realness - Page 2

The Black Rose: “Gimme Something Real or GTFO”

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Intro

The easiest way to build a real life for yourself is to learn to spot the difference between real and unreal in ourselves and others (so we can change, ignore or walk away from the unreal stuff).

In this context, ‘real’ means that you’re moving towards WHOLENESS via your true potential, you’re not blocking yourself with negative or irrational thoughts that distort your view of yourself, the world, and reality, and you’re not engaging in DRAMA or unhealthy ego dances with people that don’t support you and your growth (and who you don’t support in return).

Ultimately, this boils down to two incredibly important things:

  1. Having the best possible relationship with yourself.
  2. Having the best possible relationship with others

Really, these two things feed off each other because if you don’t work to ACCEPT yourself then you’ll never be able to provide the most amount of value you can to the world and have the best possible relationships with the people in it.

Because relationships are so important to living a ‘good’ (REAL) life, we need to be able to understand which relationships are worth keeping, which are worth ditching, and which are worth healing if need be.

This article gives you a simple but effective metaphor for just that.

Here we go:

Tending To Your Garden

In the metaphor that we’re going to run with, your life is a garden; you are the gardener and your job is to ensure that you take responsibility for making sure that your ‘garden’ is more populated with flowers (roses in this example, but you can use whatever you want) more than weeds.

This means that you need to realise that you have POWER over the garden and that if you take RESPONSIBILITY and make REAL CHOICES then this garden will be one that you actually want to spend time in.

If you don’t acknowledge your POWER, refuse to take RESPONSIBILITY and become passive and just let things happen or let nature take its course, then your garden will become overrun with WEEDS and it won’t be the kind of place you actually enjoy being in.

Roses or Weeds? That’s the basic choice for all of us but we have to step up and actually MAKE THE CHOICE otherwise we just end up living a life surrounded by unreal relationships and all of the DRAMA and BS that comes with them as everybody tries to uphold their own ego ‘stuff’ and act like an emotional retard (that’s what ‘weeds’ do).

In short then, the quality of your life will be affected by the quality of the relationships you CHOOSE to cultivate and nurture – first, the relationship with YOURSELF and then:

ROSES – the REAL relationships that add mutual VALUE to the lives of the parties involved.

WEEDS – the UNREAL relationships that don’t add mutual value and bring drama and unnecessary conflict.

Gimme Something Real or GTFO

Sometimes, we don’t realise how much power we have over our own ‘gardens’ and our ability to change the scenery.

All this means in practical terms is that it’s up to us who we ALLOW into our lives or not and that we’re more than capable of setting boundaries by saying “NO” to the unreal relationships and people that hold us back.

This might sounds strange if you’re emotionally attached to certain unhealthy ‘weeds’ that aren’t serving you but – actually, as an ADULT human being – you can kick absolutely anybody out of your life for whatever reason you want (that isn’t a recommendation that you should but just a reminder that it’s your CHOICE and you can do what you want without having to JUSTIFY yourself).

Here’s a list of ‘weeds’ that you can start to remove from your garden anytime you like:

-Fake friends that only seem to take from you and never give anything in return.

-People who don’t share your values or moral code and act in shady ways that go against your integrity.

-Family members that keep trying to fit you in a box or cause drama because of their own ego ‘stuff’.

-People you’ve outgrown for whatever reason and that are holding you back.

-Irrational people or emotional retards that are constantly causing trouble or problems for you.

-People that have stabbed you in the back too many times.

-Basically: anybody that you feel doesn’t BELONG in your garden (based on your true values, intentions, and moral code).

Get the trimmers out and say goodbye to those weeds.*

*This is an amazing thing and very empowering but it also means that if you act like a Weed people can trim YOU from their garden.

This doesn’t mean that you should get rid of anybody or everybody that annoys you – if you do that then it’s probably just your ego driving you and you’ll end up LONELY.

In the cases where people are clearly a drain on your time, energy, and attention, though – i.e. acting like bonafide WEEDS – then don’t be shy to step up and set a VALUE on your life that it actually deserves.

*Snip*.

A simple – and very effective – rule of thumb to keep in mind here is as follows:

“GIMME SOMETHING REAL OR GTFO”

Make this one of your official standards for living your life and ensuring that the people you CHOOSE to keep around are bringing the REAL stuff (in exchange for you giving them the real stuff too).

How To Spot A Rose:

If you spot a Rose in your garden then you need to do the work of nurturing the relationship and keeping it there.

This means giving something real in return (quality time, energy, and attention), appreciating its value, and ensuring that you keep it away from weeds that might be trying to KILL the relationship.

Here’s how you can spot a ‘Rose’:

They bring joy to your life

A rose will bring a sense of joy to your life by allowing you to see life CLEARY and to be your REAL SELF.

Energy

This joy will bring energy to your life and make you feel more alive on account of the relationship being LIFE-ENHANCING.

Laughter

Laughter often comes from a sense of shared TRUTH and that’s exactly what the REAL relationships are built on.

They support your goals and your purpose

The roses in your ‘garden’ actually want you to reach your goals and to move towards your life purpose because they have an ABUNDANCE mind set and your success is their success.

They help you learn and grow

The roses also realise that you won’t stay the same forever and that as life moves and those reality waves sweep over you then you’ll learn and grow into the next evolution of your realness (i.e. you’ll go more deeply into WHOLENESS – connection to yourself, the world, and reality).

In contrast, life is a little different when you let the weeds take over:

How To Spot A Weed:

They constantly make you miserable

There’s hardly and joy in your life when the weeds are involved because they’re unreal. This unreality brings FRICTION in the form of drama, frustration, and eventual MISERY.

They DRAIN your energy

The unreal nature of this misery-inducing activity will eventually drain you of energy and you’ll constantly feel depleted and lethargic around them (that’s what happens when you ALLOW the weeds to wrap themselves around you and to restrict your breathing).

There’s hardly ever any laughter

All this misery and untruth is hardly then environment for laughter (but there’ll be plenty of arguments and dramatic moments).

They belittle your goals and try to derail your purpose

The weeds want you to feel bad about yourself because they feel bad about themselves too. “Misery loves company”, after all, and so the weeds don’t want you to take action that might fill your life with more roses.

They don’t want you to learn or grow (usually so they can CONTROL you in some way and keep you the same).

Furthermore, a weed will constantly try and convince you not to grow or to do new things. This is because they don’t want you to OUTGROW them because if you do they might not have a hold on you anymore – it’s about CONTROL (so they’ll often use SHAME to try and stop you growing and GUILT to stop you doing things that are real to you as a way to convince you to stay the ‘same’).

Perhaps by reading that you’ll have already been able to see that some of the people in your life are ‘Roses’ and others are ‘Weeds’.

What you do with that information is up to you, of course, but in general you need to nurture the relationships with the roses and use them so that everybody can grow more real and you need to get rid of the weeds in whatever way works for you.

There is an exception to the rule, though:

Enter the BLACK ROSE

Sometimes, you’ll meet people in your  ‘garden’ that are hard to categorise as either a Weed or a Rose. Sometimes, they appear to be a friend; sometimes, they appear to be a foe. In this case, what you have is a Black Rose.

The Black Rose appears when you’ve taken a passive approach to letting people in your life but don’t get close enough to figure out if they have the potential to be a Rose that can add value to your life or if they’re just a Weed in disguise waiting to complicate things.

In this case, things could go either way – it’s up to you to take an active role towards making the relationship work for you (or stepping back if there are clear signs that the Black Rose will reveal it’s true nature as a Weed).

There are three main ways to handle a Black Rose appearing in your garden:

How to handle the Black Rose:

Figure out if their ‘good’ side is real or not.

Sometimes, the Black Rose will look like a nice addition to your garden but the closer you look the more you realise that appearances can be deceptive.

Maybe, for example, they will constantly let you down by saying one thing but doing another. This mismatch between words and actions is suggestive that they are being untrue in some way.

Another sign might be that they constantly gossip or say negative things about the other Roses in your garden. This is a sign that they’re just a WEED in disguise trying to destroy things from the inside out.

Obviously, you should probably try and give people the benefit of the doubt but if the Black Rose gives too many signs that the ‘good’ is just a mask for weed-like behaviour then you should be wary (and be prepared to get the pruners out when things get more intense).

Figure out if their ‘bad’ side is real or not.

Sometimes, the Black Rose might just look ‘bad’ on the surface of things because they’re moody or have a strange sense of humour or whatever. It’s possible that this is just because they’re going through some ‘stuff’ and so you might be able to tend to it and turn it into a real relationship.

This depends on how much energy you’re willing to invest overall but it’s a good way to add more roses to your garden if you give the right people the benefit of the doubt.

Figure out if they’re ‘neutral’ or not.

Sometimes, a Black Rose is actually just ‘neutral’ and the best thing to do with it – if they’re not bothering you – is to just leave them in a corner of the garden where they’re just getting on with their own thing.

This applies to people that are ambivalent towards you and that you’re ambivalent towards (basically acquaintances on the periphery of your social network) – if you see them, you can say “hello” or whatever but you don’t have a particularly meaningful relationship with them and neither or you are really interested in one (for no particular reason – just how life is sometimes).

Conclusion

Your life is in your hands but you need to know that you have a responsibility to nurture the ‘garden’ and see things clearly.

You can do this by remembering “Gimme something real or GTFO” and making sure that you’re doing the best you can to cultivate the real relationships and let the unreal ones fall by the wayside

 

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The Loop: What You Have Now Is What You Once Wanted (Whether You Know It Or Not)

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You Always Get What You Want

More often than not, the things that you have in your life now are the things that you once wanted for yourself.*

Though you might not realise it – or may even be trying to hide from it – the current state of your life and the situations that your life is comprised of are the CONSEQUENCE of all the CHOICES you made in the past.

These choices will be affected by all kinds of different factors:

-Your underlying emotional ‘stuff’.

-What you’ve been conditioned to believe is possible.

-What you’re trying to hide from about yourself, the world, or reality.

-The relationships in your life (which you’ve also CHOSEN to stick around in or not).

-Your general way of thinking (‘negative’, ‘positive’, or REAL, etc.).

-Etc. Etc.

Either way, however you may have happened to end up thinking about life, these thoughts will always affect the way that you go about making CHOICES in life, and the end result will always be the same:

If you made REAL CHOICES – i.e. choices that are based on your authentic values and intentions rather than just your instinctual programming or social conditioning – then your life will predominantly be REAL too and reflect this.

If you made UNREAL CHOICES – i.e. choices that were rooted in your EGO or your fears about yourself, the world, and reality that caused you to HIDE your true values and intentions from yourself – then you’re life will predominantly be UNREAL too and reflect this.

A simple PRINCIPLE of life that applies to us all (and that we’ve mentioned before on this site and in my course the 7-Day Personality Transplant):

If you put real in, you get real out; if you put unreal in, you get unreal out.

It’s pretty simple, but a lot of the time we forget this or we think we are being real (even though we’re not getting the results that we want – the only sure sign that we’re actually acting in a real way: we’re either at peace because we ACCEPT life or we’re at peace because we’re getting the RESULTS we want).

This article is about how it sometimes takes current reality a little time to catch up with the beliefs we’re putting into the world but how almost ALWAYS, the things we have in our lives now are simply a reflection of how we used to THINK about life and how those thoughts affected the actions we took.

You need to know this and to ACCEPT it so that you can start making better choices RIGHT NOW so that you stand a better chance of living a life you want to be living further down the line.

Here we go.

*Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everything in your life as some things are completely out of our control (‘acts of God’ like natural disasters, people dying, illness, etc.) and so this isn’t one of those solipsistic posts about how we completely create our own reality like some kind of omnipotent being (if you’ve read my books you know I think that’s BS and a lot of the ‘spiritual’ philosophies out there that that say that ‘stuff’ are just selling people what they want to believe, not the truth).

Emotional ‘stuff’ leads to assumptions leads to belief systems leads to thoughts leads to actions leads to emotional ‘stuff’.

You need to understand that the way you feel, think, and do things when you’re running on autopilot is circular and builds on itself.

If you don’t step back and take control of this process (by growing REAL, the whole point of everything discussed on this site), then you just end up getting caught in the THE LOOP and feeling that you’re powerless and have no control over your life because you forget that: 1) you have a CHOICE, and 2) what you currently have is the CONSEQUENCES of those choice.

Here’s how things unfold for most of us when we don’t step up and take control:

 

Here’s an example of how this might show up in your life if you’re not aware of your ability to make a CHOICE to change something at ANY of these different levels (a good thing because you can CHOOSE to change the area that’s easiest for you personally and still break the cycle of ‘The Loop’):

You have some underlying emotional ‘stuff’ like shame.

This shame causes you to make the fundamental assumption that you’re just not ‘good enough’.

This fundamental assumption causes you to create a kind of ‘people pleaser’ belief system where you survive by putting the needs of others before your own (so it doesn’t trigger the shame you’re trying to avoid).

This ‘people pleaser’ belief system cause you to have unreal thoughts about yourself – for example, that you can’t do the things that you’re really interested in doing in life because it might upset people or they’d disagree with your choices (for example).

That causes you to take actions that keep you in your comfort zone and to avoid your edge for fear of upsetting others or stepping up and pushing through your own emotional ‘stuff’.

The fact that you’re being passive and not taking the real actions you want to be taking (i.e. because you’re not aligned with your true values and intentions) causes you to feel more shame and so your CHOSEN actions (or lack of action) just causes you to PERPETUATE your emotional ‘stuff’ instead of healing it.

The cycle continues.

The interesting thing here (imo) is that 1) most of us aren’t AWARE that we’re involved in this cycle of ‘The Loop’ and so it just keeps repeating and we get more deeply entrenched in our lives as a CONSEQUENCE of being on the hamster wheel, and 2) because we’re not AWARE of it we don’t realise how much CHOICE we have to change our lives for the better.

We can change our lives by changing the cycle (or, more accurately, starting to change the cycle so we can get different RESULTS from life – as the old quote says “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results).

For example:

We can CHOOSE to change the level of our emotional ‘stuff’ by doing some introspective work and figuring out what’s going inside of ourselves, meditating, talking to others about our ‘feelings’ (often just talking will dissolve shame, etc.), working out emotions through our creative art, etc.

We can CHOOSE to change our fundamental ASSUMPTIONS about ourselves, the world, and reality, by doing exploratory work, digging deeper into the way that we see things through introspection or journaling, etc. and seeing what PATTERNS emerge.

We can CHOOSE to change our BELIEF SYSTEMS by actively continuing to learn new things, putting ourselves in difficult situations, chasing new experiences that push us through our EDGE, testing the validity of our beliefs and the conclusions we’ve made about ourselves, the world, and reality by philosophical enquiry, etc. etc.

We can CHOOSE to change our THOUGHTS by learning to see when our thoughts are too negative, understanding when we’re held back by LIMITING beliefs, paying attention to our inner monologue and the language we use (maybe it’s passive and unreal – for example, always about how we will “try”, “always” or “never” do certain things, etc.).

We can CHOOSE to change our ACTIONS by learning what our REAL VALUES are and translating them into goals, we can act on our REAL INTENTIONS by making sure that we know what they are (by digging beneath the surface or our social conditioning, etc.), we can create a VISION for ourselves based on the real version of ourselves we want to become (instead of who we think we are right now because of false beliefs and BS), etc. etc. etc.

In short, there’s absolutely LOADS we can choose to do if we want to change our lives for the better and get out of the passive cycle of just UNCONSCIOUSLY CHOOSING to have each of these levels feed into each other as part of a cycle of negatively based on how we might ‘feel’ about ourselves.

Whatever life you’re living right now is a CONSEQUENCE of how you’ve engaged with this cycle in the past.

To paraphrase what we said above:

If you’ve been real at all or some of these levels your life will now be more real than if you’d be unreal.

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

If you start WORKING to change your relationship with yourself at these levels then you will eventually see that your life becomes more real down the line (it won’t change overnight because you need to wait for reality to catch up – this is called the REALITY LAG).

The Payoff of ‘Negative’ Consequences

Because we make a CHOICE about how we interact with ourselves at each of the levels on this cycle – even if we just choose to let things unfold on their own terms by doing NOTHING – then we can say that the life we have right now is whatever we actually WANTED for ourselves.

This applies just as much to the ‘positive’ things we have in our lives at present as well as the ‘negative’.

For example:

Maybe we have a crappy job that we hate right now and we’re stuck in the WAGE CAGE – we might have CHOSEN this because it reinforces the negative assumptions we have about ourselves as not being good enough (in the example given above) and so we don’t have to change or can prove ourselves ‘right’ on an unconscious level.

Maybe we can’t find a relationship despite telling ourselves we want one – we might have CHOSEN this because unconsciously we fear that a relationship will cause us to change our THOUGHTS about ourselves and that would mean having to face our emotional ‘stuff’ (that those thoughts only exist to keep us avoiding in the first place).

Maybe we have our own business and we’re constantly busy taking action but never get RESULTS (no sales or whatever in this context) – this might be because we have decided to only focus on the EASY actions (like doing spread sheets all day or whatever) so that we don’t have to do the stuff that would actually push us through the EDGE to the next level (like networking or making sales calls or whatever).

You could come up with all kinds of examples but the basic point is that we choose to keep acting in ways that keep the cycle of THE LOOP going so that we can avoid growing through our comfort zone and facing the fundamental emotional ‘stuff’ that has been shaping our life since day one.

What You Can Do: How to Break the Cycle and Escape the Loop.

To start breaking this cycle and to start getting different CONSEQUENCES then you need to change your patterns at each level (though because they’re all connected then just changing in one area will make a difference in all the others).

I’ve already given some examples above but the abridged version at each level:

Emotional ‘Stuff’: You need to start DISSOLVING your shame (etc) instead of being DRIVEN by it.

Assumptions: You need to actively work to replace unreal assumptions (“I’m not good enough”, for example which is never real because it involves a judgement) with REAL assumptions (which are designed to promote self-acceptance which is REAL – for example, “I am capable of succeeding just as much as anybody else”, “I can handle whatever happens”, “Nothing can stop me being real”, etc.).

Belief Systems: You need to replace belief systems that hold you back or make the world seem like a place where good things can’t happen to you with a belief system that supports your GROWTH.

Thoughts: You need to learn to step back from your thoughts, realise that they’re not ‘You’, and to condition yourself to never give into negative thoughts that stop you from acting on your true values and intentions (such as inner criticism etc.).

Actions: You need to make sure that you actually do ACT (because action is the only thing that will get you where you want to be), but you also need to make sure that you increase AWARENESS of what’s real (about yourself, the world, and reality), that you ACCEPT your true goals, and that the ACTION you take is not just a distraction from your emotional ‘stuff’ that keeps this unreal cycle going.

In your own life, you’ll know which one makes the most sense for you to experiment with and make the most progress but I think that the ‘easiest’ way to start making changes is to change our approach to taking ACTION.

This is because if we CHOOSE to act on a vision for the highest, most real version of ourselves then the rest will kind of fall into place as the RESULTS we get from taking real action shows the futility of feeling ‘bad’ about ourselves, negative thinking that stems from this, and so on.

I’ve actually seen it quite a lot in the coaching relationships I have with people: once clients start taking real action and ACTING in a way that’s congruent with who they want to BECOME (not just who they fear they are right now) then they start to build momentum and collect EVIDENCE that goes against the foundation of feelings and thoughts that are rooted on an unreal relationship with any emotional ‘stuff’.

The short-version of what this looks like is that you need to start running towards something REAL instead of just trying to run away from the unreal stuff (that comes from your emotional ‘stuff’ and the emotions it gives you about yourself).

The steps that will put you on this path are quite simple:

  1. Figure out your true values and intentions for your life by digging into how your life would be different if you weren’t HOLDING BACK.
  2. Turn this into a VISION for the future version of yourself and what your life would look like if you could realise this vision.
  3. Ask yourself who you need to BECOME to make that vision a reality (i.e. what skills and qualities would you have).
  4. Figure out what GOALS you need to dedicate yourself to in order to close the GAP between where you are now and that highest vision.
  5. Go out there every day and start DOING what needs to be done to close that gap.

Like I said, that’s a very simple process but it will be harder to actually do in real life (instead of just on the screen or wherever you’re reading this).

Coaching can help you with this (*cough*) but so can just being DISCIPLINED and realising that if you do have a struggle along the way then it will be a struggle at one of the levels shown on the cycle above.

If you can figure out which and start attacking it then you can unblock yourself and get going again.

Either way, once you start making a shift, your life will make a shift too and eventually the life you’re living will be a CHOSEN consequence of being REAL, not just a passive consequence of being UNREAL and getting lost on the hamster wheel of THE LOOP.

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:

 

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The Faces of Humanity:  How We’re All Made Up of Different Versions of the Same Person

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Live Without Your Mask

There’s a (pretty) famous Japanese proverb that talks about how we all have 3 faces.  It goes like this:

“The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends, and your family. The third face, you never show anyone.”

I think it’s true, but – actually – we can take it a little deeper by exploring how there are more than three faces that the average person ‘has’ and also where they  come from and why.

Perhaps even more importantly than raising our AWARENESS of this ‘stuff’, we can also ask ourselves what we need to ACCEPT, in the face of these faces, as well as what ACTION we can take to improve our lives and grow more real accordingly.

(Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action – it works every time: see ‘Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World’ if you wanna apply this to your life as a whole).

If you read this article, it will help you to make sense of the MECHANICS of your relationships with yourself and the world and to start unblocking yourself and moving forward towards the only thing that really matters: an experience of WHOLENESS (or ‘connection’) to yourself, the world, and reality.

The ‘problem’ with all of these faces we each have is that we either think they don’t ‘exist’ or we think that only one of them ‘exists’ and try to ignore other parts of ourselves.

Actually, it’s completely normal and healthy to have multiple versions of ourselves in different contexts and situations because different contexts and situations allow us to express certain REAL qualities about ourselves that we might not otherwise be able to express.

Everything real about us is always within us – sometimes, it just needs a little bit of help to express itself.

The ‘FACES’ we show the world aren’t necessarily the same as masks (which mean that we’re ‘hiding’) – although, of course, they sometimes can be if we have an unreal relationship with our own emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and trauma in the shadow or fear, pride, and desire of the ego, etc.).

All of us are FLUID because reality is in FLUX – sometimes, we just forget that and this can cause confusion if we think that we’re supposed to be ‘static’ (which is just UNREAL).

These are the most common faces of the ‘average’ human being (if such a thing exists). As usual, they fit into the only three levels that anything can fit into: The Self, the World, and Reality.

How many do you recognise in yourself?

Self-Facing Faces

At the level of our relationship with our ‘Self’ we have four faces (at least). Whatever it is that we really are is what EMERGES in the interplay between the four of them.

 

Face 1: Who You Wanna Be (To Yourself)

The first face we all have is the ‘Future Facing Face’ (or whatever you wanna call it). This is basically the face we carry of the person we want to BECOME.

This is comprised of all kinds of things that are related to the desired future we have for ourselves and we have to constantly SHOW ourselves this face in order to remind ourselves of where we want or even INTEND to be going.

It is comprised of things like:

-Our standards

-Our goals

-Our ambitions

-Our vision

-Etc.

Some people show themselves this face more than others and – indeed – you have to keep showing yourself this face in order to BECOME this face.

The reason that a lot of people become stuck or stagnate in life is because they haven’t cultivated this ‘face’ and given themselves a direction to move in.

That’s when other less ‘positive’ (or – at least – future facing faces) faces tend to get a hold of them and weigh their sense of identity down in an unreal direction.

The only ‘problem’ with this ‘Future Facing Face’ is that if we have an unhealthy relationship with our own emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and trauma etc.) then the future becomes a projection of our EGO, rather than anything REAL (because we are creating goals and a vision of ourselves based on the fundamental assumptions of denying who we really are as a way of avoiding facing our shadow ‘stuff’ etc.)

Face 2: Who You Think You  Are Now (To Yourself)

The second ‘face’ that most of us have is the face of who we think we are NOW (i.e. in current reality). The keyword there is ‘think’ because it’s a product of our thoughts and mindset, not who we necessarily are in TRUTH.

Some of our thoughts might be ‘real’ or accurate (i.e. aligned with actual, valid truth) but often they aren’t because we get caught up in our INTERPRETATIONS of life, rather than life itself.

Anyway, this is the ‘Now Face’ and it’s a product of all of our self-assessments and conclusions about ourselves based on where we’ve been, where we think we’re going (based on the Future Facing Face), and the ways in which we JUDGE ourselves in the present to varying degrees of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which is what all judgements deal with).

It’s ultimately, a product of the STORY we tell ourselves about who we happen to be right now.

The interesting thing (imo) – and the thing that makes the biggest difference to the quality of our lives – is not necessarily the STORY itself, but the WAY IN WHICH WE TELL THIS STORY.

If we tell the story in a way that is fixed as a FINAL DRAFT then we will stop ourselves moving and take ourselves out of reality (and be less likely to show ourselves a real Future Facing Face because we have conditioned ourselves to be PASSIVE).

If we tell ourselves the story in way where it is constantly being written and updated then we will be more likely to keep learning and move into real life (whatever that is in the context of our own lives).

Face 3: Who You Fear You Might Be

The third face is the ‘Fear Face’ – this is the face of who you FEAR you might be. This is usually shown to us when our emotional ‘stuff’ gets a hold of us and distorts our view of ourselves by our SHAME, GUILT, or TRAUMA (or a combination of the three).

When shame distorts our vision of yourself, it will affect your view of both your ‘Future Facing Face’ and your ‘Now Face’ because it will take unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ from the PAST and cause you to stop trusting and believing in yourself (so these three faces are ultimately about the Future, the Present, and the Past and your real or unreal relationship with each).

This SHAME will tell you that you aren’t the type of person to be able to get the future that you want.

It will tell you that who you are right NOW is no good.

This is just your FEAR talking and the unresolved emotions you carry within yourself that make you feel like you’re not good enough. The FEAR FACE is the one that you show yourself when you start to believe that this shame is the truth about you (because you haven’t started to DISSOLVE the shame by facing REALITY and have instead become driven by it).

It’s the same with GUILT and TRAUMA:

When guilt distorts your vision, you convince yourself that you’re a ‘bad’ person in the present and that you ‘don’t deserve’ the future that you want. This is just your emotional ‘stuff’ showing you your FEAR FACE.

Trauma – which makes us feel powerless – will  distort your ability to tap into your own power and will make you feel that you can’t CREATE the real future that your (real) ‘Future Facing Face’ wants to you to move towards (because it will distort your view and tell you that you’re passive).

There is more variation and complexity here but  – ultimately – you have a face you show yourself in your weaker moments that is purely comprised of your FEARS about yourself.

This is ‘normal’ and part of the human experience but the more overpowering your emotions are the more you will show yourself this face and start to believe that it’s who ‘you’ really are.

If you listen enough and believe it, that’s when you stop moving and stop growing REAL and hide behind ego instead (which is just a mental box you put yourself in to keep all your emotions and ‘shadow’ stuff at bay).

Face 4:  Your Shadow Face / The Unknown

Beneath the surface of all of the faces we do show ourselves from time to time, there is another UNKNOWN FACE that bubbles away beneath the conscious experience of ourselves and that drives the course of our lives without us even knowing (not consciously at least).

This is our SHADOW FACE and it’s comprised of all the different things about ourselves (qualities, goals, ideas, ‘parts’, etc.) that we have at some stage in our lives cast aside and disowned as being ‘unacceptable’.

This usually happens because the World CONDITIONED us to believe that certain things shouldn’t exist and then we hypnotised ourselves to live as though they don’t – this being the case, over the course of our lives we try and act like these things don’t exist or suppress them (with socially unacceptable emotions like ‘rage’, for example).

The TRUTH of the matter, however, is that these ‘hidden’ parts of ourselves are just as REAL as the parts that we do face and – as what’s real is always real – these parts never go anywhere.

In fact, they’re not even ‘parts’, they’re just certain EXPRESSIONS of what we are as a WHOLE. We just conditioned ourselves not to EXPRESS them.

Even though we try and hide this ‘Unknown Face’ from ourselves, the ‘parts’ that comprise it never go anywhere and continue to call for our attention (so we can integrate them) from beneath the surface of ourselves.

One of the most common ways that these parts ‘call out’ to us is through PROJECTION.

All that means – at the simplest level – is that we try and hide these parts behind the CONSCIOUS FACES we show ourselves but UNCONSCIOUSLY we project them onto the world outside of us.

A classic way of determining this kind of thing is to look at what annoys us in other people.  For example, if somebody’s RAGE annoys you – it’s probably because you haven’t ACCEPTED your own rage that’s bubbling beneath the surface of your conscious faces.

What this means in the context of this article is that we all have a FOURTH FACE: the Shadow Face that is shown to us as a reflection of ourselves in the world or as a projection reflected back from others (if we can decode the matrix).

Facing this ‘Unknown’ face is the best chance we have at growing more WHOLE (instead of just being fragmented by only facing the fragmented, surface level faces created as a response to keep the shadow ‘stuff’ at bay).

World-Facing Faces

There are two main types of World-Facing Faces that we show the world (and which are affected by our relationships with ourselves and our ‘Self-Facing Faces’):

Face 1: The Character You  Play In MOST Social Situations To Survive Them (Who You  Show To Strangers/People You Just Met or Want to Keep at A Distance).

The first face that we have for the WORLD is the default face that we want to show other people. This is influenced by all of the SELF-FACING FACES and how we ‘feel’ about ourselves but it’s also inspired by two other things:

  1. How we need others to see us (because of our emotional ‘stuff’).
  2. How we have LEARNED to survive social situations in the past

This ‘DEFAULT’ FACE is just the one that we use to make sure we can get through life on a daily basis and to interact with people we might come across like strangers we have to talk to (people that work in coffee shops, taxi drivers, people we meet for the first time at networking events, etc. etc.).

We will try and COME ACROSS in a certain light in order to reinforce the stories we tell ourselves because of our Self-Facing Faces and the ‘Shadow Stuff’ we want to keep at bay but we will also put on a strategic way of being based on how we survived social situations in the past.

This might involve using strategies like ‘being polite’ or maybe even something like trying to be ‘humorous’ and making jokes. Whatever strategy you use, it’s ultimately about gaining CONTROL of the interaction so that you show the face you want to show.

Everybody does the same thing and it’s something we have to do to keep ‘society’ going.  Depending on how REAL you are with yourself will affect how much of your real self can shine through(the most whole version of yourself possible in a given moment).

Even if you’re relatively REAL, there will still be a slight warming up period around new people whilst you figure them out – whatever strategy you use to ‘warm up’ is just your DEFAULT FACE for the world. It’s not ‘You’ – it’s something that you CHOSE based on your conditioning and expectations of yourself and others.

Face 2: The Face You Show The World In Different Partnerships or Groups (E.G. Might Be Different Among Friends That Parents).

This is where things get (more) complicated.  There are multiple versions of this face which is the face that you show different PARTNERSHIPS or GROUPS that you’re involved in based on your own relationship with yourself (and your ‘Self-Facing Faces’) and the EXPECTATIONS that whatever group you’re in has for you (and what you think about these expectations and whether or not you care about modifying the way you come across because of them).

Here are some simple examples of your CONTEXTUAL FACES:

You might have a face that you show your parents that you wouldn’t show your friends.

You might have a face that you show your friends that you wouldn’t show your parents.

You might have a face that you show your boss that you wouldn’t show your wife/husband.

You might have a face that you show your wife/husband that you wouldn’t show your friends.

You might have a face that you show yourself (one of your Self-Facing Faces) that you wouldn’t show any of these people (not a group, just here to demonstrate the point).

The short-version of all this is that each one of these partnerships or groups forms a new SYSTEM and you need different faces to SURVIVE them because of the roles you’re asked to play and the EXPECTATIONS that come with that role.

You can still be REAL in each of these context but how much realness is able to creep out depends on the DEPTH OF INTIMACY in each of these relationships and whether or not you’re allowing expectations to be more main motivation or realness.

The number of these CONTEXTUAL FACES changes and varies over the course of our lifetimes depending on how many different groups we’re engaged in or how big our network is (or isn’t) etc.

Reality-Facing Faces

Even though in reality we are ultimately WHOLE (i.e. not divided into all of the different categories and labels that we use to make sense of the world – which we’re doing in this article too because it’s just how we make ‘sense’ of the world), we have at least two faces that show us a reflection of REALITY.

Face 1: The OBSERVER making sense of all this .

The first of our Reality-Facing Faces is the OBSERVING FACE.  This is just the version of ourselves that occasionally (for most) is able to STEP BACK from the complexity and confusion of the interplay between all of the Self-Facing and World-Facing faces and to watch things unfold.

This Observing Face is important because it is a version of ourselves  that we are able to show ourselves BEYOND JUDGEMENT.

All of the other faces mentioned so far – apart from the SHADOW FACE (which contains who we would be if we stopped judging ourselves)- are ultimately unreal because they involve JUDGEMENT at some level (which is always unreal because all you can do with reality is ACCEPT it – the opposite of judgement).

The OBSERVING FACE is an AWARENESS of what we have observed or are observing and allows us to hold space so that we can start to respond instead of just reacting to the promptings and conditionings of the other faces.

This comes from the place of WHOLENESS that is within us at all times (in fact, is what we are) and allows us to come from a place that’s REAL instead of being a fragmented consequence of our outdated biological wiring, emotional ‘stuff’, or social conditioning and programming (like the other faces mentioned at the levels of self-and world).

The FACT that you can OBSERVE all of the other faces is proof that they are not ‘You’. They are just survival tools that form the foundation of the EGO (which is fragmented, not the bigger which is an EXPERIENCE of being alive which always comes back to AWARENESS).

Face 2: The REAL self (who knows what to do with all this Awareness and to ACCEPT it and to take Action)

The final Reality-Facing Face that’s relevant here is the one (which is really part of the same process) that you show yourself when you ACCEPT what the OBSERVING FACE has become AWARE of and decide to take ACTION based on this (Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action, it works every time).

When you take this kind of REAL ACTION it allows you to stop holding yourself back based on the limitations of your Self-Facing and World-Facing Faces and to put yourself back on track towards a natural DRIVE towards wholeness that we all have.

By taking action you always learn more about reality and you always  become more whole because you  will eventually end up having to bring your SHADOW ‘stuff’ to the surface (as you find the EDGE – i.e. where all your ideas about yourself meet reality and you can grow more REAL).

In short, the realest faces you can show yourself are the ones that EMERGE when you are able to step back from the ‘other’ faces (Self-Facing and World-Facing) and to put yourself on the path of growing real.

When you do this, you realise that you have NO faces – you’re just FACING THE TRUTH and constantly moving forward and experiencing life as a WHOLE.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

This article will help you in two main ways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different paths but both with a COST.

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

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

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

-Having to give up your ‘current’ thing.

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

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

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

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

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

Etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The costs might be things like:

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

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

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

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

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

-Etc.

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

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

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

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

Or:

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

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

I know what I’d choose every time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letting go of unreal relationships that are holding you back.

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

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

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

Not being able to watch Netflix as much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having to work hard and change things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s always a choice. No excuses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

The key word here is “NEED”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Irrationality of Needing to Be Liked

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

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

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

In the first case, it’s quite simple:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a key point:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Psychology of Needing to be Liked All the Time

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

The short answer is that there are two main reasons:

  1. Reasons of the Self
  2. Reasons of the World

Reasons of the Self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reasons of the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re constantly comparing yourself to others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re always criticising yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not being  REAL to yourself or others.

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

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

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

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

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

The Final Word

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what you need to know:

Anybody can be creative

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creativity and growing real are inherently linked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In PRACTICAL terms this shows up in the following ways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most common way this process unfolds is as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take yourself out of the equation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Etc.

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

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

Learn to keep learning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the natural flow of tension and release.

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

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

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

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

Here’s what this can look like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Uncover the truth.
  2. Live the truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another FACT about human life is this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or:

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

or:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-We’re going to die one day

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

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

-We all fail

-We all have questions that can’t be answered

-Etc.

All of this stuff applies to all of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution is to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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How to be real no matter what.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Always keep the real vision in mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Set goals and habits that structure your day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Value the truth more than anything else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flip the script and start with reality before the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Embrace your weirdness.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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The Real Ones Will Say the ‘Bad’ Stuff to Your Face and the ‘Good’ Stuff Behind Your Back.

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The real ones won’t chat ? behind your back.

Instead, they’ll bring that ? to your door and help you figure out how to turn it into a ?(by helping you look at the truth about things together).

One of the main problems with living in an UNREAL WORLD is that it can be populated with so many unreal people.

The REAL ONES are out there and if you find them then you better do what you can to keep them close and keep growing even MORE REAL together – that’s what it’s all about after all: going deeper.

When you’re caught up in your own EGO ‘stuff’, you might fall into the trap of thinking that the REAL ONES are just the ones who only come to you with smiles on their faces and sycophantic words about how brilliant you are (or whatever).

Though they might have ‘good’ stuff to say, the odds are that anybody who only ever blows smoke up your ass is FAKE and either wants something from you or wants to hide something about themselves.

The TRUTH is that you need the REAL ONES to call you out on your own BS:

-We all have our own blindspots and can’t always see where we’re screwing up or holding ourselves back.

-We all have the ability to fool ourselves because of our cherished illusions and our emotional ‘stuff’ (see my latest vid on YT).

-We all need a little help or motivation to push through our EDGE and grow more real and sometimes we need a real one to give us a kick in the pants.

To somebody who doesn’t have a growth mindset – because they’re stuck in the ego stuff and its illusion of STASIS – that all sounds pretty ‘bad’.

As long as the REAL ONE is giving you the straight talk from a place of LOVE and actually wanting you to grow then it’s one of the biggest favours anybody could ever do you.

Some people will sing your praises every time they see you and then go stab you in the back as soon as your back is turned.

The REAL ONES won’t be saying anything ‘bad’ about you unless you’re right in front of them and they’re trying to help you grow.

The UNREAL ONES will smile and ask you questions to get information from you so they can compare themselves or whatever then they’ll use that to moan about you behind your back.

Find the REAL ONES and keep it real.

 

Find your blindspots and grow real with my coaching.

 

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Unicorns (from Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World)

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This is a sample chapter from the book Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World:

When we send our soul into hiding because of our fears about ourselves, the world, and reality and the perceived threat (to the Ego) of facing the Shadow Territory then our soul will keep screaming to us from beneath the surface of our unreal faces in an attempt to get our attention and wake us up again.

That’s all fine and dandy but we need to discuss another element of this unwholesome process of hiding ourselves from ourselves:

This element is the Unicorn.

In the terms of what we’ve been talking about in this book, a ‘unicorn’ is really just a vessel for all of the hidden qualities in ourselves – ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ – that allows us to gain a sort of unconscious control over the externalisation of our Shadow and its hidden messages.

It’s a way of experiencing our hidden qualities but without having to face the Shadow Territory and all of the uncomfortable work and the ego-reconfiguration that comes with it.

In short, a unicorn is a kind of ego protection device that allows you to deflect the whispers from the Shadow Territory so that you can remain the same. It’s another, more subtle, form of Control Freakery.

Our consumerist society is basically fuelled by unicorns and, with the rise of social media and the ability it gives us to fine-tune and tailor our image of ourselves and the way that we share with the world, we can even make unicorns of ourselves.

It’s all bullshit, though.

You need to be aware of unicorns and how they have a hold over you if you want to free yourself and forget about the hopelessness of being a fragmented version of who you are in your wholeness.

The most terrifying part of all this is that a unicorn can be literally anything: another person, an object, an intangible concept or idea, or even something that doesn’t even exist.

To make a unicorn of something, all we have to do is project a bunch of heightened symbolic meaning onto it and convince ourselves that it has certain qualities and attributes that we feel we lack in ourselves because of our conditioning and the BULLSHIT we believe about who we are.

In a sense, these unicorns are just an external manifestation of some image that our ego carries. They’re the bullshit belief that the conceptual or interpretational can be real but – as we’ve said in earlier sections of this book – no concept can ever be real and no interpretation is the truth.  Maybe some point more closely towards ‘the truth’ than others but the concept or interpretation itself is simply a signpost or tool.

Worshipping the concept instead of the reality is always going to leave you being removed or disconnected from the whole and that is the main problem with unicorns.

The short version, then, is that unicorns are a substitute for reality that are given heightened meaning because of our hidden emotional ‘stuff’. Because we’re not ready to own that ‘stuff’, because doing so will threaten our ego, we end up projecting it out into the world so that we can still feel it without realising that it’s coming from within ourselves.

It sounds a bit convoluted maybe but it’s pretty simple if you get some examples:

Perhaps the most common place where this unicornisation shows up to protect our egos is in romantic relationships.

We’ve already agreed that romantic relationships that are based on realness can threaten our masks because we can’t really avoid being vulnerable in those contexts.

If we resist this vulnerability, however, we can end up in a co-dependent or dysfunctional relationship where instead of real meeting real we find ego meeting ego.

Most of us have had these kinds of relationships at some stage in our short, miserable lives: they’re defined by a certain sense that something isn’t quite ‘right’ and by a push-pull dynamic as everybody’s conflicting attachment styles lead to a kind of ego dance where nobody really wants to stay and nobody really wants to leave.

This kind of ego dance is what we commonly call ‘drama’, kids.

For whatever reason, we stay in these relationships because they’ve ‘activated’ something within us that we don’t believe we can get outside of the relationship (or we just wanna get laid on the regular, whatever).

This ‘activation’ is part of the Unicorn Trap (aka ‘Unicornitis’).

Even though the relationship is distinctly unhealthy overall, we stick around because we believe we ‘love’ the other person (which we might, but that doesn’t mean we have to have a relationship with them – ‘love’ and ‘compatibility’ aren’t necessarily the same thing).

We probably even have moments of tenderness or intimacy with them – though they are few and far between in comparison to all the push-pull ego drama that unfolds the rest of the time.

Really, what’s happening in this context is that two people who don’t accept themselves are turning the other into a vessel for the feelings of unconditional self-acceptance that they’ve been hiding from themselves.

Read that last paragraph again because it might save years of your life.

It’s a kind of unspoken ‘deal’ that nobody even knows they’re taking part in: “we don’t accept ourselves but we can pretend to accept each other” – something like that, anyway.

The only reason you’d stay in an unhealthy relationship is because you don’t accept yourself in the first place but the feeling you get of being whole or understood in those rare moments of tenderness and intimacy are enough to keep you ‘hooked’.

What you don’t realise, though, is that those feelings aren’t coming from the other person – they’re already inside you and always have been.

You’ve just used the other person as a unicorn which means they serve as a vessel for you to be able to feel a degree of acceptance (or whatever else you’ve been ‘lacking’ because of your disconnection from yourself) without having to actually accept yourself and destroy your current version of the ego.

This is usually because – for whatever reason – you’ve been conditioned somewhere along the line not to give yourself permission to accept yourself and so you have to go about it in these strange and sophisticated ways.

Like I said, I used to be an emotional retard so I’ve been in this situation once or twice myself. I’m not gonna beat myself up over it or anything because I’ve seen a whole bunch of my friends in similar situations so I guess it’s just part of the ‘growth’ process.

A real, healthy relationship is when we use the context of the relationship to shave away layers of fragmentation and grow more real together by finding the Edge (see a later chapter).

The Relationship of Unicorns is what happens when you want the ‘relationship’ part but not the growth – once again because real growth would mean facing the Shadow Territory and seeing the emptiness of the ego.

Even with the ‘real’ relationships there’s a period where things start to settle down and we realise that we’ve created an idea or unicorn of the person we’ve been ‘seeing’.

Normally, we call this the ‘Honeymoon Period’ – all that’s really happened is we’ve projected all of the qualities we lack in ourselves on to this creature we’re now infatuated with and think that they have the answer to the question of our missing soul (which, don’t forget, we’re always on the quest to rediscover).

Over time, once we realise that we’re dealing with a real human being and not a fantasy, we have a rocky return to reality, and then we either stick around in the relationship and commit to trying to see what’s really there – or we move onto our next fix because we need to keep that ego in place and avoid the Shadow Territory.

Humans, eh? We’re all screwed.

Really, this idea of our “missing soul” sums it all up – if the soul is the whole within us, then we will naturally be attracted or repelled by the missing parts of ourselves in the objects of our worship or disgust (unicorns).

Not all examples are as dramatic as the romantic relationships we find ourselves in; there are plenty more mundane examples that we see around us day after day but they’re all based on the same principle of somebody subconsciously trying to fill the void inside themselves instead of simply becoming the void and closing the gap between themselves and the rest of the world and reality.

An obsession that many people have had over the last few years is ‘superheroes’ – obviously, Batman and Superman and whoever else have been around for almost a century so it’s not brand new or anything, but thanks to the popularisation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which is basically just an expensive soap opera) people have gone next level in their fanaticism and their fervour for vicarious heroics.

We sometimes forget that the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’ which means “Marked by excessive enthusiasm for and intense devotion to a cause or idea”.

Where does this ‘excessiveness’ or ‘intensity’ come from?

From BULLSHIT, of course.

Being excessively enthusiastic or intensely devoted to anything is probably never a good idea but feeling that way about made-up characters in tights suggests that there’s something extra missing in one’s soul that needs to be remedied if one is to ever sort the problem of one’s life out.

We already spoke about ‘heroes’ in an earlier chapter and you don’t really have to be a genius or anything to put the pieces in place and make the connections here, but all of this ‘Hero Worship’ doesn’t really have anything to do with the tights that these guys are wearing – or the adventures that they get in – as much as it does the QUALITIES that they embody and the qualities that have been denied in the people that are unicornising them.

Look, I’ll be totally honest and admit that I watched more than a few of those Iron Man movies – they’re great entertainment and Robert Downey Junior is the man.  I get it.

When I found myself watching these movies, though, it was at a bit of a low point in my life: I’d lost touch with my purpose, I wasn’t working on a book or anything like that, I’d probably just come out of some dysfunctional relationship after unicornising some chick and trying to solve all my mummy and daddy issues, and I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing with myself.

I always end up quoting Henry David Thoreau who said that “Most men live lives of quiet desperation” – look around you and tell me this isn’t true.

Why do most people find themselves in this state?

Because they don’t trust and believe in themselves, they have no vision for their real growth, have lost touch with their purpose, and are waiting for things to make complete ‘sense’ instead of taking the little bits of sense that they do have and making something more with it.

More than this, many – if not most – end up beaten into submission and living as the mask so that they can fit in with the rest of society and live comfortable but miserable lives in the safety of their socially, emotionally, and spiritually ‘acceptable’ personalities.

They’ve shrivelled away and gone into hiding but – as we’ve pointed out – the drive for wholeness and the quest for the soul never stops.

You’re looking for your soul right now. That’s probably why you’re still reading this shit.

Listen, here’s something you need to know and embrace about human beings, if you don’t already:

Every single one of us is fucking awesome.

Really.

We have been designed as goal-seeking, purpose-chasing forces of nature that constantly grow towards wholeness.

We’re not supposed to be shrivelled up and living in a “quiet” or “desperate” manner. That’s something we have to learn because of shame or guilt or trauma.

When people are becoming fanatical about Tony Stark – or any other superhero or unicorn – what they’re really becoming obsessed with is the qualities that they’ve denied within themselves for whatever reason.

Tony Stark doesn’t need permission to do whatever the frick he wants; he doesn’t live meekly; he doesn’t sit around wasting his potential and living a miserable life working in an office cubicle and then going home to his bored wife and snotty kids.

All of the things this guy embodies are exactly what the people who become obsessed with him are lacking in themselves.

But here’s the kicker: They don’t really ‘lack’ it; they’ve just been taught to deny it.

Their obsession is a sign that they need to reawaken these qualities in themselves to grow whole – the mere fact that they even recognise these qualities in whichever hero they end up worshipping means that the quality is definitely somewhere inside them already.

If it wasn’t, they couldn’t recognise it.

All these comic book nerds and other Hero Worshippers have suppressed their heroism (not the unhealthy kind, discussed earlier, but the need for real purpose) and so they’ve turned to unicorns. They don’t wanna face themselves so they experience these qualities through the vessel of [some super hero / rock star / product / whatever].

The tendency to worship unicorns is also used against us all the time for marketing purposes. It’s done by having companies spend millions of pounds on ‘audience research’ which is really just about helping them to understand the masks we wear, our aspirations, and the pain points that led to us being frustrated and unreal with ourselves in the first place.

When we’re queuing for hours through the night to get our hands on the latest [iPhone], or whatever, it’s not the actual object that we’re queuing for but an opportunity to be returned to our own souls for a little while.

Really, in the case of an iPhone, we’re literally just queuing for a bunch of minerals and plastics.

Yes, the coming together of these materials has great functional value in allowing us to better interact with the world and communicate with the people we love and care about or whatever, but, really, any phone on the market can do that these days and we don’t see the hipsters getting in line to buy those with such fanaticism.

Nope, for these unsavoury characters, the iPhone has been heightened to the level of a unicorn (though, to be honest, way less people give a crap about iPhones than they used to – thanks, Universe!).

Instead of it just being plastic and whatever else, it has become a vessel for storing all the missing parts of the human soul and connection to reality that makes life actually worth living.

Because these people don’t wanna get directly in touch with their souls because that would mean denying the ego and having to face the reality of flux and change and all of the complicated things that come with it (DEATH), they decide to outsource these qualities instead and get in touch indirectly.

I’m making assumptions because I’ve never queued for anything in my life unless totally necessary, but I guess the people who act in this strange manner get to feel a sense of superiority because they have some high-status (to other lonely people) technology, they feel a sense of belonging because the Apple Store Monkeys are all clapping for them, they’re getting attention because they might get their picture in the paper, and they get to see themselves as people who “think different” and are unique because of the advertising campaigns – just like everybody else!

It’s all BULLSHIT though (as you probably guessed).

If we take the ‘reverse engineering’ approach, we can make the assumption that a lot of these people really feel inferior, that they don’t really belong anywhere, that they never get any attention and are unworthy, and that they’re just sheep who have to make a concentrated effort to stand out from the crowd.

Those poor bastards.

Honestly, the human ego can make a unicorn out of just about anything in order to protect itself and stop us facing the Shadow Territory and grow through things.

‘Pretentiousness’ is another interesting example, because in this case people make a unicorn out of other people’s work and their ‘understanding’ of it or of abstract ideas and theories that they attach their identities to for ego-augmentation.

It might be something simple like ‘music’ – many of us have probably all been through the ‘edgy teenage music fan’ stage where we think that listening to obscure bands and avoiding things that are mainstream makes us ‘better’ in some way. I even know adults in their 30s and 40s that are still doing that crap – how insecure can you get?

It can happen with whole fields of thought too, though.

For the last few years, I’ve worked with a lot of designers and I must admit that some of them have been the most pretentious people I’ve ever met in my entire life.

In this case, they turned the whole concept of ‘Design’ into a unicorn, allowing it to become imbued with all of the qualities that they want to embody themselves but secretly fear that they never can: a sense of control over the world and the shaping of it, a sense of style and sophistication, a need to be creative and cool, etc.

I’m not saying that design isn’t amazing (look at what we’ve done for the world with it); I’m just saying that a lot of insecure people become attracted to it because of the way that it can be used as a unicorn that helps strengthen their desired image of themselves.

‘Philosophy’ is another unicorn so is ‘Mental health’ or ‘Writing’ – there are billions of them.

The point is that we take mere things or actions and then put all of our ‘stuff’ into them so that we can avoid our own souls.

If you look around you, you’ll see that the world is built of unicorns.

Which means it’s all bullshit.

If this 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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