Ten Step Towards Loving Yourself

Today is Valentine’s day: the day on which people traditionally express and celebrate their love for each other. But what about loving ourselves? Many people have had the idea of self-love beaten out of them through early life experiences, so here are Ten Steps Towards Loving Yourself: (more…)

The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris

My Life Coach originally recommended I read Dr Russ Harris’s bestselling book The Happiness Trap at a time when I was struggling with a lot of anxiety which was getting in the way of me achieving consistent lasting happiness. The book is practical guide to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) with a subtitle that rang a chord with me: Stop struggling, start living.

The basic premise of The Happiness Trap is summed up when Dr Harris writes:

The more we try to avoid the basic reality that all human life involves pain, the more we are likely to struggle with that pain when it arises, thereby creating even more suffering.

We spend a great deal of our lives seeking pleasant feelings and avoiding unpleasant ones, because we think that this is what will make us happy. But herein lies the trap: the techniques we use to avoid unpleasant feelings actually tend to reinforce them, like the old “don’t think of pink elephants” trick. Or we avoid our feelings altogether, leaving us disconnected from reality. Even positive activities like setting and pursuing future goals can cause us to lose connection with what’s going on around us when we immediately notice that we haven’t met those goals yet, or we experience frustration over goals we haven’t been able to achieve yet.

(more…)

Does The Secret and The Law Of Attraction Really Work?

Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret is a follow-up to the phenomenally successful movie of the same name, both of which describe the so-called Law of Attraction and how to make it work for you in your life. I am a strong believer that we get more of whatever we focus on in life, even though I don’t go along with much of the new-age mumbo-jumbo in the book and movie; and there’s a major catch they barely mention.

We naturally attract more of what we focus on because of the way our brains work. The universe doesn’t just magically provide it to us, nor do our thoughts broadcast or receive information, nor can we just sit back and wait for whatever we think of to manifest themselves in our reality. Yet I still believe The Law of Attraction works when it comes to improving our experience of life; so let me explain why. (more…)

How To Get Out Of Your Head

It’s a beautiful day so I’ve come outside to give you a confidence building exercise on getting out of your head. Now, the reason why getting out of your head is important is that we spend a lot of time doing a lot of analytical thinking, we often tend to have very analytical thinking jobs that get us really stuck in our head and we just completely lose touch with what’s going on around us.

(more…)

Everyone Else Is Afraid Of You

Here is an idea that’s a little bit zen, a bit out there. It’s the concept that:

Everyone else is afraid of you.

Now, you know that feeling that you get when you go to approach a group of strangers or a stranger and you want to start talking to them and you immediately feel this reaction of uncomfortable, anxious, approach anxiety, whatever you want to call it? It doesn’t feel good. Well, here’s the funny thing: the funny thing is that everybody else in the world feels exactly the same thing about you.

(more…)

Get Out Of Your Head And Practice Making Choices

Here is an exercise for getting out of your head and developing your ability to make choices. Often when we lack self-confidence we lose our ability to make choices because we’ve been taught in the past that it’s not okay to want what we want, it’s not okay to like what we like and we have to be kind of bland and neutral about everything.

So in today’s exercise we’re going to start reinforcing that ability to make choices by making choices about the environment around us, and they can be arbitrary choices if you like. Any choice will do to get kick-started, so let’s have a go.

(more…)

Develop A Strong Point Of View

Hey, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project here again and today I want to talk to you about the concept of developing a strong point of view. Now, this is a concept I’ve borrowed from the acting world and it’s very applicable I find to guys, particularly when we lack self-confidence. Often we’ve given up on having a really strong point of view.

Perhaps our opinion in the past hasn’t really been validated or hasn’t been valued or other people haven’t respected our point of view and we’ve learnt over time to just become kind of bland and neutral in our ideas about everything.

(more…)

Are You Addicted To Your Own Drama?

I’m sitting in a Youth Hostel in Melbourne, Australia where I’m staying for a couple of weeks while visiting the Melbourne International Comedy festival. I’ve just had breakfast and am sitting near the kitchen area chilling out before heading out for a day on the town. While I’m not one to eavesdrop, I can’t help but overhear snippets of the Skype conversation of the woman sitting next to me.

Are You Addicted To Your Own Drama?

Are You Addicted To Your Own Drama?

And what I hear is: drama. Drama, drama, drama. “She did this”, “he did that”, “she said this”, “she said that”, “She thinks I’m a bad influence”, “they don’t like me”, “she hated it”, “it sucked”, “it was awful”…

Ok, you get the idea.

If there was heaps of space, I’d simply move and get away from the negative energy; but it’s pretty crowded this morning, and the conversation reminded me how easy it is to get addicted to our own drama, and the dramas in other people’s lives around us.

Now it would be a different story if the woman was debriefing about her emotions regarding the drama she’s describing, but I’m not hearing many words from our emotional vocabulary like “sad”, “angry”, “scared”, “happy”; nor phrases like “I felt …”, “I feel…” etc.… Continue reading…

How To Silence Your Inner Critic

G’day, guys. Today you’re going to learn about how to quieten your inner critic. So your inner critic is that voice in your head that tells you that you’re stupid or that you’re wrong or that you’re not allowed to do things that you want to do or generally makes your life kind of miserable by putting the boot in and ripping into you at any opportunity.

If you’re anything like me, you have, or maybe had in the past, a very strong inner critic that is the result of a lot of criticism that you may have received when you were a kid or as an adolescent or even growing up and as an adult. Criticism even as an adult can still sting.

(more…)

Walk Barefoot As Much As Possible

Hey, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project coming at you from the beautiful bush land here, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about connecting back to nature. In our urbanized environment, often a lot of the time we’ve totally lost our connection with nature. Most of us guys these days live in big cities surrounded by concrete jungles and steel structures and motorcars and stuff, and we never even walk out into bush land like this. This is what the bush looks like in case you’ve forgotten. And as a result, we’ve really lost our connection with nature and the earth and all those things, and we’ve become a little anesthetized and insulated from it all.

We tend to walk around in rubber-soled shoes all the time, and we don’t even contact real, natural stuff anymore. So as a result we develop soles of our feet that are very thin and sensitive, and we never really harden up. That’s what I’m trying to say.

(more…)