Malcolm Gladwell 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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Communication

Notice When You’re Being Defensive

Hey there, it’s Graham again from The Confident Man Project, and I’m down in the beautiful bush today with yet another confidence building tip for you. And today I want to talk about dropping defensiveness. Now, this came up to me a few years ago when I was reading a fantastic book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink, which is all about the power of developing intuition. One of the things that Gladwell talks about in his book is the golden rule of theatrical improvisation which is the technique that comedy actors use on stage to improvise new material. And the golden rule is this: always accept what other people say about you as being the truth.

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By Graham Stoney, 10 years ago