Helping Men to Be Confident

How To Work With An Empathy Buddy

What Is An Empathy Buddy?

Get A Male Empathy Buddy

Get A Male Empathy Buddy

An empathy buddy is a great way to receive some non-judgmental emotional support from another person, without having to spend big dollars on therapy. They can be particularly valuable if you:

  • Have difficulty identifying or expressing your feelings or needs
  • Feel isolated and in need of connection
  • Don’t trust other men to treat your feelings with respect
  • Need ongoing emotional support

An empathy buddy isn’t a replacement for a therapist; if you have emotional wounds from the past that are causing you fear or anxiety in your day-to-day life, get a therapist. But if you’re looking for another way to expand your emotional vocabulary, reduce your emotional isolation or manage feelings of shame you may have about your emotions, an empathy buddy can be a great way to do it.

The idea is to have a buddy who listens to where you’re at without judging you and occasionally reflects back how you’re feeling and what your needs are. I suggest talking to your empathy buddy on a regular basis, such as every week or fortnight. Like any relationship, it may take a little while to feel fully comfortable with your empathy buddy, but following the guidelines below will help you build trust and rapport together more quickly.

The idea of an empathy buddy comes from the Non-Violent Communication (NVC) community. NVC is a style of communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg with the aim that everyone can get their needs met by communicating feelings and needs clearly and directly. Showing empathy is also a core skill for relating to other people so it’s a great thing to learn and practice in its own right.

Having an empathy buddy gives you a safe environment to explore feelings that may otherwise undermine your self-confidence, since your buddy gives you permission to feel how you feel without telling you that you’re wrong or should be different. I believe that healing unresolved feelings, especially when there is shame involved, requires us to connect to another consciousness; and an empathy buddy can help us do just that.

This is powerful stuff. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Do You Feel Like A Fraud?

Hey there, it’s Graham again here from The Confident Man Project, and today I’m coming at you live from my beautiful backyard here. As you can see, my backyard looks out over this beautiful bush land, and it’s way too nice a day to be stuck in the office this morning so, yeah, I’m here in my backyard. And today I want to talk about feeling like a fraud, and I have a confession to take and the confession is that sometimes I feel like a fraud.

Now, feeling like a fraud is very common so it’s quite possible that you might be able to relate to this. And often I’ve heard a lot of famous people, movie stars, celebrities, people in the spotlight, often talk about how they feel like a fraud. They feel as though they haven’t deserved their fame or they haven’t deserved what they’ve got or they feel as though there’s some kind of let’s call it incongruity perhaps between what they’ve got or how they’re perceived by other people and how they actually feel inside.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Cut The Emotional Umbilical Cord With Your Mother

G’day, guys. Today I want to talk about how to cut the emotional umbilical cord with your mother. Now, you may wonder why you want to do this or what I’m talking about. So the emotional umbilical cord is a metaphor to refer to that ability that your mother has to control or dominate you or influence you in ways that you may not like.

Now, the origin of the emotional umbilical cord goes back to when you were an infant, when your ability to comply with what your mother wanted was kind of essential to your survival since you were totally dependent on her to feed and clothe and house you. And at some point during your development, you need to cut this emotional umbilical cord if you want to grow up from being a boy into being a man.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Handle A Boyfriend Or Husband With A Controlling Mother: Part 2

The solution to this whole issue is for the man to man up and start stand up to his mother and saying what’s important to him whenever there’s some kind of conflict so that he can learn to side with you in the relationship rather than with his controlling mother.

There’s really nothing that you can do as a partner in terms of what his mother does, and the solution to the problem is not for the mother to change her behavior. You can’t expect other people to change, and we have really no control over other people’s behavior.

 

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Handle A Boyfriend Or Husband With A Controlling Mother: Part 1

Most of my advice is aimed at men, but today I have a video for you ladies out there on the topic of how to deal with a man who has a controlling mother. I’ve written a previous article on how to deal with a controlling mother, and I’m getting an increasing number of comments left by women in response to this article which was originally aimed at men. And the women are talking about their frustrations in having dealt with partners who had controlling mothers.

What I’ll cover here today is what you should if your boyfriend, husband or partner has a controlling mother and this is having some kind of impact – and it’s generally a negative impact – on your relationship with the guy.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

The Day I Finally Stood Up To My Critical Mother

My mother and father are still together after 50 years of marriage. They are good, church going people who are very community minded. They show love by acts of service and are often kind and generous to other people. But the way my critical mother treats my largely passive father is toxic, and I recently took the opportunity to stand up to their behaviour in order to reverse the negative effects it has had on my own life. Here’s how it panned out:

Standing Up To A Critical Mother

Standing Up To A Critical Mother

Recently my parents and I all attended my maternal aunt’s 90th birthday party, along with some extended family. We spent the weekend in a lovely guest house in the country and since it was a long drive for my aging parents, they asked me to give them a lift there and back. I am a little apprehensive because I know the way my parent’s behaviour often triggers me, but I see it as an opportunity to connect with them and spend some additional quality time together.

The two-hour drive to the guest house is relatively uneventful, with occasional friendly chatter and lunch at my parents’ favourite cafè on-route.

However, I am starting to notice the pattern in my parents relationship that often upsets me: my mother “corrects” everything my father says, in a way which sounds critical and belittling to me. His reaction is to withdraw and shut down in response to this criticism; a common trait I particularly dislike in myself.

Initially, I just witness what is happening and my internal reaction. But over the course of the weekend as I notice more and more incidents where my father says something that my mother thinks is foolish, wrong or otherwise in need of correction, I become increasingly agitated.

In my ideal world, all the years of therapy and emotional healing that I’ve had would insulate me from the effect of this and I’d be free to let them relate however they choose without me being triggered.

But in the real world, I’m not that enlightened. Not yet, anyway.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

10 Signs Your Family Is Crazy-Making

A few years ago when I did The Hoffman Process, one of the facilitators described [intlink id=”480″ type=”post”]my mother’s behaviour[/intlink] as “crazy-making”.

I thought, “Wow, that’s a fantastic description.”

And it wasn’t just my mother; it was the whole family dynamic that she and my passive father helped establish. Take a perfectly normal infant child, bring them up in a crazy-making emotionally disconnected family and you’ve pretty much got a recipe for insanity.

But how do you know if you’re living in a crazy-making family? Well, I’m glad you asked.

So here’s the top 10 signs that your family is crazy-making:

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Stand Up To An Adult Bully

Today I want to talk about how to stand up to an adult bully. This is particularly important if you are like me and you got bullied a lot when you were a kid at school. Adult bullies now are your opportunity to stand up for yourself and to heal the emotional damage that was done to you when you were a kid. Because although you might have felt unsafe standing up to the bullies when you were a kid and you might have been carrying that fear with you, now that you’re an adult it’s actually quite safe to stand up to bullies and so the adult bullies that invariably come into our lives are an opportunity to heal the bullying from the past.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

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.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Be Confident Talking To Women On The Phone

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project, and you can probably hear that there’s some kookaburras going off down in the distance in the bush land here. I’m out in the beautiful bush land just out the back of my place. And kookaburras are a native bird of Australia. It’s a bit unusual; it’s got this funky kind of laughing sort of sound that it makes, and, yeah, it just reminds me what a beautiful country I live in. I’m a pretty lucky guy.

So I want to spread some of that luck out to you by talking about the challenge of learning to be confident talking to women on the phone. And how do you go about doing this? Because I know a lot of you guys like me are just terrified of actually picking up the phone and calling the woman after we’ve got her phone number, so how do you get confident doing that and get in the mode where it’s actually a fun thing to do rather than something that just fills you with fear and dread?

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By Graham Stoney, ago