Can Infertility Damage Your Confidence at Work?
If you’re balancing your fertility journey with your career, it’s likely you’ll have experienced some friction between the two. I call this Career-Fertility Friction. It creeps up on you slowly so you’re often not aware of it until suddenly, it’s everywhere you look. You can find yourself wondering whether your confidence has been impacted at work.
Like oil and water, career and infertility don’t really go well together. You might not stop your career altogether whilst you navigate fertility challenges and you’re unlikely to stop trying for a baby because of your career. Most people press ahead with both and endure the friction, doing the best that they can.
So can infertility damage your confidence at work? Sure it can. I’ve identified three ways you might feel it and you’ll be pleased to know I’ve also suggested some actions and self-coaching questions that you might find helpful.
1. Career on pause while managing infertility
There are a few ways this can happen. It might be that you’ve quite literally stopped working in order to create more space for your fertility journey. This is not that surprising when you consider that 90% of people with long term infertility have feelings of depression according to a report done by Fertility Network UK and Middlesex University. It’s not uncommon for people need time off sick or even to have a complete career break. Returning to work after any kind of break can cause a lapse in confidence, returning after a break because of the emotional impact of fertility challenges is no different.
Alternatively you might take your foot off the gas because you have a reduced capacity for stress. This can feel like a career pause if your idea of “hard work” is firmly rooted in the way you worked before, when you weren’t juggling fertility too. For some people it’s not just an internal limiting belief though, there may well be an actual external expectation from an employer, manager, peers, clients etc.
So as much as you know you need to tap the breaks, there are internal and external voices that can have you wondering if you’re good enough when you do make that choice for you.
Another career pause people experience during infertility, is that you might feel stuck in a job you dislike, holding out for maternity leave. Changing jobs whilst trying for a baby is scary because of the risk of starting the next role pregnant. The worry is falling short of the new employer’s paid maternity leave policy. Doing a job you don’t love for longer than you want because of infertility can harm your confidence.
Tips to repair damaged confidence during or after an infertility career pause
Damaged Confidence and Acceptance
The first step to regaining confidence is often accepting the shift in the first place rather than feeling frustrated with yourself. If you were to chastise yourself for lacking confidence, that’s just more negative self-talk. If you were comforting your best friend in the same situation, you’d use soothing words and say “it’s totally understandable that infertility has created a lapse in confidence at work because you’ve had a little pause /shift in working style” and you’d tell them that’s ok, don’t be so hard on themselves.
Owning difficult decisions during infertility
There’s also something empowering about really owning the conscious decisions we make. If you’ve chosen to pause your career to make space for something else, well go you! You’re a bad-ass who made a tough choice. You can do hard things and regaining your confidence is one of them.
Micro-steps to rebuild confidence
Breaking things up into small micro-steps is also a nice way to rebuild your confidence at work. What small step can you take today that will take a little bit of confidence at work? It doesn’t matter what it is, maybe you say no when you would otherwise have said a begrudging yes.
Maybe you ask the question in a meeting instead of quietly wondering or waiting for someone else to ask. Maybe you indulge in a bit of self-promotion and talk about your wins. The concept of a micro-step is subjective, the point is that the thing is doable but takes you just far enough outside of your comfort zone that it feels a tiny bit scary. Experiencing yourself doing something scary and surviving will build that confidence back up.
2. Overwhelmed and overloaded with work and infertility
When you’re on your fertility journey, you’ve got conflicting priorities. And you’re spread thinly. It’s not that there’s less of you to go around, it’s just that there are more things, people and priorities to get to than before. That can lead to complete overwhelm.
Think of it like plate spinning. You know roughly how many plates you can spin without breaking a sweat. And you know what it’s like when there are a few extra plates on the go, the plate spinning starts to get a little bit more frantic. In the past you’ve managed this by either just frantically spinning the extras until you’re through the rough patch or by putting some down or doing whatever else you did to cope.
But with these fertility challenge plates, they come with sides of stress and emotions that impair your ability to think clearly about what to do with the extra plates. Maybe you don’t want people to know you’re not coping, or you want to feel like you are coping.
Maybe you just don’t notice you’ve got too many plates until a few crash down. Or until you crash down. Whatever the reason, you suddenly find yourself spinning too many plates and not sure what to do. Overwhelmed and overloaded.
Infertility can damage your confidence at work because if you crash or a couple plates do, you can be knocked by that.
Tips to repair damaged confidence when you’ve been overwhelmed and overloaded with work and infertility
To save me repeating myself and boring you to tears, let’s assume you remember the first step is to acknowledge and accept the shift. It’s ok, it’s normal, it’s understandable.
If we stick with the plate analogy, there are two things you could look at to get unstuck. 1. you and 2. the plates. Let’s look at you first.
We overload ourselves when we think there is a consequence to not taking on more. That consequence is like an iceberg of thoughts. On top of the water are the practical ones like “the deadline will be missed” but below the surface are the introspective ones like “I want to be perfect” or “I want recognition” and even further below the surface are things like “If I am not perfect, people will think [insert any negative thought]”. That’s your inner critic at the bottom of the iceberg, holding some core belief about you that you are protecting yourself from by taking on too much.
When you’re not dealing with your fertility challenges, you might have the energy and strength to just take on more. To spin more plates and prove your inner critic wrong. But when you’re on your fertility journey and it’s hard, you might need to change tactics. You could save some energy by reasoning with your inner critic rather than trying to outrun them. Think of all the ways your inner critic has been wrong about you. Then tell them you’ve got this and you don’t need to run yourself ragged to prove it.
We’ve covered you, now what about those plates?
A great task to set yourself is to list every plate that you’re spinning and ask these questions.
On a scale of 1-10 how important is this plate really? Whatever score you assign, now challenge yourself with “no, really really” and give the plate a new score.
Is there anyone else who can share responsibility for this plate or better yet, take it from me
What’s the worst thing that could happen if this plate smashed and how much does that matter to me?
Do I need to have a word with my inner critic about this plate?
You may well find that there are plates you’re spinning out of habit. Plates you don’t care about as much as you thought Plates other people should and could look after. And plates your inner critic has you over-prioritising.
Letting plates fall or putting them down because you’ve made a conscious decision to do so is a pretty confident thing to do. That’s likely to feel more like a relief than a failure.
3. Increased anxiety and worry surrounding work and infertility
When you’re trying to conceive, the monthly cycle of trying followed by hoping followed by disappointment followed by gearing up to try again is utterly exhausting. Even without medically diagnosed infertility or fertility challenges, this monthly hope-disappointment cycle can be emotionally draining.
The way our minds deal with anxiety is by labelling a worry as either valid (ie the threat happened) or miscategorised (ie the thing turned out to not be as scary as we thought). The trouble with infertility is that you’re on a regular cycle of having a worry validated when you don’t conceive. So the anxiety doesn’t resolve itself. But you do learn to live with it using all your little coping mechanisms and a good bit of masking. Nothing wrong with coping mechanisms at all, we need those.
At times of increased worry or anxiety, you can become more hyper-sensitive to things than you would be in more neutral times. Think of the fight/flight/freeze reaction that animals have when they sense danger. That’s hyper-awareness. It’s exactly the same for you when you’re worried or anxious, your senses are alert to any potential stressors.
This can impact your confidence because when you’re hyper-sensitive, you can be overly vigilant to flaws in your work and output. You might even misjudge how other people perceive you and your work. Negative thought spirals can form and tend to spiral, it’s kind of their thing!
Tips to repair damaged confidence when you’re anxious and worried balancing work and infertility
Remember where we start? Acknowledge and accept the shift because its…? That’s right, it’s very normal and understandable. Nice work.
The good news is, you can interrupt a negative thought spiral and regain control of your thoughts. You can help your brain discern between valid worries and miscategorised ones by taking a big deep breath. That’s right, a deep breath. There’s plenty of time for thinking and reasoning, but with worry you’ll want to first calm your thoughts down and that starts with the breath.
Take a breath that is long, deep and that pushes your lungs down into your belly. Followed by a slow exhale and another slow, deep breath. Keep doing that and flood your brain and body with oxygen. Worry and panic tend to send the heart rate racing making your breath shallow. Breathing returns to normal when the danger is gone. So taking some long deep breaths helps your brain recognise that actually, you are safe.
Then your brain can make that discernment between valid or miscategorised worry.
Taking control of your worry with your breath will help you to feel more confident. Your brain labelling more worries as “miscategorised” will also increase your confidence as you build muscle memory for overcoming worry. You can even reinforce that learning by journalling. Write down every time you felt some worry but the outcome was manageable. The act of writing things down is like reliving it. So writing down every time a worry is miscategorised, processes another experience. This helps your brain categorise more confidently in the future.
Free Workbook
Infertility can hurt your confidence at work but with work you can build it back up. Because a lot of building confidence is about experience and the act of writing things down is creating experiences for your brain. There’s a worksheet to accompany this blog post. You can use it to reflect on your own situation. Click the button below to download it.
Of course we’re only touching the sides with career pauses, overwhelm and worry. Keep journalling and using my workbook to explore how you’re feeling and what micro-steps you can take to build confidence.
My Career Plus Fertility 1:1 Program is designed to reduce the friction between your fertility journey and career. To find out how you can work with me, book a free discovery call below.