Walking Away

The short answer in terms of finding a solution to the problem of mind games is that you need to develop an ABUNDANCE mindset.

This is because and abundance mindset is ALIGNED with reality itself (which is whole and therefore abundant) and so it circumvents all of the unreal programming that causes you to get caught up in the GAMES that come from having a scarcity mindset in the first place.

When you have an abundance mindset, for example, you know that whatever you think you ‘want’ from other people isn’t SCARCE and so you will be less likely to get caught up in the CHASE.

You will also understand that ‘power’ isn’t a Zero-sum game (like the Game Player thinks) and so you won’t have to waste your time getting caught up in the false duality of dominance and submission that the POWER GAMES ultimately rest upon.

The only REAL power that any of us have in life is abundant because it comes from cultivating a REAL relationship with ourselves, the world, and reality.

The long-and-short of all this is that you would only get caught up in UNREAL GAMES if you’re being unreal with yourself at some level.

An abundance mindset allows you to start telling yourself a story about yourself and your life that is more aligned with REALITY and so you will be less likely to either play unreal games with insecure game players or you will not let the effects of the games bother you because you know that the PRIZE IS ALWAYS WORTHLESS (because it’s not real – just a false perception of power).

This brings us to the final point which is  that the easiest way to OUTSMART and ‘win’ when somebody is playing mind games is simply not to play.

If somebody is trying to lure you into a ‘chase’ or is playing any of the variations that we’ve talked about in this article then the best approach is simply to NOT GET INVOLVED.

The more REAL you are in yourself – because you’ve worked on your own emotional ‘stuff’ and you’ve raised your AWARENESS of why these kind of unreal situations emerge in our lives – the easier it will be to walk away.

This,  again, comes down to having an abundance mindset – if you’re  being UNREAL with yourself for whatever reason then you might end up putting your own personal GAME PLAYER on a pedestal and thinking that they’re more scarce than they actually are.

Actually, that’s just a sign that you’ve been dragged into some kind of game and that you’ve put them on an unreal pedestal because of  your own unreal ‘stuff’.

When you’re being real you realise that you DESERVE real in return and so you don’t need to WASTE TIME on somebody that would play games with you.

Realise that there a billions of people out there in the world and that somebody, somewhere will want to be in your life – either as friends, romantically, or otherwise – without playing games.

You can only realise that and walk away to let it happen if you have an abundance mindset.

Remember that “REAL ALWAYS WORKS” and go find the real stuff – life is too short for MIND GAMES and the only ‘thing’ allowing games in your life is you.

Stop playing and start living.

Peace,

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

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

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I used to be creative

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! 🙂

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The ‘F It’ Moment: How to Stop Being Intimidated by Life

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Stop being intimidated

One of the biggest problems I see people having to deal with when I’m coaching is that they’ve become INTIMIDATED by life.

This can show up in all kinds of different ways but the impact of having this problem is always the same: it stops them from taking the kind of ACTION they really want to be taking and from getting all of the amazing benefits that only action can bring.

In my own life, I struggled with this problem when I was younger and I’d been conditioned to stop believing in myself by various unhealthy influences in my life.

It was only when I really reached BREAKING POINT in my late teens and realised that the ideas in my head were stopping me from getting the RESULTS that I wanted from life that I was able to have a breakthrough moment of thinking “F it” and just decided to do whatever the hell I wanted (and disappeared to Japan).

That might sound a little reckless but – in retrospect – when you’ve been locked in your own MIND for however many years and then projected the mental cage outwards into the world around you then having a “F it” moment can be the only way out.

In fact, when things get serious enough and you resist reality for long enough – by NOT ACCEPTING YOURSELF – then eventually you’ll reach that crossroads where the only two options are to either keep resisting in a futile attempt to try and stay the same or to step up and say “F it” and then do something that might actually change your life and set you free.

These days I’m not intimidated by life at all and it’s because I put myself on a path of going out there and actually FIGURING OUT FOR MYSELF who I am and what I’m capable of (and not judging my own self-worth based on the results that I got) instead of letting the world TELL ME who I am and believing it without any real thought.

I could probably have never put myself on that path – or would’ve at least taken a lot longer to get there – if I didn’t reach that point of just saying “F it” and going out there and getting over my fear of truly LIVING.

If you find yourself being intimidated by life then the way out is REALITY but before you find it you might have to find yourself saying “F it” so that you can step outside of your programming and just going out and taking ACTION (the only real ‘cure’ for anything – especially the cure for a life lived from behind a mental cage).

This article will help you understand what that means and what you can do to start feeling truly ALIVE again.

Here we go:

Symptoms of Being Intimidated by Life

When we become intimidated by life we either STOP taking action completely or we only take the actions that are within our comfort zone and so won’t STRETCH us or show us the EDGE of our ideas about ourselves.

When this happens, we just end up living an inauthentic or UNREAL life where we ultimately play the role of a pawn in somebody else’s chess game (some boss we don’t even care about, some domineering partner or family member, or simply our ideas about ‘society’ as a whole).

The most common place we end up when we’re intimidated like this is the WAGE CAGE (i.e. some ‘job’ that you found yourself in because you forgot you could actually CHOOSE your own life if you stepped up and focused on the real stuff).

In short, we end up in this UNREAL STATE because by giving into intimidation we end up giving up our ACTIVE POWER and then listlessly floating along through life without any direction.

The way back to reality is to recognise the symptoms of living in this unreal manner, saying “F it”, and then getting back on track to finding our REAL LIVES again.

If you’ve become intimidated then you’ll probably suffer from some or all of the following symptoms:

Passive Mindset

When you become intimidated by life you’ll develop an UNREAL MINDSET that stops you from taking action.

This might show up in a variety of ways but the most common are things like negative thinking (which is almost always a way of trying to justify not taking action), ‘excusitis’ which is just a fancy way of saying that you’ll constantly come up with EXCUSES not to do what needs to be done, and self-limiting beliefs that tell you there’s something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with you or the world so there’s no point even trying.

All of these ways of SEEING and interpreting ourselves, the world, and reality just cause us to try and avoid acting in the world as a way of staying in our comfort zone (where we often don’t even want to be anyway because we’re miserable there as a result of resisting REALITY).

All of this is really caused by being INTIMIDATED by the perceived consequences of taking action and the emotions we’ll have to face by doing so (regardless of if we ‘fail’ or ‘succeed’).

Restlessness

As a result of not taking ACTION, you will probably become restless and irritable. This is simply because you know that there’s more to life but your intimidation has stopped you from going out and getting it.

When you don’t ACT, then you don’t let your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and/or trauma) heal itself in the way that it needs to and instead you ‘block’ the healing process behind the static beliefs that are stopping you from acting in the first place.

This causes inner friction and frustration that is experienced as RESTLESSNESS.  This is really just the DESIRE of your real self – which you’ve become detached from – screaming to be expressed in the world (and the only way you can do that is by becoming AWARE of the real ‘stuff’, ACCEPTING what’s true, and then ACTING on it).

Never Speaking Up

Intimidated people are scared of the TRUTH and for that reason they refuse to speak up and share the truth as they see it.  A big part of this is because they literally fear the truth itself because it would show the futility of their PASSIVE way of thinking and being in the world.

On a perhaps simpler level, people who are INTIMIDATED by life are almost always shame-driven individuals who have a feeling that they’re not good enough following them around like a ghost (which it is…a ghost of the past) and so they don’t want to risk ‘rocking the boat’ with their opinions or ideas in case somebody disagrees with them (which to the shame-driven individual is something that triggers all kinds of unsavoury emotions).

For this reason, when people have become intimidated by life they rarely – perhaps even never – share with others what they really think, feel, or want to do for fear of being rejected (not realising that by not sharing they’ve already REJECTED THEMSELVES).

Negative Thinking

We spoke about this above as a symptom of having a PASSIVE MINDSET (which all intimidated people eventually develop). Just to clarify a little more, negative thinking is ultimately just a form of UNREAL PESSIMISM that come from somebody trying to DEFLECT life at all costs by trying to explain it away.

That might sound a bit technical but all it means is this:

When people are intimidated it’s almost always because they have unresolved SHAME that causes them to feel like they’re not good enough in some way.

In order to try and hide from this shameful feeling (which is never real, always something they’ve picked up from outside of themselves and then taken onboard as a judgement that they continue to hypnotise themselves with), the intimidated person will concoct a POINT OF VIEW of life that justifies the story they’re telling themselves so that they can try to HIDE from their shame instead of dissolving it (by taking action).

This UNREAL POV is always negative because negativity always explains away action.

In practical terms, it just means that the intimidated person will always look on the (unreal) dark side of things in order to find reasons not to do the things that will actually free them (and you can always find a million reasons not to do things if you set your mind on doing that).

Procrastination

Another thing that intimidated people will do to avoid taking action is to procrastinate.

In simple terms, all that means is that they will focus on taking actions that feel like they’re doing something but that are actually a distraction from the REAL stuff they could be doing that will make a  big difference to their lives.

For example, I know a few coaches that would benefit from organising and having SALES CALLS but because they’re worried that they’ll be rejected or even that they’ll be successful and actually have to coach somebody they instead procrastinate by playing around on social media all day or doing other unimportant things that are their ‘hobbies’ but won’t really get them anywhere.

These tasks allow them to tell themselves the story that they’re ‘busy’ and doing things whilst also (conveniently) avoiding the things that would get them where they want to be (with the cost of having to push through their comfort zones and face themselves and other people).

Not Taking the Actions You Really Want To Take

In short, then, when you’re an INTIMIDATED person, you might be ‘busy’ in the sense that you’re constantly doing things but you probably won’t be doing the things you really want to do because you’re AFRAID of having to face yourself at some level.

Some people can spend their whole lives wasting time on distractions and busyness for this reason. If you realise you have this problem as you’re reading this then the question becomes: “What are you going to DO about it?”

Maybe it’s time to say “F it” and do some of that stuff you’ve been putting off that could change your life?

Being Outcome-Dependent Instead of Outcome-Independent

I’ve already spoken about Outcome-Independence a lot on this site (because it’s so important). If you haven’t read the main article and you’re unfamiliar with the term, then all it means is that you can live in one of two ways:

-1: Outcome-dependence (Unreal): Where your levels of self-acceptance are CONDITIONAL and affected by the outcomes you get as you go through life.

-2: Outcome-independence (Real): Where you “do your best and forget the rest” but your levels of self-acceptance are UNCONDITIONAL and not affected by the outcomes you get.

In other words, with outcome-dependence you NO LONGER feel ‘good’ about yourself if you fail to get the results you want whereas if you’re outcome-independent then you still feel good even if you ‘fail’ as you know you can pick yourself up again, learn what needs to be learned, and either try again or ACCEPT some reality that can’t be changed.

When we’re INTIMIDATED by life, we end up putting our goals on a pedestal – because we think they’ll fill the void inside ourselves (that can only be filled by ACCEPTANCE OF REALITY) – and so we inflate their importance to the extent that we become INTIMIDATED BY THE THINGS WE WANT.

Again, this comes back to our relationships with ourselves because if we become a shame-dissolving person instead of a shame-driven one it becomes a lot easier to say “F it” and go out and chase our goals in an outcome-independent way.

Imposter Syndrome

If an intimidated person actually does manage to overcome themselves and take ACTION without working on their emotional ‘stuff’ then they find themselves in a position where they feel like a fraud (Imposter Syndrome).

This is ultimately because there ends up being a gap between the way that they show themselves to the world and the SHAME that they still feel as they used action as a vessel to try and run from it instead of dissolving it.

When this happens, the intimidated person ends up being worried about being ‘found out’ (i.e. having the world reveal itself to agree with the skewed distortions of their shame).

This just adds a whole new layer of intimidation that they have to deal with because they have to find new ways to keep ‘hiding’ themselves so that they won’t be exposed as a shame-driven individual.

In reality, they could just say “F it” and keep doing what’s worked for them to get them where they are but they’re so afraid of being “found out” that they take everything too seriously to see clearly.

General Lack of Confidence

Perhaps it goes without saying, but when people become intimidated by life, they lack confidence.

This is usually for two reasons that build on each other:

-1: They keep telling themselves a story about why they can’t/shouldn’t/best not take the ACTION that they want to take (and because practise makes perfect this causes them to miss out on their own potential).

-2: Because they don’t take this action, they end up not getting results (which just reinforces the unreal story they’re telling themselves).

Once you’ve stopped taking action and you end up believing that the consequences of not taking action are WHO YOU ARE then you end up in a self-perpetuating loop that causes your confidence to dwindle.

The longer you stay in this loop the worse things can get. It’s so bad that some people spend their whole lives on this hamster wheel, going around in circles and ruining their own lives.

A shortcut to getting out of it is to realise how bad things have become, have an “F it” moment, and go out there and start ACTING again (which as you build momentum and get results will increase your confidence).

Anxiety and/or Depression

If you don’t solve the problem of intimidation then you increase your odds of becoming anxious and/or depressed. This doesn’t mean that all anxiety and depression are caused by being intimidated but it does mean that a lot of it is.

The short version is this:

Anxiety will enter your life when you create a FALSE IMAGE of yourself in an attempt to hide from your intimidation instead of pushing through it and see what’s actually REAL.

This false image just causes problems because you’ll use it as a FILTER to try and avoid reality and avoiding reality will constantly add friction to your life (which is experienced as ‘anxiety’).

Depression enters your life when you’re so intimidated that you stop MOVING. This is a consequence of developing the passive mindset mentioned above – when you start to see and think in this way then you just end up taking yourself out of action, away from any sense of purpose, and experiencing live at the level of existence alone (instead of thriving in life).

In both cases, you need to learn to say “F it” so you can start moving in a more REAL way again.

How You Became Intimidated

If you recognise the above symptoms in yourself then there’s a good chance you’ve become intimidated by life (that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re living in constant fear but it means the limits of your fear are ripe for exploration).

This means that at some level you need to say “F it” and to start taking the right kind of action again so that you can get RESULTS from life that are REAL to you.

It might be helpful to know how you ended up being intimidated in the first place (if you look at kids, for example, they have to be TAUGHT to be intimidated by life – that means in your own case it’s something that you had to learn. The good news is that if you LEARNED it then you can also UNLEARN it).

Here are some of the most common reasons for becoming intimidated by life:

Basically, you got sent into your HEAD somehow.

The short-version of what happened is that you got sent into your HEAD for whatever reason and decided to identify with it and stay there.

Normally, this is because in our early years we are made to feel ASHAMED or GUILTY in some way (or in the most extreme cases, TRAUMATISED) and it causes us to think ourselves into a fragmented version of ourselves that disowns certain emotions and desires.

For example, maybe you had a high school teacher who insulted your artwork and so you created a ‘version’ of yourself that has no interest in artistic pursuits.  The original interest is still down there – in the Shadow Territory – but you create a mental image of yourself that denies it.

This is just a hypothetical example but the point is that something happens that sends you into your head and your INTIMIDATION is just your ego’s way of keeping you there.

You might’ve listened to OTHER PEOPLE instead of yourself.

The only person who can live your life for you is…YOU.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where people will attempt to give us all kinds of unwarranted and unreal advice about how we ‘should’ live our lives.

More often than not, this advice is usually just passed on from one INTIMIDATED person to another and so it just ends up doing more harm than good.

If you listen to this advice then you’ll end up being intimidated and not listening to your own REAL VOICE which knows there’s nothing to be intimidated by.

You compared yourself to others (usually the highlight reel).

We can become intimidated – especially in the age of (anti)social media – when we look at the lives other people are portraying themselves to be living and compare ourselves and our lives to what we see.

The problem – as the old saying goes – is that when we do this we’re comparing our behind-the-scenes footage to their highlight reels. This can end up making us feel that we’re not “good enough” (that shame again) and this stops us from taking action (which, ironically, would get us where we want to be).

The solution is to realise that you can’t be compared to other people because you’re living your own life and you’ve had your own experiences which have made you the UNIQUE person that you are right now.

Comparing yourself to others is just a way of NOT ACCEPTING YOURSELF (because of the unresolved emotional ‘stuff’) and this prevents you from accepting who you are and then expressing it with your ACTIONS.

You lost your balls somehow (but you can get them back)

The super short version? Something has happened to you that’s caused you to lose your BALLS and to overthink every little detail of your life instead of ACTING on it.

You can get your balls back but you need to unlearn all of the BS that’s stopping you from recognising the truth about life: that the only person with any POWER over your life is YOU.

You let your ‘protective’ emotions like anger be turned against you (often into depression or sentimentality).

Sometimes, emotions that help us protect ourselves and to define healthy boundaries in our lives are ‘shamed’ or belittled by ‘guilt’ (in an attempt to control us) and so we develop an unhealthy relationship with them. The most common emotion that this happens with is ANGER.

When we disown our anger then it doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere – it just becomes something that we stop expressing. Because we have a mental ‘block’ that stops us expressing it externally, our anger simply TURNS AGAINST US and will be experienced as a hypercritical inner voice that constantly judges us, etc. eventually leading to a lack of action and then DEPRESSION.

Alternatively, we may also end up being overly sentimental about things because we end up experiencing everything through the FILTER of depression that a detachment from our healthy emotions can cause (and because a lack of anger can stop us from moving forward with our PURPOSE).

When we end up in this situation, we end up being intimidated by life because we think that we lack the strength to handle it (when, actually, we’re just hiding this strength from ourselves).

You let your interpretation of the past skew your vision of yourself in the present.

In short, if you’re intimidated by life in the present then you have a DISTORTED interpretation of the past and who you have become because of it.

What this might look like is different for everybody but it will usually involve you writing some kind of STORY for yourself to try and live out that DISOWNS vital parts of yourself because of shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

If you want to be REAL again and to stop being intimidated by life then you need to start writing a REAL STORY (or more accurately unlearning the BS story that stopped you expressing the real story in the first place).

This will probably mean FORGIVING YOURSELF at some level so that you can let go of the beliefs you picked up that caused you to be intimidated in the first place.

A short cut to doing this? You guessed it: you have to learn to say “F it”.

How To Stop Being Intimidated.

So how do we bring this all together and get life moving again? It’s simple in theory but not always in practice (which is the core problem).

The short answer is that you need to start talking ACTION.

The main SYMPTOM of the PROBLEM of being intimidated is that you stop taking REAL ACTION and then your life ends up being some unreal thing that you don’t want it to be.

You could spend the rest of your life trying to figure out exactly why you became intimidated in the first place (and maybe after reading the above list you have some basic idea) but the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter THAT MUCH.

If you want to REVERSE the symptoms of being intimidated then you need to start taking some kind of ACTION in your life.

More than that, you need to start taking REAL action so that you’re not just distracting yourself from the REAL version of yourself and making the problem worse (by being busy for the sake of being busy and procrastinating, etc.).

What this means in the context of your own life might be different to what it means in anybody else’s life but probably there is some ‘thing’ that you’ve wanted to be doing for a while but keep finding BS reasons (really EXCUSES) to put off doing.

If you can think of something like that then you’ve just given yourself as starting point.

All you really need to do now is to say “F it” and START doing it.

It’s either that or keep being intimidated and living an unreal life for the rest of your days.

 

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

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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:

 

You might be interested in

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