Communication

Communicate Clearly and Confidently

How To Learn Powerful Communication and Leadership Skills

Our ability to communicate authentically with other people is one of the most important life skills that we can possess. We often spend a great deal of our education learning how to analyse, think, solve problems, and understand how things work; but tend to downplay the importance of subjects that teach us how to communicate. The ability to communicate, inspire and influence other people is also a key leadership skill. Whether in business, relationships, or just in our personal lives, our ability to communicate our thoughts, feelings and ideas to other people is absolutely crucial to our success… and ultimately our happiness.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How I Discovered Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

I first came across Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication (NVC) because I wasn’t getting my needs met in relationships with other people, and recognised that the communication skills I had inherited from my parents were terrible. I also wanted a way of communicating that would help me heal some of the pain from my past without forever going to therapy, and reduce the stress I felt around relating to other people.

I was a volunteer crisis counsellor with a local telephone hotline here in Sydney, Australia for 9 years, and the way we related to callers was all based on Rogerian therapy (“Sounds like you feel …”). Marshall Rosenberg studied with Carl Rogers and used Rogers’ empathy model as the basis for NVC, adding the concept of needs as the underlying basis for feelings. So when I came across NVC it was a natural fit for me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Help Your Adult Child With A Mental Illness

I often meet parents whose adult children who are suffering from a mental illness such as anxiety, depression or anorexia, or who are suicidal. When I hear these parents talk about how they’re dealing with this situation, they often appear very stoic. They say things like “I need to be strong in order to support my son”, or remark that “I’ve told them that they are very strong”.

At the same time, I often notice my own feelings of emotional disconnection around these same parents during our interactions. They often talk a lot about themselves in great analytical detail but without much real emotional engagement, and rarely ask me about my own life or how I feel.

Empathy is the key to helping your adult child with a mental illness

I sense that they’re avoiding something in our conversations: a sense of emotional connection.

Unfortunately these behaviors are exactly the opposite of what a person with a mental illness needs in order to feel the sense of emotional safety, love and support that could potentially heal their brain and help them through a time of deep crisis.

While all parents instinctively love their adult children, mentally ill people need to be surrounded by love and support that they can actually feel.

This means being empathic rather than being stoic.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

10 Flirty Texts She Won’t Ignore

This is a guest post by Monica Viera from The Female Insider.

It can be tough trying to figure out the right thing to text a woman.

How do you strike that balance of showing interest but not scaring her off?

And is there anything you can do with your wording that will increase the chances of her replying?

Here are some suggestions for flirty texts to send her that may help you elicit a positive response.

Each suggestions is classy, sweet, and thoughtful; basically all the traits most women are looking for in a man: (more…)

By Monica Viera, ago

How To Deal With Someone Who is Upset

Many men (and women for that matter) in our society don’t deal with their emotions well. As a result, most of us are walking around carrying an ever-increasing accumulation of emotional baggage that can get triggered even in seemingly innocuous situations.

People who are upset need empathy, not judgement.

For an example where this happened to me, check out my recent story on Why I Got Upset In Guitar Class. I’ll wait here while you do that…

… OK!

Dealing with people who are upset can be very challenging. Part of what makes this challenging is that other people’s emotional upset is likely to trigger our own unresolved emotional baggage. This is why many people try to shut down expressions of unpleasant emotions in other people or resort to “rescuing” behaviors intended to stem the flow of another person’s feelings that are making us uncomfortable. Naive rescuers often think they are “helping” because they see the upset person appearing less outwardly distressed; but the upset person is simply internalizing their emotional pain which has disastrous consequences for everyone in the long run.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome The Fear Of Conflict

I developed an intense fear of conflict when I was young, and it has hung around with me for a long time. The fear evolved as a series of things led to each other: I used to find the fights between my parents very frightening as a kid, and never experienced any of their conflicts actually being resolved. Conflict was scary, and never seemed to have a positive outcome. My parent’s anger during conflict always felt out of control and destructive to me, so I decided that anger was a bad emotion to be suppressed at all costs. Plus my religion taught me to “turn the other cheek” rather than to stand up for myself when I was being treated in ways that I didn’t like. As an awkward, sensitive boy I was bullied mercilessly at my sport-oriented all-boys high school.

When we are afraid of conflict, other people can treat us like this.

When we are afraid of conflict, other people can treat us like this.

So the message I internalised was that conflict was scary and often led to me getting hurt. I developed an intense fear of conflict: Any time I was under threat or being criticised, I would collapse into sadness or be overwhelmed with fear. I didn’t know how to utilise my anger to stand up for myself in times of conflict, nor had I been taught the communication skills to resolve conflict in a win/win manner that left me feeling empowered.

Once we’ve internalised negative experiences of conflict in our nervous systems, our default programming around conflict can be to run away from it, and it can be a challenge to reprogram our brain and nervous system to step up in the face of conflict, instead of fleeing from it.

Standing up for ourselves in the face of conflict is how we overcome the fear of it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome Approach Anxiety

Here is yet another confidence building tip for you. And today you’re going to learn about how to overcome some of that approach anxiety that you may have about talking to women who you haven’t met before.

And the key to overcoming this is to break things down into manageable steps, and the step that I want to talk to you about today is simply giving compliments to women that you see without having any kind of expectation of getting anything back from them or any kind of payback or any they’re going to like you or you’re going to end up talking to them or in bed with them. Just dropping all that stuff.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Read Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton

Hey there, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project. I want to recommend to you one of the best books that I’ve ever read in the field of personal development, and it’s called Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton. This is an absolutely fantastic book to read not just once but to read over and over because I find I keep having experiences in my life where I realize, “Oh, that’s what Blanton was rabbiting on about in that book about being honest.”

So the background of this radical honesty thing is that essentially the author outlines three different levels of honesty that we typically exhibit in our lives with other people. The first one is honesty about facts; things like talking about the weather, different ideas, things that are generally accepted to be true.

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By Graham Stoney, ago