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Making meaningful connections in today's modern world can be challenging. With so many of us immersed in digital devices like computers and phones, it can be easy to feel isolated and disconnected from those around us. That doesn't have to be the case, though; there are still plenty of opportunities for meeting people online and offline if you put yourself out there! In this blog post, we'll share five ideas that will make meeting new people simpler than ever!  Expand Your Social Circle Join A Local Meetup Group Joining a local meetup group can be an ideal way to meet people with similar interests and expand your social circle. By signing up for one, you can find events tailored towards hobbies or career goals or even simple activities like board gaming. Not to mention being immersed in an environment full of people who share similar values, beliefs and interests. Conversations can easily happen between like-minded people while making valuable connections and learning new skills; ultimately, joining one could provide the perfect way to build relationships and discover passions! Register For A Local Sports League Or Recreational Activity Are you searching for an exciting and healthy way to stay active this season? Look no further than your local sports league or recreational activity centre! No matter your skill or ability level, there is sure to be something perfect for you in recreational sports - from organized team sports like soccer and basketball, yoga and dance classes and individual pursuits like salsa dancing available, plus signing up is a great way to meet new people while becoming more involved with the community! Don't wait; start exploring this fantastic world of recreational sports! Examine Online Forums And Social Media Websites Today's digital world makes finding people who share similar interests easy, and online forums and social media sites provide excellent ways to meet like-minded individuals. From discussing favourite TV shows to finding workout buddies, online forums provide ample opportunities for finding people with shared passions; it might just make some lifelong friendships along the way! So put yourself out there and start connecting with individuals who share your interests; who knows, maybe there will even be someone for whom it all starts now. If you're looking to meet a romantic partner, then consider using the best dating app online. Join A Local Community College Deciding to further your education is both admirable and exciting. Although the prospect of furthering it may be daunting, taking classes at your local community college or university may provide the ideal solution. Not only are community colleges typically more affordable than larger institutions, they often feature smaller class sizes allowing for improved interaction with others in your class. Striking up a conversation before or after classes is a great old-school way of meeting people. Step Outside Your Comfort Zone Breaking out of routine can be challenging, but it is worth your while. One way to begin is by attending public events like art shows or concerts. These experiences can be exhilarating and provide fresh perspectives on life and opportunities to meet others who show similar interests. Stepping outside your comfort zone means accepting something unfamiliar, which can be both scary and exhilarating all at the same time. Finding new connections doesn't need to follow the traditional path; with the right approach, you can make finding and developing relationships easier than ever. With so many choices at your disposal, it should be easy to locate one or several that suit your individual needs. There are endless possibilities awaiting those willing to break free from conventional expectations and embrace modern ways of connecting with one another.
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Whether you are getting ready to go back out in the dating world or are ready to shed that self-doubt you’ve been carrying around with you, there are plenty of reasons why you might want to become more confident in 2022. After all, confidence is often the key to success in our professional and personal lives. For example, if you are not feeling confident, you may be unable to open yourself up to more intimacy, which could make it harder to kickstart a relationship. Despite its importance, confidence can be hard to build. This is likely due to the fact that there are so many different factors that can chip away at our confidence - such as experiencing a breakup, the (unwanted) thoughts and opinions of others, and even our own expectations for ourselves. However, you’ll also be pleased to hear that confidence is not unattainable - you just need to be willing to work for it. Think of your confidence like a muscle in your body that you can make stronger and more pronounced by working on it each day. With that in mind, here are five steps to a more confident you.  Figure out what needs to change.
If you want to be more confident, it's likely that you’ll need to introduce some kind of change in your life. After all, if you stick to the same limiting patterns and behavior, it would be impossible for your confidence to grow under the influences that limited it in the first place. Therefore, it is vital that you get out of your own way and make real change. Figure out the root of your low-self esteem - and put plans in place to remove these factors from your life. For example, you may find that you doubt yourself because you are surrounded by toxic friends who break you down as opposed to building you up. If this is the case, you should seek to distance yourself from these people and instead find those who will support you unconditionally. Shake up your look. Most of your confidence will come from within - as it's more of a mindset than an accessory you can brandish when you need to show off a little. However, sometimes, the way we look on the outside dictates how we feel on the outside. As a result, shaking up your look is a great way to boost your confidence in 2022. Remember, this does not mean you have to opt for a dramatic haircut or throw out everything in your wardrobe. Instead, you could incorporate a few accessories, such as a rose gold septum ring, into your daily look to upgrade both your style and your confidence. Spend more time outside of your comfort zone. There is a reason we often choose to stay in our comfort zone - it's comfortable and safe and doesn’t require us to do a lot. However, as mentioned previously, if you never change, then neither will your confidence levels. As a result, you should aim to spend more time out of your comfort zone. This has numerous benefits outside of your general confidence. For example, it could help you to find your professional calling and discover the meaning of your life. Alternatively, it could help you to develop new hobbies and pastimes that reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. Finally, it also helps you to make plenty of memories. Acknowledge your ‘wins.’ Your confidence levels are tied closely to your ability to back yourself. As a result, you need to be your own biggest fan and start celebrating your wins as opposed to dismissing them. While this can be a difficult habit to fall into (especially as society encourages everyone to be humble), you’ll notice that over time your confidence grows as you begin to recognize just how great and capable you are. Remember that nobody is perfect. Here’s a secret for you: Perfection is a false construct. It is brought to us by societal expectations and photoshop. Acknowledging this will help you on your journey to confidence as it stops you from comparing yourself to others. While you may strive to be like your uber-successful friend, remember that you are successful in your own way - and they may look at you in the same light. You are your own imperfect person - and that is perfectly fine. The more you learn to love yourself - the more confident you will become. You’ll also be able to use this insight to help others become the best version of themselves too. Losing confidence can be a huge setback, not only in your personal life but also in your professional and social lives. When you don't feel confident, it shows. It's hard to put your best foot forward when you're feeling down about yourself. In this blog post, we will discuss four tips on regaining confidence and getting back on track!  Lack Of Self Confidence Affects All Aspects Of Your Life Get to the root of the problem
The first step to getting your confidence back is figuring out why you aren't feeling confident. Self-doubt can stem from nearly anywhere, so you need to determine its source. Is it because of something that happened at work? Did your last relationship cause you any emotional scars? What about the night out with friends where nobody seemed to be paying attention to you? Looking at when and why you feel less confident than usual will help narrow down the possible reasons behind the issue. Work on personal relationships The next step to regain your confidence is to repair any damage in personal relationships. It's hard to gain self-esteem when people around you aren't treating you well. For example, if your friends usually demand a lot of your time and energy, but they've been taking advantage of it; lately, that may be the reason for your lack of confidence. The same goes for romantic relationships; instead of blaming yourself or doubting yourself because it feels easier than looking at the bigger picture, take some time out for introspection and consider erectile dysfunction treatment options if it might be beneficial down the line. Visualize your success Visualizing yourself succeeding can help you regain your confidence. Mentally picturing yourself following one of your dreams or being successful in an area that always felt like a challenge for you will positively impact your self-esteem. You don't have to put all the effort into achieving this goal right away; focus on the thought of success and how amazing it would feel to get there. Make sure to write down what you visualize to have something tangible to work towards. Surround yourself with positive people Try spending more time with positive people. A simple change of your social circle can help you feel better in no time at all. This applies to friends and colleagues or family members who constantly put you down with their words or actions. If this feels like something hard to do because you're used to these people in your life, try not to ignore them when they want to spend time with you; instead, make plans for the future and gradually start distancing yourself from them until it is easier for you to spend less time around them without feeling bad about it! Regaining confidence is possible, but it takes time and effort. It's essential to keep in mind that there are always people who will want the best for you. If you don't feel like you have many of these people around you right now, try not to be discouraged; instead, work on making changes so that you can surround yourself with them! If you are a man, you know that many things can affect your confidence. Whether it is because of the way society portrays men or the way other people treat them, many men struggle with self-confidence and end up feeling like they're not good enough. This blog post will discuss ways to boost male self-confidence and help men feel better about themselves!  Many Men Struggle With Self Confidence Get A New Look Sometimes, a guy needs a new look to boost his confidence. If you have been wearing the same style of clothes for years and are starting to feel like it's time for an update, take some time to go shopping with your significant other or friends who know what they are doing when it comes to fashion. Learn A New Skill One of the best ways to boost your self-confidence is to learn a new skill. It feels great to accomplish something that you didn't think you were capable of; it feels great! Not only do you feel like you can take on the world, but you also have something new to be proud of. So why not pick up a new hobby or skill? It can be anything from learning to play a musical instrument to mastering a new language. Eat Healthily One of the best ways to boost your self-confidence is to make sure that you eat healthily. Eating unhealthy foods can cause you to feel sluggish, bloated, and generally not in a good mood. When you eat healthy foods, on the other hand, you will have more energy, be less likely to get sick, and look and feel better overall. Exercise Regularly Another great way to boost your self-confidence is to make sure that you exercise regularly. Exercise releases endorphins, which are hormones that make you feel good. When you exercise regularly, you will have more energy, think more clearly, and feel happier and more confident in yourself. Challenge Yourself One of the best ways to boost your self-confidence is to challenge yourself. When you do something challenging, it forces you to stretch yourself and grow. As you accomplish these challenges, you will start to feel more confident in your abilities. Plus, when you have set goals and achieved them, it can help you to take on even more challenges. The key is setting goals and following through, and reaching them. Boost Your Wellbeing It's no secret that testosterone levels decline as men age. For many, this can lead to a decrease in self-confidence and wellbeing. However, there is good news – testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) can help to boost male confidence and improve quality of life. TRT is a highly effective therapy that can help men enjoy natural hormone levels without the adverse side effects of other options, such as anabolic steroids. TRT has been shown to increase libido and energy levels in many cases; however, its primary function is increasing testosterone production (and not artificially elevating it). In addition, TRT performed by highly experienced physicians can help to improve mood, increase muscle mass and bone density. Set New Goals One of the best ways to boost your confidence is by setting new goals and striving to achieve them. You'll feel more motivated and driven to succeed when you have something to aim for. Make sure your goals are realistic and achievable, however, or you'll only end up feeling disappointed. Also, make sure you don't set too many goals at once. You'll only end up achieving a few and then feeling like the rest were pointless. If you're struggling to decide what your next goal should be, try keeping a journal of things you want to achieve over each day or week. In conclusion, it is essential to remember that male self-confidence can be improved with simple steps. Everyone wants to feel good about themselves, especially men who are often discouraged by their physical appearance or the perception of others. Boosting confidence starts in mind and then seeps into every aspect of life. Unfortunately, you might be like a good chunk of the population and be struggling with your confidence and self-esteem. This is okay and usually, nothing to worry about, it happens to the best of us. Occasionally, problems with confidence and self-esteem can lead to more serious issues such as anxiety and depression. If you want to avoid this happening then take a look at this article for some helpful tips.  Meet People If you are struggling with your confidence then getting out with your loved ones or those close to you is a great way to distract yourself. Distraction is key to not thinking about why you have lost your confidence. It may be due to a previous toxic relationship, these can be very draining and what has been said sticks with you for a while. Going out with your family and friends can prove to you that you are loved and wanted, leading to a huge boost in your confidence levels. If you are wanting to find new interesting people to meet then why not listen to a dating-themed podcast for young professionals. This will give you some top tips about how to act with people and how to carry on that relationship after the first date. New Hair If you feel like your loss of confidence has been caused by your hair then there are ways to fix this. This is an immediate fix and can instantly make you feel better. You can style it differently at home or you can add a splash of colour if you fancy a change. There are plenty of box dyes that you can get your hands on if you don’t fancy venturing out to the salon. If you do want to visit a hair salon then hairdressers are very adept at transforming people. When you look in the mirror you will see a whole new person. Think about what you want, maybe even show the hairdresser a couple of pictures and they will have an idea about what to do. They can completely change up your hair, you might have long luscious hair but want it short. They will cut it and style it into a short bob or other short hairstyle. You can also get it coloured the way you want at a salon. Go big and bold, show the world you have nothing to hide. Updated Wardrobe Finally, if you open your wardrobe every morning and are faced with the same dread at not being able to find anything to wear then you are not alone. This is a common occurrence in households. You might have outgrown your current style so you no longer feel comfortable in what you wear. This is another quick and easy fix. Take a visit to the local store and see what you can get your hands on. You could even take advantage of the local personal shopper service. This is where the assistant listens to what you want to wear and brings you different outfits to try on. The great thing about a personal shopper service is there is absolutely no pressure to buy what they bring you. You can try it on and decide if it is for you, if not simply hand it back. They will go to all lengths to make you happy and leave with some new clothes for a new you. If you suffer from a lack of self-confidence, then it is important that you find ways to start looking and feeling more attractive. The way you feel about yourself is inextricably linked to the way you look. It doesn’t matter who you are. You can do many things to become a much better version of yourself. Increasing your self-confidence will have a knock-on effect across the who of your life. It may improve your career prospects, your love life, and your family life as well as making it more likely that you will step outside your comfort zone. So, lets a have a look at some easy you can look and feel better.  Increasing Your Self Confidence Benefits Many Areas Of Your Life Physical Activity If you want to look and feel better, then you really should start by increasing your level of exercise. Exercise has such a major impact on how we feel that if it could be bottled and sold, it would be. Exercise increases the amount of a chemical in the body called endorphins which enable us to feel happy. Exercise also physically makes you look better. It allows you to lose weight and tone your muscles. You can use it alongside things such as shredded af to maximize fat loss. Physical activity can also boost our immune system, so if you are one that is prone to illness, than you really should start to embrace that treadmill. Pep Talk Instead of focusing on the negative in your life and constantly repeating those in your head, give yourself a pep talk instead. You should point out all the good things about yourself to yourself, and this will give you an extra boost. If you focus on positive qualities and give them attention, you will find that you become happier. You will become less withdrawn, and other people will start to notice. It is all about how you view yourself. So, big yourself up and focus on the positives. We all have them. Your Wardrobe A great way to boost how you feel is to go out and buy yourself a new wardrobe. If there is a job you want to go for, why not dress the part. How you dress will have a huge impact on how other people view you. If you dress up in a suit, or some nice jeans and a jumper you give a great first impression. Dress shabbily, and people will see you as shabby. Cut Out Toxicity There is usually someone in your life that manages to bring you down and make you feel worse after you have seen them. These people dwell on the negative and never see anything positive. They will moan and bicker. Well, maybe it is about time you cut that person from your life. If you want to feel better, you need to find people who bring you up and stick around someone who keeps you down in the dumps. If you can manage to cut out toxicity from your life, you will begin to feel freer and happier as a result. Would you like to try having phone sex but don't know where to start? Continue reading to learn some tips and where you can go to connect with like minded people.  Phone Sex With Strangers Can Be Fun There’s one thing that most people learn when they’re alone that they never thought was possible. That’s the absolute fact that phone sex with strangers is a whole lot of fun. You get to talk about all of your filthiest fantasies with someone who’s just trying to have a good time with you. You don’t have to worry about what they think of you and you don’t even have to get their name right. You just talk about whatever you want to talk about and they have fun with you. In fact, you don’t even have to be alone to learn this. NYMag has a whole article about a woman in a sexless marriage that got herself addicted to phone sex with strangers. It doesn’t matter how odd it sounds. It’s true and it’s something that any person in the world can do. All you need is a phone and you’re off and running. You can have some fun and never have to talk to the other person again. You’ll never have to worry about the way that you’re coming off because you’re only interacting with this person for an hour or so and then you can both forget that each other even exist. The Dirtier, The Better The one thing to keep in your mind is that the dirtier you can get with your phone sex, the better it’s going to be. That’s just how it is and you get to benefit from it. If you can let yourself go and really let your sexuality come out to play, then you’re going to give your phone sex partners an experience that they enjoy and would gladly come back to try out again. If you want to know just how dirty you can get, just think about porn. If there’s something that’s over the line for you, it’s probably going to be going too far. Other than that, everything is on the table. This woman talks about how dirty you have to be if you want to be a professional phone sex provider. If you take her cues, you’ll be able to get dirty without having to hold yourself back. Just ask yourself if the sex act seems like it would be fun for both of the people involved. If the answer is yes then you know that you’re on to something really good that you should try out. How to Have Phone Sex Don’t think that you can just get on your phone and start talking, though. That’s not going to get you very far. It’s a good idea to at least have a passing understanding of what constitutes phone sex and what’s just going to be blabbing with someone. You’ll have to pay attention to how they’re reacting to find out what they like and what’s going too far for them. You’ll also have to know when to send nude pics and when not to send them. It all depends on how deep into the phone sex you happen to be and where the other person is. If you need a good primer, Cosmopolitan had a really good article when it comes to having phone sex. Just think about the kind of people that the article was made for. It was written for women who want to have phone sex. If you can dial into what they’re saying, you can give the women exactly what they’re looking for. It will make you the perfect stranger for them to get naughty with when they want to explore their own desires over the phone. Find Out Where The Strangers Go If you’re already sold on the idea of having phone sex with strangers then all you need to do is find someone to have it with. There are lots of different places that offer it, but you can cut through all of that noise and find the best place for all of your phone sex needs. If you check out Arousr then you’ll be greeted with as many different people as you could ever want to have phone sex with. The best part is that you can see what everyone looks like before you decide to spend any time on them. That’s going to give you the freedom that you really need. You won’t have to wonder what she looks like when you’re talking to her. She’s going to have a pic on her profile so you know exactly how hot she happens to be. That’s going to make the phone sex much better than it would otherwise be. On top of that, these are women who love to do it. You’ll never find a more enthusiastic stranger to have phone sex with. Once you experience it, you’ll be back over and over again. Do you struggle with self confidence? Continue reading to learn how you can help yourself to improve your self respect and empower yourself.  Break Free Of Negative Patterns and Behaviours When it comes to focusing on our life and dealing with people, a healthy amount of self-respect is necessary. Most of us will learn this lesson either through a natural predisposition to self-respect, or we will be taught it through tough experiences. The less you respect yourself, the less you’re likely to project confidence, and from there, the more you wil be the victim in social situations, or perceive yourself to be that even when you aren’t. However, it’s very hard to think your way out of low self-esteem, and by virtue self-respect, if you’re not embodying it. This is not something we can endlessly theorize about, it has to be lived and tested. It turns out that we are all our biggest critic, what matters is how much you let that judgment define you or prevent you from moving forward, as this latter issue can be a real problem. In this post, we’ll discuss (through inescapably theoretical terms), how self-respect is embodied, what that even means, and how you can move forward with confidence. With that in mind, let’s get started for the better: Break Free Of Negative Cycles Breaking free of negative cycles and patterns of behavior can help you enjoy a much better sense of yourself, particularly if settling an issue that has troubled you for some time. For instance, perhaps you realize that viewing illicit adult material online, even sporadically, makes you feel worse off despite how unfortunately prevalent and accessible it is. It could be that making the life decision not to consume that can be helpful. However, the same can be said for relationships, such as breaking your trauma bonding routines with a toxic partner. The moment you put a dent in a bad habit, the better the chance of a good habit replacing it is. Take That First Step Taking that first step is a good idea. That’s all you have to do. For instance, the moment you decide you’re good enough to be treated with respect, automatically, you are. The first time someone tries to denigrate you, you can either withdraw or challenge it instead of accepting that kind of treatment. Then, you’re more likely to take that to a new social experience. The more you do this, the more you define yourself as someone worthy of respect. And that will come because you have respected yourself. Practice Self-Care It’s very difficult to practice self-respect without self-care. This is because self-respect is not always a conscious decision on your part, but rather, a culmination of the little microdecisions you have made throughout your day. If you wake up at a good time after sleeping for a full eight hours, if you have exercised, and if you have meditated before attending a meeting, it’s much easier to feel confident and proactive compared to if you had woken up ten minutes before, rushed into the office and are still waking up. Self-care is self-respect, because by practicing it you define yourself as someone worthy of that approach. Don’t be afraid to care for yourself in that light. With this advice, we hope you can understand how self-respect is embodied, not theorized, and how you may integrate it into your life. Self love is based on more than your achievements. Keep reading to learn 3 ways to help you discover your own self worth and share it with others.  Show Others You Value Yourself Many of us can struggle to understand and care for our own worth. We often think that our self-respect needs to be predicated on achievements, or our behavior. Of course, this last point isn’t that strange to consider, if you’re continually lying to people, failing to meet your responsibilities and struggling to move forward, then it’s not hard to lose a little of your self-regard. But that’s not always the healthiest way forward. For instance, someone suffering from addiction will only struggle further if they repeatedly chastise themselves, as the first step to them getting help is admitting they need it and that they are worth of it. As you can see, self-worth is deeper and more important than we may give it credit for. But how can you know your worth? After all, not all of us are in life or death situations like this, but we may simply be dealing with confidence issues, or wish to change our direction anew in life, or perhaps we just want to validate ourselves after our partner has repeatedly failed to do so in a bad relationship. In our guide, we hope to help you: Practice Self-Love It’s hard to know your self-worth if you do little to affirm it. Sometimes, practicing it in actions, not with words, can help. For instance, going out and exercising and treating yourself well with nutrition shows that you are the kind of person who is worth being taken care of. Additionally, practicing self-love by taking it easy, meditating, learning the power of ‘no’ or simply taking yourself to a show you like to see (even if your friends aren’t interested) can be a great idea. These are the matters we end up remembering going forward. Know Your Boundaries Being able to understand our boundaries, and more importantly, being able to enforce them properly is also a good idea. Knowing your boundaries is the means by which we can turn down social dates if we need to, or to take a mental health day by booking a sick day from working from time to time. It’s in telling our partner that we want to be more involved in the financial planning or that we need the morning after pill, or in being able to try something like veganism or without apology and without explanation to those who may disapprove. Knowing your boundaries helps you become a healthier, happier and more wholesome person. Sustain Good Friendships It’s important to sustain good friendships, because we take more direction and influence from our closest friends than we may imagine. Taking the time to sustain good friendships and making sure that people are good to you, and you are good to them can allow you to feel less alone, as we are social beings and deserve to have those who support us. Having friends who we can rely on is also an essentially important activity, providing us with the means to better ourselves appropriately, and also feeling part of a tight unit. That helps us know our worth as having close relationships allows us to fully blossom. With this advice, we hope you can more readily know your worth, which is no doubt bountiful. Are you able to handle major life events well? Keep reading to learn 5 ways that can help you cope when life throws something new your way. From time to time, there are always going to be various life events that crop up and completely throw you. This is just a part of life, and it can be very distressing indeed, but you can also get to a point where you are dealing with those events fairly well, or at least minimising what impact they are having on you psychologically. In this post, we are going to take a look at the process of dealing with major life events. If you can learn to approach some of the following, you should find that it is easier than you might have thought to deal with even the worst of what life can throw at you.  Positive Self Talk Can Help You Stay Balanced Try To Stay Balanced There is a lot of talk about what the primary goal should be as you try to navigate this kind of situation. But something that is bound to be worth aiming for is to try and stay as balanced as possible. As long as you are balanced, it means that you are probably dealing with the psychological aspects of it fairly well, and you are more likely to be able to move on from it as well as possible too. So what can you do to try and stay balanced? There are a few key things that might help. For instance, you could aim to recalibrate how you view the very fact of uncertainty. It is often the uncertainty about the future that makes this kind of experience so worrying, but you should aim to remind yourself that being uncertain doesn’t mean that the future is actually going to be bad. You can also balance yourself through positive self-talk and by making a plan for the near future. As long as you remain balanced, you should find it a lot easier and simpler to deal with whatever comes your way. Finding & Embracing The Transition Almost all major life changes are really forms of transition, where life is changing from one kind of experience to another. If you can start to view things in this way more than as a loss (even if there is also some loss there to be reckoned with) you are much more likely to deal with the situation in a positive manner, so that is absolutely something that you should think about. In order to do this, you might want to ask yourself just what the transition is here, and then the hard part is trying to get really excited about that, rather than merely remaining fearful. If you can do that, you should find that you are able to work with the situation a lot more, rather than working against it, as can be natural to do.  Change Your Point Of View In some forms of major life events, this can be especially hard to do. For instance, if someone close to you has died, you might not want to just immediately treat it as a transition. You will of course need time to grieve. But over time, ultimately you get out of the mire by seeing it as such, so this is still something to keep in the back of your mind. Keep Up Your Regular Schedule As Best As You Can It is totally normal and natural for these big life events to completely change your daily experience, but if you want to try and keep a handle on things you might want to think about trying to keep up your regular schedule as best as you possibly can. This may be challenging, of course, but even if you just manage to keep a few of your normal things in place, you should be able to have a much easier time of the whole thing, so it really is worth thinking about for that reason. Even just going to the same cafe you would normally visit or aiming to get up at the same time can really help. If you are finding it too difficult, try to do a little less. But bear in mind that having at least a ghost of the schedule in place can work as a very effective form of ballast, helping to keep you afloat even in the toughest times.  Don't Do It All Alone Get Help Managing The Ins & Outs All major life events come with a lot of various things you have to do to get through them, not just the emotional stuff but also other ordinary things. For instance, moving house means that you need to sort out your home and do a lot of paperwork, get insurance and so on. When someone close to you dies, you have to think about organising a funeral, finding appropriate cemetery grave markers, contacting your distant relatives and so on. It is best if you have someone on your side to give you a hand with all of this, as otherwise it can just make things all the more overwhelming. Keep In Touch With People It can be very easy to fall out of touch with the important people in your life when you are going through something huge. But it is important to have them by your side as much as possible, and you never know when you might need them all the more, so you should aim to keep in touch with them as best as you can. If you do that, you are much more likely to have an easier time dealing with whatever is going on for you, no matter how serious or stressful or exhausting it might be. Do your best to keep picking up the phone or getting on social media to contact people, and you will find that you are much more likely to get through the situation in one piece. If you can take all of this advice on board, you are much more likely to get through any major life event intact. Be sure to try for all of this, but also to forgive yourself when you fail to do any of it. That is also just part of the process. Are you tired of being on the singles train? Read 5 great tips to help you find the partner you desire.  You Can Get Off The Singles Train If You Work At It Are you forever standing alone on the (figurative) platform while all around you, other people are holding hands, embracing one another, and gazing at each other with nothing but love? Do you feel as if you are on the track to a life alone instead of a life with another? We have some advice in this article if so, as you don't have to resign yourself to a one-way journey to singledom forever. Consider the following suggestions, and let them lead you to more dates, the possibility of romance, and ultimately, the final destination that is marriage (if that is what you are looking for). #1: Give online dating a go Chances are, you have probably tried online dating already. Especially if you are living a busy lifestyle, or if you are uncomfortable mingling with others in bars and clubs, online dating is a relatively easy way to see who is out there. From websites such as Match.com and Elite Singles to dating apps such as Tinder and OkCupid, there are all kinds of online avenues to explore. So, if you haven't already done so, give it a go and use these profile tips to give you greater opportunities for success when registering with a site or app online. And if you are already online, but haven't had a lot of success thus far, you might also use the linked tips to improve your online profile. #2: Be courageous and talk to people Sometimes, you need to instigate a connection with another person. This can be done online, but remember too that you are surrounded by people on a daily basis. It could be somebody sitting opposite you on your train journey to work. It could be a colleague sitting in the next cubicle to you at the office. And it might be somebody browsing the books you like when you're next at your local bookstore. Rather than staying silent, and wishing you had the courage to open your mouth to the people you find attractive, actually say something. Just say hello, or ask them how their day is going. Should they reply, a conversation might start to flow, and while it might lead nowhere, it might also open up opportunities for further things. So, think about the people you might already know or see regularly and plan to speak to them the next time you're around them. Perhaps role-play conversations with a trusted friend if you lack confidence in what to say, and consider using mobile chat lines to hone your communication skills with others. Of course, with this latter idea, you might use also chat lines to find romance too, so check out the previous link for some useful tips. #3: Attend local Meetup groups Not only are local Meetup groups a great way to meet new people, but they also afford you the opportunity to meet the people who are into the same hobbies as you are. And by having common interests, you shouldn't have too much difficulty instigating and having conversations with others, as you should both have much to talk about. Visit Meetup.com for local hobby groups in your area, or use the platform to start a group of your own. #4: Let other people play matchmaker Think about the people who know you the best, and ask them to recommend or introduce you to other people they know who might be a good fit for you. And to make life easier for you, perhaps ask your friends or family members to invite you both to a social gathering where you will be able to meet and talk to each other in a natural and easy-going setting. You might then hit it off with that other person and arrange a time to spend more time together away from the company of others. #5: Find other ways to meet people with shared interests If you have a particular passion for a local cause, you might want to volunteer at a charity group near you. If you are a fan of a particular movie, TV show, or music group, you might want to visit the appropriate fan conventions. And if you have always wanted to go back to school to learn something new, you might want to register for courses at a college near you. These are just some of the ways to be with people who have similar interests to you, and these are just some of the places where you might then find the courage to talk to the people you find interesting and attractive. So, what do you think? Are these ideas useful to you? By following our suggestions, you might finally have the opportunity to hop off the singles train and into the arms of somebody new. And hey, even if you don't, you might still make new friends, and they could lead you into the path of the person who could be 'the one' for you. Read 5 confidence building tips to help you boost your confidence in no time at all! Sometimes our confidence levels can take a bit of a knock. It might be in the workplace, at home or in a relationship. When confidence is at its lowest, it can often have you feeling down and even feeling symptoms of low mood and anxiety as you start to question your actions and life choices. Sometimes we don’t even realise that our confidence has taken a knock, and this can start to have a negative impact on our lifestyles. However, confidence is one of those things that is taught and isn’t a natural aspect of who you are. We have to realise that we can always build ourselves back up, whether that means feeling confident in the workplace or generally making more positive choices in our life that can give us the push to move forward. So if you feel that your confidence is at an all time low then don’t despair, try these techniques that could have you boosting your confidence in no time at all.  Confidence Is Taught It is all in the mind When it comes to confidence, it is important to understand that a lot of what you feel is in your mind. You are controlling your thoughts and therefore if you feel anxious and unconfident then what you are thinking is playing a vital role in that. Switch the thought process around and start thinking positive and confident. Even if it does feel like you are faking it. It can make a world of difference to how you act and eventually you will believe in yourself more and have the confidence. What we feel can be portrayed into thoughts, what we think can then be turned into actions, so it is important to start managing your emotions and feelings from wishing, which in turn can help you to change your mindset. It is time to think about what you want to feel and not be controlled by it. Think about what you wear When it comes to the clothes you wear, think about how you wear them and dress to your body shape but also dress for the occasion. You may be surprised to read that actually having clothes that not only enable you to suit your personality, but also work within the environment, can give you a huge boost in your confidence. This is especially important if you have a particular routine and a certain type of attire to wear each day, such as heading to work. Take a high powered sales job,for example, you may want to look into wearing custom high end mens suits so that you feel able to approach the situation. This can then give you confidence because you know that you look the part. Feeling good in the clothes that you're in can instantly lift your confidence levels. Put on a happy face It may sound very simple but just put on your happy face and smile. Smiling can work wonders for your confidence and as you smile out and about you will begin to notice that the world will smile along with you. This can then help you to feel better about life and change your outlook from a negative one into a positive one. Sometimes this simple action can actually be one of the hardest things to do each day, so it is understandable that if at first you start to struggle with the mentality of just smiling. Even when you feel scared, anxious and afraid to do so. However, it is all to do with mindset, and the action can help turn a negative situation into a positive. Faking it until it starts to feel more natural. Take better care of yourself Sometimes it can mean that your just need to take better care of yourself when it comes to your appearance and also how you feel. From exercising more regularly and eating the right things, to getting a good night's sleep and spending tie with people that make you feel good rather than bring you down. Celebrate the victories and small wins Finally, don’t forget to celebrate the victories and the small wins that you will have daily. It may sound crazy, but celebrating the fact that you did well in something can boost your confidence to feel better about life in general. The small win might just be getting through a hard day at work, walking somewhere or completing a project on time, but they are your victories to celebrate. Being your own champion can really help boost confidence levels. Let’s hope that these tips help you to start boosting your confidence levels. Breaking up doesn't have to break you! Learn 7 tips to help you rebuild your confidence after a break up.  A Breakup Can Hurt Your Confidence The breakdown of a long-term relationship is never pleasant. Some relationships have a better ending than others, with agreement, mature decision making and amicable reasoning. Perhaps even lasting friendships. While others are messy. There’s arguments, custody battles, disagreements over money, property and possessions. Of course, there are also breakups that aren’t mutual. Where one part is shocked and considerably more hurt than the other. However your relationship has ended; it’s a significant change. You have to get used to living your life without that person by your side. You might have to learn how to do things for yourself, and simply how to be alone. A messy breakup might also mean that you are dealing with feelings of hurt and anger. The emotions that we go through during a breakup are very similar to those of grief, and why shouldn’t they be? A part of your life is over, and it very much feels like something has died. This can have a huge effect on your confidence, which can be even worse If you’ve been dumped. Feeling lost, and like you don’t know how to live alone can be terrible for your self-esteem. But, it doesn’t have to be. There’s nothing to stop you coming out of a relationship strong, confident and eager to meet new challenges. Here are some tips to help you rebuild your confidence.  Get The Hard Tasks Out Of The Way First Get the Hard Stuff Out of the Way Part of why breakups are so upsetting isn’t the breakup itself but all of the things that come with it. Hunter Perret talks about the difficulties of telling parents and in-laws. You might have to break the news to friends and even children. You might have to have difficult conversations about legal proceedings, dividing assets and other practicalities of moving on. It can be tempting to put these problematic tasks off until you are feeling better. But, you’ll struggle to do that while they are hanging over you. Looming as something that needs to be done. Generally, the anxiety that we feel before we do something unpleasant is worse than actually doing it. So, make a list of what needs to be done and get on with it. Only then will you be free to heel and move forward. Get Out of Bed You might feel as though all you can do is hide under your duvet and cry, which once or twice is fine. A good cry can help you to exorcise some of your emotions and start to process. But, at some point, you need to draw a line under your wallowing and get out of bed. Set an alarm and leave your phone in another room so that you have to get up to turn it off. Then, start your day. Go to work if you need to. If not, head to the gym or into town for lunch. Getting out and about can be a huge mood boost, even if you have to force yourself to do it. Treat Yourself When you’ve been hurt by someone you love, you need a little TLC. Your friends and family might offer comfort and support, but if you want a confidence boost on top, spoiling yourself can be the answer. Treat yourself to some new clothes or a fancy lunch. Book an appointment at the salon or get a massage. Just spend some time watching your favorite TV show with snacks and drinks if that’s what makes you feel good. Exercise Exercise is probably one of the best confidence boosts going. It helps you to feel as though you are taking control and doing something good for yourself. While also releasing serotonin and adrenaline which will improve your mood. Go for a run, head to the gym, take a class or just start going for walks once a day and you’ll soon start to feel good about yourself. Take Care of Yourself When you’re sad, it’s only too easy to neglect your needs. Are you eating well, getting plenty of sleep and spending time with your loved ones? If your relationship has been on the rocks for a while, it’s possible that your needs have been neglected for a long time. Start taking care of yourself, giving your body and mind what they need to stay healthy. Find Out Who Single You Is You won’t be the same person as you were when you first met your partner, especially if you’ve been together for a long time. But, you might not be who you were when you were with them either. Our hobbies and interests often change to fit with each other. So, take some time to learn more about who you are on your own. Try new hobbies, watch new TV shows, make new friends and think about what you enjoy doing. Make a Plan Making plans for your future can help you to see that you’ve got one. Plan a holiday, or write a list of places that you’d like to visit in the future. Set yourself fitness goals, or even book a big event like a race so that you’ve got something to build towards. It could also be a great time to tackle some jobs around the house, or even take on a big move. Start some DIY, and redecorating, to turn your home into your own. It’s also a great time to focus on your career. Sit down with your manager, or set yourself some goals going forward. You might even want to make a five-year plan, or start planning something big like a career change or starting your own business. While all of these things will help you to grow, and to become more confident, that doesn’t mean that you have to feel better straight away. Grieving for a relationship is ok. It’s alright to be sad, and it’s absolutely fine to have setbacks and sad days even when you are starting to feel better. Rebuild your confidence and find ways to help yourself to feel better, but don’t put pressure on yourself. If you feel sad, let yourself be sad. Just don’t let these negative feelings take over your life. Your opinion matters. Read more to learn how to make sure your voice is heard in your relationship.  Both Voices Need To Be Heard To Make A Relationship Work While relationships are a place to love that person and share life with them, they can run on power dynamics over time. There’s usually one person who takes charge, or who is meant to at least. Sometimes, it’s a pure democracy. Ideally, both are assertive in their own manner, and is willing to discuss anything with the other person. This is why people often say ‘opposites attract,’ because if you imagine two puzzle pieces fitting together snugly, you need one person of a certain shape to best connect to someone of another. However, it might be that despite being an assertive person, you usually err too much on the side of the ‘democratic ideal’ whenever you’re connected to someone in this manner. It might be that learning techniques to be more ‘positively assertive,’ can be more than worthwhile, and help the relationship flourish once more. We’re not talking of the need to boss the other around, because that will only breed animosity. Rather, it’s important to consider how you could be more playful, decide more things, and perhaps actualize yourself more in the relationship instead of letting the other do all the work. Here’s what that might look like: A Token Of Appreciation Words can often be a great idea when trying to communicate your love, but often, actions speak louder. A token of appreciation could be many things, but for the most part, it is best embodied in gifts and experiences. For example, check out Tacori’s limited edition jewelry collection to ensure your partner feels amazing during their upcoming birthday celebrations. Something handcrafted can often work brilliantly too, as it emphasizes someone willing and ready to work on the love you both share. Simply giving a gift, sometimes at random, sometimes in a targeted fashion can show you’re always willing to win their approval and know that even after marriage, sweeping them off their feet is never a finished thing. Your Decisions Often, the worst thing to say is ‘I don’t know, what do you want to do?’ It might be that your partner is tired of choosing where you eat, what movie you see, or what you do for the evening. Being a little more assertive and actually more truthful to that you wish to do can help you take charge, and that’s exciting for the other person. After all, they want to know what helps you enjoy life, and they wish to share your personality. If you leave everything up to them, you’ll struggle to make any progress at all. Don’t Skirt Around Topics It can often be quite easy to just jump around topics and sweep them under the rug. But actually, being more assertive means tackling them head-on. Perhaps your partner embarrassed you in front of their friends, and you wish to let them know you don’t appreciate that. Perhaps you are tired of always doing something their way. Perhaps you want them to help out more around the house. If you bottle feelings, you’re just going to have them explode out later in an unhealthy manner. To this end, you might find yourself worried. It’s always best to just communicate well. This way, bad relationships will end and good relationships will bloom. With these tips, you’re sure to be more positively assertive in your relationships. Are you in a possible toxic relationship? Are you looking to help someone who is in a toxic relationship? What is a toxic relationship? Learn more in this contributed post.  Have Faith In Your Own Self-Awareness The compulsion to explore whether you’re in a toxic relationship could be due to; your own perception of your relationship or your concern over someone else's, the suggestion by another that you are in a bad relationship without your awareness, or even the thought that you may be the perpetrator, the victim or that both of you in the relationship are accomplices in being abusive to one another. This post sets the foundation for how we can stop violence against women and men, by gaining an understanding of how we interpret toxic relationships, identifying some of the common mechanisms of an abusive relationship, to having faith in your own self-awareness and taking steps to prevent, stop abuse or leave a relationship entirely. How Do We Determine A Toxic Relationship? For a person to define a relationship as healthy or toxic, is for a person to judge based on their own morals, values, beliefs and their acceptance of the law that governs their state to determine what is proper behavior and actions in a relationship and what is wrong. However, no two peoples beliefs, values, upbringing and experience of seeing and being in relationships are exactly the same. Furthermore, toxicity doesn’t arrive wrapped in the same packaging for everyone to define it as something that’s immediately obvious. It creeps up in all shapes and forms, sometimes unnoticed such as the gaslighting effect, manipulation, and mind games other times tragically obvious, such as forcing substance misuse, murdering or raping of a partner. In other cases, it’s difficult for someone who is prone to being the victim, to see that they might also contribute in being abusive themselves. For some of the signs that distinguish whether you may be involved in a bad relationship, preview the next section. Common Traits Of Toxic Relationships Part of this post is to explore beyond the us and them view, “they are the abusers, and I am the victim,” it’s also to create a sense of self-awareness on whether we may unknowingly actually be abusive ourselves. By previewing the signs below, this may trigger whether you may be the culprit, accomplice or victim of a toxic relationship.
This is a non-exhaustive list of how abuse might occur between two people. Self Awareness In Relationships With the above mentioned it may be difficult to define whether some of these situations you have endured could be interpreted as abuse, or you may convince yourself that although some of the above mentioned may have happened in your relationship, that they’re not severe and won’t lead to any other toxic behavior. When we’re in a relationship, it’s difficult for us to see things objectively. Moreover, when we’re outside of a relationship, we may fail to see the whole picture and what actually occurs behind doors. However, if you feel you may be inflicting or have inflicted harm on someone else you can seek professional help to prevent violence in your relationship and any issues escalating into irreparable damage that could affect you or another person both physically and psychologically. Never doubt your feelings if you think you are being mistreated, or that you are hurting someone close to you. Your emotions and gut instinct will give you an indication that something isn’t right in your relationship. To prevent falling victim to or being part of the abusive pattern in your relationships, there are preventative measures that can be taken. Don’t make way for abusive behavior by consciously pushing your moral boundaries back to allow for abuse. Don’t discount your feelings towards abuse as unimportant. Don’t fall into an oblivion of believing normalized abuse portrayed by the media on tv, films and social media is what love entails. Protect yourself as you would your own children, be protective of your mind and body and seek family, friends and professional support from organizations such as https://www.thehotline.org/help/ to enable you to take steps to solve or end your relationship problems. More than anything, don’t wait and hope it won’t happen again. Are you lacking confidence in relationships? Read 5 tips that can help you be more confident in this contributed post.  Being Confident In Yourself Helps Your Relationship Being self-confident in a relationship is not always easy, especially if you have been hurt in one before. Being self-confident can improve a relationship though as well as being better for your overall well being. Life throws enough stresses at us without you worry about the state of your relationship. Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy No one will make you feel more worthless than you. You should value your own worth, as this will make you feel and look better. If it helps, have a new hairstyle or change the color of your hair. Anything that helps you feel more confident is good. It is very easy to be your own worst enemy and that has to stop right now! Be An Individual You should not let yourself become an extension of your partner. You are an individual with your own dreams and aspirations. People who have lived on their own for a while are often better at this because they are used to considering just themselves. Although no one would ever suggest you should be selfish, you do sometimes have to put yourself first. It can be great if you have a shared interest, but it is also good to have an interest of your own. Apart from keeping you mixing with other people, it is something else for the pair of you to discuss. You should also make sure you stay in touch with friends that you knew before you met your partner. It may well be that they socialize with both of you, but you should still have an occasional evening for just you and your friends.  Take Time To Have Fun Together Self-Disclosure
Tell your partner a secret about yourself that no one else knows. Sharing secrets or things you are ashamed of from your past can help to establish a feeling of intimacy between you. Self-disclosure can help to build your confidence in each other. For instance, if in the past a sex therapist has helped you over a problem, or you once dated someone who turned out to be a drug taker and you almost got involved in them too, your partner will be pleased that your problems were solved and that you have the confidence in them to be honest about your past. Don’t Settle For Second Best Do not let your self-esteem drop so low that you put up with someone who is constantly criticizing you and does not show you any respect. Manners cost nothing and there is no excuse for them behaving in this way. You deserve better than this, so don’t settle for second best. Walk away from the relationship, as there is no doubt that someone better will come along one day. Yes, it can be hard, but it will benefit you both in the long-term. Have Fun Make sure you have fun together sometimes at least. Laughing together is a great help for any relationship, and yours will be no different. It could be at a film you are watching or maybe playing some sort of game. Having a fun element in any relationship is vitally important if it is to succeed. How to talk to your teenager about sex, love and romance? Read more in this contributed post. Parents everywhere know exactly what it means to dread their kids growing into teenagers. Firstly, they remember what it was like for them to be teenagers. They remember the angst, the insecurity and the desperate need to fit in with the crowd. They know that their teenagers have all this to come and today, it’s so different compared to a few years ago. The world has changed so much when it comes to sex and relationships and this is not a bad thing. More complicated, perhaps, but not a bad thing. Same sex relationships two decades ago were not as openly spoken about compared to today. Romance and sex wasn’t splashed across social media for all to see. The ‘selfie’ in the smartphone era had not yet been invented for people to critique and roast online. Life and love and relationships are entirely different now. Asking a girl or boy to go out to the school disco is easy to discuss for some parents, whilst trying to advise on a chat with gay guys may be a little harder to do. It’s not ignorance; it’s just not the same as it was before. However, we now live in a time where parents are swotting up on how things work for teenagers today and not basing how they talk about sex, love and romance on wooing each other back in the Eighties. Times have changed, but talking about healthy relationships and self-respect hasn’t.  Teach Your Teenager What A Healthy Relationship Is Like. Teenagers now are still full of angst and uncertainty and it’s important that they know that you are going to be open, non-judgemental and there for them when they need you. Broaching the subject? That’s not the easy part, because teenagers don’t want to talk about themselves directly. However, as a parent you can figure out their favourite series or film and discuss the dynamics of those relationships instead and talk about the red flags to watch for in terms of gaslighting and abuse, which are very much talked about today. Teenagers need to hear that they are worthy of themselves as they are, that they don’t need to be pressured into sex when they know that they can pace themselves until they are ready. They also need to hear that their feelings are valid and valued, and that those friends who don’t listen to those feelings aren’t friends to be worrying about. Sex and love are both a normal part of life, and the more you broach this subject with your teenagers, the easier it will be to get it through to them that they are in charge of their own bodies and feelings. It’s okay to love whoever they want to love, have sex when they feel ready and not pushed - and SAFELY - and you will be there for them no matter what. Teenagers will make their mistakes: we all have, and as long as they know that you are going to be a shoulder to cry on, a non-judgemental ear to talk to and a safe haven, you can be confident that they will do their best to make good choices. 5 dating tips to help you find love in your twenties and thirties are explored in this contributed post.  Finding The Love Of Your Life Requires Dedication And Searching There will come a time in your life, it could be now, in your late twenties, thirties…. where you finally want to find someone who can settle down with you for life. Finding the love of your life is no mean feat and it will involve a lot of dedication and searching, but when you do, you’ll be treated to a relationship full of love and laughter. Be yourself It is always the first thing people will say when you come to looking for dates, but it is true. If you try to be someone else on a first date to impress someone you aren’t letting your real personality out and this can have a massive effect on your ability to find someone right for you. You want someone who loves you for all of your quirks and despite all of your floors. Be yourself and this will allow you to find them. Don’t force it If you think a date is going ok but you don’t feel any sort of romantic spark, this doesn’t mean you have to carry on stringing it along for a while to try and find that fizz of attraction. When it comes to love, when you know you just know. Don’t force a feeling of attraction and affection on yourself and someone else because it simply won’t work. If you wait long enough you will eventually find that special someone. Chat online If you struggle to get the confidence to talk to new people in person, you can always try to speak to people on the phone on a service such as Fonochatlatino.com or online on a dating app first. It might seem a little pointless but it will build up your confidence and it will allow you to meet and speak to a whole range of different people. You can share a common interest and learn how best to keep a conversation flowing ready for a real date. Go to parties If you never leave the house you will never find the one. If your friends ask you out for a night out or to a party, just say yes. You never know when your missing link will show up to an event and it can take you a long time to find them if you never go out in public. Get out there and allow people to approach you for a chat and see if any sparks happen to fly. Don’t worry about commitment Commitment is a big buzzword with relationships and of course everyone eventually wants to be able to commit to the right person. However, when you start to date people just go with the flow, don’t think about the long term until you can see it going somewhere and just enjoy the present moment with your new love. If it is meant to be it will be, and if not, you can learn from the experience for your next relationship. Learning and using your past experiences is a good way to find the one for you. Are you shy and don't feel comfortable dating? Read this contributed post which has 4 dating tips for shy guys who want to overcome their dating anxiety. There’s a common misconception that being shy has to get in the way of and ruin your dating life when that isn’t the case. Being shy doesn’t have to impact your dating success or be seen as a bad thing - we each have our own, very unique personalities and if being shy is part of yours, you need to learn to make it work for you. Perhaps you don’t know how to talk to people who you’re attracted to? Maybe you’ve tried to make a relationship work in the past while hiding your feelings and it’s all ended in one big mess? What it’s important to remember is that your shyness is not your whole identity, it’s just one part of who you are as a person.  Shyness Is Not Your Whole Identity, It's Just One Part Of Who You Are The good news is that if you take note of the tips below, you can make dating that little bit easier (and more enjoyable) for yourself. Understand that just because you’re attracted to someone that doesn’t mean they’re not a normal person Regardless of how attractive someone is, they are just normal people. That’s the thing to remember because there’s no need to be shy when talking to just another person, is there? Picture this, you’re in a supermarket, you see someone cute in the aisle but are lost for words about how to introduce yourself, but when you’re at the counter with the cashier you’re happy to chat away. These two people are no different from each other - that’s what you need to understand. Make friends who are extroverts You’re an introvert and that’s cool but make friends with people who are extroverts. Studies have shown that it’s easier to relax when you’re around louder people who like to be the centre of attention because that takes the pressure off of you. You’ll find chatting with people that you’re attracted to, far easier in this kind of setting. Date online To build confidence in yourself, spend some time online dating and using services like https://www.guyspyvoice.com/phone-free-trial/gay-male-chat-coverage to meet people. Dating can be daunting but the more people you chat to, either online or over the phone, the more your confidence should grow. As your confidence grows, you should start to feel less shy when it comes to talking to people who you’re attracted to. Let go of the bad If you've had bad dating experiences in the past, you need to stop holding onto them and let them go. If you don’t let go of the bad experiences that you’ve had, they will haunt your dating life forever and make you shyer than you were before. It’s important to realise that everyone has bad dating experiences but that they don’t have to define your future of dating. When you’re a shy guy, dating is not always an easy task, but if you take note of the tips above and implement them in how you date, you can make landing yourself a partner a slightly easier task.  How To Be Bald And Confident |
 What Men Want And Don't Know It | In my book “Mastering The Emotional Needs of Men: Ally vs. Enemy” I teach that one of the Emotional Needs of men is Masculine Identity. This is how each individual man defines his own masculinity. An Emotional Need is what a person emotionally responds to, NOT what they think. |
This means that while a man might intellectually understand that he is more than just his hair, his emotional reaction can cause him to withdraw or lose his sense of confidence from hair loss.
For many men, having hair is part of their Masculine Identity Emotional Need.
When Monty had hair he never cared what people thought about him. He was confident, arrogant, willing to make the first move, and loved to pursue women. He was envied by men, and sought after by women. He was sure of his Masculine Identity.
After his hair loss, Monty felt like he didn’t know himself anymore.
He became afraid, as he was convinced that people were looking at him, talking about him, and laughing at him. He could hardly bring himself to leave his home because of his fears. He felt that he had lost his Masculine Identity with the loss of his hair.
Now let’s go back to your story. How does this relate to YOU? You are attracted to Suzie and would like her to go out on a coffee date with you, but fear your genetic predisposition to male pattern baldness or total hair loss will keep you out of the running.
THE TRUTH IS THIS:
It was not Monty's hair loss that caused him to lack confidence, just like it is not about your receding hairline that is stopping you from asking Suzie out.
It does not matter that Monty had a reputation for being a “ladies man” and the experience to back it up.
It does not matter what you have going for you.
If you have a hard time accepting yourself, it will be even harder for you to put yourself out there and risk rejection, when you express your interest in someone who might not want you back.
Women Who Reject Balding Men
Are there women who find balding men less attractive?
Yes.
There are also women who say that bald men are sexy.
There are studies that show that some women prefer balding men, and other studies that show that women love a man with a full head of hair. Many of these studies are tied into selling products, so buyers beware.
No matter what the issue is: whether it is baldness, height, weight, finances, etc. there will be women who love it, women who are not bothered either way as long as their other criteria are met (sense of humour, honesty etc.), and there are women who will hate it to the point where no matter what else you have going for you, it will never be enough to compensate for what you are “lacking” in their eyes.
 Learn Social Cues so Hair Loss Will Never Stop You | In my program, “The Art of Calibration Program: From Creepy To Charisma” I discuss this concept and assign a percentage to make it easier to understand. So now to explain further, we will examine the topic of hair loss in men and apply randomly chosen percentages of 15%, 70% and 15%. |
The Emotional Needs of Men and Women Audio Set For the 15% of women out there who love bald or balding men:
There is nothing for you to worry about. These women are ready to love you for the way you look right now. Be enthusiastic to meet them, and when you do focus on addressing her Emotional Needs.
At the same time, you will be challenging her to address your Emotional Needs as a man.
The women that already were attracted to Monty loved him for being Monty (not because of his hair) and would have continued to want him if Monty had only continued to purse them.
Just like if Suzie already likes you, then all you have to do is make your move and ask her out.
For the 70% of women who are neutral about bald or balding men:
This is the group that you can influence the most.
They will look to you to set the example of how you want to be treated.
If you fully accept yourself and you ACT like your hair condition (whatever it may be) is not an issue for you, they will follow your example, and not make it an issue for them.
If however you do not fully accept yourself, and act like your hair loss is a big issue, they will also react to you as if it were a big issue.
Monty would have lost this group and it would not have been because they cared about his hair. Monty let his hair loss affect him so much, it was to the the point that he was no longer open to female attention, and the women picked up on that message.
That is why he would have lost this group.
Just like YOU who are too preoccupied with your thinning hairline!
Suzie is going to sense that you are not really present with her, and she is going to feel (your lack of being present) enough not to go on a date with you, if you ask her.
Dating a Younger Woman
For the 15% of women who already dislike bald or balding men:
Your best bet with this group is to cut your losses and move on.
The person Monty was before his hair loss never cared what this group of women thought because he was too focused on having fun with the 85% (15% plus 75%) of women out there (the majority) that either already liked him, or that he could influence into liking him for a date!
He didn’t care about the women that would never accept him, until he reached a crisis moment in his life where HE stopped accepting himself.
If Suzie (or any other woman) really hates bald or balding men balding, then it is best to find out as soon as possible. Move on to someone who either loves it, or is neutral about it.
Never is the real issue hair loss, or going bald, or considering yourself to be the newest member of the follically challenged community.
The issue is NOT your hair loss.
The issue is how you deal with it that matters.
Dealing With Going Bald
The Franktalks.com coaching philosophy is this:
IF THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF
THAT YOU DO NOT LIKE
YOU MUST OWN IT
To OWN it, means to either:
A) Accept it as part of who you are. If it is not going to change, work around it as best you can and do what you want to do with as little compromise as possible
or
B) Do something directly about it to change it.
A) Accepting Hair Loss
Accepting hair loss comes in different forms:
For some men accepting hair loss means learning to be okay with it, accepting the fact that some women will have a problem with it, and being okay with that.
For some men, accepting hair loss means they shave their heads and feel they are taking an assertive step towards the situation, rather than let the hair loss and possibly eventual balding happen on it's own.
For some men, accepting hair loss means never letting it stop them from doing the things they would have done if they had the hair.
Hair loss is an opportunity to self-actualize (self reflection) of what going bald means to you.
If hair loss or going bald means that you see yourself as no longer young, virile, or adept at attracting women, it will influence the way you feel about yourself, likely in a negative way.
The way you feel about yourself is a key element in the world of attracting a partner.
If hair loss or going bald holds a different meaning for you such as:
*The privilege of growing older (When you appreciate your age as you begin to attend funerals of those close to your age)
*A sign of wisdom that comes with maturity
*You just don’t have to care anymore what other people think about anything you do.
It will influence the way you feel about yourself, most likely in a very positive way.
The way you feel about yourself is a key element in the world of attracting a partner.
Acceptance:
Being okay with something by not letting it turn into a problem that hinders you from doing the things you want to do with your life.
By accepting you find a way to get your needs met, even if you cannot have everything you want.
It has nothing to do with giving up.
B) Making Some Changes
If you have accepted that this is your situation, and instead of working around it, you want to try to change your situation, the next step is to look at the options available to you.
This requires research and some experimenting to find what works for you. Just as not every person can follow the same diet plan, not every person will want to follow the same hair loss solution.
There are many causes of hair loss, and one possible cause is stress. If you feel that your hair loss is from stress, it may be time to re-evaluate your lifestyle and seek ways to make it less stressful.
This might mean some sacrifices that you did not anticipate making.
For example: It might mean a change of employment for you to something less stressful, but that also might mean a drastic pay cut. Looking at hair loss causes is just one step in the process. This is one possible solution if you are suffering hair loss from stress.
Next, have a look at other solutions that may work for you. Some men opt to wear a wig, an artificial hair piece (toupee), or other methods.
When it comes right down to it, the opinions of others do not matter (including the opinion of this author). What matters is that YOU are comfortable with the solution you seek, and you are comfortable with the risks of being exposed if you keep some of these methods a secret.
Currently there is no cure for baldness (at least none that I know of, and if someone reading this article has knowledge of such, please leave a comment to share that knowledge with men who may want it.)
women's emotions in relationships Knowledge Is Power
Do NOT be in denial of what is happening to you.
Denial instead of acceptance tends to lead to poor choices. Denial of any issue that is affecting a man's emotional well being will cause him to make questionable decisions in many areas of his life, including what to do about hair loss.
An example:
A man works a job in an area of industry that is declining. He is in denial about the longevity of his employment. He decides to increase his expenses and in turn acquires debt. Contrast this with another man who also works a job in an area of industry that is declining, but who has accepted the truth of his situation. He wisely curbs his spending while seeking out knowledge on alternative sources of income.
Your inability to cope with your hair loss will result in your eventual violation of a woman’s Emotional Needs.
Why?
The longer you date the same woman, the more she will get to know the real you. At that point, the truth will be harder to deny.
The truth about your hair loss is sure to come up and she will be concerned that you kept the truth from her. This may make her wonder what else you are not telling her.
The issue is trust not hair loss.
what men really want in a woman How To Make Balding Look Good
If you are in the position where you are in the process of balding, whether you have vertex baldness, a receding hairline, or you are anticipating hair loss and want to take proactive self-care steps,
there is nothing wrong with seeking out some advice on the subject.
Hair loss and confidence are tied together for many men who see it as part of their Masculine Identity emotional need.
True confidence develops as a result of the actions you take.
If your appearance is what you are worried about
(and you consider your hair to be part of your appearance)
then take action!
Put work into your overall appearance.
Look your best and carry yourself in a way
that displays your pride.
There have been studies done on men’s online dating profile photos. The studies found that the photos of men, which received the MOST likes, were the photos in which the men expressed PRIDE in their faces.
The facial expression of feeling proud was interpreted as CONFIDENCE.
 change your life in 90 days | For over 15 years I have coached men about dating and relationships. In that time the message that I have received over and over again is that men really do not feel they should ask for help. It is part of many male cultures to be an independent achiever. What we as men must remember is that even the most accomplished men have a team of coaches, mentors and advisers. |
| Clients who have taken action and asked for help have achieved great success in their lives. In 90 days Adult Male Virgins who were never able to admit they even had problems with sex and dating, found themselves with multiple girlfriends! They found confidence through their actions. They developed pride in their appearance (and yes many of these men did have hair loss concerns). |  lose your virginity in 90 days |
If YOU are embarrassed about your thinning hair, don’t be.
Take action! Ignoring what is happening to your hair, and being in denial does not help you in the long term.
The worse thing you can do is try to hide your concerns,
and end up trying untested methods
which could harm your remaining hair,
and possibly your health.
Accept your hair loss situation.
Own it.
Love yourself regardless of it.
Be PROUD of your appearance as it is,
and know that you can do something about it
if you want to change it.
Seek out some those who can help you
to keep your confidence up.
Remember Monty?
It took a little longer than expected, but with the proper coaching and guidance Monty was willing to go out in public again.
Eventually he remembered everything that he still had going for him before he lost all of his hair. Monty took action and found the pride in himself that he had lost.
He even went back to his playboy lifestyle for a time until he met a woman he really adored. The married and today they have a family together.
Monty now plans to teach his son everything he learned.
Now back to YOU.
Do you want to take action?
Find your PRIDE and CONFIDENCE.
Work on what is holding you back
and find the confidence to ask out your "Suzie"
@wearehims @emotionalneeds #hairloss #hairlosstraining #hairlossproblem #hairlossproblems #hairlossexpert #hairlosstattoo #HairlossAutority #hairlosscontrol #hairlossremedy #hairlosssalon #hairlossconsultation #HairlossPreShampoo #hairlosscourse #hairlossremedies #hairlossspecialist #hairlosstherapy #hairlossproducts #hairlosscoverup #hairlossshampoo #hairlosssollution #hairlosstreatment #hairlossfrommedication #HairLossForMen #hairlossclinic #hairlosssoultion #hairlossolotion #hairlosscover #hairlossinwomen #hairlossprevention #hairlossanswers #BaldGuyWithNoWorries #baldchick #baldboys #baldnesssolution #baldie #balding #baldisbeautiful #baldinghelp #baldingteens #baldingsolutions #baldingsolution #baldisbadass #bald #nohair #nohairdontcare #scalpmicropigmentation
Sign up for coaching TODAY and let's get you to the point where even Monty would envy you.
-Frank Kermit
Get Her Now
Ways to Make New Friends at Anime Conventions
5+ Ways to Make New Friends at Anime Conventions
by Roger Senpai
(Originally, I called this post “10 Ways to Make New Friends at Anime Conventions.” But I felt some methods are better than others. So the first 5 ways are great, while the latter 5 are just okay. Still lots of ways to make new friends though!)
Being a cosplay event organizer, I’ve seen many people who attend Anime conventions in order to meet new friends. However, when you see groups of cosplayers huddling together and talking to only their friends, making new friends at a con may seem like a daunting task. But I'm here to help – I myself have made many friends at Anime conventions! And I've met them through a variety of ways.
Before I begin, I should emphasize this list is far more useful if you have a genuine interest in geek fandom (e.g. video games, Anime, comic books). Otherwise, if you have absolutely no interest, you may come off as that guy who’s just trying to pick up girls at the Anime convention. Or you’re a girl who decided to buy a Sailor Moon dress to get some attention at the con. I mean, you don’t have to be a weeaboo or a nerd. But you should have the mindset that you’re going to have fun at an Anime convention, regardless of who you meet.
Based on my experience, here are 10 different ways to make new friends at Anime conventions:
1) Wear a popular cosplay - Of all the techniques listed here, wearing a popular cosplay is by far the easiest and most effective way to meet new friends at a con. Having a good and popular costume opens up all doors as people will approach YOU - whether asking to take a photo of your costume, or complimenting how amazing it is! And once that icebreaker is open, you can take the conversation further if you wanted.
For example, let's say you're cosplaying D.Va from Overwatch. Some possible scenarios:
Con Attendee: “OMG I love your D.Va costume!” OR “Excuse me; can I take a photo of you? Your D.Va cosplay is sooo amazing!”
You: Sure!
(Pose for photo)
Con Attendee: “Do you play a lot of Overwatch? We should play together sometime.” (Exchange Battle.Net accounts) OR “I’m going to cosplay Tracer at the next con. Do you want to cosplay Overwatch together?”
Alright, I actually don’t know how a typical Overwatch conversation would go. But that's a quick example showing simply how easy it is to make friends when you're cosplaying a popular character.
Also, more than likely there are other people either wearing the same costume or cosplaying a character from the same series. And most of the time, they will want to take a photo with you - another way to break the ice.
The costume itself doesn't have to be that great either. I used to cosplay Sebastian from the Anime Black Butler, and honestly the material was poor quality (I bought it off a cheap cosplay site). But most people don't care - if you're cosplaying someone they like, they will open up and talk to you. I met two good friends from Otakuthon because they were cosplaying Ciel and Grell, also from Black Butler. I’ve also met three other friends at Anime Shogatsu because they loved my Sebastian cosplay and because we had a great conversation after taking my photo.
So I cannot emphasize how many friends I've made by simply wearing a cosplay that was considered popular. There's no easier way to socialize at an Anime convention than to cosplay a popular character. This is especially true if you're shy or introverted - people will come to you!
If you don’t know what’s considered a popular cosplay, look at the photos of a large convention that recently took place. If you see a lot of the same characters, more than likely it’s popular at this moment in time.
And don’t worry about anyone judging you for wearing a “popular” cosplay or cosplaying a character you’ve never watched in an Anime or played in a video game. A lot of people do this, and the community loves to preach, “Cosplay whoever you want.” And who cares – you’re at a convention to have fun and make new friends.
2) Schedule or attend a group cosplay photoshoot - At many Anime conventions, group photos are scheduled for attendees cosplaying from the same series. (E.g. My Hero Academia photoshoot 2 p.m. Area C of the Toronto Congress Centre, Pokémon shoot at 3 p.m. in the hotel area). These photoshoots are great opportunities to chat with cosplayers from the same series. Not only is it fun to take pictures together with creative poses, more than likely you'll have things in common - after all you're cosplaying from the same series!
I cosplay Marth pretty often, so I decided to hold a few Fire Emblem photoshoots at smaller conventions. Not only did I get to meet new cosplayers this way, I made a few new friends who've taught me how to improve my Marth costume. A win-win situation.
Being a cosplay event organizer, I’ve seen many people who attend Anime conventions in order to meet new friends. However, when you see groups of cosplayers huddling together and talking to only their friends, making new friends at a con may seem like a daunting task. But I'm here to help – I myself have made many friends at Anime conventions! And I've met them through a variety of ways.
Before I begin, I should emphasize this list is far more useful if you have a genuine interest in geek fandom (e.g. video games, Anime, comic books). Otherwise, if you have absolutely no interest, you may come off as that guy who’s just trying to pick up girls at the Anime convention. Or you’re a girl who decided to buy a Sailor Moon dress to get some attention at the con. I mean, you don’t have to be a weeaboo or a nerd. But you should have the mindset that you’re going to have fun at an Anime convention, regardless of who you meet.
Based on my experience, here are 10 different ways to make new friends at Anime conventions:
1) Wear a popular cosplay - Of all the techniques listed here, wearing a popular cosplay is by far the easiest and most effective way to meet new friends at a con. Having a good and popular costume opens up all doors as people will approach YOU - whether asking to take a photo of your costume, or complimenting how amazing it is! And once that icebreaker is open, you can take the conversation further if you wanted.
For example, let's say you're cosplaying D.Va from Overwatch. Some possible scenarios:
Con Attendee: “OMG I love your D.Va costume!” OR “Excuse me; can I take a photo of you? Your D.Va cosplay is sooo amazing!”
You: Sure!
(Pose for photo)
Con Attendee: “Do you play a lot of Overwatch? We should play together sometime.” (Exchange Battle.Net accounts) OR “I’m going to cosplay Tracer at the next con. Do you want to cosplay Overwatch together?”
Alright, I actually don’t know how a typical Overwatch conversation would go. But that's a quick example showing simply how easy it is to make friends when you're cosplaying a popular character.
Also, more than likely there are other people either wearing the same costume or cosplaying a character from the same series. And most of the time, they will want to take a photo with you - another way to break the ice.
The costume itself doesn't have to be that great either. I used to cosplay Sebastian from the Anime Black Butler, and honestly the material was poor quality (I bought it off a cheap cosplay site). But most people don't care - if you're cosplaying someone they like, they will open up and talk to you. I met two good friends from Otakuthon because they were cosplaying Ciel and Grell, also from Black Butler. I’ve also met three other friends at Anime Shogatsu because they loved my Sebastian cosplay and because we had a great conversation after taking my photo.
So I cannot emphasize how many friends I've made by simply wearing a cosplay that was considered popular. There's no easier way to socialize at an Anime convention than to cosplay a popular character. This is especially true if you're shy or introverted - people will come to you!
If you don’t know what’s considered a popular cosplay, look at the photos of a large convention that recently took place. If you see a lot of the same characters, more than likely it’s popular at this moment in time.
And don’t worry about anyone judging you for wearing a “popular” cosplay or cosplaying a character you’ve never watched in an Anime or played in a video game. A lot of people do this, and the community loves to preach, “Cosplay whoever you want.” And who cares – you’re at a convention to have fun and make new friends.
2) Schedule or attend a group cosplay photoshoot - At many Anime conventions, group photos are scheduled for attendees cosplaying from the same series. (E.g. My Hero Academia photoshoot 2 p.m. Area C of the Toronto Congress Centre, Pokémon shoot at 3 p.m. in the hotel area). These photoshoots are great opportunities to chat with cosplayers from the same series. Not only is it fun to take pictures together with creative poses, more than likely you'll have things in common - after all you're cosplaying from the same series!
I cosplay Marth pretty often, so I decided to hold a few Fire Emblem photoshoots at smaller conventions. Not only did I get to meet new cosplayers this way, I made a few new friends who've taught me how to improve my Marth costume. A win-win situation.
THE FIRE EMBLEM HEROS
3) Take photos of cosplayers - If you decide you don't want to cosplay, you can always take photos of cosplayers. Start off by asking for their photo ("Excuse me, can I take a photo of your costume?"). After you finish taking their picture, you can ask about their cosplay ("How did you make it" or "Did you see the ending of Naruto, blah blah"). Then gauge their response. If they're giving you a one-word answer or looking away, they probably have somewhere to go. But if they're genuinely interested, then perhaps they want to know more about you. You'd be surprised how taking a picture of someone has led to friendship.
Once, I saw a good Star Trek cosplayer and asked for her photo. While I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about Star Wars to a fan of Star Trek, for some reason I decided to talk about Star Wars to her after I took the photo. I found out we actually had a lot in common! So we kept in touch and now she’s a good acquaintance of mine, and I’m happy to see she’s still making great cosplays to this day.
You never know who you can meet by simply asking for their photo.
Just be aware that there are certain times where it's inappropriate to ask for a photo. For example, don't ask to take a picture if they're sitting down, or eating or busy doing something else. It's considered especially rude to ask for a photo while they’re in the middle of their own photoshoot; interrupting the photographer and the cosplayer is not a good first impression to make!
4) Volunteer - Volunteering is a great way to meet new people during an Anime convention. Not the actual attendees themselves, but the volunteers and staff you're working alongside with. It's like meeting coworkers at your job, but in a more fun, casual environment. It doesn’t have to feel like work either – you can usually decide what type of volunteer work to do, and how many hours you want to help.
A few years ago, I volunteered for Anime Boston (yes, a convention outside of my own country!). They accepted my application and the experience was a lot of fun. My fellow volunteers and staff were great people to volunteer and socialize with, and I still keep in touch with them today. By volunteering for Anime Boston, I made a bunch of new friends and I got a bunch of swag and free stuff during the con as well.
5) Bring a Card Game - Whether it's Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, card games are a great way to break the ice with your fellow attendees at an Anime convention. There's always going to be somebody bored or lonely at a con. Bring one of these card games to a convention and invite them to play with you. Not only will it be fun, you’ll also make a new friend this way.
Back when I first started the Cosplay Hangout Group, most people who showed up for my cosplay events didn't talk to each other. Like many new people in the cosplay community, it was somewhat awkward and people were standing around. So I decided to bring my Cards Against Humanity deck and made the attendees play together. Not only was the game hilarious and eased the nervousness of some, it allowed them to socialize with each other. How beautiful that game is.
6) Hit up the Con Rave - I know the raves at cons get a bad rep for sketchy people and drug addicts, but I've met some great people at raves, including cosplayers, DJs, performers, singers and fashion artists. It's a wonderful and diverse mix of people at a rave. Starting a conversation at a rave can be as easy as giving someone your glow stick or "Kandi."
7) Hotel Parties - If you're going to a large Anime convention, there will always be hotels where attendees are staying for the weekend. And with hotels, come hotel parties! Probably the most difficult part is getting invited. But if you socialize enough during the con, you will find yourself invited to one. Believe me, it’s not that difficult. I've been to several conventions outside of my own city and I've been invited to hotel parties by attendees I've never met prior. Anyways, if you want to make new friends and you get invited, be damn sure to accept the invitation and go.
Yes, sometimes it can be awkward at the party when everyone knows each other and you know nobody at first. But don't worry, there's always someone at the hotel party similar to one described in that Alessia Cara track, Here (God I hate that song).
let's party
8) Host a Panel - What better way to gather like-minded people than hosting a panel at a con?! But seriously, it's not a bad idea. You are talking about a topic that you're interested in. And the people who attended your panel are also interested in the subject.
I hosted a Pokémon panel a couple of years back. The attendees were as enthusiastic about Pokémon as I was, and if I wanted a few players to battle with, I could easily have picked a few right there at the panel. In fact, one guy came up to me and wanted to be my friend. He asked for my Facebook account. But he kept interrupting my damn panel, so I didn’t want to be friends with him!
9) Tabletop Gaming - At many Anime conventions, there's a room dedicated to tabletop gaming. Although some people will already be with their friends playing together, there are a few people who are looking for someone to join their game. Maybe one of their friends left for a photoshoot, and they're now missing a player? Much like bringing a card game to a con, tabletop gaming is a good way to have fun and meet new people. I got to hangout with some cool people in the Tabletop gaming room at Youmacon. I sure as hell don't remember what game it was, but it was fun talking about differences between Detroit and Toronto!
10) Video Game rooms - What better way to start a friendship than to kick their ass in Smash Bros.?! Okay, I haven't made many friends in video game rooms - because they're too salty after I beat them.
:)
 ROGER SENPAI | About The Author
|
#cosplay #cosplaywip #animecosplay #cosplaylife #cosplayer #animelife #cosplaylife #animeconvention #cosplans #cosplaying #cosplayfun #cosplayworld #cosplaylifestyle #cosplaycommunity
Learn How To Play The Charisma Game for Singles
The Charisma Game
by Frank Kermit
This is a Group Activity I created for you to practice with others.
I created this for use when I was running weekly workshops for single for dating.
I have included it in my coaching workbooks:
I'm a Man, That's My Job
and
I'm a Woman, It My Time
The premise: Each person in the room will offer one compliment to every other person in the room, WITHOUT expecting a compliment in return.
When someone compliments you, you are instructed to simply say “THANK YOU”, without offering a compliment back.
There are a few different ways to do it.
For a larger group, have them walk around without saying a word, approaching as many people as they can. When they get face to face with someone, they must offer a compliment, without expecting one back, and the person being complimented must say. “THANK YOU” before saying anything else.
For smaller groups, or groups of people with limited mobility, you can have everyone sit in a circle and each person takes a turn in complimenting all the other members in the group, one by one. In this set up, allow everyone some time to write down their compliments to others in the group without having anyone share them. Smaller groups ideally have everyone wearing a name-tag (use first name or nickname)
Finally for very small groups of people who are horrendously shy, you can resort to people writing down the compliment for each person on a number of pieces of paper, then all the papers are collected and the host of the evening will pull out each one and read them out loud.
Do not use this one unless in extreme circumstances. It is a last resort method of doing it. It does not reach all of the goals needed.
The compliments can be superficial.
It can be based on a physical feature like a smile, complimenting the person’s eyes, mode of attire, or style of clothing.
If you start the group meet with the Charisma Game, most all of the compliments are going to be superficial, as most people will likely not know each other.
If you run the Charisma Game 3-4 times over the span of the group meet (which is the way is usually works best), at each start of the Charisma Game you an instruct people to compliment how the person has participated in the group meet thus far.
Very important to keep in mind; Instruct everyone that compliments are to remain appropriate and be non-sexual in nature. Do remember that some of the people who attend such group meetings are very socially awkward and may not know what is and is not an appropriate compliment. So offer some guidelines as to what is and is not an appropriate compliment.
Finally, set a time limit. The Charisma Game is to happen for a 2-4 minute span at most with medium sized groups. You do not want the same people pairing up during the same segment of the game.
Finally, set a time limit. The Charisma Game is to happen for a 2-4 minute span at most with medium sized groups. You do not want the same people pairing up during the same segment of the game.
The point of The Charisma Game is:
-To teach people that going up to meet a stranger
to make that person feel good is OK to do
-To teach people strangers coming up to meet you and
attempt to make you feel good is OK to do
-To teach people how
to simply accept a
compliment
(Which some people have a hard time doing)
-To teach people that saying
THANK YOU
is enough,
and not to feel obligated to compliment
back just because
someone complimented them first
-To teach people not to expect anything back
and not be attached to an outcome when they try to
meet someone new
-To build up people’s
confidence in being able to compliment others, and
for people to have their confidence reinforced by
the compliments of others
-To give people a
chance to meet each other in the group settings
are going to be regular ongoing meetings
-To teach people that the more times you approach
the same person over the course of the workshop,
the easier it gets each time, and carry that comfort
outside the workshop space
The Definition of Charisma as I teach it, is to make a person feel good about him or her self, while at the same time present a positive impression of yourself to them.
If you can do that, then you have Charisma.
THE ART OF CALIBRATION PROGRAM: FROM CREEPY TO CHARISMA EBOOK
The use of compliments is how you make a person feel good. HOW you compliment a person without the pressure of expecting anything said in return is how you start to train yourself to make a favorable impression of yourself in the process.
Some of the things that would happen is that people from the workshop would get used to talking to people they liked as well as talking to people they did not like, which is a good social skill to develop.
Some of the people would approach me afterwards and tell me how difficult the first few were, but once they got used to it, they felt more comfortable as they did it more often.
Some people would take me aside and complain that everyone complimented him or her on exactly the same thing (for example, everyone complimented one person on her hairpin, and never on anything else). If this happens, it is a sign for the person to “step up” and give people something else to compliment. It is a great way for someone to learn they may not come across in the ways they thought.
Get a group of people together and try it. Good luck!
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5 ways to boost your confidence are explored in this contributed post.
Confidence is the key to life. It’s a way to help you believe in your own actions, and it assists in giving you the power you need to overcome adversity. Confidence also gives you the self-motivation it takes to succeed in life, whether it’s reaching your goal of marriage or operating a successful business. Confidence can be what makes or breaks our lives, so here are some tips to help inspire your confidence.
look sharp
Believing in Yourself
Confidence is sometimes seen as a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Being able to go outside while wearing a suit and not feeling out of place? That’s confidence. The ability to stand up on a stage to speak to an audience? Confidence. Suggesting workplace changes to your boss for the sake of improving their business? Once again, confidence. If you believe in yourself and wash away the doubt, you’ll find that it’s much easier to live your life and make the right calls.
Appearances Matter
Your appearance is a huge part of your confidence. Whether it’s the clothes you wear or the smile you put on in public, your confidence can be determined by your outward appearance. You should keep yourself well-groomed, browse for custom suits that make you look comfortable and also practice better body language. Just remember that your appearance will be the first thing people see, and that’s how they will typically judge you the first time around.
Destroy Negativity
Negative thoughts are pointless, useless and don’t serve any purpose other than to scare you and make you doubt. If self-belief is one of the keys to a confident lifestyle, then lowering your worth and spreading negative thoughts is a quick way to destroying any belief you have in yourself.
Promote Positivity
On the contrary, promoting positivity is a sure way to bolster your own self-worth. Learning to spread positive messages and thinking in a positive manner will help you maintain our confidence. Being able to smile and think logically in the face of adversity, be it a problem at work or an issue at home, will help you deal with problems quickly and efficiently. Your positivity will eventually grow on people and become infectious, and people will see you as a driving force of positive energy that will motivate them.
Know Yourself
Knowing yourself is half the battle when aspiring for confidence. As mentioned before, confidence is how much you believe in yourself, but if you’re unsure about your own principles then this is almost impossible to achieve. Learn more about yourself by exploring things that you hide away from the public. Live the life you want to and embrace the thoughts and feelings you have. You’ll find it much easier to believe in yourself and grow confidence if you have a good understanding of your own personality.
There are many other ways to promote confidence in yourself, but these should give you a fantastic foundation to build upon. Just remember that finding confidence is an endless journey of self-discovery.
To Belly Dance or Not To Belly Dance
To Belly Dance Or Not To Belly Dance
Written by: Pillow Talk Gal
Updated February 28, 2018
When I was asked if I wanted to take part in a belly dancing class and write an article about it, I was really excited. Then, the more I thought about it the more I began to worry a little. I have never really attended any kind of dance class (if you don’t count when I was little) so belly dancing seemed like a bit of a leap. I have to admit though; I was curious and nervous at the same time.
The day of my first class had finally arrived and my excitement/curiosity had made me almost an hour early. At least parking was a breeze (I found a spot literally in front of the building). I had some extra time to kill, so I decided to sit in the park right across from the dance studio. Despite the honking of cars and bustle of the city, it was very relaxing and helped to calm my nerves a little bit.
| Then, before I knew it, it was time to meet the group and start my belling dancing experience. I was met by Brooke Megan (teacher and belly dance guru) with the warmest of smiles and the most welcoming of greetings. The studio had a very warm and inviting vibe and I was instantly put at ease. |  Brooke Megan Belly Dancer |
An introduction to the rest of my fellow dancers was given and everyone was gracious and friendly towards me (the new comer). Students had the option to bring their own hip scarves or to choose one from Brooke’s wide, not to mention beautiful, collection. Not having any of my own, I chose one of Brookes’ (I would later find out that she’s owned this particular hip scarf for 8 years- no pressure).
Once everyone was ready to begin, we all took our seats on our mats and Brooke began her introduction to what holistic belly dancing is all about.
 Brooke Megan Belly Dancer | Brooke’s view is that ‘’Dance is more than just a series of movements, and by underscoring its strong links to mental and spiritual health, it can be used to guide women toward a greater understanding of self’’. |
The class was a safe space where women could share their thoughts and emotions without judgement. After Brookes’ explanations, we all sat in our circle and experienced the openness of touch with one another.
We all paired up and gave our partners hand massages using essentials oils (this exercise is practiced openly to learn to relax and give of ourselves but also to receive from others.
| Also it helps one to be open to new experiences and emotions by letting go of any negative energy we may have stored up). |  Brooke Megan - Belly Dance Classes |
We were given a small demonstration as to how to massage the hand then we were off (of course it is clearly mentioned by Brooke that any and all activities done in the classroom are not forced upon students and anytime anyone is not comfortable with something, they are free to sit out with no judgement or issues). This said, I sat back and allowed my partner to give me my hand massage.
At first, I was clearly not relaxed as my partner was so keenly able to detect (by simply feeling how tense my forearm was). Then as she calmly told me to relax and enjoy, I found myself surrendering to the calming music playing in the background and found that my massage was actually very pleasant.
I found myself letting go of my tension and just giving into the moment.
Once we had given and received our hand massages, we gathered in our circle once more and captured what we had taken away from the experience, in our journals.
The group then proceeded to share their thoughts on the massage exercise and what they had taken away from the experience. I myself shared how impressed I was with my partner’s ability to almost immediately detect where I was holding all my tension in my forearm (carpal tunnel syndrome- a common job hazard among writers) and therefore she was able to relieve some of the pain.
 Brooke Megan - Belly Dance Classes | Now that our spirits were open and our emotional palettes were cleansed, it was time to warm up our bodies and belly dance. We started by stretching out and getting our muscles ready. Then came the moment I had been so anxious about: experiencing what belly dancing was all about. |
Poses and stances were front and center and I awoke muscles my body seemed to have forgotten I had.
We observed ourselves in the studio mirrors so as to mimic what Brooke was showing us (to the best of our abilities).
Brooke gave us a phenomenal example of what we could eventually accomplish with these wonderful moves and she performed for the entire class.
It inspired us all and definitely made me want to give it a whirl.
Brooke Megan - Belly Dancing Classes
The amazing part is by this time I wasn’t feeling self conscience at all. I was totally comfortable in the environment that Brooke had created for the class.
We all moved to the music, holding our belly dance poses and receiving encouragement from each other and Brooke.
The aspect that surprised me the most is that as a woman, I have spent the better part of my life trying to make my body giggle as little as possible.
Now, I was being encouraged to shake all my little bits as much as I could and it was fabulous! No shame, just pure liberation and enjoyment of the female form in all its glory.
As we danced and learned how to move our bodies, time seemed to just fly by. Before I knew it, the class had come to an end and it was time to cool down. Brooke gave each and every one individual high-fives and congratulations on a job well done. It was such a rewarding experience.
 Brooke Megan - Belly Dance Classes | So that marked the end of my first belly dancing experience (the first of many to come). As I said my goodbyes to my fellow belly dancers, I mentioned how I was looking forward to the next class. I made my way home and discovered that I had a level of renewed energy and optimism that I have not felt in a very long time. I felt a boost both mentally and physically (even though my muscles were telling me otherwise). |
I am so looking forward to next week’s class.
Namaste!
-Pillow Talk Gal
About Pillow Talk Gal
Born and raised in British Columbia, she is a professional woman managing a career, marriage, and a teenager. Life can be challenging at times but she's a firm believer that everything in life happens for a reason, and more often than not, she tries to understand those reasons.
"Join me in my journey throughout life’s issues and I guarantee you’ll be left pondering an issue or two." - Pillow Talk Gal
*Disclaimer: All photos of Brooke Megan are copyright Brooke Megan and all persons in the photos retain all their rights, interest and titles in the photos. All photos appear here with written permission on file with Brooke Megan.
Brooke Megan About Brooke Megan and House of Lavender
- Holistic Belly Dance Group
Located at: 5582A Sherbrooke Street O, Montreal, QC H4A 1W3
Telephone number: 514-814-7557
Face book page: House of Lavender: Beauty and Wellness
Brooke Megan has been teaching belly dancing for 8 years and has extensive experience in dance through her teaching at Carlton University in Ottawa.
She herself was introduced to belly dancing through group lessons and was compelled to share this wonderful art form with others. She has performed at the Shenkman Art Centre in Ottawa, various art galleries and cafes. Her goal in offering belly dance lessons is to educate people with regards to the beauty and strength of exotic dance. She wants to have people experience this art form at a grass roots level.
Her six week program is open to all who wish to explore their creative side all the while relieving stress and getting fit.
For more information call 514-814-7557 or check out her Face book page: House of Lavender: Beauty and Wellness
Bad Sex? Speak Up! Tell Your Sex Partner, Not Your Friends!
Bad Sex? Speak Up!
by Kristin Casey
In response and review of a New Your Magazine Article
As an intimacy coach, my time is spent immersed in topics of dating, relationships, and sexuality. Aside from working directly with clients, I keep up on relevant research, articles, books, opinion pieces, and the occasional, well-thought-out blog.
A variety of evolving attitudes and perspectives informs my work and feeds my passion. Half of what I read is inspiring and encouraging.
The other half…not so much.
A recent piece in NYMag.com (a copy of said article is at the bottom of this post, for the purposes of fair use fair copying as a review of the article, and to provide a balanced perspective) relayed the experiences of female college students, a diverse population of smart, savvy, autonomous adults, who feel something between chagrined and victimized, by a widespread epidemic of bad sex.
The premise of the article seems to be that this situation needs further interrogation.
That this “vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture” needs to be acknowledged.
The question is, by whom?
If, like me, you’re thinking by the dissatisfied women’s partners, of course,
you’ll want to read on.
Here are a few key points from the article:
- The title, “The Game Is Rigged—why sex that’s consensual can still be bad and why we’re not talking about it” seems to presume two things. First, that by default, men have all the control and are taking unfair advantage of it, and second, that the only thing a woman must do to ensure she isn’t to blame for bad sex is consent.
- They Make Assumptions. When these women don’t like the way a man touches them in bed, they can’t or won’t bring themselves to say anything about it because they “assume it won’t matter to him.”
- The question was posed, “how can they [women] get guys to get them off?” (Seriously, that was an actual question, as if the phrase ‘let me show you how to get me off’ never occurred to them.)
- A woman gets drunk at a campus party thrown by men she doesn’t know. She makes out with more than a couple of them, then the next day feels weird, confused, and dissatisfied by “what went down.” She eventually decides “campus feminism” is at fault for acting like Yes and No are simple concepts. (I don’t even know where to begin with this one. Literally, there is nothing simpler in the entire universe than Yes or No.)
The above sampling of learned helplessness is not an anomaly.
I hear this stuff from women all the time, daily, in person and online. I’ve been hearing it since my teens. (I’m currently 49.) I could write a book on this topic, and maybe someday I will.
For now, my question is,
Where is the accountability?
Where is any attempt to take personal responsibility for one’s choices, behavior, and sex life?
Where is any indication these women understand they have as much control as the man in bed—as much as they choose to wield, in fact—and with that control comes not just the power but the duty to be as “good” as they expect him to be?
My next question is, what is this nebulous force “campus feminism” and why is it tasked with addressing these women’s problem?
Why aren’t the sexually dissatisfied women—presumably feminists themselves—addressing it with their individual sex partners?
(I hate to point out the obvious, but honestly, I feel like I just solved their entire problem.)
I hear this stuff from women all the time, daily, in person and online. I’ve been hearing it since my teens. (I’m currently 49.) I could write a book on this topic, and maybe someday I will.
For now, my question is,
Where is the accountability?
Where is any attempt to take personal responsibility for one’s choices, behavior, and sex life?
Where is any indication these women understand they have as much control as the man in bed—as much as they choose to wield, in fact—and with that control comes not just the power but the duty to be as “good” as they expect him to be?
My next question is, what is this nebulous force “campus feminism” and why is it tasked with addressing these women’s problem?
Why aren’t the sexually dissatisfied women—presumably feminists themselves—addressing it with their individual sex partners?
(I hate to point out the obvious, but honestly, I feel like I just solved their entire problem.)
This quote from the article is most illuminating.
A 29-year-old editorial director of a well-known feminist website, has just described her longstanding unsatisfying sex life.
She winds up feeling bad for not having done the work of telling her partners how to make her feel good.
“What I want is not for me to have that burden. I want one of my male partners, who are wonderful men who care about me, to have just once been like, ‘No, this is unacceptable to me. I’m not going to continue to have sex with you when you’re not getting off!’ And I can’t imagine that happening.”
To be clear, this thing she pines for yet can’t imagine happening, is a fairytale scenario, akin to waving a hanky for a prince to ride up to save her.
Is this what we’re calling empowerment now?
Is this how “campus feminism”—or any feminism—works?
(No, it’s absolutely not.)
The burden?
The “burden” of learning what brings a woman sexual pleasure belongs to her alone.
The burden of conveying that information to her partner(s) is also hers alone.
It’s not only unreasonable to place the burden on men, it’s illogical.
Even more absurd, is an outspoken, influential feminist stating on record, without a hint of irony, that she can’t be expected to experience sexual pleasure until it’s presented to her, by a man, on a silver platter.
This isn’t how feminism works.
More importantly, it’s not how good sex works.
Yet this willful obtuseness is pervasive.
A few examples off the top of my head:
- She Still Had Sex?: A woman I know (in her late-20s, professionally accomplished with an advanced degree) met a man on Tinder and invited him to her home, only to discover she wasn’t attracted to him in person. Though she said he seemed perfectly nice and unthreatening, instead of calling off the tryst, she made the decision to have sex with him “because it felt like the path of least resistance.” After he left, she sent him a rage-filled text for “allowing” her to go through with it. She stated that he should’ve sensed her disinterest and bowed out of his own accord. (Because he didn’t read her mind and act as her moral compass for her, she was livid.)
- Great Fatigue?: I once heard a woman say that the process of insisting on condom use caused her “great fatigue.” (Is she having sex on a treadmill? How much energy does it take to say “deal-breaker, dude”?)
- How Dare He Ask Her What She Likes?: At a group lunch recently, a friend of a friend complained about new lovers who ask her “what do you like?” in bed. The other women at the table laughed mockingly at these nameless men with their awkward ignorance. (She refused to answer the offending question posed by her hapless lovers, by the way, and instead would wait till later to gleefully chastise them to friends.)
- Saying Nothing At All? At the same luncheon, minutes later, another woman expressed dismay about men who mimic porn moves in bed. She called them cartoonish and ignorant. When I asked what she said or did to redirect their behavior in ways she found more pleasurable, she and the entire table stared at me blankly. (Because I’m the one who doesn’t get it!?)
The above anecdotes were shared amongst women only,
done so after the fact.
More recently, I witnessed an online verbal attack directed at a man. On a popular feminist blog, in the comment section, a thoughtful and sensitive young man expressed insecurity about his general datability and sexual performance. He then made a casual observation suggesting women have it easier in bed (since women, more than men, are given the option to be passive during sex). It didn’t go over well.
He was verbally abused, rudely shut down, and blatantly denied the space to share his honest experiences, simply because they weren’t in-line with the going narrative, constructed by female commenters—a narrative, I might add, about the male experience. One reply in particular, struck me as exceptionally insensitive. An angry, accusatory young woman refused to believe this man (or any man) could be effected by expectations beyond that of his current partner. She said all he had to do was find an understanding girlfriend and “boom.” He’d cease to feel stress, pressure, or self-doubt about his manliness. She insisted societal expectations weren’t a “thing” for men. They’re only a thing for women. This, on a website known for long thought pieces on rape culture, internalized misogyny, fat shaming, cat calling, trigger warnings, safe spaces, and bullying in all forms. (Well, almost all forms, it would seem.)
Compassion For Men
It is stressful for a man to enter every sexual scenario believing his “man badge” is on the line. Why is that hard to believe?
(Especially by women who find it overwhelmingly stressful to say anything along the lines of “please touch me differently.”)
A man’s entire life is comprised of win/lose moments. They’re raised to be competitive, to earn their stripes by impressing the rest of The Pack. These rigid masculine roles are so ingrained as to be systemic.
Men are bombarded from all directions, by parents, peers, society at large, and their own internalized image of what “real” men are.
Of course, some women are ambitious too and prioritize career success, but in our society that’s considered their option.
For men, it’s an expectation. It’s placed on them at birth.
That burden is integral to the male experience.
Men labor (literally) under the belief they’re 100% responsible for every success or failure in life, including every sexual encounter.
That’s how sex becomes about scoring points and being a stud, versus sharing intimacy and pleasure with a partner.
Complicit in this skewed vision of what constitutes “good sex” is every woman who wanted something different—more foreplay, a softer touch, less tongue, more tongue, or whatever special (or banal) thing happens to turn her on—and failed to convey those specific desires to her partner.
It is stressful for a man to enter every sexual scenario believing his “man badge” is on the line. Why is that hard to believe?
(Especially by women who find it overwhelmingly stressful to say anything along the lines of “please touch me differently.”)
A man’s entire life is comprised of win/lose moments. They’re raised to be competitive, to earn their stripes by impressing the rest of The Pack. These rigid masculine roles are so ingrained as to be systemic.
Men are bombarded from all directions, by parents, peers, society at large, and their own internalized image of what “real” men are.
Of course, some women are ambitious too and prioritize career success, but in our society that’s considered their option.
For men, it’s an expectation. It’s placed on them at birth.
That burden is integral to the male experience.
Men labor (literally) under the belief they’re 100% responsible for every success or failure in life, including every sexual encounter.
That’s how sex becomes about scoring points and being a stud, versus sharing intimacy and pleasure with a partner.
Complicit in this skewed vision of what constitutes “good sex” is every woman who wanted something different—more foreplay, a softer touch, less tongue, more tongue, or whatever special (or banal) thing happens to turn her on—and failed to convey those specific desires to her partner.
It’s time for archaic gender roles to be put to bed (so to speak).
But if men are to shift their perspective—if we expect them to drop the “stud role,” with its performance-oriented approach to sex—what then?
As is made clear in the NYMag article, women can’t or won’t state their needs, much less take charge in bed.
If they’re so unhappy with the way men are doing it, when will they ever speak up?
When will they become participants in bed, instead of passive, silent, disgruntled audience members writing scathing reviews after the fact?
But if men are to shift their perspective—if we expect them to drop the “stud role,” with its performance-oriented approach to sex—what then?
As is made clear in the NYMag article, women can’t or won’t state their needs, much less take charge in bed.
If they’re so unhappy with the way men are doing it, when will they ever speak up?
When will they become participants in bed, instead of passive, silent, disgruntled audience members writing scathing reviews after the fact?
The dissatisfied women in the article cited power imbalances as the cause of all their problems. In a way, I suppose that’s true. Yet women can reclaim their power at any time by
1) finding their voices and
2) using them.
And not to freelance journalists or to each other,
but to their male partners.
Women who cannot ask for what they want in bed,
shouldn’t even be having sex.
They’re better off in a tower somewhere,
waving a hanky out the window,
awaiting a fairytale prince to save them.
About The Author
Kristin Casey is an intimacy coach in Austin, Texas. She works exclusively with male clients, specializing in overcoming performance anxiety, dissociation, various forms of dysfunction, and related intimacy issues.
http://www.KCaseyConsulting.com
www.Facebook.com/IntimacyCoachATX
Kristin Casey is an intimacy coach in Austin, Texas. She works exclusively with male clients, specializing in overcoming performance anxiety, dissociation, various forms of dysfunction, and related intimacy issues.
http://www.KCaseyConsulting.com
www.Facebook.com/IntimacyCoachATX
*Disclaimer:
the views of the author do not necessarily represent the views of Franktalks.com.
It is important to present different views/mindsets, and that includes material that may be deemed controversial in nature.
**Disclaimer:
The Articles produced in this post were written by the authors and all rights, titles and interests in these articles belong to the authors (or whoever they assigned those rights too). These articles are published here and are used herein under Fair Use and Fair Copying for the purposes of reviews, and remain the property of the author.
the views of the author do not necessarily represent the views of Franktalks.com.
It is important to present different views/mindsets, and that includes material that may be deemed controversial in nature.
**Disclaimer:
The Articles produced in this post were written by the authors and all rights, titles and interests in these articles belong to the authors (or whoever they assigned those rights too). These articles are published here and are used herein under Fair Use and Fair Copying for the purposes of reviews, and remain the property of the author.
SEX ON CAMPUS
The Game Is Rigged
Why sex that’s consensual can still be bad. And why we’re not talking about it.
By Rebecca Traister
Last winter, Reina Gattuso was a Harvard senior majoring in literature and gender studies and writing a biweekly column for the college newspaper, the Crimson. She covered a variety of subjects, among them her sexuality (she identifies as queer) and Harvard’s byzantine class hierarchies, and she wrote a regular feature called “Four Dollar Wine Critic.” In February, she dedicated her column to the subject of sexist sex.
Gattuso is not against sex by any means. “I don’t say yes. I say oh, yes. I say yes, please,” she wrote. And she did say yes at a booze-soaked party hosted by a group of men she didn’t know. One of the men told her that because she was bisexual, he assumed she was “particularly down to fuck.” He said she could make out with his girlfriend if she would hook up with another of the men.
“I have so much to drink my memory becomes dark water, brief flashes when I flicker up for air,” Gattuso wrote. “I’m being kissed. There’s a boy, then another boy. I keep asking if I’m pretty. I keep saying yes.” But in the morning, she wrote, “I feel weird about what went down” and was unsure how to express her feelings of dissatisfaction and confusion over “such a fucked-up experience.”
Eventually, she realized that what she was grappling with was not just the night in question but also the failure of campus feminism to address those kinds of experiences. We tend to talk about consent “as an individual process,” she wrote, “not asking ‘What kinds of power are operating in this situation?’ but only ‘Did you or did you not say yes?’ ” Feminists, she continued, “sometimes talk about ‘yes’ and ‘no’ like they’re uncomplicated … But ethical sex is hard. And it won’t stop being hard until we … minimize, as much as possible, power imbalances related to sex.”
It may feel as though contemporary feminists are always talking about the power imbalances related to sex, thanks to the recently robust and radical campus campaigns against rape and sexual assault. But contemporary feminism’s shortcomings may lie in not its overradicalization but rather its underradicalization. Because, outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking.
Feminism has a long, complicated relationship to sex, one that has cycled from embrace to critique and back again. By the time a generation of women woke feminism from its backlash slumber around the millennium, the sex wars of the 1980s were long over. Some second-wave feminists, including Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, had seen sex, pornography, and sexism as all of a piece, finding it impossible to pick the strands of pleasure from the suffocating fabric of oppression. So-called sex-positive feminists — Ellen Willis, Joan Nestle, Susie Bright — set themselves against what they saw as this puritanical slant. The sex-positive crusaders won the war for a million reasons, perhaps especially because their work offered optimism: that sexual agency and equality were available to women, that we were not destined to live our sexual lives as objects or victims, that we could take our pleasures and our power too. They won because sex can be fun and thrilling and because, for the most part, human beings want very badly to partake of it.
So it was only natural that when feminism was resurrected by young women creating a new movement, it was self-consciously sex friendly, insouciant in its approach to the signs and symbols of objectification. No one would ever mistake these feminists for humorless harridans or frigid dick-rejectors. But the underpinning philosophy had shifted slightly. Sex positivity was originally a term used to describe a theory of women, sex, and power; it advocated for any kind of sexual behavior — from kink to celibacy to conscious power play — that women might enjoy on their own terms and not on terms dictated by a misogynistic culture. Now it has become shorthand for a brand of feminism that was a cheerleader for, not a censor of, sex — all sex. Feminism’s sexual focus narrowed in on one issue: coercion and violence. Sex that took place without clear consent wasn’t even sex; it was rape.
In this line of thinking, sex after yes, sex without violence or coercion, is good. Sex is feminist. And empowered women are supposed to enjoy the hell out of it. In fact, Alexandra Brodsky, a Yale law student and founder of anti-rape organization Know Your IX, tells me that she has heard from women who feel that “not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure.”
Except that young women don’t always enjoy sex — and not because of any innately feminine psychological or physical condition. The hetero (and non-hetero, but, let’s face it, mostly hetero) sex on offer to young women is not of very high quality, for reasons having to do with youthful ineptitude and tenderness of hearts, sure, but also the fact that the game remains rigged.
It’s rigged in ways that go well beyond consent. Students I spoke to talked about “male sexual entitlement,” the expectation that male sexual needs take priority, with men presumed to take sex and women presumed to give it to them. They spoke of how men set the terms, host the parties, provide the alcohol, exert the influence. Male attention and approval remain the validating metric of female worth, and women are still (perhaps increasingly) expected to look and fuck like porn stars — plucked, smooth, their pleasure performed persuasively. Meanwhile, male climax remains the accepted finish of hetero encounters; a woman’s orgasm is still the elusive, optional bonus round. Then there are the double standards that continue to redound negatively to women: A woman in pursuit is loose or hard up; a man in pursuit is healthy and horny. A woman who says no is a prude or a cock tease; a man who says no is rejecting the woman in question. And now these sexual judgments cut in two directions: Young women feel that they are being judged either for having too much sex, or for not having enough, or enough good, sex. Finally, young people often have very drunk sex, which in theory means subpar sex for both parties, but which in practice is often worse (like, physically worse) for women.
As Olive Bromberg, a 22-year-old genderqueer sophomore at Evergreen State, sees it, modern notions of sex positivity only reinforce this gendered power imbalance. “There seems to be an assumption that is ‘Oh, you’re sexual, that means you’ll be sexual with me,’” Bromberg says. “It feeds into this sense of male sexual entitlement via sexual liberation of oneself, and it’s really fucked.”
And again, this is all part of consensual sex, the kind that is supposed to be women’s feminist reward. There’s a whole other level of confusion around the smudgy margins when it comes to experiences like the one I had at college 20 years ago. It was an encounter that today’s activists might call “rape”; which feminist hobgoblin Katie Roiphe, whose anti-rape-activist screed The Morning After was then all the rage, would have called “bad sex”; and which I understood at the time to be not atypical of much of the sex available to my undergraduate peers: drunk, brief, rough, debatably agreed upon, and not one bit pleasurable. It was an encounter to which I consented for complicated reasons, and in which my body participated but I felt wholly absent.
“A lot of sex feels like this,” Gattuso wrote in May, after her popular Crimson columns drew the attention of Feministing, a website at which she has since become a contributor. “Sex where we don’t matter. Where we may as well not be there. Sex where we don’t say no, because we don’t want to say no, sex where we say yes even, when we’re even into it, but where we fear … that if we did say no, or if we don’t like the pressure on our necks or the way they touch us, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t count, because we don’t count.”
This is not pearl-clutching over the moral or emotional hazards of “hookup culture.” This is not an objection to promiscuity or to the casual nature of some sexual encounters. First of all, studies have shown that today’s young people are actually having less sex than their parents did. Second, old-fashioned relationships, from courtship to marriage, presented their own risks for women. Having humiliating sex with a man who treats you terribly at a frat party is bad but not inherently worse than being publicly shunned for having had sex with him, or being unable to obtain an abortion after getting pregnant by him, or being doomed to have disappointing sex with him for the next 50 years. But it’s still bad in ways that are worth talking about.
Maya Dusenbery, editorial director at Feministing, says that she increasingly hears questions from young women on college campuses that are “not just about violence but all the other bullshit they’re dealing with sexually — how they can get guys to get them off, for instance. I think they need feminists to put forth a positive alternative vision for what sex could be and isn’t. And it’s not just about rape. That’s not the only reason that sexual culture is shitty.”
And it’s not as if that culture disappears upon graduation. Dusenbery, who is now 29, speaks of her “great feminist shame”: After a decade of sexual activity, she very often still doesn’t get off. “In one way that feels so superficial, but then, if I believe sexual pleasure is important, that’s terrible! Come on, Maya! Communicate!” She winds up feeling bad for not having done the work of telling her partners how to make her feel good. “What I want is not for me to have that burden. I want one of my male partners, who are wonderful men who care about me, to have just once been like, ‘No, this is unacceptable to me. I’m not going to continue to have sex with you when you’re not getting off!’ And I can’t imagine that happening.”
Gattuso, who is now on a Fulbright fellowship in India, writes to me in an email: “I sometimes think that in our real, deep, important feminist desire to communicate that sexual violence is absolutely and utterly not okay … we can forget that we are often hurt in ways more subtle and persistent … And we can often totally forget that at the end of the day, sex is also about pleasure.”
Pleasure! Women want pleasure, or at least an equal shot at it. That doesn’t mean some prim quid-pro-quo sexual chore-chart. No one’s saying that sex can’t be complicated and perverse, its pleasures reliant — for some — on riffing on old power imbalances. But its complications can and should be mutually borne, offering comparable degrees of self-determination and satisfaction to women and men.
After all, sex is also, still, political. Contemporary feminism asks us to acknowledge that women “can have as many partners as men, initiate sex as freely as men, without being brutalized and stigmatized, and that’s great,” says Salamishah Tillet, a professor of English and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-founder of A Long Walk Home, an organization that works to end violence against women. The problem arises, she continues, with the feeling that “that alone will mean we’re equal. That alone is not an answer to a system of persistent sexual domination or exploitation. These women are still having these encounters within that larger structure, and men are not being asked to think of the women having sex as their equal partners.”
The black feminist tradition has never completely bought into sex positivity as a means toward a political end. Stereotypes of hypersexualization have always made it harder for black women to be believed as victims of sexual assault and also made it harder for them to engage in a sex-positive culture. Just last year, bell hooks startled an audience during an interview by suggesting that “the face of … liberatory sexuality” for black women might be celibacy.
I am not suggesting that contemporary feminism do away with its sex-positive framework or with its anti-rape activism. But it may need to add a new angle of critique. Describing the strain of popular sex positivity often simply understood as “You get it, girl,” Brodsky says, “I think of it sometimes as Lean In for good sex. In that there are these structural factors that are conspiring against terrific sex, but at work or in the bedroom, if you have the magic word, if you try hard enough, if you are good enough, you can transcend those.” Like Lean In, this kind of sex boosterism can be very valuable. But, continues Brodsky, we need to add to it, just as we do in the workplace. “We need both collective solutions and individual solutions.”
Dusenbery imagines a world in which feminists stop using the language of combat — as in combating rape culture — and instead set out to promote a specific vision of what sexual equality could entail. “It would include so much more: from the orgasm gap to the truly criminal sexual miseducation of our youth to abortion rights to the sexual double standard. Broadening the scope would not only push us to provide the same kind of deep analysis that’s been developed around rape culture in recent years but also help us better see the connections between all the inequities in the sexual culture.”
One thing that’s clear is that feminists need to raise the bar for women’s sex lives way, way higher. “Sure, teaching consent to college freshmen may be necessary in a culture in which kids are graduating from high school thinking it’s okay to have sex with someone who is unconscious,” says Dusenbery. “But I don’t want us to ever lose sight of the fact that consent is not the goal. Seriously, God help us if the best we can say about the sex we have is that it was consensual.”
*This article appears in the October 19, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.
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