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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.  

 

Nov 10, 2022

Have you noticed that since finding out that you weren't gonna be a mom, you felt as though your life is at a standstill. Is life just going on around you and you were sort of in this surf of life, so you might be moving forward, but not necessarily by your own projection?

Do you feel like you were are moving forward on this wave in your career, but you didn't really have sort of a grounding on where you were and where you see yourself in the future.

I work a lot with women that are successful, career driven women in the corporate world, just total bad asses and fertility happens and then you feel like you are stuck in your professional career with no direction. It's not a great place to be long term if you are somebody who is used to success, used to thriving, used to being somebody that always had forward movement in their life. 

 

This is something that we commonly deal with in our community here. I thought today it would be really interesting to offer you some opportunities to see whether this is where you are in your career. So I was working with my, one of my students last week. She has had a successful career and where she's been, she's never really thought about where she wanted to go in her.

 

She thought about one day maybe becoming a mom and leaving work altogether. Like she just never thought she would be at a point where she was working this far into her or into her life, being in her career, because she thought she was going to, you know, be a stay-at-home mom. So now that she knows that's not going to happen, there's this feeling of pressure.

 

Is this what I want to do?

What else do I want to be?

Being somebody who's always identified with this position in your job. The type of women that I work with are historically very successful, career driven, active in the community, doers just. Your typical thriving female who, until infertility, until the fertility journey came about, never really felt like there was not a clear roadmap on where their life was going, that there was just always this forward movement.

 

And then infertility happens. Your fertility journey ends. You don't have a child, and a lot of the women in my community are not used to that stagnation that you feel. When you find out that life is just gonna be so different than you imagined it would. My student that I was working on never thought that at this point in her life she would be working.

 

So she never really thought about a career path beyond what she was doing. She had desires to maybe work part-time, enjoy having some dabbling in. Professional world, but really be a stay at home mom. So she never really thought much about what she wanted to do in her future because, you know, just assumed she was gonna be a mom.

 

So if you relate to that, and you're at this point now where you're done with your fertility journey, you know you're living. The future without children, and you really desire to create that plan for yourself, but it's just not clear to you. I'm gonna share with you some of the tools that we've been using and to help you sort of figure that out.

 

And first of all, recognizing what it is in your career that you like. What are the things you enjoy doing? What are the things that you're good at? What are some things that maybe you have been interested that other people do, but. Just never imagined yourself there, so you did not dig in deeper. So getting curious, what are you good at?

 

What are your strengths? Maybe creating a brand statement for yourself, which is a practice my students do. We work on this together, creating your brand statement. In order to create that brand statement, you have to get really clear. A, a very robust list of questions and thought work that we do to get to that point, to really be clear on who you are as this new version of you as, as this future that is just so your oyster.

 

What is it that you aspire to be or aspire to? And that might freak you out because that seems like a really big lift after coming off this infertility journey. But the greatest thing about it is that this can evolve. Just the practice of going through and challenging your mind. To get creative and to let the barriers down and to let the automatic know, I couldn't do that, or no, I might not be good at that.

 

Learning how to turn that off and get curious when you have those thoughts come up that I might not be good at that or. What if I don't excel? What if I'm not successful? All these things that might be coming up for you instead of shutting them down and just saying, Okay, I'm just gonna stay where I'm at in my warm, cozy, comfy place.

 

But if you take an opportunity to evaluate, why am I thinking that when that comes up, be like, What about this new trajectory? Do I feel like I wouldn't be good at? Is it maybe one thing that you might not be good at versus 10 things that you know you are good at, but you're letting this one potential doubt in your mind hold you back from going forward.

 

So what we work on is understanding what it is that you're thinking and then asking yourself, is that really true? That is some of the best work that we've been working on as far as creating a. Potential for where you want to go in your future, in your workplace, in a talent, and something that you aspire to try.

 

And it's been really magical work, so I hope that's of help to you. I know it can feel overwhelming. I know it could feel very daunting to start to even consider what your possibilities are, but when you work with someone like me, I will help you navigate what that roadmap looks like in your future and when you get this trajectory of starting to dream again, you will feel such a lightness and such a ability to truly breathe again and start to thrive again. I hope this was helpful. I also wanted to offer you the fact that I know the holidays are coming up. If you're like me, you are wondering how the heck we've already skipped Thanksgiving, and here we are with Christmas decorations everywhere we look, and I know what a triggering time the holidays can be.

 

You might be. Not looking forward to a holiday. Get together because you know, you've gotta walk into that family gathering and be asked again. When are you gonna have kids? Any baby news. You know? These questions that I know are so. Innocently asked, but really get to the core of the sadness and the emptiness and the loneliness that many of us feel around the holiday season.

 

So because of that, I have put together a guide to meaningful holidays. I would love to share it with you, and you might find great value in preparing yourself for some of the things that are giving you some anxiousness around the holidays. I'm also offering a free call on Saturday, November the 19th. If you're interested in joining that, we are gonna go through the guide together.

 

I'm gonna help you figure out how to fill it out so that you can best utilize it and really, Some time in there to do some one-on-one coaching. If there's something that's really been bothering you, some anxiousness or some dread that you're feeling around the holidays, bring it to the call. Let's talk about it.