Forget About What Your Family Thinks Of You

For many men I know who lack confidence, the seeds of low self-esteem were planted early on during childhood in our family of origin. In an ideal world, our parents create an environment in which we can flourish as a young boy, thrive as an adolescent, and fulfill our potential as a man: confident and self-assured. We feel loved unconditionally, get on brilliantly with our siblings, and learn to deal constructively with conflict that inevitably occurs within any family.

In the real world though, things work a little differently. Unless parents make a conscious effort to deal with their personal issues through some other form of personal growth or therapy, they tend to unconsciously pass on their own insecurities to their children. They can’t help it; as children we are particularly sensitive to what goes on in our environment, and our parents are our natural role models whose behavior we tend to copy. Our parents have a god-like status to us as a young boy, and we can’t help but naively assume that the way they operate in the world is a good way for us to be too. As children we lack the real world experience and insight to notice that the way our parents operate doesn’t necessarily work real well for them either, and we don’t know any better.… Continue reading…

Improve Confidence using Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) Techniques

I’m excited to say that I’ve just added an awesome new free bonus to the [intlink id=”33″ type=”page”]The Confident Man Program[/intlink]. This audio interview with Russ Harris, bestselling author of The Happiness Trap and The Confidence Gap, uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help you build even more confidence with the most powerful techniques from all of modern psychology.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy combines the latest helping approaches with timeless wisdom

The best thing I got from this interview was that feelings of confidence only arise after we’ve stepped out in faith and taken action. Competence precedes feelings of confidence. But how do you handle the fear and anxiety that arises when you take action and step into the unknown? Well, that’s where ACT comes in: it has strategies for dealing with the fear and anxiety that would otherwise hold us back. It’s valuable material, and well worth a listen.… Continue reading…

My father and I on the platform at Broken Hill station

Spending “Quality” Time With My Father

When my father invited me recently to join him on a Railway Historical Society trip from Sydney to Broken Hill and back, my initial thought was “5 days stuck on a rusty old train with uncomfortable seats isn’t exactly my thing”. But I’d been looking for an opportunity to travel somewhere and spend some quality time with my Dad, so I ended up jumping at the chance.

My father is 79, and although he’s just as mentally alert as he’s ever been, he’s not getting any younger. His father lived to be 100 and there’s no sign of mine dropping dead any time soon. But whenever I speak to men whose fathers have died, they often talk about feelings of regret over the questions they didn’t ask, and the connection they never made with their father while he was still alive. He’s not going to be here with all faculties intact forever.

Photo of my father and I at Broken Hill station

Dad and I next to the train at Broken Hill station

On the other hand, connecting with my father isn’t exactly easy. He’s in his element in a group of mostly-retired mostly-male historical train buffs. They talk about the intricacies of the trains, the tracks, the sidings, government mismanagement of their cherished but slowly declining rail transport, and the resulting increasingly-deserted towns we pass through on the way.… Continue reading…

How Theatrical Improvisation Increases Your Confidence

I’ve been taking a bunch of theatrical improvisation courses lately because it’s a really fun, engaging way to increase self-confidence. There’s a part of me that loves being on stage, without the old inhibitions that used to get in the way of everyday life. The skills involved in theatrical improvisation, also known as Comedy Improvisation or Improv, turn out to be essential life skills, especially when it comes to interacting confidently with other people.

Much of what I’ve learned in Improv class reverses a lot of what I learned about how to act while growing up. Many of us have huge chunks of our creativity, and our true personality, beaten out of us in the education and socialization process while we were young. We got punished for failure, bullied for being different, and ridiculed when we got things wrong. So we learned to play it small, avoid risks, and generally keep our head down to avoid getting kicked. It was a conservative survival strategy that worked at the time, but doesn’t work so well in the adult world.

Theatrical improvisation, on the other hand, teaches us how to:

  • Fail brilliantly.
  • Say “Yes” to opportunities.
  • Take risks.
  • Listen to other people.
  • Get out of our heads.
Continue reading…

4 New Videos To Help You Build Self-Confidence

I might be down with the ‘flu, but I’ve recently posted 4 new YouTube videos to help you build self-confidence. Click the Watch On YouTube button, and hit the Like button so they go viral:

3 Keys To Building Self-Confidence for Men:

How To Start Conversations with Strangers:

The Easiest Way Ever For Men To Build Confidence With Women:

The Biggest Factor That Undermines Self-Confidence:

Remember to hit Like, and leave a comment to let me know what you think!… Continue reading…

How to Have Better Relationships With Women

Here’s a story with some relationship advice for you. I took my Dad out to dinner last week as his 79th Birthday gift. He is actively downsizing in preparation for moving into a retirement village with my mother, so I appreciate that the last thing he wants is a physical gift from me. He’d much rather have some quality time together.

Unfortunately we have slightly different definitions of “quality time”. As my father droned on and on over dinner telling me story after boring story, I felt myself shutting down and becoming increasingly frustrated and angry with him. He lives in his own little world, oblivious of the effect his words have on other people. I used to wonder why it was that as an adult, I found myself pushed away by his stories all the time and began feeling resentful every time he launched into one. Now I know, and the simple answer has the power to totally transform relationships:

My Dad’s stories have no emotional content.

Over the past few years, I’ve been studying the broad spectrum of human communication. Here are some of the things I’ve learned from the various different fields I’ve studied:

  • To be a powerful public speaker, you must tell stories that engage your audience’s emotions.

Continue reading…

What is Your Greatest Challenge?

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…)

Rethinking Pride

Pride has been given a bad rap, and it’s time to rethink it so we can all feel good about ourselves. It’s a normal basic human emotion; that good feeling that we get when we acknowledge how fundamentally good and powerful we are. In our achievement-oriented society, we most often experience it when we’ve done something we feel good about; but genuine pride reflects a deeper sense of feeling good about who we are at our core. Pride is the opposite feeling to shame.

We’ve often been taught to stifle our pride, along with many of our other feelings, leading to a lack of self-esteem and self-confidence. Some religions teach that pride is a sin, we’re bad at our core and need redemption. Sayings like “getting a big head”, “too big for his boots” or “he was a proud man” confuse pride with arrogance. “Pride comes before a fall” makes us wary of acknowledging our pride and instils fear that things will go bad if we feel too good. All these sayings and beliefs are intended to keep you down, stop you feeling good about yourself, and stop you being powerful so that other people don’t feel uncomfortable about their insecurity over their own lack of power and pride in themselves.… Continue reading…

How To Stay Sane When You Work In I.T.

A career in Information Technology can be mentally stimulating and great for your bank balance, but may not be quite so ideal for your emotional and mental health. Computer engineering, software development, engineering, science or any I.T. related work is great for exercising your analytical skills, but it can leave the more primitive (read: more powerful) emotional parts of your brain under utilised.

As far back as 1979, Richard Bandler and John Grinder (the guys behind Neuro Linguistic Programming) wrote in their book Frogs Into Princes:

We come from California and the whole world out there is run by electronics firms. We have a lot of people who are called ‘engineers,’ and engineers typically at a certain point have to go to therapy. It’s a rule, I don’t know why, but they come in and they usually all say the same thing, they go:

Well, I could see for a long time how, you know, I was really climbing up and becoming successful and then suddenly, you know, when I began to get towards the top, I just looked around and my life looked empty. Can you see that? I mean, could you see what that would be like for a man of my age?’”Continue reading…

Build Self-Esteem by Becoming Self-Validating

If you grew up in an environment where you felt a sense of unconditional love, you probably developed strong self-worth and confidence by default. And you’re probably not reading this. But if you felt early on that love was tied to acceptance and approval from other people, you may have developed a bad habit of seeking external approval and validation from other people as a way of feeling good about yourself.

The problem with seeking external validation is that our self-worth ends up at the mercy of other people and what we imagine they are thinking of us. This leads to insecurity rather than self-confidence. We may feel good when we get their approval, but we feel terrible when we don’t; or even just if we think we don’t. Seeking external validation can become an addiction that causes an endless cycle of highs and lows and leaves us feeling overly self-conscious.

Build Self-Confidence By Becoming Self-Validating.
Image courtesy Pixabay

I know first hand what this is like, because I lived most of my life that way, and it’s not where you want to be.

The solution is to practise internal validation, so you’re not reliant on other people’s approval to feel good about yourself.

Learn to make choices that are best for you while considering the consequences for yourself. Don’t ignore the impact your choices have on other people, but don’t make it more important than the impact on yourself. Stop worrying what other people will think all the time. Ironically, the more approval you give yourself, the more you end up getting it from other people; and when you don’t, you won’t care so much.

Here’s how to become self-validating: (more…)