5 Actions a Woman Needs to See to Trust You to Lead Her (From A Man’s POV)

One of the things that’s damaging relationships today, is that it seems to appear women no longer want to be led by a man. I say “seems to appear” because as much as the independent movement and their actions show that they don’t want to be led, deep down under that independent shell, no woman WANTS to be independent.

This epidemic was not created by women nor is it just an act of insubordination. This is a product of men’s actions that have caused our women to lose trust in us. So in this blog I am going to give you 5 things you need to do to get a woman to trust you enough to allow you to lead her.

1. Have a Goal.

We have this idea that a woman is supposed to follow us, even if we’re going nowhere and that is the biggest reason men can’t get women to follow their lead. I mean, if you tell your woman that you want her to follow your lead and she responds, “No problem. Wherever you go, I’ll go. So, where are we going?” and you don’t have an answer, do you really think she’s supposed to follow you? Let’s say she doesn’t even ask where, she just stands and looks at you waiting for you to move but you have no idea where you’re going, you’ll both be standing in a room looking at each other for the rest of your lives.

To knock out your biggest obstacle, the first thing you have to do, at minimum, is to have a thought out goal. It will be best to have a goal and a plan but a good woman will see your goal and help you plan for it. I’m not talking about some goal that you throw out there and no part of your life is leaning in that direction; I’m talking about a goal that you took time to think through. You may or may not have all the steps as to how to attain it but you spend time educating yourself to come closer to obtaining those steps.

Now when in or beginning a relationship you have to convey this vision and more importantly, show her how she fits in it. Give her something she can think about during the day. Give her an image of how your lives will look together in 15 years, give her an image of herself that she can work towards. If you show her the man that you’re going to be, she’ll see the woman that she needs to be to fit into that vision. If you don’t do this, then she will attempt to be the man in her vision for how she wants her life to look as opposed to following your vision. That will be avoided if you have a goal that you have explained to her.

2. Communicate

Having a goal is great but how will it help your relationship if she doesn’t know about it? As boys, we are taught that bottling everything up makes us a man. We can’t show emotion and we definitely can’t cry. This error in how most of us were raised has caused us to be men that don’t express anything. This leads to our women being in the dark about everything that is going on in our minds.

Imagine this: Let’s say you bought a new home, you spent time painting, arranging the furniture and getting the house ready to move in. You bring your lady to the house for the first time and you walk in and go straight up the steps to the bedroom expecting her to follow but the house is pitch black. Since you know the house, you can navigate through it in the dark but as much as she wants to follow you, she can’t because she can’t see.

In like fashion, a woman is completely unable to follow you without being communicated to. The same way saying take a left or right or go straight will help her follow you in the dark, letting her know about every decision that needs to be made will help her follow you in life. Notice I said “Decision that needs to be made.” She does not need to find out what’s going on after it’s already happening; if you want her to trust your leading, you will have to let her know EVERYTHING that has the potential to affect your lives. You communicating what you anticipate coming your way and her seeing how you formulate your decisions will help her to not need to know every little detail in the future.

If you want her to trust your decision making, show her how you make decisions!!

3. Take Initiative

This has to permeate every area of the relationship. You have to present yourself as a man that actually follows through to get things done. Any lack in taking initiative will place her in a position where she has to take it. The first place this starts is with dates. How can you expect her to follow you in life, if you can’t show her that you can come up with an idea for a date? A woman will rather do something she doesn’t particularly like but can tell that you put thought into than to continually hear “Where do you want to go?”

This is where we lose trust in the beginning of our relationships and we lose it more and more every time we concede the decision making to the woman. This isn’t limited to dates. Choose what schools your children go to. Choose what type of foods will be in your home. Choose the color you paint the house. Whenever there is a decision to be made, be a man and make an educated decision. Do not at any cost resort to saying “Whatever you like.” Now I am not saying make any random decision for the sake of making a decision but that you take the time to figure out what the best one is and help her to understand why you made the choice that you did.

This does not mean you don’t include her in making any decisions but that you show her you WILL make decisions. If you can’t show that you can make a menial decision, that shows you can’t make important decisions. How can you tell a woman you made a decision to move the family to another state if you can’t choose what color your bedroom should be? If you want your woman to follow your leading, you must show her that you have the capacity (making educated decisions) and the drive to be the one that decides what’s best for the family. If you don’t, she’ll have no choice but to make YOUR decisions for YOU!!

4. Keep Your Word

When an individual is following something, whether another person, an idea or any way of life; the number one thing that is looked for is trust. Once someone or something is deemed trustworthy then people will have no problem following it. How does something or someone build trust? By doing what they say they’re going to do. When we buy name brand products we’re not just paying for the product; we’re paying for the trustworthiness of the name. We know that certain brands have a history of doing what they advertise to do. Because of the trust we have in them, we don’t mind spending extra money to have the peace of mind that what we bought is going to do what we need it to do.

It is imperative that we build this same type of trust with our women. It is a very sad reality we live in when lying and Man has become synonymous. We have done so many sheisty things to our women over the years that even a man that has his life together encounters a problem as far as leading because there is no trust in us men as a whole. So to begin building that trust back up, we have to prove ourselves trustworthy. I know some man somewhere is reading right now thinking “I don’t have to prove myself.” YES YOU DO!!

We have to understand that someone who is considering building a future with us is not solely looking at our actions but the principles behind them. You ever wonder why a woman is getting on your nerves over what you think is something small? That’s because she sees that how you view this little situation will be so much worse if you have the same mindset in a bigger instance. If every Wednesday she gets off at 4:30 and you’re supposed to pick her up, unless something tragic happened, there is no excuse for you to be fifteen plus minutes late. You knew all week that you had to be there at that time and for whatever reason you didn’t properly prepare to do what you agreed to do. No, waiting fifteen minutes isn’t a big deal; the big deal is you didn’t do what you said you would.

These are the types of things that cause our women to second guess our leadership abilities. If you forget to pick her up, you might forget to pay the electric bill and now the family is sitting in the dark. So for us to build the trust, we need to have to start following through on EVERYTHING that we consent to doing. Every little task is important to assuring your character as dependable. When you say yes to do something, you have to make sure that you get it done. If for some reason you can’t, going back to the communication piece let her know ahead of time. Don’t let her find out on the backend when she asks you about it, expecting it to already be done.

A good woman won’t continue to question you if you have proven yourself trustworthy time and time again. When you say something, she will count it as done. It is our duty as Men to take the stress off of our women but as long as they have to check behind us like children, we will have strains in our relationship roles because they have added stress on them. If you want her to follow then make sure your saying it is as good as it being done. From now on, your word and accomplished should be synonymous.

5. Consistency 

The first four actions we’ve covered don’t mean anything if they’re not done on a consistent basis. You can have a goal some days, take initiative sometimes, communicate on what you feel the need to and get done what you want when you want but if you don’t do these things AT ALL times, you will not get your woman to follow your lead. Outside of the spontaneity of dates and trips, your woman should know you like clockwork.  She should not have to guess how you are going to be from day to day or how you’re going to make decisions; she should be able to hear about an occurrence and know how you would respond to it because that’s the way you always respond.

One of our biggest problems is we’re not consistent with ourselves. Our ideals are shaped by whatever is currently popular or acceptable. We have to pull away from what we see and have a core foundation of who we are, what we believe and what we stand for. Once we have our core then all of our decision making will be based on these three things, so that no matter what situation we come across, we will handle them from the same morals.

We should know that we are: a Man that is in a relationship, who believes that he should be monogamous and doesn’t stand for infidelity.  These core values will consistently keep us from cheating. In like manner, your belief system should provoke you to be the same Man every day. This will give your character stability. Once your character is proven to be stable then your leadership can be believed to be stable. The questions of how or why you do things will be gone because she has a history of seeing the way you always operate. If you put forth the effort to create a steady baseline for her to go back to before she questions your leadership, which will help prevent her from questioning your leadership.

Now this is not an exhaustive list of getting your woman to trust you enough to follow your leading but it is a great start to building that relationship. This blog is not a guarantee to make your woman follow you because you followed it step by step. The same way we have issues that we need to deal with, some women have issues that they need to deal with and the truth of the matter is, their issues usually start with us. What this blog provides is a list of actions, which we can control, to better facilitate the proper order of a relationship. These are the things that we normally get wrong which prevents us from effectively leading our families. If you can get these 5 actions down then you are on the right path to creating a relationship where your woman can trust you enough to follow your lead.

By Mitchell Chance