Getting EXACTLY what you need from men!

Not getting what they ask of men is a common complaint heard from women before they’ve done the Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women workshop. The workshop devotes all of Sunday morning to why women aren’t getting they ask for, and then we teach them how to get it without strain, fuss or manipulation. Sounds pretty good, right? I can tell you that it works wonders, and it works on all men, not just the ones who you think “owe” you.

Why, then, even when we know how to ask, are we often getting results that look nothing like the pictures we originally had in our minds

To provide an example of what I’m talking about, I’ll use a story told by a woman in one of our recent private Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women workshops (I have her permission to share it with you). For the purpose of this email, we’ll call her Sarah, and her husband Jason.

Sarah had bought some new towels and towel racks and requested that Jason put up a new towel rack in their bathroom. He was happy to do it for her (Jason has a history of building things around the house for Sarah, even without her asking).

Sarah returned home that evening, went into her master bath, and saw the good news and the bad new. The good news was the towel rack was up. The bad news was that when she draped a bath towel over the bar, the towel hit the floor. Oops, too low.

Instead of asking Jason to remove the rack entirely and patch and paint the holes, Sarah decided she could use the bar for hand towels. She asked Jason to install an additional towel rack, off to the side and higher than the first. Jason was happy to do it for her.

Well, Jason looked at the towel, looked at the rack, and decided to hang it at a height that looked right to him, all six feet, five inches of him. Needless to say, the rack was a bit too high for five foot, four inch Sarah.

Why don’t we get what we wanted?

As women, we make assumptions about what other people (specifically women) read into our conversations. We’re connected; we speak on the same wavelength; we talk the same language; we understand each other. Unfortunately, when we’re speaking with men we make the same assumptions. We’re not wrong to do so, because that voice in our heads, that woman who criticizes us all the time, is telling us “He should know exactly what I’m talking about.” And, too much detail drives men crazy, so we don’t want to do that.

It’s not that men are stupid. It’s not that they’re perverse. It’s not that they don’t want to make us happy, because they do. It’s that men can’t read our minds. A common request heard from the Sunday afternoon panel of men in our workshops is “Just tell us exactly what you mean. We’re not mind readers.”

How to get exactly what you need.

Before you can read a book you have to open the cover. Before you can read a letter you have to open the envelope. If you want a man to read your mind you have to open it for him. You need to describe the pictures that are in your mind. You do that by opening your mouth and letting the pictures come out.

What Sarah could have done was taken Jason into their master bath, draped a bath towel over the towel bar, asked him to hold the rack against the wall and move it until it matched the picture in her mind. It would have taken about 15 seconds to do that and neither Jason’s masculinity nor his prowess as a handyman would have suffered in doing so. (I checked with my husband Michael to make sure.) Then both Sarah and Jason would have had the same picture, and Sarah would have gotten the results she originally wanted.

In Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women, we teach and practice a specially designed conversation to help women communicate our needs to men. Graduates who use this method get more satisfaction and better results from all the men in their lives. But it’s up to us to remember that men are not women; we have to reveal what’s in our minds to them so they don’t have to guess.