Women would understand men better if they knew these things...

What do women need to understand about men in order to understand them better? I got a question the other day on Instagram from a woman who basically asked, what do I need to know about men that maybe I just don't understand? You know, what do I need to know about what it's like to be a man in order to better understand the man that I'm with or the men that I work with? And I thought this was a very interesting question. And so we're going to dive into five simple things that I think would help almost every woman understand a man's lived experience in a much deeper way. And these are five things that I wrote about. I would love to hear your thoughts and add to them. So if you're listening to this on the podcast on Spotify or itunes, first off, make sure you subscribe, but also DM me and let me know what you think. And if you're watching this on YouTube, comment below, also subscribe. So let's dive straight into it. I think the first piece that, that as I was thinking about, you know, the differences between being a man and being a woman and what it's like to live in a male experience, the first thing that came to mind was remove from your life. If you're a woman, imagine removing from your life your closest friends and network, the people that you talk about, your hopes and your dreams to, your fears, stuff about your body, your emotional life, what's happening in your relationship, you know how your sex life is going, you know how things are going with work or your family or your, you know, your other friends. Because the reality is that the average man is quite isolated. The average man is not necessarily lonely per se. But, you know, recently there were some stats that came out that something like 1 in 5 men within North America can't identify a close friend. I actually think the stat was 15%. Apologies. 15% of men in North America can't identify a best or close friend. And the reality is that the rest of the rest of the male population can only identify one, maybe two close friends. Whereas, you know, in the 60s and the 70s and before that, men on average had six or seven close friends. And. And so we can see that more and more and more what it's like to be a man in modern society is to be removed from very close connection. And the interesting thing is, even when you have a lot of close friends or some close friends as a man, for a lot of men.

You can't. They're not talking about the real depth of their life. They're not talking about the real depth of challenge showing up in their marriage. They're not talking about maybe the sexual struggles that are happening in the relationship. They're not talking about, you know, the grief that they experienced after their father passed. They're not talking about these really hard hitting things that are showing up for them personally. And for most women, that's very foreign because for a lot of women, and it's not every single woman, but for a lot of women, they have a small group or a large group of women that they talk about absolutely everything with. They talk about their sex life, their finances, their body, their mind, how they're feeling, stuff with their parents and their family. All of it's on the table. So that's, number one, remove from your life, your closest friends and network. Number two is if you want to better understand what it's like to be a man, sever your connection to your deep sense of internal guidance or intuition. For the majority of men in our modern culture, what has happened is that rationality and logic have been over indexed. They have been platformed far above any kind of instinct, any kind of intuition, any type of gut intelligence. And Einstein had a great quote that sort of emphasized this where he said, the rational mind is a faithful servant and the intuitive mind is a sacred gift. But we have created a culture that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. And you know, here's an example of a man who had incredible intuition and used his imagination, used his intuition, used his instinct to create concepts that radically changed physics and science as we know it. And then he used his rational mind and logic afterwards to sort of back up what his intuition had come up with. But for most men, we are taught to be logical, we are taught to be calculated, we are taught to be rational. We are taught to think through our problems endlessly. And so what happens for a lot of men, a lot of men that I've worked with over the years and talked to over the years, is that we can get caught over rationalizing our problems. And so we start to face emotional issues in our life. We start to face issues where we're trying to find direction, we're trying to find a deeper sense of purpose. You know, we're trying to figure out whether we want to be in this relationship or not. And we're limited to the data and the information that our rational mind can compute and calculate and crunch at any given time, and mostly severed and disconnected from a deeper type of intuitional intelligence or gut level intelligence. So if you're a woman out there, imagine cutting yourself off from that deeper sense of intelligence. Next, number three is link your value, link your sense of self worth to external standards of productivity, right? So this is the third one. If you really want to understand what it's like to be a man, link your value to external standards of productivity or always be facing certain ideas of your worth and your value being linked to how much you can do and how well you can do it. So for a lot of men, what has happened? And again, I'm not saying that these things are great things or bad things, I'm not talking about them morally, that's not in the conversation here. I'm just talking about if you really want to understand what it's like to be a man, you want to better understand the men in your life. These are some of the ways you can do it. So imagine linking your whole, whole sense of value, your whole sense of self worth onto what you do and how well you can do it, how much you can produce, how much you can build, how much you can accomplish, how much you can do and then how well you can do those things. Because in our culture, post industrial age, a lot of a man's value and a lot of a man's worth was inextricably linked to how much can you do, how much can you earn, how much can you build so that you can provide that for your family, right? So you can build up this sort of empire. So if you want to understand men, imagine tying your whole sense of self worth to your job, to how much you can earn, how much you can provide. And this kind of constant comparison that emerges in comparing yourself to the men and the people that are around you, how much are you earning, how much are you doing in comparison to them? You know, and so what I think is interesting is that social media has made it very easy for men to go online and see examples of other guys that are doing more than them and have the perception that they have a higher sense of value. So that's number three. Number four is imagine experiencing one tenth of the validation that you get on a regular basis. So imagine getting 1/10 of, of the validation that you get from society that you get from friends, that you get from peers, that you get from your family, that you get from your work environment. So the reason why I say this is because for the majority of men, they are working and living largely thankless lives. And this isn't a boo hoo, it's not a woe is men. I'm just giving you insight that A lot of men live very thankless lives and will then go to the ends of the earth for individuals that give them some praise and some validation. This is why so many nice guys, what are they seeking in relationships? What are nice guys actually wanting from women? They want praise, they want validation. Why? Because it is so effing scarce in their life that it becomes something that they are deeply craving. And so I'll give you a couple examples, right? 90, 96 of electricians, they are men. 84.3% of truck drivers, they are men. 84.4% of people who are in the military, they are men. 95.5% of sewage disposal and sanitary services men, right? Garbage truck drivers, guys that are getting into the sewers, making sure that, you know, when you flush your toilet, it's taken care of and goes out into the city. All of these jobs. And by the way, those are all stats from the Labor Bureau, right? 95% of oil workers are men. Factory workers, predominantly men. So all of these jobs that allow the foundation of society to operate, allow you to have electricity to your home, allow you to have WI fi in your home, allow, you know, your toilet to flush properly, allow you to have, you know, just sort of the basic necessities of life and existence, those jobs are predominantly men. And for the majority of those men, they aren't getting thanked, right? They're not getting a lot of praise and validation. The trucker that is sacrificing a lot to spend, you know, hours, weeks, days, months on the road, making sure that your Amazon goods are being, you know, shipped from a warehouse to your front door, they're not getting praised and complimented very often, right? The guys that are doing the sewage work and driving the garbage trucks, they're not hearing the like. Thank you so much. I appreciate everything that you do. They're largely living a thankless existence where their services and what they're doing is largely unthanked. And this is an experience for a lot of men I've actually talked to. I mean, Listen, I've done 700 podcasts. I've talked to countless men from around the world. I've worked with tens of thousands of men over the last decade. And this is a very common experience that so many men are starved for validation. And what happens is that a lot of these men inadvertently, at some point in their life, will either shut down and say, I don't need thanks. I don't need praise. I'm going to cut myself off from needing that. And it creates this kind of emotional disconnection. From the people in their life because they've had to shut down part of themselves to not expect praise and validation for working and providing and protecting and, you know, doing these jobs. Or they start to act in maladaptive ways to get that praise and validation, right? Maybe it's through prostitutes, maybe it's through porn, maybe it's through, you know, being the sort of nice guy and constantly seeking validation from whatever it is. But they'll start to act out. So that's a big piece of the equation. That's number four. So imagine getting way less validation, way less praise, way less acknowledgement than you normally would. Lastly, and this is a very interesting one, imagine that you are condemned, praised, and expected to have complete control over your sense of dominance. Okay? So imagine that you are expected to be okay with being condemned, praised, and have complete control over your sense of dominance. So a man's relationship to dominance is very interesting, right? I did a poll on Instagram where, you know, 2,500 men, 2,500 women went through it, and what we found was that more women want men to be dominant in the bedroom. Men than men want to be dominant in the bedroom. There's also this notion out in society that a dominant man is a dangerous man. If you are. If you display any kind of dominance, if you display that you are more assertive as a man, that's constituted as dominant. If you're very direct in communication, if you're very assertive in terms of what you'll tolerate and what you won't tolerate, that is seen as dominant. And if you are dominant as a man, that is bad, that's wrong, that's unhealthy, that's toxic masculinity. That's a. It's a whole bunch of things. Generally speaking, if a woman displays those traits, it's more socially acceptable in today's modern era. But if a man displays those traits, he's toxic, he's dangerous, he's unhealthy, he's a whole bunch of things. So imagine that if you were to be assertive and direct and speak your. Your needs, your wants, your desires, what's okay, what's not okay, that you are expected to have absolute, complete control over your sense of dominance, right? So you'll get praised if you are dominant in a situation that calls for it, right? You're out in public, you know, somebody, a woman or a child is getting attacked, and you have some type of display where you step in, you protect that woman or that child, you display the dominance in that moment you protect them physically from harm, you'll get praised for that. But if you are in a situation within a work environment where you're being assertive and you're saying, I disagree, I don't think this is the right direction for us to go, and you're being very direct and you're being very calculated, and you're coming across as more dominant within that board meeting, you're likely to get.

Criticized for embodying that more dominant space. Now, there are, you know, exemptions to that rule for the most part. But when it comes to things like relationships, when it comes to things like colleges, when it comes to think, things like social environments, men are expected to have complete and utter control over their sense of when they are being dominant, when it's okay for them to use it, when it's okay for them to display it, and when not to. And the challenge with this, the really big challenge, is that depending on the political environment and the political leanings, it's a very different spectrum. And depending on the individual that you talk to, it's a very different spectrum. And so to be a man in relationship with his own sense of dominance, his own assertiveness, is to walk out into the world and speak to 100 people and have 100 different people tell you 100 different things of how you should relate to your own sense of dominance, how you should relate to your own sense of assertiveness. Because everybody has a different opinion, everybody has a different expectation. And if you are too dominant for some, they're going to try and cancel you. If you're not dominant for enough for others, they're going to. They're going to, you know, discard you. And so a man's relationship to his own sense of dominance is something that can really make or break him within society, within social settings, in relationships, in work environments. And the expectation on you as a man is that you have complete control in any given moment, under any given situation, that you know exactly how much sense of assertiveness or dominance to display, to tap into, and when not to in any given situation. So those are five sort of principles that I think that if, you know, if women put themselves into their. A man's shoes and imagined experiencing those things, that would give them a much deeper context of what it is like to be a man. Now, I'm curious to get your thoughts, so chime in. If you're watching this on YouTube, comment below, let me know what you would add to this. If you're a woman watching this, let me know what you thought of this video. How did this hit home for you? Feel free to DM me on Instagram. And as always, don't forget to man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it or would be interested in commenting on it. So until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.