What's interesting to be aware of is that you can meet similar challenges on either type of day and it's not the type of day itself that will dictate whether you breeze through dealing with those challenges or you struggle.
How you experience and cope with things that show up in your day depends on your state of mind which determines whether you are in the Emergency State, Neutral State or Living State.
On those days that you are struggling, you are in the Emergency State, and when you are in the Emergency State, the analytical part of your brain (Thinking Brain) gets side-tracked because from a real danger perspective it is too slow to deal with Emergencies.
The part of your brain that responds to your emotions (Feeling Brain) is very primitive, and doesn't know the difference between a real emergency or any distress you might be feeling due to dealing with a difficult fertility journey.
With your Thinking Brain unable to function effectively the tasks you usually find simple and straightforward or even complex tasks that you typically enjoy sinking your teeth into feel difficult and hard to achieve. You also notice everything that is going wrong in your day because your Feeling Brain is on full alert for problems.
You have control over this though, because you can choose what you think which determines how you feel and in turn which State you are in.
You can do this as your day progresses, but it is always to get ahead of the game isn't it so right from the start of each day you want to make sure your Thinking Brain is working collaboratively with your Feeling Brain to make sure that you are not inappropriately in the Emergency State.
To help you with this, I have put together a Daily Pep Talk for you to carry out each morning.
Now if that makes you think, oh no I already have so much to do each day that's fine as it takes less than 3 minutes and you can do it before you even get out of bed.
My motto is Simple Solutions for Powerful Change and things can't get any simpler, yet powerful than your Daily Pep Talk
Your Daily Pep Talk uses Conscious Emotional ProcessingTM in the form of inviting your Thinking Brain and Feeling Brain to plan out how your day is going to be.
The thoughts from your Thinking Brain will create the imagery and emotion that your Feeling Brain understands causing it to subconsciously look for ways to make your day happen as you imagine it. When parts of your day don’t happen as you want, you are in a great state of mind to handle that.
There are three elements to your Daily Pep-Talk, and they each take less than a minute to do:
Conscious Character - With this, you are stepping into the person you want to be to carry out what you want to achieve that day. To do this, you will simply say, "I am the person who < state what action you want to take, the feeling(s) you want to experience and the reason for taking action>. For example, “I am the person who carries out my Daily Pep Talk because I know that it will help me to feel calm in my mind and set me up for a great day”. By adding in the feelings to this statement, you are engaging your Feeling Brain, helping to motivate you into taking action. You can have more than one Conscious Character statement focused on anything you want to achieve that day.
Conscious Intending - The next step is to run through your day in your mind and imagine everything you want to happen, big and small, working out as you want. Do this with your eyes closed and as you run through the activities of your day say what you are imagining.
You can experience this purely through words in your mind or you may see images as well, the important part is to experience the feelings. For example; “I enjoy having a nice breakfast with my partner?”, “I have a nice walk in the park with my dog”, “I feel calm and relaxed on my way to work”, “I love how my colleagues all smile at me at work”, “I enjoy sharing my talk at work and how interested everyone is.”.
Hopefully, you get the idea, just a quick run through your day with a focus on your day going well. That said, it is important to let go of your day having to go this way which I appreciate may feel contradictory but the reason for this is that if you put pressure on your day having to be like this then you end up imagining things going wrong. You won’t be able to help yourself even if it is on a small scale because if your Feeling Brain gets any whiff of stress, even the tiniest bit because you’ve started focusing on the need to control an outcome it will want to protect you. Your Feeling Brain will aim to protect you by looking out for problems causing you to notice all the things that go ‘wrong’ in your day rather than all the things that are going well. So, when you are imagining your day ahead just let the thoughts drift through your mind with no big emotional attachment to them having to go that way.
Conscious Gratitude - Before I tell you about this, I must explain a problem I’ve got with gratitude because it is important to your emotional well-being. I acknowledge that gratitude plays a useful part in our lives which is why it is part of your Daily Pep Talk. However, it seems to me that gratitude has become a very trendy thing these days and I don’t believe it is always being used for good. To me there is a dark side of gratitude and when I hear someone saying to a person who is struggling with something like a difficult fertility journey to be grateful I want to shout, “Seriously STOP with the gratitude bomb when someone is in pain.”
If you are in a place of distress and someone tells you to be grateful it is completely dismissing your feelings. Sure, there’s always going to be someone else worse off and yes you may have good things going on in other areas of your life, but a smack in the face upset should not be squashed down by gratitude.
Those difficult feelings deserve to be heard, and if they aren’t, they will be left to fester. Acknowledging your upset allows your feelings to flow and will help you feel emotionally in control rather than trying to control your emotions which of course is what we are aiming for with Feel Right Emotional EmpowermentTM, so be FREETM (see what I did there) to tell someone to beep off if that they tell you to be grateful when you are upset.
Back to what I mean by Conscious Gratitude which is to appreciate that you can feel gratitude in the moment as you move through your day. You can set the intention to notice those times rather than needing to put aside a time each day in which to be grateful. For me, the feelings are so much more authentic when I experience gratitude in the moment, and I notice gratitude way more often because it is naturally filtering through my day.
So just before completing your Daily Pep Talk say to yourself, “I look forward to the feelings of gratitude that will naturally flow into my awareness as I move through my day”. Or a similar statement with wording that feels right for you.
At first, when you start to practise Conscious Gratitude, you might want to link it to your Conscious Intending. For example, when you have that lovely breakfast with your partner, you can feel grateful for that. Of course, your partner may have got out the wrong side of the bed, and so your breakfast might not go to plan, and you may not be feeling grateful. As you will find out later in the book, this may be a place for acceptance that things don’t always go your way rather than gratitude.
Alternatively, you may find you feel grateful for knowing how to set your day up well and look forward to sharing this with your partner. That’s the great thing about Conscious Gratitude, you start your day by acknowledging that gratitude is a great feeling to have and look forward to feeling grateful as it shows up through your day. Yet, you don’t feel forced to feel gratitude anytime you feel upset because someone has said you should. I hope this makes sense because when you experience gratitude in this way, it is a beautiful and powerful feeling.
I hope you have enjoyed this excerpt from my upcoming book, “I just want to have a baby: a guide for your emotional well-being on your journey from Fertility Despair to Fertility Freedom."
I will be announcing the launch date very soon, in the meantime if you are struggling emotionally due to a difficult fertility journey come and join our Freedom Fertility FormulaTM Emotional Well-Being Support Facebook Gr
