Episode 70: Transcript

You are listening to episode 70 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.

(upbeat music) Hello, hello, and welcome back to a new week of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I'm your host, Sarah, and I'm super excited to be talking to you guys today.

I don't know if you guys really find it necessary, but I do that little intro where I tell you what number episode this is.

It's probably not the most needed part of the show, but honestly, I use that as my check-in to make sure the mic's set up, everything's gonna record right.

I record that one phrase, listen to it, make sure it sounds good before I start the episode.

And it's just my routine.

But saying today, episode 70 is kind of crazy to me.

I'm just like, where did the time go.

I cannot believe we've been doing this podcast for 70 weeks in a row.

It's just crazy.

So thank you for being here.

Thank you for listening.

If you're a new time listener, if you've been around the whole time, I'm grateful for all of you.

I just love that I get to share all this information and I would be so appreciative if you would do me one favor.

And that is to go on to whatever podcast app you're listening to.

I know most of you listen on the Apple podcast app and leave a review.

It doesn't take that long, I promise.

But that makes such a difference in this podcast showing up when women go to search for their podcasts and if they're looking for support.

So leave a review.

I promise I will read all of them.

It is super meaningful to me to have those reviews and I appreciate every single one of them.

So thank you so much but let's get into today's episode.

We're closing out this month on New Beginnings and I promised as I talked through quite a few of these episodes like I would share with you a couple practical tools and so that's what we're gonna close out today with is we're going to talk through two tools that I find super helpful in, you know, planning for how I'm going to approach things.

And before we do that, just to recap, we've talked about really what my goals for you are for 2024 in your fertility journey.

We've talked about the importance of possibility and some ideas of ways to get possibility into your life.

We talked about the baby Believe Plan and how to use that framework to help you create more possibility.

And then last week I walked you through if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling honestly in that like I give up energy, how to get out of that energy.

And I really hope you guys found that helpful.

But today what we're going to do is we're going to close out these episodes with these tools that you can use to apply today to, again, make this the best year of trying to conceive yet, and there's two of them.

One is the thought ladder and one is emotional creation.

So really, the way I see this is it's thought creation and emotion creation.

So the first one, thought creation, I call the thought ladder, and this was actually included in the baby belief plan download that that I talked about earlier this month.

So if you didn't already download it, the link is in the podcast, show notes, or you can go to sarahbrandell.

com/babybeliefplan and it will be there for you.

But what happens is you go through the three steps of the baby belief plan and then if you find gaps in your thoughts and you wanna create new thoughts, the thought ladder is how you do that.

And I think often about affirmations, when I think about creating new thoughts, and I've never been the biggest fan of affirmations.

I find them to be kind of odd.

Why.

Because the classic affirmations you hear, either one sound like pie in the sky, stupid things you don't believe, or they're like loose and fluffy and have weird wording.

So there's actually the guy who created the miracle morning, how, what's his name.

How Elrod.

He created the miracle morning.

He has these steps that he recommends people do in their morning routine, et cetera.

One of them is to do affirmations.

And I remember when I first saw that, I'm like, I hate affirmations, but his thoughts about affirmations are on point with what I'm going to share today with the thought ladder and that he agrees.

It makes no sense to tell yourself a lie, right.

So if you're sitting here today and you are broke as a joke and you just keep saying to yourself over and over again, "I'm wealthy.

I'm wealthy.

I'm wealthy.

" Like, your brain doesn't believe that.

And so every time you say it, it's not going to be beneficial to say that.

Now, we could talk about looking at what does make you wealthy even in a broke state.

And we could talk about that.

But affirmations shouldn't be a lie.

They shouldn't be something that feels unbelievable.

I think that's important.

And then number two, he talks about using excessive words and making it sound loosey-goosey.

So he talks about, you know, like when people talk about like money flows to me and these types of things.

Um, if that's your, your jam, like you like hoarding like that, awesome.

I'm much more analytical than that.

And so I think that's why I like the thought ladder more than affirmations.

But if you use affirmations in the way that Hal talks about in the miracle morning, then I think it aligns perfectly with the thought ladder.

And so what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna give you an example.

It's from that worksheet and it's a common one.

I tend, I shared with you guys when we talked about the baby belief plan, I tend to find that the one that women struggle with the most is belief in their self, right.

Belief in their ability of their body to carry the baby.

And I know I struggled with this.

Even after I had my daughter, I had two more miscarriages.

So then I had one pregnancy that worked, three that didn't.

I had really, really tough time believing my body was capable of carrying a pregnancy successfully.

And so, you know, the step one in the baby belief plan is to be honest with where you're at.

So the example thought I give at the bottom of the ladder in the worksheet is that I don't trust my body to carry a baby to term.

And that's just being honest.

Like we're not expecting ourselves to be dishonest here.

We're not telling ourselves lies.

We're being honest with what we're thinking.

And the goal with the thought ladder is to kind of create the next closest thought that feels slightly better to think, but still feels true.

For example, the one that I have in the workbook as an example is my body has been through so much and is still going.

And that feels true, right.

Like even after I'd gone through three miscarriages, I was still going through things.

I'd been on hormones and meds and ovulation and stuff.

My body had been through so much and I still was going.

I still was showing up.

When it comes to a thought ladder, I actually believe you should practice each rung for some amount of time.

So practice thinking my body has been through so much and it is still going.

If you put that on the background of your phone, if you write that on a post, if you do it as an affirmation every day, whatever it is for a while until that feels more believable to you, more top priority to you than the previous thought.

So you practice that thought.

You bring it to the awareness of your brain as the thought that you want to think on purpose more often.

My body has been through so much and it's still going.

Now I think that more often than I think I don't trust my body.

And then once you feel that you've ingrained that thought, it feels believable, it feels doable, it feels like something that just comes up from time to time, it just pops into your brain.

Now we go to the next step on the ladder.

And you get to decide what these steps are, you get to write them out, that's what the worksheet is for, is to help you come up with them.

But the next one I gave as an example was, my body is capable of so many things in this life.

And this one was another one that I felt really pretty true about, right.

Like my body had birth a child.

My body had birthed three miscarriages.

My body had gotten me through so many skills I've done in my life.

My body can take me places, had fed a child, you know.

I was able to list things that my body was able to do.

It's able to get me up and out of bed every day, walk, go exercise, do all of these things.

So my body is capable of so many things in this life.

And I practice that thought for a while.

Like this could be for some things, for some thoughts, it's like, nope, I believe that now it's good, like within a couple of days.

Others like it may be a couple of months and that's okay.

If you have to practice a thought for a couple of months before you feel ready to go to the next rung, that's totally fine.

The next one that I had, and this one felt really big for me was my body is resilient.

And the reason that this one felt very big to me was a reminder that like my body has the ability to heal and actually improve and do something differently than it had been doing before.

And so this one was really important to me.

I spent a lot of time on this thought weeks, weeks, practicing this, reminding myself this, looking for examples that this was true.

Reminding myself of remember when you really wanted to do that Race and you train and you train and your body got injured But then you train some more and you practice and you healed up and you got through it And you did that race that was an example of your body being resilient And so I would remind myself of these things and I would practice the sentence And then from there You know we can carry on from there Maybe by the next cycle you get to my body is capable of so many things and that's as far as we get and that's okay Maybe two, three, four cycles down the road, we get to my body is resilient.

Maybe five cycles down the road, we get to my next thought, which was, it is possible for my body to carry a baby to turn.

So now we've gone from, I don't trust my body to do this, to, hey, I actually think that would be possible.

I'm not certain, nothing in life is certain, it just doesn't exist, but it's possible.

And wow, doesn't that feel good to have that possibility.

And then the last thought you can see in the worksheet that I gave myself to work on after I'd worked on "It's Possible" was this could be my body's time to shine.

And I would tell myself that going into cycles, this could be the time, this could be the time my body gets pregnant, carries this baby to term.

And I keep telling myself that today, I'm 31 weeks with this IVF baby.

And it took us four plus years to get pregnant with this baby.

I tell myself every day, this is my time for my body to shine.

This is my time for my body to shine.

This is my time, right.

'Cause that just feels good to me.

You get to make these thoughts whatever you want them to be.

It's be your thought creation, but we use this stepwise approach to ease us there.

We don't just start telling ourselves, I'm wealthy when we don't believe we're wealthy.

That doesn't work.

So using the Thought Ladder helps us get to goal thoughts.

So if that sounds useful to you, as you work through what we've talked about over the last month, make sure you download that worksheet.

It'll be in the link in the show notes.

And start building your own Thought Ladders as you build them, share them with me.

Tell me what you're putting into your Thought Ladder.

I would love to hear.

And that is our first tool of the two tools we're going to talk about today.

So as I said, with these two tools, there's ones that create thoughts and there's ones that create feelings.

And so this first one was creating thoughts.

The next one is focused actually on creating feelings and I really love using this tool.

There's really not much to it.

I don't have a worksheet or anything for this one, but I love this way of thinking and approaching things because it can be used in so many areas of life, but especially in infertility.

And that is how we intentionally create feelings.

So what I will think about is I will think about something in the future and how I want to feel during that experience.

So the common place that this comes up is like, how do I want to feel on transfer day.

How do I want to feel during the two week wait.

How do I want to feel during the holidays with family over.

How do I want to feel at the baby shower.

We come up with what would be my goal emotions.

Now here we can lay out our goal emotions but we also need to be realistic.

For example, in my two week wait I'm not just going to put positivity and hope.

I know doubt is going to come.

I know fear is going to come.

I know worry is going to come.

And so I want to be realistic about my emotion creation.

So the way that I would approach it when I was approaching like my next two week wait is I would say, I want to feel hopeful.

I wanna feel excited, but I also wanna feel compassionate of my fears.

I want you to be realistic.

I typically like to stick to somewhere between two to four emotions that you're working towards.

And then what you do is you list out, what do I need to think about.

What do I need to believe to feel that emotion.

So for example, I want to be hopeful.

To me, this one is an aspirational type of emotion.

So I would list out thoughts like, this could be the embryo.

I could be pregnant within the next couple of weeks.

X and X date could be our due date.

We could have a baby by this holiday.

These hopeful kind of similar to excitement as an emotion.

These things that help cultivate hope and excitement around my journey.

This is a new protocol.

This is a new cycle.

This is a new embryo.

These are all thoughts that help me feel hopeful, that help me feel excited.

So I list them out and I intentionally come to these.

So on day one of my two week wait, I literally sit down and I read all of my thoughts that help me build hope and excitement.

And I check in every single day, as often as you want, multiple times a day, if it's on my phone or whatever, to remind myself, these are the thoughts I wanna think on purpose to create excitement, to create hope.

Like I said, I wanna have compassion.

So what are some thoughts for that.

Maybe it is, of course with my past, there's gonna be some fear.

It wouldn't make sense if my brain didn't want to protect me with some doubt.

I want to love myself through the painful emotions of this two week wait.

Those are some examples of some thoughts that I could write down that remind me, hey, it's not all gonna be fun.

there's gonna be some painful emotions, but I can be compassionate towards myself during that time.

And so I list out my thoughts, whatever they are, sometimes it's just a couple like that.

Sometimes I literally have like 15 thoughts that help me feel excited.

I have 15 thoughts that help me feel compassionate and I list them all out and I intentionally, on a day to day basis during that time, check in and read those thoughts to help me create those emotions.

I mentioned I use this in so many areas, like you can use this as a baby shower.

If you're feeling really negative, I actually have a baby shower coming up in three days that I have to go to that I really don't feel super excited about.

I almost even just said that I don't wanna go to it.

That's not true.

I do want to go to it, but I'm not super excited about it.

The reason is why it doesn't matter, but I'm not super excited about it.

And so I did this work.

I thought, what do I wanna feel at this baby shower.

I wanna be happy for her.

And I wanna feel understanding of myself, right.

Compassionate understanding of how I'm feeling.

So I think about all the things, the thoughts I listed out of, I'm happy for her and her family.

I'm happy that they're growing their family.

What a beautiful example of what's possible to have children, et cetera.

These are the thoughts that helped me build some happiness for her.

And then I also thought about, of course it's not gonna be an easy experience for me.

Of course my brain is gonna be a little bit frustrated with this experience.

Of course I don't have to love the entire baby shower.

I can leave early if I want.

And those thoughts can help remind me to be understanding of myself during the process.

So this is how we do intentional emotion creation.

Often I think we just live our lives on autopilot.

We go through the emotions and feel, we go through the emotions, not the emotions, but we go through the motions of day to day life and we feel like emotions are just happening to us.

When we have more control than, and we think we do, we really do, we have more control over the experience and the ability to cultivate emotions.

And so we can use this type of tool to help us create the emotions we want to be experiencing during that process.

So I hope this was helpful, two different examples of ways to create thoughts and then ways to create emotions.

I hope that you guys put this into use.

Like I said, share how you're applying these.

I love to hear what you guys are doing with it.

And I will talk to you all again next week in our month all about self love and compassion.

Talk to you soon and have a great 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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