Life Skills

Life Skills and Experience

How to Deal With Setbacks

Time for some truth-telling: things haven’t been entirely rosy here at Confident Man Headquarters in the last few months. Life has ups and downs, and I’m certainly not immune to the emotional roller-coaster effect they can cause. They say bad luck comes in threes and I don’t know if it’s just bad luck, bad karma or whatever, but I do know it hasn’t felt all that great lately.

So what’s been going on?

Well, firstly I started a new treatment program for Chronic Fatigue and although I’m cautiously optimistic of my health improving, one of the initial side-effects was being hit with a truckload of anxiety which left me feeling despondent, depressed and hopeless.

Around the same time I entered a Theatrical Improvisation (a.k.a. Improv) contest with some new friends of mine; only to withdraw before the contest had even begun because I was feeling overwhelmed with anxiety and stress. Something I loved doing suddenly stopped being fun.

I also quit Toastmasters because I now know enough about public speaking and it doesn’t make sense to pursue it any further until my health improves. This meant my social world was shrinking, right at the time I was feeling isolated, ill and anxious already.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Actually Work

Well it’s that time of year again. Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? How did you go with last year’s? Have you given up smoking yet? Lost weight? Learned to be confident with women? Or perhaps you gave up on the whole idea years ago because you found that it just doesn’t work.

Well join the club. But if you’d like this year to be better than last year, you need to start doing something differently. So here’s a process to make New Year’s Resolutions that actually work and make a profound difference in your life:

Write Down Your Goals

The first and most important step is to frame your New Year’s Resolutions as goals that you can work towards, and write them down. Get yourself a goal book to write your goals down in and track your progress towards them. Keep it handy as you’ll be using it a lot: It will remind you of what goals are important to you so you don’t get distracted by other less important activities, and it will help build your confidence as you start to notice goals that you set yourself being achieved.

(more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago