Are you who you want to be? I'm guessing probably not.

For this question to be truthfully answered, it has to be followed up with another question, first.

Are you living authentically? 

Well, first, let us define ‘authentic’ —>  “not false or copied; genuine; real”

At first thought, most of us will probably say ‘Yes, of course, I’m living authentically.” 

Be honest with yourself.

Do you struggle with low self-esteem, fear of judgement, or hold a heavy desire to be liked by others? 

All of these feelings are rooted in us not accepting some part of ourselves, leading us to crave and seek validation from others.

When we are in this space, we will often deny the parts of ourselves that desire expression due to fear of rejection.

We live our lives behind a facade.

We can not live as who we truly want to be if we are not living in accordance with our authentic selves. 

I want to share with you two powerful habits I recommend you adopt if you want to live authentically into who you truly want to be.

How do I know If  I am Living authentically?

“You can tell when you’re saying something that’s not authentic by feeling out whether or not it makes you strong.” - Jordan Peterson

Two important aspects of being authentic are mentioned in this quote.

What we ‘say’ and how we ‘feel. ’

Why is what we say important —> The power of words has been highly downplayed in our modern times.

The words we use hold energy through the intentions we place with them. 

Our word is our power to create and express our creativity.  

It is through the word that we manifest everything. 

Regardless of what language we speak, our intent manifests through the energy our words carry.

Our subconscious does not know the difference between truth and joke.

It takes whatever we say as truth.

What we dream, what we feel, and who we are, will all be manifested through the words we use.

The Words we use will shape our reality.

Why is what we feel important —> That feeling we get in our gut is more than just that, a ‘gut feeling.’

That’s our intuition.

Sometimes, it can be masked by our ego.

Want to know a simple trick on how to tell them apart?

Our Intuition pulls us towards something in alignment with us. 

Our ego pushes us to run away.

We must relearn how to trust our intuition.

That feeling is when we instinctively know when something we are doing is right, wrong or not in alignment.

If you want to find out more about how to live authentically with higher emotional intelligence, reach out to me here to have a free no obligation conversation to establish a sense of direction. My gift to you!

How do I live authentically?

Glad you asked! There are two habits I recommend adopting to begin living an authentic life.

The first habit I recommend adopting is keeping these powerful self-reflection questions in your back pocket for whenever those unsettled twists hit your gut;
—> “Is this who I want to be? ” & 
—> “How do I WANT to show up right now?”

Sounds pretty straightforward, right?

These questions give us space to marinate in our thoughts.

Taking inventory if our words and feelings are all in alignment with our actions. 

The second habit I recommend adopting is some form of Inner child work.

Inner child work, or inner child healing, is a way to address our needs that weren't met as a child. 

We all have a younger part of ourselves that we feel wasn’t quite loved the right way or the way we feel we 'should' have been loved. 

Even if we had the best parents in the world.

By dedicating this time to go within, we begin peeling back the layers of our everyday coping habits; like being avoidant or seeking modalities to numb our feelings. 

Fully accepting and integrating our subconscious into consciousness is the best way to process, heal and move forward.

“An authentic life is one where our needs are met, we feel fulfilled, we experience self-actualization, and we flourish.”
-Positive Psychology

Without inner child work, we would forever have unmet needs remaining unfulfilled in certain areas of our younger selves.

These unmet needs trickle into our present moment and impact how we show up in the world.

If you need a new inner child work habit, click here to set up a call to discuss how it works, and how it can change your life!

- Dillon "Wolverine" Andres

How to break the Victim Mindset and find our Authentic Self.

First off, what does it mean to have a victim mindset?? To put it in the simplest of terms, it's having the mentality that our current condition of life is someone else's fault or responsibility. Have you ever blamed someone else for how you're feeling? It's not something that's uncommon. Our ego likes to place outside blame when we are in a state of vulnerability. However, it's important for us to remember to not let this belief overtake our conscious beliefs and run away from us. Even though there seems to be a lot of societal conditioning currently being pushed to make victim mentality the new expected status quo.

Our quality of life is determined by the quality of the relationship we have with ourselves.

Are you dealing with feeling inadequate? Or maybe a feeling of abandonment? Scarcity?

These are a few of the insecurities that I, myself, have had to work through most of my life. The thoughts I would attach to these feelings I allowed to dictate the quality of my life. I bet you can guess how far I got with this mentality.

I blamed everyone and everything outside of myself for how miserable I felt. It wasn't until I learnt this one secret on how to redirect my thoughts to the ones I wanted to be having that my life changed. It's called "breaking the cycle."

***We break the cycle of our thought patterns and interject it with the thought that we want.***

That's it. Yet, many of us out there, including myself, make this so much harder than it needs to be. It really is this simple, however, it can be tedious. We have to do this practice over and over again until one day we forget that we didn't have to mentally interject a new thought. It begins to happen automatically. Then we realize the new thought habit actually stuck in our mind without any effort.

I like to look at our brain as a big telephone operator board from the early years. We would call the operator and they would manually unplug our line and plug it into a new auxiliary. This is how the brain works, through the process of neuroplasticity -The ability of the brain to change in structure or function in response to experience. We rewire our brain to what we want to be thinking about.

The issue is, we have a lifetime of beliefs and what we perceive to be 'supporting factors' of these beliefs, to solidify whatever narrative we are currently telling ourselves. It's a matter of retraining our mind to tell ourselves a different story. To change the identity we're holding onto.

What thought do I want to put in there? Just like breaking a habit of cracking knuckles or trying to quit smoking, we interject the new habit over and over again until we no longer have to do it consciously because the new practice became the new habit.

How do we redirect our thoughts??

It's important to remember that - life just "is." Life is neither good nor bad, however, the way WE perceive it to be makes it so. Holding onto a victim mindset clearly does not serve us. Here are 2 questions we can ask ourselves when we feel as if we are slipping into this mindset that will direct our thoughts in the direction we want them to go through the process of elimination.

1) Does this thought serve me?

When we're in a situation and we begin to feel that 'yuk' in our gut and we want to blame somebody else for how we feel, or a circumstance that happened, or anything along the lines of - "I'm this way because 'this' happened." We ask ourselves, "Does this thought serve me?"

No. No, it probably doesn't. We know that it doesn't, because if the thought served us, we wouldn't have to ask ourselves this question in the first place.

2) Is this belief rooted in love? Or is this belief rooted in fear?

Much like the first question, if we're asking ourselves this question, it's probably fear. Because if it was rooted in love we wouldn't feel any yuck in our guts going on. We tend to ignore the feelings that we get going on in our gut. Trusting our intuition and trusting who we are is a good practice to start.

If we know this thought is out of fear, what are we afraid of?

This is how we start getting down to the core root beliefs.

"Life just 'is.' Life is neither good nor bad, however, the way WE perceive it to be makes it so." (Click to Tweet)

Now that we've established our break in our thought habit cycle, we input the desired thought framed in a scope of growth, abundance, love, opportunity etc. For example, instead of saying "I always seem to be broke," say, "This is not in the budget at this moment." Notice how the second phrase doesn't create a negative identity attachment around the belief of being 'broke' and leaves room for hope and opportunity.

Simple doesn't always mean easy, but I promise you if you stick to this practice - break the thought habit cycle and interject the new desired thought, one day, you will feel that inner peace and freedom in a life you are truly proud of.

Let me know below how this shows up for you!

- Dillon "Wolverine" Andres

Fifteen, Fat and Feeling like a Reject

This was my story about half my lifetime ago. I remember it as if it was yesterday. Standing at the bottom of the stairs in my childhood home staring at myself, shirtless in the mirror. I didn't have words to describe what I was looking at. All I knew was I had to make a change. To this day I can remember the feelings of inadequacy and resentment.

You’re not alone

That was the day I decided I had enough and needed to start making different choices in my life. I had been bullied and bugged for my weight for so long I believed I should have been “numb” to that feeling by that point. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The scars felt just as fresh as the day they were made and it only solidified my identity as a reject each time I was reminded of them. Bullying was only about half of my concern. What really confused me was the lack of feeling accepted. It was fairly simple for me to make friends. Yet, there always seemed to be this lingering feeling that the friendships were formed out of convenience due to growing up in a small town. Don’t get thankful for the memories and lessons learnt. However, with time, that familiar feeling of being an outsider or a black sheep would eventually manifest.

"The scars felt just as fresh as the day they were made and it only solidified my identity as a reject each time I was reminded of them." (Click to Tweet)

How I found my Confidence

I wish I had some sort of “Find your confidence in 7 days,” formula bullshit for you…. but I don’t. Just the simple raw truth, and it’s a truth that not everyone likes.  Are you ready for it?? —------> It takes time, patience, work and the result is based on the effort and intention we put into them. FFS right? Probably an answer you already heard before. Admit it though, there was still a piece of you hoping for an “Easy way.” I get it. However, even though there is no ‘easy’ way,  I’m going to share with you what I believe to be the “3 pillars of well-being”, and the order I discovered how important each of them are:

Physical movement - This one was probably a no brainer. I was fat so I needed to exercise. Lifting weights was my main choice. I discovered a love for pushing my body to see what it could adapt to (sometimes/often way too far). This has looked very different for me over the years as goals changed or shifted. Bodybuilding, powerlifting, and boxing were 3 primary choices. 

What I discovered with this specific pillar was that even though my body was changing and I was feeling better about how I looked, there was still something rooted deep down that was getting at me. It was as if I “plucked the weed from my garden,” but because the root was still there, so was my feeling of inadequacy.

Health - Health is paired with physical movement. Well, I believe it should be anyway. Many people choose to do one or the other. In hindsight, pairing them together is more like multiplying the benefits opposed to simply adding them. Give the body good fuel and performance will increase.  Health includes anything we put into our bodies. Everything. From food to supplements to vitamins to prescriptions. I’m not going to get too deep into diets and whatnot in this article, but I'll leave you with my 3 golden rules;

1) Consume as natural as possible 

2) If ya can’t kill it or grow it, Don’t eat it 

3) Maintain at least an 80/20 ratio

(80% of what you consume will fit directly into the first 2 rules, 20% may fall outside of the guidelines. Stay strict 80% of the time and allow some wiggle room 20%).

That’s it. Pretty simple if you ask me. However, we both know that there are many people out there who like to overcomplicate things in an attempt to ‘reinvent the wheel.’ 

Okay! Now we’re here. I should be feeling amazing, right? Then WTF did I still not feel good enough?! Oh, that’s right… After about 10 years of chasing a feeling of worthiness and happiness through a big bench press, six pack abs or a healthy bowel movement, I realized this one golden nugget that changed my entire life and how I look at it -

**The problem wasn’t the problem. The problem was my relationship to the problem.**  

 Uhmmm, what?? Yeah that’s right, you read that correctly. I realized that if I couldn't cultivate the feeling of ‘good enough’ right now, the 6 pack wasn’t going to do it for me either. I had to change the way I looked at everything. I had to explore the root behind why I didn’t feel good enough. This is when I began to truly understand the importance behind this third pillar of well-being, self awareness. This includes , Emotional, mental and spiritual health. 

Self Awareness - Just like the second ‘health’ pillar, I'm not going to dive too deep here otherwise we’d be here all day. At its core, self awareness is the process of asking ourselves questions to get to the root of how and why our thoughts and feelings are programmed the way they are. Where I personally fell short in this practice for so long was the fact I was asking myself the questions, but I wasn’t actually answering them. I would read all these self help books, watch videos and consume content believing that I would one day be magically “fixed/healed.” Nope. I placed this expectation on myself over and over with no results met other than further frustration and resentment. Boy, I was sure tired of still feeling shitty towards myself. 

It wasn’t until I actually started doing what the self-help books and courses told me to do that I began to feel and see life differently. That’s the key. We ACTUALLY have to take the action needed to create the life we want.   This is self awareness at its core. Ask questions, take action, learn from experience, repeat.

I’ll leave you with this question to ponder on; If I were to give you a book on how to ride a unicycle and you were to read it cover to cover to memorize it, would you know how to ride a unicycle??   No, you wouldn’t. You would understand the process of it. However, until you hop onto that son of a bitch and practice it, you won’t be getting too far. Remember this the next time you hold yourself back because you feel like you don't have everything figured out. How are we supposed to know how to do something if we’ve never done it before? We try something new and unfamiliar,  then we learn from our mistakes when they’re made. Then we do it all over again. 

We can never fail if we never give up.

This was a 15 year process. The importance of each of these 3 pillars was learnt approximately 5 years apart leading to today(the time I’m writing this). In my opinion, start with the 3rd pillar of self awareness. Ask yourself the tough questions and seek answers. Then you won’t waste the same time I did chasing that feeling of adequacy through an ever changing goal. Hell, even commenting below with a question on how to get started would even be considered a step forward. With self awareness, the importance of health and physical movement will be understood and you will be able to actually enjoy your journey to health instead of building resentment.

I understand this feels easier said than done. Just remember this discomfort is simply because the thought of taking action on what we truly want is unfamiliar. That's why people like myself are here. If you are ready to take back and own your life to finally live it the way you truly want to, let's chat, click here to see what kind of magic we can make together.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Don't forget to subscribe for more awesome content 😁