Helping Men to Be Confident

Basic Emotions

HappinessMany of us guys lack a basic emotional literacy; we have physical sensations when we’re feeling something, but we often don’t know how to identify what we’re feeling, nor are we able to recognise emotions in other people. Being able to identify emotions is the basis of empathy, which is a core communication skill.

In short, most of us don’t understand how our emotions work. Simply learning to identify and express the following basic emotions will improve your relationships dramatically: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How’s Your Mental Health This Week?

It’s Mental Health Week here in Australia, and I’m very pleased to see many organisations and individuals talking about the topic of mental health in order to provide hope for healing and reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness in our community. I’m also a little anxious because the issue is close to my heart. There are many people who suffer from mental illness in my extended family and I know we still have a long way to go as a community in tackling the problems underlying the recent rapid increase in mental illness.

Having suffered from debilitating panic attacks, social phobia, generalised anxiety, depression and chronic fatigue myself, I know that these are real biological conditions which you can’t just “snap yourself out of” or simply wish away with positive thinking or well-intentioned affirmations alone.

Make A Move Towards Better Mental Health

Make A Move Towards Better Mental Health

Especially for men.

Destigmatising mental illness is certainly a step in the right direction, but if we want to help people living with mental illness to free themselves from their suffering, we need to go a step deeper and destigmatise the emotions behind it too.

Let’s face it: Men have feelings, and it’s time we stopped holding them in.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Treat Each Other With Respect

If you have someone in your life who treat you in ways that leave you feeling unsafe, propose introducing these Ground Rules For Emotionally Safe Communication in that relationship.

respectAgreeing to these ground rules in all our communication helps us both to feel safe and have our feelings respected. They are particularly important during challenging conversations when we are triggered with anger, sadness, fear, guilt and/or shame. We commit to applying them even when we are most upset.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Are you feeling stuck, frustrated or blocked?

If you have been feeling stuck, blocked, and frustrated, my good friend, Nicholas de Castella, has an exciting opportunity I would like to invite you to share in…

Breakthrough To Freedom

Breakthrough To Freedom using Emotional Intelligence

For over 20 years, Nicholas has taught people just like you how to raise their Emotional Intelligence.  As you may know, raising your Emotional Intelligence is vital to unlocking the key to your happiness, fulfillment and success.

Nicholas will be hosting a FREE BREAKTHROUGH SESSION in which he will guide you through a Breakthrough session and outline the 5 proven steps to living authentically, having boundless energy, feeling unshakeable passion, and creating the kind of life that gets you excited to wake up and jump out of bed in the morning.

As you complete each step, you will take your health, relationships, wealth and satisfaction to a whole new level.

So let’ jump in, shall we?

Step 1: Raise Self Awareness:

  • Create a vision for who you want to be and the life you want to live
  • Develop Emotional Literacy: enhance your ability to respond most effectively

Step 2: Peak Functioning  (Attitude / Mindset)

  • Equanimity: How to cultivate an open spacious, non-judgemental, reactive mind
  • Inner harmony and balance:  Learn to stop relentless thinking and calm a busy mind
  • Cultivate Optimism:  Motivate yourself for enjoyment, ease and achievement

Step 3: Grit (Emotional Mastery)

  • Courage: The ability to step into the unknown, uncertainty and unfamiliar
  • Determination & Endurance:  The ability to delay gratification and stay focused
  • Clear blockages and release resistance
  • Persistence: how to keep on going when things are moving slowly
  • Resilience: ability to bounce back after setbacks and not take things personally

Step 4: Inducing Flow (Heart Intelligence)

  • Effortless flow: the ability to achieve with more joy and ease
  • Self determination: The freedom that comes from feeling whole and complete in yourself
  • Inducing Grace: gratitude, kindness, generosity
  • Intuition: making better decisions, divine timing

Step 5: Setting up practices and systems

  • Establishing healthy habits
  • Establishing daily rituals
  • Building a team: connecting, enrolling and inspiring others
  • Engaging teachers and mentors

If you’re ready to gain crystal clear clarity on what you really want and finally build the powerful momentum you need to succeed, then you absolutely do not want to miss Nicholas’ next FREE BREAKTHROUGH TO FREEDOM session on Wednesday, October 8th at 8PM AEDT (Australian Eastern Daylight Time). … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Deep Emotional Wounds

Peter Saxon

Holistic Counsellor Peter Saxon

Emotional wounds from early life can have a profoundly detrimental effect on our self confidence and our ability to be successful in life.

Even wounds that we’re unaware of or reluctant to acknowledge can still strongly effect us because they operate on the unconscious or subconscious level. These wounds can lead to self-sabotaging behaviour that may be obvious to other people, while we remain oblivious to what’s going on. Yet we keep encountering similar painful experiences in life over and over, unable to pinpoint what’s causing this pattern or how to break out of it.

Often deep emotional wounds that we may be unaware of are at the heart of our ongoing suffering. Fortunately my good friend Peter Saxon is an expert on dealing with exactly this problem in men’s lives, and I recently seized the opportunity to interview him on the topic.

My favourite quote from this interview is:

“When we really get to experience our feelings directly without avoiding or grasping or going to the emotional drama of the feeling, and are actually be able to sit with it, and then look to identify what the need is underneath that feeling, and getting help to meet that need: life changes dramatically.”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Be Present

Spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle often talk about presence as the key to accessing a relaxed state of true inner confidence in all situations. Well that’s great in theory, but how do you do it in practice?

Moose MillerIn this insightful interview with Transformation Coach Moose Miller from MeetEveryMoment.com, you’ll learn the key techniques for dealing with difficult emotions and thought patterns that stop us from being confidently present in our interactions with other people.

Practicing these techniques consistently over time leads to a sense of relaxed confidence that men and women alike find tremendously appealing.

Here’s what you’ll learn:
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By Graham Stoney, ago

I’m Declaring This Year: The Year Of Badass

I’ve decided to declare this year The Year Of Badass. Now this doesn’t mean I’ll be getting all tattooed up, dealing drugs out the back of my place, joining a motorcycle gang, doing drive-by shootings or burning down the homes of people I don’t like. It’s not about being an asshole.

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Being a badass dude is about living via our internal compass and doing life the way we want, rather than trying to keep other people happy doing what they think is acceptable all the time. It’s going to piss a few people off mainly because they’ll be jealous that they aren’t living their life the way they know, deep down, that they should be. Trying to keep everyone else happy is a recipe for misery. So being able to tolerate the discomfort that other people will feel when we live life our way is all part of learning to be a badass. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable occasionally.

At the same time, I’ve recently taken a deeper interest in Taoist philosophy. The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tze recognised that life had a certain flow to it, and that by living in accordance with our true nature we can live life much more easily. When we stop fighting against our deeper nature, things that used to seem difficult now become effortless. It’s almost as if the action we take requires no action at all because we’re living in accordance with “The Way” of our essential nature and the nature of life around us.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

What To Do When You’re Emotionally Triggered

Do you ever experience situations where you suddenly feel really bad in response to something happening around you, and have a compelling urge to withdraw or shut down? If so, you’ve probably been emotionally triggered.

I’ve been doing some acting training lately with a local theatre company which does shows based on Forum Theatre. This style of theatre is highly interactive: The actors perform a play in which things end badly for one or more of the characters; but then instead of leaving it there they go back and replay some of the scenes using suggestions from the audience as to what the characters could do differently that might change the final outcome. We even get members of the audience up on stage to role play their suggestions while the other actors remain in character to see how the ideas from the audience play out in practice.

The role I was being trained for was to act as the Joker: a kind of cheeky M.C. whose role is to liaise between the actors and the audience, asking for suggestions from the audience and encouraging them to get up on stage to play those suggestions out. While the introduction to this part of the play was scripted, the audience interaction is all improvised based on the suggestions that the audience offer. Some suggestions will be worth running with while others may need to be modified or combined depending on everything from the values of the organisation presenting the show to the time constraints imposed by the venue.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Lose Weight Without Really Trying

If you’re carrying around a few extra pounds of flab, that’s not going to be great for your confidence. A bunch of friends of mine have recently forked out for an expensive coaching program to motivate them to lose weight fast; and although it seems to be working for them, I shake my head each time they talk about it.

Why? Because you can lose weight for free, without really trying. I know because I’ve been doing it myself for the last few months. In fact I’m kinda pissed off that the new board shorts that I bought at the beginning of this summer are too big for me now and I’ll have to fork out for a new pair soon.

So here’s how to lose weight without really trying:

Stop Looking For A Quick Fix

The biggest problem with the well-intentioned program my friends are on is that it promises a relatively quick fix. If you want your body to settle at its ideal weight, what you need is a lifestyle change. Looking for a quick fix to life’s problems is symptomatic of childish thinking, indicating that you haven’t really grown up yet. Adult obesity is a manifestation of childish thinking.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago