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.
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.
Most of my life I’ve struggled with finding self-esteem and although my life is still a work-in-progress, I believe I’ve finally discovered the simple secret to self-esteem. I could write a book on it, but I think the shorter the book the more powerful it would be and I can cover the whole deal in one short article. As a bonus, I’m even going to throw in the cure for loneliness. So here goes:
Self-esteem is really about self-acceptance. This needs to come from within us, because when our self-acceptance is based on external reinforcement we are always at the mercy of circumstances outside our control such as other people’s opinions and random events in our life.
Our deepest, most powerful internal experience of ourselves comes from how we feel. While we aren’t our feelings, they are a true reflection of our core experience in any moment.
We also have a fundamental need as humans to connect with other people, so our ability to connect in general has a huge impact on the way we see ourselves. While we don’t want our self-esteem to be dependent on what other people think or feel about us, connecting with other people fulfills this basic need and gives us a powerful emotional reinforcement.… Continue reading…