Welcome to IVF This, episode 112- Being your own champion

Hello, hello, hello, my beautiful friends. I hope you’re all doing so, so well today. 

Today, we’re gonna talk about how to be your own champion- something that I think is undervalued while also being overlooked. Apparently, this concept is quite the contortionist. 

So I’m gonna start by telling you how I had to do that today. Trigger warning. I am going to be talking a bit about my kids- not the whole episode but to give you context as to why I think being you own champion is so important. So if that’s gonna be tough for you- no harm, no foul, no shade, no shame. We’ve got 111 other episodes that you can check out until you’re ready to hear this one. 

So, my two oldest have been out of school all weekend, for the Easter holiday. On Friday we took them to the movies and to run a few errands and just to have some fun. But I had planned for them to go to this day camp thing on Monday so that I could get some writing done and they could get some fun time in at the trampoline park. So it was all beautifully planned.

Well, I woke up this morning in a rush. Do you ever have those days? Where you wake up pretty much on time but you still feel like you’re in a rush? That was me. Full stop. Everything was this nervous, frenetic energy. I was snapping at everyone and super frustrated at the slightest perceived inconvenience. It was like I just had this running list of things that “had” to get accomplished, and everything was due RIGHT NOW! And everything was taking much longer than I had anticipated it taking. 

But when I finally got to dropping off the boys at this day camp, we walked in and it was like a ghost town and my stomach dropped. I found someone that worked there and they were so kind but they let me know that the only day camp for the kids had been the Friday before, the one where we took them to the movies. I had signed up for THAT class, but I had been absolutely certain it was supposed to be for Monday, today. 

So my kiddos were so disappointed, and I was completely embarrassed. By the time we had made it out of the building I was already in tears. My son’s were very gentle with me and they could see how upset I was. Now, they were still disappointed, rightfully so, but I was pretty upset. Upset with myself, still running on all of that adrenaline and cortisol that I started my day with. And oh, let me tell you about ALLL of the thoughts that were coursing through my head. 

“How could you do this?”

“What’s wrong with you?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t notice the dates were wrong.”

And just a bunch of crap like that. I’m sure many of you can relate. 

I could feel the hot flush of my cheeks and my heart pounding and I knew the emotion I was experiencing was embarrassment. Now, It’s really important to remember and to know that no one was trying to make me feel bad about any of this. 

The woman at the trampoline park had been so gentle and said, “you’re doing the best you can.” 

Both of my son’s were disappointed but still telling me, “we are ok, momma. We can have fun at home.” 

I texted my husband to tell him and kind of preempted it with, “I need to you not really react to this and I need you to know that I’m really upset with myself.” Just to let him know, hey, I’m taking this harder than you can imagine so please be gentle with me. Which he was, which is no surprise. But I cried all the way home. 

So I dropped the boys off at home, and I started heading to my kickboxing class- which had been the plan beforehand. My husband works from home so he was going to hang out with them while I worked out and did the rest of the things on my to-do list. 

And again, I cried all the way to my kickboxing class. Reciting all of the unhelpful, mean, shame-provoking thoughts. When I got to my gym, I sat in my car. The tears were easing but the conversation in my head was on full blast. Do you ever have that feeling like you just want to crawl out of your skin? That was me. Sitting in this gym parking lot. 

So this is where self-coaching is so powerful. 

I knew that the feelings I was experiencing this morning- that urgency and rush; were going to stay with me. The embarrassment and disappointment had eased that urgency a bit but it was still there. I knew I was experiencing embarrassment, and that was ok. I wanted to be embarrassed by my actions. Not like I was super glad that things happened the way that they did, but I didn’t want to feel happy about how things transpired. And that’s important to remember when we talk about the more uncomfortable emotions. I wasn’t trying to be like sunshine and daisies, and “everything is awesome.” It was most assuredly not awesome that I had made that mistake, but it also wasn’t the Greek tragedy that I was making it mean in my brain. 

Ordinarily, I would have pulled out my journal and jotted some things down; paper thinking. But I didn’t bring my journal with me. So I did the next best thing I could do in that moment, and I paused. I paused and slowed my breathing. And I just opened myself up to the urgency, the embarrassment- all of the feelings. You might be asking yourself, Emily, Who wants to open up to a tight chest? Who wants to open up to stress? But when I did that – and this is why I teach it – it helped me let that flow through me. It helped me process all of those emotions and then reconsider things from a different perspective. It helped me kind of get my nervous system in a place where I could access the wisdom of my higher brain. Not the part of my brain that was lobbing all sorts of accusations and disgust- the part of my brain that is more gentle and responsive. I placed my hand on my chest, which is something I talk a lot about on this podcast, it's a super fast way to ground myself while I’m deep breathing. And I started to remind myself, right now I’m feeling a lot of things, but being a bully to myself is optional. I don’t have to make this part harder on myself by being an ahole. I don’t HAVE to beat myself up over this. I can be embarrassed or stressed or whatever, and not make it mean anything about my worth or me, as a person. 

And that’s when I sat down and I wrote this podcast episode and all of what I’m about to tell you just kind of poured out of me. And it’s really all related, right? It’s why we aren’t being our own champions. And I know this firsthand because I’ve done it so many times myself. And how to do it. So, that’s what I want to teach you today. And I think it’s going to be incredibly useful for you. 

Here’s the problem, as I see it. We aren’t being our own champions. We are judging ourselves at every turn. We are expecting the impossible from ourselves. I kind of see it like, we’re acting like circus ringmasters, trying to control everything and everyone, trying to make everyone happy, put on the show, solve all the problems, do all the things, get to all the drs appts, learn as much as we can about the IVF process, take all the medications, all the supplements, exercise enough but not too much, eat all the right foods, meet everyone’s needs, manage the finances, handle the house, keep everyone happy, prove to ourselves and others how strong we are and that we’ve got it all under control. 

We’re expecting the impossible. We’re expecting perfection. And we’ve adopted the standards of consumerism as our own, right? We have to look the part. We have to have all the things. We have to be happy all the time. And we don’t because we can’t, because it isn’t possible and because that’s not where happiness comes from. 

But we hold ourselves to this standard that doesn’t make any sense and isn’t possible and we make ourselves miserable and we put so much pressure on ourselves, it’s literally killing us. I’m not exaggerating. Our nervous systems are exhausted. And I’m not even talking about how out of whack things already are just because of the stress and grief of infertility or treatments. 

Our adrenal fatigue, off the charts. We’re anxious, we’re stressed, we’re sad. And that’s why I want to do this episode, because it doesn’t have to be this way. But most of us, we’re either dwelling in the past or we’re worried about the future and we’re wishing things hadn’t happened the way that they did or we’re wishing that we could get a do-over. 

Or we’re looking forward and we’re feeling anxious about what’s coming our way. And we’re allowing ourselves to believe the terrible stories that our brains are making up about how things are going to unfold instead of choosing on purpose what we want to believe and what we want to create and we’re feeling very helpless and powerless. And we’re doing it to ourselves and we don’t know we’re doing it. 

And we don’t know how to feel our feelings, and so we’re distracting ourselves from what we feel and we’re using food and alcohol and work and projects and Netflix and shopping and cellphones and social media. 

And we’re judging. We are judging so much. We’re judging how we feel. We’re telling ourselves we should be feeling differently. We’re judging our grief. We’re telling ourselves we should be farther along or we should be doing it differently. We’re judging ourselves as people, as wives, as workers, as friends, as whatever our roles are. 

We’re using whatever is going on in our friends lives, the friends that have children or are pregnant, as weapons against us, as evidence that we aren’t good enough, that they have what we want, or that we’re terrible friends for even thinking that. We’re comparing ourselves to other people. We’re using their success as weapons against ourselves. We’re judging how other people show up and wishing that they were different. 

And this judgment is keeping us so frustrated and so resentful and so stuck. And most of us are not making ourselves and our mental health a priority. We aren’t figuring out how to take care of ourselves from a place of self-love. We’re not choosing to make time to invest in what will ultimately allow us to create the life we want. We aren’t being our own champions. 

And listen, I say this with love. I say this as a woman who has done this to herself and still has to constantly remind herself to be her own champion, right? We teach what we most need to learn. I continue to try and learn this for myself and so therefore I will teach it to you. 

So, this doesn’t come from a high preachy place. This doesn’t come from any sort of judgment, as though I am better than you. I am struggling with this as much as anyone on the planet. I mean, clearly if a missed appointment for a children’s day camp can take me down for a bit. 

So, what do we do? How do we become our own champion? I think there are essentially three steps. Just three. I’m not saying they’re easy, but they’re simple to understand. 

So, first, we actually have to make a decision that we will be our own champion. We have to decide that for ourselves. We have to decide that we will figure out how to do it, that we won’t give up until we create a different relationship with ourselves. 

We have to decide now to treat ourselves with loving kindness, no matter what. And not only do we have to decide now, but we have to keep choosing it over and over every day for the rest of our lives. We have to keep reminding ourselves that we are our own advocate, our own ally, our own cheerleader, our own champion. 

There is no one more qualified. No one else can do this job. But we have to choose to do it. So, are you with me? I want you to choose to do it now. Even if you think you’ve already chosen it, choose it again. Reaffirm to yourself that you choose to be your own champion, no matter what. That’s step number one. 

We have to choose to make a decision that we are our own champion, we will be our own champion. Step number two is we have to get clear on how we want to measure our success. We have to decide that perfect is not the goal. It is not possible. It is not the goal. Last weeks’ episode, called The Gap vs the Gain talks about this. How we measure success in a way that doesn’t serve us. 

Here’s my suggestion, based on the agreement I made to myself – we decide that the goal is to be an imperfect messy human whose heart is in the right place, that we wake up every day and that we do the best we can with what we know and that that is a measure of our success, that we figure out how to love ourselves, including our flaws, how to love our imperfect human selves. 

Look friends, I am MESSY. I am an ADHD, anxiety-fueled chaos goblin, that runs on too much caffeine and have sticky notes, google tasks list, a people around me gently nudging me to complete my tasks. 

And, I’m an incredibly empathetic and insightful person. I can get to the root of why someone is hurting, pretty quickly. I can make just about anyone laugh, and I believe I help people see how beautiful, unique, and loved they are. 

I don’t know that if I was less of a chaos goblin, I would be able to do those other things. And I like that I can do those other things. I love it, actually. I love being of service. I love filling people up with love, and laughter, and realism, and hope. So I’m both things. I’m all things. I’m messy. I’m imperfect. Yet, they all sort of fit together. 

The idea is to  stop holding ourselves back from feeling good because of our own self-criticism and we allow our feelings to run their course and we stop judging ourselves for having them and we stop telling ourselves they shouldn’t be there and we focus on what we can control. Which is just our thoughts and our feelings and our actions. Think, fell, do. That’s how we create the life we truly want- with or without children. We can do this, in the waiting. 

We can’t control the way other people think or feel, even those closest to us, and certainly not our family, friends, or our coworkers or any of the people that have opinions about how we’re running our lives. And we need to stay in our own lane, let other people have their own human experience. 

Because the only thing we can control is our response to how other people choose to be. We can control our response to the things that happen to us. And we’ve got to stop using everybody else’s thoughts and feelings as our measurement. So, let’s get really clear on how we want to measure success because if it’s based on how everybody else is feeling or the past which is over or the future which hasn’t happened yet, we’re going to keep ourselves miserable. And this is not being our own champion. 

So, here’s my measurement. Today, was I an imperfect and messy human who did the best she could with what she knew? And the answer to this question every day is... yes. No matter what kind of day you had, no matter what you thought, what you felt how you did, how you showed up. 

No matter how often your brain or other people tell you that you should have, would have, could have been different or better, the answer to this question, “Was I an imperfect and messy human who did the best she could with what you knew?” the answer is always yes. 

Last step. And this may be the trickiest. This may require the most practice. And this is probably where I spend the most time when I’m helping my clients. We have to notice the judgmental thoughts, release them, and choose new thoughts on purpose. 

Notice the judgmental thoughts, release them, and choose new thoughts on purpose. The thoughts we think are not us. We are not our thoughts. We are the awareness behind our thoughts. We are humans with thoughts. 

We can think about our thoughts. We can notice them. We can turn them into objects. We can see them as things that float into our mind and not be attached to them. I’m quite convinced, these judgmental thoughts, these fear-causing thoughts, these stress-causing thoughts, all of these thoughts are just part of the human experience. 

They will always show up in our human brain. That’s fine. It doesn’t matter. When we are able to detach ourselves from those thoughts because we can notice them and we can see them, “Oh, this is the part where my brain tells me that I should be doing it differently. I see that sentence in my mind, I should be doing it differently. It is a sentence. It is not useful. It is not serving me. Just because it showed up in my brain, doesn’t mean I have to keep thinking it. it doesn’t mean I have to focus my attention there. It doesn’t mean I have to believe it. I can notice it and I can let it go and I can choose a new thought on purpose.” 

I love the idea – and this is another way of saying step three – talk to yourself more than you listen to yourself. That’s the answer. Talk to yourself more than you listen to yourself. Because if all we do is listen to ourselves and we have all of these un-useful thoughts on repeat, all of these judgmental thoughts, all of these perfectionist thoughts, all of these thoughts that keep us from being our own champion, if all we do is listen to those same thoughts that have very well-established pathways in our brain and just keep showing up, guess what we create. 

We create the same stuff we’ve always created. We create the same misery we’ve always created. We keep ourselves repeating the same cycles everywhere. So, we’ve got to notice the judgmental thoughts and see them for what they are; words strung together in the form of sentences with punctuation on repeat in our brain. 

So, let’s go back through it. Three steps. Make a decision that we’ll be our own champion. That’s step one. Step two, get clear on how we want to measure our success. And my suggestion is that the goal is to be an 

imperfect and messy human whose heart is in the right place, who does the best she can with what she knows. 

That’s my suggestion. Because the answer to that question, “Did I do those things?” is always yes, always. And then the third step is that we have to notice the judgmental thoughts as thoughts. We have to release them and we have to choose new thoughts on purpose. We’re going to talk to ourselves more than we listen to ourselves. And that is how we become our own champions. That’s it. 

So, if you relate to any of this, welcome to the human experience. It’s not just you, I swear. I have so many conversations with people all the time who think that whatever it is they’re thinking and feeling is unique to them and that surely other people don’t struggle with these same things. And I just want to tell you that that is not true. 

We’re all humans and we’re all struggling with these same things. And so, if this resonated with you, it’s because you’re a human on the planet. And I hear you. 

So, I hope it was helpful and, as always, especially if you want help with step number three, noticing the thoughts, releasing them, and choosing new thoughts on purpose, I do so much coaching and I have tools and strategies of exactly how to do this in more detail. 

Ok, so this is what I have for you all today. I hope each and every one of you chooses to be your own champion. Each and every one of you is worthy of that. Each and every one of you is worthy of love, and respect, and kindness, and gentleness. 

And that’s what I want for each and every one of you. 

So, have a wonderful week. And I will talk to you soon.