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.

How To Deal With People Who Offend You

I’ve woken up this morning, and the world’s gone crazy again. Men with guns have killed people who offended them, plus a few other random people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Last month it was my own hometown of Sydney, this month it’s another city I love, Paris.

I am Charlie. So are you.

I am Charlie. So are you.

Social media and the newspapers are abuzz with political leaders and lay people saying they won’t cave in to “terrorists” by giving in to fear. Police and military forces have responded, and most of the gunmen and their accomplices are now dead. So are some of the hostages.

I feel deeply saddened for the people who have lost their lives, and the families they leave behind. Yet I don’t buy the rhetoric that says we won’t feel fear because that would just be giving the “terrorists” what they want. To be honest, I feel frightened and powerless when I see people much like myself caught up in hostage dramas and ending up dying at the hands of men with guns who believe their martyrdom will earn them rewards in an afterlife I don’t even believe exists.

How can I possibly hope to influence the behaviour of people who subscribe to an ideology I don’t agree with, following a religion I don’t know much about, with a spiritual leader who appears above criticism in their minds? Even within Islam, different sects have a history of killing each other over what appear to me to be relatively minor doctrinal differences (or more likely because they just wanted their land and/or possessions), so the answer doesn’t appear to lie there.

That said, if the pen really is mightier than the sword, I’m willing to give it a go.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Catalogue Your Strengths

Hey, it’s Graham here again and today you’re going to learn another confidence building activity, and this time I’m going to talk to you about cataloging your strengths. When we lack self-confidence, we often spend a lot of time on our weaknesses. We might spend a lot of time working on our weaknesses or simply dwelling on our weaknesses and noticing how we don’t feel the way that we’d like to feel all the time.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Read The Way Of The Superior Man by David Deida

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project, and today I want to recommend this book to you. It’s called The Way of the Superior Man. That’s a pretty cool title. I mean, who doesn’t want to be the superior man, right? Well, let me tell you a couple of things that I really like about this book. But first I’ll read to you a little bit from the introduction:

The newly evolving man is not a scared bully, posturing like some King Kong in charge of the universe. Nor is he a new age wimp, all spineless, smiley and starry-eyed. He has embraced both his inner masculine and feminine, and he no longer holds onto either of them.

He doesn’t need to be right all the time, nor does he need to always be safe, co-operating and sharing like androgynous Mr. Nice Guy. He simply lives from his deepest core, fearlessly giving his gifts, feeling through the fleeting moment into the openness of existence, totally committed to magnifying love.

Well, that sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? A little bit airy-fairy perhaps, but let me tell you a couple of things that I got out of this book that I really like. So the first one is the concept of masculine and feminine energy. Now, the idea behind this is that all of us have a mixture of masculine and feminine energies that are running our life.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome Perfectionism

Hey there, it’s Graham, and I want to talk to you about the problem of perfectionism and how to overcome it because perfectionism is a massive problem when it comes to undermining your self-confidence.

Now, how do I know this? Well, I know because I’m a recovering perfectionist myself and I know exactly how much damage this evil beast can do deep down in your subconscious and I’ve found some strategies that have helped me to overcome it and so I want to share them with you.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Express Anger Constructively

Hey, it’s Graham here, and today you’re going to learn about how to express anger constructively. So anger is an emotion that’s perfectly normal and natural thing for a human being to have, and like any emotion it can be expressed in a way that’s constructive for you and the people around you and it can also be expressed in a way that is destructive for you and the people around you, or it can be suppressed which is another destructive way of handling anger.

So let’s have a talk about how to express anger constructively. And the first obvious way to do this is verbally, to actually say that you’re angry. Now, if you don’t do this, you can end up repressing your anger and that can lead to a whole heap of problems in your life, in your relationships, your health can suffer. It’s just bad shit to start repressing your anger.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Unlocking Repressed Anger: What To Do If You “Never Get Angry”

Hey, it’s Graham here, and I’m feeling cranky today so let’s talk about anger. Now, there are two mistakes you can make with anger. The first one is to suppress it, pretending you don’t feel angry and just push that emotion down. And the second one is to just spew your anger out so that you express it destructively. Now, today I want to talk about the first one of those, which is suppressing your anger, and why we do that and why it’s not a good idea and what you can do about it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Stop Seeking Validation From Your Family

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project again and today I want to talk at you about your family. Family issues have been pretty huge for me so I know a little bit about this and I want to share with you what I have learned, particularly about stopping seeking validation from your family. What tends to happen when we’re young is that our parents experience us as an infant, as a baby, as a child, an adolescent and then by the time we become an adult our parents’ view of us is often so fixed by their earlier experiences of us that they have a lot of trouble accepting who we now are as an adult being different to who we were as a child.

And this is the reason why a lot of the time when we hang around our families we tend to regress back into a child-like state where we behave and relate to our parents and our siblings in much the same way that we did when we were a kid.

That’s not necessarily what you want to do if your childhood experience wasn’t one where you felt reinforced and validated and loved and just nurtured and you had a really fun time all the time. So if you want to break away from some of the family stuff, it’s really important that you stop seeking validation from your family.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Notice When You’re Being Defensive

Hey there, it’s Graham again from The Confident Man Project, and I’m down in the beautiful bush today with yet another confidence building tip for you. And today I want to talk about dropping defensiveness. Now, this came up to me a few years ago when I was reading a fantastic book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink, which is all about the power of developing intuition. One of the things that Gladwell talks about in his book is the golden rule of theatrical improvisation which is the technique that comedy actors use on stage to improvise new material. And the golden rule is this: always accept what other people say about you as being the truth.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Practice Using “I” Statements

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project again and today you’re going to learn about becoming assertive by using “I” statements in conversations. I find that a lot of times when talking to people or listening to people who lack confidence, what we often tend to do is we use the word “you” where really we mean “I”. Often the reason behind this is simply bad practice, we’ve got into a bad habit of doing it, and also we’re wanting to try to connect with the other people who we’re talking to so we end up saying “you” to talk about general experiences in the hope that they’ll get where we’re coming from instead of saying “I” where we’re talking about our specific experience.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

3 Keys To Building Self-Confidence For Men

Hi, I’m Graham, and I’m on a mission to help single guys build self-confidence. Now, the reason why I care about this is I was one of those kids back in high school that always got picked last for the football team, the soccer team, the cricket team. Whatever it was, I was like the last one to be picked. And that wasn’t the only thing that happened, but the lack of self-confidence that I took from situations like that, when I took that out into the everyday world, totally didn’t work.

So when you lack self-confidence, it really sucks and it has a massive impact on your life. Now, I don’t need to tell you that if you’re a guy that doesn’t have self-confidence. And, in particular, the area that it impacts the worst is your relationships with women. So, yeah, guys, you really want to get this handled. And so what I want to do is I’m going to tell you three key steps that you need if you want to build self-confidence.

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By Graham Stoney, ago