I encourage pregnant women to tune into their thoughts and feelings and use these as a guide to determine what choices and approaches best resonate with them. It’s a success formula for finding your way to best enjoy your pregnancy.
This is, of course, an approach that you can use at any time during your life. Tune into yourself – tune out the “shoulds” and opinions from the world around you – and discover the choices that will work best for you in any area of life.
And, I think this type of reflection is especially useful during pregnancy. Why do I say that? For a few reasons.
- During pregnancy, you may need to revisit your thoughts and feelings a few times before you truly discover what best fits for you. When you become pregnant, you start doing things you’ve never done before and making decisions you’ve never had to consider before. You may not find what’s ideal for you right out of the chute. You may check-in with your thoughts and feelings and make your initial best guess. Then when you move forward with your initial choice, you’ll get your next layer of thoughts and feelings about how that choice is working for you. You want to, again, tune into this new wave of “data” and determine if the current course is working for you or if a change of direction would feel best.
- Pregnancy is a finite period of time. It’s also a time when you are engaged in a critical task: housing and nourishing your unborn baby. This can add up to a lot of pressure to do it exactly right. You want to continually reflect on what you want to do and distinguish this from what you feel you should do.
- You’ve just become the parent of this baby in your belly. Parent-related questions and considerations are going to start coming up for you. While you’re pregnant and before you’re involved in the logistics of caring for a newborn, you have the fantastic opportunity to identify what’s most important to you as a parent. With reflection, you can identify your parenting values, if you will. If you make conscious, intentional choices during your pregnancy, they will naturally demonstrate what you believe to be most important about parenting.
What do you find useful about being reflective?
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