45. Why Our Differences (Having Infertility, etc.) Make Us So Uncomfortable

Hi, friends. Welcome to Fearless Infertility a podcast for women struggling with the mental anguish that comes with infertility. My name is Jenica and after suffering in silence for too long I was able to pull myself out of the dark, take control over my mind, and create joy during my infertility experience. I’m here to help you do the same, sister. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to Fearless Infertility, episode 45, why our differences, having infertility et cetera, make us so uncomfortable. In today’s episode I will be talking about why we feel so uncomfortable when we are different from the crowd. Why it’s okay because our brain is just trying to protect us. And how to look at ourselves in a way that is completely empowering so you can genuinely create a life that you love and are proud of. Let’s get to it.

Hello, my beautiful friends. I hope you’re having a fabulous day. And if you’re not, I hope that being here with me today might just add a little bit of joy, a little bit of happiness, and that you feel like you’re hanging out with a friend, because that’s how I see you.

My day is honestly not going too bad. I actually woke up at 10:30 today. I have not done this in I honestly cannot remember how long. Like what is actually happening? So lately, I mean, it’s like the holidays, right? When I’m recording this, it’s before Christmas. You guys will hear it the first week of the new year in 2022 if you’re listening to it right when it releases.

And I mean, you know how it is during the holiday time, you have so many fun things that you’re doing. There’s lots of stuff that you want to get done and family coming into town. And I actually have someone that helps me with my home, she’s a lifesaver.

So she works full time with my mom and I was mentioning to my mom one day that I needed some help around the house because I run this business, I have my Slice of Style business. I am a mom to my twins, I’m a wife. And then also keeping on top of the house is a lot to do on your own. So I was mentioning to my mom, I’m like I don’t need someone full time to help me. But I need maybe like an hour or two a day.

And she’s amazing because she’ll come over for an hour or two when I need her after work. And I texted her yesterday and I said, “Hey, if you’re missing me, I could use you for a couple hours today.” And she was here from 3:30 until, I think it was 9:30. And we were both literally working our butts off, like we did not stop.

And the main floor is clean. We organized the bottom floor because my sister and her little twins are here with her husband. But the top floor is just really, really messy still. So that’s kind of my philosophy that I’ve lived by in this last little while, I can have one floor of my home clean. But that means that one of the others is most likely a disaster. So I’m sitting in my office and I’m like, can we walk from the door to the desk? If we step over a few things, there’s a small path.

So anyway, today I woke up at seven and then Tyler woke up. He went downstairs to do the Peloton and I said hey, will you shut the door, I think I’m just going to sleep for a little bit longer because it’s Christmas break, my kids are off school.

I let them watch their iPads on Tuesdays and Fridays we’ve decided because it’s too addicting if they do it every single day. And so they were on their iPads for a little bit. And I fell back asleep and woke up at 10:30. I needed it, it sounds like.

So there’s a lot of things that I’m still excited to do, like make a maybe wider path from the door to my desk in my office that we can actually walk and be a little bit more organized. If you’ve been following on Instagram, I’ve been organizing my home. I ordered basically the entire Container Store. And we’re going through each room one by one.

So we’ve got things to do, but I feel really proud of myself. We’re getting there and my body just really needed that rest because we have been going lately.

So we are here in the new year, 2022. And I’m so excited for this year because I’m excited about what all of us as a community will become. I’m excited for us this year about the experiences we will go through to be able to become the human beings that we were always meant to be.

And I cannot wait to work with you this year and teach you tools that I have learned that, honestly, I would say me 2021 my most growing– I don’t even know if that’s proper grammar. I grew the most in 2021, I think, than I have in a long time because I was pushed out of my comfort zone so much.

I feel like I was uncomfortable all the time and so I was able to grow so much in a good way. I was able to learn tools and concepts that at first oftentimes my brain wanted to reject. And then I gave it thought and tried out new ideas and these tools have been absolutely life changing for me.

So here in 2022 I’m going to continue to share those tools with you and I hope you’ll join me in Fearless Infertility program when doors are open as well because I genuinely think that this is the way to create whatever life it is that you want, and to really empower you to be able to know that you’re capable of experiencing anything that comes your way this year. So this is our year, friends, I’m excited.

This week’s podcast review is from Ava fan for life. And Ava fan for life says, “I love this podcast. Jenica is such an amazing coach and the tools she provides for dealing with not only infertility, but any trial in life are so valuable. Highly recommend. I’ve dealt with infertility for seven years, and I’ve done IVF three times. And I wish so badly that I’d had this podcast as a resource when I was in the thick of it all.”

Please email me at [email protected]. I need to change my email by the way, I’m working on that. But for now, email me at [email protected] with your size and address and I will get those pj’s and socks sent out to you. And anyone else who’s listening, I choose a new winner every week for my buttery soft bamboo pj’s and socks to send out to you as a thank you for leaving a rating and review.

This helps bring more women into our community, and helps them to be able to more easily access the Fearless Infertility tools because, I mean, you can probably relate I don’t think that most of us expected to experience infertility. And so it’s really nice to be able to easily search for tools that are helpful when we do realize that this will be our circumstance.

So please leave a rating and review, it helps these women. And then I also like to treat you as well with a pair of pj’s and socks to say thank you for your time.

I am very excited about today’s podcast episode. And to be honest with you, creating this podcast is an absolute delight for me because I’m constantly seeking and looking for ways to be able to uplift your life and offer you tools to be able to see things in a way that will benefit you and that will serve you in your life to empower you.

And this podcast topic is the same purpose. And we’re going to be talking about standing out and kind of what that means. And I got this idea because I taught a lesson in church, I teach the youth, they’re at ages 11 through 13. And twice a month I talk with this amazing group of young people about life’s challenges, about becoming closer to Jesus, about just really finding their way. And this is similar to the topic that we talked about on Sunday.

And it’s about being a peculiar people. And people of my church, I think that’s a common concept. And it’s because I think a lot of the things that we as followers of Jesus Christ do are different than the world, right? And even just little things, and by no means am I saying that my way and every single thing I do is the right way, okay? I am an imperfect human being that is trying her best and continuing to learn and grow.

But there’s certain things that are in my church that are a little bit different. So for example we don’t drink alcohol. And honestly, if I wasn’t part of the church, I probably would. And I don’t think there’s like anything terribly wrong with it. Obviously, it’s not great for our liver, it’s not great for our bodies, I think it’s poison.

But it’s not like the majority of the world probably abuses it, I think it’s more of a social thing. I am personally glad that I never drank alcohol because I honestly, I think I would be have become an alcoholic after my kids were born. And I’m not joking. It sounds kind of funny, but I turned to overeating a little bit and I think I probably would have wanted to numb my emotions a little bit more with the use of alcohol. So I personally am glad that I didn’t use it.

And so anyway, but that being said if you drink, I am not judging you. I don’t think that my way is the right way. I think that my way is the right way for me, which is obviously why I’m choosing it. But there’s certain things about the way that I live, and I know the way that you live, that are different from the world.

And I was talking to these kids about this and while I was preparing this lesson, and again, this podcast, I was thinking about why does it make us uncomfortable when we are different from the world? I think especially when we’re young, but I also experienced this again in my early 30s, where I kind of started to feel a little a little bit insecure.

It makes us feel uncomfortable when we are different from the world. And I know through what I’ve learned this past year is that the brain is just trying to protect us. So when our brains were created and when human beings first lived on the earth, if they were different from their tribe or they were different from the people that they surround themselves with, it could literally mean life or death.

And so if they were outside of the group they could have experienced any number of catastrophes that would have led to the end of their lives. Being attacked by animals, starvation, elemental stresses on our body with weather. And so our brains still tend to think that way for our survival.

So there’s nothing wrong with us when we want to be a part of the group.  We want to be similar to other people, because that’s genuinely how our brains were created. And we can appreciate that, right? We can say, “Hey, brain, thank you for trying to protect me.”

But now that we know that, that typically now in our modern day, if you’re listening to this, if you are different than other people, you are not going to die. You might be judged by other people, you might be criticized. But typically it’s not a difference between life and death in most situations that you and I are faced with in our lives today.

And so from that perspective, we can then make decisions based on our prefrontal cortex and be more intentional when our brain wants to offer us thoughts that are not serving us. When we want to be like other people that in those circumstances it wouldn’t genuinely serve us, we can then use our prefrontal cortex to make decisions from a proactive place versus a reactive place.

And this also leads into self-confidence. And I learned a lot about self-confidence in 2021 because I think it was something that I needed to learn the most. For me in middle school, and I think for probably a lot of you in middle school, I think that’s a very common time to be super insecure because you’re trying to learn about the world, about where your place is in the world, about hormones. Fun times.

I always tell people I would not take a million dollars to relive middle school because it was just a really difficult, weird time in my life. But it was fascinating, because I noticed in my early 30s, late 20s, that I started to feel a little bit, not as self-confident. And I was very confused by this at first because I didn’t understand where self-confidence comes from.

And I did an entire podcast episode on self confidence that I go into further detail on this that I suggest you listen to. But to put it briefly, self-confidence comes from knowing that you’re capable of feeling all of the emotions that come with certain challenging circumstances for you and moving forward anyway.

So in most of our circumstances that we are in in our lives, we’re typically not in physical danger. So essentially, what it comes down to is that when we are scared of something, or we are fearful of something, and it is causing us anxiety, it’s because we are scared of feeling that emotion. It’s not a comfortable emotion, we would prefer to feel positive emotions like joy, happiness, contentment, peace.

But when we are aware of what the fear is based on, it becomes a lot less scary. It’s like shining a flashlight in a closet that we’re scared a monster is in and when we see what we’re actually afraid of, it’s not physical harm. It’s feeling this emotion that is super uncomfortable for us.

Then we can say, “Okay, step back, I have survived all of the uncomfortable circumstances that I have been in thus far in my life. And I am fully capable of feeling these emotions, even though I don’t like them necessarily. But I know that experiencing them will help me get to my result that I want.” Then we are much more willing to go through them because it’s not as scary as we thought that it once was.

And so self-confidence comes from knowing that we are capable of feeling any emotion, that we are capable of surviving it. And when we can see that that’s what we were scared of all along, it’s not doing the thing that we want to do, it’s feeling that discomfort while doing it. And so we can be fully self-confident, all of us, because we know that we are capable because we’ve done it before. And we are fully capable of doing it again.

I cannot separate my knowledge of who I am, which is a daughter of God from the work that I do here, because it’s in me. It’s a part of me, this is why I’m here because I know through my experiences with infertility, and the awareness of who I am, which is a divine daughter of my creator, that doing this work is something that I have been called to do because of who I am.

And I see you because of who you are. You were created by our Creator. You are divine, you are royalty. And so knowing who I am and what I am capable of because of who created me and because of evidence that I have survived every difficult emotion that I’ve ever been through allows me to continue to move forward with confidence.

Some of the things that I say to my kids frequently are– You know, I would probably say I say this at least once a day, is being your mama is my absolute favorite thing in the whole world. And I think in part it is because I see the truth in motherhood, which is that in co-creation with my husband and with God we created and brought a human life into this world.

And so I see the truth in who they are and who I am. And it is something that I think can be washed away from experiences we have in the world, thoughts that we allow in our mind. So I almost feel like the things that I know now are things that my soul knew and then forgot.

And I had a beautiful conversation a couple weeks ago when I was hosting Jodi Moore’s book launch. And it was this amazing woman that I’d never met, her name is Emily Christensen, you can find her at Emily Christensen Coaching. And she does coaching for families, specifically in relation to pornography. Her family was destroyed by it and there’s a lot of drama and details to the story that she has not shared.

But she really wants to help prevent that in other families. And I had had this question on my heart because there are certain circumstances that we are presented with in our life that I don’t think, I’m like I wouldn’t have chosen this. This is way too hard. And I think all of us can relate to that, where we think that, I mean, there’s no way I would have chosen this. This is too hard, I just can’t trust that.

And so I thought about that lately and I thought, well, I know that my God values agency. And the reason why I know that is because his plan was to come to earth and we could all be 100% accountable and choose our own lives.

And so in that war in heaven that I believe was there, we could either choose that plan of agency and come to the earth and we would have trials and be able to choose what we wanted to choose. Or we could choose Satan’s plan, which you don’t have happiness or joy, but you also don’t have sadness. It’s kind of like more neutral but you don’t have any choice, everyone would just be happy all the time.

And there’s sometimes where I’ve thought that doesn’t sound that bad. But I can see that in making our choices, we are able to see the strength that we have and we’re able to develop characteristics that we wouldn’t be able to develop otherwise. And so I trust that my God values agency.

And so I know that he would have presented the whole plan for me before I had to choose. Because I don’t think that he would have hidden things from me because he values agency and because he values me as a divine creation. And he wanted me to be able to fully choose what I wanted to in order to progress and grow or in order to choose Satan’s plan.

So that being said, I had this conversation with Emily that I met. And there had been this question on my heart, though, because I was like there are certain things that I just don’t think people would have chosen in life. There’s really horrific, awful things that people experience in this life, and many of them being at an impact or as a result of other people’s choices.

And so there’s certain things that I’m like, honestly, like the awful things that happen in the world, would we have chosen that? And she said something that I thought was so beautiful. And I hadn’t even brought this up to her, I just think it was kind of a divinely inspired moment.

And she said, I believe that I chose everything that has happened to me in my life because, she said before she was on this earth I want to be like Jesus Christ. And God said, you can be like Jesus Christ. You can, and this is the path.

And she said, I know I would have chosen to experience what I’ve experienced with the disintegration of my family, with all of the trials I’ve gone through with my dad and his choices that have impacted me, even though I didn’t deserve it. I know I would have chosen that to become like my savior, Jesus Christ.

And that was like, I mean, I can hardly say that without being emotional because that feels like truth to me. And there are so many things that you experience in infertility and in any other big trial in your life where it will bring you to your knees begging for mercy, begging for more strength. And I think that as divine creations of our Heavenly Father, that we chose that ahead of time. That we knew we would experience this, because we knew that it would allow us to become like our Savior. That was our path. That was what we chose.

And so I love this perspective because this gives me so much respect for all of the human beings that are in existence on this earth. I believe that we all chose to be here. Now, are there really horrific, awful decisions that many human beings on this earth make? Absolutely. And so I don’t agree with the decisions. But from a basic standpoint of acknowledging who we all are, I stand in respect for every human being for making that initial decision.

Now, do I agree with all of these awful, horrific decisions that they have then made since then? No. Do I support that? Absolutely not. But this perspective has allowed me to, without having to have anyone prove anything to me, I automatically respect other human beings because I see their wholeness and their worth. And I’m so impressed by that decision that they made.

And so I think automatically we have chosen to stand out from the crowd. I think that we did before now when we can even remember that we did. And so if you are feeling uncomfortable in infertility because you think it makes you different from other people, I want you to remember this and try this thought on. That maybe this is something that I chose so I could become my highest self.

And there will be days where you will probably doubt that, as I do. Where I say there’s no way that I would have chosen this hard path. This is too hard. I don’t feel capable. I can’t see myself choosing this. But I want you to try on this thought. This, for me, has been incredibly empowering because then I can then honor my soul and my spirit, who knew that I was capable of this.

And I can rely on that knowledge to help me to continue to move forward with the knowledge that I can be self-confident in knowing that I have survived any of the awful emotions that I have experienced thus far. I see you as a beautiful, divine being and I respect you for these trials that I believe you chose before you even came to this earth.

I believe that this is exactly what you were made for. And I believe that you are fully capable of continuing to move forward even when it’s hard. And I am a huge Peloton fan. I think I talk about this quite frequently over on Instagram. I’ll do little Instagram stories of me on my Peloton. And Robin is one of my favorite instructors. And she’s not part of my church, but I don’t think that we need to believe the same things to acknowledge who we are.

We are all sons and daughters of God. And she says so much truth that I absolutely love. And she talks all the time about the fact that we deserve more than easy. Our spirits deserve more than an easy life. We chose these challenges because of who we knew we would be because of them.

So when you are standing out of the crowd because you were experiencing infertility and you don’t believe that it is a comfortable place to be, you’re right. But it’s also the place, in my opinion, that you were meant to take up. You were meant to take up this space because this is such a challenging trial that you knew your soul was capable of moving through and your spirit is capable of. And you can acknowledge that in yourself at any given time, it is a choice.

I think that you are strong and brave, even on the days where you don’t feel it. I think that there is opposition in all things so that we can have the full human experience and be able to really savor those incredible moments and be proud of ourselves when we see the contrast to those days where we just really don’t know if we’re capable.

So when you are part of the crowd, when you are different from what you believe is everyone else being able to easily conceive children, I want you to remember that you are strong and you are experiencing this because you are strong. And you made that choice.

And this may be a very strange concept for some of you. If you are not from my same background, or if this is something that you haven’t talked about with your friends and family before this might be a little weird. You might say I don’t know, this sounds a little tricky.

But it might be something that will really benefit you as it has benefited me and helped me to really stand in my own power. And remember that I am literally created from the Ultimate Creator and I have that DNA. I have that divinity in me where I can create anything that I want to. And from that place of power we can choose the thoughts that serve us and thereby choose any result that we want to get in our lives.

I love you all so much. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day. If you are interested in working with me this year, I cannot wait to walk in empowerment together as divine beings that I know we are. So go to fearlessinfertility.com You can get on the wait list for the program and I will let you know all the information when the doors open.

I will also send you my Morning Mindset Magic Checklist in the meantime so you can start doing the items in your day to feel your most empowered and remember that divinity within you. I love you. I will see you here next week.

I know how tough it is to struggle through infertility. If you’re ready to get ahead of the pain and frustration, the best way is to create an ironclad mindset. That’s where it all starts. I have the best free download for you, you’re going to love it. It’s my morning mindset magic checklist. You’ll get the seven tips I use to create my mindset each morning so I can create a life I love despite my challenges.

You will lower your anxiety and increase your peace. I spent a couple years of trial and error and finally came upon this list of actions I take or never take every morning, even when I don’t want to because they work every single time. Download for free at fearlessinfertility.com/mindsetmagic.

Thanks for listening to Fearless Infertility. If you want the best infertility support and community on the planet visit fearlessinfertility.com. See you there.