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In This Episode
Adriane is the owner of Empowered Womb, and she is a certified Maternal Support Practitioner (Doula) who specializes in Natural Fertility and is also a certified Fitness Specialist. Adriane is passionate about putting the power back into the hands of the woman from the very beginning of her maternal journey. Your husband can be involved in the charting tool to help with fertility, a stronger connection, and intimacy.
Highlights
01:03 Adriane Cook is the owner and founder of Empowered Womb. Through her work as a Certified Natural Fertility Doula, she uses the charting tool as the primary tool to help her clients to support women physically, emotionally, and through education. Her digital course is the Empowered Charting for Pregnancy, and a discount is available if you finish this episode!
04:15 Fertility can cause stress in a marriage but Adriane reminds us that mindset is the best place to start when you deal with this.
10:37 Knowing what food impacts you can help during fertility. The way food affects our body is unique so we can take note of these sensitivities in a food diary or in your chart.
16:11 Although charting is very woman-centered, our husbands can also be involved in the process. By knowing what you need first, you can help your husband understand what is going on.
19:20 The charting method is one way for us to see patterns in our bodies, mentally, physically and emotionally. There are times where we are more creative, sensitive, or introspective.
24:05 Adriane started out her work by reading the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Tony Weschler. It began with helping friends then turning it into a successful course.
28:56 Rebbetzin Bat-Chen feels that it is her responsibility to pass on the message that the cycle is not about your period but ovulation. It is a time when you want to shine because it makes you who you are.
34:17 Charting can take pressure off intimacy with your husband by communicating what’s going on in your body. There is a difference between love making and baby making, and the latter can put a strain on your marriage. It’s supposed to be fun and make you feel good.
41:17 Rebbetzin Bat-Chen’s CALM Method from the Marriage Breakthrough Retreat is aligned with Adriane’s values. ByConnecting with yourself, you bring awareness to how you feel and how to communicate these emotions with others, especially your husband.
41:57 It’s okay if your husband is not into the chart but it doesn’t change your responsibility for yourself.
44:20 Adriane shares three groups of women who can use the charting tool, who are invited to join her digital course, Empowered Charting for Pregnancy.
Links
Adriane Cook: Website | Instagram
FLOW Mastermind – A Business Mastermind for an Integrated Life
FLY Mastermind – A Marriage Mastermind for a Fulfilling Life
5 Surprising Ways to Improve Your Marriage
Books Mentioned
Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Tony Weschler
Let’s Connect!
Connected for Real is on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn
For more information about Connected for Real, visit the website!
Let’s Work Together!
Join the FLOW Mastermind – A Business Mastermind for an Integrated Life or the FLY Mastermind – A Marriage Mastermind for a Fulfilling Life!
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REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Welcome to the Connected For Real Podcast! I’m Rebbetzin Bat-Chen Grossman, a marriage coach for women in business, and my mission is to bring God’s presence into your life, into your marriage, and into your business. Let’s get started. The following is one of the many conversations I had with experts and professionals about real life and how it affects marriage. Let me know your takeaways on Instagram or Facebook, @connectedforreal. Enjoy.
And we are live. Welcome everyone to the connected for real podcast. I just finished the marriage breakthrough retreat so I’m still in that marriage breakthrough mode. So the connected for real podcast—today, we have Adriane with us and we’re gonna be talking about fertility and how it affects your marriage. First, Adriane’s gonna introduce herself so go ahead. Tell us what makes you so cool.
ADRIANE COOK
Hello. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate it. It’s really exciting. So my name is Adriane Cook. I am the owner and founder of Empowered Womb. I am a proud wife and I have two amazing daughters, and they are seven years old and just 11 months. So, my life is very full and I’m very blessed.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Thank god. That’s awesome. We had four girls first, so for the first 10 years of our life, we were the girl family.
ADRIANE COOK
Oh yeah, we are all things girls here. We love it. We really do. It’s really fun.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
It makes it really exciting. Okay, cool. So what is it that you do and how do you help people?
ADRIANE COOK
Yeah, so I am what’s called a certified natural fertility doula and I think to understand what I do, you need to understand what it is that a doula does. So, a doula is, by its very simple definition, someone who serves and more specifically, someone who serves those embarking on their maternal journey and beyond. My specialization is in natural fertility. The way that I show my service and support is through physical support, emotional support, but also educational support. I’m really big into that information and how an individual can use that to their own benefit to further their journey. So, in a very basic sense, I use the charting of the menstrual cycle as my primary tool in helping my clients ask quality questions about their body and their fertility so that they can get the answers that they seek, and I do that primarily through my digital course, which is called Empowered Charting for Pregnancy, which is really exciting.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
That is really exciting.
So I have charted in the past and I think that is definitely one of those things that creates so much mind-body connection. Just being aware and doing something every single day that gives you a bigger picture of what’s going on with you and where you are in the world, it just feels really, like you said, empowering because you have what to look at. You have data points. It’s really, really interesting. It’s also fascinating.
ADRIANE COOK
It really is. It’s both. It’s both fascinating and empowering. What I always tell my clients is that empowering is an interesting word. It’s a buzz word we hear it all the time, but the truth is, I can’t empower anyone. A course can’t empower you. A professional can’t empower you. An app, your friends— nobody can empower you but yourself and you need to have knowledge about your unique body and fertility in order to ask those quality questions, in order to know what actions to take. So, I really want to put the power back in the hands of the woman.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes, yes. I love that. I love that.
Okay, let’s get into how fertility in general and I think that we could also address feeling the stress of not being fertile or trying to conceive and not conceiving, how everything—all of it affects marriage.
ADRIANE COOK
Oh gosh. So many ways. I think we just have to acknowledge that it does. I think we should all just take a collective breath and know that we’re all in that same boat.
Yes, this is a journey, we’re in it together and it impacts your life in such a huge way. So, I just think acknowledging that, first of all, that it’s not just something to brush off is important. We don’t want to do that. We want to acknowledge that it’s got a real implication in our lives.
So, after we do that, then we can turn to things. How can we look at this experience? Whether we’re just embarking on it or we’re having challenges and look at our partner, take each other’s hands, and say not, “Why is this happening to us?” But, “How is this happening for us?” And when we change that mindset then we get curious and we ask really good questions, and we work together and it’s more unifying than dividing and that’s the place where I like to encourage my clients to start.
I mean we can go really deep but if you have specific questions, let’s dive in.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
You can go deep. I’m a very deep person and everybody who’s listening is deep.
ADRIANE COOK
Well, from a charting perspective, like you were speaking about earlier, you can see through your temperatures, through the length of your luteal phase, which for those who may not be familiar, is from the time of ovulation until either your period starts or you find that you have a positive pregnancy test but that luteal phase is the second half of the cycle. That can really tell us a lot, as can the length of the follicular phase and how long it takes one to ovulate first. So follicular is the first phase.
You can see in your chart how things like stress, sickness, travel, what you eat—
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
How you move—
ADRIANE COOK
How you move. Oh exercise that’s a huge one. I’m a certified pre- and post-natal fitness specialist, so that is also a big part of what I do as well—is teach women how to exercise and move in sync with their cycles so you can see how all of these things—
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
By the way, that’s how I found you. That’s why I was like ding, ding, ding we gotta have her on—because there’s a disconnect between—I’ll tell you from what my perspective and what I’m hearing because I’m talking to a lot of women all the time.
I’m hearing a disconnect between knowing what phase I’m in, which is one thing, awareness, and then knowing what to do with that, which is a totally different ball game. You can look at your data points and collect it all and not have a clue what this means for me in practicality, and what I like about what you were doing is you were then teaching, how do I use these points, what do I do with this. It’s so important because. Like you were saying, information is everything but how does it apply to me?
ADRIANE COOK
Absolutely, and how it applies to you is slightly different than how it applies to me and our friend and our mother—every woman is unique and so similar to one another. We are also not small men. [laughs] god created male and female to be so uniquely different and special, and I love to honor that and it’s very common in the fitness industry for programs, exercise, routines, even the research is male-dominated and there’s a variety of reasons for that that we don’t necessarily need to get into now, but the truth is we’re being fed, “Well, this program works for everyone and this diet and this routine should be what works for all people,” when in fact it probably does work for most men, but we’re not focusing on how it affects the woman as an individual.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Within the woman, how it affects each stage of where she is—so we can have— we’re a group full of women and we’re all in different stages and different phases and different things and one is breastfeeding and one is post- and one is pre- and everybody is doing something, and you try to get them all into one cohesive routine or something, it’s not going to be very helpful.
ADRIANE COOK
No, it really isn’t, and let’s dive into why.
So cortisol—we all are familiar with that term but what it really is the stress hormone and cortisol is incredibly intuitive and it’s very protective of us. So if it senses that we are under stress, for example, if we are doing a super hard intense workout—maybe crossfit or some sort of circuit, that’s very intense but we’re doing that during the week before our period, cortisol is going to go, “Warning, warning. We need to protect ourselves. This is not ideal for making a baby. We are going to delay ovulation. We are going to shorten that luteal phase. We are going to do whatever we can to protect this person and make sure that they don’t procreate because it’s not safe,” and you can carry that over into stress and all the other factors that we discussed—food, sleep, etc. But exercise really plays a part. There absolutely is a time in the cycle where it’s time to kick butt. There is a time where we can max out on our weights, we can run that long distance, and we can do well and the body responds and it loves it, but then there are times where we are called to rest. I always say it’s like our bodies have an internal personal trainer. It legit has a program designed specifically for you and if you’re familiar with your chart and what’s going on in your body and what phase you’re in, not only does it totally help your fitness and your exercise abilities, but it optimizes your fertility 100%.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I love that. I love that and I so much resonate with this message.
Let’s talk about nutrition. How is the foods that we eat affect our fertility?
ADRIANE COOK
Well, in a big way and I think what’s most important to remember here, just like we talked about earlier, is it’s very specific to an individual and it’s why paying attention and making notes, whether it’s in your chart or a food diary, is very important because I might be sensitive to gluten or dairy and I might see that in my chart, but you may not be. I think the primary overarching message is that we really want to promote eating whole foods, a variety. We don’t want to necessarily restrict any particular food group. We want to stay away from processed foods, things that can kind of mess with the chemicals in our body, and as free from toxins as possible. Those are very general but yet highly impactful guides for anyone, but then you need to go a little bit deeper and see how specific foods impact you, and that’s a very, very good reason to take note of that.
I have a pregnancy achievement chart and there’s spots to make notes, and if you’re paying attention to your food, you can say, “Okay. Well, I had a significant amount of bread or pizza or what it was if it was packed with gluten,” and the next day you’re sluggish or your temperature was sky high and your energy level is low, those might be some signs to you that gluten isn’t ideal for you but you might do that and wake up and feel energized and rejuvenated, and it may not affect you, which is why we don’t like to generalize like, oh, low carb, no carb, like all of those things and so—
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
What makes it so hard is that it’s so comfortable to say, “I just want you to tell me what to do.” We look for these solutions that somebody else figured out for us, what’s right and what’s wrong and just tell me because I’m so tired of thinking, and here you’re like turning it around and saying no you gotta think you gotta get connected to yourself you have to be aware and know where you are and what you’re doing what’s happening in your body because you’re unique and that’s really, really hard because it’s not a quick fix and it’s not an easy solution and it’s not one of those things that’s just like just solves my problems for me. It’s one of those things where you have to be super honest and get really, really practical and go inside to find the answers from within and that’s sometimes why—same with my work I’m a marriage coach and I help women with their marriage but it’s from within it’s what are the answers that are coming up for you and it has nothing to do with anyone else. It has to do with you. It’s really difficult to sell because it’s not one of those like, “Easy peasy—here just take this and you’ll be all done.”
ADRIANE COOK
I know and that’s why I give general guidelines but just like you, once you flip that script and you help them understand how it can work for you instead of why is this happening to you, then again, they’re in the driver’s seat then they feel like, “Oh yeah, well I don’t have to follow the diet that my girlfriend is following. I have freedom,” and for anybody who’s actually tried to follow a diet everyone knows it works for a while and then it stops working and why does it stop working is because while you return back to your life you return back to who you really are and then you’re left trying to figure out all over again what went wrong. Well, what went wrong is you weren’t listening to yourself. You weren’t listening and paying attention and taking action based on what is right for your own unique body.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
And I think that’s what’s so freeing.
ADRIANE COOK
It is freeing. It totally is.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
When you let go of that story that you want someone else to solve your problem and you’re willing to go inside, you actually find the long lasting answers.
ADRIANE COOK
Yes, right. Yes. One hundred percent. One hundred percent and doesn’t that feel amazing that your doctor isn’t in charge of you and some generic program or something you found on Google isn’t the boss of you—that you’re the boss of you and that god designed you that way because He’s living inside of you and He has this ability to speak through you? I mean, wow. That’s incredible. It’s incredible to know that that exists and it’s so freeing, like you said. It is absolutely the definition of freedom.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes, exactly. So, I think people say, “I don’t know—this and that.” My program is a year-long program and I say I’m making it a yearlong because I want you to go through all the seasons and I want you go through all the different hardships and situations that are going to come up and all the holidays and all the things—I want you go through winter. I want you to go through summer. I want you to go through all of the ups and downs with me so that by the end, I know that you’ve really got a real basis for this new level of consciousness. I don’t want you to feel really good and then crash because you don’t know what to do next. I want you to have the tools and I feel like this is something that’s one of those tools that’s really important—is how do I figure out myself by looking at what’s going on inside me?
ADRIANE COOK
Yeah. One hundred percent. I couldn’t agree more.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
How can people involve their husband in the charting because it’s a very woman-centered situation?
ADRIANE COOK
It is and it can be. Oh my goodness. I love it when I hear that a husband knows what the chart looks like or when he asks what phase his wife is in. That’s amazing and if you’re on the same wavelength with that, it does make communication far easier but there’s a spectrum. He doesn’t necessarily have to hold the thermometer in your mouth and take your temperature for you. That level of involvement would be fine but it’s not necessary. It’s a tool, like you probably have many, to open that communication and you said, “Well, here’s my chart it says that for the next five days I’m likely fertile and this would be a great time for us to try to make a baby,” for one example but I am gonna kind of circle back to the very beginning of our conversation and how we were able to look at our chart and see what external influences we’re doing to our body.
So let’s say our relationship is maybe a little bit rocky. Maybe we’re a little bit stressed out. We can make notes of that and we will see in real time how that affects our body and our fertility. If we’re not feeling connected with our husbands, if we are barely seeing each other or barely sleeping or we don’t have any time to be intimate, and you’re taking notes of that in your chart, you can see in real time where you need to work on things.
Okay, you could maybe just say relationships aren’t ideal or we had a fight last night or whatever the case may be—you’re gonna start to see a pattern and again to your point, it’s not this quick fix. You’re not going to chart for three days and say, “Oh, well I know all the things that we need to fix.” Over time, cycle by cycle, you’re going to start to see patterns develop and you’re going to start to see the areas where your body is like cortisol—trying to keep me safe things don’t seem ideal right now for procreating, and it’s just this cohesive unit and if you want to bring your husband into that conversation as well and say, “Look, I noticed that we whenever we fight my temperatures go sky high and my follicular phase is lengthened because my body feels stressed out. How can we work on this together?” And then your husband can see oh my goodness. This isn’t just a mental thing. This legit affects her body. I think a husband will genuinely care about how that affects his wife and I think that they’re more on board. Men like data. I mean, I’m just generalizing here but as a general rule, if a man can’t see it, it makes it a little bit more difficult to fully comprehend what’s going on, and if his wife can provide actual evidence like look this is what’s happening to my body. How can we work together? I think he’s gonna be able to jump on board a little bit more quickly with some deeper understanding.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I love that. Now, let’s turn that around. Do you find that there are times in the cycle that we tend to be more sensitive or take things to heart? The fights tend to be more pattern-like. Is there a time when your body is testing the waters or making sure that everything is safe before—
ADRIANE COOK
Yes. So, again generalizing and you need to be able to check your own charts to see if this matches for you, but as a general rule, that week before your period or I even say, the five days before and days one and two of your period, you’re probably at your most sensitive in terms of going inward. This is the time that the body has specifically built for us to reflect and to go inward and to figure out like, “Am I happy in my life? What needs to change?” We get really introspective and it’s done on purpose and it’s such a beautiful thing, but also like, “Leave me alone. I’m gonna go into my little cave and I need some time to just process things and I don’t want a lot of conflict and I don’t want a lot of noise,” and again generalizing but many women find this to be true, and so if a husband is coming in hot with some kind of issue that you guys have been going through and he wants to have this big long discussion and he wants to figure it out, this is likely not the time. Wait about four more days and you’re gonna have a totally different conversation with a much different result.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes. I love this. I was working with one woman one-on-one and she said, “I see a pattern suddenly after working with you for a couple of weeks that every Friday is when we fight,” and then we broke that down. What’s going on on Fridays and what’s going on on Saturdays, and why is it that you’re fighting on Fridays? And it was a protective mechanism. She was creating the fights. It was really interesting. It was a super eye-opening conversation, even to her. Awareness is 50% of the work, if not more. Maybe even 90%. [It] is so helpful to just know.
I was thinking of a way that husbands can be part of this conversation. I know my husband’s very not into all this stuff. I’m all into it and I’m doing my thing and my husband’s just like, “Just tell me what you need,” he’s very acts of service and I’m very words [of affirmation]—so I like the wordy stuff and he’s just like, “Get to get to the point. What do you need?” And so if I know what I need, then I can communicate what I need then it makes it so much easier for him to then know what I need. It makes sense when I say it but they’re assuming that we want our husbands to just know. “He should know to leave me alone now,” or, “He should know that I need more protein,” or, “That I want more quiet or that I want a foot rub,” or I don’t know what. He’s not going to know if you don’t know and the biggest problem is that we don’t know.
ADRIANE COOK
Exactly. We’re not very connected.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes, we’re so disconnected and we just don’t know to the point where we get so—again, we get into that loop of I want someone else to tell me what I want. I want someone else to know what I need because I don’t know what I need, and then you’ve lost yourself and it’s really sad.
ADRIANE COOK
Well, that’s why I really love your message of connected for real and I’ve listened to enough of your stuff to know that yes, we want to truly be connected for real as a couple but that only happens when we’re connected for real first to ourselves, and that really does apply to every area of our lives. Truly.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
It’s true. In my retreat, I do the first day—is connect to yourself. The second day is connect to god, and then only the third day we address your husband because in a marriage retreat, where you would think your husband’s the problem—guess what? He’s not. He’s really the last in the chain. There’s just so much that comes free husband. There’s my connection with myself and then all of the god-baggage with my connection with my with god was why is this happening to me and why did I do this and why is this in my life, and all these different issues that we feel are a little disconnected there and sometimes, you think you’re connected and then you start going deep and you’re like, “Wow. This is really helpful to just bring awareness to how I feel.
And then your connection with your husband is really—it’s just being able to communicate what’s happening with those other connections.
ADRIANE COOK
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been married 14 years and it’s taken us a while to figure that out but once we did, once that clicked, it’s a total game changer.
Yeah, and I think that I didn’t even ask you—how did you get into all this fertility work?
ADRIANE COOK
Well, let’s see. So my oldest daughter is seven and I don’t—I think a friend just recommended to me a book. You might be familiar Taking Charge Of Your Fertility by Tony Weschler, [a] life-changing book for me, and I knew we wanted to start a family. I was just kind of thinking about it. I’m a type A, pre-plan organized person in general and so I was like, “Oh well, I want to have a baby in a couple years. I should probably learn about this,” so I cracked open that book and it just blew my mind. It blew my mind. It’s a very big book. It took me a very long time to work through it but through that, I learned how to chart my own cycles and do that before trying to even conceive and I was just like, “How do women not know?” Nobody taught me this in school. My mom was really open with me about my body and my cycle, but even she didn’t necessarily know those intricacies about this timing and all of that. It really did empower me and I was like, “Everybody needs to know about this. This is crazy.” I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I’m like—literally nobody—nobody’s talking about this.
So, honestly for the first, probably seven years I—well, maybe not seven years—she’s seven now—for probably the first four years or so, I was literally just telling girlfriends. They would be come up in conversation like, “Oh, my cycle this,” or, “Oh my period that,” or, “Oh, we want to try to have a baby,” and I’d be like, “Oh, well have you read this book? Or do when you’re ovulating?” And they’d look at me like what are you talking about—crickets, and so I would honestly, one-by-one teach them. I would teach them how to chart and then they text me and they’d be like, “Okay, this is my chart. What do I do? When do we try? What’s going on?” And I would just do this because I was passionate about it for a very long time, and I don’t know—
It was a few years ago now where I was doing this for a girlfriend who was trying to have her fourth baby and things just weren’t happening the same as they were for the first three. So we were looking at her charts, teaching her how to do that and kind of figuring it out step by step, helping her ask quality questions and she goes, “You know, people could pay you to do this,” and I was like, “Oh, you might be right. I really love doing this.”
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes, and you do it so well you do it so well. It’s not only people will pay you because this is what’s needed in the world but you’re so good at this.
ADRIANE COOK
Oh, thank you.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
It’s so powerful when you have those collide. There’s a need and you’re amazing—boom!
ADRIANE COOK
Well you’re so sweet and I appreciate that, but I think it comes from the awe and the passion. Like when we first chatted about this. Every time I talk about it, I get emotional. The human body, specifically the female body is a miracle. It’s amazing. When you start to learn about the specificities like the built-in exercise routine, just to name one or the way the body protects us, or the fact that a man is literally fertile every single day of his life and we are fertile maybe five to six days in one cycle—just the nuance—just the real, unique—I don’t know special pieces of a woman are so downplayed. They’re not talked about and I feel like when a woman finally understands that her body’s not working against her, when her body isn’t this, a period isn’t just some like terrible obligation that you have to endure for five or six days—when she realizes how it benefits her, it changes the game. It just changes you as a person, and that’s what I want women to know is they’re powerful, they’re beautiful, they were designed on purpose. When you share that information with somebody, you cannot be stoic. You cannot. You cannot be neutral on any of that, so thank you. I feel and I hope that that is what is portrayed when I work with clients, when they take my course. I hope they walk away from it knowing my body is incredible and I can work with it.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes, yes. Your body is incredible and I think the first step and we were talking about this before about teenagers and learning all the stuff—the first step is, in my opinion—I told you we had four girls first so I have some teenagers now and one of the things that I make sure that is coming from my side because they talk about it in school, they bring experts to discuss it with them, blah, blah, blah, but it’s my responsibility as a mother to pass on the message that it’s not about your period. It’s actually about your ovulation. It’s the top of the circle, not the bottom of the circle and I sit down with my daughters and I tell them this is a cycle. It’s a circle. It goes up and down up and down and everybody focuses on the bottom where [it] is your period and I’m telling you, the focus is on top. The focus is on find out when you’re ovulating. That’s the time when you want to shine, when you feel good when you feel like singing and dancing in the streets, you want to find that time because it makes you who you are. When you try to figure out how do I get to my best self, you’re cyclical. You’re not going to be at your best self all the time but if you could figure out when you do get to be at your best self, then you can really push yourself into those times and shine during those times. It’s so wonderful to just be aware—to have that awareness is so important.
ADRIANE COOK
It is. There is talk in the community about terminology and who knows if this will ever change but instead of calling it the menstrual cycle, referring to it as an ovulatory cycle because it is. It’s the star of the show and I love how you said we’re not actually designed and meant to be at the top of our game all the time, so what a relief. What pressure that relieves that we don’t have to be miss Perky Penny showing up and being the social butterfly and the top of our game all the time. We legit were not designed to be that way. The body is designed to have times of introspectiveness—is that a word? [Laughs] to be introspective—we have built-in times to rest. We have built-in times to stay steady and then we have built-in times to shine and to explode and to just kick butt, so that’s so beautiful. I’m censoring myself a little bit but—
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I appreciate that.
ADRIANE COOK
It’s such an awesome time.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
It is. It’s so amazing and I love how you connect it to the fact that we are designed this way. God made us this way. It’s not a mistake and I think that a lot of—especially women in business because my specialty is—I’m a marriage coach for women in business. I think that women in business have this whole other pressure of being in the business world, where men like you were saying are so the same every single day. Their cycle is a 24-hour cycle. They know when they get their best energy, when they have their slump and every day it’s the same time and every day it’s the same cycle, and they can really schedule themselves that way, and then you go into like, “But I’m in business and I’m not functioning that way.” There are times where I know I’m like, “yes I can do this,” and times where I’m like, “I don’t want to do anything,” and if you can be okay with that and really lean into that—I mean, that is life-changing.
ADRIANE COOK
Well, it is and they do have a term that I love. It’s called cycle syncing and again, it kind of spans our life, but if you want to talk about work specifically, there are times ovulatory times are great times to be on video and do interviews and be social and have meetings. That’s a great time. A few days before your period, you’re gonna want to maybe edit your emails and look at the week ahead and do more internal stuff, probably avoid some of those meetings and postpone them until you’re in a space where you’re able to think more clearly about the present. Right now, you’re planning right and then there’s times, like the late follicular phase, you should be in your creative phase. You are designing, you are drawing up those emails, you are just flourishing in that creativity and again, you were designed to be able to do and be in that headspace at that particular time but if you don’t know where you are in your cycle, if you’re not charting to know, “Hey, this is my follicular phase and I could really capitalize on my creativity right now,” it’s a missed opportunity.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
It is and it creates so much frustration and resentment towards the whole like, “Ugh, I just can’t do this thing.” You feel like a failure, meanwhile you’re not the failure. It’s a system you’re trying to put yourself into and especially since we’re women in business and we get to run our own show we get to actually call the shots, why not know how to optimize that? One of my four pillars in my program is optimize your business. Make it work for you. Don’t fit into something that doesn’t fit you, except—instead fit it into your life make it really good.
So, there’s so much going on in my head I want to ask you about but is there anything that’s coming up for you that you feel like you have to add here?
ADRIANE COOK
Well, let’s see. I think if we want to circle this back to marriage, which we should we again want to be joined with our partners in understanding that there is a time and a season for everything and that includes intimacy, that includes an ideal time for communication, and here’s another piece that I just want to draw in from the cycle chart perspective, if you aren’t familiar with your fertile window and when that is those five to six days only, it can create this kind of pressure and it isn’t for everyone. I don’t like to generalize but many experience this. “Well, we have to have sex every day. We have to do it every other day. We have to have to have to,” like that have to language, but if you know your body, you can really capitalize on this and make it fun. You are in your shining time, that time where you’re most energetic and excited to be connected, so you can take advantage of that and you don’t have to do it for 30 days. You can focus on that for five to seven days. That’s a lot easier and a lot more fun than, “Okay, well we’re going to do this for however long it takes—three months, four months, a year.” That can be really draining on a relationship and it does help when your husband understands what’s going on in your body. Communicating that first is really imperative, but also if they know like okay I don’t have to be Mr. Romance for the whole month. It takes some pressure off for him too.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yeah, I love that that’s really important and one of the things that I really loved about the book know your body—wait, what was it by Christine Northrup. I don’t remember the words of the the name of the book but it’s that was the one I read. I don’t remember the name. Anyway the thing I love—what? Do you remember it?
ADRIANE COOK
Is it Know Your Body, Know Your Cycle? Is that right?
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
No.
ADRIANE COOK
But I know what book you’re referring to. It’s a great—
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yeah but she is like—that looks like a huge bible of a book. It’s so thick and I’m so proud of myself for reading it. I’m like, “Wuhoo!” Because I was not a reader in those days and I actually really pushed through and I was like, “Wow this is really interesting if I’m still reading it.”
The thing that I love and I really still carry with me and tell my women is there is a huge difference between love making and baby making, and the pressure of baby making will put such a strain on your marriage and you forget about the fact that it’s supposed to be fun, like you were saying. It’s supposed to be good. It’s supposed to be nice, and it becomes a chore, almost like the thing that you’re working towards and if we don’t get to the result, that’s it. It’s over and there’s so much pressure there that I see sometimes a couple will finally succeed like five years into their marriage like, “Wow! They had a baby and everybody’s like, ‘Woohoo! It happened,’” and everything’s okay and then two three years later they get divorced because it’s like [exhales]. It’s almost like you check the box and now there’s nothing left, and it breaks my heart because it’s so painful to watch but it’s something that has to be spoken about because it’s not the way it has to be that. It shouldn’t ever get to the point where you’re so focused on the result that you forget what’s really happening.
ADRIANE COOK
Yeah, I agree I think it’s really important to make sure that you understand that your spouse is not you. You can’t expect your spouse to respond and feel the exact same way that you do about this circumstance. When we have those expectations—I mean expectations—I’m sure you dive into that with your program as well, those can be killers. It can be total game changer when we expect one thing and get a totally different result and if we go into it just understanding that our spouse is an individual with individual thoughts and feelings and it’s okay and they’re allowed to feel differently than you, it changes the way that you approach conversation. It changes the way that you approach trying to conceive. Maybe you talk about love languages. Keeping your spouse in mind—I might be a quality time person and it’s not that my husband isn’t but what might really help him feel connected is words of affirmation or physical touch. If you kind of go into the brain of your spouse, I find that it becomes cyclical. Then they want to do the same for you and then you feel seen. You both feel seen even though you might be feeling differently, and I do think that that is something that I encourage my clients to do because I’m all about asking the questions—quality questions and so you could also ask your spouse like, “I feel one way but I want to know how this experience is affecting you. Tell me what this has been like for you,” and then instead of them feeling like, “Oh, I have to feel exactly the way that she does,” their wall comes down, and then they really do share what’s affecting them and how they feel about it and that can change how you approach things, and then like you said, years down the line if you’ve developed a habit of connecting with each other in that way, you can preserve and actually flourish the relationship as opposed to the opposite.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes, yes. I love it and I have a whole class on the five love languages and our connections to god, and I take the five love languages and I transfer them and how do we relate to god and using those five languages. It’s really fascinating and one of the things that I say there is that not only do you have the responsibility of learning another language for your husband’s sake, you have to understand what he’s going through and how to speak his language. Sometimes you have to learn new words and new sentences and slowly get better and better at this language but also you have to lean into your language and not leave it behind because that’s what attracted him to you to begin with. That’s your superpower—is being that way, so be your full self and be that. Let’s say, for me words of affirmation, it was refreshing for my husband for someone to say that they appreciate him or obviously people appreciated him in his life but most of the people around him were not words of affirmation, so to hear it from an actual person and to be told over and over again how amazing he is—“Oh okay, that feels really good.” So I know that because it’s my special—my gift, I can lean into that. So don’t think that you have to learn his language and lean into that and forget your own. It’s really important for you to stay with yours as much as learning a new language.
And the other thing is that is your responsibility to also fill yourself up because we wait for someone else to fill us up all the time and we go back to this over and over again because I have a method called the CALM method and CALM, the C stands for Connect to yourself right back to square one always connect to yourself because if you don’t know what fills you up, then you’re not gonna be able to fill yourself up and then you’re gonna be looking for external fill up, which is never going to fill up. It just feels like an empty hole. People give and give and give and they feel like it’s not working because it’s not. You’re not containing it, so there’s something really important about that.
I just want to also bring another point. Some people will say, “Well, my husband’s not into these things. I don’t it doesn’t matter how much I chart or I know or I understand or blah, blah, blah. He’s not into it so it’s not going to work because we have nothing—I can’t—it’s just nothing. No connection, no communication,” and I think that’s really important to also validate that it’s okay. It’s okay for him to be wherever he is and that doesn’t change your responsibility for yourself.
ADRIANE COOK
So true. One hundred percent. Yeah, it is okay and it doesn’t mean that he can’t change or that you can’t change. Growth is something that we should all embrace, so I don’t think it’s a death sentence by any means.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I think it’s really once you lean into it, most of what I find is that the husband will join and usually, it takes me three to four months to suddenly see that change and I see it all the time. I see a pattern already, so I can already tell you it’s gonna take about three to four months and you’re gonna do your thing and you’re going to really stick to it and then he’s going to start finding it interesting, and you’re going to be shocked because you’re going to be like, “You actually care?” But yes, he does. He just was waiting for it not to be a pressure on him.
ADRIANE COOK
Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I think we continue the cycle back to this theme of when you own it for yourself when you pay attention to you and you are aware of your own needs and you can approach it from this really positive, exciting mindset with no pressure on him. Like you said, he’s gonna be drawn to that. He’s gonna be drawn to the fact that you are embracing something really special within you and it’s your husband. He’s going to be curious like, “What’s going on there?” So that’s just a natural way of things that I think can just take the pressure off the table. You don’t have to shove a book or your chart in front of him and say, “Learn this and figure it out.” It can just be like talking and passing like, “Oh, my body is really feeling good today and I know what it’s doing and I feel really excited about it,” and you can just kind of have this positive reflection on yourself that’s going to draw him to you naturally, I think.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes, I agree. I love this.
Anybody in the comments want to ask any questions? Because we are getting some cute comments with his and loves, and I love that but I want to hear from you. If you do have a question, feel free to chime in, and I want to ask you a very technical question.
Who is charting for? Because is it for people who are very focused on getting pregnant? Is it for people who just want to know where they’re at? Is it—is it—what’s the—
ADRIANE COOK
All right, are you ready?
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I am.
ADRIANE COOK
So, if you are a woman on hormonal birth control charting, your cycle will not necessarily have the same reflections because you’re not ovulating. You’re not having a traditional cycle. Your hormones are not functioning in the way that your body would naturally, so, if you are on hormonal birth control but you think you might be going off of it later on in life, I guess there is still some value in establishing charting habits, like taking your temperature and getting familiar with that but in terms of being able to interpret it, it is for the woman who is cycling naturally, okay? And then we can break that down into a variety of different levels. So, any woman any woman who is cycling can per benefit from charting their cycles, whether they want to become pregnant or not. Now, I do not focus on pregnancy prevention but there are absolutely ways to do that while cycling and while being off of hormonal birth control, and you can then take advantage of the other cycle thinking things we talked about, like working with your business, exercising, whatever other ways you want to use that cycle to your advantage.
I particularly work with three subsets of women though in my digital course called Empowered Charting for Pregnancy. The first is the woman who knows she wants to become pregnant at some point in the future and she just wants to learn as much about her body beforehand and that’s honestly what I promote and what I really, really want to happen because like you said, you take your people through a whole year because of the fluctuations of life and truly, if you are cycling and charting your cycle for a couple of years before trying to conceive, you’re going to be the expert on your own body and it’s going to be so empowering when you start trying to conceive. So that’s number one.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
By the way, this is a gift you give to yourself for the next stage, which is pregnancy and birth. It doesn’t end with getting to your body and, “Okay, great. Now I’m pregnant.” Through pregnancy, you’re going to find that your connection with your body is so helpful to know when you need to rest, when you need to eat, what your body is telling you and then for birth, that is the ultimate connection with your body because you actually go within and turn off your brain and let your body do its thing and your belief in your body and your ability to really let go and surrender because you trust that your body knows what it’s doing, is the biggest gift that you can give yourself.
ADRIANE COOK
I couldn’t say it better.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes. Just seven months ago, I had a home birth and this is my first time that it was a planned home birth and I actually was really excited about it and I felt that the more—because every time before a birth, I do some sort of connecting thing. I do like a course or a thing because I always love to learn. I’m that type of person. And so this time around, I just felt like it was a gift that I was able to just shut down and let my body do its thing because I had so much trust in this perfectly designed vehicle that god created. I didn’t have to control it and as much as I am a control freak, I really, really felt like that process was a gift and so I just want to tell you all, if you’re charting now even if it’s just so that you can get to know how charting works. It’s worth it. It’s worth it. So, do it. Okay, go. Go ahead. Sorry for cutting you off.
ADRIANE COOK
No, you’re fine, and again, I couldn’t have said it better, but it there is some science there because then you have this peace and this belief so that our cortisol levels calm on down and they’re like, “Alright, do what you want,” so there is actual physiological benefits to that as well.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Yes. I love the science piece. It’s so important.
ADRIANE COOK
Yes, so the second the second group of women that I encourage to take this course is the couple or the woman who is currently in the early stages of trying to conceive right now and then they know and understand that learning about their body can only help them to save time and I always say sanity because we can go to weird places on our mind but this really helps develop what you were talking about 100%, so when you’re in that process it’s still not too late it’s a perfect time to learn more about your body. And then the third group of women is those who are trying to conceive for quite some time and it’s been a long road and they really do want to try everything that they can to conceive naturally before moving forward with reproductive assistance. Again, whether or not charting produces a pregnancy, I find that when women go through this course, they are then empowered. So, not only does learning about their unique body help them figure out the next steps to take but then they’re confident in those steps. So, even if reproductive assistance is their next step, they don’t have regrets. They go into that process with power and confidence knowing that that’s their next step and that’s 100% what it should be for them, but it takes away the questioning and it takes away the doubt and the shame, which I think a lot of women can also deal with sometimes, when they’re in that phase of life, and so for those three subsets of women, this digital course can be extraordinarily beneficial.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
I love it. I love it, love it, love it, and I love what you said it takes away the doubt and I just want to tell you all [that] doubt is the absence of god because when you bring god into it, you cannot doubt. It is exactly what it needs to be and it had to be this way and it is what it is and you just let go of trying to be in control of all of the little pieces and how it should have been and what should have happened. All of that goes away when you bring god into it, so I love that you say that. It’s so, so important.
How can people find you? How can they find out about the course? How can they follow you?
ADRIANE COOK
Yeah, I hang out on Instagram probably the most so my handle is @empowered_womb, and if you click on my bio link, you’re going to be able to see all the information about the digital course and your listeners are the first to learn about the pre-order opportunity for the course. So if they pre-order between now and I believe like march 6th or 7th, they’re going to get a nice discount on the course and it’ll be available at the end of march, so that’s very exciting, and if they want to check out my website there’s information on there as well, which is empoweredwomb.com.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Wow. I love it. Thank you so much, Adriane. I enjoyed this conversation so much. It’s amazing.
ADRIANE COOK
I love chatting with you and I love your work. Thank you for what you’re doing. It is so needed and so important.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
Thank you. I am so grateful. It’s so amazing.
I always say [that] we, as women, especially women in business, we fly together as a group and having the ability to have such amazing people in my group, in my surrounding, to be able to share with my listeners is amazing. So thank you so much for coming.
ADRIANE COOK
Yeah, you’re welcome. My pleasure.
REBBETZIN BAT-CHEN GROSSMAN
And thank you!