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.

Read How To Talk To Anyone by Leil Lowndes

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project with some tips for you on how to feel more confident when you’re having conversations with other people. And the biggest tip that I have in fact is to read a book on the subject which is this one called How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tips for Big Success in Relationships by Leil Lowndes.

Obviously our sense of self-confidence is most pronounced or lack of self-confidence is most pronounced when we’re trying to have conversations with other people and we’re feeling like, “I don’t know how to do this,”, “I don’t know what to say and how to relate to these people,” or, “I’m feeling shy or awkward or socially anxious.”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Make Eye Contact With Strangers

Hey there, it’s Graham with another confidence building activity for you this week. And this activity is all about making eye contact with strangers. As you’re going about your daily routine, as you’re walking particularly through crowds of people and you see other strangers, the basic thing that you need to do here is to simply make eye contact with them and hold that eye contact for as long as possible.

Now, there’s an interesting little social phenomena here when two people make eye contact, particularly two strangers. One of them will always avert their gaze first. And what happens is that the person with the highest level of social status and self-confidence, which tend to go together, is the person that maintains the gaze the longest. This is very interesting and you’ll start to notice this. Whenever you make eye contact with someone, the person that averts their gaze first is the one with the lower level of self-confidence.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Practice Speaking More Slowly And Deeply

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project with yet another confidence building tip for you. And today I want to talk about the way that we speak. The way that we speak says a whole lot about our level of general self-confidence and how nervous we are in any particular situation.

So what you want to do is to practice speaking more slowly and more deeply, particularly if you’ve got a bit of a high-pitched voice or if you find yourself always speaking very quickly; you’re always in a rush to get things out and you’ve got to say what you’ve got to say.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

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

The 5 States Of Self-Confidence

Hey guys, it’s Graham here, and I want to talk about the five states of self-confidence so that you can build your confidence more quickly. Now, all of us go through these different states of various different points in our life and at different times during the day, but it’s useful to recognize what state you’re currently at so that you can know what it is that you should do in order to move yourself to a higher state where ultimately you’ll feel more confident. The more often you do this, the more confident you’ll feel generally.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

The Biggest Factor That Undermines Self-Confidence

Hey there, it’s Graham here. Now, if you’re interested in making some serious inroads into boosting your self-confidence, then you’ve come to the right place because what I want to do is talk about the number 1 factor that undermines our self-confidence the most. And it’s an interesting one because very, very few people are even prepared to talk about it. So you’re probably wondering, “Well, what is it?” Well, it’s very simple. In one word, the problem is shame.

Now, you probably recognize shame as a feeling of embarrassment or as a feeling of inhibition that holds you back from doing things sometimes, and it’s often accompanied by the thought in your head of “What are people going to think? If I do what I want to do, if I act on my impulses, then what are people going to think?”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Go To A Dance Class

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project again, and today I want to give you my number 1 tip for building your confidence with women, for getting exercise, for just having a lot of fun. This is an absolute showstopper. You’ve got to go do this if you haven’t already done it. So what am I talking about? Well, I’m talking about learning to dance.

Now, for me, I want to all boys’ high school where playing rugby and getting your head kicked in was kind of the way to be the macho man and be a bit of a hero, and the whole idea of dancing sounding a bit kind of gay to me, to be honest. I didn’t think I would be doing that.

How wrong I was because women absolutely love men that dance. There are genetic biological reasons for that. In the animal kingdom, a lot of animals use dance as a way of attracting their mate, and a lot of that same programming is built into the brains of human beings as well.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Angry Men, Passive Men by Marvin Allen

I read a lot of books on personal development and as a result of that it’s pretty rare nowadays that I come across a book that contains brand new concepts or ideas that I’ve never heard of before. So what I’m looking for in the books that I read now is more a matter of how they affect me, like how they make me feel.

Because I really believe that if you want to make a lasting change in your life, then you need to deal with emotions and particularly the emotions that we have been avoiding feeling in the past and all that business that’s repressed in our subconscious.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Nonviolent Communication: Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg

Hey, it’s Graham here again and if you were to ask me the question, “What’s one book that you could read that would help you to improve your communication skills, get on better with women and men, help you deal with conflict better, make you a better person, just make your life flow more easily and generally improve the quality of life here on the planet?”, one book every human should read is this one.

It’s called Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall Rosenberg. Let me try to hold it straight. And I highly, highly, highly recommend this book. In fact, I would say if you are only able to read one book on personal development or self-help or whatever, how to live a better life, anything, how to self-actualize, this would be the book to read.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Get Emotional Healing

Hey, it’s Graham here again with another confidence building idea for you. And today I want to talk about a serious subject which is the weighty topic of getting some emotional healing, if you need it. Now what tends to happen to us in life is invariably we go through a series of events, some of which are great and some of which are not so good, and some of the ones which are not so good can be so heavy that they’re really traumatic and they leave us with some kind of emotional scarring deep down in our psyche that hangs around and affects us for the rest of our life until we get to the point where we’re ready to deal with this stuff.

Now, the way that your subconscious works and that your emotions work are that any time you have a event that happens with a strong emotional response, in particular an emotional response that’s too strong for you to deal with at the time, we end up with a traumatic memory stored deep in our subconscious. And what happens is that any time in the future that we’re in a similar kind of situation, we’ll have the same emotion arise because we’ve been programmed for that by the traumatic event that’s happened back in our past.

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By Graham Stoney, ago