Emotions

Learn to master your basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, peace, love and joy.

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

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

Basic Emotions

HappinessMany of us guys lack a basic emotional literacy; we have physical sensations when we’re feeling something, but we often don’t know how to identify what we’re feeling, nor are we able to recognise emotions in other people. Being able to identify emotions is the basis of empathy, which is a core communication skill.

In short, most of us don’t understand how our emotions work. Simply learning to identify and express the following basic emotions will improve your relationships dramatically: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Are you feeling stuck, frustrated or blocked?

If you have been feeling stuck, blocked, and frustrated, my good friend, Nicholas de Castella, has an exciting opportunity I would like to invite you to share in…

Breakthrough To Freedom

Breakthrough To Freedom using Emotional Intelligence

For over 20 years, Nicholas has taught people just like you how to raise their Emotional Intelligence.  As you may know, raising your Emotional Intelligence is vital to unlocking the key to your happiness, fulfillment and success.

Nicholas will be hosting a FREE BREAKTHROUGH SESSION in which he will guide you through a Breakthrough session and outline the 5 proven steps to living authentically, having boundless energy, feeling unshakeable passion, and creating the kind of life that gets you excited to wake up and jump out of bed in the morning.

As you complete each step, you will take your health, relationships, wealth and satisfaction to a whole new level.

So let’ jump in, shall we?

Step 1: Raise Self Awareness:

  • Create a vision for who you want to be and the life you want to live
  • Develop Emotional Literacy: enhance your ability to respond most effectively

Step 2: Peak Functioning  (Attitude / Mindset)

  • Equanimity: How to cultivate an open spacious, non-judgemental, reactive mind
  • Inner harmony and balance:  Learn to stop relentless thinking and calm a busy mind
  • Cultivate Optimism:  Motivate yourself for enjoyment, ease and achievement

Step 3: Grit (Emotional Mastery)

  • Courage: The ability to step into the unknown, uncertainty and unfamiliar
  • Determination & Endurance:  The ability to delay gratification and stay focused
  • Clear blockages and release resistance
  • Persistence: how to keep on going when things are moving slowly
  • Resilience: ability to bounce back after setbacks and not take things personally

Step 4: Inducing Flow (Heart Intelligence)

  • Effortless flow: the ability to achieve with more joy and ease
  • Self determination: The freedom that comes from feeling whole and complete in yourself
  • Inducing Grace: gratitude, kindness, generosity
  • Intuition: making better decisions, divine timing

Step 5: Setting up practices and systems

  • Establishing healthy habits
  • Establishing daily rituals
  • Building a team: connecting, enrolling and inspiring others
  • Engaging teachers and mentors

If you’re ready to gain crystal clear clarity on what you really want and finally build the powerful momentum you need to succeed, then you absolutely do not want to miss Nicholas’ next FREE BREAKTHROUGH TO FREEDOM session on Wednesday, October 8th at 8PM AEDT (Australian Eastern Daylight Time). … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Deep Emotional Wounds

Peter Saxon

Holistic Counsellor Peter Saxon

Emotional wounds from early life can have a profoundly detrimental effect on our self confidence and our ability to be successful in life.

Even wounds that we’re unaware of or reluctant to acknowledge can still strongly effect us because they operate on the unconscious or subconscious level. These wounds can lead to self-sabotaging behaviour that may be obvious to other people, while we remain oblivious to what’s going on. Yet we keep encountering similar painful experiences in life over and over, unable to pinpoint what’s causing this pattern or how to break out of it.

Often deep emotional wounds that we may be unaware of are at the heart of our ongoing suffering. Fortunately my good friend Peter Saxon is an expert on dealing with exactly this problem in men’s lives, and I recently seized the opportunity to interview him on the topic.

My favourite quote from this interview is:

“When we really get to experience our feelings directly without avoiding or grasping or going to the emotional drama of the feeling, and are actually be able to sit with it, and then look to identify what the need is underneath that feeling, and getting help to meet that need: life changes dramatically.”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

What To Do When You’re Emotionally Triggered

Do you ever experience situations where you suddenly feel really bad in response to something happening around you, and have a compelling urge to withdraw or shut down? If so, you’ve probably been emotionally triggered.

I’ve been doing some acting training lately with a local theatre company which does shows based on Forum Theatre. This style of theatre is highly interactive: The actors perform a play in which things end badly for one or more of the characters; but then instead of leaving it there they go back and replay some of the scenes using suggestions from the audience as to what the characters could do differently that might change the final outcome. We even get members of the audience up on stage to role play their suggestions while the other actors remain in character to see how the ideas from the audience play out in practice.

The role I was being trained for was to act as the Joker: a kind of cheeky M.C. whose role is to liaise between the actors and the audience, asking for suggestions from the audience and encouraging them to get up on stage to play those suggestions out. While the introduction to this part of the play was scripted, the audience interaction is all improvised based on the suggestions that the audience offer. Some suggestions will be worth running with while others may need to be modified or combined depending on everything from the values of the organisation presenting the show to the time constraints imposed by the venue.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Whiny, Complaining People Really Make Me Angry

My punching bag has been getting a good workout lately, getting more of my repressed anger out of my system. One of the recent triggers has been whiny, complaining people.

Put Up or Shut Up

Put Up or Shut Up

For example, last week I was in an acting class where everyone seemed to want to complain about something. One woman turned up late and complained that she had trouble parking the car, and seemed to want the teacher to solve the problem for her. I’d managed to get a parking space with no trouble, and there’s a train station right across the road so it really didn’t seem like a huge deal to me. A bit of forward planning and she’d be able to park the car and get to class on time.

Then another guy turned up late and started protesting when the teacher requested that he turn up on time in future. Thing is, he always turns up late. It’s like his thing to be late, and he always makes a big deal of it when he walks into the room. We even used it to mock him in a performance one time; but really he’s the only one who finds it funny.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

The Single Biggest Mistake Of My Life

I was telling a female friend of mine recently about a realisation I’d come to regarding the single biggest mistake of my life. The one that had caused me more pain and grief than anything else.

The biggest mistake I ever made was taking on a false belief. An idea, the consequences of which were enormous. It fundamentally changed how I behaved around other people, leading me to suppress and alter my whole concept of who I was. This one belief and it’s consequences led me to end up hating myself and thinking there was something wrong with me.

It’s an idea that I took on so early in my childhood that I can’t even remember when I decided to believe in it. Although I borrowed this idea from the people closest to me while growing up, it was still my choice to adopt it in my own life; something I now regret.

So what was the faulty idea behind the biggest mistake of my life?

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Getting Angry With My Father

I’ve spent the last few years working hard on connecting more deeply with my father, motivated by a few reasons: For one, I felt I was missing something in my own sense of self; a connection to my own masculinity that would normally comes from a boy’s father. I also found myself feeling a profound sense of grief and loss towards my father, which seemed particularly odd given that he’s still very much alive and kicking. And then other men I’ve talked to whose father’s had died have often told me how much they regret not connecting on a deeper level and getting the chance to ask questions they’d long for an answer to, while he was still alive.

Being Angry With Our Father Can Be Challenging

Frankly, it hasn’t been an easy process. My experience of my father is that he talks about his experiences in excruciating detail that is totally devoid of emotional content. This often leaves me switching off and ending up feeling isolated, lonely and depressed in his presence. He says things that just aren’t very interesting and appears to show no regard for whether his listener finds the conversation engaging or not. When he tells me about visiting a relative or going to a concert, I’m likely to hear more about the parking and travel arrangements than whether he enjoyed the actual event itself.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago