Joseph Campbell Archives • The Confident Man Project

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- Graham’s StoryI suffered from a chronic lack of self-confidence right from early childhood through most of my adult life. I am a sensitive person and was deeply traumatized by the never-ending conflict and hostility in my parent’s relationship. My mother was, and still is, the dominant force in my family of origin. Highly intelligent but emotionally withheld, she was always quick to criticise and would never back down in any of the petty arguments with my father that characterized their relationship. He, on the other hand, was relatively passive yet and was often driven to explode with frustration due to his inability to express his emotions or to handle my mother’s frequent put-downs. She would berate him saying “You stupid creature; why can’t you just tell me what you’re thinking!”, not realizing the irony behind her nagging criticism. Our home didn’t feel like a safe or fun place to be much of the time. My two elder sisters both dealt with this in their own way, leaving me feeling excluded and abandoned a lot of the time. My sensitivity in this situation was always invalidated, caused me a great deal of grief and felt like a genuine weakness. Ironically, my parents…
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- ConfidenceConfidence, or more precisely self-confidence, is an awareness that you have the ability to rise to whatever challenge life throws at you. It is the single most important asset that a man can possess, because it determines how you respond to challenges that impact how well everything else in your life goes. Great challenges always involve great opportunities, but it’s only through having confidence in yourself that you are able to see and take advantage of these opportunities. Confidence is partly general and partly contextual. You might feel confident about your ability to drive a car, but not so confident about your ability to play a guitar… especially if you’ve never learned. But an innate sense of self-confidence will make it much easier for you to learn to play a guitar, because you’ll feel more positive about the likelihood of success and less worried about failure. Every skill that you acquire has the potential to build your self-confidence, and this general sense of confidence begins to spill over into other areas of your life. We start out in life by inheriting the confidence of our parents, plus or minus a little depending on our personality and individual disposition. Lack of…
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Masculinity

The Hero’s Journey From Frightened Boy To Confident Man

I’ve been fascinated lately to discover the work of Joseph Campbell and his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell’s life work involved analysing the myths, legends and stories of every nation, culture and religion to identify common themes and patterns between them. He found a striking commonality between the stories of different cultures and identified a pattern which seems etched in the human psyche that he called The Hero’s Journey. Think of any major blockbuster movie or movie franchise like Lord Of The Rings or Star Wars, and you’ll see elements of The Hero’s Journey. I also see a remarkable parallel with the adventure that every man is called to in growing from a frightened boy into a confident man.

The hero of every man’s story is ourselves. Not necessarily who we are now, or who we think we are; but our real self that only emerges as the journey progresses. It’s the journey from boy to man, but also the journey of self-knowledge, stepping into our own power, being more authentic and ultimately being free. So here’s how I see men growing up fitting into the framework that Campbell identifies for the every man hero:

The Hero's Journey is also a metaphor for growing from a boy into a man

The Hero’s Journey

Initially, we live in the protected world of childhood.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, 12 yearsSeptember 17, 2012 ago