Boost Creativity by Getting Real with Oli Anderson

Jennifer Norman:
Hello beautiful humans. Welcome to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast, your source for hope, healing, happiness and humanity. My name is Jennifer Norman. I'm the founder of The Human Beauty Movement and your host. This podcast is here to guide you on your journey of self love, empowerment, soul alignment and joy. With each episode, I invite beautiful humans from all corners of the globe to join me for open conversations about their life lessons and the important work that they are doing to help heal humankind. Take a moment now to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. I'm so glad you're here, joining me for today's show.

Jennifer Norman:
Today we're tackling an issue many of us face, the struggle to bring more authenticity or realness into our lives. If you've ever felt stuck, held back by your own beliefs, or disconnected from your true self, then this episode is for you. Today's guest is someone who has dedicated his life to helping people overcome these exact challenges. Oli Anderson is an author and coach who specializes in guiding individuals to get out of their own way and make real choices that lead to wholeness and tangible results. Oli's work focuses on cultivating realness, learning to listen to yourself, acting on the truth, and creating a life that reflects your authentic self. Ali is the author of Personal a short course in realness and shadow, freedom from B's in an unreal world. So in this episode, Ali will share insights from his personal journey, the universal themes he's discovered through his coaching work, and practical advice on how you can start bringing more realness into your life. We'll explore how to identify and overcome the beliefs that are holding you back and how to take aligned action that brings real results.

Jennifer Norman:
By the end of this conversation, you'll have a clearer understanding of how to tune into your natural drives toward wholeness and real growth. So whether you're an artist, an entrepreneur, or somebody who simply is looking to experience life on a deeper level, Oli's wisdom will help you start making meaningful choices today. So without further ado, let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Oli.

Oli Anderson:
Jennifer, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to explore all this stuff with you. I gotta say, that was a remarkable introduction and I hope I can live up to that. It was like my obituary or something. I think that was. It was good. It summed up a lot of things, but anyway. Yeah, sorry, I'm.

Jennifer Norman:
Well, the good thing is that you're not dead yet! You're here and we get to talk about, we get to talk about realness. And so I guess my first question for you is, like, what to you does realness mean? And why do you think it's such a central theme in what you're doing as far as your work?

Oli Anderson:
I'm going to try and reel myself in because I have a tendency to just unleash so many things when I start talking about this. So for me, ultimately, realness boils down to three things. It used to be two steps I always give. Now it's three. So basically, it's about uncovering the truth and then accepting the truth and then living and breathing the truth. When I'm coaching people, I go through a related process. It's awareness, acceptance, and action. Ultimately, realness is about accepting life and ourselves to the greatest degree available to us.

Oli Anderson:
I think we can always go deeper into it because we always have, I guess, unconscious blocks, conscious blocks, limiting beliefs, all these kind of things. But as we go through the course of our lives, if we can try and stay grounded in this attitude of constantly uncovering the truth, accepting the truth, and then living and breathing the truth, then we can get a deeper connection, ideally day by day, to ourselves, other people, and the world. And so if I was going to sum it all up, I would say that realness is ultimately about acceptance, but it also involves the journey into a deeper sense of acceptance. It always leads to wholeness, which is about connection. That's ultimately how I see it. I don't know if that's too complicated.

Jennifer Norman:
Not at all. But I know that you have an interesting personal journey that led you there, because, as most people, you find your purpose through your own experiences, and you come to this big aha. Moment, as it were, and then you realize, wow, the way that I was living before is not the way that I wanted to. And so can you tell us a little bit about your own personal journey and how that shaped your understanding and commitment to realness?

Oli Anderson:
Yeah. So I learned a lot of these lessons about realness due to some health issues that I had. The short version of the long story is that I ended up getting kidney failure. I've still got kidney failure, so I've been on dialysis for 17 years and counting. Very healthy. Despite that, believe it or not. Obviously, I've got no kidneys at work. But, like, I live a very healthy life.

Oli Anderson:
Like, eat healthy food and I do yoga every day, and I work out and go hiking, all these kind of things. I'm in a very good place now because I learned these lessons about realness. Ultimately, it gave me the stronger foundation of acceptance on which to build my life. Now, early on, though, when I first experienced this issue with kidney failure, I basically went through what everyone likes to call the dark night of the soul. Ultimately, I see it as a kind of tunnel. And, like, I kind of went into the tunnel with one set of ideas about who I was, what life was, how it all works. And as I went through that tunnel and came out the other side, I ultimately kind of. It was kind of like a vortex, let's say.

Oli Anderson:
And it just shaved off all these layers of kind of fragmentary illusions and unreal beliefs that were keeping me from seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, which sounds very poetic, and I'm bringing death into it again. But ultimately I learned it, because when I first was diagnosed with a kidney failure, I went into a situation with an identity or version of myself that was kind of misaligned with the truth about who I actually was. And it was only by facing and learning to accept that I had this illness and that I might not live as long as I thought I was going to live. And blah, blah, blah, blah. It was only by learning to accept all of that stuff that I was able to hold up all of my outdated beliefs and everything in the light of that truth. And at first, my tendency was to resist, like I was trying to cling to the old version of myself. I suppose for context, I should add light. So when I first got diagnosed with the illness, I was actually living in Tokyo, in Japan.

Oli Anderson:
I had a really kind of, I don't know, like a high flying kind of life. Like, I was doing, like, modeling and tv, extra work and all this kind of stuff. Didn't really have the normal day to day responsibilities that people have. I was just out there traveling the world and climbing Mount Fuji, all these kind of things. And then all of a sudden, I thought I had flu. But it turned out to be something much worse. And I had to basically leave this life I had in Japan and come back to the UK, where I'm from, so I could get a kidney transplant. That sucked in itself for various reasons, but then when I did have the kidney transplant, that went totally wrong.

Oli Anderson:
So the short version of that long story is, connect the kidney to your artery. For some reason, when they connected, it just burst. I lost loads of blood. I was in a coma. All this kind of stuff that was. Well, I was going to say that wasn't that bad. Obviously, it was bad. That was, like, awful.

Oli Anderson:
But the worst part was having to rebuild my life after that, because I always thought, like, right, I'm gonna get this kidney transplant, and then I'll basically go back to normal life. Like, I'll be able to go back to Japan if I want, and I can be with my girlfriend or get married, have a normal life, and blah, blah, blah, blah. When the kidney burst, it basically just put me on a trajectory from bad to worse. Like, as dramatic as it sounds, like, ultimately, because the kidney transplant went wrong, they gave me loads of blood transfusions. I had, like, 37 blood transfusions, something like that. Yeah. I'm very lucky to be here. But anyway, normally when you're on dialysis, they try not to give you blood transfusions because it makes it harder to get another kidney.

Oli Anderson:
The average waiting time in the UK to get a kidney transplant is about two years. I've been on dialysis for 17 years because that original kidney transplant was 15 years ago. Because I had all these blood transfusions, got, like, an immunity, basically, to, like, pretty much. I'll reject every kidney that they give me. It's very hard for me to get one. Yeah. So for that reason, I've been on dialysis ever since. At first, that was one of those things where it's like, oh, my God.

Oli Anderson:
Like, if I look at who I was 15 years ago when I realized I might still be on dialysis today, there was so much resistance. Like, all of these thoughts that you get, like, these kind of ego driven thoughts. I say ego driven because I think the ego is anything that causes you to resist the way that things actually are and to get you to try and control things that you can't control. What I've learned is it was totally out of my control. And actually being where I am now is actually amazing. Like, even though I'm still on dialysis, like, I've got my own business and, like, I go hiking every weekend and, like, you know, everything's awesome. And when I was there, like, I was just really kind of in this emotional quagmire of resistance. I was just thinking, like, I'm being punished for something, or it's so unfair that this has happened and all of these interpretations that we try and put on the situation to try and deal with our emotional stuff, like, really what I've learned is, like, all of those thoughts were stopping me from really just embracing a deep acceptance of the situation and the way that things were.

Oli Anderson:
The reason I was resisting it was because if I did actually accept that new reality that I'd found myself in, I had to let go of that old identity that I become attached to, of you know, myself who was traveling in Tokyo and doing all these things, or, you know, even just the vision that I might have had for the future and all those different things that we get attached to our expectations and ideals and all that stuff. And it just went. And, like, by letting it go, I found a strange kind of piece. Like, I don't want to sound like I'm trying to be all enlightened or something, but, like, the end result of letting go of all of that stuff and just accepting things for what they were really, like, freed me. And I started to feel, like, better than I'd ever felt. Like, literally, I had so much energy and, like, I was just focused on where I wanted to go. And I was really thinking about, like, okay, if I've. Back then, I didn't think I'd still be alive now.

Oli Anderson:
Like, to be totally honest, like, I. I thought I was in the worst, worst case scenario. It's like, oh, my God, this kidney transplant's gone wrong. And the life expectancy on dialysis is five years. Back then I didn't know that it's five years because most people on dialysis are already really old. So I was thinking, oh, my God, I'm going to be dead in five years. What we're gonna do? And, like, at first I just had to really confront all of my fears, but then I realized, like, you can't lose anything real. All the things I was afraid of losing, I'd already lost anyway because they were just things I was attached to because of my, like, ego, basically.

Oli Anderson:
I keep using this word ego. And ultimately, that all taught me about realness because it showed me that a lot of the things we're holding onto are not real at all. But we give them so much importance. We put these fragments on a pedestal and we treat them as the whole of life. But the whole of life is this relationship with life where life is constantly calling you out of yourself. It's constantly calling you forward. But we don't, it doesn't always meet our expectations of what that might look like. And if we can let go of our own expectations and we can learn to really go with what actually is, then it always leads to this place of wholeness because it always the final lesson, like I keep saying, I guess it's always acceptance.

Oli Anderson:
And the only thing you can accept is the truth. And the only thing that is going to happen if you accept the truth is it's going to connect you to other people and life because we're all sharing this crazy human experience, but it's going to connect you to yourself as well. And then you can kind of combine the two and you can kind of create a purpose for yourself, I guess, wherever. This sounds very dramatic, but you're using the time that you have to serve others and to just be in life without worrying about life. I can rant and rave all day about this.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. What a beautiful story about your journey. And it is one that I think is a bit familiar, perhaps not in the health condition itself, but in the fact that I think a lot of people go through life and then they build up ego and they get to this place where they look back and they're like, I just feel like there's such dissonance between the real me and the one that is for show or the one that is status oriented or the one that keeps striving for this, something which is leaving me feeling unfulfilled. And so what you were able to do through horrible situation, frankly. But it is one that I think when you are faced with death, when you are faced with health, there's this very profound statement from the Romans. It might have been Marcus Aurelius time, which is memento mori, when you're probably familiar with it, because I know you love stoicism, which is, we're all going to die, remember? We are all going to die.

Oli Anderson:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
And it's not to be morose or it's not to be morbid. It's really just to say, you know what? Enjoy your life. Be real. Life is too short to live somebody else's life or to not live it with gusto to the way that you want to be. Life is too short. So remember, we're all going to die, and then at the end, you can't take it with you. So why not do this work now? You don't have to wait for some traumatic event or some precipice dark night of the soul in order to do it. You can start where you are and really continue to have.

Jennifer Norman:
Have a relationship with yourself, where you know yourself.

Oli Anderson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
I certainly felt like I wasn't able to do that for the longest time. Being in the beauty industry, it's nothing but facade for a lot of it, and you end up feeling like your life becomes a bit superficial. So I'd love to turn to how you coach, and I know that you've written books on this, about how the steps that you put forth to your clients and to people who are reading your book, how does that help to get back to real? I know that a lot of people will say, I don't even know who I am. I don't even know. Like, when you say, who are you? They're like, I have no clue. You know, they'll say, I'm an accountant. I'm a banker. I'm a...They'll point to their occupation as to who they are, but that's not really them. How do you point them back to them?

Oli Anderson:
Yeah. So normally it goes through a process of awareness, acceptance and action. The first step to change, like in any transformational journey, is always awareness. That's a common thing in the world of coaching. And I'm. You can't really take anyone on these journeys or guide them without raising their awareness. Ultimately, it comes down to raising awareness of exactly what you just said, which is the distinction between the kind of superficial or conditioned version of ourselves that we have created to just survive life running around on autopilot versus who we really are. When we slow down and we test our assumptions about all of the things we've been chasing and that we think are going to bring meaning to our lives, what you said about death is really important.

Oli Anderson:
Memento Mori. I think a lot of people, because they're running around as a consequence or reaction to their own conditioning, they've never really just paused to reflect on what it is that they really want. A quote that I'm always throwing out is by Abraham Maslow. He said, "Knowing what we really want in life is a rare psychological achievement." And I think that's so true. Like most people, it's not that it's difficult to find out what we really want. It's just that we just. We take it for granted.

Oli Anderson:
We think that the values of society, like the ones that I'm sure you've kind of witnessed people chasing in the beauty industry, for example, or around profit and greed and all these kind of capitalistic values that we tend to chase as a culture. We think that they're our values, but they're not our values. They're just something that we've taken on board because of our culture, and then we've internalized it as our own kind of compass. And so we've all got this thing inside us that's just leading us in totally the wrong direction. And then what happens, because we're following somebody else's path, is we end up in a situation where we just feel completely restless. We feel like there's an itch that needs to be scratched, but we don't know how to scratch it. And we feel like we might be getting results in life like maybe we've got a nice job or we've got a partner or whatever it is that we thought we wanted, but it's only at that superficial level. And the reason it's superficial is because we've only been setting goals for ourselves at the level of the identity we've picked up because of the world and our external conditioning.

Oli Anderson:
And so for me, in answer to your question, the first step of the journey is just looking at some of our blind spots, raising awareness of some of the maybe unconscious patterns, like the things that keep showing up in our lives that are trying to teach us things. For example, the same relationship problems popping up again and again, the same emotional problems popping up again and again, looking at things where maybe we're telling ourselves that we want something. So maybe common ones are like, people might tell themselves that they want to start a new business. It never gets any traction. They might tell themselves that they want to find a new partner, but they keep meeting people and then pushing them away. Or it's the wrong kind of person. Maybe they keep telling themselves they want to like get healthy and lose weight or whatever it is, but it just doesn't happen. If there's something like that where people are constantly telling themselves that they want a specific result but they're not getting it, then you can bet your bottom dollar that there's some unconscious intention beneath the surface that is actually driving them much more.

Oli Anderson:
So, for example, if you take the common example of people want to get more clients for their business and they're always talking about doing it, but they never actually do it, probably they've got an unconscious intention that's causing them to avoid the fear of being seen as an imposter, or they're trying to avoid being salesy and all that kind of stuff, showing up as a cheesy salesperson or whatever it is, the unconscious intentions are always going to lives much more. If you can understand that. Then you can start to kind of reverse engineer the relationship that people have with themselves at the level of their beliefs and their identity and see what's actually driving them. And then you can start bringing that to the surface. That's going to allow, basically, I'm going to start running a little bit now. It's going to allow the shadow self to start emerging. Ultimately, this is where my rant begins about the shadow self and the ego. So the way that I look at this part of raising awareness is understanding that the ego is something that we've created as a reaction to our underlying shame, guilt and trauma.

Oli Anderson:
Shame is probably the most common driver in the world. When people are driven by shame, what they end up doing is they abolish or try to hide from the things that were shamed in the first place. So let's take something simple. Let's say somebody was a kid and they were painting pictures and they showed it to their parents, and their parents said, oh, this is, this is terrible. This is the worst picture I've ever seen in my life. And because of that, the kid becomes ashamed of their creativity. They, you know, they screw up the artwork, they throw it in the bin, and then 30 years later, down the line, they're still detached from their creativity because they've created a version of themselves, like an ego version, that is a fragmented version of who they are. Because they split off from their creativity when they were age seven or wherever.

Oli Anderson:
That creativity never went anywhere because it's real. I believe what's real is always real. We're just either connected to it or we're not. And so when you start raising awareness of the identities that people have created for themselves, I keep doing this little box thing because I see the ego as like a little box. When you raise awareness of that and you start to break through some of the cracks and look at some of the unconscious stuff that's going on, these real things start emerging again because they. There's a common saying, like, it's always getting thrown around in coaching circles. Emotions are energy, emotion. The thing that stops the emotions moving is the ego.

Oli Anderson:
The only thing you can really block an emotion with is like a mental construct, which is what the ego is made of, fragmented emotional construct. And so once you start poking around with that stuff and raising awareness that it's not real, well, then the real stuff starts moving again. That gets you onto the second stage. So I've just spent loads of time rambling about the awareness part. Sorry. But once you've raised that awareness, you have to start accepting the things that your lack of awareness was blocking. And that means that you're ultimately going to become reconnected to your real values, your real intentions, your real drives, all these things that have probably always been there, but they've just been blocked behind this kind of the mental filter of the ego that we became attached to and started to identify with. Once you become accepting of that stuff, that's when you can start taking action, like real action, because the action that you're going to take is going to be aligned with your newfound awareness, but also with an acceptance of who you really are.

Oli Anderson:
And even though I'm describing it as kind of a linear process. Awareness, acceptance, action. It's kind of cyclical. Like you can hop around through these stages and all that kind of stuff, but ultimately the path is kind of linear. Like you have to start with acceptance and you have to finish in this place if you ever can really finish. That's a strange word to use, but you to end up in this place where you're constantly taking this inspired action that is aligned with what you found when you started digging beneath the surface and sort of raised awareness and got that foundation in relation to wholeness and fragmentation. I have really found that a lot of the start of these journeys, if someone comes to you for coaching or something like that, they're coming for a reason. Normally they're not 100% happy with life and everything's puppy dogs and rainbows.

Oli Anderson:
They've got that restless feeling or they've got that itch, or they've reached some kind of a crunch point where they feel like they need to, to change their lives. And so they really. They're gonna have some kind of emotional symptoms, like maybe they're beating themselves up or they're anxious or they feel like they're missing out on their potential or whatever it is. Those symptoms only exist at the start of these transformational journeys because they become fragmented within themselves and they're holding on to this little box, the ego, which is built of fragments. Anyway, once they go through the process and they start accepting themselves and letting go of the beliefs, etc. That are causing them to be fragmented, they really tune into this natural drive towards wholeness that we all have anyway. I have really found in my own life and with my clients that once you start to accept yourself and you stop blocking that self acceptance with the ego stuff, then it kind of just starts happening organically anyway, because we're all constantly moving towards wholeness. We have this inner drive to move towards wholeness, which is just connection to ourselves, connection to other people and connection to life.

Oli Anderson:
When we're resisting it because of our fear ultimately, and lack of trust in ourselves and life because of the ego stuff, that's when we keep clinging to all these unreal things. And that causes this inner friction that causes the kind of problems people have at the start of these transformational journeys. So for me, awareness, acceptance and action, and it's all just about moving deeper and deeper into the truth. When you get to the end stage, you trust yourself more and you trust life more and so you can take action that's more real, which means it's going to get you results because it's not all filtered through the ego stuff.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow. Thank you for that very deep explanation. And this is, this, ladies and gentlemen, is very deep work. As you can tell. This is something that not enough people in the world go through. In terms of an exercise, I think that there's a lot of unconsciousness, a lot of autopiloting, where we just kind of do as we're told, or we go through life thinking that life is supposed to be a certain way and we're not supposed to rock the boat. And then we kind of feel like, who am I? What, you know, gets into this existential crisis. And so finding this discovery about patterns, things that come up issues, concerns, blockages, is really, really important for you to be able to know yourself a little bit better.

Jennifer Norman:
Coaching definitely helps to be able to uncover that, because it's not easy to do by yourself. I don't know if anybody really has the discipline enough to just sit with themselves and go through shadow work and then be able to map out all of the steps to take inspired action towards yourself so that you're not barking up the wrong tree, you're ending up on the right tree, the one that was meant for you, and you can live your life, life to your fullest. Expression of self actualization, as it were.

Oli Anderson:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
And the point that you brought up, as far as it being a continuous cycle, this is true. It's not like a one and done sort of situation, because it's a practice. It's like life is a journey. It's a practice. It's something that we continuously will check and nurture and grow and evolve, and every day there'll be a new challenge or something to think about. And even when you're halfway up that tree, you might be like, oh, there's a branch. Do I go take that branch? Is that the right one? Or, you know, there's always decision points, there's always forks in the road. And if you are able to do that work, that gut check, that will automatically tell you, no, this is right for me, you'll be on the right path.

Jennifer Norman:
Rather than feeling like you've veered off onto a life that really wasn't your own, I think that it's interesting that some people might say, okay, well, I'm taking inspired action, and maybe those actions are leading me to want the bigger house. And then they might step back and say, well, isn't that ego? Aren't all of the things that I might be be craving in life? Like, how do I know if they are truly real, or if I'm just trying to put a ruse over what that is with this ego that will always be with us. Because if you're human, you have an ego. We do, in a way, to survive and to know the difference between Oli and Jen. So can you describe how you coach people to continue on a path of true, inspired action?

Oli Anderson:
Yes. So I think it's really important what you just said, that we all have an ego. I think we can't kill the ego. Like, I'm not one of those super spiritual guys that thinks we can just dissolve the ego into absolute nothingness and just obliterate ourselves. The ego is useful because it helps us to survive in the world. It only causes problems when we think that it's who we are and we become attached to it and treat it as a fixed entity. I think we need to put it in the backseat so that our realness and experience of being is kind of in the driving seat and moving us forward. I think if we can do that, then we can get to the point that I think you're kind of alluding to around inspired action.

Oli Anderson:
Where. Have you heard of the taoist concept of Wu Wei? Where. Yeah, so it's where we. We can basically learn to want things without wanting them, and it allows us to stay in the flow. For me, it all comes down, really, when moving forward to two different states. We're either flowing with life, which means that we're responding to life as it happens. We're navigating based on, you know, whatever obstacles arise, whatever branches need climbing as we go up that tree, we're responding from a place of wholeness and being grounded in our understanding of the truth, versus the alternative version, which is where we're forcing things. Forcing means that we want something so much that we become so focused, obsessed with the goal that we can actually look at life as it's happening around us and be engaged in the process of living.

Oli Anderson:
And so, for me, when I'm coaching people around the challenge that you just mentioned, which is wanting more things in life or moving towards more things in life without taking ourselves out of this process of moving towards wholeness and maintaining perspective on the way there, I basically tell people two things. One is that once you know what the goal is, so say you want that new house or you want that Lamborghini or whatever, once you know what the goal is, you can actually let go of the goal. You can detach from the goal, you can take your identity out of getting there, and you can realize that whether you reach that goal or not has absolutely no effect on your levels of self acceptance. Like, actually, whether you get that thing or you don't get that thing, you're still whole, you're still connected to truth, you're still connected to life, and it has no effect on how valuable you are as a person or your self esteem or any of that stuff. If you do think reaching that goal is going to hold the key to you finally feeling good about yourself, are you finally feeling like other people are going to respect you and you're going to get all this external validation or whatever it is that you think it's going to do for you, then ultimately you've turned the goal into a kind of magical unicorn. And you're projecting all of the qualities that you've denied within yourself onto this thing. And it's just another way of keeping it at arm's length, I think, so that you don't have to face your shadow self. Basically, what I'm saying is all the things that are hiding in the shadow, like, say, self worth, which was there anyway until you became split from yourself and fragmented.

Oli Anderson:
Your self worth is always there, your self acceptance is always there. But because your ego at present is detached from it, it puts it onto that goal. So it puts it onto that house, whatever it is, and says, right, if you can get this house, finally, you can feel good about yourself. So basically, if we can accept that that is our goal, but instead detach from the goal, take our emotional goodwill towards ourselves out of the equation and just focus on the process of moving towards it, then in a strange kind of way, the process of living becomes both the goal and the process, if that makes sense. Like we're making it all just one experience, rather than having this kind of goal, just hovering above us as something that may or may not solve our, our problems. I think if you can do that and you can take your identity out of it, then the second thing, of the two things I was going to say. So the first thing is detaching, taking your identity away from the goal. The second thing is knowing that if you can't be happy without something, then you won't be happy with it.

Oli Anderson:
So if you're not happy right now because you're detached from yourself, you're not moving towards wholeness and blah, blah, blah. If you're not happy without it, then you're not going to be happy with it. You'll probably be more unhappy because you'll be. Yeah, you'll be worried about losing it, or you'll be worried about someone taking it away, or you'll still have this inner void because you haven't done this inner work that we're talking about. So if you understand that, then you can basically flip the script. You can start to do the inner work first, because you can always start to cultivate that healthy relationship with yourself. And if you take it to level of values and awareness and all the things we're talking about, probably you're chasing that goal, that house, because it's the embodiment of certain values. Values can be kind of manifest in all kinds of different ways, myriad ways.

Oli Anderson:
So say you want to get that house because it's going to give you a sense of. Of freedom or something. Well, that value of freedom, there'll be things right now that you can do anyway to still bring that same value into your life. And so if you understand it at that level, you don't need the house. It's just something that you want as an expression of yourself. And so if you can see it as that, an expression of what's already real, instead of something that's going to make you feel real, then I think it solves that problem of inspired action, because you're not taking the action to compensate for anything. You're just taking the action to express more of what you already have and what you're already grateful for. And I think it's, if you can understand it like that, then you've got some real perspective.

Oli Anderson:
That's how I see it.

Jennifer Norman:
Amazing. So I want to pause there for a moment because I think here is the place where we can identify for some of our listeners how they might be feeling or thinking in order to be able to build this kind of self awareness of how they're living their lives, the choices that they're making. So the first thing is, if you're doing something because you want to impress, because you want to, you're like, okay, if I get this house or if I get this Lamborghini, you know, people are going to be like, whoa, look at that person. Oh, and envy, if you're doing it because you want to be people to envy you or to be jealous of what you have, that is an ego based decision that is probably not the real you coming through. It's probably something that is covering up or overcompensating for a deficiency in a feeling of self worth or shame or lack that you're feeling, feeling inside. If you are going through the motions and saying, like, well, I'm a young kid. I just got out of college, I'm trying to get a job, and this is all that's here for me. And so I must go into this clerical job because it's entry level.

Jennifer Norman:
It's all that I can do. If you go into that and you're saying, well, this is my life path now, without saying like, okay, well, this is a stepping stone because life is never going to be perfect unless you get to that place where you've ultimately made it perfect. But so long as you're still putting out those cues that I really want to do music, I really want to do art, or I really want to be a scientist, like, this is my choice, then you will be able to take inspired action while you've got this day job, which is going to help get you to where you want to be. And knowing that it's just temporary, this is really just you being able to manage through life as life is happening, to get to a place that is more a full expression of yourself. If you feel a compulsion that I want to, if you're a boy and you want to wear makeup, and it's something that, like, your family absolutely would be horrified by. If you're doing, if you're not being artistic, if you're not being creative, if you're feeling stymied because of what others might think, that is also an indication that you're not being real with yourself and you probably know that already. But finding avenues of places where you can still love those people around you and also live out to your fullest expression. And so there are a few cues that will ultimately get you there.

Jennifer Norman:
Health and happiness and your relationships and your feelings of connection. Like, if you're feeling like your decisions are positively integrating with those senses of connectivity, then you're on the right track. If, however, you're feeling like it's depleting your health in the long run, it's depleting your relationships in the long run, because there's always going to be ebbs and flows here and there in the course of life. But if overall your actions are creating rifts or they're creating positive thriving, that's when you know that you're on a sense of real force yourself. Do you have anything to add to that, ali?

Oli Anderson:
No. I love everything you just said. I think that's the ultimate barometer. If your relationships are thriving, including a relationship with yourself, and you keep flowing, then that's the key indicator that you are on the right path, that you're moving with reality instead of against it, the opposite of that way of being is that you're so attached to kind of proving yourself to the world or impressing people with whatever goals it is you set for yourself are that you're not flowing, but you're constantly, like, hitting a brick wall. You're constantly getting feedback from life that something needs to change, but you're not making those changes. I think that's why a lot of people end up burned out in many cases, not all cases, because they're so attached to needing to show up in a certain way so that they can be seen in a certain way by others. That life is constantly. It's asking them to course correct, but they don't necessarily learn the lessons and let go and start moving in a slightly different direction.

Oli Anderson:
You can still move towards the same vision overall, but they don't make those little coarse corrections and adjustments that are going to allow them to go internally so they can get better results externally. But ultimately, yeah, it all comes down to flow.

Jennifer Norman:
I think it's interesting, the conversation about flow. I know that within a lot of the spiritual community, there is a feeling like, oh, if it's hard, because life isn't supposed to be hard, like, then you're not in flow or you're not living your truth. And I would like to counter that, because I think that certainly my perspective is that life shouldn't be about suffering. Like, I don't think that you should suffer through life. However, there are going to be moments of life where you're building skill, where you're obtaining resources, going out and hunting for your food is not an easy thing. But you can say, I'm enjoying the process of doing it. It's not easy, but I really feel like it's fulfilling and it's rewarding. The work unto itself is the reward.

Jennifer Norman:
Then if you can look at it that way, and if you feel that way about it, then I think that you're probably on the right track. If you're shunning hard work, or if you're shunning anything that isn't flow, then that is going to be a bit more difficult to survive in as a human on earth.

Oli Anderson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, 100%. Like, I think some people are so open minded that their brains fall out when it comes to the flow stuff, and it becomes a. They have, like, this idealized version of what it means to flow with life. That actually is a way of keeping them in a kind of passive state. Like, ultimately, it's a way of avoiding the law of cause and effect. The way that I like to describe what you just talked about is that initially, in those initial stages, there's, like, three little shifts. They're all the same thing, but you have to go from force before you can flow.

Oli Anderson:
You have to put effort in before it becomes effortless. And you have to put conscious attention on things before it becomes unconscious. So you reach that stage of unconscious competence. And I'm glad you brought that up, obviously, because I was sounding like one of those hippies there where it's like, you know, we can just let go and flow with the universe. Actually, to start building momentum, you have to put that effort in. You have to force things a little bit in the sense of giving them a nudge or overcoming your old habitual ways of thinking and believing that are stopping you from getting to that point or, like, upskilling and developing certain qualities. And I think it comes down to the three levels that always pop up in coaching. The comfort zone, the stretch zone, and the panic zone.

Oli Anderson:
So if. Yeah, I don't know if you've heard that before. That's just a thing that I heard somewhere. But, like, the comfort zone, obviously, we all know what that is. If you're in the comfort zone and you believe in flow, well, you're going to try and find ways to make flow seem like it's, you know, the universe trying to keep you in your comfort zone because you don't want to face your emotional stuff and you don't want to grow through whatever it is you need to grow.

Jennifer Norman:
And that becomes an epidemic of unresiliency.

Oli Anderson:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
Like, softness is because you haven't built up that callus, as it were, to life.

Oli Anderson:
Yeah, yeah. And, like, actually building up that callous is what allows you to kind of really keep flowing, I guess, because you can see things. A callous just means, I guess, you've been exposed to reality so many times that it doesn't bother you anymore, if that makes sense. Yeah, so I was gonna. Yeah, yeah. Like, that's a perfect example. Like, actually a very perfect example. Cause, like, when you're first learning the guitar, it's not like you just pick it up and you can magically play, like, I don't know, it's great symphony or something like that.

Oli Anderson:
You have to put effort into it. You learn the chords, you learn the scales, you learn all the finger positions, etcetera. And then eventually, you get to this point where the effort you put in becomes effortless. Like, ultimately, that's like a law of life, I suppose. Like, if you want to get the results, you have to work with life. And that's a great example of the kind of universal things we all have to deal with.

Jennifer Norman:
Right? Right. And again, not to try to conflate the idea of the suffering and that aspect, that life is always going to be that way. It's that when you're able to take inspired action and know that it's something that is really based on something that you love and something that really lights you up, then you'll be willing to put in the hours. You'll be willing to build up those calluses on your fingers to start playing. You'll start tracking your time and analyzing. You'll start measuring your improvements. You'll start getting. Getting that positive momentum to that place where things are getting to flow.

Jennifer Norman:
And then flow is where you're performing. It's not where you're learning and it's not where you're building up your talents and you're building up your skill in order to arrive at a place of excellence. Because I, and truly, I think that what we all want to do is strive for excellence in our life that is aligned with our inner beings, that is aligned with our realness. And so getting yourself on track is the first step. Like building that awareness so that you can build out that life of your own creation that really does express and manifest into the way that you want and that you can feel like that ultimate joy. I think that is where this work can be truly beneficial. And then after that, I know that some of the things that you do, Ali, are you work with brands and businesses because you are a creative performance coach. And you do help people to really kind of build out companies or brands or associations, extensions of themselves, which are reflections of their true nature.

Jennifer Norman:
Can you walk us through the process that you use with your clients to help them on this path of creative performance?

Oli Anderson:
Yeah. So the short version of that is, I've got a tool that I created that I use with my business coaching clients. It's called the Truth Bomb Brand Design Canvas. If people google it, you can download it for free. There's like a, an online tutorial I made that walks you through it. Ultimately, the whole point of this tool is helping people to design something, a creative project or a business, that is aligned with two things. First of all, who they really are and the things that they care about.

Oli Anderson:
So their realness, let's say, just for brevity. The second thing is that it's aligned with human nature. Human nature in this case, simply means that human beings are tribal creatures. So you need to design around a community, but also, human beings are all on this path that we keep talking about of going deeper and deeper into wholeness. And so if you can understand that human beings are constantly growing and evolving and that your creative business, or whatever business it is, can feed into that growth process, then you can create something that's much more valuable for your audience, basically. So this tool that I use at the start of the the business coaching journey is the truthbomb brand design canvas. Like I said, it goes through four different stages. Substance, style, communication and community.

Oli Anderson:
It all comes down to the substance arm. Ultimately, substance is really just diving deep and figuring out what your business really means in terms of realness to other people. So the first question is basically a bunch of questions at each level. The first question is about values. So it all comes back to values, really. If you know your real values, then ultimately you can design those values into everything else to do with your business. You can design it into your marketing, you can design it into the service delivery, you can design it into the way that you relate to people, the way that you communicate with people, etc. So if you understand your values, that's the starting point of substance.

Oli Anderson:
There's other stuff in there, like what are you really helping people with? It could be anything really. Like, let's say somebody has a coffee shop. That's a very simple kind of business, right? If somebody goes to your coffee shop, they're not just going to your coffee shop for a cup of coffee. They're going because it's an experience to reconnect to their friends and to have some deep conversations and maybe to be seen at a certain place in a certain way and etcetera. If you dig deep into what you're really providing people and you understand that and you're aware of it, because again, awareness, acceptance, action, you can deliver to people something that they actually really connect with and that they really want, but also that's going to help them grow in the way they want to. So I'll give you the abridged version. So substance is what the business really means to you and the people that you serve. Style is basically just about like the more standard branding.

Oli Anderson:
So what does it look like? How do you take that substance and translate it into a style that is going to resonate with the people in your audience? I often describe it as like the bat signal. So like the bat signal calls Batman. If you understand your substance, then you can design your branding in such a way that when people see it, it's going to attract the right people. So for example, if you're a creative person and you've got a creative business, you're trying to attract other creative people. There's no point having like a really dull logo that would look belong to an accountancy agency or something like that. It needs to reflect who you are. So that's the abridged version of that. Communication is looking at the messages that you can kind of elicit from your substance.

Oli Anderson:
One thing that I like to talk about is polarizing premises. Like, if you understand the substance of your business and what you're trying to, like, do for the world and help people to achieve in the world, there are going to be some things that you have to share that not everybody agrees with. A lot of people try and shy away from that stuff, especially if they've, you know, they've got a creative business and they're making YouTube videos. Whatever it is, they don't always share, like, the messages that are going to have the most impact and that are going to resonate the most. But if you understand the things that are going to polarize, then you're more likely, obviously, to turn some people off, but you're also going to turn the right people on and they're going to be able to relate to you. So communication is about getting those kind of messages out there again, go back to substance, and then community is like building a community around those values and the things that you're doing so that you can help people to build connections, which is ultimately what the community part should be about, I think.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, I have a feeling so many people are going to be so interested to learn more about you, Oli. So you've got to tell everybody where they can find you and learn more about. About your work.

Oli Anderson:
So my website is just my name, olianderson.co.uk. I'm on Instagram, although I haven't been posting that much on there recently. But people can send DM's on there. I've got a YouTube channel. If you search for my name, I'm on there. But yeah, the main point of contact is probably my website. I've got a podcast as well. I should say that it's called Creative Status. It really is just about exploring what it means to be real. Like, how can we unblock ourselves in the way we've been talking about using creativity as a vehicle in most cases. Although to be honest, I've kind of deviated from the creativity thing a little bit and I just end up focusing on the, you know, the healing slash, realness, wholeness stuff. But anyway, yeah, that's available on all podcast platforms. I was a bit of a tongue twister and yeah, creative status, that's what it's called.

Jennifer Norman:
So, yeah, excellent. Excellent. Well, Oli Anderson, thank you so much for all of this incredible information that you've been able to share. It's really very important work that you're doing, and I so appreciate all of the things that you're doing to help people to find their real self, and I know that your impact is extremely profound. You've definitely opened my eyes to a lot of different ideas and concepts, and so I'm really looking forward to other people getting to know you. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.

Oli Anderson:
Jennifer, thank you so much for just listening to me ramble about all this stuff and letting me come on your podcast. It's been awesome. So, yeah, thank you so much.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, follow rate and review us wherever you stream podcasts The Human Beauty Movement is a community based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.