When I was born I was absolutely tiny. The cord that attached me to the placenta had become tangled and the nutrients weren’t making their way through. I was so small I could fit in the palm of my Mum’s hand and spent the first couple of weeks in an incubator.

As I child I really wasn’t into food. I’d probably be described as a fussy eater but I didn’t care for eating the way that others did. I’d run around a million miles an hour and eating just seemed like a waste of time. (Things have changed since then).

So when you combine my poor start in the world and my lack of eating, it’s not surprising I remained vertically challenged. I was always one of the smallest in my year and this became more noticeable during high school and my teenage years. While everyone got their growth spurt, my height continued to plod along in tiny increments.

I remember getting a school photo done when I was in year 9 or 10. We were all lined up in our years and it looked like I’ve been put in the wrong place. I’m barely up to the shoulders of the two guys either side of me.

As I finished up school and went to university I became a bit more interested in food. Pretty terrible fast food to be exact, but I was now eating more. Over this stage I wouldn’t say I had a growth spurt as such but I did continue to get taller well into my early 20s. Still, to this day I’m short and my height is somewhere around 5 foot 7 and 5 foot 8.

My lack of height is extenuated these days because nearly all my male friends are very tall. I have a big friends network and I can think of just three other male friends who are less than six foot. And the majority of them at six foot two or three or more. Some as tall as six foot five.

When we hang out I look like some kind of man-child with all of them towering over me. My gay male friends refer to me as a twink.

I’ve mentioned before about my love for Malcolm Gladwell. In his book Blink he looks at implicit biases that we all have and how height is one such bias. How tall a man is can impact on whether he will pass the interview stage for a job. It will also affect the likelihood of how high he will make it up the organisation ladder.

Gladwell mentions that he’s found, on average, male CEOs were just a shade under six feet tall. The average height for an American male is five foot nine, so as a group, CEOs average three inches higher than the population.

But the statistics get worse for those of us who are on the short side and have high-level positions in corporations in our sights.

As a percentage of the US population, men who are six feet or taller account for just 14.5 percent. But if you are to look at the list of CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies, 58% of them are six feet or over.

In the US population only 3.9 percent are six foot two or taller, but of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, almost a third are six foot two or taller.

They even did some research into height and how it alone (when all other variables are removed) effects earning power. An extra inch of height is worth $789 more to a male’s yearly salary.

So if you compare someone who is six feet tall versus someone who is five feet tall, where they are equally as qualified, the taller counter part will earn on average an extra $5,525 more per year. Over the course of a lifetime this adds up to a lot of extra (or missed out on) money.

There are lots of men from whom their lack of height is something they don’t take well. Personally it doesn’t bother me. When I was younger I probably wished I was more masculine but I’m now at a place where I genuinely don’t give it any thought.

This is a good thing, because whether I like it or not, my height isn’t going to change. *

And my not caring about the situation is even the case when I consider the statistics on earning power. Why? Because while the average person who is shorter earns less, it doesn’t necessarily make this a reality for me. Statistics tells us what is most likely to happen at the population level, it doesn’t tell me what is definitely going to happen in my situation.

There are two important points I want you to get out of this.

The first is that people have to live in the real world. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again “live in the ‘is’ world, not the ‘should be’ world”. I could tell myself all the ways life would be better if I was taller, but even if they were true, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m never going to be taller.

This is especially true when I’m working with women who are trying to give up dieting after decades of being ‘on’ or ‘off’ one diet or another. Or women who are trying to overcome disordered eating and everything that it entails.

They get so angry with themselves that they ever got on this rollercoaster. They regularly ask me where I think their weight would be if they never dieted. Or if I think they’d be having problems with their cycle/thyroid/sleep/[fill in the blank] if they never started dieting.

The simple answer to this question is “who cares”. You don’t have a time machine and can’t travel back and stop yourself making the decisions that you did. So why spend time thinking about the ‘what ifs’ because there is noting to do to change it.

Or people say that they want to make changes but only if certain outcomes occur. That they want to overcome their disordered eating patterns but they don’t want to put on any weight. Or that they want to instantly know when they are hungry or full. Or that they don’t want to have to deal with the anxiety around food or exercise as part of the healing process.

Well regardless of what you want or how they’d like things to happen, reality doesn’t care about how you’d like it to go.

The only way to get over the issues is to go through the stuff (physically, mentally and emotionally) that they’d prefer to avoid. They either go through this or they don’t improve. There’s no magic wand (or magical protocol) that changes this. And if someone is trying to sell it to you, run the other way, as tempting as it may be to “give it a go”.

But as part of living in the real world, don’t make it out worse than it really is. Be careful what stories you are creating around the situation that aren’t necessarily true. Just like statistics on height don’t automatically set my income threshold, whatever you are telling yourself about the situation doesn’t automatically make it true for you.

So much of the discomfort that people suffer is because they don’t want to accept the reality of a situation. They want to rally against things they can’t change (at least in the long term) because of a story they create about this reality that isn’t actually true. When you can see and accept things for what they really are, life gets a whole lot easier.