Comedy Therapist

Mastering Emotions at Passionately Alive

I often feel that my emotions are running my life. When it comes to happiness, joy, peace and love, that’s fine by me; but when it’s fear, sadness, anxiety, loneliness or depression, that’s not so good. We like to think that we’re in conscious control of our lives all the time, but the reality is that everything we do is driven by an emotion of one sort or another. We’re constantly either seeking the pleasant emotions or avoiding the unpleasant ones. Our emotions exist in our subconscious, so we often aren’t consciously aware of them until they pop up strongly enough to interrupt what we’re doing and make their presence felt. But they still play their role whether we acknowledge it or not; and if we ignore them, they just get louder and stronger until we start paying attention.

Our society places a premium analytical thinking and often downplays the … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

I Lied to the Guy from the Phone Company Today

OK, I admit it. I lied today. I don’t normally do that; I’m a terrible liar in fact. I’m sure it goes back to when I was a kid and how my mother could always tell when I was lying. She wasn’t the sort of person you wanted to get on the wrong side of. So I’m badly out of practice. But I’m working on it.

Or rather, I’ve actually been working on becoming a more persuasive and powerful communicator. I’ve joined Toastmasters. I’m doing workshops on public speaking, sales and marketing. I’m reading The 48 Laws of Power. This last one is all a bit Machiavellian for me, and if taken literally the laws involve a lot more deception than I’m really comfortable with. But I’m learning. And today it came in handy.

I decided that time to get ADSL2+ broadband is long overdue, but there’s a … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

The Power of Thinking without Thinking

I found this book about the power of intuition fascinating. Essentially the idea is that when we develop expertise and intuition in a certain area, our intuition can become a more reliable guide than what we end up with by using our analytical thinking. The trick is to know when to trust our snap judgements, and when they are likely to lead us astray or bias us in some way. Often we are quite unaware of our biases and unless we’re aware of when they’re operating, we go along thinking that we’re making objective choices when really we’re not.

Although it’s tangential to the main theme, one of the most interesting insights I got from this book was in the section on spontaneity where the author talked about the golden rule of improvised comedy: characters accept everything that happens to them. They accept whatever … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Voice Dialogue, Self Awareness and Your Inner Child

We like to think that we’re consciously in control of everything we do, but the reality is that the emotions, beliefs and memories buried deep in our subconscious are running the show most of the time. And while the subconscious baggage we accumulate may have served a purpose in the past, sometimes it isn’t so helpful in our present day lives. Getting in touch with our subconscious to change what’s lurking down there so that it works for us rather than against us is hard because our conscious thinking gets in the way and we can end up just over-analysing ourselves.

A few years back I decided that some self-awareness was what I was missing. I just didn’t see myself as positively and as capable as I seemed to be in other people’s eyes. So I found a group working on self-awareness by doing inner child work. They used a … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Feeling Depressed? Try having a Good Cry

I was feeling depressed on Tuesday. I’d been struggling with Chronic Fatigue for over a year, and it was one of the bad days when I woke up feeling like I’d been run over by a bus that just kept backing up and having another go me it over and over. I’d also spent over a year writing and publishing an ebook which wasn’t selling as well as I would have liked. I was having a bad day and felt lousy.

Australian society doesn’t do a great job of encouraging us guys to express how we feel, especially when we’re down. Our English stiff-upper-lip cultural heritage combined with the rugged blokey mentality tells us that if you’re a guy and you cry, there’s something wrong with you. Yet crying is our natural way of releasing emotions of sadness or loss. When you have a good cry, it might feel … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Whose Life Is It Anyway? by Nina Brown

When to stop Taking Care of Their Feelings & Start Taking Care of Your Own.

This is a great little book aimed at those of us who tend to take on other people’s emotions a little more readily than we would like. It’s a relatively short and easy read, covering topics relating to emotional boundaries, and how to avoid becoming enmeshed in or manipulated by other people and their emotional states.

The early chapters deal with emotional susceptibility, avoiding taking responsibility for other people’s feelings, and allowing other people to experience their own emotional states without negatively impacting on us. Later chapters deal with psychological and emotional strength, creativity, spirituality and improving relationships.

There are lots of exercises in the book similar to those I was doing with my life coach at the time that I read it, so I skimmed over them… but they sounded pretty good and surely … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

What is a Life Coach?

The goal of a life coach is to help you to have a great life. This involves a sense of meaning, purpose and fulfilment, along with liberal doses of happiness and the ability to deal powerfully with things when they go wrong. As humans we get bored if we feel like we’re not moving forward, but the big question often is which direction to move in. To establish this we need to understand our core values, and set a continual stream of achievable goals based on those values. Setting goals gives us something to focus our efforts on, and achieving goals builds our sense of life satisfaction and self-esteem, and inspires us and the people around us on to further goals. It’s important that the goals we set are achievable, consistent with our values, and allow us to use and develop our personal strengths.

The coaches I know use a … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Wife Swap

I love the TV show Wife Swap. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that they get two families from middle America who volunteer to have their wives swap places for two weeks. During the first week, both families run by the usual rules so the “new wife” can learn how they normally operate; but in the second week, the new wife gets to make whatever rule changes they want. Each family volunteers on the basis that they agree to abide by whatever rules the new wife chooses to set.

Invariably the producers choose two families at the opposite ends of some spectrum, be it religious, political, economic, traditional/progressive, or whatever. Today’s episode featured a real estate executive who was always on the phone and had no time for her kids, swapping places with a suffocating obsessive-compulsive stay-at-home Mom who home-schooled and controlled her whole family.

I always … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

Dr Phil

Dr Phil is on TV again, using big words like “maturity” and “responsibility”, and talking about relationships. I like Dr Phil; he’s charismatic, compassionate and assertive with the people who come on his show. He doesn’t take crap from them, and calls them on their blind spots when they try to spin some story on him. But I can’t help wondering about the people who agree to go on the program. There is something voyeuristic about watching another person’s personal problems being aired before a mass audience, and surely something exhibitionist about wanting to go on the program.

Some of the people are clearly at their wit’s end and don’t know what else to do; perhaps they think that going on Dr Phil and exposing the lies and the secrecy that keeps them bound will release them from whatever is keeping them trapped. And maybe it does; but not everyone … Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago