self-confidence

Walk Barefoot As Much As Possible

Hey, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project coming at you from the beautiful bush land here, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about connecting back to nature. In our urbanized environment, often a lot of the time we’ve totally lost our connection with nature. Most of us guys these days live in big cities surrounded by concrete jungles and steel structures and motorcars and stuff, and we never even walk out into bush land like this. This is what the bush looks like in case you’ve forgotten. And as a result, we’ve really lost our connection with nature and the earth and all those things, and we’ve become a little anesthetized and insulated from it all.

We tend to walk around in rubber-soled shoes all the time, and we don’t even contact real, natural stuff anymore. So as a result we develop soles of our feet that are very thin and sensitive, and we never really harden up. That’s what I’m trying to say.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Unlocking Repressed Anger: What To Do If You “Never Get Angry”

Hey, it’s Graham here, and I’m feeling cranky today so let’s talk about anger. Now, there are two mistakes you can make with anger. The first one is to suppress it, pretending you don’t feel angry and just push that emotion down. And the second one is to just spew your anger out so that you express it destructively. Now, today I want to talk about the first one of those, which is suppressing your anger, and why we do that and why it’s not a good idea and what you can do about it.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Stop Seeking Validation From Your Family

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project again and today I want to talk at you about your family. Family issues have been pretty huge for me so I know a little bit about this and I want to share with you what I have learned, particularly about stopping seeking validation from your family. What tends to happen when we’re young is that our parents experience us as an infant, as a baby, as a child, an adolescent and then by the time we become an adult our parents’ view of us is often so fixed by their earlier experiences of us that they have a lot of trouble accepting who we now are as an adult being different to who we were as a child.

And this is the reason why a lot of the time when we hang around our families we tend to regress back into a child-like state where we behave and relate to our parents and our siblings in much the same way that we did when we were a kid.

That’s not necessarily what you want to do if your childhood experience wasn’t one where you felt reinforced and validated and loved and just nurtured and you had a really fun time all the time. So if you want to break away from some of the family stuff, it’s really important that you stop seeking validation from your family.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Practice Using “I” Statements

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project again and today you’re going to learn about becoming assertive by using “I” statements in conversations. I find that a lot of times when talking to people or listening to people who lack confidence, what we often tend to do is we use the word “you” where really we mean “I”. Often the reason behind this is simply bad practice, we’ve got into a bad habit of doing it, and also we’re wanting to try to connect with the other people who we’re talking to so we end up saying “you” to talk about general experiences in the hope that they’ll get where we’re coming from instead of saying “I” where we’re talking about our specific experience.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

3 Keys To Building Self-Confidence For Men

Hi, I’m Graham, and I’m on a mission to help single guys build self-confidence. Now, the reason why I care about this is I was one of those kids back in high school that always got picked last for the football team, the soccer team, the cricket team. Whatever it was, I was like the last one to be picked. And that wasn’t the only thing that happened, but the lack of self-confidence that I took from situations like that, when I took that out into the everyday world, totally didn’t work.

So when you lack self-confidence, it really sucks and it has a massive impact on your life. Now, I don’t need to tell you that if you’re a guy that doesn’t have self-confidence. And, in particular, the area that it impacts the worst is your relationships with women. So, yeah, guys, you really want to get this handled. And so what I want to do is I’m going to tell you three key steps that you need if you want to build self-confidence.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Read How To Talk To Anyone by Leil Lowndes

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project with some tips for you on how to feel more confident when you’re having conversations with other people. And the biggest tip that I have in fact is to read a book on the subject which is this one called How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tips for Big Success in Relationships by Leil Lowndes.

Obviously our sense of self-confidence is most pronounced or lack of self-confidence is most pronounced when we’re trying to have conversations with other people and we’re feeling like, “I don’t know how to do this,”, “I don’t know what to say and how to relate to these people,” or, “I’m feeling shy or awkward or socially anxious.”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Make Eye Contact With Strangers

Hey there, it’s Graham with another confidence building activity for you this week. And this activity is all about making eye contact with strangers. As you’re going about your daily routine, as you’re walking particularly through crowds of people and you see other strangers, the basic thing that you need to do here is to simply make eye contact with them and hold that eye contact for as long as possible.

Now, there’s an interesting little social phenomena here when two people make eye contact, particularly two strangers. One of them will always avert their gaze first. And what happens is that the person with the highest level of social status and self-confidence, which tend to go together, is the person that maintains the gaze the longest. This is very interesting and you’ll start to notice this. Whenever you make eye contact with someone, the person that averts their gaze first is the one with the lower level of self-confidence.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Practice Speaking More Slowly And Deeply

Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project with yet another confidence building tip for you. And today I want to talk about the way that we speak. The way that we speak says a whole lot about our level of general self-confidence and how nervous we are in any particular situation.

So what you want to do is to practice speaking more slowly and more deeply, particularly if you’ve got a bit of a high-pitched voice or if you find yourself always speaking very quickly; you’re always in a rush to get things out and you’ve got to say what you’ve got to say.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Start Expressing How You Feel

Hey there, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project, and today you are going to learn all about the importance of expressing how you feel. Now, as guys, often we don’t get taught how to do this, we don’t learn how to do this, we don’t practice how to do this; we just tend to keep our feelings to ourselves a lot of the time and this is a massive problem because when we bottle up our emotions inside, we are prone to all sorts of horrible things like illness and depression and just unhappiness and frustration and it makes it hard to connect with other people, particularly with women who just love having an emotional connection with you.

And so I want to really advocate for the idea of you expressing how you feel in any moment. Like, right now I’m feeling a whole mixture of things. I’m feeling happy and I’m feeling frustrated and I’m feeling a bit pissed off and irritated and, you know, all this stuff is going on inside me all at once and it’s very unhealthy to just keep all that stuff bottled down inside.

So it’s very important to be able to express how you feel, and there are a few basic emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, joy, love, peace, frustration, fear, anxiety. These are the main ones; there’s not all that many when you actually count them, and that’s just completely off the top of my head.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

The 5 States Of Self-Confidence

Hey guys, it’s Graham here, and I want to talk about the five states of self-confidence so that you can build your confidence more quickly. Now, all of us go through these different states of various different points in our life and at different times during the day, but it’s useful to recognize what state you’re currently at so that you can know what it is that you should do in order to move yourself to a higher state where ultimately you’ll feel more confident. The more often you do this, the more confident you’ll feel generally.

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By Graham Stoney, ago