It’s a good question so I thought I would spend some time today answering that whilst also sharing why I care so much about what I do.The first thing to understand is that whilst support groups serve the useful purpose of providing a safe place to chat, they don’t usually go beyond enabling people to feel heard.

Replies given generally come from the advice giver's perspective based on their values, beliefs and journey so far, which means that whilst advice is given with the best intentions, it is not unique to the receiver's needs and therefore may not be the most useful information for them to hear.

Free support groups are therefore valuable but are limited in their offering, which is why I’m being approached about Freedom Fertility Formula Specialists Training by people who run these groups, so they can give better support to their members

When it comes to charging though as Freedom Fertility Formula Specialists we can often feel conflicted. We’d love to be able to help everyone who needs us and we know that we can’t. Sadly not everyone can afford to work with us and like most people we need to earn money to pay our bills and live our lives.When I saw the following quote by Walt Disney though a light bulb went on in my head and it reconciled that conflict for me.

We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.

You see Walt Disney wanted to make people happy and to do that he made films. So in his mind he made money to make films, he did not make films to make money.

I want to reduce the mental anguish of infertility to improve lives and support pregnancy success.

This Walt Disney quote made me realise that the more clients I see and the more Freedom Fertility Specialists I train, with the knock on effect of how many clients they then also work with, the more able I will be to help those who can't afford my services.

Because when I am earning more money I can make a bigger contribution through charitable (and maybe one day even through philanthropic) giving.Many people can afford and want to pay for a premium 1:1 service, however for those that genuinely can’t I’m already doing what I can in relation to helping with that, whilst still recognising that I have to take care of myself and my family’s needs too.

I use the word genuinely because there is a difference between not being able to and not wanting to afford something. I appreciate it is unfair to have to pay for something that many others do not, however, there are many such things in life and unfortunately life isn’t always fair to us.

As one of my biggest values is fairness I aim to make things fairer for all people struggling with infertility, at least from the perspective of working with a Freedom Fertility Formula Specialist.

You may wonder why I care so much about the work that I do though, so I thought I would give you an insight by sharing a piece of my history with you.

I did not have my own fertility struggle although I watched my best friend Sarita go through one for over 10 years. It was a desire to support her that led me to train in HypnoFertility, which primarily focused on using the mind to help with pregnancy success.

I am very happy to say that I have been able to help Sarita and over 90% of my clients become pregnant and have their longed-for baby.

However, I very quickly began to realise that there was another problem EQUAL to the desire to get pregnant that my clients were facing and needed help with.

This was that their intense desire to have a baby that was going unfulfilled month after month, year after year, was having both a short and long-term effect on their mental health and the ability to live a fulfilling life. Worse, that this impact had the potential to continue even after fertility success.

A difficult fertility journey can change how a woman experiences her pregnancy, the type of birth she has and how her partner supports her. It can affect how a woman feels in those early weeks after her baby is born and how she copes with breastfeeding. Those who have had a difficult pathway to parenting also feel like they parent differently to those who have not.

I was already supporting clients through their emotional journey from pregnancy to parenting so it made complete sense to me to bring this into my fertility work also and the difference for my clients was tremendous.

However, I had to find a way of working with clients that got them off the downward cycle of despair before they became pregnant, which is how the Freedom Fertility Formula was born.

That is how helping those struggling with infertility and my deeper passion for supporting strong mental health and emotional well-being really began to merge.

It’s taken me quite a few years to make the complete link and whilst it's not an infertility journey, I believe the connection comes from the struggle and difficult feelings around my mums journey when pregnant with me and where that led.It’s a journey of loss and deep emotion and whilst a different kind of loss than grieving for the loss of a baby you’ve not yet had, it is a story of family.

Let me explain how for me my story connects with the work that I do.

My mum lost my biological dad when she was 8 months pregnant with me, which I am sure you can imagine was incredibly hard for her. I strongly believe though that the way it then impacted on our lives for years to come, could have been very different if she knew what I now teach around understanding emotions.I found out the above at 16yo, which meant the man I thought was my biological dad turned out not to be so. It didn’t make him any less my dad though and it was a wonderful lesson for me in how ‘blood is most definitely not thicker than water’ and that families are made up in all different ways.

I want to help couples grow their family in whatever way is right for them.

Those first two points messed me up big time and I thought there was something really wrong with me. But I HID how I was feeling from everyone and SILENTLY STRUGGLED ALONE FOR YEARS (does that sound familiar?).

When I FINALLY got help, I wished I’d reached out many years before.

Nothing impacts on your life like the silent words you play out in your head. Finding the right person to listen to you though is of the utmost important, because if you don’t the person you share with can bring you further down, forcing you to once again retreat and hide behind a mask that no-one knows is there.

I know my journey hasn’t been the same as yours but then no two people’s journeys are, even when they look the same. Even if two people have experienced similar fertility journeys, they will each have their unique feelings around that. In fact, sometimes a similar journey can mean not truly understanding how another person feels because you can inadvertently place your feelings into another’s situation.

The wonderful thing about working with emotions though is that when we support from a place of empathy, we realise we don’t have to feel what another person feels to be able to acknowledge and help them with their pain.

What we need to know is how to walk beside them on that journey and be there for them, listening to their pain, showing them how they can handle it and guiding them towards a different way of being that is right for them whilst living in the wait.

Ultimately, and coming back to the first thing I trained in to help Sarita to get pregnant, supporting the mind/body connection to help with fertility success too.

I hope you can see why this work is so important to me and why I MUST grow my business.

Because if I don’t, I can’t fulfil my life’s purpose which I believe is to save people from having to go through years of mental anguish and emotional pain like I did.

Whilst I could have chosen many different areas to focus on with this work which would have been a difficult decision to make, because of my amazing friend Sarita it turned out that I was destined to help those who are struggling with infertility. Supporting them initially with the emotional impact that their fertility struggle is having on their lives and then on-wards with their journeys, wherever they and their destiny decides for them to take.

If you have got to a place where you are ready to reach out, you may find that my unique Freedom Fertility First Aid session is right for you. You can find out more details here.