Helping Men to Be Confident

What you get in the Deep Inner Game package

Deep Inner Game

What you get in the Deep Inner Game packageI’ve been watching David DeAngelo’s Deep Inner Game program with Dr Paul, and it’s really brilliant. The program is about developing the mindset that men need to be successful, particularly focused on women, dating and relationships. This mindset is often referred to as our “inner game”, and it really extends to the bigger picture of being confident and successful in life generally.

Here are some of the key things that I’ve learned:

Boundaries

Many of our problems in relating to other people are caused by having a weak psychological and emotional personal boundary, often viewed as having holes in our boundary.

Saying “No” is how we patch holes in our boundary.

Expressing preferences also helps build our boundary, and demonstrates it to other people. Women find this very attractive, even if their preferences differ from ours. If you’re very bad at expressing preferences, you may feel like you don’t have any; in which case you may need to start with arbitrary preferences. e.g. I love dogs, I hate cats.

Immature boundaries either have holes, or are thick and impermeable. Mature boundaries have doors that allow us to control what gets in and what does not.

Perfectionism is caused by a hole in our boundary, projecting our own faults and internal ideals out onto other people.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Pick-up Lines

If you’re looking for pick-up lines, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. Pick-up lines are a short-cut solution which seem appealing, but don’t work for average guys in practise.

Women will see straight through you when you use them. They’ll reject you, and you’ll just go away feeling worse than before. Ask any guy who is a natural with women, and he’ll tell you that it doesn’t matter what you say to a woman; what matters is what’s going on inside you when you say it. This is why your mindset is soooooo important.

To be successful using pickup lines, you first need to have a confident abundance mindset, and be detached from the outcome when approaching a woman. This means you don’t mind how things work out, because you know there are literally millions of other women you can talk to if this one doesn’t work out. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Teasing the Girl at the Humorous Speaking Workshop

I’ve been at a humorous speaking workshop today, learning what I need to know to get into the comedy/speaking/seminar game. At one point I wandered up to the two cutest girls in the room to say hello. It’s a very friendly environment because almost everyone there was from Toastmasters, an organisation that people join to develop their social skills and self-confidence.

So I wander up to say “hello”, and one of the girls in the pair says: “So, you’re the guy that’s robotic, yeah?”. It was a reference to a question I asked earlier in the workshop about how to be authentic expressing emotion when you’re not a naturally emotionally expressive person. I explained to the girls that I’d had some feedback about this from my acting class, and that other people had compared me to Elliot Goblet, an Aussie comic with a very deadpan delivery. Something I didn’t consider a compliment at the time!

Then during our chat she had another go at me! Right… game on! I started teasing her mercilessly: “Just because you get to district level in the International Speech contest is no excuse to treat your fellow Toastmasters like dirt, you know! I’m not talking to you any more.”.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Reaching A Critical Mass Of Success With Women

There’s something about reaching a critical mass of success with women, after which you feel like you’re not even trying any more.

Tonight I wound up having dinner with Steph from my acting class; she’s smart, very attractive, and really lovely. A pleasure to hang out with. When I got home, I found I’d left my laptop on all day, and as I went to close it I found Ruth and Liz wanting to talk to me. Oh and another email from Jenny.

I don’t have time to follow them all up this week, and I’ll be out practising more approaches this weekend with my wing man, so things are only going to hot up. Meanwhile Gina from my acting class has totally fallen for me. We did an exercise in class today, and she was sooooo excited when we got to the end of it. But I could tell from the sparkle in her eye that it was more than just the exercise she was excited about.

Female attention is a great boost to a man’s confidence!… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Chatting Up A Hot German Girl At The Train Station

I can still remember the day a really pretty girl from my Venturer group stopped to talk to me at the bus stop on the way home from high school. One of the kids at school the next day asked me “Who was that girl you were chatting up?”, and when I answered “That was Kate, from Venturers”, his mate remarked “Actually, it looked more like she was chatting you up!”. Well yes… Kate had a boyfriend at the time, and I was rather inept when it came to talking to women.

Not any more though! Today I headed out to catch up over lunch with Janice, a gorgeous intuitive girl from my acting class. While waiting for Janice, I found myself casually gazing down the street, straight past a very pretty blonde girl. She thought I was making eye contact with her, and wandered over to talk to me! I think the fact that I wasn’t actually trying to make eye contact with her, combined with the fact that I was waiting for another woman, made me particularly relaxed and approachable.

Her name turned out to be Gloria. “As in Gloria Jean’s”, she said.

“Well that’s amazing Gloria, because we’re both wearing jeans.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Being a Cool Guy who Doesn’t Care about What Other People Think

Carol from Canberra turned up on the weekend with four of her girlfriends, in town to check out fashion week. So on Saturday night I met up with them in the city for dinner and some dancing afterwards. One of Carol’s friends had had to go home early, and another guy named Terry tagged along who was a mutual friend of Andrea, one of the others.

We headed for dinner at Blackbird, a classy bar/cafe at Darling Harbour, the place to be in Sydney on a Saturday night. I sat opposite Carol, and next to her friend Jenni, who seemed like quite a live wire. Jenni was quite attractive, but seemed a little stand-offish and obtuse, so I started joking around with her and teasing her a bit, while also chatting with Carol. At one stage Jenni started complaining about running out of cigarettes, and asked “Do you know where to get cigarettes around here?”

“No, I don’t. Are you a smoker?”

“Yeah, and I’m out of cigarettes. I want to get some cigarettes!!!”, she protested

“Oh. I hate smokers.”, I countered.

Jenni was a bit taken aback at this. But the truth is that I do hate smokers. Or more specifically, I hate it when people are smoking.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

No More Mr. Nice Guy by Dr. Robert A. Glover

No More Mr. Nice Guy!

The most striking thing I notice that guys who lack confidence and struggle to attract the women they want in their lives have in common is Nice Guy Syndrome. This affliction is characterised by the constant seeking of approval from other people (especially women), an intense fear of rejection, and a misguided belief that we can get our needs met by always being unfailingly “nice” and inoffensive to other people.

Dr. Robert A. Glover is a therapist who works primarily with men who are suffering from Nice Guy Syndrome. As a recovering Nice Guy himself, he has a special insight into Nice Guy Syndrome, and why it is such an ineffective way of getting our needs met as a man. I first heard about his book No More Mr. Nice Guy on one of David DeAngelo’s Interviews With Dating Gurus series, and immediately recognised the Nice Guy traits Dr. Glover described, in myself. One of the most telling things was actually a quote from his ex-wife, who told him: “How do I know that you will stand up for me, if you can’t even stand up to me?”

The basic working paradigm of the typical Nice Guy that Dr.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Overcome Self-Consciousness

Self-consciousness is a huge problem for us when we lack confidence, because it broadcasts neediness and insecurity to other people. It also makes other people feel ill at ease around us, especially women. Our social interactions suffer, and our self-confidence becomes even more undermined as a result. It’s a viscous cycle. So overcoming self-consciousness is an essential step in becoming a confident man.

This is one of the biggest issues I’ve struggled with in my life, arising as a chronic fear of what other people thought. As a result, in the past I always dressed conservatively and had a conservative hairstyle. This was dreadful as far as attracting and relating to women went.

A big breakthrough for me came a couple of years ago when a stage production I was in gave me an excuse to dye my hair blonde. Getting over the fear of what other people would think and say when I showed up with blonde hair was a big step for me at the time. And the more I’ve gone down the path of overcoming self-consciousness, the more I’ve found women both comfortable around me, and attracted to me.

Last month I decided to quit shaving and grow a beard.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton

Radical Honesty, The New Revised Edition: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth

I was blown away by this brilliant book; it totally had me hooked. One of the things that I noticed when talking to Frank the natural was just how brutally honest he was, and that women found this trait very, very attractive. Even if they found him offensive at times, there was something about his disarming honesty that got under their skin. And this book explains what it is, and how to get it.

The author puts the boot straight into the curse of moralism as the cause of our obsessive self-critical thinking and resulting inability to be free to be ourselves, and act instinctively instead of regimentally. He cites two modern-day institutions as prime examples that perpetuate moralism: lawyers and the legal system, and the Catholic church; both of which are rich sources of clients in his psychotherapy practice. By pushing doctrines and sets of rules about what’s right and wrong, and how people should behave, these institutions and others like them enslave people to black-and-white thinking that goes against the inherent contradictions of life as a human being.

The result is that we end up stuck in our head, beating ourselves up over natural behavior and trying to work out analytically what behavior we think is right, rather than actually living authentically.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago