Well, I had an experience during Mother’s Day, and the happiness it brought me comes directly from what I learned during the Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women workshop. I’ll say more about that shortly, but first please read on.

Our new Nyack home has front and back porches, and we found some great second-hand outdoor chairs at the Nyack street fair a couple of weeks ago. What we didn’t have was a table for the back so we could entertain and enjoy food and drinks. Michael knew I wanted the table, we talked about where we might get the table, but we never discussed actually going out and buying it.

On Friday before Mother’s Day, I looked out onto the porch and saw the perfect outdoor table, all assembled and sitting among our chairs. Wow, now we were set for entertaining my parents outdoors on Sunday. That table made me happy, and I let Michael know.

Sunday came, and Michael made it clear that all he wanted me to do was set out the hors d’oeuvres; he would handle preparing, cooking and serving the meal. (He also cleans up after himself in the kitchen.) My services wouldn’t be needed, so I would have uninterrupted time with my parents, my older sister and her two daughters.

What Michael provided for me last Sunday was priceless. My father is 88 and my mother 80. The time I spend with them is precious. He gave me the gifts of the table and his time in the kitchen because he knew they would make me happy. That’s all our men want for us, to make us happy. Too bad many of us don’t let them know how, or appreciate them after they do.

Better communication, more satisfaction and happiness from men is available from the Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women workshop. The workshop provides you with simple information, tested and proven by thousands of women, that will help get you what you what you need from men. This information will help you effectively communicate to men what would make you happy.

What does this say about men’s behavior? In the Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women workshop we discuss the polar opposite relationship women and men have concerning information about themselves.

As women, we reveal… constantly. We can’t help it because it’s an instinctive behavior. Instinct forces us to reveal details about ourselves because the more someone gets to know us the more they will grow to like us. To a cavewoman, having others like you just might determine whether or not you survived.

Men, on the other hand, conceal details about themselves. By protecting personal information like strengths, weaknesses, alliances and preferences, a man feels he is protecting himself from attack. Again, this is an instinctive behavior built into our DNA.

In Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women, we go into far more detail about why he’s not opening up to you, or why he doesn’t seem interested in your each and every word. After we explain the conflicting forces at work, we teach our participants how to get what they need from the men in their lives. We teach women just what to do to have men, any man really, dig deep down inside and reveal his innermost self. We also teach you how to grab his listening, so he does remember what you need to tell him.

Graduates of Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women leave the workshop with the possibility for new future with all the men in their lives. Women’s revealing and men’s concealing is only one of the twenty topics we cover during the weekend. The workshop is full of incredible information and provides proven tools and techniques that have worked for thousands of women.

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.

In the Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women workshop we explain why, to a single-focused man like me, almost every outside stimulus occurs as an interruption. Anything that diverts our attention away from the task at hand is potentially very costly in terms of lost time and productivity. Men don’t easily transition from A to B and then back to A. In contrast, multitasking women easily shuttle from one task to another; interruption being a natural part of their lives.

To understand the dynamic, you have examine the two components of the transaction: the question and the answer.

Because men generally get to the point quickly and because we’re focused on getting only what need for the task at hand, questions are pointed and direct. “Jay, can you put that XYZ spreadsheet on the server.” “Burt, can you make a meeting at ABC Company’s offices on Thursday?” Bing, bang, boom, it’s over in seconds. There’s no “getting related” before asking for what we need. There’s no back-story about why we need it. There’s no preface for the question.

If the responding man’s answer is in the affirmative, it may come as a grunt, a hand wave, or a head nod. Occasionally we’ll even use language to answer “yes.” Simple and direct. If our response is negative, it may take a few more words, but we’re also direct. For men, “No” just means no. We’re not wondering “What did he mean by that?” We don’t take the “No” personally. We’re not concerned that saying “No” to a male colleague is going to strain our relationship.

The entire transaction takes mere seconds, beginning to end. We’re in, we’re out, and we’re done. It’s not gracious. It may not be “civilized.” But it’s efficient, and that’s what counts.

Can you see that when there’s a woman in front of the man it’s a totally different scenario? The question takes longer, usually a lot longer. Even an affirmative response needs to be delivered a bit more graciously. Because we’re sensitive to your feelings - yes, believe it or not we are - negative responses demand even more consideration and time. All of which throws us off the track we were on. It could take us fifteen minutes to get back to where we were when you walked through the door.

For men who are less single-focused and more capable of multitasking, the effects of interruption will be minimized. However, most of my gender cringes inwardly at every interruption because we suffer its effects. Wish it weren’t so, but it is. I hope this provides some insight into, yet another, puzzling behavior of men.

Many women notice how men appear somewhat “limited,” only being able to do one thing at a time. In contrast, women are multi-tasking maniacs, doing all kinds of tasks at once. In Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women we explain the differences in the design of men and women, and how differences in design show up as differences in our behavior. This is actually a good thing, and learning why affords our graduates with a lot of freedom and less stress.

Anyway, a man who is doing that one thing at a time gets frustrated when something stands in the way of him finishing what it is he’s doing. I know, a woman would suggest he do something else in the meantime, but men aren’t built that way. His frustration is often expressed as impatience, and it causes the women around him to become anxious.

The actual mechanism is way more complicated than I can go into here, but we spend a lot of time on it in the workshop. Once they see how the entire process works, participants learn how to use what they know to get they need from men, without causing upset for themselves or for the men in their lives.

Consider the men in your life, when they’ve been impatient, and how it affected you. Perhaps knowing that men are actually intended to behave differently from women will help prevent some of the tension you’d be feeling in similar, future situations.