Welcome to IVF This, episode 159, IVF and purpose. 

Hello, hello, hello, my beautiful friends. I hope you are all doing so, so well today. Still mind boggling that we're at episode 159, let alone that next episode will be 160. But thank you very much for joining me For however long you've been on this ride, for however long you will be on this ride, I am just genuinely grateful and appreciative that you gave this podcast a chance and that you continue to give this podcast a chance. And if this is the first time you've ever listened to me or my voice or anything that we're talking about, welcome. And I hope you find something of value to bring to your life or to your IVF experience. And that's what we're here for. Today's gonna be a little bit of an interesting topic. I think I talk about this topic of purpose, this idea of purpose pretty frequently, but I don't think I label it as such. And this came up from a couple of client calls that I've had recently where things are not going so well for a few of my clients. They have not really had the success that they have wanted, that we all wanted, that we've kind of expected. And they're really struggling with this idea of, well, what the hell am I supposed to do, right? Not necessarily walking away from treatment or ending treatment or anything like that. But even just what the hell do I do in the meantime? What does this mean about me and my life and my purpose even in the waiting? And so that's what I wanted to cover today. And like I said, I think I cover a lot of this stuff in more specific ways when I cover different topics. But the idea really is around purpose and waiting well or finding joy in the little things, right? Whatever.

Whatever one of those resonates for you, that's what we're really gonna talk about today. I cover a lot of this stuff and I talk specifically about purpose with a lot of my clients, but I wanted to give you guys the basic understanding of my philosophy to get you kinda headed in the right direction if you're struggling. I just don't want you to have to struggle as much in this area as maybe you are. So, first and foremost, before I tell you about my philosophy on purpose, I want you to offer that purpose, I wanna offer you that purpose has nothing to do with your worth, your worth as a person. I believe that our worth, your worth, my worth is already established. Your worth, our worth, my worth, whatever, non -negotiable. If you believe that, that will help you when you try to stop and, no. If you believe that, that will help you because when you stop trying to earn your worth by way of your purpose, by way of what you do, of what you bring to the world, of how you think about the world, of being of service to other people, and a lot of us are doing this, and I used to do this as well, but what we're really, there's no amount of doing or producing or servitude, that will prove us worthy because we're already worthy. We're 100 % worthy. We just have to decide to believe that we are, right? So I want to encourage you to decide to believe that your worth is inherent. Your worth as a person, your worth as a woman, your worth as a mother or a future mother. It's all there. You were born with it. It is divine. It cannot be taken or added to. It is perfect exactly the way it is. 

So if we can decide that our purpose has nothing to do with our worth and our worth is already established, that makes finding purpose or understanding purpose so much easier. Okay, because most of us have this very heavy or like complicated experience of purpose, right? We stress about it. A lot of times we think it's something that's lacking in our lives or within ourselves, and we don't know what it is, and so we think about it as being a problem, like a problem that we need to figure out or something that we need to find. But what I believe is that purpose is just another way to describe how we choose to spend our time and energy. That's it. It's a way to describe how we choose to spend our time and our energy and how we choose to spend our time and energy can evolve and iterate many times throughout our lives without ever having been wrong about it being our purpose. For instance, I have had a few different careers, right? I was a social worker for many years, then I was in healthcare administration for many years, and I've been a coach for many years.

All of these things, none of them were wrong, but they definitely reflected my choice of energy and passion at the time, right? All of them kind of, I believe, from my journey have kind of built upon themselves, right? Being a social worker led me to be a great healthcare administrator. Both of those have led me to be a fantastic coach. Like, I think everything has served a purpose, but it doesn't mean that being a social worker for as long as I was or even being a social worker in general was wrong just because it is no longer my purpose. Do you see what I'm saying? Like just because where you were 15 years ago is not where you are now doesn't mean that that thing that you were doing, right, photography or working at Hobby Lobby, that was a job that I had for many years through college was working at Hobby Lobby, it doesn't mean that any of those things weren't your purpose.

It just means that over, like, doesn't mean it wasn't your overall purpose. I don't believe that many people have one purpose in their life. I think we're two multifaceted, multi -dimensional, dynamic people to have one purpose in our lives. My husband might be the exception to the rule. Since he was about, I think, 18 or 19, was the first time he took an economics course.

And from that moment on, he knew that he wanted to be an economist. He wanted to inflict or impact change in the world through economics. He's very much the exception, I believe. I think my experience is more of the rule that I've kind of iterated and changed and grown throughout my life. But yeah, I think the more that we can understand that,

Our purpose is going to shift and change throughout our lives and none of it is wrong. It is all in service of our growth and how we choose to spend our time and energy. Now, I want to remind everyone listening to this podcast that if you were socialized as a woman, if you were born a woman and socialized as a woman, much of your purpose has been socialized into you to be a mom.

Right, now that's not to say that it doesn't, it takes away from your desire to be a mother now. That's not what I'm saying at all, but there is an aspect of socialization, culture, that molds the way that we see our purpose and we see our world. And for a lot of us, we've been socialized to want children. And so I think what can happen when social expectations, maybe the timing of your life, and infertility all converge at the same time, it can be incredibly distressful because this is the thing that we've been told our entire lives that we should want and that we now do want. And we're now being told that we can't get it no matter how hard we work. You know, the inputs don't equal the outputs. I say that a lot in this podcast. And so that can be a very almost existential crisis. It can cause a crisis of identity because now if we can't, quote unquote, fulfill our purpose, which I hope you understand. I'm using all of the air quotes possible because I don't believe, I believe that being a mother is a purpose, not necessarily a person's sole purpose. Again, I'm gonna go back to that. We're incredibly dynamic, complex creatures, and I don't think, I think black and white thinking feeds into that. This is my only purpose.

It can be very, very disconcerting. It can be very, very unsettling when this is something that you want to spend your time and energy on, by definition of purpose. And it's not, you cannot get there or you can't get there alone or you're having to use medical interventions. There are a lot of things impeding that, right? So a lot of times what happens is we have this break.

Right, whether you can be called trauma, it can be called just a breach in your expectations, I use that phrasing a lot. That is a very challenging thing to work through, right? So when we have this idea of purpose being this very heavy thing that we're either trying to find or cultivate or understand.

And then we have this added layer of this identity of wanting to become a mother, being socialized to be a mother, and now we're having difficulty with either infertility, recurrent pregnancy loss, infant loss, things like that. I want us to kind of uncouple some of the heaviness from this purpose, right? I want to give you permission to lighten up a little bit about quote unquote purpose and not play so much pressure on yourselves, not to worry that by spending your time and energy on, maybe you're spending your time and energy on not completely focusing on IVF. That's fine. Right, I have clients that tell me, you know, I don't know that I want it bad enough because I think about other things. There's nothing wrong with that, right? There's also nothing wrong with IVF being the thing that you think about and talk about most, right? I think where we talk about it being a quote unquote problem, I'm using a lot of quotes in this episode, I apologize for that, but a thing being a quote unquote problem is when we decide it's a problem, when it starts to really and truly interfere with our occupation, with our work, with our focus, with our mental, emotional, financial well -being, okay? But I want us to give ourselves permission to lighten up a little bit about, purpose and how we can let it evolve and change over time. We can even let it evolve and change while we're pursuing IVF, while we're pursuing having children or more children. I want us to remind ourselves that even if we declare our purpose, it still won't take away from the emotional experience of being human. And let's say you have a purpose of being of service, right? I've talked about that, that I've do believe that one of my purposes in life is to be of service and I enjoy being of service. But that doesn't mean that I don't experience very real emotional upheaval or emotional challenges as it relates to being of service, right? I don't necessarily talk about the most light and airy things in my coaching practice. I certainly didn't talk about light and airy things when I was working with hospice or trauma patients, things like that.

That's okay, just because something is your purpose. And I think this is really gonna resonate once you do have children as well. I think that a lot of times we can get caught in this trap that once we have our children, that that is gonna somehow alleviate some of the pressure we feel on our purpose because then we place that emphasis and that focus and that purpose on these children. But I gotta tell you, it's not gonna change.

We want you to have that human experience of all of those emotions, that complex dynamic human experience. And that is also gonna be true in motherhood, right? You can believe and feel that your children are your purpose and there are gonna be times that you just want to absolutely throttle them. I am not condoning violence. I actually don't believe in like spanking or physical punishment in any sort of way. But that doesn't mean you won't maybe have the feeling to. I certainly have the feeling sometimes. You know, there is okay, it is okay to have that really human emotional experience alongside your purpose. I think our human brain is always looking for an easy button, right? Like an escape hatch. It keeps looking for a way out of life being hard for life to be easy, right? I talk about this in a previous podcast called The Motivational Triad. Our brain only wants three things. It wants to only wants three things, wants to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and to be as efficient as possible, right? So our brain is constantly on the lookout for an escape hatch, for a way to avoid pain, to seek pleasure, and to be as efficient as possible. But that isn't necessarily the way life works, just because that's the way our brain is wired. So it's not like you're going to be able to find those escape hatches in every situation, and in fact, when you can't find that easy button or that escape hatch.

Usually that's when our brain starts to make all of the BS mess that you probably are experiencing, right? We also have to give up this idea that the grass is gonna be greener if we get to a certain point, right? That life is gonna be better or more fuller or richer once we have children, once we get pregnant. Or once we believe for the sake of this podcast what our purpose is that somehow life will be better, life will be different.

That's what it is. Life is just gonna be different. It won't necessarily be better. It's just gonna change, right? I believe in 50 -50, right? Life is 50 % beauty and 50 % tragedy, 50 % love and 50 % heartache. And your experience of IVF is very similar. Your experience of, hopefully, for all of you that want it, I want your heart's desire the experience of motherhood is gonna be 50 -50. 50 % of the time, it's gonna be the most amazing thing you've ever experienced, and 50 % of the time, it's gonna be the worst thing you've ever experienced. And both of those things are okay. Both of those things can coexist at the same time because they often do in everyday life. We just don't think about it in those terms. And in fact, more often than not, we spend time telling ourselves that we should feel differently than how we feel.

Right, it should feel better. It shouldn't feel better. It should feel exactly the way it feels right now. And even if that's a wonderful feeling and even if that's a really difficult feeling. So I think when I think about how I think about purpose, I think a lot of it has come from a lot of the teachers that I've had throughout my life. I can't remember exactly where.

I kind of pulled this from maybe Brooke Castillo from the Life Coach School. I've had many influences, right? But I like the idea that purpose can be separated into a big P purpose as in like a capital letter P and then a lowercase P purpose, right? So big P purpose and a little P purpose. And when I think we're thinking about our big P, our capital P purpose, I believe what we want to offer really big purpose the purpose of all of the purposes is to be a good and decent human on the planet That's it No, pomp. No circumstance My big p purpose is to contribute in a meaningful way and be a good kind decent person in this planet just to exist like just have the experience of What it's like to live life as a human on this planet?

And the good news is that you're already doing that. I'm already doing that. At least I mean, I believe that I'm already doing that. And so if that is the purpose of your life, right, if it can be kind of compartmentalized in that way, the existential crisis doesn't need to exist. You're already doing that. You are already living as a human, contributing to this world in the best way that you know how. And so if it's true that I can think that because you're listening to this podcast, that means that you can just stop worrying what your big P purpose because you're already doing it, right? 

So again, if your purpose and your worth, right, you don't have to earn anything, you don't have to prove anything, you're just human, you're just a kind, decent, contributing member to humanity, to Earth, that's your big P purpose. Check that box, you're already doing it, okay? So then the little P purpose is a choice. Purpose isn't something we need to know before we take action. Like, I didn't think before I went into social work this was my purpose, right? I kind of stumbled on it. I was gonna say I found it, but really knowing myself, I probably stumbled on it more than found it than anything because it took me a while to settle into this idea of like, I really enjoy this aspect of my life similar to when I became a mother for the first time. I was stumbling around in the dark, just experiencing a tremendous amount of postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety to be sure, but also I felt very discombobulated because my understanding was that once I got this, I would get to feel X, Y, Z, right? Whatever that emotion was that I was perceiving I would get to feel, I wasn't feeling it. Or at least I wasn't feeling it to the degree that I thought I should. And so it was so unnerving to me, but I didn't necessarily need to know that before I got pregnant, right? You don't need to know that you will find your purpose if you want to start a new job or go to school or have kids. You don't necessarily need to know that exactly what that purpose is, right? like I can label it as I want to be of service to people, you don't have to know that to get started. Because it is in the journey. It is in the path that we find that. It's in the process, right? I know that IVF is a process and there are many people who say trust the process. Sometimes you do have to trust the process, the process for you, right? Because my experience is not gonna be your experience. There are eight billion different experiences currently in the world right now, and none of them are good or better or best from each other. They just are, right? I talk a lot about like imperfect action when my clients will talk to me about like they need to make a decision. Imperfect action just means that you're making the best decision you can make with the information that you have available and you're allowing yourself to not necessarily believe that there is a one right and a one wrong answer. So if we adopt this idea of learning by doing, I think, life gets a little bit easier. I think most of the time we spend so much time clamped down in that space of I don't want to make the wrong choice that makes life, our life, our experience, our IVF journey that much harder because you believe that there is a right and a wrong. But the only way to know if there's a right or a wrong is by judging the outcome. We don't know the outcome. We have no idea of the outcome.

So the best that we can do is trust ourselves in making those decisions by taking just a little bit of action, by learning, by doing. We can actually progress a little bit faster. And when I use, no, hang on. We used to use this acronym a lot. I think they still use it in corporate America. I'm just so far removed from corporate America now. But it's like PDCA. So plan, do, check, adjust. I think that's the acronym, plan, do, check, adjust. That's learning by doing, right? It's an iterative process. And that's what we're talking about. The idea is not at all to have a plan that you have to follow.

Now I know, I know that all of the hackles on all of my control freak girlies are going up and you're like, Emily, I don't think you understand, I need to control, I hear you. I myself am a control freak junkie. Or I'm trying to, recovering -ish, semi -quasi -recovering, very active tense, not past tense, recovering control freak. Because control and safety, when we think that we get control, when we're trying to maintain control, we do that because we want to feel safe. We don't trust ourselves and we don't trust the things around us to happen naturally the way that we think that they should exactly go down. That's the problem, right? That's when we work ourselves up into a lather and then we rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat over and over and over. That's the part that becomes very, very untenable.

And that's when our desire for control and our need for purpose, right, that you're almost like white knuckling purpose comes into effect, right? It seems like we are, no. We can only learn by doing. We can't learn how to navigate IVF before we start IVF. It's not possible. I'm a very talented coach and I can give you a lot of techniques, I can give you a lot of tools, I can give you a lot of things to work on, but we don't know how you're going to respond to medications, how your hormones are gonna do. If you become super ragey and murdery during your IVF cycle, we don't know. We can't possibly know or plan for that beforehand. We have to learn it by doing, right? And so, I think that this recipe for perfectionism that a lot of us fall into, particularly people that are drawn to me, which I love, it's fine, we will heal together. But a lot of that are hard lessons learned. It's not so much a joke as it is my biography, but I will say that I have only ever learned a lesson the hard way. I think that that's probably true for a lot of my Control Freak perfectionist girlies.

But it doesn't mean that we have to, okay? 

So in essence, there is no amount of planning that will give you the same data that you will get from doing, right? And so instead of telling yourself that you have to know what this next cycle is going to bring or to tell yourself you need to know what this next chapter of your life is going to look like and to be really clear on your purpose, you can't.

You can change your goals, you can change the things that you wanna change, you can pivot like I have done many times in my life, but you have to get out there and just try things. Take that imperfect action. That is how you can figure out what your purpose is. Now whether that is a short term or a long term purpose is totally up to you. When I was talking, when I referred to the clients at the top of this episode that kind of inspired this episode, One of them was trying to figure out what her purpose was. She was, she's going to take about six months off from IVF. She's gone through several rounds and she really has decided that she needs a break. And one of the things that she was belaboring was what is my purpose going to be taking that time off? Well, we don't know. What are some things that you want to do? She wanted to take up pickleball, which I think I feel like is a really popularly growing sport right now, especially in the States.

She wanted to take a pickleball. Okay, can that be part of your purpose? One of my clients who's relatively new to IVF, she's about to go into her first dim cycle, almost had this idea of what should my purpose be during IVF, going through IVF this first time? Well, what we ended up kind of getting to was that your purpose should be, I'm really curious how this is gonna go. Your purpose should be to learn.

Learn about yourself, learn about your relationships, learn about your needs, learn about the whole process, the IVF process. I feel like all of us kind of walk in with a naivete or just an uneducation, probably for a good cause, like unless you are a reproductive endocrinologist or work closely with one, having never gone through IVF is a very mysterious process. So, you know, her purpose was to be educated about all of those things, right? So your purpose doesn't have to be this ironclad thing that you never give up. Your purpose can be evolving and changing over time just like you do, right? There's no, use your willingness to do, to take action as your measure of success in finding purpose, right? I think that my willingness to kind of pivot, in these different areas, you know, I didn't get all of my, I have a bachelor's and two master's degrees. I didn't get them all in one go. I got my bachelor's degree and then I took a couple of years off and then I got my master's in social work and then I took several years off and then I got my master's in healthcare administration. And then a few years after that, I decided to pivot to coaching. So like, it is a very iterative process. You are allowed to tinker and not worry about planning and just see how things change and evolve and that is truly the idea of purpose and finding your purpose. And all along the way, your brain is gonna offer you all of the I don't knows, right? I don't know what to do, what is my purpose gonna be? I know that purpose is a really big thing that we talk about when clients are not having any success with IVF and maybe they just have decided that that is going to be the end of their pursuit of children. Purpose is a really big discussion around that point. So even if that is never gonna be on your horizon, I still think that understanding how to cultivate your own purpose and that purpose is largely done and found by imperfect action and by doing things and trying things and learning about yourself, sometimes the easier those transitions can be, right? Whether it's walking away from treatment, taking a break from treatment, continuing treatment finding success for treatment and becoming pregnant and becoming a mom. You're going to have to figure out how to navigate this idea of purpose in every single one of those scenarios for the rest of your life. So let it be a learning experience and not something that you have to do right now. Okay, I know that was very long -winded, a little bit longer than I'm normally talking, but I really do feel like the more creative you get with this idea of purpose, the more curious you get with this idea of purpose, the easier it will come, the more compassionate you're gonna be with yourself and the more connected you're gonna be with yourself. And I mean, that's the ball game, friends. That is everything. So this is a little bit more of an intellectual exercise rather than concrete information, but I hope you found it valuable and I hope you have a beautiful week and I'll talk to you soon.

Bye bye.