music

Ten Positive Things To Do During COVID19 Lockdown

It looks like we’ve all got about 6 months to fill in social isolation. How you are going to spend the time? Are you going to use it productively, or waste it bingeing on NetFlix until you can’t see any more?

It’s times like these when thinking creatively is particularly important. And since I’m here to do your thinking for you, here are ten positive things to do during the COVID19 lockdown that will leave you better off in the future when we can all go out again: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Domineering Women

One of the challenges of growing up with a domineering mother who routinely disrespected our boundaries as an infant or adolescent, is that we can become hypersensitive to boundary violations with women as an adult. This can make domineering women particularly difficult to deal with when we encounter them in our daily lives. However, being assertive with such women can help us heal our wounded inner child when we stand up to them powerfully in a way that wasn’t safe for us as a child to stand up to our mother.

This leaves us feeling more confident and powerful in our interactions with other people generally; especially those who remind us unconsciously of our domineering mother. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Recovering From Childhood Issues, Difficult Mothers, Bullying, and Low Self-Esteem By Healing Your Past

I was recently interviewed by Christopher from The Craft of Charisma podcast about the work that I do with my clients to help them regain their natural confidence. The full interview ran over two hours as we went deep into many of the issues that have impacted our self-confidence in the past, how we worked through them and how we both now help other men too.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

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, ago

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 17th 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, ago

How To Deal With Other People’s Jealousy

An interesting thing happens when we get out act together, drop our victim stories, start taking responsibility for our lives and getting what we want in life: Other people’s response to us change significantly. The majority of people treat powerful, self-confident men with respect; but there will always be people who respond with hostility because they are jealous of our success.

Don’t Get Trapped By Other People’s Jealousy

The only real downside to letting go of our insecurities and learning to live life on our own terms is that other people’s insecurities can start getting triggered by us.

This happened to me today at music college when another male student walked up to a lighthearted group conversation I was having and suddenly said “Graham, you need to stop being such a cunt.”

That didn’t feel good to me: I immediately felt deflated. When I thought about it later, I felt angry; but when I interpreted what he said in the context of possible jealousy towards me, I could see that his comment was really about him rather than me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Why I Got Upset In Guitar Class

I’m a full time music student at the moment, and I’m loving learning how to write songs, perform in front of people and express myself through music. Music is great because it deals with both the analytical and emotional side of our brain.

Becoming a rock star isn’t all riffs and distortion. There’s conflict with other musicians to navigate too.

However, the irrational nature of emotions means that they don’t always arise just when we want them to. Most of us are still carrying unhealed emotional baggage from our past which can get triggered in what might otherwise seem fairly innocuous situations. This can make dealing with unexpected upsets challenging both in ourselves and in other people.

In yesterday’s guitar class, I got triggered by my teacher’s response to what I though was a fairly intelligent question about whether the best way to improvise over a chord sequence in a major key would be by using the associated relative minor scale. My engineering brain thought that this would lead to less potential dissonance; but for any other budding musicians out there the answer turns out to be No: you use the minor pentatonic scale of the same key.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

My Plan For Next Year: Become A Rock Star

One of the activities that I recommend in The Confident Man Program Guide is to learn to play a musical instrument. There are a whole host of benefits to doing this beyond simply being able to play music: You also learn a whole bunch of life success skills in the process such as:

  • Committing to a challenging task
  • Taking daily action towards your goal in the form of practice
  • Dealing with plateaus and setbacks
  • Overcoming your own resistance to success
  • Developing both sides of your brain: analytical and emotional
  • Expressing yourself on a deeper level
  • Having more fun!

Once you’ve got some basic skills under your belt you can also jam with other musicians and join a band where you’ll also learn: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

Are You An Angry Young Man?

Anger is one of the emotions that I have found most difficult to deal with in the past. I grew up in a house where anger was handled in ways that I found very frightening, leading me to become very afraid of conflict. This meant that I made a decision fairly early on in life that anger was a “bad” emotion that I should suppress at all costs. I became very ashamed of anybody knowing when I was angry.

I ended up internalising a lot of rage and unhappiness. I just didn’t know how to let anger go and how to get it out of my system. It wasn’t until the last few years that I even realised just how angry I was deep down.

I now know that anger is not “bad” emotion; it’s just a signal that our needs aren’t getting met. Anger provides energy for us to act assertively in situations where people are treating us in ways we don’t like. If we’ve learned to be passive in the face of our anger, that energy gets trapped in our nervous system.

Because I have many years of internalising my anger, the situations where I would have liked to act assertively have long passed. Yet I’m still carrying that anger in my nervous system.

So the question becomes: How to let it go?

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By Graham Stoney, ago

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, ago