Last Updated on March 21, 2018
The video above has been viewed nearly three million times on YouTube in just a few short weeks. I think the reason is that everyone can see themselves in it.
The gals can totally get the need to try to convince their man to just empathize, just say “I’m so sorry about this constant ache” – and get him to realize that listening to her feelings actually makes her feel better.
The guys, on the other hand, can totally feel this man’s pain – thinking, You’re saying you have this achy pressure in your head, but if you’d just let me address the problem you wouldn’t have the achy pressure anymore! Duh!
What I personally found most amusing was that even though I’ve spent a decade talking to thousands of men to understand how they think, this video for the first time actually helped me see just how ridiculous men must find our insistence on listening, when (in their minds) there is an obvious problem that, if fixed, would “solve” the feeling!
So of course that made me wonder – and I’m throwing this out there for all of you creative types to give me some input – how would a woman producer get across in video form the female version of this? What would help a guy see that it really isn’t the problem that matters, but how we feel about the problem? This video is like one giant video-sized illustration of the “listening” chapter in For Men Only, but it is presenting it more from the male point of view.
Because from the female point of view, in the research for that book we found that 95 percent of women said fixing the problem wouldn’t actually fix the problem! Because the real problem was all the jumbled feelings the woman needed to talk through, get off her chest, and feel like were being understood. In fact, the women usually said they could fix the problem on their own if they had to, but they couldn’t feel listened to on their own. So this made me wonder … how would one get that across in similarly clever video form?
Any ideas?
Shaunti Feldhahn is a best selling author and nationally renowned speaker, best known for her break out book For Women Only that led to a series of other related titles. She has been featured on The Today Show, Fox News, K-Love radio and many other media outlets. Shaunti is the mother of two school age children she places as a priority while remaining a professional woman who seeks to equip others to find balance in their lives. Her much needed Life Ready Woman series was developed to help women understand their role in today’s “do-it-all” world. Shaunti has been a mom for 13 years, she and Jeff have been married for 18 years.
I HATE this video… if I had to guess it was done by a man…. to make it look like women are just a bundle of emotions rather than dealing with the heart of the issue.
YES we need things done! It is ludicrous to assume we don’t “want things done” but just want to “talk about it”… and the fact that women want to buy into that and submissively “agree” that it’s an emotional thing rather than a male accountability thing is enraging.