Oct 4, 2022
I want to talk about a topic this week and offer you some opportunity to do some belief work in your own life. So, you know that I teach about the BFA cycle, so the belief, feel, act cycle, and one of the most. Eye opening and liberating parts of my journey of navigating my future.
When I found out that I was not going to be a mom, the thing that I just always assumed my whole life, I would be. So, I've been doing a lot of work around beliefs and what beliefs we have, what beliefs we carry about ourselves in our lives that might not be helping us anymore. So I'd like to first clarify that I'm not somebody that feels like I need to question every part of my life and my being and pull myself apart in nitpick, but if something doesn't, get me feeling the way that I want to feel or have the outcomes that I'm working to achieve with myself and with my goals and with my future, then that's when I sort of get curious about my beliefs around certain things.
I'm going to present this to you today and I'd love for you to consider where this might be coming up for you. So I think back to when I was dreaming about my future. Maybe I was in middle school, maybe I was in high school, sitting on my best friend's bed and we're sitting there probably with a trapper keeper and going through magazines with Duran Duran and who knows what other.
Probably Michael Jackson. And for me it was Ricky Martin in Minuto. I used to love that. And you would dream about how you saw your future. You'd marry a guy who had brown hair who was athletic, move to the suburbs and have the house with the white picket fence.
Probably two or three kids, max, hopefully a boy, hopefully a girl. And we create this vision for our future. And then we continue on with our future. High school, college, maybe grad school, whatever it is, career. boyfriends, relationships, friendships, all these things that have changed throughout our life.
And we get to this point in our life, and we've never given ourselves the opportunity to consider whether that life for ourselves that we dreamed of so long ago is still relevant in what we want in our life today. When I started considering that this was an opportunity to go through and ask myself some pointed questions about how I've compared who I am today to where I thought I would be, or what I thought I would have, and all these things that I created with a mind that was so unknowing and so uneducated to the future that would lie ahead of me. And so I've lived these magnificent years in challenging years and formative years. Never asking myself with what knowledge I have today or with what talent or skill or heartache or change in trajectory, Have I experienced that I want to start considering what is it that I truly want in my life? Is it that version of me that I dreamed of when I was 14 or 16 or 18 depending on, and never really went back and evaluated who I was then. And knowing what I know now is that the future that I really, truly. This work has been so liberating for me to decide that I could believe differently about what I want knowing what I know now and knowing that I ended up being somebody who didn't have children. Do I want to live in the belief that my life will never feel fulfilling because I don't have those children? Or decide that I can create a baseline now with that knowledge and decide with somebody, who knows so much more information about where your life ended up. I decided to believe that I could create new dreams for myself or new goals for myself, or new opinions of who I become or who I've been all these years, with the knowledge that I have now about who I am. For me, it was very liberating to decide that I don't always have to compare myself with a past version that I created with this past version of myself.
If you could just let yourself say I am Childless, or I am child free, or I'm not going to have children; however, it is you want to define your circumstance. That's up to you as well. I mean, that's another liberating thing to think about. You don't have to use somebody else's definition of where you are in your journey right now, or how you want to consider yourself as a woman. You have the ability to decide your definition for yourself. And to me, that's another thing that feels like these shackles come off of you, that you don't have to be qualifying yourself as somebody through a definition that somebody else has created for you. But knowing that you have the opportunity to start to dream again. And that's where I have found that considering the beliefs that maybe you've just gathered, because that was the way people always thought of women that didn't have children, or you always knew somebody in your past or maybe some old lady at church who never had kids and you always felt sorry for her.
because she didn't have anywhere to go on the holidays, so because of that, you've assumed that that is going to be you. And you believe that that's how women that don't have children end up in their older years. The ability that you have to say that doesn't have to be my belief of where I'm going to end up and start to decide.
Maybe you're going to form great friendships with new people. Maybe you're going to have a circle of women that don't have children, and you ladies and your futures together happen to create this new tradition or this new support system, or this new nucleus with this chosen family of yours and letting yourself and giving yourself that liberty.
To just start to consider what is it that you're believing about your story now? What are the things that don't feel good to you? Start to decide, what are my beliefs about that thing?
Are those beliefs that I need to believe anymore? Because the great thing is there is nobody who can tell you what you do and don't believe that is totally up to you and totally.
Open for you to decide. Now, maybe you have beliefs that align differently than somebody and deciding is that a problem? Do you want to veer from a belief system that you grew up having? No one has to tell you that you do or you don't. But just knowing that it's an opportunity is so liberating. We just think that there's one way of believe our whole life, and maybe we have this life that is so different than we ever dreamed it would be, and we can believe that it might be okay. It might feel good. We don't have to believe a hundred percent right now that we love our life because we're not a mom. But if we're just open to the possibility that we can believe something new about our future and who we are and the journey that we committed to that didn't turn out the way that we thought it would, maybe we can make peace with that and believe that we might just learn to love our life and we might just feel in control of our future and be excited about who we can become and consider new possibilities.
This is some beautiful work. I'd love for you to do some paper thinking, if you're noticing yourself feeling disappointed, when you think about where you are today or where you're at in a certain place in your life that you feel stuck or you consistently are trying to come to terms with, just start to ask yourself, what is it that I'm believing?
What is this story? That I believe. And why does it make me feel a way that I don't want to feel anymore? And let me know what you think. This is the type of stuff that we work on in Thrive after infertility, which it's starting this week.
The thing about Thrive, and again, like thinking about beliefs and being able to change them, this is my first round of doing it and I just had this belief of what it was going to turn out to be. And it has changed into something so different than I had envisioned. It's changed just in this. Organic way, I feel like it's turned into something that's going to be so perfect, even though it's so different than the vision I had for my first mastermind. And I can't wait for it to start. I can't wait for the growth that's going to come out of it. I can't wait for the ability the women that I'm working with.
Have to create change for themselves and to truly create a roadmap to thrive again.