Helping Men to Be Confident

I can relate; Men need to hear this

Hey guys, I just want to respond to Tony Porter’s TEDWomen speech about the man box and his call to men. I think the only problem with this speech is that it’s given at a conference mainly with women.T he actual substance of his talk really isn’t just about violence against women: It’s about freedom for men as you’ll notice in the quote right at the very end.

I can totally relate to what Tony’s saying. I had a father who was just emotionally not there. He was physically there so perhaps I was luckier than some guys, but when it came to anything related to emotions he completely kept them to himself. He was obviously very ashamed of how he felt and I think still is, and as a result the only emotions that I could see him express really were when he would seethe with frustration or when he would explode with anger.

And, yeah, that might be okay for the man box, but it’s not okay for relationships with people generally. So, yeah, I can relate to Tony’s message, and I recommend this video to any guys, not just to women:

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Start An Exercise Routine

Hey, it’s Graham again from The Confident Man Project, and today you’re going to learn about how to start an exercise routine and why that is important to your self-confidence. Well, exercise is an awesome thing. There really are very few downsides unless you do too hard and you injure yourself.

But exercise is good for your physical health, it’s good for your mental health, it’s a massive cure for depression and anxiety, it boosts your self-confidence, it helps you build muscle tone, it generally makes you more sociable. So there’s really no downside. It takes a little bit of time, but if you don’t have time for exercise then, well, your priorities are a little bit screwed and you really need to get that into gear and get it fixed.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Get On Stage At An Open Mic Night

Hey, it’s Graham here with another confidence expanding tip for you. And today I want to talk about the suggestion of getting up on stage at an open mic night, performing your musical talents if you have any or your comedic talents if you have any or whatever talent it is that you have, doing it up on stage and getting outside your comfort zone which is of course the way that you build confidence the fastest.

Any big city will have comedy clubs and entertainment venues that have regular open mic nights, typically on Tuesdays or Wednesdays because those are the nights where it gets a little bit quiet and a lot of the professional acts prefer to perform on Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights. So Tuesdays and Wednesdays are often open mic nights where anybody who has a bit of talent that they want to develop can go along and tread the boards, get up on stage and have a go at entertaining people.

I recommend that you give it a go. Like, this will make your heart race like nothing else. If you’re a bit of a funny guy and you’ve got some good wise-cracks, a few jokes that you want to run, I recommend that what you do is you work out some stories from your real life that have made you laugh that you think have been funny and that you put them together into a little five-minute comedy routine.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Walk Like The Terminator

Hey, it’s Graham here with another confidence building activity for you. Now, the way that you walk says a whole lot about how confident that you feel inside and what happens is that when you’re walking down the street, the way that we walk projects our inner sense of self-confidence out into the world and other people can’t help but respond to us by noticing the way that we’re walking and the level of confidence with which we’re walking.

So I want to have a bit of fun with this activity and the idea of this activity is to focus on the way that you walk and to walk like The Terminator. So if you haven’t seen it before, grab a copy of Terminator 1. Notice the way that Arnold Schwarzenegger walks when he’s striding down the street. He’s standing in a very erect position. He’s swinging his arms back and forward. He’s striding along like a machine, and basically what you want to do is start striding along like a powerful machine as well.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Learn To Recognize Women’s Tests

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project with another confidence building idea for you this week, and today I’m going to talk to you about learning to recognize tests that women throw at us guys. To get a perspective on this, you need to understand that women, particularly attractive women, are besieged by attention from guys all the time and they need to have some little way of working out which guys they want to be hanging around with. So they can’t help but start throwing out little tests to guys to find out what it is that we’re made of.

Women aren’t always conscious that they’re doing this. It just becomes a habitual part of their pattern of relating to people who come up and approache them, and a lot of guys find this extremely disarming and that’s kind of the point of why women sometimes do this.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

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.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With People Who Offend You

I’ve woken up this morning, and the world’s gone crazy again. Men with guns have killed people who offended them, plus a few other random people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Last month it was my own hometown of Sydney, this month it’s another city I love, Paris.

I am Charlie. So are you.

I am Charlie. So are you.

Social media and the newspapers are abuzz with political leaders and lay people saying they won’t cave in to “terrorists” by giving in to fear. Police and military forces have responded, and most of the gunmen and their accomplices are now dead. So are some of the hostages.

I feel deeply saddened for the people who have lost their lives, and the families they leave behind. Yet I don’t buy the rhetoric that says we won’t feel fear because that would just be giving the “terrorists” what they want. To be honest, I feel frightened and powerless when I see people much like myself caught up in hostage dramas and ending up dying at the hands of men with guns who believe their martyrdom will earn them rewards in an afterlife I don’t even believe exists.

How can I possibly hope to influence the behaviour of people who subscribe to an ideology I don’t agree with, following a religion I don’t know much about, with a spiritual leader who appears above criticism in their minds? Even within Islam, different sects have a history of killing each other over what appear to me to be relatively minor doctrinal differences (or more likely because they just wanted their land and/or possessions), so the answer doesn’t appear to lie there.

That said, if the pen really is mightier than the sword, I’m willing to give it a go.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Catalogue Your Strengths

Hey, it’s Graham here again and today you’re going to learn another confidence building activity, and this time I’m going to talk to you about cataloging your strengths. When we lack self-confidence, we often spend a lot of time on our weaknesses. We might spend a lot of time working on our weaknesses or simply dwelling on our weaknesses and noticing how we don’t feel the way that we’d like to feel all the time.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Read The Way Of The Superior Man by David Deida

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project, and today I want to recommend this book to you. It’s called The Way of the Superior Man. That’s a pretty cool title. I mean, who doesn’t want to be the superior man, right? Well, let me tell you a couple of things that I really like about this book. But first I’ll read to you a little bit from the introduction:

The newly evolving man is not a scared bully, posturing like some King Kong in charge of the universe. Nor is he a new age wimp, all spineless, smiley and starry-eyed. He has embraced both his inner masculine and feminine, and he no longer holds onto either of them.

He doesn’t need to be right all the time, nor does he need to always be safe, co-operating and sharing like androgynous Mr. Nice Guy. He simply lives from his deepest core, fearlessly giving his gifts, feeling through the fleeting moment into the openness of existence, totally committed to magnifying love.

Well, that sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? A little bit airy-fairy perhaps, but let me tell you a couple of things that I got out of this book that I really like. So the first one is the concept of masculine and feminine energy. Now, the idea behind this is that all of us have a mixture of masculine and feminine energies that are running our life.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome Perfectionism

Hey there, it’s Graham, and I want to talk to you about the problem of perfectionism and how to overcome it because perfectionism is a massive problem when it comes to undermining your self-confidence.

Now, how do I know this? Well, I know because I’m a recovering perfectionist myself and I know exactly how much damage this evil beast can do deep down in your subconscious and I’ve found some strategies that have helped me to overcome it and so I want to share them with you.

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By Graham Stoney, ago