No wonder women are confused. There is so much misinformation floating around about who men really are. Plus, what a woman already “knows” can get in the way of learning and applying what she really needs to know about the man she loves.
Wisdom is the ability to apply what you know to the appropriate time, place, & situation.
The other day, a woman reached out to me who had actually worked with me before with her husband. At one point during our work together, I had told her, “I don’t think your husband is going to change until you do.”
When she reached out to me this week, she actually was still in that mindset. She wants him to change, and that’s why she wants to do couple’s therapy. Well, she continually attacks, blames, and criticizes him. And this is something that happens all the time.
So why don’t women take my advice?
Maybe they don’t realize that I have an inside track. I talk to guys all the time, and they tell me stuff. Stuff that they’ve been trying to tell their wives for a very long time. But for some reason, the women just don’t hear them.
So I have often acted as a translator for men, taking what they are trying to say and translating it into something that she can actually understand.
To do that, we’ve got to look at what a man’s experiences from the time he’s born until the time he dies. We cannot look at a man and think he is the same as a woman.
- His biology is different.
- His life experience is different.
- The expectations and the purposes that drive him are very different than those that drive a woman.
For example, women are all about expressing emotions and using lots of words to do so. That’s how we connect with one another. And we think it’s how we’re going to connect with men as well. But it doesn’t work.
Why doesn’t it work?
Well, because men are taught to avoid emotions from the start.
- It’s not that they don’t experience emotions.
- They do they experience them very powerfully.
- But they have been trained from a very young age not to express those emotions.
So when an adult male and adult female get together, they have two totally different goals for communication, for emotions, and for words.
- Men make different choices in the words they use.
- Men choose to use fewer words and in the number of words that they use.
When you put those differences together, you’re asking for trouble!
That’s why I choose to teach women first. Because we tend to be much more invested in learning about relationships than men are. There are good reasons for that which, I talk about elsewhere.
I focus on helping women understand what a man thinks, what he’s feeling, and why he does the things he does. That’s going change how you respond to him.
When you look at him as though he were your girlfriend, and try to talk to him that way, it’s not going to work. You are speaking a totally different language. He will …
- shut down
- get angry
- pull away
Differences in our communication styles do not work well together.
I have to ask myself what gets in the way of us using this really valuable information.
- the stuff guys are telling us directly that we don’t hear or
- things guys have told me, and I have shared with you
Why don’t we take that information and actually do something with it?
Here are several reasons:
- Fixed mindset. We have a preconceived idea about who men are and what our relationship should look like. We have a really hard time letting go of that to embrace the truth about men.
- Basic fear. It takes a really brave woman to even want to know the truth.
- Lack of self-confidence. It takes a really confident woman to be able to apply that truth to her own life.
- Holding on. We’ve got to let go of trying to tell a man what to do. Attack, blame, and criticism don’t help either of you grow.
The tricky part is we think oftentimes that we’re just having a conversation. But because our communication style is so incredibly different, it doesn’t come across the same to him. Why you say can come across as an attack, blame, or criticism because guys are sensitive to different things than we are.
We’re just getting started. There’s so much to learn about men.