Episode 67: Transcript

You are listening to episode 67 of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

Welcome to the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I'm your host and fertility life coach, Sarah Brandell.

Join us each week as we walk through navigating your trying to conceive journey.

My mission is to share the skills of managing your mind, processing emotions, and living a full life to create a more authentic path to motherhood.

Hello hello and welcome back to another episode of the Paths to Motherhood podcast.

I am super excited to have you here if you're listening live.

We are right in the midst of a brand new year.

It's January.

If you joined us last week you know that I shared a lot about what my goals for all of you are this year and how we're going to get to those goals.

And we're going to do that by bouncing around a handful of different topics.

Really, how do you give yourself a new beginning on this journey.

How do you approach trying to conceive from a totally new perspective, a fresh approach, and of start a new.

As I was working through these episodes for this month, something that came up often, something that I thought about often was just the fact that it's so easy to get bogged down by our past and every setback and everything that's gone wrong and everything that we've been through that we feel so focused on those things that we kind of forget how to move forward.

So my goal this month is to really help you do that.

And today we are going to focus on one of those topics.

And I get it.

Like in this journey, it makes total sense that we feel defeated, that we feel negative, that we get down on ourselves, that we start to question is this ever gonna work.

Will this ever happen.

I know that because I've been there.

I've thought those things.

I've literally said those things.

And those questions, they never go away.

So I think that a lot of us have truly experienced trauma of this journey, whether that's been through infertility, whether that's been through pregnancy loss, and it helps support this negative focused mindset.

And even if you had some wins along the way, it's really hard to drop that trauma side of things.

But today, what I want to talk about, what I see as one key ingredient that you have to have while trying to conceive.

Without it, honestly, I don't think that much else matters.

You can go through the motions, you can track, you can show up to appointments, but without this one ingredient, I really am willing to bet you won't get pregnant.

And so what is that that I'm talking about.

It is belief in possibility.

Belief in the possibility of your baby that you are.

then there's really no point in trying, right.

That is setting yourself up for failure from the start.

There are so many examples of this in the world.

I think to nocebo's, so a nocebo is a negative placebo.

There are times where we have done tests where we've given people things and said, "Oh, this is going to negatively impact your way," and it was just a false pill, a sugar pill, something like that and it truly does negatively impact their care.

You see this and people who are brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, but they look around their house, their neighborhood, the people around them in their school and no one goes to college or goes on to better themselves and so they just don't even know that that's an option for them.

We see this with business owners who honestly quit before they should or they really never even get started and because they were just doomed to fail from the start.

And what we're gonna talk about often this month is that what's happening here, what our brain is doing is it's getting stuck.

In part, it's like we do totally have this tendency to go towards all or nothing thinking.

In addition to that, we have a propensity to go towards the negative.

And what happens is if we're always going to the negative, that's when we get stuck in the "this is never gonna happen, Why are we even trying this, the waste of my time.

That's really just truly getting stuck in the negative nothing type of thinking.

And if we're living there, if we're showing up from there, we're gonna show up differently.

We're gonna care for ourselves differently.

We're gonna take our medications differently to track our cycles differently.

We're gonna care for our bodies differently.

The trick here is not to solve this problem what many typically think, right.

Because I hear this time and time again, you have all heard this, you may have even thought this because it's what our brain wants to offer, is well, if that I need to be 100 full-holy, I need to be positive all the time, I need to believe this is absolutely 100% without a doubt is gonna work.

And again, that's all or nothing thinking showing up.

Just swing the the pendulum in the opposite direction.

And what I have seen to be true over and over again is believing 100% it's not going to work, does not benefit you, and believing 100% it is going to work, does not benefit you.

So that's really not the goal.

That's not where we live.

We actually want to find some balance.

We want to live somewhere in the middle.

We want to live where we think, you know, this could work out.

This could actually happen for me.

I can see examples of how that's possible.

Yeah, I have doubt.

Yeah, I have fear.

Yeah, I have some history that tells me that it may be more difficult than the average person, but I think it might work out.

And see how much nicer that feels to think than the heavy negativity or the heavy positivity even.

Really the goal is, well sometimes we're gonna have hope and and sometimes we're gonna have doubt, and that's totally okay.

I kind of think about this balance as something called equal airtime, and this is really just giving focus to both sides, right.

Allowing ourselves to have time for both of those.

We don't get upset when negative thoughts come up.

We don't avoid when negative thoughts come up.

We don't run away when negative thoughts come up, but we also go to work intentionally creating moments of possibility.

The truth is only from believing in possibility of this journey working out is when we will show up, right.

If I don't believe it's going to work out, I'm not going to show up well.

If I believe it's possible for me, I'm going to show up differently.

I'm going to take care of myself, my mental health, my body, my relationships differently.

I'm gonna go to appointments and tests and appointments or medications that I committed to.

I'm gonna follow through on things.

And that comes from believing there is a chance this could work out.

So now that I kind of have sold you on why it's important to have possibility, how do we weave more possibility into our day to day.

For many of us, we honestly have been so beaten down down by this journey that it doesn't come naturally to us to have possibility.

And so I find that we actually have to go about intentionally creating thoughts of possibility.

We have to go looking for it.

We have to create more of it.

We have to be open to it.

So interestingly from a science side of things, and this system is part of our brain that helps us deal with the fact that we receive millions and millions of inputs, a visual and auditory stimuli, and touch stimuli a day.

And so what the RAS does is it learns what it can kind of tune out and put into the background.

Things that are happening to us, around us, near us, and some of that stuff out for us to help us focus on what's important.

I think about if I'm in a car, like if I was taking the moment to notice every single tree on the side of the road, and the birds flying by in the sky, in the shape of the clouds, and up here, and then over here, or what the carnex to me is doing, and what the radio station is saying, and I was focused on all of those things, you can imagine how distracted I would be from driving safely.

And so what our RAS system does, is it actually starts to tune out some of that stuff.

We notice less of our surroundings around us, the general view of things, we notice less detail, we hear less detail because this allows us to focus more on what we need to focus on.

And it thinks about this, you know, this focus of what's important from a few days.

What we know through psychology is that we as humans are primed to focus more on negativity, on dangers, on worries, on fears.

There's a reason that news channels are not full of just positive happy-go-lucky stories all day.

We don't get intrigued by those as much as we get intrigued by negative news.

This is just playing to how our brain works, right.

It is on surveillance mode at any given time looking for bad news.

The truth is, is that when it's doing that, it's trying to protect us, but we have to remind ourselves that this half the story is focusing on negative half to, hey, it's possible.

There is positivity here.

I'm just to notice those things.

And this is really where the RAS system comes into play is it does that tuning out until we have to remind it to not tune everything out that we don't want to tune out all the positivity.

And so the way there's actually this phenomenon, the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon, basically what we ask our RAS to pay attention to it will.

And so this phenomenon, right.

If I think of, oh, I just bought a new yellow, Suddenly you're gonna start noticing yellow cars everywhere on the road.

Before you were tuning them out, you weren't even recognizing that they were there, but now that you have a yellow, everyone else's yellow car.

And so we need to use this phenomenon, this tendency to our advantage.

So what I encourage you to do is to ask yourself to check in.

What is working right now on my journey.

What is going well right now on my journey.

Enforce yourself to answer.

Look for evidence that things are going well, even if it's something small.

This is honestly one of the reasons I love social media because it doesn't have to only be that's important.

I think we all should be doing that.

We should be asking yourself what's going well in our own journey.

I also think you can use others for possibility creation.

So I can tell you that I absolutely have looked to others that I'm inspired by that are building businesses to inspire me and empower me to keep going in my own business.

I see their evidence of success as possibility that that could be something that I could achieve too.

And so that's what I would love for you to use is to look at the infertility and pregnancy loss, social media community, right.

You will find example after example after example of women who have been through so, so much pain, so much grief and have miracles, have successes.

And these stories are not stories we wanna use to beat ourselves up 'cause we're not there yet.

Instead, we wanna use these stories as examples of what could be possible for you.

The key here is that you have to direct your brain there.

You have to ask your RAS system to pay attention to this.

So check in, ask yourself this week, what's going well right now.

What's working.

Where are some examples of this being possible for me right now on my journey.

How can I weave moments of intentionally focusing on possibility into my week.

It's not that I have to avoid the doubt.

It's not that I'm not allowed to have fear.

It's not that I'm not allowed to have negative thoughts.

Those can be there.

but I also am going to intentionally allow for moments of hope, of excitement, of possibility.

So this is what I want you to work on this week.

I want you to try to go about creating possibility in your day to day life.

Check in with yourself, ask yourself these questions, look for examples, and share them with me.

Message me, tell me how it's working for you, and come back next week so we can keep talking about this topic of starting off the new year with a, the key here is that you have to direct your brain there.

You have to ask your RAS system to pay attention to this.

So check in, ask yourself this week, what's going well right now.

What's working.

Where are some examples of this being possible for me right now on my journey.

How can I weave moments of intentionally focusing on possibility into my week.

It's not that I have to avoid the doubt.

It's not that I'm not allowed to have fear.

It's not that I'm not allowed to have negative thoughts.

Those can be there, but I also am going to intentionally allow for moments of hope, of excitement, of possibility.

So this is what I want you to work on this week.

I want you to try to go about creating possibility in your day to day life.

Check in with yourself, ask yourself these questions, look for examples and share them with me, message me, tell me how it's working for you and come back next week so we can keep talking about this topic of starting off the new year with a new beginning on your trying to conceive journey.

I hope you all have a great week and I will talk to you all next week.

Hey there, inspired mama.

If you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to leave a review in your podcast player.

This helps to share the message with so many more women just like you.

Also, if you know of another hopeful mama on her path to motherhood, please share this episode with her.

I would love to get this into the ears of anyone who needs to hear it.

If you are ready to step this work up and not only learn these tools but to apply them to your unique story, head to the link in the show notes to apply for a free consult call.

I would be honored to help you.

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