Welcome And How We Help

Welcome to the Brilliant Fertility Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Katie Rose, and this podcast to help illuminate the path ahead of you. With expert interviews, clinical pearls, and real client success stories, my intention is to bring you hope for what's possible on this journey, and to give you tools and resources to navigate the ups and downs on the road before you. If you find this podcast helpful, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And I have a favorite. If you have a minute, can you leave us a five-star review? And let us know what did you learn, what did you come away with? Did you leave with that spark of hope? This helps more people like you find the podcast. My mission is to support as many humans as possible on their path to become parents. And by you sharing and subscribing, you're part of that mission too. And I'm so grateful for you for being here. And this is the story of how our office building came to be. Now I have really wrestled with like being in this new beautiful space. Like a lot of people have stopped to ask me, like, oh, what's it like being in there? Isn't it wonderful? And I'm like, yes. And I'm waiting for my nervous system to land here. There, there's still some loose ends that I'll share. And and I think I know after talking to so many of you about your own process through having it take a long time to get pregnant, finally getting pregnant, possibly losing a pregnancy, and then getting pregnant again. And it's like that sense of just like, is this real? When's the other shoe gonna drop? Like, am I really safe to be here and fully enjoy this? And so I will say I am learning to fully enjoy this. I'm the first person in my family to have done something like this. And so that's a wild experience. I didn't really have any example setters. And same for my husband. He he does have some entrepreneurs in his family, but no one had really done anything like this. So if we just start with the timeline of it. So I'm recording this just after we've had our open house. So it's like feeling really real. And we've, you know, we we had such a good turnout. It was really phenomenal. And I had patients come from all over, um, patients who I hadn't seen in person in years, um, patients who've, you know, gone through their fertility journey and come out the other side and brought their children. I mean, it was it was really such a beautiful, heartfelt experience. And I had so much gratitude. And like those moments that I've had of like F and hell, like, am I doing the right thing? Like, should I be doing this? Like, what for what purpose when I could, you know, just as easily have very low overhead working from home? Like, why this? Why this space? And and really it's all about community. So getting to welcome our community in, getting these sneak peeks, like what this is gonna be. Uh, we had some speakers come, people who we've worked with, and uh just really show off what our community is made of. It was so special. And it took a long time to get there. I don't want anyone thinking that this was some overnight success project. This really for me was first conceived back in about 2018. And it it started as just like having this urgency to really be able to use my skill set. And the practice that I had previously been in was a great nest, right? It was a great starting point. I learned so much from the owner and the other providers there. And I really wanted to focus on fertility. Uh, that was my passion, and I needed a space that allowed me to use the skills that I had accumulated over the years in a way that really honored my patients' journeys. So when that need wasn't being met, and that I realized probably between seven, 2017, 2018, I just started kind of keeping an open mind about what that could look like. And interestingly, there was a patient who reached out to me and said, Hey, my husband is a chiropractor, he owns this massive building that we're we're kind of trying to downsize from. Like, would you like to come look at it and lease half the building? And I was like, Oh, I don't know if I want to do that. I barely know you and I've never seen this building. So let's just slow down and check it out. And I did go check it out and I just had a sense of like this could work. Like for some reason I see myself here, but like this is not the final landing place. And what was really interesting about it is I sat on that opportunity. I said, you know, give me a couple months to really think about this. Um, my husband was starting his physical therapy practice at the same time. We had graduated from graduate school at the same time. He had done his residency, his fellowship. And he was also at a point of like needing to branch out and use his skill set. So he had already started the planning on that. And we we were trying for our second baby, or at least we were open to conception at that point. And he was like, oh my God, we can't possibly both be going out on our own at the same time. Like that seems irresponsible. We're parents now. And a part of me wishes that I had just been like so much more trusting in myself at the time, because I know I could have pulled it off now that I know what I'm capable of. But eight years ago, not almost nine years ago, I was still quite a nervous Nelly. And I really took that to heart and was like, yeah, okay, he's right. I should be responsible. I'll let him do his thing, I'll be the supportive partner. And then at some point, you know, he can take on that role when it's time for me to go out on my own. So I ended up declining that offer, but it turns out that about six months later, they decided they wanted to sell the building. And the practice I was in was like very much growing out of the space. We had been growing out of the space for as long as I had been there since 2013. And so I said, I might know someone who would buy this place. And I connected the dots on that for the owner of the practice I was in and the owner of this practice that had wanted to leave space. And that luckily did end up working out. And I worked out of that space after my previous um associate bought that building. I worked there for gosh, five almost six years, I want to say. And I continued to learn a lot and continued to feel the pressure and the urgency to go out on my own. And things just kept not quite lining up. I would find a space and then someone would come and swoop in and offer two years of the lease cash up front. And it was like, oh, okay, can't compete with that. Um, so there were just multiple things one after another like that over the 2019 to 2021 timeframe. That finally, in about like fall of 2021, my husband said, Hey, I'm starting to grow out of my space now. And if you're having problems finding a commercial space that meets your needs, probably going to be equally as hard for me. So, what if we just bought land and built our own spaces? Like we could actually just build what we want. And I thought that was totally bonkers. I was like, there is I can't even fathom that. Like, we both have student loans. We now have two children. Like, on what grounds would any financial advisor think that's a good idea? Like, I just I could not make any sense of it the first time it was brought up. It was such a it was such a fear response. And it was almost like my whole body just wanted to reject it, even though I really hadn't had time to sit with it and check in with my intuition on it. And I wonder for you, if you can relate to not only the timeline of like, my goodness, just one thing after another after another, just not working out, not working in my favor, feeling like this is never gonna happen. And then someone presenting an option that was like, are you crazy? Like, no, that's there's no way that could possibly work out. And then my husband started to do a little bit more research. He talked to his accountant, we talked to our financial planner, he talked to someone in his family who'd had some experience owning commercial properties. And the math started to math a little better for me. But there were still a lot of steps that had to be taken in order to even like get to the point of being able to break ground on something like that. We had to hire an architect and have architectural plans drafted before we could even apply to purchase the plot of land that we had our eye on, which happened to be just across the parking lot from the previous space that my husband had been leasing for his physical therapy practice. So we had to get the architect, we had to get the plans, we had to pay for the plans to be drafted. We had to go through many revisions of those plans. That all in all took, gosh, six or seven months. So here now we're we're coming to the end of 2022. And the plot of land that we originally wanted, they said, oh no, no, that that plot is not zoned for medical. That's gonna be a bank. And meanwhile, we're like, what? It has been sitting empty for like 15 years or longer, and who flipping cares? And so we've learned so much. We've learned so much about so many areas that we had no knowledge about five years ago, zero knowledge about. You know, being in this for over a decade, 13 years, it just all flows really naturally for me when I'm looking at a fertility case and I'm looking through someone's labs and I'm going through that history and I'm asking, you know, questions about other health factors that might be sort of woven into the fertility. And having that experience of having to be a total beginner again was so necessary for me in my practice to be able to have that level of understanding of like, oh, this is this is where so many of my patients are, and that's okay. Like I can hold their hand through this, I can meet them in it and guide them. And some of the guidance that we had for this building journey was really, really helpful and hand-holding. And some of it was a total slap in the face. Like, I will not go into so many of the stories because there is liability involved. But one of the lessons that I had to learn, maybe even the biggest lesson that I had to learn was how to stand in my power from a very regulated place. And I mean this because we worked with a contracting company who was not very transparent. Um unfortunately that there were mistakes on both the architect's part and the contractor's um communications that led to some really huge issues, like multi tens of thousand dollars issues. I mean, it and this is like where we could really get into some horrific numbers. And I know some of you have also spent a horrific amount of money to try to get pregnant through multiple rounds of IVF, through multiple regenerative PRP ovarian injections. Like I know that so many of you have really invested. And my goodness, there was a lot invested in this building, and a lot of it at times just felt like, well, this is not sexy. Um, you know, some of the things that we found out about like the utilities that were already supposed to be like on the land, like, oh nope, sorry, that wasn't uh that wasn't actually the case. Here's a$42,000 bill.

Like, what?

Guarding The Vision From Negativity

Hiring Help To Protect The Build

Trusting The Timeline In Fertility

Blessing The Space And Closing

We are we are not people who come from money. So this was wild to us to not only feel like, okay, we like we we are already so far into this, like there's no turning back. How do we actually meet this with grace and gratitude and fortitude and resilience? How do we keep going when there's so many times and it just feels like this? There is no way we are gonna be able to pull this off. There's no way we're gonna be able to continue to be able to pay for any of this or even just sustain like the level of gaslighting that we were experiencing. I mean, literal walls fell down during the building process. And like, thankfully, I do 100% believe that all of the walls in here are sound now. So if you come visit, I'm not worried about any walls falling down on you. Obviously, multiple layers of inspection had to happen to get to completion, but literal fucking walls fell down. I kid you not. There were so many issues that like literally we had to continue to come back to the vision over and over and over again. And some of the meditations that I produced during this time for the Brilliant Fertility program or for the live retreats that I was running were very much coming from that personal place of like, okay, guys, we gotta stand in this vision, we gotta stand in our power here because if this is on your heart, then I believe it was meant for you. And this space was on our hearts, so it must be meant for us. I have I had to believe that there was literally no other choice. And what did that standing in power mean? That meant doing a lot of nervous system regulation strategies, a lot of tools before I would engage with anyone on the contracting or the architectural team, like even when it came to opening an email or answering an email. Um, I would sometimes have my husband filter an email before I would send it. Um, because sometimes he'd be like, wow, this one sounds very angry. And I was like, Well, I am angry. And he was like, I know, and we should be, but you know, maybe if we want to continue working with them, we'll have to find, you know, ways of communicating that are a little bit more conducive to cooperation. So I had to find that dance of honoring myself and the emotions that were very appropriate for what was happening while also being able to engage in a measured way. And I hope that makes sense because by no means do I believe that we should need to censor ourselves. And so if you've had the experience, for example, of having a provider who you did not feel heard by or who flat out made a mistake and would not own up to it, Lord knows they're counseled not to by malpractice. But how do you approach that? Like there were times when I wanted to come at it like a screaming banshee, and that would likely not have been well received. So instead, I would go for my tapping walk. I would hit my ginormous rubber tire with a sledgehammer while listening to Rage Against the Machine. I would do some breath work, I would write out what I really wanted to say as a first draft. And then I would actually sit down and be like, okay, if we want to continue this communication, how do we need to go forward? And not coming from a place of I'm gonna let these people walk all over me and be a dysregulated banshee, but how can I be the most powerful version of myself? Not in a sense of dominance of power, but just of showing that presence that you can't fuck with me. And that was a really big shift for me. Um my tendency in the past really had been to just internally freak out, but not actually stand up for myself or not stand up for my values. And that was a pattern that needed to end. So I'm curious if you are aware of any patterns that you're ready to end to as you step into your power, as you step into that mama bear energy. I wonder what it's time to let go of, and I wonder what it might be time to step into. Another lesson that I had from this experience was to be really discerning about who I shared this dream project with. I learned pretty quickly that there were some people who were just going to project all their own stuff all over everyone else's dreams. And I hear this so often from patients, especially my patients who are single mothers by choice, and my patients who are trying to get pregnant at over 40, or patients who have had multiple miscarriages and they continue to try. And their family is like, why do you keep doing this to yourself? You know what's going to happen. Or couples who've already had children and they would like to continue to have children and that they get the you at least you have one, or at least you already have kids. Like, why do you keep trying? As if it's any of their mother effing business, how you grow your family. And I had to realize that with this project, that this was no one else's business. And the people who I shared this vision with from the get-go were people who I just instinctually trusted. Um, big shout out to Bonnie Golden, who was my prenatal yoga teacher when I was in my second pregnancy. I shared this vision with her when I was pregnant, and we got to chatting at some point, and I told her that I was a naturopath who worked with fertility, and she was like, Oh, that's just amazing. You know, where are you now? What do you want to do? And I she was the first person that I really said it out loud to, other than my husband. Like, I envision having this space that is all things fertility. And we have a community room where people can come meet and have a circle and learn from others who've been through this experience and learn from other experts in the community. And I just couldn't quite figure out how to put it together at that time. And of course, just about to have a baby. And so I was like, Oh, this feels like an insane time to be even dreaming about this. And Bonnie was like, No, I see it, and I love this for you, and I love this for our community. And those are the people who you want to share your dream with. And it's kind of hard to suss out sometimes who that is. And what's really painful is sometimes the people who are closest to us, who are supposed to love us, aren't the biggest cheerleaders when it comes to those dreams. And there, it was one person that I shared this with in particular, who, you know, just instead of saying, like, oh my gosh, I am so excited for you. Like, this is really big, and I'm rooting for you every step of the way, which was what I needed to hear because I was fucking scared. It just was like, oh my God, that's gonna be so hard. I was like, there it is, the projection. No, thank you. I reject that. That's not mine, that's yours. And thankfully at that point, I was like well into my training in the subconscious mind work and hypnosis, and I understood projection pretty well, and I had witnessed a lot of patterns with that person, and I was just like, okay, well, I know we won't be sharing any more details with this person, and that's okay. I felt sad, I had to honor that sadness, and I also had to honor the dream and the vision and um not continue to share bits of that with that person because it it would totally just turn into a spiral of negativity, and I am not for toxic positivity. You guys, if you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, you know that I'm very anti-toxic positivity, and I'm also very anti problem trances. So there's this concept we learned about in my hypnosis training that you know, a lot of what we digest media-wise, social media, news media, is is very trance-like. You know, it's meant to kind of put you in this state where you're not very conscious of how you're absorbing the information. And there are social situations that can also induce trance-like state as well, for better or for worse. The problem trance is one of them. So if you think about there's someone in your world who every time you get together, it just devolves into oh my God, there's this problem and there's that problem, and there's this horrible person, and what they're doing, and then all these problems in the world. And it's like, okay, there's one thing is to have, you know, a few minutes of venting. But when you realize that, like, man, this I was at this dinner for two hours, and like all we did was talk about problems or how terrible things are, how terrible these other people are, gossiping, and it's that is also inducing this trance-like state. So this project for me caused me to be very protective of my energy and very protective of the vision and staying positive within the vision while almost daily needing to honor the hard emotions that were coming up. There was a lot of fear for me that we weren't going to be able to pull this off, or we were like literally gonna go bankrupt doing it. There was fear that I was making a mistake, that I could have just found a way to be happy where I was for as long as I could. There were fears that, you know, what if we did finish it and then no one came to see me, or I was working so hard that I couldn't even enjoy my family and enjoy my life. Um, and I I had to acknowledge those and also counsel myself and receive support. We'll get to that one next to keep going. And so that does bring me to my next big lesson is hiring help. So, yes, we had the hired help in terms of like we could not build this literal building with our own hands. That would not have been safe. But where did we have to hire other help? Well, we had to hire an attorney because it was very clear at some point that they these contractors were not taking us as the clients seriously. Um and and were completely neglecting aspects of the project that needed to move forward. So I really resisted this one because I am not a litigious person, I am not a confrontational person, and I really did my homework. And I want to thank Natasha at Originate Natural Building Materials for seeking out some attorney references for me. And I called around and I landed on someone who ended up just being so grounded in their approach and so holistic in their vision of like, here's a spectrum. And on one end of this spectrum is making some phone calls to see how we can move things along. And on the other end of the spectrum is full nuclear, and here's what that usually ends up costing and how much time that usually takes and what's involved with that. And then there's this big middle zone, and we don't necessarily know what to expect in that middle zone yet, but I'll be with you every step of the way. And I was like, oh my gosh, that sounds so much like what I talk to my patients about, right? It's like we have this spectrum of what we could expect when you're trying to get pregnant. And on one end, it's like, well, you know, we make a couple tweaks and you could get pregnant within one, two months. On the other end of the spectrum, like this could go on for a while. Some people do end up going to IVF or genre egg or adoption. And at what point would we make those decisions? And I'll hold your hand through all of it. And I was like, oh my goodness, I think I've like I've found an attorney who does not meet the uh the stereotype of bloodsucking attorneys. No offense if you're an attorney out there. I've actually worked with some of the loveliest attorneys that I can imagine. I have so many family members, so many cousins who are attorneys as well, um, that I that we've had the jokes around. But I was just so grateful for this person's guidance because there were so many things I couldn't navigate on my own. Babysitting these people was like a full-time job. I actually don't quite know how I got through some of it. Um, and you know, my husband, thank goodness, was very much on top of them as well. God bless him, we all need like a month off. But hiring help was so necessary. And at certain point, we can't be DIYing this stuff that we are not experts in. And honestly, even if I was an expert in this, I was so close to it that having other expert eyeballs on it who could be totally objective and not have their own emotions wrapped up in it was game-changing. Absolutely game-changing. So hiring an attorney was one of the best investments that I made. Working with originate natural building materials was another one of the best decisions I made. Um, Natasha, their owner, helped me make decisions for this building that um involved natural building materials, non-toxic building materials, because if we're gonna do this, we might as well do it right. And I didn't want to be bringing people into a space that's just gonna provide more endocrine disruptors when they're already working so hard to balance their hormones. And if I'm gonna be working in here, you know, eight to ten hours multiple days a week, I certainly didn't want that exposure for myself either. So thank goodness experts exist in the world of building supplies to make healthy spaces. And the final hiring help that we did was um getting a third-party contractor. So someone who had decades of experience in commercial building, in medical building specifically, actually come in and give us like point by point what they're seeing happening in the project versus what our contractor was telling us. And that was it wasn't an easy decision to make to bring that person on because we were like, oh man, they're gonna see this as a real contentious hire here. But we had to do it at that point. Like we were years into the project. So just kind of referring to the timeline, we broke ground in October of 2022. We received a certificate of occupancy in October of 2025. And there's so many jokes about building, especially like building from a ground up, of like, oh, well, plan on it taking a year longer and twice what they originally quoted you for. And it's a joke, but it's not a joke. Like that timeline was soul sucking. And at a certain point in this, with hiring help, I hired mental emotional support for myself. So I worked with um Megan Blacksmith, who was one of my trainers, my NLP hypnosis timeline therapy trainers. Um, and I also worked with someone named Louise Wilson who does like beautiful ancestral connection work, and Maria Serbis, who works with the Akashic Records, which um she was actually the one who there was a particular zone of time when I was really annoyed about where the building progress or lack of progress was. And I was in a group session with Maria, and she was just like, I'm getting a pretty strong message that there's a reminder here that there's so many parallels in this building to what your patients are dealing with in their fertility. And as you continue to navigate this with self-compassion and grace and letting go of this idea that it has to be hard and that it the final product is not gonna be as sweet if it wasn't hard. Like when you start to let go of that and learn that it's safe for things to be easy, it's gonna start getting easier and flowing more easily, and you can relay that wisdom to your patients too. I was like, well, I'll be damned if that wasn't some really solid advice that I've continued to work on. And it it is just so funny that like we can't see our own blind spots, and there are many paths to uncovering those blind spots, that's for sure. And you know, we can we can all be working on that through journaling and through topping. Those are the two tools that really helped me the most during all of this, but it was so helpful to have other people asking good questions and helping me tune into intuition on days when I was just really wrapped up in the stress of it. And it's so similar to how I approach people who are really stressed during their fertility progress or lack of progress in their minds. So, as painful as it was to go through, there was so much wisdom in it. I think if I was willing to sit in the emotion, to ask for help and to get perspective to see the wisdom, like a very you know, there could have been a point, a sliding door moment when I decided to just be a bitter banshee through this and let it turn me into someone who doesn't trust anyone, who doesn't learn how to stay in a regulated place through very dysregulating circumstances, that that could have been an alternative. And I'm glad that's not the direction that I chose. So the final piece of this, I've mentioned the timeline a couple times, but I do want to really come back to it because if I had known in 2021, when we first started having the conversation about building from the ground up, if I had actually known how much it was gonna cost and how many years it was gonna take, I never would have done it. And I wonder how many of you are sitting there wondering how long it's gonna take before you hold your baby in your arms. And the truth is we don't know. And that's so hard. That uncertainty is one of the hardest parts of this because if we just knew when it was gonna be done, when they're gonna be here, we could maybe stop stressing out about it. What the hell do we do with that? We have to learn how to be in the now as much as possible, how to navigate this day by day, breath by breath. Ask who's gonna be on my team, who can hold me through this, who's my village, who can I trust to share the dream with who can really root for me on days when this is so hard and keep trusting that that dream is yours for a reason. I believe that for you. And if I hadn't just walked this like crazy four and a half year journey to this building getting done, I don't know if I would be able to stand in that statement so powerfully. But I do believe that to be true. But the timeline doesn't matter as much as who you become during that time. Yes, I know there's the pressure around time and age when you're wanting to have a baby, and we have to have real conversations about that. And we have to have the trust that that desire is ours for a reason. And if that is something that you truly desire, then we have to ask, okay, what can we reasonably do to influence this outcome? And what do we need to surrender? How can we let go? Well, I'm totally forgetting to thank my friend and colleague and hypnotherapist, um, Atana Morelli. I also did several, oh, probably a dozen hypnosis sessions with her right around the time we were trying to get funding because I don't want anyone to think that we like paid cash for this project. Um, no, we had to get a commercial bill loan from a bank and we had to get funding for that, and we got rejected multiple times for a different reason each time, which I'm learning now is actually like really common in the world of entrepreneurship. Had no idea back then what that would actually look like, but I I signed up for several hypnosis sessions with Atenna, and oh, that helped me so much. We we did cord cutting and future self and planting seeds of trust. And it was actually just scrolling through all of the recordings that I have from that today that I can still re-listen to. And that's what I love about hypnosis is that we can create custom recordings and they can be really beautiful daily support to keep moving through something challenging from a place of power. So that really helped me too. I can't remember how I quite got onto that, but I think just the timeline thing of having that way to connect the vision on days when it just felt like I can't even see. it like it feels so far away that I don't I don't even know how to pull that up in my mind as something that is like actually going to be done. And occasionally I do have situations like that with people who are trying to conceive that they like we've been at this for so long. It's been so hard like I can't even imagine holding my baby because it just feels like such a faraway dream. And I don't want to put myself in a position of being in more pain for having like seen it and felt it but not be that close to it. So I know a building is not a baby and I absolutely have no intention of minimizing the importance of life of carrying life of wanting that life to be from your own genetic material and raising that human. I do not mean to minimize that in any way shape or form it is truly one of the biggest blessings and gifts and yet I also I learned so much through this building process that I think helped me become a better provider. Helped me remember some of some of what you go through. I'm far enough on the other side of my fertility journeys that I think to reach back in in a new way to that connection was impactful for me. And I hope you took something from this episode whether it be a reminder that it's okay if you don't share the dream with everyone you want to just have a few really great cheerleaders or that sometimes we got to learn to stand in our power and set our boundaries and not let people walk all over us or that we have to come back to that vision every day when the timeline feels really unclear and impossible. I am sending so much love to you and and I do hope that if you if you are local if you're in Arizona that you come visit us at this beautiful new building at some point since we did have the opportunity to build from the ground up I actually went through and wrote intentions on every single wall and so every wall in this building has something really kind, inspirational, magical written on it to uh I don't know, just create that intention of healing and living life to the fullest and being able to fulfill all of the dreams that you have in your heart. And even if you are not in Arizona and you don't have the ability to come visit us, I hope you know that with this podcast I intend for all of those things for you as well. Until next time sending you so much love