Emotions and the Baby Decision

When women (and some men) first approach me, they are often racked with emotions such as fear and anxiety. Some of the things I've heard from clients include:

'I can't get to sleep - sometimes I wake up thinking and thinking and thinking about whether I should become a mother or not.'

'I'm completely worried I'll make the wrong choice - that I will regret not having children... and then I worry that I will regret having children!'

'It's taking over - all the thoughts about whether I'm ready to be a mother or whether I should remain childfree''

 The first thing I encourage all my clients to do is to I think we have to acknowledge and put our negative fears on the table - without that, they just keep going round and round and round.

Once we do that, I think it's important to be able to put our fears and anxieties to one side.

Interestingly, some research has been done on the role of 'negative' emotions in decision making.

In the article   Understanding the Dynamics of Decision-Making and Choice: A Scoping Study of Key Psychological Theories to Inform The Design and Analysis of the Panel Study by Bryony Beresford and Tricia Sloper , the researchers explored different models of decision making which involved emotions.  In one, the researched said that a successful decision making model people would be engaged in:

-  Minimizing the experience of negative emotion while making the decision and
    afterwards;
 -  Maximising the ease of justification of a decision to oneself and to others.

This very much tallies with a coaching approach where we work with clients to help them put to one side negative emotions such as fears or anxiety through finding ways to explore more positive mindsets

When I work coaching clients, I usually encourage all my clients to write all their fears and anxieties.  Often we do this as a mind map - I then take some of the most powerful ones and I encourage clients to write them on large pieces of paper and really look at them.  If we are in the room together, we will look at them together and I sometimes get clients to move and step into the space beside the fears.  I we are doing a phone or Skype session, I might also encourage a client do this.  We really explore how powerful is that fear - where do they feel the fear in their body for example.  I ask clients which of these fears about having and not having children are really fears driven by their saboteur.  And then, we look at how they can put that fear aside - even if just for five minutes - in order to look at the baby decision from a less fearful mindset.