Graham Stoney

I struggled for years with low self-esteem, anxiety and a lack of self-confidence before finding a solution that really worked. I created The Confident Man Program to help other men live the life of their dreams. I also offer 1-on-1 coaching via Skype so if you related to this article contact me about coaching.

Get Out Of Your Head And Practice Making Choices

Here is an exercise for getting out of your head and developing your ability to make choices. Often when we lack self-confidence we lose our ability to make choices because we’ve been taught in the past that it’s not okay to want what we want, it’s not okay to like what we like and we have to be kind of bland and neutral about everything.

So in today’s exercise we’re going to start reinforcing that ability to make choices by making choices about the environment around us, and they can be arbitrary choices if you like. Any choice will do to get kick-started, so let’s have a go.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

What To Do On A First Date

Today I want to talk about what you should do on a first date. A lot of guys are stressed out about what to do on a first date and end up setting up some fancy, highfalutin dinner date thing where the woman feels kind of trapped and the guy feels like he’s got to impress, and it’s just stress and tension and it’s just not a whole lot of fun for everybody.

So what you really want to do on a first date is simply take a woman out for coffee. Go to a coffee shop and just sit around and have a chat. Keep it nice and light and casual. Nothing too heavy-duty. Make it easy for her to escape if she needs to escape if she doesn’t like you and don’t get all caught up on the idea that she needs to like you.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

What Do Women Think About Men Having Coaching?

Hey guys. In case you’ve ever questioned the value of getting coaching to help overcome the gap between what your father should have taught you, and what you actually learned; check out the comment I just received on my article about the problem of passive fathers teaming up with controlling mothers.

Helen writes:

My husband has totally abdicated his role as a leader in our family. He is content to remain checked out of parenting, the marriage, consumed with self-pity over having his life now seriously limited by MS, addicted to watching sports and living in complete submission to life…he lives life like he is a guest in his own world. My children, now 20 and 23 see him as weak willed, clueless, apathetic and a poser. For many years I have worried about my son and growing into man. I have been the one to throw the football, teach how to use tools and power equipment, how to paint, wax a car, fix leaky faucets, hang a light fixture etc. His Dad just passively watched saying he was not good at that stuff….he is simply lazy, passive and apathetic. With the challenges of life, his own crappy father, he chose to get bitter instead of be better.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Don’t Shave For A Week

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project. Today, I have a suggestion for you which you might notice I’ve got a little bit of facial hair going on here and that’s because I haven’t been shaving for about a week now. So I’ve got about a week-long growth.

If you want to make a big change in your life, one of the big ways to do that that’s pretty easy and dramatic is to make some change in your personal appearance. For instance, if you’ve never had a beard, well, try growing one. If you always have a beard, try shaving it off. If you’ve never had a mustache, try growing one of those. If you always have on, try shaving it off.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Manage Anger Constructively

I grew up in a home where anger wasn’t handled well. Let me take you back there:

Do Other People Push Your Anger Button?

Do Other People Push Your Anger Button?

Now, don’t get me wrong. My mother lets her anger flow freely, but she rarely uses the actual words “I am angry”. Instead, her anger comes out as hurtful criticism, put-downs and emotional bullying.

My dad isn’t any better. He bottles his anger up so badly that he often seethes with resentment so loud that I can hear him muttering under his breath when I’m playing in the next room. It’s frightening.

All it takes is for mum to walk in and say, “What’s wrong with you, you stupid creature?” and, bang, next round of World War III is back on again.

What I learned from all this was the idea that anger was somehow a bad thing, that it was a bad emotion that I should never feel, because it always seemed to be expressed destructively around me.

As a result, I learned to push down my anger very hard, to suppress it. In fact, I pushed it down so hard that in the end I barely even felt it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How Your Emotions Work

Hi, I’m Graham. I had 18 years of formal education – that’s 12 years of primary and high school, and then another six years at university studying engineering – and during that time, I learnt a lot about how to think but very little about how to feel or how my emotions worked.

In fact, I can’t remember in that entire time a single class where I sat down and had a teacher teach me how my emotions work.

Now, possibly maybe in art classes or in music classes or maybe even in English they might’ve come close, but really nothing all that direct and concrete.

And that’s a shame because, fundamentally as humans, we’re all driven by our emotions. All our behavior is an attempt to either move towards pleasure or move away from pain.

So emotions are absolutely key to getting what we want in life. They’re also the key to a successful relationship, especially with women.

So in the rest of this article, I’m going to give you a quick introduction into how your emotions work.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Develop A Strong Point Of View

Hey, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project here again and today I want to talk to you about the concept of developing a strong point of view. Now, this is a concept I’ve borrowed from the acting world and it’s very applicable I find to guys, particularly when we lack self-confidence. Often we’ve given up on having a really strong point of view.

Perhaps our opinion in the past hasn’t really been validated or hasn’t been valued or other people haven’t respected our point of view and we’ve learnt over time to just become kind of bland and neutral in our ideas about everything.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Are You Addicted To Your Own Drama?

I’m sitting in a Youth Hostel in Melbourne, Australia where I’m staying for a couple of weeks while visiting the Melbourne International Comedy festival. I’ve just had breakfast and am sitting near the kitchen area chilling out before heading out for a day on the town. While I’m not one to eavesdrop, I can’t help but overhear snippets of the Skype conversation of the woman sitting next to me.

Are You Addicted To Your Own Drama?

Are You Addicted To Your Own Drama?

And what I hear is: drama. Drama, drama, drama. “She did this”, “he did that”, “she said this”, “she said that”, “She thinks I’m a bad influence”, “they don’t like me”, “she hated it”, “it sucked”, “it was awful”…

Ok, you get the idea.

If there was heaps of space, I’d simply move and get away from the negative energy; but it’s pretty crowded this morning, and the conversation reminded me how easy it is to get addicted to our own drama, and the dramas in other people’s lives around us.

Now it would be a different story if the woman was debriefing about her emotions regarding the drama she’s describing, but I’m not hearing many words from our emotional vocabulary like “sad”, “angry”, “scared”, “happy”; nor phrases like “I felt …”, “I feel…” etc.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Want To See Me Doing Stand-Up Comedy Live On Stage?

One of the things I highly recommend for facing your fears in The Confident Man Program is getting up at an open-mic night and performing in front of a live audience. You’ll feel the excitement beforehand and the adrenaline rush when you’re up there, and the elation afterwards knowing that you’ve conquered most people’s biggest fear. From then on, it becomes really fun.

Given that I like to walk my talk, here’s the video of my recent graduation gig from a stand-up comedy course that I did recently. My biggest fear was losing the plot on-stage and forgetting my material. Everything was going great until about 5 minutes in… when I lost it completely! The results was hilarious. I know you’ll enjoy it:

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Get Some Cool New Clothes

Hey there, it’s Graham again from The Confident Man Project, and I want to teach you this week about how to go out and get yourself decked out in some hot new clothes, not anything like what I’m currently wearing, ironically enough. But that’s okay because I’m going to tell you what you need to know here.

So basically the story is that if you are still wearing the sort of clothes that your mother dressed you in when you were a kid, that’s probably not the latest fashion of today and it’s probably not what you want to be wearing when you hit the town when you’re out strutting your stuff, meeting new people and just having a bit of fun.

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By Graham Stoney, ago