EP12: Juggling A Career with TTC? You Need THIS.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

Are there times when you feel like you are barely keeping your head above water, between your demanding career and trying to conceive? Learn the secret ingredient, most women miss, when it comes to truly having it all on this journey.

Transcript:

Hey gorgeous, if you want success on your fertility journey, you’ve got to have the mindset for it. It’s time to kick fear, negativity, doubt, shame, jealousy, and the whole clown car of low vibe fertility journey BS to the curb. I’m your host, Roseanne Austin, Fertility Mindset Master. Former prosecutor and recovering type A control freak perfectionist, I use the power of mindset to get pregnant naturally and have my baby boy at 43, despite years of fertility treatment failure.

I help women across the globe beat the odds on their fertility journey, just like I did. Get ready for a quick hit of confidence, joy, feminine badassery, and loads of hell yes for your fertility journey. It’s time to get fearless, baby, fearlessly fertile. Let’s do this. Welcome to the Fearlessly Fertile Podcast, episode 12.

Juggling a career and trying to conceive? You need this. Girl, whether you fully realize it or not, when you are on this journey, you have two full time jobs. The one you spent years in school for, And the one you had no fucking clue would actually be work. What’s crazy is that with this second job, whose uber sexy title is Mama in the Making, if you aren’t careful, it will take over your life to such a point that you may find yourself wishing for more work.

While you are at work, to take your mind off this not so side side hustle, you’ve got going. That is our focus for this week, love. We’re going to talk about what you need to have in place if you’re juggling these two meaningful parts of your very precious life. When I was knee deep in my fertility journey, I was juggling my work as a sexual assault prosecutor with managing an endless stream of appointments that required me to quietly disappear from work, taking medications with militaristic precision, and trying to plan my work schedule around the moving targets of retrievals, transfers, and carefully planned sexy time with my husband.

It was nuts. The way I had to precisely manage time and resources made me feel like Eisenhower during the four day window he had for D Day. However, my guess is that old Ike took way better care of himself than I did. In full masculine make it happen mode, I’d shoot myself up with Lupron in the morning, then head out the door, get into court, do an opening statement for a five week sexual assault case with 30 witnesses, Then have 15 minutes for lunch, prepare for the next witnesses or legal argument I had to make, down a handful of crazy herb capsules, drink some mushroom tea, drink some water, then get back into court for a full afternoon, get done by five o’clock, go home, work on my case for another two hours, wolf down my painfully boring healthy dinner, watch tv for 15 minutes, then go to bed and repeat the same shit the next day.

I’m pretty much out of breath even recounting that shit for you. Not once did I ever stop, slow down, and take in the insanity of what I was doing or how I was doing it. I didn’t dare ask myself, Hey, hey girl, y you need anything? You need anything? No, no, I just went about my shit like the fucking Terminator because that’s who I am.

I get shit done. I’m not a weak, whiny bitch. But the truth was, that act was getting old and I was fucking tired. I had spent years in machine mode and it was catching up with me. But I just kept pushing. Now, whether you are in the courtroom or not, my guess is you are doing something kind of like what I described.

In your own way, you keep pushing. Maybe on top of the things that I described, you’re on the road or traveling for work, which only adds another interesting masochism. That’s what we do, right? We just keep pushing. When I think about my clients all over the world, these women, they’re A players. They put in the work to get where they are in life, and they are damn sure not cutting corners on this journey.

When it comes to stamina and the ability to keep moving forward, there is no question they have what it takes. While that is a wonderful characteristic to have, and it is unquestionably valuable, it’s not sustainable long term, babe. Sprints? Yes. Running an entire marathon like that? No. Any seasoned runner will tell you, hell no.

All that insane pace will do is wear you down, cross your eyes, and drive you to make shitty decisions from a place of worn out craziness. You can’t afford to do that if you’re serious about success on this journey. That’s neither intelligent nor strategic. And we need to have as much as we can of both if we want to make it to the winner’s circle.

What’s really interesting is we try to apply the skills that made us successful in the workplace to how we approach this journey. As I said, while there may be some skill and approaches that have some crossover, climbing the corporate ladder and baby making don’t necessarily have a direct translation.

At work, you might get chided if you mess up on things more than once. We are talking about the fucking miracle of life. The timeline for that shit and the grace of getting it right are in the hands of God and the universe, not some unreasonable taskmaster on a power trip hiding in some distant cubicle.

The number of times we will swing the bat and how quickly victory comes is by its very nature an unknown quantity. Therefore, that means applying the rules or measures you’d use at work for what’s quote unquote too many times to try, or what is actually quote unquote failure is therefore woefully misguided and even worse.

Let’s remember our scope of work here, shall we? We are women. We are trying to conceive and carry babies. We are counting on our bodies. We need our bodies to do us a huge fucking favor. It’s the only body we’ve got. We’ve got to care for it and not flood it with cortisol, also known as stress hormone, and keep it in perpetual fight or flight mode, which is Utterly and completely toxic and therefore potentially running it into the ground.

Mama, we’ve got to do better than that. When you are juggling a demanding career and trying to conceive, you’ve got to have a solid, non negotiable strategy for, drumroll please, Self care. That doesn’t mean you have to quit your killer position or work less, but it does mean you have to show way more respect for your body than you have to this point.

Self fucking care. Okay, and if you are resistant and stubborn like I am, let’s just put this shit out on the table. Self care? It’s not weak. It’s fucking survival. It’s what will see you through to victory. Having run myself to the point where I was crispy around the edges, I can tell you that the decisions I made from that place were short sighted and shitty.

Self care has to be part of your fertility strategy if you don’t want to find yourself in that miserable fucking place. So let’s talk about what self care actually means. The coolest thing is that it can mean virtually anything as long as it brings you some well deserved pleasure, with a capital P. We get inundated with images of spas and exotic vacations.

If that’s your jam, great. Get your ass to a luxurious spa or on a Zika free beach somewhere in the world. But, if that doesn’t fit into your calendar right now, you’ve got to get creative, sister. Self care can mean things like getting 15 minutes. Making sure you have your very favorite treats on hand for whenever you fucking want one.

It can mean pedicures, investing in a disgustingly sappy romance novel with some oiled up guy on the cover. There’s no shame in your game, girl. Rock on with the freak in you. It can also mean dropping everything and getting on the phone with your best girlfriend to talk shit for 20 minutes. It can also be hiring a housekeeper so you can give yourself something with a truly finite supply.

Time. It’s also cutting off negative people. It’s finally taking that salsa lesson you’ve been threatening to take. It can be taking a nap in the middle of the day for no other reason than it makes your heart sing. Are you getting the picture? Self care, my darling, is not a luxury. If you want victory on this journey, you’ve got to take care of the most critical resource you’ve got.

Y O U U. Fuck being a martyr or a saint. Nobody who wants to cross the finish line has time for that nonsense. It’s old, it’s tired, and it is not getting you results, my love. You’ve gotta get this clear in your head because not doing so is setting you up to make a costly mistake. Because you may shoot yourself in the foot and quit way before it’s even called for in the larger scheme of things because you are run the fuck down.

Alright? I wholeheartedly stand by a woman’s right to choose when her journey comes to an end, but you bet your ass that decision is only intelligently made when it can be done without regret. That’s why what you think and believe is so critical. What you think and believe is way more clear when you have taken care of yourself, sweetness.

So here’s an exercise. Make the decision to spend an hour every week without fail doing something that’s just for you. Do whatever the hell you want for an hour, as long as it makes you happy. Fuck excuses! If you can’t find an hour for yourself, you got bigger problems. And, we seriously need to talk.

Consider your practice of self care preparation for your baby, because when they come, you want this shit firmly in place. Self care isn’t just about helping you get pregnant. It’s about positioning yourself to be the mom you’ve always wanted to be when that baby gets here. The lame, ridiculous, worn out story of the burnt out mom.

You don’t want any of that bullshit near you or your baby. This is way too important, and your dreams are worth more than that, than a misogynistic story that people tried to put on our moms 3, 000 years ago. Be the woman who takes a stand for having it all a great career success on this journey and motherhood on her terms.

All of that, my darling is supported by your non negotiable of self care. If you want to learn more about me, my coaching practice, my online courses that are changing the lives of women across the globe, or read my amazing client success stories, check me out at Dot from maybe to baby dot com or see what I’m up to on Instagram at Roseanne Austin Fertility.

Till next time my darling, change your mindset, change your results. Love this episode of the Fearlessly Fertile podcast? Subscribe now and leave an awesome review. Remember, the desire in your heart to be a mom is there because it was meant for you. When it comes to your dreams, keep saying hell yes.

Rosanne offers a variety of programs to help you on your fertility journey — from Self-study, to Live, to Private Coaching.