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.

10 Signs Your Family Is Crazy-Making

A few years ago when I did The Hoffman Process, one of the facilitators described [intlink id=”480″ type=”post”]my mother’s behaviour[/intlink] as “crazy-making”.

I thought, “Wow, that’s a fantastic description.”

And it wasn’t just my mother; it was the whole family dynamic that she and my passive father helped establish. Take a perfectly normal infant child, bring them up in a crazy-making emotionally disconnected family and you’ve pretty much got a recipe for insanity.

But how do you know if you’re living in a crazy-making family? Well, I’m glad you asked.

So here’s the top 10 signs that your family is crazy-making:

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Stand Up To An Adult Bully

Today I want to talk about how to stand up to an adult bully. This is particularly important if you are like me and you got bullied a lot when you were a kid at school. Adult bullies now are your opportunity to stand up for yourself and to heal the emotional damage that was done to you when you were a kid. Because although you might have felt unsafe standing up to the bullies when you were a kid and you might have been carrying that fear with you, now that you’re an adult it’s actually quite safe to stand up to bullies and so the adult bullies that invariably come into our lives are an opportunity to heal the bullying from the past.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Silence Your Inner Critic

G’day, guys. Today you’re going to learn about how to quieten your inner critic. So your inner critic is that voice in your head that tells you that you’re stupid or that you’re wrong or that you’re not allowed to do things that you want to do or generally makes your life kind of miserable by putting the boot in and ripping into you at any opportunity.

If you’re anything like me, you have, or maybe had in the past, a very strong inner critic that is the result of a lot of criticism that you may have received when you were a kid or as an adolescent or even growing up and as an adult. Criticism even as an adult can still sting.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Be Confident Talking To Women On The Phone

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project, and you can probably hear that there’s some kookaburras going off down in the distance in the bush land here. I’m out in the beautiful bush land just out the back of my place. And kookaburras are a native bird of Australia. It’s a bit unusual; it’s got this funky kind of laughing sort of sound that it makes, and, yeah, it just reminds me what a beautiful country I live in. I’m a pretty lucky guy.

So I want to spread some of that luck out to you by talking about the challenge of learning to be confident talking to women on the phone. And how do you go about doing this? Because I know a lot of you guys like me are just terrified of actually picking up the phone and calling the woman after we’ve got her phone number, so how do you get confident doing that and get in the mode where it’s actually a fun thing to do rather than something that just fills you with fear and dread?

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By Graham Stoney, ago

I can relate; Men need to hear this

Hey guys, I just want to respond to Tony Porter’s TEDWomen speech about the man box and his call to men. I think the only problem with this speech is that it’s given at a conference mainly with women.T he actual substance of his talk really isn’t just about violence against women: It’s about freedom for men as you’ll notice in the quote right at the very end.

I can totally relate to what Tony’s saying. I had a father who was just emotionally not there. He was physically there so perhaps I was luckier than some guys, but when it came to anything related to emotions he completely kept them to himself. He was obviously very ashamed of how he felt and I think still is, and as a result the only emotions that I could see him express really were when he would seethe with frustration or when he would explode with anger.

And, yeah, that might be okay for the man box, but it’s not okay for relationships with people generally. So, yeah, I can relate to Tony’s message, and I recommend this video to any guys, not just to women:

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Start An Exercise Routine

Hey, it’s Graham again from The Confident Man Project, and today you’re going to learn about how to start an exercise routine and why that is important to your self-confidence. Well, exercise is an awesome thing. There really are very few downsides unless you do too hard and you injure yourself.

But exercise is good for your physical health, it’s good for your mental health, it’s a massive cure for depression and anxiety, it boosts your self-confidence, it helps you build muscle tone, it generally makes you more sociable. So there’s really no downside. It takes a little bit of time, but if you don’t have time for exercise then, well, your priorities are a little bit screwed and you really need to get that into gear and get it fixed.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Get On Stage At An Open Mic Night

Hey, it’s Graham here with another confidence expanding tip for you. And today I want to talk about the suggestion of getting up on stage at an open mic night, performing your musical talents if you have any or your comedic talents if you have any or whatever talent it is that you have, doing it up on stage and getting outside your comfort zone which is of course the way that you build confidence the fastest.

Any big city will have comedy clubs and entertainment venues that have regular open mic nights, typically on Tuesdays or Wednesdays because those are the nights where it gets a little bit quiet and a lot of the professional acts prefer to perform on Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights. So Tuesdays and Wednesdays are often open mic nights where anybody who has a bit of talent that they want to develop can go along and tread the boards, get up on stage and have a go at entertaining people.

I recommend that you give it a go. Like, this will make your heart race like nothing else. If you’re a bit of a funny guy and you’ve got some good wise-cracks, a few jokes that you want to run, I recommend that what you do is you work out some stories from your real life that have made you laugh that you think have been funny and that you put them together into a little five-minute comedy routine.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Walk Like The Terminator

Hey, it’s Graham here with another confidence building activity for you. Now, the way that you walk says a whole lot about how confident that you feel inside and what happens is that when you’re walking down the street, the way that we walk projects our inner sense of self-confidence out into the world and other people can’t help but respond to us by noticing the way that we’re walking and the level of confidence with which we’re walking.

So I want to have a bit of fun with this activity and the idea of this activity is to focus on the way that you walk and to walk like The Terminator. So if you haven’t seen it before, grab a copy of Terminator 1. Notice the way that Arnold Schwarzenegger walks when he’s striding down the street. He’s standing in a very erect position. He’s swinging his arms back and forward. He’s striding along like a machine, and basically what you want to do is start striding along like a powerful machine as well.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Learn To Recognize Women’s Tests

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project with another confidence building idea for you this week, and today I’m going to talk to you about learning to recognize tests that women throw at us guys. To get a perspective on this, you need to understand that women, particularly attractive women, are besieged by attention from guys all the time and they need to have some little way of working out which guys they want to be hanging around with. So they can’t help but start throwing out little tests to guys to find out what it is that we’re made of.

Women aren’t always conscious that they’re doing this. It just becomes a habitual part of their pattern of relating to people who come up and approache them, and a lot of guys find this extremely disarming and that’s kind of the point of why women sometimes do this.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Walk Barefoot As Much As Possible

Hey, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project coming at you from the beautiful bush land here, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about connecting back to nature. In our urbanized environment, often a lot of the time we’ve totally lost our connection with nature. Most of us guys these days live in big cities surrounded by concrete jungles and steel structures and motorcars and stuff, and we never even walk out into bush land like this. This is what the bush looks like in case you’ve forgotten. And as a result, we’ve really lost our connection with nature and the earth and all those things, and we’ve become a little anesthetized and insulated from it all.

We tend to walk around in rubber-soled shoes all the time, and we don’t even contact real, natural stuff anymore. So as a result we develop soles of our feet that are very thin and sensitive, and we never really harden up. That’s what I’m trying to say.

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By Graham Stoney, ago