Welcome to IVF this episode 27- Me as your 1:1 coach

Hello, hello my friends. How are you doing today? I’m doing so well. Working my way through this stim cycle and, it’s still pretty early so I’m feeling pretty good. I know the bloating and grapefruit ovary is coming so I’m riding this waze for as long as possible. 

It’s been a few weeks since I talked about Clubhouse so I wanted to remind you all that I am on clubhouse. If you don’t know, Clubhouse is an audio only app where you can drop into rooms, that’s what they call them, and listen to different conversations. There’s a big infertility presence that is growing on CH and a lot of amazing coaches and advocates. And I host a room every Monday at 1pm cst. Right now clubhouse is only available to apple users but android fans, your time is coming. So if you use apple products, not just the iphone but you can also access on an ipad, join clubhouse. It is invite only, so if you need an invite just DM me on IG and I can get you set up! On IG and CH my username is @IVFthiscoaching. 

Today, is a super fun day because it’s not a concept I’m breaking down but rather me talking about my 1:1 coaching program. I get a lot of questions about how it works and who is it for and coaching in and around infertility and IVF is still kind of unknown to people. For a very long time these topics have kind of been relegated to counseling and therapy so most people don’t know that this service is available. 

I will say that I am ONE of MANY infertility or IVF coaches. There are so many out there. Amazing coaches that I am friends with and or follow on IG, that are helping people everyday. 

There’s no turf war here. I know that I am not for everyone. I know that I cannot help everyone, just by the virtue of being ONE person- so if you’re on IG you can just search fertility or infertility coach, IVF coach and a ton of stuff will pop up. 

If you’re curious about the difference between coaching and counseling, I break that down in episode 10 of this podcast- its by no means and exhaustive breakdown bc I try to keep these suckers no longer than 30’ish minutes but I think it provides a great overview should you have any questions. 

So my program is called IVF This, obviously. 

It’s a 3 month program- I do 13 weeks because we coach once a week for 12 weeks, over zoom, and then we have a wrap-up call.  Each part of the experience is designed to move toward acceptance. 

A lot of the pain of our experience lies in resistance. 

The fact that we’re on this journey.

It’s about re-wiring our ingrained thought proceses.

So over the course of 12 weeks, we break down a lot of the BS in our brain.

The first month is all about awareness. You’ve heard me say that we can’t fix what we can’t see.

So we create a lot of awareness around our thinking, awareness around the resistance, our tendency to avoid or resist emotion’s, and around our unconscious belief systems. 

And really getting to a point where you can see your thoughts for what they are: sentences and pictures ion our minds. And also see them for what they are not- which is automatic truth. So many of us walk around with this belief that if we think it, it’s true. We don’t question what it is we are thinking and why. 

WE talk about things like Stories vs facts- this is an important part of awareness. But we rarely think to ask ourselves, ok, what are the facts of this. So facts are the things that everyone in the world can agree upon. It’s the 2+2=4. It’s the I had a drs appt today and the dr said words. It’s the I had a discussion with my partner last night and they said words. 

The STORY is the drama we add to the facts. The mustard on top. The I had a drs appt today and she said that my lining looks like this and that’s good but I asked about it in FB group and people with that lining don’t have successful implantation so that means that I won’t have a successful implantation. Or, my partner and I had a fight and he said that I was too emotional and he just doesn’t understand how hard this is and he just wants me to snap out of it. 

The facts are always pretty boring, which is why our brains are so good at ratcheting up the drama. But the drama typically, I won’t say always, but damn near always creates PAIN and suffering for us. So we get really good at figuring out the story vs the facts. 

We break down what thoughts are, which I’ve talked about a lot on this podcast but also what does our thinking create for us. 

To give you an example, many of us have had the thought, or have the thought “this shouldn’t be happening” or “I shouldn’t have to do this, it’s so easy for other people to get pregnant.”

I’ll talk about the “should’s” a little more in an upcoming episode but essentially when we think things in that vain, we feel maybe anger, frustration, or resentment. When we feel anger, resentment, or frustration (whatever that prevailing emotion is) then you might lash out at the people you love, ruminate, stew or dwell in that anger, you might try to disconnect or numb from you life (SM, alcohol, eating), maybe you find blame in yourself or your partner, maybe you ruminate about other people getting pregnant “easily” which means that what happens in that moment is that we are creating and building more anger, frustration, or resentment. 

When we fixate on these things, you’re basically giving your brain a directive to go out and find evidence of the injustice in what you’re, or the to find evidence of things to blame on ourselves or someone else, to find the fault somewhere, to perpetuate this cycle of victimhood that feels so terrible. 

Now, I’m not saying that this isn’t a normal thought process. Not at all, in fact if you lined up 100 women experiencing infertility, they would probably completely agree with you. But what is this thought bringing to your life. How is it serving you? How is it not serving you?

And when I ask you, how is it serving you, I know our knee-jerk reaction is to say “it’s not” but that’s not entirely true either. Because it is that cycle, and our brains LOVE us to get caught in thought loops because its so unconscious that our brain doesn’t have to do anything new. So, it DOES serve you in some ways, keeping you locked into the same thought patters, but does that serve your overall goal of not feeling like crap? No, probably not. I don’t know many of us that actively pursue feeling like crap- its typically only because we don’t KNOW there’s a different way to Feel. 

We also look at how to ask the right questions. Our brains are these AMAZING super computers. And the things with computers is that you have to give it the right command to get out of it what you’re wanting. The same thing goes with brains. You have to give your brain the right directive for what you’re wanting. It’s just that most of us don’t know what type of directive to give. We don’t know how to ask ourselves the right questions. WE don’t know how to give our brain the right directions. Our brain wants to answer questions, that’s the thing it is best at. Our brain wants to collect information. But what when we ask it things like “What am I supposed to do next” or “I don’t know what to do next” or “what if this is how my life is always going to be” or “what if I will never have children” Does that mean that I will never be happy”

These are things that most of us have asked ourselves, right? I know I have and sometimes still do. 

When you give your brain that kind of direction, it is going to get to work collecting evidence to support the underlying belief system that you don’t know what you want, you don’t know how you will ever be happy, that your life will always be how you feel it is right now. Anytime you ask yourself those types of questions, or the underlying belief that you have about yourself or your life. 

And that’s why I’ve talked about curiousty before, because when you ask yourself “will I ever be happy” or “will I always feel this anxious” those questions pre-suppose that those are 1) the only way for you to feel, 2) that anxiety is something bad, and 3) that a baby would bring the end to anxiety and would create happiness (check out my epsode “A baby won’t solve for” for more info on that). It also is LAYERED with judgment. Judgment about yourself, about your current life, about a future that you might never have. That whatever is in the future is WAY better than what you have right now, which only decimates your motivation to do any work to improve the here and now. 

Curiosty strips away some of that judgment. 

A different question might be “how can I manage my anxiety in this moment?” Reminding yourself, I have navigated anxiety before, I know that I can open up to it and experience it and it wont kill me. 

What are ways that I can connect with my partner? Instead of “will we always fight about this?

A question like, “How can I enjoy my life right now? How can I love myself through this?

We’re not blowing sunshine and daisies out of asses here, that’s not what this is about

This is just about tweaking the question. Like a brain hack- bypassing that built-in negativity bias so we can get our brain moving into something that is going to be more productive, helpful, or serve you. Instead of relying on our old BS thoughts and belief systems. 

WE will talk a lot about trauma. Trauma is something I think that is one of the most underacknowledged and underdiscussed aspects of infertility. 

There are so many aspects of trauma that we don’t talk about, recognize, or acknowledge- so it’s very interwoven throughout the process. 

So we spend time demystifying the aspects of trauma and helping you to make sense of what is happening in your brain that trauma has influences. 

The second month we work together is all about emotional balance. 

 A lot of us feel like we’re at the mercy of our feelings. WE spend an entire month talking about feelings. 

We talk about what feelings actually are- I define them as a vibration in your body. They can’t hurt you, they can’t kill you (even if it can feel that way). 

A big part of emotional balance is knowing that you can handle any emotion that comes your way. So many of us tell ourselves that we don’t know how we would handle something, if it should come to pass. We don’t think we handle things well, or that we handle them at all. As if emotions are something to be handled. But emotions aren’t. They’re something to experience. We can manage those things but we have to build up enough belief within ourselves that we CAN. And the way we do that is duh-duh-duh-duh feeling them. 

We have to pull back the curtain on the feelings we avoid. The feelings we resist. 

Let me give you an example. I’ve mentioned on the podcast that we’re going through our 2nd round of IVF. This go-round I don’t have as much fear as I did the first time. I mean I’m human so it’s definitely there but it’s not freezing me the way it’s done in the past. I don’t have rose colored glasses on, I’m very realistic about our probabilities. But I know, whatever happens, I know how to take care of me. I know how to have my own back. I don’t have to judge my feelings, or kick the crap out of myself, or any of that stuff that I’ve done in the past. 

I can sit with fear or grief and let it pass through me. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck. It doesn’t mean that I enjoy it or anything like that. It still hurts, it’s still painful. But I know that I can do that, if and when the time comes. 

Then I teach you how to process your feelings. We talk about feelings, and I help you understand them but unless you learn how to actually process them, it’s just an intellectual exercise. And I want it to be more than that. 

Because these are skills you will learn and use for the rest of your life. 

I truly believe that the gift of coaching isn’t just specific to that moment, to that time together. To that 1 hour per week for 13 weeks. I don’t believe you are paying me for coaching you for 13 weeks. I believe, in my bones, you are paying me for a transformation and tools that you can use forever. Long after you are seeking fertility treatments, into motherhood,  if you decide to stop treatments and are rebuilding your life. As a partner, as a member of society. Your career, everything. 

The tools that I teach, and the method really transcends your entire life. 

And processing feelings is a cornerstone of this transformation. 

The next step is for allowing those emotions to be there. We resist our emotions because we don’t think we can handle them. Well, when you learn how to process them, then you know how to “handle” them. The next step is to allow them to be there. Whatever you’re feeling in the moment that you’re feeling them. 

And the final steps towards emotional balance is with taking responsibility for your thoughts and feelings. So this is probably one of my favorite things to teach because it is so huge. So conventional wisdom tells us that other people and other situations create our pain. Someone said something and it hurt your feelings. BUT, if you’ve listened to me for any amount of time. You probably know what I’m going to say- YOU are in charge of that shit. 

If you’re new to this podcast, check out the episode titled: Managing opinions.

People cannot create any emotion for us. I know we think they can. And I know that is reinforced time and time again but it’s not true. What happens is someone says or does something and you make that mean something. It’s in the “what are you making it mean” where the pain lives. When we give people credit for creating feelings for us, we are also handing over to them, our emotional wellbeing. Basically saying “ok, you’re in charge of how I think and feel, not me” That is called emotional childhood.

So we learn about Emotional Adulthood. What does it mean to be in charge of and take responsibility over your thoughts and feelings?

Knowing that you are the one creating your own pain. 

Remember, I tell you guys all the time. Infertility isn’t what creates so much pain for us. It is our thoughts about ourselves in relation to infertility that is so damn painful. 

So that’s what we start to unpack and identify

And finally, the last month is all about acceptance. 

We talk about things like unconditional love, arguing with reality, surrender, and how to move forward. 

Now, this is a rough outline of the program and obviously things come up along the way but we cover ALL of these things at different points during our 3 months together. 

So, I hope this provides you with a really good idea of what it would be like to work with me. 

If you’re still curious or if you want some first-hand experience, go to my website or my IG page: @IVFthiscoaching or www.ivfthiscoaching.com and book a mini-session. Minisessions are 30 minutes that are completely dedicated to actual coaching. You come with something you want to talk about and we coach on it for 30 minutes. 

So that’s one option, the other option is booking a consultation. So the consultation is about an hour long and this is where we dig deep into what it would be like to work together. WE cover all the logistics and we talk about where you are and we make a plan for where you want to go.

Both calls are super fun. I’ve talked with so many amazing women and I hope I get to talk with you soon, too!

That’s all for me this week, remember, I adore you and you’ve got this.