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The "So Now What?" Podcast


I am a Fertility Survivor.  The kind you enter into treatments hoping you will never be... childless.  After several rounds of IUI and IVF, at some of the leading Fertility Centers, I was told I was no longer a candidate for fertility treatment.  It left me asking myself...

So now what?

For the years that followed, I tried to put myself back together and tell myself I would be OK, but I wasn't.  I was shattered - I felt alone and failed by the whole process and especially, my body.  I yearned for others that felt the pain I felt and someone that could help me navigate a life without a child. 

I didn't find it, so I decide to create it.  

Fast forward to today. I am still childless, but my beliefs about my life have changed.  I decided that I can create meaning and purpose in my life even though I am not a mother.  I've learned to love myself and the body I felt failed me as a woman.

If you've been on this journey, hop on and join me as we create something we were not offered.  Let's create a sisterhood for the bravest women I know.  We brush ourselves off and don't let terms like: Failed, Unexplained, Miscarriage, Not-viable or Advanced Maternal Age define us anymore.  

 

Dec 21, 2021

Download your FREE version of the "Guide to Meaningful Holidays".

https://stitchcoaching.com/holiday-workbook/

Hello, beautiful people. I hope everyone is enjoying this glorious time of year. I know for some, this year can be a little bit more spiky than most, with all the things going on in the world and health concerns and families not coming together as they normally would. And add that on top of infertility and not having children to share your holidays with or your holiday traditions with it can be a little bit confusing, and hard to find happiness and joy and all the things that we want to feel around the holidays, but just can't seem to navigate through. Which brings me to this week's episode where we're talking about creating meaningful holidays. And those of you who listen to the podcast regularly know that I created a guide to meaningful holidays. And I've been working a lot with my private clients on how they're filling out the guide. And each week, we take a little bit of time to discuss the progress, they're seeing maybe some of the sticking points that are coming up for them, some of the thoughts that they're having some of the journal prompts, and frankly, so many of the breakthroughs that they've made by taking time to just take note of what's coming up for them as they're approaching the holiday season.  In today's episode, we go through and look at some of the things that are available to you, as you come to a close on this year, and start thinking about what's available to you next year and what you're making the holiday season mean about the meaning that you have in your life.

So, let's talk all about the guide to meaningful holidays.  I'm certainly thrilled with the feedback I've gotten about the guide and how it's helped my clients and even some of my colleagues and friends that have used it think differently about their holiday gatherings this year. And just to give you some background, I created the guide because I wanted to share an opportunity for others to transform their thoughts around the holidays. For me, someone who went through six years in my infertility path, combined with fertility treatments, multiple rounds of IUI, multiple rounds of IVF. And sprinkled in there some days of just sitting in waiting and trying to decide what the next decision was going to be for us in the creation of a family. So I know the sadness, and I understand the self doubt the holidays can present. And frankly, I was sick of feeling anxious, anticipating questions that might be waiting for me about when I was going to have kids and I thought I just had to toughen up in order to make it through another holiday gathering. And really, I was just over sobbing my way through Christmas morning. Because my husband and I would wake up and just like other every other morning, look at each other and just be the two of us. And we had no child to share in the magic of Christmas. When I started working with a life coach, and discovered that I could confidently show up as me, Lana, a woman in her 40s who has no children and lives fully and believes that my life has meaning even without children. Because as you know, the thoughts we think, create the feelings that we have about being childless. And I've learned that changing my life started with choosing thoughts that led me to think differently and feel differently about my life without children.

I think started working with a life coach for myself. And frankly, I just never even knew the power that I had to choose thoughts or to create different feelings in my life, I just assumed that life comes at you. And it just as something that you deal with each problem, or each controversy or each roadblock that comes at you. And I never really realized that I could think differently about my life without children in my life with infertility. As I became more aware of the power that I had to choose those thoughts and create the feelings, I started to see amazing results in my life. And many of you who listened regularly know my story. But I was feeling so down about my fertility journey, and learning that I could create new thoughts and feelings really transformed me. And I went from thinking I was a letdown of a woman, because I failed IVF cycles and judging myself for feeling the sadness that I felt and the feelings of envy and jealousy around friends with kids or people that I passed in the store that were pregnant. And I'm now somebody who can lead an abundant life and feel proud of myself and achieve my dreams, even if I'm not a mom. And the progress I've seen in my life is proof that anyone can do it. And I'm certainly no unicorn. I've said this before, I just never realized no one ever presented me an opportunity to think differently about a journey in my life that caused me so much heartbreak. And so we fast forward to now and I'm a discovery coach, I'm certified through the Life Coach School. Becoming certified means that I can teach this freedom to you on this podcast, I can teach it to my clients in my private practice, I can teach it to my friends that I meet. And it's really amazing that the ability, we have to learn this skill of thinking differently about our lives, allowed me to stop feeling dread. And stop trying not to think about what the next 50 years of my life would be. And what I had to look forward to because I didn't have children. So if you look at the guide, and I failed to mention that the guide is available to you to download for free on stitchcoaching.com. I put a link to it in the show notes.

When you go through the guide, you'll see that I started a process of changing my thoughts by simply observing them. So that's where the journaling comes in - paper thinking as I call it.  Paper thinking gave me such great insight into how I was judging myself about the sadness I felt around the holidays. I offered you seven days of journal prompts, just to sort of get a baseline for where you are. And the guide is awesome in the fact that you can continue to use those journal prompts, over and over. So it doesn't mean that you just do it for the seven days that are offered to you. You can change them up a little bit, maybe change some words in there. And instead of thinking about gearing, your journal prompts towards the holidays, maybe it's about New Years, maybe it's about a birthday, maybe it's about a milestone date, but really allowing yourself to freely notice and write down your thoughts is so helpful. I know when I first was introduced to journaling, I promised myself that I would at least try it for a few minutes a day. It was something I was not used to it was something that frankly, I thought taking the time to write my thoughts down on paper was sort of a waste of my time that I had much more important things to do with my day and money to make and writing my thoughts down on paper and reflecting about how I was feeling just didn't seem to be an impactful or task oriented or goal oriented way of living my life because I was used to telling myself that my feelings were solved oft that I, if I felt sadness, if I felt weakness, if I felt envy if I felt any of these things that come along with living a life with infertility, that those feelings weren't useful to me. And that's why I created an opportunity for you to really get curious in the journal prompts. When you do your paper thinking, start to let things flow. And don’t judge yourself for the words that come up on paper. No telling yourself you're weak, no telling yourself you'll never get through this or that this exercise isn't helpful, because it's not edging you forward. Because, honestly, this is such a transformational exercise. And it allowed me for the first time to really get curious about the thoughts I was having around the holidays. And from there, I knew that if I wanted to consider new thoughts, I had to feel worthy to speak them. So that's where I went through and put in a handful of and affirmations. And if you haven't used affirmations before, they're basically just sentence starters, I am, I believe, I will, and just a few words that you can finish the rest of the sentence with. But really, if you start to speak and think of your life in a way that gives you power in it, or gives you intention in it, or frankly, allows you to affirm the thoughts that you want to have and the feelings you want to have. The affirmations really are an abundant resource that allow you to create feelings of worth of creating new traditions, maybe celebrating holidays in a different way exploring ideas about yourself, and your happiness in relation to the holidays. If you haven't used affirmations before, I also recommend finding a few that you write down and post somewhere maybe on a post, it may be on a reminder on your phone that'll pop up at random times throughout the day. And just really remind you when you chose that thought how you wanted to feel or when you chose that sentence, what it was you were aiming for, because we just sometimes need to be reminded of it. And then finally, I was wanting to really create new thought patterns in my own life around the holidays. So that's where I went through and created the new thoughts to think section. So I challenged myself with a series of questions that allowed me to just dive deeper into why I wanted to create a new mindset for myself around the holidays. And I'm certainly not saying that this growth is going to happen overnight. And my progress, certainly in my own life didn't come without commitment, or discomfort. Because feeling and allowing myself to feel and recognize some of the feelings that are just buried away back in our mind and back in our hearts. And really allowing myself to think them on paper can be super uncomfortable. If it's not something that you've done before. The feedback I've gotten about this guide is that it allows one to experience the holidays in such a different way in a more controlled emotional way, in a more meaningful way. And I want you to see that that's available to you too. I created a live guided training, I have that available on my Facebook page. If you aren't, please follow stitch coaching on Facebook and I created a live training so on top of using this podcast as your resource to filling out the guide you can also go through and get a guided training where I've gone through and done all this for you over video.

 

So if you do the work with this guide, and allow yourself the freedom of just flowing and immersing yourself into what you want to think about yourself, how you want to feel because so many of us are just right This day, I'm just not going to go that if you don't go to family holidays, if you don't go to the holiday parties, if you lock yourself up with a box of Kleenex, sure, that's fine. And absolutely no judgment, there's never ever going to be judgment for me if you need to feel those emotions. But if it's to a point where you're avoiding feeling emotions, by staying home and avoiding the gatherings, because you're not wanting to process your emotions, you're never going to get to the other side of this. So my goal with the guide is to offer you an opportunity to just get curious about how you could show up, how you could go, if you don't want to go right now and find a way to make the holiday celebration or the holiday gathering seem a little less caustic this year. And I always like to offer, I don't know that I've mentioned it necessarily here on the podcast. But I offer discovery calls. And now through the end of the year, I'm offering them free of charge. And when I started this journey, no one truly knew what I was going through. I thought I was alone in feeling the way I did about my inability to have children, even after multiple rounds of IVF. And I put this facade on that portrayed me as a woman who had it all I had a loving husband, I had a beautiful home. I have a six figure career. But as long as I was thinking the way I was about living my life without children, it would never be enough. And I'd always be thinking I'm not enough. And I see now, how I yearned for a community that knew that too. Or somebody who I could share with that wouldn't judge me. And my coaching practice is dedicated to teaching women that they can think differently. And every client that I work with starts with doing a discovery call. And it's certainly the launching point for the future you can create. So I'll also invite you to go to stitch coaching.com. And you can click on my calendar, if you'd like to schedule a discovery call and just spend some time together and just do a one on one. And even decide whether you think coaching is right for you. There's absolutely no strings attached. I'm not going to ask you for a credit card. I'm not going to ask you to sign a contract. I just want you to see that living a life with infertility doesn't have to be empty, because I'm your proof. So I hope that helped you today. I hope that everyone has a beautiful rest of the week. Stay safe,  and remember, it's never too late to discover your meaning.