How To Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

I’ve noticed a consistent pattern among myself and my coaching clients: we all have a history of not standing up for ourselves when other people behave in ways that we don’t feel good to us. Most of us had parents who weren’t willing or able to teach us how to deal with our emotions, to self-soothe our nervous system when we were in distress, or to stand up for ourselves when our emotional or physical boundaries were being violated. Often the person we most needed to stand up to was one or both of our parents themselves, and that rarely goes well when you’re a distressed child trying to stand up to an adult who is being unreasonable because their wounded inner child is running the show.

Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

Turn Your Anger Into Assertiveness

All of this is a recipe for ever-increasing anger, resentment and frustration. We end up overcompensating in a desperate attempt to get our needs met. Internalise that toxic cocktail and it’s no wonder we end up anxious, depressed and lacking self-confidence.

Behavior patterns learned as a child tend to stick even if they never really worked well, and coping strategies learned as a child rarely work well in the adult world. If nobody shows us a better way, we tend to continue behaving in ways that increase our internal store of resentment and frustration long into adulthood with no way of releasing the emotional pressure cooker.

After a while we end up bitter and resentful towards a hostile world that just won’t seem to give us what we need or want.

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How To Heal Emotional Trauma

Sumelevate Life Coach Sume Chatz recently interviewed me for his video podcast about how I work with my coaching clients to help them heal emotional trauma from the past so they can move on to a happier future.

The interview packs a heap of information into a half hour, covering topics like:

  • How family of origin issues can set you up for emotional problems down the track
  • The impact of poor communication skills on our world view as children
  • How to heal overwhelming anxiety
  • The role of the subconscious and how to work with it
  • Mindfulness and the importance of living in the present
  • What I actually do in Skype sessions with my clients
  • How to coach someone in emotional trauma
  • How to get motivated towards your goals

That’s a lot of valuable information for one half hour! I recommend you check it out.

emotional traumaThe one thing I didn’t mention explicitly was what exactly emotional trauma is: the emotional residue left in our brains and nervous system attached to memories of any emotionally overwhelming past event that we weren’t able to fully express and release at the time.

Healing trauma is important because emotionally charged memories from the past restrict our ability to be freely self-expressed and get on with life in the present.

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What Do Women Think About Men Having Coaching?

Hey guys. In case you’ve ever questioned the value of getting coaching to help overcome the gap between what your father should have taught you, and what you actually learned; check out the comment I just received on my article about the problem of passive fathers teaming up with controlling mothers.

Helen writes:

My husband has totally abdicated his role as a leader in our family. He is content to remain checked out of parenting, the marriage, consumed with self-pity over having his life now seriously limited by MS, addicted to watching sports and living in complete submission to life…he lives life like he is a guest in his own world. My children, now 20 and 23 see him as weak willed, clueless, apathetic and a poser. For many years I have worried about my son and growing into man. I have been the one to throw the football, teach how to use tools and power equipment, how to paint, wax a car, fix leaky faucets, hang a light fixture etc. His Dad just passively watched saying he was not good at that stuff….he is simply lazy, passive and apathetic. With the challenges of life, his own crappy father, he chose to get bitter instead of be better.Continue reading…

Seek Out A Male Mentor

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project, and I want to talk to you today about the importance of finding some mentors or a mentor. Everybody who is successful in life has people behind the scenes that are teaching them and mentoring them and helping them take the next step from where they currently are towards where it is that they want to go.

You may not know this because often the mentors are hidden. The mentors generally do not advertise themselves, but you can bet your bottom dollar that ever successful person out there has one or people in their lives who are mentoring them specifically to help them to achieve the sort of success in life that they want.

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How To Stand Up To An Adult Bully

Today I want to talk about how to stand up to an adult bully. This is particularly important if you are like me and you got bullied a lot when you were a kid at school. Adult bullies now are your opportunity to stand up for yourself and to heal the emotional damage that was done to you when you were a kid. Because although you might have felt unsafe standing up to the bullies when you were a kid and you might have been carrying that fear with you, now that you’re an adult it’s actually quite safe to stand up to bullies and so the adult bullies that invariably come into our lives are an opportunity to heal the bullying from the past.

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Need Someone To Talk To? I’m available

Life can be hard and we all need a little support from time-to-time. I spend a lot of my time coaching other people, and being coached myself; I find it tremendously rewarding connecting with others and helping them get past obstacles int heir life that I’ve struggled with too. If you’re stuck and don’t know where to turn, contact me so we can line up a time to talk over Skype and see if I can help you in person. Often just having someone else there who understands where we’re coming from can help lessen our isolation and build our self-confidence.

Need Someone To Talk To?

Just this morning I had a call from someone who was overcome with anxiety and desperate to know what to do. I’ve been there myself, so I could offer empathy and reassure them that they were going to be OK. After a while talking to me, they felt much calmer and more able to cope with what they were going through.

Here’s some of the feedback I’ve been getting lately from people I talk to:

“I wish I’d had that conversation with you twenty years ago Graham”
– Paul, Chatswood Australia

“I cannot overstate how much talking to you has helped me.Continue reading…

The Voice In Our Heads That Creates Self-Doubt

I have a little voice in my head that’s capable of creating almost unlimited amounts of self-doubt. Actually it’s not so little. It’s the voice that shouts “It’s not going to work!” when I try something new that’s really important to me, “You’re going to screw it up!” when I’m playing music for other people, or “She won’t want to talk to you!” when I see a woman I find really attractive. And fuck it’s been pissing me off lately.

After years of personal development, workshops, counseling courses, life coach training courses, and just plain good old procrastination, I’ve finally decided to offer one-on-one coaching to other men via Skype. I am way qualified for this by now; most of my life coach friends have far less training and counseling experience than I do, yet they started coaching ages ago. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be doing the same.

Listening to Our Inner Critic can lead to Self-Doubt

Well, there is according to my inner critic. No sooner have I hit the “order” button on the business cards calling myself a Confidence Coach than that shitty little voice in my head says: “Nobody’s going to pay you to coach them!… Continue reading…

Life Coaching

A good life coach helps you identify your core values, picture your dream life congruent with these values, set goals to strive towards in making your dream a reality, and break your goals down into small achievable steps that you can take to work towards achieving them. It’s about working out what will make you most happy and fulfilled in life, developing a plan to help you get there, and supporting you along the way.

A Life Coach can help you find the path to success and happiness.

Having a coach is like having a friend who is always really honest with you and on your side no matter what. They can help you celebrate your successes and motivate you when the going gets tough so you don’t give up. They also help you identify and resolve blind spots, emotional barriers and other issues that get in the way of your personal happiness which you mightn’t otherwise recognize.

You might think that a good friend could do everything for you that a life coach can, and that would be true if your friends are all positive, encouraging, success-oriented and don’t let their personal agenda get in the way of supporting you.… Continue reading…