5 Fertility Mindset Misconceptions
Hey mama-bear,
Are you trying your best to create a fertility mindset – but still feel totally controlled by your moods and the ups and downs of your fertility journey?
Do you wish you could get a grasp on your thoughts – but you can’t seem to make the doubt and fear quiet down, even just a tiny bit?
Do you feel like you’re confused about how to still feel your feelings – but try to “think positive” too?
I was confused too.
In today’s brand-new podcast, we’re clearing up 5 Fertility Mindset Misconceptions.
We’re covering these 5 misconceptions:
1. Isn’t fertility a physical problem?
2. Isn’t mindset work just spiritual bypassing the reality?
3. Mindset work isn’t tangible. I have a hard time doing it because of this.
4. It’s too hard to change my beliefs around my fertility, after everything I’ve been through.
5. If I do fertility mindset work, then aren’t I admitting that it’s my fault it hasn’t happened yet?
These are all valid questions and are worthy of thought-out answers that you’ll find inside this episode.
In order to create change within our minds and bodies, we have to sit with the resistance to creating a fertility mindset in the first place…. BEFORE we can be with the solution the lies within.
You’re not gonna want to miss this one. It’s not a podcast preaching for you to DO BETTER. In fact, it’s the OPPOSITE of all that not-enough-yet NONSENSE.
You will finish this podcast with a new-found hope for both a baby-filled future, and a sincerely loving relationship with yourself (exactly as you are, right now, at this very moment).
xo Spenser
Listen to the full episode:
full episode transcript:
Welcome to the Fertile Ground podcast with Spenser Brassard. The only podcast that teaches you how to get your mind and body on board so you can get your baby on board. And now, here's your host, mind-body fertility expert and certified life coach, Spenser Brassard.
Hey, mama bear, as per usual, I'm very grateful and absolutely honored to be here with you today in your ears when you're on your walk, or you're in your car, or just doing stuff around your house. I've personally been spending a lot of my time just resting, napping, and honestly reflecting on my life and how I've been feeling and what I want to create.
And it's honestly been exactly what the doctor ordered. I intended to do this because I feel like I've been, or I noticed I've been using a lot of doing, and especially since we were in our renovation, like a lot of doing stuff around the house as a bit of a distraction to how I was feeling. So, although I've been resting, I've also been sitting in a lot of discomfort of, you know, a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of nothingness, and honestly, a lot of boredom as well. I feel just so much clear headed, like the result of that is a lot of connection to my spirit, which is worth every minute of it.
Okay. So I want to start this week's podcast with a DM I received from a client who literally just finished her six months with us inside of Fertility Mind-Body Mastery. So if you're just joining in, Fertility Mind-Body Mastery is the only program that I offer and it's the only way you can work with me. And so, here is what one of my clients sent me: "Spencer I'm pregnant and I'm shocked. We didn't get the best news at our last follicles study appointment. The doctor said if this round didn't work, IUI would be our best option. I immediately felt my whole body close up. I felt like nothing would work for us. I started doing your meditations at night and I know they are what got us as positive. I feel like our last group coaching call, the last coaching call that I've had with you, helped me so much when we talked about letting myself feel sad and disappointed. After this appointment I let myself feel depressed for an entire week, but I journaled every morning and let myself feel the sad. Not feeling guilty about this helped so much. Thank you for the amazing work you do. We are forever grateful to you." So I want you to notice something. She didn't get good news at the doctor and she actually felt depressed. Still got pregnant. How is that possible? Right. That's so ironic. And that's so different to what we think is the path to pregnancy.
This isn't a typical perfectionist fantasy when you're trying to conceive. This isn't what you would expect. And this isn't what your monkey mind even tells you what's possible. But this is the power of mastering a fertility mindset.
Now, hopefully your curiosity is peaked and you're thinking, what the fuck is Spenser talking about? How is this even possible? And you know, maybe a fertility mindset isn't really what I think. So keep listening, because we're going to talk about all the misconceptions around mastering a fertility mindset.
So let's start by going through five misconceptions. Number one , is infertility solely a medical issue. Maybe you believe that fertility is mostly a physical issue. And if believing this makes you feel good and better then keep believing this. The only reason why we want to work on disbelieving a thought is if it makes us feel like shit, right? And I know I've worked with clients who felt relief in this thought; believing it was a physical issue and just wanted to work with me to feel better.
But my, in my sovereignty, in my true belief, I didn't believe this, right. Something about me knew this journey was about something deeper. And I'm not denying at all that the physical is a component, is one component of fertility. But it's not everything. And research confirms this because of the mind-body connection and research done at the Domar Center of Harvard, as well as a continuous and fascinating study of epigenetics.
The mind-body connection is of course the effect in which your thoughts and your beliefs have on your nervous system, the hormones, and the organs inside of you. If your thoughts around your fertility journey leave you feeling like you were in a constant threat, needing to always be on and never safe to breathe, rest, or feel pleasure, then this can cause your body to respond to these thoughts and in doing so, your body is actually being an incredible servant to you and doing exactly what it's meant to do. And studies show that stress can shut down activity of a hypothalamus pituitary gland, which controls the reproductive system. It controls ovulation, it controls your periods. Um, and that's just one of the examples of how. Stress can affect our bodies. And I actually saw, um, how COVID had an effect on our bodies and research backs that up as well.
So epigenetics, on the other hand, is the study of how your behaviors and your environments can cause changes to the way your genes work. Before the study of epigenetics, we believed we were just purely victims to our genes. Predispose to our inherited DNA and that our bodies were just set in stone. Like for example, if your mother had diabetes, it was thought of that you would get it as well. Now we know that we can turn our genes on and off based on environmental factors, such as diet, stressors, and pollutants.
And addressing these environmental factors can affect the gene expression of your embryos and your uterine environment and of sperm as well. So it's actually really fucking cool. I think that is very cool; for me personally I felt incredibly empowered and garnered a very healthy sense of control to know that I wasn't a victim to a purely physical issue. Nor will I ever be. I will always have a healthy sense of control in my response to my mental and physical health. Right. And I want you to hear that again, a healthy sense of control in my response to myself. And this is what I learned in my fertility journey. This is what you can learn on your fertility journey and pass this incredible wisdom onto your child.
So number two, mindset work is spiritually bypassing. Basically believing that mindset work is all about thinking positive and attempting to bypass and change how you really feel, to think, quote, unquote, more positive. This is how it started out for me, right. Just think positive, you know, especially as a result of reading the law of attraction.
And when I was in a high vibe, right. I was like, God, I'm going to be pregnant so fast. Right. And then I would wake up one day and it'd be like, shit, it's gone. And you know, we've all had those days. The high vibe is no longer there because, remember, I'm a human and this still occurs regularly within my life. And when it would happen, when I was trying to conceive, I was so mad at myself and I resisted all of the negative emotion. And that's what toxic positivity is. It's resistance from the human experience. It's guilt for feeling anything other than fantastic. And if you're a human, you do not feel fantastic all the time, even when you have your baby.
And the only thing worse than having a shitty day is believing that you shouldn't be having a shitty day. Right. And for the fellow perfectionist, the only thing worse than not being perfect is believing you should be perfect. What I teach in my group program, and how I coach, and what you learned in the testimonial at the start of the podcast - I teach in the utmost compassion for the human experience.
I was raised and bred as a perfectionist, not just by my parents, but by culture, by teachers, by, , my coaches. Right. Like in sports, by my dance coach, you know, and everything and believing that anything less than the best, just wasn't enough. And not only that, but motivating me with, you know, by putting down myself, right. Just like a lot of people did and also attaching my worth to my accomplishments and lack thereof accomplishments. And this led to a lot of shame around just being myself and feeling how I feel. So unless tamed, the monkey mind has a unique way of making your feelings and/or actions wrong or bad
somehow. And the fertility journey can amplify this and shine a light on this habit behavior, a mindset, that you've most likely had your whole life.And it will most likely grip even stronger onto the identity of being the best at first and cause more resistance within your mind and body. So what I slowly unraveled before getting pregnant was letting go of all of that soul-sucking guilt for being a human and having human emotions of anger, sadness, deep grief, not wanting to jump out of bed in the morning and annoyance and frustration.
And I can say with 100% certainty that the sooner you accept these emotions, the faster it leaves and the less torturous the experiences. I mean, it still sucks to feel uncomfortable. Like it's still, you know, feels like shit, but that's okay. So what if it fucking sucks, at least you're feeling things. And this is one of the crucial skills I teach, because it will lead to a lifetime of love for yourself. And love for your child. Even in their shitty days, you can hold them in their sadness without needing to fix them or telling them they're wrong in feeling the way they feel. And we do this by believing that there's truly nothing to fix about ourselves. Even now, as you are on the road to your baby, there's nothing wrong with you.
I mean, I know I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but I've always said that this fertility journey is not about becoming something that you're not, but unbecoming who you think you should be, so that you can be who you really are. And this goes against everything we're taught. Right?
Culture teaches, do more, add, add, add, have, have, have. My approach is less is more, don't add, subtract, and UNBECOME who you thought you should be. And this is when you can review who you really are. Okay. And oddly, this mental and emotional relief just truly works wonders on the mind and body as you let go of all of that resistance.
So no, fertility mindset work is not about spiritually bypassing and closing your heart off to reality, but learning how to open your heart deeply and hold yourself with so much love and the variations of our emotions and our human experience.
Number three, fertility mindset work is intangible. How do I know if it's working? What if it's not? So to me saying fertility mindset work is intangible is like saying that college is intangible or school is intangible. Right? And that's why I think this work is a good analogy with school. Although in my opinion, way more fun. I wasn't a fan of school. I actually was a college dropout. That was like my way of being a little rebel. But, in school the intangible is a different working brain, right? A skill. You don't leave with anything tangible besides a diploma or a degree, but you still value it and know that it will provide for you and help you to create the life, and in this case, the career that you want.
But in my case with the mindset, it's the family that you want. But you still have to put the degree to work. Let's say you become a nurse. You still have to put what you learned into practice daily. And eventually it becomes second nature. Or I guess, you know, we could also look at this from arguably a completely alternative perspective, but you received something very tangible from life coaching, which is a new and improved brain that you can apply to every area of your life.
I swear. The biggest takeaway all of my clients have beyond getting pregnant is how it's helped them in all of the categories, in their careers, in their marriages, in setting boundaries, within their families, in their health. Because how we do one thing is how we do everything. And that's a beautiful way to simplify life.
Life coaching is very similar in that you're investing in a brain that thinks differently: learning how to change your thoughts about your current life circumstance to consciously think and believe thoughts that support new feelings of relief, of self love, and elicit feelings of safety, and at times relaxation.
From these new thoughts and emotions we tend to take new actions that eventually bring about new and often tangible results. And here's an example, and this is from a life coach called Brooke Castillo. She has a life coaching certification, I didn't go through her, but she still is very brilliant in her ways. Um, but this is her process: it goes circumstance. Right? The first thing is circumstance. A circumstance is neutral, it's not a judgment. It's a neutral statement about a life circumstance. So for example, this would be not pregnant yet. Then after circumstance, everyone has a different thought about that circumstance, which we create unconsciously and automatically without life coaching. To follow in this example, let's say your thought is I'm a failure, right? Or my body's failing me. This creates an emotion of shame, which motivates the shameful action, eating an entire pizza and drinking a whole bottle of Chardonnay motivated by guilt and shame. Results in still being on this trying to conceive cycle. The beautiful news about this is that these circumstance does not need to change in order for you to think and feel differently about yourself and your life.
New thoughts, elicit new feelings, which create new actions and then new results. Obviously the main tangible that my coaching has helped to create are the hundreds of human babies. Sounds kind of funny to say that, but it's true. And, and really when I look at my son, I'm like, oh my God, like you came from nothing, right. You, you started as a spec, as a spark of light, right. But everything that you have, that you're looking at always started from nothing. The chair you're sitting on, or the shoes you're wearing, they all started from nothing. An intangible idea that was eventually created as a physical manifestation, in a reality by another human.
And life coaching and creating a fertility mindset teaches you how to do this, how to create something from nothing in a compassionate and gentle way, instead of hustling, forcing willpower and a just do it mentality.
Okay. Number four, it's too hard to think and believe new thoughts. And the perfectionist brain really loves to say it's too hard. I'm just going to keep going at the pace I'm going. And I'm going to keep working really, really hard. This is way too hard to think new thoughts. I remember I was in a business meeting once and I heard an older man, an older white man, surprise shocker right there, right, say that we should judge people based off of their history. And I remember my whole body just shrilled when he said that and rejected this truth because it made life and people feel so concrete. If we want to change our thoughts and beliefs, then we have to begin to believe in just one thing. We have to believe in change, not from the space that something is wrong with me, and I need to fix myself, but from the space of nothing is wrong with me.
And I want to truly work on believing this with every cell of my body. We have to create a growth mindset. We have to let go of all of those fixed analytical thoughts that make us feel so stuck to our past and paralyzed or unable to move. We have to begin the process of letting go of our past. And all of those thoughts that make us feel destined to only what's happened so far.
I want to say something and give you permission to do something right now. I actually want you to think delusional and I'm not even kidding. For too long I allowed thoughts of well, people will think I'm crazy to believe I can get pregnant after my history. And they did. Uh, you know, it really did hold me back for a really long time. And it kept me in adding up the years and the statistics and wondering what would be so wrong with me that it hasn't happened yet. But guess what? So fucking what if people think you're delusional to finally believe after X amount of years?
So what if you even think you're crazy at first, lean into these crazy beliefs, have compassion for your Crazy. Let it exist inside of you. It is the way to your dreams. My approach to fertility mindset work is not hard in the conventional sense because it's not masculine and using willpower or trying to force yourself into something new, but it will challenge you out of your comfort zone, of the just do it mentality.
And this is uncomfortable at first. I mean, I still work on this, you guys, for example, and this is what my coach said to me this past week. You know, once you stop hustling, then you have to feel all of the feelings that you've been hustling not to feel. And that's exactly what happens, but this is exactly what needs to happen to welcome this new energy.
And at worse, what it is is an uncomfortable feeling. I like to describe this as a deep thawing process of the mind and the body. And it's really ideal for fertility, for your nervous system. And what I've really noticed is it's ideal for my connection to spirit, which only elicits incredible feelings of trust and permission to surrender.
And then the last one, number five, fertility mindset work is admitting and taking on the belief that it's my fault that I'm not pregnant yet. Now I really want you to listen to this one. It's absolutely not your fault that your current life circumstance is that you're not pregnant yet. Here's another perspective.
What if as human beings we had unexpected experiences in life and we all had this, right, no one was exempt. We, every single human, had an unexpected experience in their life. Life didn't go according to plan and in our way, through the fog of the fear and uncertainty, our healing ability that lied within these experiences was to learn incredible compassion for ourselves.
And in this field of compassion, we were able to both feel through the experience, in other words, to not deny our emotions of anger, frustration, confusion, and fear of what the future holds, but to learn how to hold ourselves through it, to take full responsibility in the role that we are asking for, which is mothering. To mother ourselves. Not to say that our healing is only on us. You know, we, and a big lesson for me was partnering with people who can also hold us in the experience, who can facilitate the healing. And to be honest, I kind of hate the word healing because it implies that something is broken and needs fixing.
Then I learned that what needs healing is the false belief that something is wrong with you in the first place. Having shitty days feeling anxious and being impatient is not a fertility problem, but shaming yourself for having negative human emotions is, and this is what we work on inside of my program, Fertility Mind-Body Mastery. Waking up with shame for your failure to reach the impossible standard of perfection is what can trip you up for years. It's what tripped me up for years. Perfection. Fertility perfection is not the goal, self-compassion is, forgiving yourself is, loving yourself is. Instead we need to learn the alchemy of compassion.
For these inevitably shitty days, we need to start making our emotions mean more than just emotions. We need to stop analyzing the shit out of every little thing and learn how to be with ourselves and increase our capacity to sit in the discomfort of being a human, to sit with pain, without creating the story of suffering. To sit next to the energy of fear as if you're sitting next to it on a park bench, and to just communicate with it telepathically and say, I'm here, I see you, I feel you. To love ourselves through this discomfort, ironically, as I've stated, the negative emotions and shitty days passed much faster when we learn how to treat ourselves this way and they become fewer and far between, but they will always be. Even when you have your baby, speaking from experience, the only thing you have control over is your response to yourself in these moments.
And I talk a lot about response in the private training that I offer if you apply and are accepted into Fertility Mind-Body Mastery. And here's what I want you to hear Mama bear, this is what the next generation needs. The highest purpose in my work for this world is that I can feel the next generation of souls coming through are desiring an environment in which they can have permission to be what they're signing up for, a human. The freedom to feel it all, permission to fail and fuck up and still be loved and a huge yearning to remember that they will always have a choice to love themselves through life's experiences, no matter what happens or what they move through in their lifetime. And we give them permission by giving ourselves permission for it.
And this is the best news ever because you get to let the fuck go of perfecting your fertility. Do you see how much deeper and kinder and healing the quality of fertility mindset work that I teach is. It is honestly your life's work. It will always be your life's work, and it plays out beautifully in every category of your life and will hold you in motherly compassion for as long as you live.
Once you learn these skills, it's the most beautiful remembering of who you really are and who you've been all along. Isn't that beautiful. This is who you've been all along. And what this experience of fertility is really connected to underneath the surface. And in this all the little fertility details seem so minor compared to this truth.
Instead, make this work your fertile ground. All the little details of how, when, when and where and why will follow easily and effortlessly when you make this your number one priority. There is a very compassionate, very forgiving, very humanity accepting approach to creating your baby. There is a so not complicated step-by-step process waiting for you to gently gift to yourself. And it is all laid out for you. And it will only cause relief, magic, and love for yourself as you move through this gentle process. And this can all be found inside of my six month group coaching program. It's where you get access to me weekly as your guide. As you move through this very unique approach to conceiving that miracle of yours that's waiting.
So you can apply for my program at www.spenserbrassard.com. I can't wait to see your application. Let's make some fucking magic. Okay. That's all for today. Lots of love. Bye.
Thanks for tuning in. If you want to fast track your mind-body connection you can sign up for free fertility mindset trainings at www.spenserbrassard.com.