Comedy Therapist

Path of Love

I went to Path of Love hoping that it would help me deal with a constant feeling of mild anxiety that I was experiencing. Whenever I wasn’t engrossed in some activity, I felt anxious and I just couldn’t seem to shake it.

David Guetta’s “When Love Takes Over” (Featuring Kelly Rowland) always reminds me of my Path of Love Experience. Play it as you read along:

There were some obvious contributing factors: I had been ill with Chronic Fatigue for over two years, and although I was gradually recovering, my limited energy and feeling constantly unwell for such a long time was a constant source of frustration. I was also lacking direction generally: it had been about six years since I’d had a full-time job, and I was unsure how to find a new vocation earning money doing something that I loved again, especially with the added burden of illness. … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Tell Better Stories

The difference between a $100 public speaker and a $1000 speaker, is $1000 stories. If you want to be a more powerful public speaker and command higher fees, you need to tell better stories. With this in mind, I spent last weekend at a 2-Day Storytelling Bootcamp run by Craig Valentine and Darren LaCroix here in Sydney, Australia.

Craig and Darren are past World Champions of Public Speaking, and this was Craig’s first visit to Australia. His specialty is Storytelling, so I really wanted to go along and learn from one of the best in the world. Craig has a great storytelling system where each story incorporates these elements:

  • Curiosity.
  • Characters.
  • Escalating Conflict.
  • A Cure, usually provided by a Guru.
  • A Change in the emotion or attitude of one or more of the main characters.
  • Conversations, depicted with dialogue rather than narration.
  • A Carry-out message called a foundational phrase:
… Continue reading…
By Graham Stoney, ago

Lie To Me

One of my favourite TV shows is Lie To Me. Tim Roth plays Dr Cal Lightman, an eccentric expert in deception detection who runs his own consulting business primarily assisting lawyers and prosecutors get to the truth. There’s always a story behind the story, and the trick is to work out who’s lying about it. His techniques combine reading of facial microexpressions, body language, gestures and human behaviour to discern the true emotions of everyone involved; often including his own staff.

Having learned the art of stripping away people’s facades to reveal what is really going on underneath, Dr Lightman has an arrogant edge about him, which is tempered by his paranoia and the painful dysfunctional relationships that he finds himself in. He sees through the white lies that other people spin to soften the real truth from him, and relies on his ability to cut through the protective … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Into The Wild

Spoiler Warning: This review gives away the ending. If you don’t want to know what happens, stop reading now!

Listen to Eddie Vedder’s cover of Hard Sun written by Gordon Peterson from the Into The Wild Soundtrack as you read along:

I was profoundly moved by this film telling the true story of Christopher McCandless’s journey of self-discovery into the Alaskan wilderness. Directed by Sean Penn and starring Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless, this film hit me hard and I found it hugely cathartic. Despite a packed cinema, it was as though there was just me and this film connected to each other; I cried almost the whole way through.

Part of the reason I connected with it so strongly was that I first saw it while on a journey into the wild of my own: a solo 2,500km motorcycle road-trip of self-discovery from my home town of Sydney to … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Life Coach Training with Beyond Success

If you’re interested in training to become a Life Coach, you might be interested in my experience of the Life Coach training course run by Beyond Success.

I first heard Paul Blackburn from Beyond Success speak at a Think and Grow Rich event run by Stuart Zadel, back in July 2007. At the time, I had been suffering from Chronic Fatigue for about 4 months, and was feeling very anxious, agitated, exhausted, and desperate about my future. Having visited a bunch of doctors with no success, I didn’t know why I was ill or what to do about it. I was beginning to worry about how I was going to be able to earn money again in the future. I had burned out rather spectacularly from my Engineering career, and although I had plenty of available job offers the idea of going back to a job in an industry I … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Nice Guy Syndrome

When I start hearing the same message coming at me from multiple independent sources, that usually gets my attention. This year I’ve had several sources giving me the message that women want men with backbone who they can “push up against”. They get tired and ultimately resentful of Nice Guys who always yield powerlessly to them, and everyone else.

I listened to an interview by David DeAngelo (of Double Your Dating fame) talking with Robert Glover described what is wrong with Nice Guys most succinctly by quoting a comment from his ex-wife, who said “How would I know that you could ever stand up for me, if you can’t even stand up to me?”. Robert calls it Nice Guy Syndrome, and has even written a book titled No More Mr. Nice Guy! He points out that while Nice Guys think that what they are doing will please other people, … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Writing a book using OpenOffice.org

My first book, on attracting women, was created using the OpenOffice.org 3.1 Office Productivity Suite. I like OpenOffice because it’s free, is community-supported, and has most of the features that I really need to get my job done. Here’s my experience using it on seriously sized projects of over 200 pages.

I recently finished the 3rd draft of a 450 page book, so I know what it’s like to use OpenOffice.org Writer to create and edit a significant work with over 30 chapters, a two-level table of contents, and several pictures. I also used OpenOffice.org Draw for the cover design, and PDF export to generate files to send to Lulu for printing. I was pleased to find that OpenOffice.org was up to the task, but there were a few quirks I had to navigate and some missing features which made the task more painful than I would have … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Loving Yourself by The Human Awareness Institute

I spent last weekend at a workshop on Loving Yourself run by The Human Awareness Institute (HAI). It’s the second in a series of workshops they run on the topic of Love, Intimacy and Sexuality. While the confidentiality agreement prevents me from talking too much about the content of the workshop, what I can say is that it was an opportunity to profoundly deepen the connection that I felt with other people, and with myself.

I’ve always struggled with the idea of really loving myself, and when I first heard about the HAI courses I knew that this workshop was for me. I did the pre-requisite level 1 workshop about a year ago, and then had to wait a year before having the opportunity to do level 2. Over the course of the workshop I found myself gradually losing the inhibitions and fears about other people’s judgments, which tend to … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Happiness by Matthieu Ricard

A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill

I was put onto the audio edition of this book by a colleague from my Toastmasters club during a conversation about what makes us happy. The book is a fusion of eastern Buddhist philosophy and western scientific thinking on what it means to adopt happiness as a lasting state of mind. A key point reiterated here which I hear a lot these days is that true happiness is an internal state; it is not dependent on external factors. If we are relying on other people or external circumstances for our happiness, then we are always at the whims and mercies of things that are beyond our control. When we are at peace with who we are inside, our happiness can be based on internal factors over which we have much greater control.

I can relate to a lot of what the author … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Anger Management by Crockery

One of the rules that had to be obeyed when I was growing up was: Don’t run in the house, because you might break something. Walk instead. Stay calm. Don’t get too excited. Getting excited might cause you to hurt yourself, something or someone else. It also seemed to irritate the grown-ups; it seemed that grown-ups just weren’t supposed to get excited.

Not when they were happy anyway. The only time grown-ups seemed to get excited was when they were angry; and then there seemed to no limits to how excited they could get. The rest of the time they seemed to be holding their excitement inside; but when they were really angry, they really let loose. I found that terrifying. I got in real trouble when I acted like that, but grown-ups were allowed different rules to me. And so I learned that I wasn’t allowed to get … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago