Common Mistakes Women Make When Communicating with Men (At Work and In Personal Life)

Common Mistakes Women Make When Communicating with Men

Many women struggle to build relationships with the opposite sex, both in their personal and professional lives. What truly hinders our confidence in male-dominated environments and how can we overcome these challenges? Let’s delve into these issues and explore potential solutions.

Lack of Self-Belief

Often, I encounter beautiful, intelligent, educated, and interesting women who, unfortunately, see themselves in a completely different light. They lack confidence in their knowledge and abilities and harbor many fears. This self-perception is largely influenced by the culture we live in. Constant discussions about achieving success and earning millions by the age of 20, along with the perfect images on social media, negatively impact our self-esteem. Consequently, this affects many aspects of our lives.

People around us believe what we convey to them. If you frequently tell your boss during work meetings that you lack the experience or knowledge for a task, he will eventually believe it and stop assigning you interesting projects. The same applies to personal relationships. By constantly belittling yourself and your qualities when communicating with a man, you will make him believe it. This is why psychologists always advise us to understand ourselves first before trying to understand others.

Discover and love yourself, and never speak negatively about yourself. There will always be someone better than us in certain aspects, but this is no reason to engage in self-flagellation!

The Desire to Completely Merge with a Man

This point pertains specifically to personal relationships. Some women immerse themselves in relationships with a certain fanaticism, literally living for the man and his interests, spending all 24 hours with him, and going everywhere together.

It might seem that such involvement and interest from a woman would appeal to men, but it doesn’t. The lack of personal time that partners can spend apart, pursuing their own activities, only negatively affects relationships. Any mature person would want to see an equally mature partner beside them, someone who has their own outlook on life and, most importantly, is independent. Meet with friends, read, go for a walk alone, or join a gym. Remember that in a relationship, there are two independent and adult individuals with their own interests and leisure activities.

The Belief That Women Know/Can Do Less Than Men

For a very long time, women lived in dependence on men and, without any basis, had far fewer freedoms. Fortunately, this is all in the past, so today we can equally choose how to live, what to learn, where to work, what to wear, etc.

However, in many professional fields, gender discrimination still exists. For example, there are still few women working in IT, analytics, and finance because we are still trapped by stereotypes. Of course, men and women differ in many ways: we have more developed emotional intelligence, while men excel in logic. But these are just general traits that do not exclude the possibility of a woman being an excellent financier or a man being a great teacher.

Therefore, if you are looking for a new job in a “male” field or feel insecure working in a male-dominated team, remind yourself frequently that each of us has strengths and weaknesses. And, by the way, they are not dependent on gender.

The Desire to Please Everyone

You know yourself that it is not only unnecessary but impossible to please everyone. However, our complexes and traumas make us think otherwise. In our attempts to gain attention and recognition, we strive to please, doing something at our own expense just to get approval.

Not only does this often backfire on us, but people around us also do not perceive such behavior positively. At least because it is insincere. In both personal and professional relationships, you will receive much more respect if you are true to yourself. Yes, you will definitely offend someone, and someone else might not like you, but that’s normal. The main thing is that most people will see you as a person with your own opinions and views, and honesty towards yourself and others is the most important thing in building strong relationships with people, especially with men who value straightforwardness and simplicity.

Unwillingness to Listen, Hear, and Seek Compromises

Any relationship, even the warmest and most trusting, can be ruined if there is no communication between people. Conflicts and misunderstandings are an inevitable and natural part of our lives. The main thing is to know how to find a way out of them.

Problems arise when we, often unknowingly, start to silence grievances and our desires, stop hearing the people around us. This is a real avoidance of problems, which, unfortunately, does not help in solving them.

No one can read your mind and understand what you are thinking or what you really want. Moreover, men are not good at picking up hints and subtleties. Therefore, be extremely honest with both your partner and colleagues. Explain what and why you would like to improve, what you dislike about the current situation, etc. Of course, without rudeness and personal attacks: approach the issue analytically. By the way, you should voice not only negative but also positive moments. If your partner did something nice for you, tell him about it. You can praise a colleague who quickly completed a task at a general meeting. For men, such little things are no less important than for women.

For further reading, check out this article on setting goals effectively.