Welcome to IVF This, episode 111- The Gap vs the Gain

Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends. I hope you are all doing so, so well. 

I was talking with a potential client the other day, she had booked a mini session and we were going through the couple of questions that I ask at the beginning, just to get some background and she was talking about how she was going into her second full cycle, like a full retrieval cycle. Her first cycle did not produce any embryos, like she went through retrieval and then the ones that fertilized, arrested at some point in the process. So this was their second attempt for embryos. But what struck me, and what spurred my desire to talk about this concept on the podcast is that she said something, that I’ve heard many times over, from clients, from colleagues, from friends that have gone through IVF and that’s “I did all of this for nothing.”

When I was talking to my client, the thing that we discussed is what I’m about to share with you. 

Now, before I kick it off, I want to make it VERY clear that judging our experience by the outcome is HUMAN. It’s normal. It’s pretty much default. If you do this, there is nothing wrong with you. But there is another option. Like everything that I offer to you, this mindset is an option. There will be times that you may find it beneficial and there are time you might tell me to screw off in your head- both are completely fine. But the purpose of this episode is to show you there is another way to view these situations in which you feel like you come out of the experience, the stimulation part of it, the egg retrieval, the embryo development stage, if you’re doing genetic testing, and certainly if the transfer is unsuccessful- there is an option. 

So, let me introduce the concept of Gap vs Gain by the person who created it, Dan Sullivan. His book, cleverly titled The Gap vs the Gain: The high achievers guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success. So to help explain his concept, I want you to remember the episode I did on the negativity bias- it’s a good one to relisten to because this concept, what I’m going to talk about today builds on the understanding that we have a preexisting negativity bas that lives in our brain, rent -free. 

So, the two things that I want to teach you in this podcast, I want to teach you what gap versus gain actually is And I want to make sure that you have a way to implement this information into your life so that you start recognizing when you’re measuring yourself in an un-useful way and can intentionally set yourself up to create something that actually has you measuring your life in such a way that compounds happiness. That’s what I want for you. So, gap versus gain and then a way to implement that idea. 

So, I think before we get into the specifics of how to measure, we can pretty much all agree that measurement is valuable. It’s how we know that we’ve made progress. 

When I worked in hospital case management and in corporate healthcare, we used to throw around this phrase regularly, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Now, if you’re in the corporate world, you might have vomited a bit in your mouth, as I nearly did just saying it because the corporate world borders on a little obsessed with key performance indicators and scorecards and dashboards and measuring because we know that we couldn’t manage what we didn’t measure. 

And so, I’m absolutely not encouraging any of us to obsess over measurement. But I do believe that it’s important that we set ourselves up for success with the way that we think about the way that we measure our progress in our lives; certainly within the context of infertility and treatments. 

Because what I have found is that most of us are doing it all wrong. Well, let me rephrase because “wrong” is an absolute term, so I think most of us do it in a way that doesn’t serve us. 

We’re really setting ourselves up to feel discouraged and defeated. And we’re pursuing happiness and we’re measuring ourselves against the wrong things. We’re measuring ourselves against the gap instead of the gain. 

So, what does that mean, gap versus gain? Why do we care? Unhappiness comes from measuring ourselves against where we are relative to where we want to go. In other words, unhappiness comes from measuring ourselves against where we are to where we want to go. 

Happiness, on the other hand, is what we create when we measure the progress we’ve made based on where we’ve come from. Are you following? Okay, I hear people say all the time, “I just don’t feel like I’m living up to my potential.” Or, “I just don’t think my child is living up to his or her potential.” Have you said this? I know I have. Hell, I married my first husband based on what I perceived to be his potential. 

I think a lot of us think this. But what’s really true – and it’s good to know – is that none of us will ever live up to our potential. This doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t fall in love with our lives again. One of my favorite coaches, Krista St. Germain put it to me like this, “It’s just to say that our potential always exists in the future. And we live in the present. It’s impossible to measure ourselves against our potential.” Because what is our potential even? 

Our potential is just an idea. It’s not a real thing. It’s a concept. Our potential just describes our idea of what’s possible. But it’s not a fixed point. It’s not a tangible thing that exists. So, until we die, none of us are ever living up to our potential. And it doesn’t mean we’re not loving life and doing amazing things. It just means that it’s an impossible thing to measure ourselves against because it’s a concept. 

Let me off you this example, and surprisingly it’s a sports metaphor, which isn’t a big strength of mine. But in the states we just wrapped up the men’s and, most importantly, the women’s college basketball finals. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a massive bracket-style, single-elimination tournament. I’m not a huge fan of basketball, most sports besides soccer really, but my husband loves basketball and the women’s tournament got HUGE press coverage because there are some incredible players out there right now. The final game was between The University of Iowa that has Caitlin Clark, and extraordinary player, and Louisiana State University (LSU) which has such a deep bench it’s unreal- phenomenal team. But the reason this ties into what we’re talking about is because the winner was determined based on who scored the most points, in this case LSU. It was not determined or measured based on the combined total of each team’s hypothetical potential- it wouldn’t make any sense if championships were played like that. Both teams started at zero and at the end of the game, we take a retrospective look and measure the team based on the points they gained, you with me? That’s what it means to focus on the gain. THAT’S how we want to, or can alternatively, measure a goal. 

Krista, the coach I mentioned before, she offered this example: think of this like running. If we were measuring ourselves by our potential and we were running, that would be like trying to measure ourselves based on how close we are to the horizon. We would run and run and run and run and the horizon would still be equally far away because the horizon isn’t a fixed point. 

The horizon is an idea. It’s not actually somewhere that physically exists. We couldn’t measure our progress based on how close we were to the edge of the horizon. We would never even try because we know better. 

So, what I want you to take away from this is that none of us ever live up to our potential, and that’s okay. Because our potential is just an idea, not a fixed place. But when we measure ourselves based on where we are and what we could potentially do, or how we feel and what we could potentially feel in the future, we are focused on the gap. 

The gap is the distance between where we are and our idea of where we could be. The gap is based on where we are relative to potential. On the other hand, the gain is what we find when we look backward and measure how far we’ve come based on where we started. Can you see how much more useful this is in terms of measuring? 

So, again, unhappiness comes from measuring ourselves against an ideal, because we’ll never hit it because the ideal will just keep changing, just like the horizon. And happiness is what we get when we measure the progress we’ve made based on where we’ve come from. 

So the client that I talked about at the top of the episode, what we discussed was how 1) she’s categorized as “unknown infertility,” and 2) how her dr explained to her in her WTF call, that’s what referred to when something goes wrong in the cycle or something and you talk to your consultant and you’re like “what the eff just happened?” anyway, her dr explained, that watching her during the stim cycle, the dr learned a lot about how her body reacted to the meds, and the the dr now has some suspicions of silent endo and so they’re gonna do a bit of a workup before launching into cycle #2. 

It's VERY easy to say, “all of that was for nothing” (the gap) because we measure the outcome. And since the outcome was incongruent with her expectations, understandably so, that thought left her feeling defeated. But it wasn’t all for nothing. Her and her medical team learned A LOT about her body and how her body responded to medications and how there might be something else going on that is contributing to this difficulty; so it wasn’t for nothing. Identifying the “gain” is all about being willing to be wrong about measuring only the outcome. 

And this is true, and no less valid, than if you had two embryos develop when you had maybe expected four- whatever the numbers might be. That is still a disappointment because you’re measuring by the gap, the ideal, your expectation, instead of the gain.  Another aspect that she gained was the for the first time in her life, she was going to therapy and seeking out additional supports. For the first time, she realized she needed help and ask sought it out and utilized it. Do you know how monumental that step is for a lot of people? And this isn’t like some humble brag for me, she actually declined to work with me, since she had just stared seeing her therapist and wanted to see how that would go and I one million percent support her in that. But that, alone, recognizing you need support, finding support, and utilizing support- three very distinct gains. 

Since we have been socialized to believe that our “gains” should be big, and flashy, and tangible- these might not seem like gains to some or even most of us. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t. She learned a lot about herself during that first cycle. She, like most of us, had never given herself injections. She learned she could do that. She learned how to manage the ridiculous logistics of IVF and her work, and her relationships. Those are gains- no two ways about it. Now, remembering that negativity bias I mentioned earlier, a lot of us will not allow ourselves to acknowledge those things as gains; so to do that, we have to be very intentional about how we think about those things. We have to deliberately steer our brains to look for those things- it won’t necessarily be an automatic thing. 

I think for many of us we think about how we checked off al the boxes- at least this was a lot of my thought process. I did all of the things society told me I ‘should do.” Right, I went to college, a few times, I married someone I loved and we built a life, he finished school, we bought a house- we check all the damn boxes. So I was DEEEEPLY unhappy because I was measuring my progress with items left on my “to do” list rather than the items I had checked off on my to-do list. I was perpetually caught up in the “ok, what’s next?” mentality, never allowing myself the opportunity to relish in all that I had created- and please know that I did not develop this skill overnight. In all actuality I don’t think this really sank in and resonated for me until after we had our failed transfer and I had to pretty much rethink how I thought my life would look like. 

But that’s the point, if you’re measuring your progress based on the items left on your to-do list, then you’re in the gap. Because your to-do list is growing all the time. 

It never stops growing. It’s virtually infinite. You finish one thing, and then poof, two more. So, measuring our progress against infinity makes no sense. Of course it’s a recipe for frustration. And there really is no such thing as to-do list zero, unless you’re checking out of life, and I don’t think you are or you wouldn’t be listening to this podcast, right? So, why do we do that to ourselves? Why do we not stop and look backwards and say, “Good job, you. Good job. Look what you did today You did all these things.” And give ourselves credit for what we did instead of what’s left to be done, because we’ll just keep adding to the list. 

When we measure our current life against the one that we have in our head about when we have a baby, or another baby, we’re measuring it against the ideal. We think that our lives can ONLY get better by that little miracle addition- that’s an ideal. 

If you’ve been on this journey long enough you start to measure the person you were before to the person you are now; which isn’t a fair comparison. Because it leaves out the fact that between then and now, major upheavals, heartaches, disappointment, and possibly traumas have occurred along the way. 

So, we want to measure the progress that we’ve made since we started on this journey, however minuscule you might think the gain is. That puts us back in the gain. Measure how you feel now against how you want to feel in the future, and you’re going to be in the gap. And that’s not where you want to be. That’s a recipe for misery. 

If you’re really scratching your head as to what ANY possible gain could be- hear me when I say this- You could have thrown in the towel and you could have given up (on treatment, which there’s nothing wrong with that, on relationships, on your career, on life). You didn’t. You kept putting and you keep putting one foot in front of the other. Here you are. You’re listening to this podcast. That’s something. So, I encourage you to own and take credit for it. Build on it. Give yourself credit for not giving up. Give yourself credit for being the resilient woman that you are. Measure yourself based on how far you’ve come relative to where you were, not how far you could still potentially go. 

Okay, so that’s gap versus gain. When we’re focused on what’s in front of us, what’s between where we are and the ideal of where we could potentially go, that’s a recipe for disaster. We want to focus on where we are and look backward from where we came. We want to set a goal and then measure ourselves based on where we came from. 

You owe it to yourself to celebrate who you are, where you are, and how far you have come- EVEN, and most especially when you are waiting on that baby. 

I’ve said this a thousand times, but a baby doesn’t solve for these things. That’s not a baby’s job. That future baby’s job is to eat, sleep, poop, and grow. Not to fix whatever you perceive to be wrong with you- because there is nothing wrong with you. You’ve likely never been taught these things. 

Let yourself celebrate those “little” wins along the way. Allow yourself to revel in the fact that you are going through some really hard stuff- and you’re doing it with far more grace, composure, and compassion than you might ever allow yourself to own. But I will. I will always be the one to hold that belief- I’ll do that for each and every one of you. 

Ok, that is what I have for you today. Have a wonderful week and I will talk to you soon.