Did you know I have a sheet packed full of pregnancy after lost journal prompts to help you bond with your baby, process your feelings, and even let yourself get excited?

I do. Go to Smooth Stones coaching.com/paal-prompts to get yours. Are you wondering if you should even try for a rainbow baby again or be done? You need my ebook? It’s only $9, and it will walk you step by step through the process of making a decision you can feel rock solid about. Just go to MTOs coaching.com/ebook.

Or go in the show notes. The links are always right there. As this podcast publishes, I will be in Texas at a mastermind for coaches who are certified through the life coach school like I am. It’s been two and a half really long years since we could gather in person, and I’m so excited to learn and MLE and see old friends and online friends because meeting people you know so well online and then getting to hug them is one of the best things in the world.

A few months back, I got to meet one of my clients and give her a hug, and it was the best. All of my coach friends found so much clarity when we learned the self-coaching model created by Brooke Castillo and all of us coach on different topics. There are coaches for parenting, dating style business, healing from infidelity, being a doctor’s wife, physicians in burnout, learning to stop overdrinking, learning to work with your period rather than against it.

And many that coach on anything as general life coaches, so many good subjects. And I absolutely love it. I love that there are so many women who are able to help people very often with things they have struggled with themselves. I love how they share their wins and how they achieve them, and also their fails and how they kept going.

We often talk about the power of just being in that room. It is like electricity, and it comes from being with people who want. What you want, who love what you love. Who are self-improvement nerds like I am, who are parents doing something for themselves and making it okay, right? Like it’s okay as a mother or a bereaved mother to do things that you wanna do that are important to you.

It comes from seeing what’s possible. The school I go to has grown exponentially in the past few years, and it’s really cool to see evidence that you can create anything you want with the model. And getting ready for this trip really made me think about the value of surrounding yourself with people who lift you up and believe in you, and help you be your favorite ver version of yourself.

I think this is vitally important for all women. It can sometimes be challenging, and I think it’s vitally important in different areas of our life, like grief, family, career, fitness, our religious beliefs. If you wanna run a marathon, usually the first thing you do is find people who have done that or who are training.

Now, if you are living a life, That is child free, not by choice. You’ll probably wanna find some friends who understand what that’s like, and hopefully not just vent about the hard parts, but encourage each other and help each other to still find joy even when things aren’t the way you want them. Jim Rohn famously said that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.

I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that the people around us influence the way we think and therefore how we feel. It’s just part of being a human. We wanna fit in and what we surround ourselves with will eventually rub off. This is why sports teams have such devoted fans and why cults happen in the extreme.

Even being here and listening to me will influence how you think, because I’m showing you a different way and I hope that it resonates with you and helps you. But there are many people who disagree with taking responsibility for your thoughts and feelings and the things that I teach, and that’s okay.

Those aren’t my people I will go to when I wanna geek out about self-coaching. This is something we need to pay attention to after loss, as our emotions are even more raw. So the people around us. Really do influence us. Whatever your goals are, find your people that help you get there and lift you up when you fall.

I wanted to tell you a little bit about, of an example. I grew up in a place that I wanted to share an example from my life when I was probably six or seven. My mom joined the church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, and I’ve shared about that on here before. But we lived in an area with not very many members of that church.

And if you are one or if you know one, you know that this is a very demanding religion with a very high standards of things that we do and things we don’t do. We don’t do drink coffee, we don’t drink alcohol. We don’t do drugs. We try to keep clean language and keep morally clean. So no sex until marriage and.

Where I grew up, this was not the norm. And there was some, you know, some people who didn’t agree with the way that we believed and people who would say things and people who would do things. And it was also just hard feeling like I didn’t fit in because every activity involved alcohol, every activity involved, things that I just wasn’t comfortable with.

And so as much as I loved my friends and had great friends, I just struggled there to not feel like a weirdo, to be honest. And so once I got older and I had a chance to go to college, I decided to go to a church sponsored school. So I actually left where I grew up in Canada and moved to the United States to go to a school where people had the same beliefs as me.

And what happened was I could be me. Like I wasn’t that weird Mormon girl. I was just Amy, and it was so nice and such a relief to just be able to do the things I wanted to do and to know that people had the same values as me. And I, I loved it and I met my husband and I am still here. Now, this is obviously an extreme example and I’m not saying you should move to another country if people don’t think the same way you do.

Of course, right? This is more likely gonna be something that you’re doing mentally, is shifting the people you surround yourself with. And at 18, I did blame a lot of my feelings on my circumstances. But I also knew within myself that I could flourish and succeed in a different environment, and I’m proud of me for taking that step to find where I belonged.

The model shows us how our thoughts create our results, and it gives us a lot of our power back. Who you associate with goes in the circumstance line, what they do, what they say. All of that goes in the circumstance line. So you can have any kind of people around you, and you can still succeed if you’re managing your mind, but it’s often harder.

So another more simple example of this is my oldest daughter, she’s a self-proclaimed nerd, and in high school she made a goal if she earned enough money, she was gonna buy this really fancy, custom light saver. Now I like Star Wars, but I questioned if this was the best use of her money, right? Because I did not have the same values as her.

But she persisted and she met her goal and she got the one she wanted and she ordered it and it took forever to get here and she loves it now. She is in college this year, and I’m sure there are people who think it’s weird to have a lightsaber or to carry it around or to have lights, saber battles out on the lawn.

But there are also people who think it’s really cool and they love to geek out about every detail of each other’s weapons, and they do have battles out on the grass. And when she’s with those people, she gets to feel fully herself and have so much fun and just enjoys something she loves. And she’s found people like that.

And I’m so happy for her and I’m proud of her for knowing what she wants. Going for it and then finding a group that can appreciate it, so you don’t have to do anything drastic to adjust the people around you. You just need to know what you want and then go for it. Now, this is kind of like all the movies where the small town kid has big dreams and the people around him just want him to stay and do the practical thing.

It takes a lot of energy to do something different. Humans are programmed to stay in groups, so anything outside the norm is scary for all involved. But then that small town kid hits the big city and finds his people, and all of a sudden his dreams seem like they’re a lot closer. Peers and mentors are there to help him along the way, and everything starts happening when challenges arise.

His new group helps him get back up. This story repeats over and over. Why is it easier to believe in himself when he finds his people? Because he sees them doing it because he gets tips and tricks and support because he has people farther ahead of him who can show him the way. Because he doesn’t have to spend time worrying about how different he is and how much he’s letting everyone down.

He just focuses on what he wants. Now, changing your circumstances is not something I recommend until you have cleaned up how you are thinking and you realize that you are ultimately the one creating the results you have. You have to be aware of what’s going on in your head. Or you can move or change groups and still have the same doubts and voices in your head, and nothing actually changes.

You’re gonna give up and go back to that comfort zone or go home. But if you can clearly see that you are in a place that isn’t conducive to your progress, it’s always okay to leave just because you want to. You don’t need any other reason. You can leave because you just don’t align with where you are anymore.

You can leave because you don’t share the same values anymore. You decide what your reason is and if you like it and it’s not coming from fear or running from your emotions, then do it. A lot of people struggle with this as grief evolves. At first, they can’t connect with the people in their lives who are used to how they were before.

So they move to find lost mom friends, and that is great and works until it’s not anymore. Life goes on, healing happens, but then there is so much guilt for leaving those support groups. I see people struggling with these transitions all the time. One that’s especially obvious is if you’ve been in a loss support space and then you get pregnant with your rainbow baby.

And then it’s like you don’t wanna hurt people’s feelings. You don’t wanna post pictures of your belly, but you also wanna celebrate your baby. And also you get kind of tired of seeing the hurt and the pain and the loss all day, every day. And you know that it’s gonna be better for you if you leave that space.

You know what? It’s okay to change your circle as your life changes and your desires change. This is exactly what you need to do. Listen to yourself. Honor that voice inside of you, especially if you’re in a season right now where you’re feeling that pull to change your circle and who you surround yourself with.

It’s okay to honor that. It’s okay if people are sad about that, and it’s okay if they don’t understand. Love them through it all. It doesn’t have to be a big announcement. You don’t need to draw attention to what’s happening. Just start to shift to your new circle. Make sure you are self coaching and doing thought downloads on all the ways your brain is freaking out because it will.

But go for it. The people who are around you are gonna offer you their thoughts and it makes it easier to get what you want. Like I said, it’s easier when people have similar goals, and it doesn’t mean you have to cut people out of your life. Just expand your circle, find new places, grow your circle.

Whatever works for you. The reason I love being in a room full of coaches is because when I am clean in my thinking and I’m not comparing myself to them, I can see how their success and their unique ways of running their business has worked for them. And then I think it’s possible for me, I want you to find the room where you believe that you can get what you want.

Something my clients often say is that they’re drawn to me because they wanted what? I have a life where grief is not crippling, where I know how to handle it. A life that is full of so many good things and so much less guilt, blame and emotional exhaustion. They wanna believe that’s possible for them.

And to anyone listening, I want you to know that it is. All you have to do is learn how to find yourself again. It’s hard being in a place where you feel like you don’t belong. It’s hard finding hope when you are surrounded by people who are stuck. It’s hard finding your path when the people around you don’t believe you can change or they don’t like the new version of you who isn’t gonna act the way you used to.

The power of being in a space with someone who loves you a hundred percent as you are helps you believe. Maybe you can love yourself 100% too. Being in a space with someone who knows how to navigate all the emotions shows you the way that you can do it too. Being in a room with someone who has completely permanently forgiven herself for everything that happened or surrounding the deaths of her baby, makes it possible for you too.

Being in a room with someone who takes full responsibility for her feelings, actions, and results empowers you to do the same and see how incredible the changes are. Being in a room with someone who loves themselves and all their messy humanness lets you know that you can love yourself right there too, and that is where everything starts to change.

It only takes one person to show you how much better you’re gonna feel when you finally align yourself with who you want to be. Again. I’d like to be that person for you. Get in the room and see what changes. Go in the show notes to sign up for a consult call and get started. Don’t wait to change who you are surrounding yourself with.

You need someone in your corner who will support you through all that life After loss brings. Surround yourself with people who have what you want. Learn from them. Let them help you. I’ll see you next time.