As we anticipate the upcoming celebration of holidays, I want to take this opportunity and share with you one of the twenty-eight strategies that I discuss in Love and Infertility: Survival Strategies for Balancing Infertility, Marriage, and Life.

The purpose of Love and Infertility was to provide useful tips for couples in all states of trying to create their family. The exercises can be done alone or with your partner and include: Goal setting, “red-flag” phrases and creating an “Elevator Speech”. But right now I’d like to share with you "Celebrate Victories" which is actually the last strategy that I have included in Love and Infertility.

The debilitating, heart-wrenching experience of infertility can suck the last, tiniest bit of hope out of your being. "Strategy 28" helps you to create a system that trains your mind to notice what is possible and to create moments in your life that not only bring comfort but also joyfulness.

After you've read the following excerpt, please feel free to visit my website to learn about the other helpful strategies.

Blessings, Kristen

Strategy 28: Celebrate Victories

The gratitude principle, in a nutshell, states that when you stop feeling gratitude, you stop progressing, either at work or at home. Dan Sullivan, Mark’s strategic coach, came to this understanding during his twenty years of working with a variety of people. He concluded that the level of gratitude you hold is in direct correlation to your success and your level of upward mobility. “To explain the principle,” Mark told me, “Sullivan used the example of a man who was a great success, but had lost the connection to the people who had helped him create his life. He thought he could do it all alone. Subsequently, with this lack of gratitude for his supporters, he was getting a divorce and his business was in a steep decline.”

I’m pretty confident that all the time Mark was listening to Dan’s story, he was changing the names and events to correlate with our situation. That, in a sense, Mark blamed our gradual loss of connection on the dwindling amount of abundance in our lives, fearing that our future contained only further decline.

Ironically , only an hour earlier, I was the person so empty of gratitude. Just that afternoon, I had been sitting on our front steps telling my close friend Sarah how upset I was that a family member was going to have another child. The news of their new baby reopened the wounds of our difficulty having a family. We had been blessed at last with our son, Cole, but we were desperately trying to have another child, to no avail. As I sat there crying, Sarah listened attentively and compassionately, all the while providing a grounding voice, which brought me back to my true reality: I had a blessed life.

“Kristen, I know that hearing news of the pregnancy sent you for a loop, and it’s okay to feel that way,” she said, first acknowledging where I was on the emotional wreck meter, then she hugged me and continued. “You and Mark have a wonderful life, Kristen. You’re so blessed with Cole. I admire your dedication to helping others and your ability to do it all. And you brighten people’s lives, especially mine.” She gave me final tight squeeze and ran to retrieve her own son from the schoolbus.

As I watched her quickly run across the front yard, I was so upset with myself for the lack of gratitude I showed. Sarah was so right; I was living a blessed life with Mark, our son, my family and friends, and the work successes I’d achieved. When was the last time I had thanked Sarah for her friendship? When was the last time I had told Mark how much I appreciated him, for that matter? Even though I expressed my gratitude for them nightly in my journal, it was a private form of giving thanks; I was failing at telling them and others how grateful I was for them in my life. I was the man in Dan Sullivan’s story. I had lost my focus on expressing thanks and on celebrating the victories of each day.

Sarah had taught me that you needed to celebrate your victories, not wallow in your failures. We often talked every day, and Sarah consistently set an obtainable goal for herself daily. At the end of the day, she felt victorious about completing that goal. She was always grateful and celebratory.

I tried to model her behavior and that same sense of celebration of life and gratitude for each day. But, being confronted with our baby-creating challenges, I drifted away from that spirit. Strategy Seven, explores the impact gratitude can have on the process of creation and introduces the concept of a gratitude list. Creating that list helps you focus on the good things in your life and , lets you tune out the unproductive negative chatter that some of our unhealthy emotions can produce. This strategy has proven helpful for many of us facing the procreation challenge.

For celebrating victories, gratitude plays a different role. In this context, gratitude is key to developing a habit of celebration and needs to be consistently woven into the fabric of your daily life. With that in mind, I’d like to share with you two examples of how my family started to celebrate minor daily events. Remember the honey-do list in Strategy Seventeen? How Mark wanted an official after-work greeting daily? I made it my goal to give Mark that two-second greeting, and in my mind I transformed it into one of my celebrations of day. After spending the day apart and completing our individual responsibilities, we celebrate our reunion and safe return home at the end of the day. This welcoming celebration has become an important part of our lives; my five-year-old son, who now participates in this evening ritual, views this as “normal.”

Another example of simple acts of celebration is giving thanks at the beginning of your dinner. Gratitude here, for us, stems from the spiritual concept of thanking the universe and God for the wonderful food we will be eating and to celebrate the efforts it took to bring that food onto the table. Our dinner-time blessing was also a forum for non-culinary statements of gratitude. For example, while I was writing this book, every night at the dinner celebration my son would say, “…and thank you for mom almost completing her book.” His thankfulness changed the context of my daily struggles. With that expression of abundance, he helped me transform the stress of writing a book into a wonderful challenge that I was blessed to experience.

Applying the same philosophy to fertility, we can all be thankful for the amazing technological breakthroughs of the past several years—for the opportunity to make our baby-creating dreams become a reality, no matter what the odds.

Putting It Into Practice

1.Celebrate even the tiny victories. When heartbreaking news arrives, and your fragile dream of parenthood falls from its pedestal and shatters into a million pieces, it can be hard enough not to spend the whole day crying, let alone find something to be grateful for. But there’s always something to celebrate. Are you, otherwise, healthy? Be grateful. Did you meet your goals for the day? Be grateful. Did you make it to the gas station on fumes, without running out of gas? Celebrate! That’s a victory. Look for that tiny speck to cling to in your current situation.

2.Create the habit. Take a moment and look at your daily life. Is there a time during the day that you can integrate a celebration? After we’ve eaten dinner and cleaned up the dishes, we crank up Cher’s song “Believe” and sing at the top of our lungs, dancing around like hotties from the seventies. We look forward to that moment, as it reminds us to believe in life’s opportunities. What I didn’t realize is that you can see into our kitchen from the street, and one night I arrived home after dinner and, passing our house to pull into our driveway, I could see Mark and Cole dancing away. From the outside looking in, it looked like complete mania, but I knew what was happening, and it warmed my heart.

What little ritual can you create that would have its own secret meaning, puzzling to someone looking in from the outside?

3.Don’t diminish your achievements. One of the experiential programs we offer in our seminars is the “Firewalk Experience,” where participates walk over 1200 degree hot coals that we make by burning oak to red hot embers. During the seminar, we help people look at their fears and use some of the strategies I’ve shared with you in this book to take action and overcome them. It’s amazing to me that after the participants visit the fire and are assured that it is real, feeling the searing heat on their legs, they not only willingly walk the intimidating eight-foot path, but they call for the walk to be longer. “Make it longer! That was nothing!” At this point, Mark will stop the group and celebrate their achievement in overcoming their fear and reaching the other side without charred limbs.

How easy it is for us humans to face extraordinary challenges when we really put our minds to it! Like the participants in our Firewalk, you can overcome your fears and diminish your obstacles by persevering through the emotional, physical, and spiritual challenges you are working through to create your family.

Take a moment to make a list of all you’ve gone through in pursuit of your dreams. Acknowledge your own personal Firewalk, then celebrate it.

4.Don’t forget Grace. Of the many reasons we named our daughter Grace, the name’s spiritual significance to us was the greatest. Grace means a gift from God, and we feel very strongly that the infinite love shown to us by God is what enabled us to conceive her. Basking in her presence daily and saying and hearing her name are constant reminders of the fortune and beauty in our lives. I regret the negative thoughts and emotions that poured out of me during the five years it took to conceive her, and I’m embarrassed by my behavior. I wish I’d called upon the grace of the universe or God more often to help me navigate through our difficult journey. If this resonates with you, add a sprinkle of grace each day with a homemade prayer or short message of thanks to celebrate your day.

In closing, I’d like to share with you a poem.

How To Live On An Island
by Sandy Gingras

Dance on edges, stretch, listen in on shells, put living things back,
Cultivate quiet, boogie, practice simplicity, sugar yourself with sand,
Float, carry a bucket, ride rusty bikes—go with the wind, walk tender, respect
Leave no wake, tune up your senses, build castles and leave them for the moon to find,
Run with waves, discover treasure, remember yourself, keep off the rocks, ebb and flow
Laugh like a gull, thank.