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 Gain Confidence by Public Speaking

Public speaking is often seen as the ultimate in self-confidence. After all, if you can get up in front of an audience and talk from a platform, surely you must have amazing confidence. Well, yes and no. The truth is that public speaking is a skill that anyone can learn. You don’t have to have amazing confidence to do it. But like learning any new skill, particularly one that involves overcoming a fear, this will boost your general level of self-confidence; which is why learning public speaking is so appealing.

The key to effective public speaking is to tell stories in which you have some emotional investment. Your emotions are what connect you with your audience. If you can get up on stage an relive an exciting or emotionally engaging story, and tie it to some lesson or point that you learned, people will want to hear what you have to say. The secret is to avoid going into presenter mode where you lecture people, which audiences hate. And the way to avoid lecturing is to tell stories.

Storytelling is fun, entertaining, and helps you overcome your self-consciousness in front of other people. Plus you’ll find that if you tell personal stories, other people will relate to what you have to say and you’ll get positive reinforcement from them, further adding to your growing confidence.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Overcome Low Self-Esteem

Life is difficult when you don’t feel good about yourself. Low self-esteem can lead to a lack of self-confidence, difficulty in relationships, social anxiety, depression, and a general sense of unhappiness and disillusionment with life.

Self-confidence is the antidote to low self-esteem.
Image courtesy Pixabay

But you don’t have to suffer from low self-esteem. Here are some steps you can take to build high self-esteem and greater self-confidence:

Work Out What Is Important To You

When we know what we stand for and what our basic values are, we’re much less susceptible to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Even when things don’t go our way, we’ve still got our core values to fall back on. Values that are important to us also act as a guiding light to help us make decisions, and recognize when we’re acting out of integrity. The more we act in integrity with our basic values, the more self-esteem we tend to generate.

Spend some time writing down a list of values that are important to you, like happiness, love, respect, success, relationships, family, friends, etc etc. Prioritize the list by asking yourself “Would I give X up for Y?” as you work your way down it.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Overcome Social Anxiety

Social anxiety and the sense of shyness that it causes can be one of the most frustrating aspects of a lack of self-confidence. Much of our joy and happiness in life comes from our relationships with other people, and shyness cuts off many of our opportunities to meet new and interesting people before we’ve even begun.

In this age of computers, iPods, the Internet, chat rooms, online forums, Facebook, Twitter and other social media web sites, we’re getting more and more used to relating to other people electronically. That means we’re getting less and less practise at social skills, so naturally we’re gradually becoming more socially anxious.

But like any form of anxiety, social anxiety is treatable if you approach it in the right way. You don’t have to be held hostage by your fear of other people in social situations. I’ve been working on this for a long time myself, and here’s what I’ve found most helpful:

Understand That It’s Normal

Firstly, understand that some degree of social anxiety is normal. We’re all biologically programmed to be wary of people we don’t know, and to suss them out to work out whether they’re friend or foe before trusting and being able to fully relax around them.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Recognize and Overcome Perfectionism

Perfectionism will undermine your self-confidence like nothing else. Trying to maintain a facade of perfection all the time and holding yourself to unachievable standards is exhausting; I know, I’ve tried. But before you can do anything about perfectionism, you need to be able to recognize it.

Here are some clues that you might be suffering from perfectionism:

  • A deep fear of failure, and sense of devastation when it happens

  • Getting upset when you don’t win all the time

  • Feeling ashamed of your thoughts and emotions

  • Holding back on expressing how you really feel

  • Fear of what others might think of you

  • A sense of self-consciousness

  • Using sarcasm or passive aggression when relating to others

  • Communicating non-assertively

  • Being driven to high achievement all the time-to-time

  • Difficulty relaxing

Any of this sound familiar?

Ok, so now we can see the problem, here are two different ways of looking at it:

  1. You’re not perfect, and never will be. Neither is anyone else. Pretending to be perfect when you’re really not is living a lie. It cuts you off from relating deeply to other people, because they can’t relate to your facade of invulnerability. As a result, you sometimes come across as distant or aloof.
… Continue reading…
By Graham Stoney, ago

Forget About What Your Family Thinks Of You

For many men I know who lack confidence, the seeds of low self-esteem were planted early on during childhood in our family of origin. In an ideal world, our parents create an environment in which we can flourish as a young boy, thrive as an adolescent, and fulfill our potential as a man: confident and self-assured. We feel loved unconditionally, get on brilliantly with our siblings, and learn to deal constructively with conflict that inevitably occurs within any family.

In the real world though, things work a little differently. Unless parents make a conscious effort to deal with their personal issues through some other form of personal growth or therapy, they tend to unconsciously pass on their own insecurities to their children. They can’t help it; as children we are particularly sensitive to what goes on in our environment, and our parents are our natural role models whose behavior we tend to copy. Our parents have a god-like status to us as a young boy, and we can’t help but naively assume that the way they operate in the world is a good way for us to be too. As children we lack the real world experience and insight to notice that the way our parents operate doesn’t necessarily work real well for them either, and we don’t know any better.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Improve Confidence using Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) Techniques

I’m excited to say that I’ve just added an awesome new free bonus to the [intlink id=”33″ type=”page”]The Confident Man Program[/intlink]. This audio interview with Russ Harris, bestselling author of The Happiness Trap and The Confidence Gap, uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help you build even more confidence with the most powerful techniques from all of modern psychology.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy combines the latest helping approaches with timeless wisdom

The best thing I got from this interview was that feelings of confidence only arise after we’ve stepped out in faith and taken action. Competence precedes feelings of confidence. But how do you handle the fear and anxiety that arises when you take action and step into the unknown? Well, that’s where ACT comes in: it has strategies for dealing with the fear and anxiety that would otherwise hold us back. It’s valuable material, and well worth a listen.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago
My father and I on the platform at Broken Hill station

Spending “Quality” Time With My Father

When my father invited me recently to join him on a Railway Historical Society trip from Sydney to Broken Hill and back, my initial thought was “5 days stuck on a rusty old train with uncomfortable seats isn’t exactly my thing”. But I’d been looking for an opportunity to travel somewhere and spend some quality time with my Dad, so I ended up jumping at the chance.

My father is 79, and although he’s just as mentally alert as he’s ever been, he’s not getting any younger. His father lived to be 100 and there’s no sign of mine dropping dead any time soon. But whenever I speak to men whose fathers have died, they often talk about feelings of regret over the questions they didn’t ask, and the connection they never made with their father while he was still alive. He’s not going to be here with all faculties intact forever.

Photo of my father and I at Broken Hill station

Dad and I next to the train at Broken Hill station

On the other hand, connecting with my father isn’t exactly easy. He’s in his element in a group of mostly-retired mostly-male historical train buffs. They talk about the intricacies of the trains, the tracks, the sidings, government mismanagement of their cherished but slowly declining rail transport, and the resulting increasingly-deserted towns we pass through on the way.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How Theatrical Improvisation Increases Your Confidence

I’ve been taking a bunch of theatrical improvisation courses lately because it’s a really fun, engaging way to increase self-confidence. There’s a part of me that loves being on stage, without the old inhibitions that used to get in the way of everyday life. The skills involved in theatrical improvisation, also known as Comedy Improvisation or Improv, turn out to be essential life skills, especially when it comes to interacting confidently with other people.

Much of what I’ve learned in Improv class reverses a lot of what I learned about how to act while growing up. Many of us have huge chunks of our creativity, and our true personality, beaten out of us in the education and socialization process while we were young. We got punished for failure, bullied for being different, and ridiculed when we got things wrong. So we learned to play it small, avoid risks, and generally keep our head down to avoid getting kicked. It was a conservative survival strategy that worked at the time, but doesn’t work so well in the adult world.

Theatrical improvisation, on the other hand, teaches us how to:

  • Fail brilliantly.
  • Say “Yes” to opportunities.
  • Take risks.
  • Listen to other people.
  • Get out of our heads.
… Continue reading…
By Graham Stoney, ago

4 New Videos To Help You Build Self-Confidence

I might be down with the ‘flu, but I’ve recently posted 4 new YouTube videos to help you build self-confidence. Click the Watch On YouTube button, and hit the Like button so they go viral:

3 Keys To Building Self-Confidence for Men:

How To Start Conversations with Strangers:

The Easiest Way Ever For Men To Build Confidence With Women:

The Biggest Factor That Undermines Self-Confidence:

Remember to hit Like, and leave a comment to let me know what you think!… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Have Better Relationships With Women

Here’s a story with some relationship advice for you. I took my Dad out to dinner last week as his 79th Birthday gift. He is actively downsizing in preparation for moving into a retirement village with my mother, so I appreciate that the last thing he wants is a physical gift from me. He’d much rather have some quality time together.

Unfortunately we have slightly different definitions of “quality time”. As my father droned on and on over dinner telling me story after boring story, I felt myself shutting down and becoming increasingly frustrated and angry with him. He lives in his own little world, oblivious of the effect his words have on other people. I used to wonder why it was that as an adult, I found myself pushed away by his stories all the time and began feeling resentful every time he launched into one. Now I know, and the simple answer has the power to totally transform relationships:

My Dad’s stories have no emotional content.

Over the past few years, I’ve been studying the broad spectrum of human communication. Here are some of the things I’ve learned from the various different fields I’ve studied:

  • To be a powerful public speaker, you must tell stories that engage your audience’s emotions.

… Continue reading…
By Graham Stoney, ago