Helping Men to Be Confident

Why “Being Yourself” Doesn’t Work When Meeting Women

I often hear women giving guys who struggle when it comes to meeting women the well-intentioned but deadly advice:

Just be yourself.

Any guy seeking advice on meeting women knows that this just doesn’t work. After all, you’ve been “being yourself” your whole life, and look where it’s got you so far. Given that so many women offer this nugget of advice so frequently, it’s worth looking at why it fails in practice:

Who Are You Really Anyway?

Who you are is a combination of your core self, and all the learned behaviours that you’ve acquired since you were conceived. Together, these make up your personality. Of all the animals on the planet, humans have the largest capacity for learning, and hence the highest proportion of learned behaviour in our personalities. Your personality is what other people experience when they meet you, but it’s not really who you are at your core.

Given that most of your personality is learned behaviour, if you are sufficiently motivated and persistent you can learn new behaviours which get you better results; especially in your interactions with other people. If you feel like a failure when it comes to women, you need to realise that they problem isn’t you; the problem is the way you have learned to behave and communicate.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Overcoming Reluctance To Approach Women

As guys, we can be our own worst enemy sometimes. I just had this question from a reader:

I have finally come to the realisation that I know enough of this stuff. What I haven’t mastered is the action step. And I don’t know why. Whenever I see an attractive woman, I know I have a lot to offer, but regardless of what I think, I still don’t actually do anything. It drives me spare to be honest. How do you connect learning and doing?

I fall into this trap too sometimes; I see an attractive woman, yet I don’t approach her. Call it approach anxiety, fear of the unknown, not knowing what to say, limiting beliefs, lack of confidence… It doesn’t matter what you call it, the question is: what to do about it.

So here are a bunch of ideas that work for me at overcoming or avoiding approach anxiety/reluctance:

Start Wherever You’re At

Don’t beat yourself up just because you don’t approach every woman you find attractive. I don’t either, but I am committed to personal growth and to improving my social and communication skills on a consistent basis, and that’s what gets me results. Start wherever you’re at, and keep working on your social skills until you can talk to absolutely anyone.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Get What You Deserve by Jay Levinson & Seth Godin

Now this is one fascinating book. It points out that the way other people treat us is determined by the way we communicate ourselves to them. In every interaction we have with other people, the way we communicate is marketing ourselves to them. Even if you think you aren’t involved in marketing yourself to other people and the world, you’re still doing it; just not intentionally and therefore probably not very effectively. This may explain why you’re not getting the results you want in some areas of your life. If you don’t have the life you want, it’s because you haven’t learned to communicate (i.e. market yourself) effectively in that area.

What you get in life from other people depends on the signals you send.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Recover from a Christian Upbringing

I grew up in a conservative Christian church-going family. During years of Sunday school, church services and various fellowship groups, I was fed a diet of deception which helped undermine my fragile self-esteem. My sensitivity and having emotionally disconnected parents who were in constant conflict didn’t help, and it’s difficult to judge exactly how much of the damage was due to religious indoctrination, and how much was simply due to the environment I grew up in. My parents could return from a church service where the minister preached on the theme of “Love”, and have a blazingly abusive argument. Throw in this level of hypocrisy, and you get a boy who grows up into one seriously confused adult.

Were you made to feel small by your childhood religion?

Were you made to feel small by your childhood religion?

Childhood religious teaching has a pervasive effect. For many years into adulthood I continued attending church before I wised up, and even became involved in the church leadership. At the time I believed I was doing the right thing; but looking back I can see how appallingly narrow-minded and naïve I was.

Realising that I had been misled was painful, and didn’t suddenly undo overnight the damage that had been done to my psyche over many years.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Recover from a Passive or Ineffective Father

Having a passive, ineffective or absent father has an enormous effect on a man’s development and eventual self-confidence. The quality of your relationship with your father, and his ability to pass on to you his positive masculine wisdom and energy are the most important factors in you developing your full potential as a man.

A passive father will damage your sense of masculinity

However, if your father was relatively passive, non-assertive, ineffective, absent physically or even just shy and withheld, you may have some work to do in order to recover what you missed out on. Here are some suggestions on how to fill the gap your father left:

Join a Men’s Group

The most important indicator of confidence in a man is your secure ability to relate meaningfully to other men. Your relationship with other men is modeled on your relationship with your father, and on your friendships with other boys while growing up. You can’t improve on this by yourself, nor can you do it with women: you need to find other men who you can relate to on a deeper level.

Find men you can trust who are prepared to drop the usual competitive male bravado and talk straight with you about their successes, failures, frustrations and joys in life.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Get Yourself a Male Mentor

In an ideal world, your father taught you everything you need to know in order to grow into a confident, powerful, successful man. In the real world, my father didn’t know half of what I needed in order to be the man I was meant to be. That meant I needed to find other male mentors to fill in the gaps. If you talk to anyone successful at anything, you’ll discover that they didn’t get there on their own: they had help from their teachers and mentors. So I suggest that you specifically seek out men who have achieved what you want to achieve, and learn everything you can from them.

Your relationship with a mentor can take many forms. Mentoring may happen in person, remotely via email, at training courses, or through books, ebooks and websites. It may be a one-off interaction, a short term relationship or a longer term arrangement. Successful people love passing on their wisdom, seeing other people flourish and helping them avoid the obstacles that they got stuck on in their own journey. Some mentors coach others willingly for free as part of the way they give back to the world, and others make a living doing it professionally.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Learning How to Meet Women In Bars and Nightclubs

Ever wondered what it’s really like to do one of those dating workshop bootcamps where a pick-up artist takes you into nightclubs and teaches you how to approach women? One of my new year’s resolutions for 2010 was to finally overcome my fear of approaching and interacting with attractive women. I already had an interesting life, but how are women supposed to get to know me if I’m too afraid to approach them because I’ve never learned how to do it?

So I went along to a seminar run by street pick-up expert Alex Coulson, and decided it was time to get serious by signing up to one of Alex and Moxie’s dating workshop bootcamps. I already knew Alex as I had interviewed him on one of the Confident Man bonus products, and Moxie was an ex-Love Systems instructor so I figured these guys were the real deal.

On a weekend 2 months later, they would take a small group of guys out into nightclubs on Friday and Saturday night and teach us how to approach and interact with women. In the weeks leading up to the bootcamp, Moxie would give us coaching over the phone to prepare us for the big weekend.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Recover From a Controlling Mother

Growing up with a controlling and/or domineering mother can suppress your masculinity and leave you stuck feeling and acting like a boy in a man’s body. My mother was the dominant figure in my family of origin and with a relatively passive father it was a disastrous recipe for my developing masculinity.

A controlling mother creates a relationship dynamic that will undermine your confidence in yourself as a man unless you take steps to counter its effects. So here are some steps to take to help you recover from growing up with a controlling, dominant mother:

Recognize that Your Mother is Controlling

Did you have a controlling Mother?

Did you have a controlling Mother?

The first step to dealing with a problem is to recognize that it exists. It took me a long time to even see that my mother was controlling. It wasn’t until I did The Landmark Forum in my mid-30s and they started talking about how controlling most of us are that I had this insight.

When I was a child, my mother used a physical leash to control me; partly for my own safety, and partly for her convenience. As I got older, verbal stoushes with my father made it very clear that the masculine point of view wasn’t welcome in our household.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Can you Relate to Into The Wild too?

Spoiler Warning: This review gives away the ending. If you don’t want to know what happens, stop reading now!

I was profoundly moved by this film directed by Sean Penn. Starring Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless, it tells the true story Christopher’s journey of self-discovery leading into the Alaskan wilderness. This film hit me hard, and I found it hugely cathartic. Despite a packed cinema, it was as though there was just me and this film connected to each other. I cried almost the whole way through.

Part of the reason I connected with it so strongly was that I first saw it while on a journey into the wild of my own; in my case a solo motorcycle road-trip of self-discovery from my home town of Sydney to Byron Bay where I saw the film, and beyond. There are also many parallels between Christopher’s emotionally disconnected family, and my own. The scenes depicting the ongoing conflict between his parents transported me straight back to my own childhood and the sense of emotional disconnection between Christopher and his father mirrored that between me and mine.

Every character in the film is flawed in some way, and I found myself relating deeply to the pain in each and every one.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Men’s Group

The discomfort and apprehension is so palpable you can feel it just watching Men’s Group, as six men meet for the first time in the leader’s home to begin the painful cathartic process of talking about their lives. Half of them are ambivalent about even being there; some are there under duress, and all are struggling in some key area of their life. They’re in pain, and their learning how to heal and sort things out by sharing it with other men. It’s a practical lesson in learning to trust and how to do intimacy with other human beings, with no printed agenda or how-to-style self-help book to guide them. It’s as simple and as difficult as talking about what’s going on, and listening to each other… really listening.

What really goes on in a Men’s Group?

I could relate immediately to this movie. I’d even visited the particular men’s group in Sydney that it’s modeled on a couple of times before recently finding a group more to my liking. The guys in this movie aren’t just acting; they’re being very real. At times the comments seem inappropriate but they’re learning to stop self-censoring and talk about what’s real. It’s not always what they want to hear, but it does always end up bringing them closer together.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago