IVF This Podcast Episode #59 The Thought Ladder
Welcome to IVF This Episode 59- The thought ladder
Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends. I hope you are all doing so well. I am doing well myself.
I think like all of us I am trying to stay safe and healthy during this latest Omicron surge, so hope you are all staying safe and healthy right now.
Before I get into what the thought ladder is, I wanted to share some listener love, which I haven’t done in a little while.
So, I’ve got two to share today:
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Infertility is really hard and lonely. It’s nice to know that the thoughts and feelings that you’ve had about IVF and infertility are likely shared by many others. Emily helps validate your experience and gives you practical strategies to stop it from overtaking your life.
nkh94 via Apple Podcasts · Canada · 12/29/21
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Y’all! I’m only on episode one and I’m tearing up because she gets me! I’m starting IVF next month and this is exactly what I needed for the 3 weeks leading up to the start. So thankful for this podcast!
Amh7u via Apple Podcasts · United States of America · 12/29/21
Ahhh I just, thank you, just thank you. For taking the time to share the podcast, for taking a second to rate and review it. I cannot tell you how much it means to me. And I’e got a couple more that I will share next week too but I will say this- when you take time to rate and review a podcast, and this is pretty specific to apple podcasts, but taking that time helps the podcast become discoverable. Meaning, the more engagement we get from it, similar to SM platforms like IG and TT, the more Apple will recommend it. Now I know that Spotify and Good podcasts don’t have the option to do that but if that is your preferred podcast platform, then another option for you is to share it on your SM, if you want. Take a screen shot and share it in your stories, and don’t forget to tag me @ivfthiscoaching
If you’re a part of any infertility or IVF FB groups, you can suggest it in there. I always feel like we’re our own IVF This community and we’re just spreading the word that there is a possibility of feeling differently during this process. So I really appreciate your help in spreading that message.
Ok, so let’s talk about thought ladders. Whenever I am working with ANYONE, mini session, my coaching clients, especially at the beginning of working together, we will go through one of those think/feel/do cycles, which is I would say the foundational tool of my coaching, so we go through the think, feel, do- they can see how their thoughts are creating their feelings, and what they’re “doing’ based on that feeling but, inevitably, the next question is always “Ok, how do I change that.”
Now, if you have listened for any length of time, you know that automatically changing your thoughts is not really the name of my game.
Mostly, because it doesn’t work like that. Most of our unconscious thought patterns are so deeply engrained in our subconscious, that 1) we don’t really pay attention to them, and 2) when you are able to identify them trying to “switch them better thought” doesn’t really create lasting and sustainable change.
Intellectually knowing that your thoughts create your feelings and truly understanding it and simultaneously questioning those unconscious belief patterns are two very different things. Which is not a problem! Since none of us are taught about our feelings, except that other people are responsible for them and that you don’t really have any control over them- which is complete BS. You’re essentially having to unlearn a lifetime of social programming. That shit takes time, my friends.
And then the idea of “ok, I’ll just switch my thoughts to something better”- this is kind of like my love/ hate relationship with mantra’s and affirmations or the phrase “just think positively”. Mantras and affirmations are perfectly fine, they look so inspirational on Pintrest and they are usually paired with beautiful images for an perfectly quaffed IG grid BUT for most of us, the affirmations or mantras are a bit too far fetched for us to really believe.
So let me give you an example: If I have always told myself that I am a piece of shit that cannot do things right. If I live in this perfectionistic fantasy of unless it’s perfect it’s not worth doing and I am not worthy- then a mantra or affirmation of “I am strong, smart, and capable” is literally just me reciting words- I don’t believe it. It might settle in on me for a few minutes, hours or days, but my brain will always go back to thinking, how it’s always thought so the recurring belief of me being a piece of shit will ALWAYS be more believable.
And THAT”S what we’re really talking about- believability. Not thoughts being true or not. That’s kind of irrelevant. I don’t really care if you have all the evidence in the world to factually prove a thought out- I don’t care. I care how that thought makes you feel! When it comes to our brains opinions, which is all that is outside of data that is agreed upon by the collective world to be true like 2+2=4 everything that you think about yourself, your life, your job, other people is an opinion.
When you’re just repeating something that you don’t believe, you’re not going to get an emotional response. So, if our thoughts crete our feelings, and our feelings drive our actions- without the emotional response you will not take action based on that feeling- because non exists.
Now that doesn’t mena you should NEVER use an affirmation or mantra, stick with me a few more minutes and I’m gonna show you how to use them a bit more constructively.
It’s just that the really crappy thoughts the really crappy opinions tend to be the LOUDER or more consistent thoughts- which is why, what I call “thought swapping” doesn’t work in the long run. In fact, sometimes it actually feels worse because then you layer on the guilt or shame of “not doing it right” because it’s “not working” and then you’ve just piled on mre craptastic thoughts on top of other craptastic thoughts.
So the thought ladder is a tool that we use to accomplish what is essentially the main practice of thought work, which is going from thinking one thought to thinking something else. I think there are really two main things of thought work. Like, main, main premises. One is having feelings and processing emotion, and the other is changing your thoughts.
We use the thought ladder when we have an aspirational thought that we want to work up to- so an aspirational thought might be ANYTHIGN you want to think on purpose (this could be where we use mantras or affirmations).
The thought ladder is a tool for helping you develop neutral or baby-step thoughts, so in this episode I call them ladder thoughts but if you've heard me talk about neutral thoughts or baby-step thoughts before, it's all the same. It's a new thought you want to practice believing, even though it may not be the ultimate thought you want to have forever.
So a neutral thought, a baby-step thought, a ladder thought, they're not the be all and end all thought necessarily that you want to believe forever. They're a thought on the way to that forever thought. So I'm going to explain how this works. The thought ladder is very simple.
So, I love to make this a written exercise so that you can see it in real time. You start by drawing a ladder on a piece of paper. It does not have to be fancy. No one is handing out art awards here.
So at the bottom of the ladder, you put your current thought. Now, notice I said thought. Singular. One thought per ladder. The current thought goes at the bottom of the ladder. Now, at the top of the ladder, you put your goal thought. Your goal thought is a thought that you would like to believe. You don't believe this thought yet. That's why it goes at the top as the goal thought, the aspirational thought.
Now, some of your brains are like, I don’t know what my goal thought is, it's too hard, I don’t want to choose the “wrong” thought. News flash, there’s no right or wrong. This is not something to burn the midnight oil on, ok. If you're not sure what you would want to believe as your goal thought, you can ask yourself one thing, which is what is the opposite of your current thought.
So if your current thought is, I will never be a mother. Then the aspirational thought is maybe “I will be a mother, someday.”
Outside of motherhood or infertility, because this can be used for ANYTHING, you can imagine someone who sort of is that kind of person that you want to be. They have the feeling you want or they have the result you want or they have the beliefs you want, they have the thing in their life you want. Whatever it is. What would they be thinking?
Just an aside: Your brain may not be ready to come up with a truly positive goal thought yet, but it will get there. And there's no real right or wrong. Honestly, your goal thought doesn't matter that much because we're just trying to give you some vague idea of what would be different, so it's okay.
Now, also please remember that you are not supposed to believe this. I know I said that but I'm going to say it again. When you think your goal thought, you will not feel better. If you feel better when you think it, then you accidentally discovered a thought you can already believe and you can stop doing the ladder and just practice that.
But if you're doing a ladder, usually the reason is you can't believe the goal thought. So it's not supposed to feel good. It should probably feel like nothing. Like sure, it would be nice to believe that but I don't. That's what a goal thought is. It's a thought where if I suggested it to you, you would say to me, yeah sure, it would be nice to believe that, but I don't. But my brain has all these objections, but I don't feel anything.
So you take your goal thought, whatever it is it'll do, write it at the top of the ladder. So, now what we have to do is figure out what thoughts are going to take us from the bottom, our current thought, up to the goal thought at the top of the ladder. And to do that, we need to brainstorm neutral thoughts.
Ladder thoughts are not usually super inspirational. They will not be featured on Instagram accounts on photos of people doing yoga on the beach. They will not be engraved on jewelry on Etsy. They don't make good quotes. They're not super inspirational. They likely will not make you feel all warm and squishy inside. They're very small steps, but they're thoughts you can believe.
Now, I teach my clients several different ways to do this, but for the sake of this podcast NOT being an hour long I’ll give you the highlights.
Usually, to get the ball rolling on the ladder thoughts, you may want to try to use an “opener” an opening phrase like I'm open to believing, or I'm learning to believe.
So if you’re trying to work up the ladder to the aspirational thought of “I will be a mother” then one of the rungs on the ladder might be, “I’m open to believing it is a possibility for me to one day become a mother”- like put ALLLLLL of the qualifiers in there. “I’m learning to believe that it’s possible that one day I will be a mother” – grammar be damned this is just about opening your mind up to possibilities.
It’s essentially like, here's the goal thought and then we just put in front of it I'm open to believing, I'm learning to believe, I'm becoming a person who does believe.
We attach an opener to the goal thought. You can also attach an opener to the current thought, like it's possible my brain is not reliable when it tells me this thought. So you could think it's possible my brain is not reliable when it tells me I'm not ever going to be a mom. So that's kind of an opener you can attach to the goal thought or to the current thought.
You could also try what I call depersonalizing the thought. Our thoughts are most painful when they're about us, so if you have the thought that you're never going to become a mother because of a diagnosis or because maybe you’ve had failed fertility treatmetns in the past. But you might be able to believe a thought like there are women with my diagnosis or who have had failed fertility treatments in the past that have become mothers.
You're making the thought be about other people who share something with you. They have something in common with you, but it's more distant than making it about yourself and your brain won't put up as many objections.
So those are a couple of tools I like to use, a couple of examples, but there's no right or wrong way to come up with a ladder thought, truly.
It just needs to be slightly better than your current thought. And I really encourage you to brainstorm several any time you do a thought ladder. There isn't a right answer. Come up with a few and then read each one and see which one feels best to you. And so important, you have to remember, best may just be feeling like nothing.
Like, feeling neutral. Or it might even just be feeling like bad but not quite as bad. Like especially with anxiety, sometimes a neutral thought will just feel like oh, my anxiety went from an eight to a four on a scale of one to 10.
That's still good. A four is better than eight. That's the whole point of a ladder thought.
It doesn't do you any good to be like, wishing and looking for a thought that will magically solve all your feelings when you're not ready for that. It's much better to practice a thought that improves things a little bit and over time, it will get better and better. So just going for feeling a tiny bit better, even just a slight lessening of feeling bad. It's not supposed to feel amazing. Once you pick a thought, you need to practice it.
You can also just set an alarm on your phone if you don't want to get fancy. You can put sticky notes around the house. Anything you can do to remind yourself to think the thought.
And then you need to practice, practice, practice. The biggest question I get about thought ladders usually is how do I know when I'm ready to go to the next rung on the ladder, or to practice the goal thought. And there's no right or wrong to this but I think kind of once you're thinking the new thought, the ladder thought that you chose, once you're sort of thinking that naturally, like you don’t have to practice it all the time, it just comes up on its own, then you can move to the next rung of the ladder, or you might be ready for that aspirational thought.
One of the things that I find interesting about the thought ladder is that I usually - let's say I brainstorm five different ladder thoughts. So it's like, there's lots of rungs on my ladder. I don't usually have to go through them
all. Usually if I practice one until it's natural or maybe even two, my brain kind of like, makes the jump the rest of the way on its own.
So, sometimes that happens, sometimes not. Sometimes you do have to go through many iterations. And the other fascinating thing, if you're more advanced at this work, is that sometimes you'll get to your goal thought and be like, oh, I now can see an even better thought about this. So now what was my goal thought now becomes my current thought and I want to set a new goal thought, all on the same issue. It’s a perfectly mailable process that you can create to your own liking.
So as your evolving as a person, as you’re learning more about thought work, you can start a whole new ladder. And you can always just check in with yourself by practicing thinking the goal thought and seeing how you feel.
Your body is always the guide. So you always just check back in with your body. Alright, so that is the thought ladder and it is a super effective tool for incremental thought change work, which I think is really the magic. It's not like, revolution overnight. It's not transformation immediately. I just don't believe that shit really exists. It really is a daily grind sometimes, especially in the beginning, but that's okay.
Your brain is grinding away anyway, making you feel terrible. It's like when my clients say, "Thought work is hard." I'm like, yeah, well thinking shitty thoughts about yourself your whole life is also hard. Might as well put the effort into something that's going to make us feel better.
And that’s all that I want for you, my beautiful friends.
Ok, so that’s the thought ladder. I hope you enjoyed it, if you have any questions or if youre wanting to create your own thought ladder, schedule a mini-session with me! We can work together to build you one. The mini session is completely complimentary. Go to my website www.ivfthiscoaching.com to schedule or you can go to the bio on my socials @ivfthiscoaching and book a mini-session.
Ok, that is what I have for you, lovelies. Have a beautiful week and I will talk to you soon.