Nov 23, 2021
As we embark on the Thanksgiving holidays, and all the official hoopla that is about to start for the holiday season. many of us and many couples are starting to get anxious and this big pit in their stomachs, because the holidays bring up a huge sense of lacking. So we're going to be rolling into the celebration season and that many have coined to be full of gratitude, magic abundance. And we can be so harsh and judgmental of ourselves. Because we're not feeling festive. And we're not feeling this joyous way that others expect us to be.
But maybe the real thing is that we're not feeling as festive as we expect ourselves to be. So the great news is that all of this is manageable, and it's modifiable. It's just going to take a little bit of awareness on your part.
So speaking of awareness, before we get too far into this, I wanted to make sure that you had an opportunity to go over to stitchcoaching.com, or into my Instagram bio into the linktree and download the “Guide to Meaningful Holidays”, it's live. And for those that have been listening to the podcast, you know, my belief in the power of paper thinking, aka journaling, and the benefit we offer ourselves by pulling our thoughts and our feelings that are circling around in our minds and actually putting them onto paper. And really creating something tangible that we've taken them out of our minds and just sort of dumped them on paper. And this guide offers seven days of prompts to start getting those thoughts out of your mind and on paper. So in anticipation of the season, my private clients have started working on the journal prompts in the free guide. So every day, I'll prompt you with an idea that will get you writing and thinking. And what we're going to do is repeat the daily prompts each week. So we'll take this through the New Year. And it will be an awesome opportunity for you to see the growth in yourself. As you look back on your weeks prior, and the discovery you're going to make about the thoughts and feelings you're having. I actually met with a client last week and we talked about her day one discovery prompt. And the question was, what do I currently think about celebrating the holidays. And when we were working together this weekend, she told me that she has so much dread about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday with her family. Because the family has a tradition where they go around the table and sometime during their dinner and share what they're thankful for. And she said of course I'm grateful for you know, my house family job, you know, the the common things, I guess that are set around the table. But she said that she's feeling the sense of uneasiness because it got her to questioning what it was beyond that, that she has an abundance of and not because she doesn't have gratitude for the house, family, job, all that good stuff, but she really is working on thinking about something deeper, her gratitude, and that when she thinks about what she's grateful for, the one wish she had was to be a mother and that's not working in her favor.
So we got to talking in our session about whether it's possible to be thankful for a life without motherhood. Because we've tried and we've prayed for it. We've gone through medical treatments for it and devoted our mental and financial resources towards a goal that didn't happen. And it seems like there's just not an option to pull ourselves out of this place of emptiness.
So we got to talking about the opportunity to decide how we want to feel about motherhood and whether there's ever an opportunity to feel gratitude.
When you've decided that you're not going to pursue further treatments, or not going to get an egg donor or pursue adoption. And we're oftentimes left with a lot of judgments about ourselves. And there's certainly this grieving period that comes along with it. But as that grief is surrounding you, there's also great freedom and believing that you're not having a child.
And the opportunity to see that that is just a fact and a circumstance that we have in our life. But if we can take that and learn over time to not judge ourselves, in our reproductive abilities, that's where our liberty lies for us to start having gratitude for ourselves beyond motherhood.
Because basically, after our fertility journeys, and we're left with two options, the first is to live a life with a sense of lacking.
And the second is to believe that there are things about you to be grateful for beyond motherhood. And until we purposely decide that we're ready for the latter, you're going to continuously butt up against a lack of gratitude for anything in your life that you accomplish, or anything in your life that you could feel proud of. Because you give all of your power away, and align yourself worth to the outcome of fertility treatments that you endured.
So in today's podcast, I'd like to offer you an opportunity to take just a little bit deeper into yourself, and start to do the work in the meaningful guide. And start to identify qualities about yourself, or things that commonly have come up for you in the past, around holidays. And start to discover what it is that you can have true gratitude for.
So if I have an opportunity, this Thanksgiving to sit around the table, and discuss what I'm grateful for.
I took a lot of time to think about this. And I've decided that I'm grateful for my past, because it brought me my future.
And there's so many of us that live in a past that didn't give us what we wanted. Or maybe it seemed to be the most abundant time in our life. Think back to college, when you're like, Oh, I just wish I could go back to college and, and have the great times I had in the life that I had. But when we live in our past, we don't excel, we don't move forward, we don't create abundance in our future. So coming up with the grateful feeling I have for the past that I've endured, and the obstacles I've overcome, has allowed me to see the greatness that I've been able to take away from that and the belief that I can recreate with my life, and the love that I can find once again, because I know what a strong person I am. And that I have a lot more talent, to offer to be sitting in a sense of emptiness for the rest of my life.
This week, I'd like you to start to think about when's the last time you offered yourself an opportunity to recognize the thoughts and the feelings that you have about yourself.
So imagine an opportunity where you could look at your life from an outsider's perspective. When you have conversations with someone, or people ask questions about you, imagine that any discussion of you and your motherhood or your status of being a mom or off the table? What would you talk about? What are the things that would be of interest to the people that you meet?
Because oftentimes, we get so focused on the thoughts we have about ourselves, that we let that dictate what we believe about ourselves, and the lack of gratitude we have for ourselves.
So many of us have amazing success stories that we don't even give ourselves credit for. The lack of gratitude we have for ourselves is what holds us back to creating a future of abundance.
There's so many of us who are so successful in our workplace. We've landed here deals, we've gotten these amazing promotions. We've broken glass ceilings and environments where women historically didn't succeed. But we forget to be thankful to ourselves for showing us the way to our success. And we've somehow developed this notion that our inability to become mothers is a detour to a life where we feel thankful for who we are as women. I don't know about you, but nowhere in the playbook did someone write a chapter about you being a mother, or the reproductive ability of your ovaries, being a definer of the success story that you are in your life. And so we create this barrier to ourselves and prevent a life that feels enough because we can't give birth to a child. So as we enter this week of Thanksgiving, I invite you to start giving some thought to the greatness within you. What are the things about you that you're grateful for?
Many of us don't even like to give ourselves credit, because somehow we've decided that it's boastful or egotistical to point out what's wonderful about us.
So I will tell you today that you are worth celebrating. There's so much greatness in your life. And there's no need to judge yourself, if it's been a while since you've searched for it. But commend yourself for wanting to get on the other side of this feeling of emptiness. And commend yourself for doing the work and rolling your sleeves up. And for downloading the guide and actually taking time to put pen to paper and do some paper thinking and decide that you are worth an abundant future.
And that not having a child does not have to be a sentence to a life of holidays, year after year that seems empty, and not worth celebrating.
And think about it this way. If you download the guide, and you even start your journal prompt today, by Thanksgiving, you'll have three under your belt.
And you'll have already started to think about some ideas that you have about how you think about celebrating the holidays. And day two, you're going to talk about how you could think about celebrating holidays without children. Day three, you're going to identify what's going to be hard this holiday season. Because when you put all that stuff down on paper, your mind is going to start showing itself to you. And then you're going to start seeing that there's just a lot of jibberish in there that just isn't worth your time and energy.
So I'm just super stoked about this guide. And I really hope that you take the time to download it and put the work in it. And then go through each week. Starting with day one through day seven. When you get to day seven, go back to day one the next week, and you'll see the growth and the development that you will bring forth for yourself.
Also just a reminder that on December 11, we are doing our monthly life after IVF call and we are going to do a deep dive into the guide. So if you have some questions or want to join us on that call, it is a free call. And I hope that you will DM me and I will make sure that I get you the invite to the call. Because there's going to be lots of great stuff, some awesome ladies I know are going to be there, that are part of the community. And I just can't wait for all of you to start working together and meeting each other and bonding because we are an awesome group of women.
So with that, I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving.
Have gratitude for yourself this year. Don't judge yourself if you're feeling empty if you're feeling lonely, and know that you can choose to feel differently. Whenever you're ready. And there's no rush to be ready. You take it at your own pace. This is not a race. But just an opportunity to know that all the power is within you to live a meaningful and abundant life.
And it's never too late to discover your meaning.