anxiety

Start Expressing How You Feel

Hey there, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project, and today you are going to learn all about the importance of expressing how you feel. Now, as guys, often we don’t get taught how to do this, we don’t learn how to do this, we don’t practice how to do this; we just tend to keep our feelings to ourselves a lot of the time and this is a massive problem because when we bottle up our emotions inside, we are prone to all sorts of horrible things like illness and depression and just unhappiness and frustration and it makes it hard to connect with other people, particularly with women who just love having an emotional connection with you.

And so I want to really advocate for the idea of you expressing how you feel in any moment. Like, right now I’m feeling a whole mixture of things. I’m feeling happy and I’m feeling frustrated and I’m feeling a bit pissed off and irritated and, you know, all this stuff is going on inside me all at once and it’s very unhealthy to just keep all that stuff bottled down inside.

So it’s very important to be able to express how you feel, and there are a few basic emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, joy, love, peace, frustration, fear, anxiety. These are the main ones; there’s not all that many when you actually count them, and that’s just completely off the top of my head.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Welcome to the Confident Man Channel!

Hey guys, it’s Graham here. Welcome to The Confident Man Channel!

The whole purpose of this channel is to help you to self-actualise and become the confident man that you were always intended to be. So if you’ve come from the place where I used to be where you’ve got low self-esteem, chronic anxiety, panic attacks, just struggles dealing with life, particularly relating to women, and life in general is not going the way that you want, well this is the place to be.

I highly recommend that you grab yourself a copy of The Confident Man Program, it’s got all my condensed wisdom on how to go from where you don’t want to be to where you do want to be all packed into one easy-to-read guide. It also comes with a whole heap of bonuses where I interview a bunch of experts on all sorts of topics which will help you build your self-esteem, become a more confident man and leave a greater mark on the world.

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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 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

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
Anxious Man

Telling The Truth About Anxiety

I had another reminder last night about the value of telling the truth for healing anxiety. This year has been a pretty rough one for me, with all sorts of anxiety exacerbated by chronic fatigue bubbling up in different situations. I’ve had a few conversations with my sister about it, who invited me to a talk at The Resilience Centre on overcoming anxious thinking which she wanted to attend because several of her friends suffer from anxiety. It turns out to be a common problem.

Anxious Man

Anxious Man (photo courtesy PhotoXpress)

Part of the talk used the analogy of a sailing ship with demons in the hold. When we sail towards the land representing our goals, sometimes the demons jump up on deck and start going crazy forcing us back out to sea. We often end up avoiding going after our goals to settle the demons back down; but we end up bored, restless and feeling unfulfilled. The key to reaching our goals when we’re feeling anxious is to take it one step at a time and learn to deal with the demons that come up without being overwhelmed. Each time we successfully sail closer to the land, the demons get a little quieter.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Handle A Panic Attack

I have to admit to leading something of a double life: on the one hand I write about confidence, but I also suffer from panic attacks and anxiety. Having a panic attack is one of the most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever had, and even just mild anxiety can make life pretty painful. It’s not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. Well, maybe just on the really bad ones.

So here’s how to handle a panic or anxiety attack:

Recognize The Symptoms

Most people I know who suffer from anxiety or panic attacks didn’t recognize what was happening to them when they first had a panic attack. They were just going about their daily lives when suddenly: BAM! Their heart started racing, they were overwhelmed with fear, their bodies started shaking, they couldn’t concentrate, they became exhausted and just had to stop everything they were doing. Some thought they were dying, or were having a heart attack.

I was overseas traveling alone in France when I had my first full-blown panic attack, and the word “frightening” just doesn’t cut it. It was fucking terrifying, and I found myself throwing up out of sheer terror. Fortunately I had a sympathetic friend back home I could call, and recognized what was really going on.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Deal With Setbacks

Time for some truth-telling: things haven’t been entirely rosy here at Confident Man Headquarters in the last few months. Life has ups and downs, and I’m certainly not immune to the emotional roller-coaster effect they can cause. They say bad luck comes in threes and I don’t know if it’s just bad luck, bad karma or whatever, but I do know it hasn’t felt all that great lately.

So what’s been going on?

Well, firstly I started a new treatment program for Chronic Fatigue and although I’m cautiously optimistic of my health improving, one of the initial side-effects was being hit with a truckload of anxiety which left me feeling despondent, depressed and hopeless.

Around the same time I entered a Theatrical Improvisation (a.k.a. Improv) contest with some new friends of mine; only to withdraw before the contest had even begun because I was feeling overwhelmed with anxiety and stress. Something I loved doing suddenly stopped being fun.

I also quit Toastmasters because I now know enough about public speaking and it doesn’t make sense to pursue it any further until my health improves. This meant my social world was shrinking, right at the time I was feeling isolated, ill and anxious already.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago