I wanted to talk about the antidote to overwhelm because it’s something that will come up in your life again and again. It’s one thing I can be certain of is that you are gonna have times in your life where you feel overwhelmed with what is going on in your life, things, obviously, have not gone the way that you had pictured them in your head – they never do. And you’re going to be dealing with overwhelm, you’re going to be feeling a bit stuck, maybe, on where you are in life, what are you supposed to be doing, what’s going on, things like that.
So here is my recipe for overwhelm. You guys will all know, I had a total wig out last year. Ross ruptured his spleen, he was off work for four and a half months, I just felt drained. I didn’t have any energy, emotional or physical, to deal with anything outside of this kind of mess that we were in, I felt really overwhelmed, I felt really confused about what am I going to do with my business?
I had gone back to work in an office, which is an interesting story. I discovered that I am this health-type called connector – I need in-person, physical contact with people in order to thrive in life, and so I feel like that’s been the right decision for me, because that is actually how I felt. I felt like I was a caged animal when I was working from home, it all just felt like a little bit too much and I felt really unclear and really stuck with where I was.
So it’s kind of a four-step process – four things that I want you to consider when you feel like everything is just too much and everything is really overwhelming.
STEP 1: SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY
I say it all the time, is that the antidote to overwhelm is to simplify.
So I want you to think, when you feel like you’re in this space, where everything is too much, you don’t know what’s going on or where you’re headed, what can you delete? Or what can you cut out from your life? Or who can you cut out from your life?
Some times there are people who just drain all of our energy. Some times there are activities that just drain all of our energy. Some times there are things that just feel like we’re not enjoying them, we don’t know why we’re doing them, but we feel obliged to do them, or we feel like society says we should do them.
For me, when I was on my fertility journey, one of those was going to acupuncture. I had to go three times a week, in addition to my naturopath appointments, in addition to working in a management role, in addition to all of the other things that happen in life, and it was the point where I thought, “Something’s gotta give here.”
So I cut out the acupuncture. It can be really easy to fall into the trap, when we’re on our fertility journey, of thinking, “Oh, I have to do a hundred out of a hundred things.” And a hundred out of a hundred things, can I tell you, is not possible, I couldn’t.
If you’re stretched too thin and doing all of these things, you’re not doing them well, or they don’t light you up, and so it’s really time to focus on conserving your energy, looking at what things you can delete, that are no longer serving you in your life, and getting rid of them. So things change, times change, but when you cut out the things that don’t work for you, the overwhelm just starts to melt away.
Another example, for us, was we had an investment property that we owned that were renting out. We bought it in 2009, just after the global financial crisis, and that property just sucked money out of us the whole time we had it.
And it wasn’t just the money – it was also this mental load of always having to get tenants and tenants not doing the right things. We analyzed our life and decided it was time to let it go. We sold it at a loss – for less than we bought it. So when we sold it, we still had some residual mortgage to pay off.
But I’ve never looked back on that investment property. We cut our losses and life has felt so much better.
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step 2: take your time
The next thing that I recommend that you do is take your time figuring out the answer. You don’t need to do everything at once, you don’t need to figure out the answer right now, your life doesn’t need to be perfect. In life, things come in waves. You’ll feel stuck or overwhelmed at some future point in your life as well.
Take your time thinking about things, testing things out, thinking about, “Well, how would I feel if I changed this in my life?” Or “How would I feel?” And try to really visualize putting yourself in that place, but take your time. Don’t feel like you’re rushed into making a decision. Even if you are 43 and everyone’s telling you that your biological clock is ticking, you need to make a decision right now, taking an extra week, or an extra two weeks, or even a couple of months, in the scheme of things, is not going to make that much difference.
step 3: get off your phone
The third thing is to get off your phone. We are used to this fast-paced state of living, with everything is coming at us at once. We are used to multi-tasking all the time and then we have our phones and we have things like Facebook and social media.
Social media is wired to help us consume a lot of information at a small amount of time. It’s also wired to get us needing external gratification – so when your phone starts dinging with Facebook notifications, it’s stimulating something in our brains and not in a simplified, minimalistic sense. It is totally adding to the overwhelm that we feel, because we are absorbing so much more information than we used to.
I have no doubt that at a physiological, caveman level, our bodies and our brains have not caught up and adapted to where our society is and this information overload that we have. So please get off your phone, unfollow people, unfollow pages, take off the notifications on your phone. You might even uninstall the Facebook app on your phone, and just go and set a time to check, once a week, on the desktop, for what your announcements are. Just taking the announcements off your home screen on your phone, I dare say, would make a big difference.
step 4: get help
This has been a real big change in my mindset, since I went through all of these challenges on my fertility journey, and that is to get help. Some times, when we’re overwhelmed we can’t see the wood for the trees, and we feel like everything’s a bit of a fog, and it’s hard to know what the right decision is. It helps to have someone work through that with you.
Sometimes, a health professional can help you do some digging. I currently work with a life coach. I’m also in an e-course at the moment on various things. Since I had my miscarriage, I have changed my outlook – now I never hesitate to get help, whatever help that is, whether it’s emotional or spiritual, whether that’s from friends or family.
Studies show that the most successful people in the world – CEOs, multi-millionaires, billionaires – don’t hesitate to ask for help. And if you think about it, like if you owned a huge company, you wouldn’t be doing everything, right? You delegate things. So you almost need to have this change in your mindset that you will delegate some things in your life that you don’t have to have the burden of absolutely everything.
And so for me, that’s been working with a life coach and taking courses, and it’s helping me. I feel energized, I feel like I have someone who cares about me, who’s working through this with me, and it makes me feel a hundred times better. It helps me get to a resolution really quickly. I can’t recommend that enough.
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announcement: the fertility warrior intensive
The Fertility Warrior Intensive is back! It’s had such a makeover – instead of being six modules in six weeks, it’s now 12 modules in 12 weeks. As I said, I invest thousands of dollars in my education, in my learning, in my training, I read some thing like two audio books a week. I feel that I have so much more that I can bring you and I wanted to go at a more manageable pace.
It’s still intensive, you would still need to set aside about an hour a week, but there’s some really powerful lessons in it, and I really encourage you to check it out. We’ve had amazing results on this course. I don’t think I’ve had anyone do the full course on this and think that it hasn’t been really life-changing.
Mind-body programs have been shown to really improve IVF success rates, fertilization rates, end-points in cycles, all sorts of things, and so it can really help you improve your chances of falling pregnant.
But the course will help you through more than just your fertility journey. You’ll have tools to help you through anything that comes your way even after infertility. It’s inevitable that you will have future dramas in your life, and this will help you get clear on what to do in those situations, feel really confident and calm, moving through the hardships that we have in future life.
So for a tiny little cost, compared to the cost of IVF, the results, in terms of pregnancies, from my coaching and my Fertility Warrior Intensive Group have been mind-blowing.
The doors won’t be open permanently, they’re only gonna be open for a couple of weeks and then the doors will close and we’ll only run the program once every six months.
So if you’re interested in joining, then now is definitely the time to do it, and you get access to the course, including any future updates, for life.
And, obviously, have that support with me. I want to be that person for you, I want to help you on your journey, I want to help you feel like you are calm, confident, and empowered, because you’ve got me in your corner,
Learn more about the Fertility Warrior Intensive
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