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How to Build Your Self Confidence

It’s The Gentlemen’s Curb a lifestyle blog where fashion meets fitness in a BIG way. We are back with some more information for you. When you lack confidence, it is all too easy to hide away inside and keep yourself to yourself. Unfortunately, this is also the fastest route to loneliness and isolation. And that’s not going to boost your confidence, is it? When you are feeling low and can’t get yourself together, the road back to self-confidence can seem long and exhausting and, to be honest, you are going to have to put in a fair bit of effort to get yourself going. You need to put yourself into situations outside your comfort zone and learn to see what others see in yourself. You can be strong, confident and happy. All you need to do is give yourself a nudge in the right direction. 

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Tackling Body Confidence

Lots of people lacking body confidence end up lacking confidence more generally. This is quite logical in one respect because if you are embarrassed by your appearance, you are less likely to want other people to see you. Then as you avoid people more, it gets harder to go out, you start to worry about your social skills and a vicious cycle begins. Body confidence does not arrive overnight. You will always have days where you look in the mirror and don’t see what you want. This is normal for everyone, the only difference is that a confident person will look, shrug, grin anyway and get on with life. If you want to have body confidence, you need to get rid of your hangups and carry on regardless.  Accept yourself. A great way to give yourself more body confidence is to join a sports team. Not only will you feel fitter and better, but you will have a ready-made group to encourage you to do better. They don’t care what you look like as long as you arrive ready to run around and have some fun! Soccer and basketball are both great for getting involved in a local team and baseball is a lot of fun too (have a look at this website for some equipment to help get your eye in).  When you realize that most people are interested in you as a person rather than you as a body, you should relax a lot more. The most important thing is not that you look like a model, but that you are fit and healthy. This looks different on everyone so give yourself a break!

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Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone

Confidence is about being able to walk into a new situation and keep your cool. You are still you, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. This is worth remembering because, for those people who get incredibly anxious when doing something new, you can ground yourself in the knowledge that very little is really going to change.

If you spend a lot of time in hiding, you won’t give yourself much opportunity to spread your wings or build your confidence. So, if you want to grow, you need to put yourself in a bit of discomfort and then take a step back and think about what has happened.

Everyone finds different things scary so you will have to think about what you are avoiding to work out what you need to do. For example, if you tend to avoid talking to new people, you should learn to talk to strangers (keep reading for more!), if you are afraid of failing, you should try something you’ve never done before, etc.

The point of stepping outside your comfort zone is that you will quickly find that the world carries on regardless of what happens. Yes, you might embarrass yourself but 99 times out of 100 you won’t. And if you do, laugh it off, make a joke at your own expense and move on. You can’t stop yourself having those 99 brilliant experiences for fear of one bad one so the more you see that you don’t fail, the more you will realize that you have nothing to worry about. That’s all confidence really is.

And once you have mastered that, it’s time for the biggie: learning to talk to strangers.

Learning to Talk to Strangers

Lots of people are nervous about meeting new people because they are worried they are going to say something stupid. This is a fairly normal worry to have but it shouldn’t stop you chatting with a stranger in a bar or meeting new people in general. In fact, you need to embrace the quiver of nerves in your stomach and just go for it!

If you are looking for something more structured, have a go at these exercises in talking to strangers by Kio Stark. Starting with sitting and observing, these exercises are a good way to get you chatting with people and sharing with them. We are all social creatures really and though some people will feel weird about you saying hello to them or asking them a question, for the most part, people are happy to engage for some time.

You will be surprised by how many good responses you to get from talking to strangers but you shouldn’t be, really. The likelihood of you actually saying something stupid and the whole world collapsing in on itself is really very remote. In fact, if you want evidence of this, Jessica Pan, an English journalist in London did an experiment to see what would happen if she spoke to strangers more often. At the peak of her experiment, she asked strangers stupid questions. It was fine.

The more you get used to talking to people, the more confident you will become. Part of this is a simple realization that most people are nice and willing to chat but another confidence-building aspect is the discovery that you are also a nice person willing to chat. People aren’t repulsed by you or afraid or whatever it is you fear. They just see you as a stranger, exactly how you see them.  So you see, your body, your fears, and your shyness are no reason not to be confident. Build yourself up, get out there and go and do whatever you want.

You’ve got this.

It’s The Gentlemen’s Curb a lifestyle blog where fashion meets fitness in a BIG way.

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5 Things You Learn When Heading Out Of Your Comfort Zone

It’s the Gentlemen’s Curb a lifestyle blog where fashion meets fitness in a BIG way. We are back to share some information with you today. Heading out of your comfort zone is necessary if you’re to live as your best self. Without this, life often becomes a matter of shrinking rather than expanding. If you hope to live as a gentleman and become the full embodiment of your masculine power, then sooner rather than later you should become competent in heading out of your comfort zone.

 However, this is not always as easy as it sounds. To do so is strange, entering the unknown, and can often lead us to worry. The ‘hero’s journey,’ that age-old story template often contributed to Joseph Campbell for explaining, has been grappling with this idea for millennia. As humans, we are absolutely fascinated by the ability to enter areas that we are relatively unfamiliar with, and to use conquest to make them ours, or at least more familiar. 

People might say that this is not easy to find in the modern day, but we’d suggest otherwise. There are many different things you could learn on your street alone, and that’s before you even consider conquest on another landmass. Here are a few things that heading outside your comfort zone can teach you, right from the beginning:

You’re Stronger Than You Think

You’re stronger than you think. You’ve read that sentence twice now, and it’s not always likely to make an impact. What matters is actually experiencing it, and knowing it for yourself. A child might be afraid of needles until they realize that actually, they don’t hurt half as much as they might have expected. It might be that you’re terrified to volunteer or to head to a new job for the first time.

Within the first week though, you’re much more likely to feel comfortable in your new surroundings. You’re stronger than you think. Your body and mind are evolved to live in the unknown, that is how our species has survived. You only know this however when you experience this as a practical reality.

The Fire Grows

When you head out of your comfort zone, your relationship with the unknown changes. This means that you add fuel to the fire of your curiosity instead of being afraid of what it has to offer. This only compounds with time, and soon your internal fire for more will rage.

You Begin Caring

Heading out of your comfort zone makes you a much more emotionally calibrated person. When you become comfortable with it, you ensure that you understand the benefits of doing so, and will be much less likely to fall into isolationism. You’re also more likely to make healthy choices. This could be as simple as following a men’s sober living program or choosing to eat keto. Whatever it means for you, the importance is that you care to begin with.

You Become Magnetic

One of the best ways to become interesting is to become interested in the world around you. This natural curiosity defines you as someone who cares about life and is magnetized to it. As a result, you become magnetic in the social field. That’s all we need to say.

You ‘Know’ That There’s More

It’s easy to think that your own little box is enough for you. When you see the outside world, learn something new, or challenge yourself, you’ll realize that is not the case. There is absolutely more out there for you, and this doesn’t simply stay a nice thing to think about when you experience it. It becomes a practical reality, something you can absolutely experience. When you have the capacity to do this, you ensure that you will seek this out in almost everything you do.

These things are fun to read about, but even better to experience. What’s stopping you? Until next time, it’s The Gentlemen’s Curb a lifestyle blog where fashion meets fitness in a BIG way. If you have a topic that you want us to cover, feel free to email kava.king@gentlemenscurb.com

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Learning To Hunt: It’s A Matter Of Survival

It’s The Gentlemen’s Curb a lifestyle blog where fashion meets fitness in a BIG way. Here is some information about survival.  Being in a survival situation means that you are dealing with extreme conditions. A big part of being in those conditions is learning how to survive, which is why learning to hunt is going to be a very important tool in your arsenal. When you are in the wilderness trekking and hiking, the most practical animals that you can hunt are birds, small game, and fish. These can be caught by hand and are so common that you won’t be without food in an extreme situation.

Larger mammals such as deer would need you to be properly equipped. You would need to have the right rifle to shoot from a distance, as well as a rifle sling from HuntersTechWorld.com to keep yourself hands-free when you need to be. Learning to shoot is a necessity when you are hunting. Small game and birds along with fish and invertebrates should be the most important considerations for your survival hunting. Almost all of them can be eaten and rabbits and geese have the most amount of flesh to offer you when hungry. The smaller the animal you want to catch to eat, the better chance you have of ensnaring it in traps. You have to hunt with care, though, as you don’t want to catch other people in the traps that you set. When you do catch an animal, you need to ensure that they are cooked thoroughly through. Killing the microorganisms and bacteria in the meat, especially lean meat, will help your body to process what it is you are eating. You need to make sure that you also consume some of the animal fat; when you’re in a survival situation, diet does not matter!

Mankind has hunted animals since the dawn of time itself, and this doesn’t go away just because there are parts of the world where cities and skyscrapers reside. There are still areas of total forest or desert, and so hunting to survive is still a necessity. Most people wouldn’t know what to do if something happened and the world plunged into one that needed people to rely on their basic survival instincts. Learning to hunt is something that will one day come in handy, especially you would be relying on yourself to eat. Wild animals don’t just sit down and wait for you to come by and kill them. You have to learn how to be precise with your hunting so that you get the best animals to help you to survive. Wild animals feel the presence of humans before they see you, so they will move away. Learning to hunt can help you to hone the skills that you need to keep yourself alive in a precarious situation. You can learn to track animals and identify the right prey to hunt and there are guides like these that can help you to get there.

Hunting isn’t just a sport for some, it’s a means to ensure that they live and keep living while they try to get from surviving to living again. Until next time, it’s The Gentlemen’s Curb where fashion meets fitness in a BIG way.