by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
What You Focus On Grows: Make Sure It’s REAL
If you’ve ever felt like you’re floating through life with no anchor, no compass, and no sense of where you’re going – or even worse, like you’re sprinting in all directions at once – then you’re probably not alone.
Many people hit a point where the noise of the world gets so loud that they lose touch with what actually matters the most to them and so life becomes increasingly unreal.
But what if the solution to all that chaos and confusion wasn’t outside you, but within?
Allow me to introduce you to the Tree of Devotion – a simple but powerful tool to help you get rooted in what’s real, find direction in your life, and focus your energy on the things that truly matter. Think of it as a kind of living map of purpose – custom-built for you by you (the REAL you, that is).
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Tree of Devotion: What We Cover in This Article
- What You Focus On Grows: Make Sure It’s REAL
- What is the Tree of Devotion?
- Why This Works: Realness Over Randomness
- Focus is Devotion
- Designing Your Tree: What Are Your Six Branches?
- Turning Vision into Devotion
- Devotion = Direction
- Stay Rooted in the Real
- Try This: The Tree of Devotion Weekly Ritual
- The Tree of Devotion: Your Life is the Garden
What is the Tree of Devotion?
The Tree of Devotion is based on a beautifully simple idea: you are the tree, and the branches are the main areas of your life that you’re here to nurture. These are the parts of your life that, when given your attention and care, will bear fruit – real, meaningful results that reflect the person you are becoming and need to be in your realness.
Picture it like this:
The tree trunk represents you – rooted in what you know is true.
Extending from that trunk are six strong branches – these represent the six areas of life that matter the most to you. They can be anything that reflects your core values and real purpose: family, health, art, learning, business, spirituality – whatever feels real for you and that will allow you to start flourishing in a real way if you can focus on these areas.
The point of knowing this is really simple:
If you tend to these areas with focus and devotion, you’ll grow, you’ll bear fruit, and you’ll become more real.
Why This Works: Realness Over Randomness
Most people chase results without checking if they’re planting the right seeds and so they end up with ‘fruit’ in their lives that they don’t like the flavour of – they’re trying to grow mangoes in a cactus patch, wondering why nothing tastes sweet.
The Tree of Devotion flips that on it’s head because it makes sure that instead of chasing shadows, you focus on what’s real – day in and day out.
Your life’s results – the ‘fruit’ – never lie; they’re a reflection of what you’ve been feeding the tree with: your thoughts, your energy, your actions.
To paraphrase Jesus a bad tree cannot bear good fruit and so:
If you don’t like the results you’re getting, check your roots.
That’s the heart of the Realness philosophy if you put something real in you get something real out; if you put something unreal in, you get something unreal out.
Focus is Devotion
In an age of distraction, focus is radical, but devotion is revolutionary.
The Tree of Devotion invites you to bring both:
It’s not about perfection but about devoted focus – choosing to turn up each day and tend to the six areas that you’ve chosen as being worthy of your time, energy, and attention (the most valuable assets you have because you’re going to be dead one day).
This isn’t hustle culture – it’s wholeness culture:
You’re not forcing anything in an ego-driven way – you’re simply feeding something sacred by giving it the focus that it needs to flourish.
And the more you focus, the more you grow. It’s pretty simple when you think about it.
Designing Your Tree: What Are Your Six Branches?
This is where the real magic happens. The Tree of Devotion is personal and so there’s no one-size-fits-all.
The six branches must reflect your values, your goals, your the flavour of realness that only you can embody and bring more expression and amplification to.
One coaching client I’ve been working with recently, decided that his focus needed to be in the following six areas (or ‘branches’):
- Family
- Spirituality
- Work
- Fitness
- DIY
- Chess
You can see how personal that list is and how it reflects who the client in question wants to grow into but your own Tree of Devotion will probably be completely different.
It might be something like:
- Health
- Creativity
- Relationships
- Inner Peace
- Contribution
- Learning
There’s no right answer – only the real answer. You can literally put whatever you want on your own ‘branches’ – the only criterion for success is that each of the areas are REAL to you and that you know you have potential to bring fruit if you devote yourself to the process.
Here are some simple questions that can help you to start figuring out what your Tree of Devotion needs to look like:
- What are the six areas of life that – if I focused on them every day in a real way – would make me feel like I’m becoming the person I was born to be?
- Which branches do I want to bear fruit in?
- Where do I feel most aligned, alive, and authentic?
Choose six, write them down, sketch your tree, and then devote yourself to it.
Turning Vision into Devotion
Once you’ve got your six branches, the next step is turning your vision into a practice – here’s the process:
1. Create a Vision for Each Branch
Define what the ‘fruit’ looks like in each area:
Be bold and specific so that you don’t hold back and that you know exactly what it is that you’re trying to achieve.
If one of your branches is ‘Health’, maybe the vision is to feel strong, energised, and at home in your body.
If one branch is ‘Creativity’, then maybe the vision is to finish and publish your novel.
2. Break it into Goals
The next step is to start turning your vision into action by asking yourself what goals would move the needle in each area.
These need to be real goals, rooted in your values, not someone else’s expectations.
For example, if you chose the ‘Creativity’ vision above then one of your goals is to finish writing your novel – give yourself a deadline for this and how many words (approx.) you need to write and then you know what you’re aiming for.
3. Build Habits
This is where realness meets routine so that you can be consistent with your focus:
What daily, weekly, or monthly habits would tend to each branch?
It doesn’t need to be complicated – it could be as simple as things like:
- Daily walk (Health)
- Weekly date night (Relationships)
- 15 mins of writing (Creativity)
- One act of service (Contribution)
Every time you do one of these habits, you’re watering your tree and being actively engaged in the necessary process required to bring FRUIT to your life.
You don’t need to do anything major in most cases because results/fruit usually come from small consistent actions done over time.
You just need to be devoted to making it happen.
Devotion = Direction
One of the biggest reasons people feel lost is they have nothing pulling them forward – no vision, nothing to be devoted to…just reacting to life instead of co-creating it.
The Tree of Devotion changes that because it gives you a why for your actions, a framework for your focus, and a direction for your days.
It isn’t about adding pressure – it’s about offering purpose.
When you know what matters, you stop wasting energy on what doesn’t.
What to Do If You’re Not Seeing Fruit
You might be thinking: “What if I’m doing all this and nothing’s working?”
Well, here’s a hard truth wrapped in compassion:
If you’re not getting results, you’re not tending to the tree in a real way.
That might sound blunt to some but it’s actually empowering because it means you’re not broken – you’ve just been distracted and your focus isn’t where it needs to be.
You’re not unworthy – you’ve just been feeding unreality instead of reality.
If you’re not getting results then check your focus, check your habits, and check whether the branches you’ve chosen are even yours or if they were handed to you by your parents, society, or your scared little ego.
If the fruit is bad, change the root. Always.
(You change the root by changing your relationship with yourself and growing real).
Stay Rooted in the Real
The key to everything is staying rooted in your realness:
That means making decisions from a place of truth – not from fear, comparison, or any other ego stance.
It means aligning your six branches with who you really are – not who you think you should be – and it means showing up each day, not for the performance, but for the process.
You won’t be perfect; you’ll have off days; branches will get storm-damaged and some fruit will rot before it ripens.
That’s OK. though – you’re not here to be flawless: you’re here to grow real.
Try This: The Tree of Devotion Weekly Ritual
Here’s a simple weekly ritual to keep your focus alive:
- Review your six branches every week.
- Write one goal or action for each per week.
- Ask: What’s one habit I could strengthen in each branch?
- Reflect: What fruit did I grow? What needs pruning?
You can do this in a journal, on a whiteboard, or with post-it note but just do it.
Devotion is what turns ideas into evolution and if you know what you need to be devoted to then you’ll evolve.
The Tree of Devotion: Your Life is the Garden
In the end, the Tree of Devotion is more than a tool – it’s a mindset, a metaphor, and a philosophy.
Your life is a garden and you are both the gardener and the soil; you don’t control the weather, but you do control what you plant, what you water, and what you let wither.
So stop waiting for purpose to strike like lightning and take a more active and real approach:
Plant it. Water it. Devote yourself to it.
That’s how you find direction.
You can download a blank version of the Tree of Devotion here (though, really, I recommend sketching out your own somewhere to get that creativity flowing).
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to find focus and direction in your life and you’re interested in coaching then book a free session with me and I’ll get you moving right away.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
Join the 7-Day Bare Ass Minimum (BAM) Challenge and start to implement foundational health habits and a powerful life vision only a week from now.
