Episode 95: Pursuing Getting Real with Oli Anderson

🎶 Podcast Intro: Welcome to the pursuing uncomfortable podcast, where we give you the encouragement you need to lean into the uncomfortable stuff life puts in front of you, so you can love your life. If you are ready to overcome all the yuck that keeps you up at night, you're in the right place. I am your host, Melissa Ebken let's get going. 🎶

🎶 Episode Intro:  Hey there. Welcome back to the pursuing uncomfortable podcast. I'm Melissa, your host. And today we have a truly inspiring guest joining us. Our guest today is Oli Anderson, an author and coach who specializes in helping people to get real. In this episode, we'll delve into the transformative process of awareness, acceptance, and action and explore how embracing our whole selves can lead to incredible growth and success. Get ready to be inspired and motivated as we discuss the importance of being real, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and living a life filled with purpose and authenticity. So without further ado let's dive into this thought provoking conversation with Oli Anderson.   🎶

Episode:
Melissa Ebken  0:00  
Oli, welcome to the Pursuing Uncomfortable Podcast. How are you today?

Oli Anderson  0:06  
Yeah, I'm doing really good. Thank you for having me today. Somebody just walked through the room then sorry. I'm doing good. I'm excited to be talking to you about all this stuff. And yeah, let's just see where we end up. Oh, yeah. 

Melissa Ebken  0:20  
Yeah, this is fantastic. Thanks for zooming in from across the Atlantic Ocean to be with us today. We appreciate that. So, Oli, let's get real. Tell us about yourself and let you do.

Oli Anderson  0:35  
Well, real is the key word. So my name is Oli Anderson. I'm an author. I'm a coach. Ultimately, I work in two main areas, but they're both linked by the idea of realness. So I wake up, I do life coaching, business coaching. And the key theme that I'm trying to explore with people is realness. What is real about them? Their real values, their real intentions, how can they embody that in their creative projects, or in their business or in just life itself? I found through my own experience, that we tend to complicate things. There's so much complexity in life. But actually, if you just take it to that really basic level of real or unreal, you can solve 99% of your problems as long as you act on what you learned. Another way that I often talk about it is either fragmentation, or wholeness. So probably as we go through this conversation, those four words are going to keep getting thrown out; real, unreal, and wholeness and fragmentation. For me, realness is just wholeness. Its connection to yourself, connection to other people, and connection to light, at large. And the fragmentation, the unreal stuff is all of the beliefs and ideas that we picked up, that stop us from appreciating that. And I've found in life and business, again, if you can tap into the real stuff, and you can move towards wholeness, connect to other people, make sure it's an expression of what's going on inside you, then things tend to work out. So I'm trying to reel myself in. Otherwise, I'll keep ranting and raving at you. That's the abridged version.

Melissa Ebken  2:12  
Well, thank you for that, now was that, was there a point in your life when things weren't going well, when things weren't hitting all the cylinders? And then can you talk to us about what that was like in your life? And how? Through growing through that you came to this point?

Oli Anderson  2:30  
Yeah, so there's quite a dramatic story. I'll give you the short version. Otherwise, we'll be talking for hours. Basically, I learned a lot of this stuff through having a long term health condition. So the story is, when I was in my 20s, I went to Japan. I was teaching English initially. And then I started doing like, you know, movie, extra work and modeling and all this kind of stuff. I thought I was on top of the world, I was living the highlife. And then suddenly, my health just started to deteriorate. I thought I had flu. But long story short, it turned out to be kidney failure. So I ended up in the hospital. In Japan, I stayed there for a month, then had to come back to the UK, because I needed a kidney transplant. I was on dialysis still am. Waited a year and a half for the aforementioned transplant. Had it and then after about a week, it just went horrifically wrong. Basically, when they give you a transplant, they connect it to the artery in your inner thigh. for some inexplicable reason, it just burst, like the kidney just burst open. Was blood all over the place, I was in a coma. They told my my family that when I woke up, I was gonna have brain damage. So who knows? Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Basically, because of that whole process, I just learned so much about how life works, how, you know, we're all hurdling towards death. All these kinds of things, it seemed quite bleak, initially. But as I went through the process of kind of deconstructing my ego, and becoming more aware of the way that life actually works, I realized that all it actually happened was I just had the volume turned all the way up. And all of the things that I was facing by going through that they were the same thing that everybody, every other human being on the planet is facing. Just because the volume had been turned up so high, it was so easy for me to gain awareness of what that was. And so basically, through the process of kind of losing my ideas about myself and what I thought life was and blah, blah, blah, and hitting rock bottom. I was able to rebuild, and to distinguish, distinguish between what was real about me and what wasn't, because actually all that happened when I hit rock bottom after the transplant was I just realized all of these different ideas I've been clinging to all of these different expectations. about, you know, what life is and what might be possible and what I should be and what I shouldn't be, and blah, blah, blah, all of those things were unreal. And the real stuff about me was still there. And so once I realized that, and I started kind of taking responsibility for it I guess, and taking actions and all the things I had to do to, to kind of allow those seeds to grow. Then things just started working out. And I realized, even though it had been a bit of a roller coaster, it was actually kind of a blessing. And now when I look back, I can kind of laugh about this whole kidney transplant thing and the journey I've been on because actually, despite how bleak it seemed like, then, like now everything is actually kind of amazing. And I'm actually grateful that it happened, because it showed me, you know, who I am, what life is and how life works. So that's the short version of all that.

Melissa Ebken  5:55  
Well, I for one, vote to not have my kidney explode. I prefer to share the lessons gleaned from that from your experience and not have to build them on my own.

Oli Anderson  6:07  
Yeah. I think that's a good strategy. Yeah, I think that's a really important point as well, because actually, you don't have to hit rock bottom, you don't have to, you know, have anything extreme happen to you to learn all these lessons, because actually, what we're talking about is just life, it just works in a certain way. And you can either, you know, I believe if if you, if you don't pay attention, and you don't make some effort to raise awareness of what life actually is and who you actually are, then eventually life is going to call out to you anyway. Like, it's always whispering to you. And if you don't listen, it's gonna scream at you, and it's gonna slap you in the face. And that's when you end up hitting rock bottom, or something, you know, bad is gonna happen to you. Bad in scare quotes, but actually because we're dealing with life and the fundamental truth about life, and reality is the same for all of us, which is just wholeness. You can do things, no matter what your situation I have now found to kind of move in that direction. And this is why I like to keep it simple. Like I said, at the start, it's all about either realness, or un unrealness unreal, a wholeness or fragmentation. And I think I'll try not to make this too complicated. The process I normally walk people through is a three step process. This is the process that I realized when I look back, I went through, so it's probably easier if I just tell you these three steps instead of running a raving about all kinds of weird, different things. So the first step is awareness. 

Melissa Ebken  7:40  
Well, I was going to ask a brilliant a question about what are three things you could tell us about having about getting real with our life? That's a great, thank you read my mind and just offered that. 

Oli Anderson  7:52  
Right? Okay. That's obviously wholeness, in action right there. So the three steps, awareness, acceptance and action. I have now found from my life from from coaching people, in my coaching process, that those three steps awareness, acceptance and action, they play a role in any transformative process that anybody is going through. Because ultimately, if you think about transformation, whether it's from unreal to real, or from not having a business to having a business, or any, any other thing you can think about in life, you have to go through those stages. Awareness means okay, asking yourself the right questions, figuring out what you need to know, figuring out who you are, where you're holding yourself back, blah, blah, blah. Acceptance is about looking at where you've been holding back. Where are you, purposely, even maybe unconsciously, where are you blind to the truth about life? What are you hiding? Why are you discerning about yourself? And then action is obviously, I think, the most important step, because if you don't take action, then you're not going to get anywhere. A lot of people, sometimes we get that. So awareness, acceptance and action. Sometimes I describe it in a different way. It's the same three stages, but awareness is deconstructing the ego. I think, when you first set out on these journeys of transformation, you have to look at your ego, basically, your sense of identity that you have chosen and created, in order to create the life that you currently have. And if you can reverse engineer your life, you can kind of understand your identity, if that makes sense. Like ultimately, the way that we are related to ourselves, affects the life that we end up building. So a simple example is maybe we have a lot of doubt, or we think that we have to be too timid or whatever it is, because the way we've been brought up, then our life is going to be a reflection of that because we're not going to be taking the calculated risks that we need to take in order to get where we need to be. Maybe that's a bad example. But basically what I'm saying is the assumptions we carry about ourselves, affect our lives. And so if you want to change your life, you have to start by looking at the assumptions you carry about yourself, and see whether they're real or unreal. The thing is when people have been on, 

Melissa Ebken  7:58  
Can I jump in here real quick? To ask a question for clarification? So when you say, deconstruct ego, what I'm hearing that means to me is that we all have a certain amount of assumptions we make about ourselves, our capabilities, our value. Yeah, what we can do what we know. And deconstructing the ego might include telling a different narrative about ourselves or learning that we are more capable or more valuable, or all of those just writing a different tape to play. Yeah, ultimately, that our minds is that what you're talking about?

Oli Anderson  10:40  
Yeah. So the way that I look at the ego, it goes back to I started, start again. So it's either unreal or its real, alright, although the ego is never really real, because it's a bunch of fragments. So it's either about wholeness or fragmentation. So the way that I think of the ego, it's just all these fragments that we've picked up, as we go through life, and the causes to hold back or to hesitate on acting on the wholeness is within us that's trying to express itself out in the world. And it is things that you just said, so it's the stories that we tell ourselves is the expectations we have about life in order to compensate because of shame, and guilt, and trauma. Its the goals, we might have picked up all of these different things. They're all just fragments and concepts and ideas. But reality itself is beyond all of us because if you think about it, expectations, ideas, assumptions, opinions, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, all these things that make up our sense of self, in the smallest version of self. They're all fragments, and we need them. Because we're in fragmented bodies, we have to perceive life in this fragmented way, we have to interpret life, to the best of our ability based on what we've been through. But the problem is, if we attach to those perceptions, and interpretations, then we just end up creating a kind of veil between us in life that ultimately affects what is possible in life. And if that were, there's always going to be some kind of a veil, because we're in our bodies, like I just said, you can't escape that if you're here on planet Earth. But if the veil is designed in a way, that is a reflection of your underlying emotional stuff, so normally, when I talk about this talk about shame, guilt, and trauma, if you have underlying shame, guilt and trauma, they're going to create a little box for you to live in. That is not an expression of who you really are. Because they're an expression of the shame and guilt of trauma, which are ultimately just blocks towards wholeness. And actually, I think you can dissolve those things by taking action and choosing a sense of purpose Melissa. But anyway, the ego ultimately is just a box that we create, in order to survive whatever we think we've been through. But if we attach to the box and think that the box is real, then we fall into the trap of thinking that we are static, that we are never going to change. But ultimately, this whole wholeness fragmentation thing is about acknowledging that life is about change. It's about flow, it's about flux, everything keeps moving. Because at the end of the day, we'll be talking about these things we need to be aware of, now they're in the composition. At the end of the day, we're all going to be dead. And this is one of those things that I'm grateful I learned through this whole kidney thing, like, okay, I'm gonna die one day, maybe that seems, you know, terrible. But actually, it's another blessing because it shows you that everything keeps moving, everything keeps changing, that you can keep expanding and evolving and growing, and blah, blah, blah. But the only way you can expand and evolve, and all these amazing things I've just said is if you let go of the egos, ideas, the box, the ideas of stasis, basically. And so deconstructing the ego is ultimately that becoming aware of all of these different ways that the ego makes you perceive and interpret life that are not real. So some examples are, like I just said, the ego makes you think that everything is static, the ego makes you think that cause and effect is not a real thing that you can just click your fingers and get everything you want. The ego makes you think that you have to be perfect all the time that you can control everything, bla bla, bla, bla, bla, all of these different things, stop you living a real life. And so deconstructing the ego becoming aware, is becoming aware of those natural principles that apply to us all that, if you align with, then you'll be able to have a better life without necessarily hitting rock bottom, because you can just say, Okay, one thing I need to be aware of in life, for example, is cause and effect. Okay? So if I want to get certain results in life, certain effects, I need to be the cause that's going to do that. And then you can say, How do I do it? Blah, blah, blah. So that was a big rumble about awareness and deconstructing the ego. I don't know if it made sense, but yes,

Melissa Ebken  14:59  
Yeah, that's helpful. I think it a practical way of understanding it is if someone sees potential in you and offers you a position or an opportunity, you might say, that's just not really who I am. And that's your ego talking. Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But that first initial reaction is that's outside of my experience, I would have to grow into that. That would require qualities of myself that have never been fully realized or worked upon, all of that stuff is ego. 

Oli Anderson  15:33  
Yeah, I would say so. Because they ultimately, limiting your potential. And I think part of being real is understanding that we all have limits, like, I can't lick my elbow. And no matter how hard I try, for example, but we all have way more potential than we tend to believe, or that we think, is possible. And so anything that causes us to hold back, is just fragmentation. That's how I truly see it now. Unless you unless we've been real, like if there is a real limit, like it's very unlikely, I'm going to jump out the window now and, and fly, you know, in the sky, or whatever. That is, that's real. Like, if it's me saying, I can't start my own business, I can't write this book, I can't do this, I can't do that. That is unreal, its some learned thing that we've picked up. And normally, it's just a protective device. That just seems to make life easier in the short term. But in the long term is just a denial of how amazing and blessed we can be. 

Melissa Ebken  16:38  
For sure. Okay, so number two, I know number three, it was action number one was awareness. And number two is?

Oli Anderson  16:47  
Number two is acceptance, or integrating the shadow. So the journey I went through is deconstructing the ego, integrating the shadow. And then the third one is taking inspired action and building a life that I actually care about. So it might be helpful if I talk about how I see the relationship between the ego and the shadow. So the story of the typical human being, I'm always throwing this out all over the place, is pretty simple. It's a story of going from wholeness, to fragmentation. And then if you're looking back to wholeness, so how that normally looks. We're all born, we're all whole, we connected to life, we're spontaneous, we're not holding ourselves back. We're just following our impulses and our instincts, and we're doing what we need to do. Obviously, your instincts can get you in trouble sometimes. But in general, when we're kids, we're just very whole, very connected. We don't have all this mental chatter, and the hamster wheel of the same old thoughts going round and round in our brains holding us back from life. The thing is, as we start to get older, well, the world starts giving us all these external messages. Normally starts with the word no, no, no, no, you can't do this. You can't do that. And then occasionally, they start telling us, we should do this. And we should do that. I read something ages ago, I can't remember the exact numbers. So I might be given misinformation. But it said something like when when we're young, we hear the word no, like, exponentially more than the word yes. And apparently, that contributes to us being kind of disconnected from ourselves in later life. Either way, no matter what the ratio is of yester knows, something normally happens in people's lives, where they start to feel ashamed of who they really are. Maybe it's their parents not liking their artwork or something, maybe it's a bully at school, maybe it's a teacher, whatever it is, something will happen to most people, that causes them to feel ashamed, either of who they are completely, if that's even possible. Or of certain parts of themselves, and it, it could be their emotions, it could be the goals, it could be whatever. Actually, I'm just talking about shame. But also guilt comes into it. Because sometimes, people want to do things, and people try to make them feel guilty for it. So they hide those goals. Sometimes, maybe they're angry about something. So people shame those emotions. The point is, certain things happen to people and then they disown certain parts of themselves. When they've disowned these parts, that's when they end up creating this ego because the ego is a fragmented version of the whole. And it's ultimately designed as a mask that we wear. So we can pretend these parts that have been shamed or we'd be made feel guilty of or in the worst cases, traumatized by whatever's going on the outside world. We put this mask on, in an attempt to pretend those things no longer exist. Once that's happened, we've become fragmented. Then as we get into adult life, we have normally reached a state where we've been wearing the mask for so long, that we think it's who we are. And that is the ego that I keep talking about. And when that happens, you now have a situation where there's a dance going on inside you, between the mask that you're wearing the box that you've put yourself in, and you're trying to live through. Because it's ultimately just a filter for life, there's a dance between the ego, and all of the disowned parts of yourselves of yourself, that are now in the shadow territory. And so your shadow and your ego are basically in a battle. And the way that I look at it is, you know, I'm a bit of a broken record, the ego is just a bunch of fragments. Its a box, its not real. It's a survival device that helps you to function. So you don't have to go through what you've already been through. But in the short term, you know, that's a good strategy in the long term, you're gonna feel restless, you're gonna be depressed, maybe you're gonna be anxious, because you're puting something false out into the world. So the fragments are what we put out into life, but in the shadow territory, all of these disowned parts are ultimately, real, they're whole, and they're constantly trying to get back to the surface. And so they're constantly trying to get our attention. This is what I was saying earlier, like, ultimately, these parts will keep whispering for our, for us to listen, so we can kind of reintegrate them. And if we don't listen, because we're so attached to the ego, then something will happen. Like these things always come to the surface, they're basically guiding our whole life. There's a quote by Carl Jung, he said something like I can't remember verbatum but, you know, until you discover the unconscious, which is where all the shadows surface, it will rule your life, and you'll call it fit. And I think a lot of the time, there's all these things going on in people's lives, like the same patterns keep repeating, or they'll keep attracting the same scenarios into life, whatever it is, and it's their unconscious trying to get their attention. And if you learn to listen, then you can actually kind of bring these parts back to the surface, maybe it's your anger, maybe it's some goal that you denied that you you know, you want to start acting on again, I was talking to someone recently, they always wanted to be a singer, but they never did anything about it. And now they've reached their 60s. And they're actually going out there and singing, that's been there the whole time. And they created this little box to live in, where that wasn't even a possibility. But eventually, people reached reached that breaking point where they're like, Oh, this is the real me, this is what I need to do. And it's because they raised that awareness. And then they got to the second stage, they've accepted it, and they brought it to the surface. And one final thing I should say, in this little rant about the shadow stuff, people tend to think that all of the things down there are bad things, but they're not. Its beyond good and bad. So like maybe your anger is down there. Maybe your desire for affection is down there. It could be literally it could be anything. But ultimately, if you don't bring it to the surface, and integrate into the actions that you're taking, and the direction that you're moving in, you'll always feel fragmented and disconnected from life, because those things are the real you and all any of us need I have found and truly believe all any of us need is to feel real. And the way we do that is by raising awareness of this ego, what am I holding back on bla bla bla bla bla, why do I believe that I'm not capable of whatever it is I want to do? What's down there? How do I bring it up, and you can bring it up through action, which is the third step.

Melissa Ebken  23:31  
Well tell us a little bit about action.

Oli Anderson  23:35  
So the important thing about the action stage is if you don't raise awareness, and you don't go through the process of process of acceptance, then the actions that you take will be unreal. And I think a lot of people fall into the trap of being a human doing as people say, instead of a human being, because they don't do this inner work first. And obviously, it's hard to do it. Like it's one of the hardest things in the world facing yourself. But if you don't do it, then ultimately you're just wasting your time because all of the actions you're taking are going to be unreal, they're going to be inspired by or motivated by your programming. All of the conditioning that you picked up from the external world, which is not a reflection of your true values and intentions is going to be a reflection of your self hypnosis and the ego and the desire that you have the unconscious desire to hide your real self from yourself. And so, you're constantly going to be doing things you're constantly going to be busy distracting yourself. The way that I look at it, its good to be busy. If you're moving towards the truth. It's bad to be busy if you just distracting yourself. And so ultimately it comes down to two things. You're either taking action to move towards the truth, or you're taking actions keep running on the spot. In an attempt to hide from the truth, I truly believe that the truth will set you free. But first, it will p you off. And it will make you miserable. And the reason it will p you off and make you miserable, is because it's a threat to the ego, basically. And people think they need the ego, because it protects them in the short term from all those underlying things that we're talking about shame, guilt, trauma, whatever else is down there. And the truth is always going to bring that to the surface, it's going to hold out in front of you. And it's going to show you that your identity you've created for yourself is not real, and who wants to think that about themselves really. And so this is why action is so important. But it has to be inspired action, which means you're cultivating the conditions for you to be able to listen to yourself, and to make sure that what you're doing comes from that place of wholeness, that place of realness instead of the the ego stuff. And the shortcut to doing that, that I've found works for a lot of people is just dive deep inside yourself. Not so deep that it's painful. But just start with something simple. Figure out your true values. What what do you really value? Most people, you know, we have we value creativity, for example. That's why I'm always talking about that. Truth is something we should we can all value and get benefit from because at the end of the day, that's what this is all about. Uncover the truth, and then put it into some kind of action. If you do those two things, then your life will be amazing. But the thing that stops us is there you go. So anyway, action is any real action is inspired action that is going to move you towards wholeness, instead of the same old fragmentation that's keeping you a don't want to be anyway. Yeah. 

Melissa Ebken  26:41  
So what I'd hear you saying is pursue the uncomfortable. To jump into the hard things. 

Oli Anderson  26:46  
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So the common thing in coaching, there's the three levels. So you've probably already heard this, the comfort zone, the stretch zone, and the panic zone, being real, it's about putting yourself in the stretch zone, or finding your edge. I'll just go through this. Comfort zone is when you just you're in the box of the ego, you're doing what is not going to change anything. Its going to keep you in the same emotional level, the same intellectual level on the same spiritual level, because you're just controlling everything basically, in an attempt to remain the same, which is impossible, because life keeps changing, and we're all moving towards death, like I said. The stretch zone is where you get into a place just outside that box. And it feels good. I always tell people, when you get there, you feel a kind of creative tension. Because there's it's kind of a natural tension that comes from exploring the gap between where you currently are and where you want to be. And if you stay in the ego, and wait, I'm gesticulating a lot in this in this podcast. But if you stay in the box, you're not gonna feel alive, you're not gonna feel that creative tension. Because you're not expanding, you're not growing. And because when we've been real, it's always about wholeness, or wholeness, in our experience, as human beings is always about that feeling of expansion. And so creative tension, getting in that stretch zone, getting feeling the edge of what you currently know, is where you will feel each feel truly alive and truly get the results that you want. The other thing though, is if you go into the panic zone, which means you got too far, further than what you're currently ready for, then you'll feel bad, you'll literally panic, you put stress on yourself, you'll feel out of balance, you won't get results, because you're trying too hard. You've been outcome dependent, and all that kind of stuff. And so the skill that we need to develop or the attitude we need to develop is about being honest with ourselves, honest enough to say, right? Am I really stretching myself now? Or am I pushing myself too much, because of my ego stuff like I'm trying to compensate. I find that a lot of people who end up in the panic zone, they have a lot of underlying shame, and stuff like that. And so they try and do too much to try and compensate for those feelings of shame to try and make themselves feel big because it feels small inside. But actually, that just exacerbates the problems because if you do put yourself in the panic zone, well, you're not gonna get the results and then it opens up this negative spiral where things go from bad to worse. And so being real, ultimately, is I always talked about writing the reality waves. Reality is about wholeness is always going wherever it's gonna go. Your job when you go unreal, is to find a wave that is going in the direction you want to go in and ride it. And for me, that's how I like to think of the stretch zone, because you have to stretch to maintain your balance and stay on the wave. By the same time. You're not falling into the egos trap of trying to force everything or trying to control everything. I think that's the big lesson. Like ultimately this all boils down to you're either forcing life, which is ego, or you're flowing with life, but you're not flowing in a way where you're so open minded your brains fall out, you're flowing in a way where you're doing everything you can, but then you leave the rest to God or the universe or whatever you want to call it. And that's the sweet spot where you can if you get there that's stretching. So I don't know if I answered the question there. Sorry.

That was brilliant. Thank you, Oli. And friends, if you're listening, you heard it here. Make sure you pursued the uncomfortable you can grow from it. So you can grow through it and you will get real with yourself and your life. Oli, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much.

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