Helping Men to Be Confident

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is one of those books that pretty much everyone on the planet would benefit from reading. The basic premise is that a great deal of our unhappiness and insecurity is caused by us wallowing in regret about the past, or worrying about the future. Many of us spend relatively little time actually being connected to the present moment, which is ironic because the present moment is the only one we have available to us. The past has already happened and cannot be changed, and the future hasn’t happened yet; we have relatively little real control over it either. So all we really have to work with is the present moment.

This book gives the clearest description I’ve come across of why it’s important to remain connected to the present moment. It’s particularly important when it comes to relationships with other people, since we’re difficult to connect with when our minds are somewhere else.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

And When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison

I first encountered Blake Morrison when I heard him speak at the Sydney Writer’s Festival ten years ago on the rarely-deeply-discussed topic of the relationship between fathers and sons. I knew immediately that I was going to relate to his book And When Did You Last See Your Father.

The book is an autobiographical series of vignettes spanning Blake’s life, each of which add a piece to the puzzle depicting his larger-than-life father as seen through the son’s eyes. Interspersed between these snapshots is the background scene of Blake’s aging father’s gradual death due to cancer. In many ways it reminded me of in my relationship with my own father. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin E.P. Seligman

Martin Seligman is one of my favourite personal development authors. Not only are his books easy to read, but as the founder of the Positive Psychology movement he’s got the academic credentials and professional experience to know what the research says, and what he’s talking about.

His book What You Can Change and What You Can’t is billed as “The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement”. I was drawn to this book while contemplating the question: “Just how much can a person change?” I was particularly interested in whether it’s possible to make major changes in how we relate to other people, like if an introvert can become an extrovert. I’ve done the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator a couple of times in the past and I was never certain whether I was really an introvert, or just a traumatised extrovert. I love hanging around people when it goes well, but it hasn’t always gone as well as I would have liked and some of my early interactions with people were quite traumatic. I believe this is what led me to develop tremendous social anxiety. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

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…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Domineering Women

One of the challenges of growing up with a domineering mother who routinely disrespected our boundaries as an infant or adolescent, is that we can become hypersensitive to boundary violations with women as an adult. This can make domineering women particularly difficult to deal with when we encounter them in our daily lives. However, being assertive with such women can help us heal our wounded inner child when we stand up to them powerfully in a way that wasn’t safe for us as a child to stand up to our mother.

This leaves us feeling more confident and powerful in our interactions with other people generally; especially those who remind us unconsciously of our domineering mother. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

The Dance of Fear by Harriet Lerner

The main thing I got from Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Fear is that fear and anxiety aren’t just individual problems; they totally impact the way we relate with each other. Anxiety is contagious and gets passed around between us whenever we interact with anxious people. Families, companies, organisations, churches, countries and social groups of all kinds can become infected with anxiety that affects everyone in the group. When a social system becomes fear-based or shame-based, everyone in it suffers.

Fear can be like a dance, often involving other people

Since anxiety causes suffering, we naturally want to escape. One way of escaping is to dump our anxiety on someone else. Being a sensitive person, I’ve always been susceptible to having other people’s anxiety dumped on me, but it’s only now that I’m learning to recognise when this is happening.

This book helped me identify such a situation once when I volunteered to lead a public speaking training course run by my Toastmaster’s club. I had run it successfully several times before and we always got great feedback from the participants on how valuable it was. But this time I wanted to make it even better by talking more about how anxiety works physiologically, and throwing in some exercises I had learned during my acting classes to help deal with fear right up front.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re the only one on the planet with feelings? Does it sometimes seem as though your life is at the mercy of your moods? Does everyone around you seem to be cruising along just fine with their emotional barrier up, making it difficult for you to connect with them, and leaving you feeling like there’s something wrong with you? Do you feel out of place because you’re a man, and men aren’t supposed to have feelings; or do you feel that because you’re a woman with feelings, you’re playing second fiddle to the cold, hard men that rule the planet?

Emotional Intelligence is a vital skill we often don’t learn at school

I can relate to these feelings sometimes, and with this in mind I recently tackled Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence. It seemed to me that the message I’d received from my family, my all-boys high school and my society at large while growing up was that emotions were a sign of weakness to be eliminated at all costs. I wasn’t supposed to have feelings when I was a boy; and yet I still have them even now as a man. I’ve often felt deep down that there was something wrong with me as a result. Men were supposed to be emotionally invulnerable, but I’m not. I’d like to be. Other people seem to be; or are they just faking it? I often get hijacked by my own feelings preventing me from doing what I really want. Surely by now I was supposed to be past all that; I’m not a kid any more, after all. Perhaps a little EQ would bring an answer to the quandary.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How (Not) To Manage Anger: Lessons From My Parents

When we are young, we learn to manage our emotions through the interactions with our immediate caregivers, principally our mother and father. The way our parents manage their emotions leaves a dramatic imprint on our developing nervous system that can last long into adulthood. This is particularly true of strong emotions like anger.

Two common adult reactions to poor emotional management by our parents are to submit or to rebel. We either live the rest of our lives managing our emotions they way they taught us out of fear and submission, or doing the opposite out of anger and rebellion. Neither of these two reactions represent true freedom. A better approach is to make our own choice in each situation but this takes insight and practice, especially if we choose to do things differently from the default programming we got from our parents. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Get A Toxic Mother Out Of Your Nervous System

When we are children our survival depends on having support from our biological caregivers, principally our mother. If she rejects us, we die. Since our very life depends on her support, this gives us a tremendous desire for approval from our mother that goes deep into our nervous system.

If our mother was emotionally mature, mentally developed and physically competent at facing the challenges of her own life, her relationship with our father and of raising us, her reciprocal feelings of love towards us motivates her to meet our basic needs. Our nervous system calms down over time as we learn to regulate our emotions via the empathic bond that we share with our mothers, and to a lesser extent with our fathers, siblings and other significant older people in our infant lives.

Over time as we begin to individuate from our mothers, particularly during adolescence, our need for love, support and approval from her diminishes as we learn how to form healthy relationships with other people and to meet our own survival needs. Once our survival is no longer dependent on our mother and we are free to pursue our own goals, even ones that she may not approve of. This is part of the process of growing from a dependent boy into a [intlink id=”33″ type=”page”]confident, independent man[/intlink].

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Man-Hatred In The Media

It seems like every day I’m coming across articles and interviews in the media on so-called “toxic masculinity” written and organised by man-hating post-feminists with an obvious personal agenda of beating up on men. They piggy-back on otherwise positive themes like equality, the #metoo movement, tackling domestic violence or eliminating sexual assault; but then hijack the agenda with an underlying theme that men are crap and the future is female.

Plenty of other social commentators have dissected the inherent hypocrisy of man-haters relying on societal infrastructure predominantly provided and maintained by men that keeps them housed, clothed and fed with clean water, electricity, telecommunications and other services so reliable that they fail to notice they’re even there; while at the same time complaining at every opportunity about the behavior of a tiny minority of men as if it were the universal norm.

So instead of delving any further into what’s wrong with man-haters, I’m going to focus on how to deal with the problem: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago