Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project, and today I want to talk about how to be successful. Well, how the hell should I know how to be successful? If you want to be successful, I suspect you take tips from somebody who’s already really successful. And that’s why I’m going to recommend – instead of listening to me – that you read this book by Richard Branson called Losing My Virginity.
http://youtu.be/mrdeVe5oxtI
Many men have mother issues that undermine our self-confidence by stopping us from really growing up and fulfilling our true potential. Unresolved mother issues cause us to remain emotionally and developmentally immature; a boy in a man’s body. If we had a critical or controlling mother we’re particularly prone to having mother issues. Add in a passive father and a lack of tribal structure with initiation rituals in modern society to force us from the cozy comfort of our mother’s breast, and it’s easy to slip from childhood into adulthood without ever actually growing up.
Unresolved mother issues can leave you stuck in a permanent state of adolescence.
This leaves us forever unconsciously seeking comfort and reassurance from our mother, and our neediness ends up projected onto any woman we come across; which is a disaster for our relationships with women.
In normal human development, we individuate from our mothers during adolescence as we grow into being our own man with our own set of values different from hers. This is a time of rapid brain rewiring and emotional upheaval as we alternate between feeling emotionally connected with our mother, and separating from her to explore the world and our place in it.
If our mother wasn’t emotionally available to connect to, or tried to control our excursions into the world in order to prevent her feeling upset in case we got hurt, then everything can go horribly wrong. Nice Guy Syndrome and the associated approval seeking are classic symptoms of mother issues. Insecurity resulting from unresolved mother issues ends up being unconsciously projected onto everyone and everything around us, having a serious negative impact on our whole life.
Here’s how to heal your mother issues: (more…)
Many of us struggle with self-confidence issues, but for some that anxiety can lead us down a dangerous path; we might drink a little extra liquid courage or experiment with an illicit substance in an effort to feel more accepted. But what begins as a confidence-booster can quickly spiral into an addiction, and for Kyle, it took over his entire life. He was kind enough to tell me about his experience — a story of loss, rehabilitation, and recovery.
Photo credit: Pixabay
Hey guys,
Here’s an open question for you: what is your greatest challenge when it comes to self-confidence?
Is it confidence with women, confidence at work, being yourself around your family, dealing with fear and anxiety, believing in yourself, or something else? All of these things are or have been major stumbling blocks for me, but I’m interested to hear what obstacles you currently have that you’d just love to get past. The ones that would change your life and set you free. (more…)
If we were surrounded by emotionally available adult caregivers as an infant, our developing brain and nervous system learned to regulate our emotions via a healthy emotional attachment to the adults around us. However if we were surrounded by emotionally unavailable adults who routinely dismissed, minimised or suppressed both their own emotions and ours, we experienced emotional abandonment.
Being denied the emotional connection we needed as an infant can have a traumatic effect on our developing brain. Emotional abandonment can lead to Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) or what Susan Anderson calls PTSD of Abandonment in adults. The primary result is that we fail to develop healthy adult emotional regulation and can often end up feeling overwhelmed by our own emotions. This effect can last long into adulthood until we find a way to address it.
Emotional abandonment is a massive problem even in communities and families that are otherwise free of overt abuse. It’s fairly easy to recognise when you’ve been on the receiving end of physical, sexual or emotional abuse as a child and most adults recognise that reaching out for help is the appropriate, responsible and shameless thing to do.
However, with emotional abandonment the problem is fundamentally one of neglect and this is more difficult to recognise. We typically only have our own experience of childhood to compare against in identifying what is and isn’t normal or healthy. When you’re just a kid and everyone around you is avoiding emotional connection, it’s hard not to conclude that this is how to live. (more…)
I’m a full time music student at the moment, and I’m loving learning how to write songs, perform in front of people and express myself through music. Music is great because it deals with both the analytical and emotional side of our brain.
Becoming a rock star isn’t all riffs and distortion. There’s conflict with other musicians to navigate too.
However, the irrational nature of emotions means that they don’t always arise just when we want them to. Most of us are still carrying unhealed emotional baggage from our past which can get triggered in what might otherwise seem fairly innocuous situations. This can make dealing with unexpected upsets challenging both in ourselves and in other people.
In yesterday’s guitar class, I got triggered by my teacher’s response to what I though was a fairly intelligent question about whether the best way to improvise over a chord sequence in a major key would be by using the associated relative minor scale. My engineering brain thought that this would lead to less potential dissonance; but for any other budding musicians out there the answer turns out to be No: you use the minor pentatonic scale of the same key.
