comedy Archives • The Confident Man Project

Life Skills

You Never Know Where The Confident Man Program Will Take You

One of the confidence-building activities that I recommend in The Confident Man Program guide is learning to play a musical instrument. Learning to play music is awesome because it’s fun, it teaches persistence which is a valuable life skill, and it means you can ultimately join a band and jam with other musicians. Plus artistic skills like musicality are very attractive to women for evolutionary reasons; which is another way of saying that they make you an interesting, well-rounded man.

You never know where learning a skill like music can take you. In my case, I learned to play music as an adult and my chosen instrument was guitar. Sure, it’s taken a long time, but like any valuable skill the rewards lie waiting for the man willing to rise to the challenge of giving it a serious go.

This year I even put on my first solo show, at the 2017 Sydney Fringe Comedy Festival. If you’ve checked out my story, you’ll know that I used to be paralysed by anxiety in front of people; so for me to put together a full hour of original material and let go of worrying what the audience might think of me was a huge achievement. If you’re looking for some inspiration or are just wondering what’s possible for you, I think you’ll enjoy watching the video here: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, 6 years ago

Self Esteem

How I Healed My Boys High School Choir Bullying Trauma

I went to an all-boys high school where the first grade rugby team enjoyed the highest social status. Anyone who wasn’t into aggressive body-contact sports got their head kicked in other ways, and boys on each level of the social hierarchy boosted their flagging self-esteem by bullying the boys on the level below. Any innate sensitivity in a boy was crushed both in the classroom and in the play/battle-ground.

Although I was highly intelligent and generally got good grades, this wasn’t valued as highly as sporting prowess at my high school and being a thin, nerdy kid who was the youngest in my year, I didn’t do so well at school socially.

I spent my lunch times singing in the school choir or hanging out in the computer room learning to use the new machines that the teachers didn’t know what to do with. This was a couple of years before the computer revolution went mainstream and decades before Big Bang Theory made nerds hot prime-time-viewing commodities.

Childhood bullying can leave our adult selves feeling self-conscious and hyper-vigilant to criticism from others.

Since I was a late developer my voice didn’t break until well after high school. It was embarrassing still being in the alto section of the all-boy choir as I headed into Year 11 so I quit and joined the lighting crew in the hall instead where I could feel good about solving technical problems backstage and wouldn’t have to perform in front of people and end up feeling so self-conscious.

Fast-forward 30 years to 2017 and I’m studying music full-time at a local tertiary college. My dream is to use a combination of music and comedy to teach the principles of trauma awareness and emotional intelligence to the masses. I think that would be great fun for me because along the way I’ll get to overcome my remaining insecurities in terms of freedom of self-expression, and it would also give an extra dimension of meaning and purpose to what I’m doing. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, 7 yearsOctober 5, 2017 ago

Emotions

Using Music To Express Anger and Rage

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been studying Music Performance full-time at a local tertiary college, and the experience has been extremely healing for me. The interactions with teachers and other students have brought a lot of my unresolved adolescent insecurities to the surface: in some ways, going to college is like going back to high school. My fears about whether I would fit in brought up a lot of anxiety for me, coupled with a very strong desire to try hard to make other students like me. I often had to take a deep breath and remind myself to focus on what I was learning and just have fun participating instead.

“Full-time” at the college I’m attending is only 2.5 days per week; although I spend pretty much all the rest of the week doing homework of various forms: learning to play new instruments, practising songs for our performance night, writing my own songs and getting them recorded.

In the process I’ve found music an excellent way to express anger and rage. A lot of the songs I’ve been writing have a great deal of anger in them, inspired primarily by life circumstances and/or other people’s behaviour. Writing, performing, recording and releasing these songs has been extremely cathartic for me and the feedback from the other students has been very positive and accepting. Over half my fellow students are straight out of high school and also have a lot of anger and rage to express. Although I’m more than twice their age, they get where I’m coming from.

Finally, my inner teenager is beginning to feel accepted.

The Song To Play When You’re Having A Bad Day

After six months hard work, I’ve even released my first single: a song titled Everything Is Fucked that I wrote in a yin yoga class in North Bondi at 6:37pm on 17^th February 2017 while in Frog pose for seven agonising minutes.

At the time, I had been suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for nine years and after five months pushing myself through three excruciating yoga sessions a week, wasn’t getting the results that I had hoped for: I had totally failed to pick-up at a yoga studio full of gorgeous young women, I was rapidly going broke because my Life Coaching business had failed to take off (who wants a sick Life Coach?!?), both my elderly parents had been diagnosed with cancer, a sweet hot girl I met online and completely fell for had started going out with a musician who lived 12,000 km closer to her than me; and I was still chronically ill. When the dishwasher in my apartment appeared to have stopped working properly, that was the last straw for me.

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By Graham Stoney, 7 yearsAugust 18, 2017 ago

Self Esteem

Get On Stage At An Open Mic Night

Hey, it’s Graham here with another confidence expanding tip for you. And today I want to talk about the suggestion of getting up on stage at an open mic night, performing your musical talents if you have any or your comedic talents if you have any or whatever talent it is that you have, doing it up on stage and getting outside your comfort zone which is of course the way that you build confidence the fastest.

Any big city will have comedy clubs and entertainment venues that have regular open mic nights, typically on Tuesdays or Wednesdays because those are the nights where it gets a little bit quiet and a lot of the professional acts prefer to perform on Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights. So Tuesdays and Wednesdays are often open mic nights where anybody who has a bit of talent that they want to develop can go along and tread the boards, get up on stage and have a go at entertaining people.

I recommend that you give it a go. Like, this will make your heart race like nothing else. If you’re a bit of a funny guy and you’ve got some good wise-cracks, a few jokes that you want to run, I recommend that what you do is you work out some stories from your real life that have made you laugh that you think have been funny and that you put them together into a little five-minute comedy routine.

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By Graham Stoney, 9 years ago

Relationships

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: