Top 4 Myths About Teaching Fertility Awareness (Episode 553)

Full Transcript: Episode 553

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack:

This is the Fertility Friday Podcast, episode number 553. In today’s episode, I’m tackling the top four myths about teaching fertility awareness. This topic has come up several times in our FAMM program. This episode is coming from the perspective of a FAMM practitioner who is also wanting to utilize the menstrual cycle as a diagnostic tool and vital sign when working with clients. It’s partially related to marketing and how you put yourself out there, but it also reflects your expectations when you dive into this field of fertility awareness. Let’s go ahead and jump into the top four myths about teaching fertility awareness.

Myth number one is that your clients are coming to you primarily for charting support. That might seem really strange because I’m talking about teaching fertility awareness — but what I found over the years is that although that may be the case in some situations, ultimately your clients are looking for support with bigger challenges. Although you may think when you take a fertility awareness certification program that your clients will come to you solely for charting support, what you find is that your clients are seeking a solution for a more significant problem in most cases.

Let me give you some of the examples I’ve found. Over the years, I’ve worked with a significant number of clients who had horrible side effects with birth control — to the point of unbearable. These are women who went on one pill formulation and it didn’t work, tried another, maybe tried the hormonal IUD, and eventually after years of going from brand to brand and type to type, they decided that hormonal contraceptives simply don’t work for them. Side effects ranged from depression, anxiety, panic attacks, libido issues, and painful sex, among others. When they finally discovered there was a non-hormonal birth control option that was highly effective with no side effects, they were filled with relief. That’s one example of clients coming for what appears to be charting support — but ultimately seeking a solution to a bigger problem.

I’ve also worked with a significant number of clients who want to prepare their body for pregnancy, come off hormonal birth control, and take a break from hormones. There are women focused on natural alternatives, steering away from pesticides, upleveling their health across the board — and then they discover the pill connection. There are women wanting to address hormonal imbalances — looking at their luteal phases, concerned they’re too short; looking at their mucus production and not impressed with what they’re seeing; dealing with irregular cycles or PMS. There are women trying to conceive, wanting clarity on how to time sex correctly and what their cycle is telling them. And of course, there are women who have just discovered fertility awareness and are excited about it for its own sake.

The point is: when you jump into this field and think about who your clients are going to be and what you’re going to do for them, what can happen is your actual clients are coming to you looking for something you didn’t anticipate. This is when you start to see the limitations of your training. Myth number one: your clients are coming to you primarily for charting support. In reality, that support is typically to address a larger problem they are facing.

That leads into myth number two: when you’re teaching fertility awareness, the main service you’re offering your clients is teaching fertility awareness charting. Bear with me, because I know it sounds strange. Many fertility awareness instructors and other practitioners who’ve started offering these services may have found this too — you think, okay, I’m teaching charting, which of course you are. But what I want you to think about as a practitioner is what your clients really need support with first, what their underlying reasons are for coming to you. I want you to think about charting as the vehicle and tool you’re using to support your clients to achieve whatever goal they’re looking to achieve.

The goals may be: freedom from hormonal birth control side effects while maintaining high contraceptive effectiveness; normalizing the menstrual cycle so hormonal imbalances and cycle irregularities resolve; resolving specific concerning symptoms; preparing the body for pregnancy; or overcoming health and hormonal challenges preventing conception. Although you may think your primary job is teaching charting, I encourage FAMM practitioners to realize that fertility awareness is simply the tool we’re using to support clients to achieve those deeper goals beyond simply charting.

This is important because a lot of women who really dive into fertility awareness charting — especially the most enthusiastic ones — find their way to this knowledge on their own and seek do-it-yourself options rather than paying a practitioner. So the actual clients who are coming to you are coming because they are really struggling with something and they need your support with it. Charting is the tool — not the main feature. Women aren’t looking to chart their cycles just because it’s fun. Even for myself, when I first started charting my cycles, it was for hormone-free birth control. I had no idea it was connected to health. For many women, there’s a very specific reason they want to do this — it’s not charting in and of itself, it’s what it can do for them.

This is why in the FAMM program, we take the charting piece to the next level. Our program is extremely comprehensive so that practitioners not only learn the ins and outs of teaching charting confidently using the evidence-based, highest-efficacy method of birth control — we go beyond that, because clients ultimately are seeking more than just the logistics and basics.

That brings us to myth number three: taking a fertility awareness training program is sufficient to support your clients with advanced cycle issues. This is something many fertility awareness educators discover pretty quickly after they graduate and start working with clients. The two myths we’ve gone through build on each other and lead here. You graduate from your fertility awareness training program, super excited to go into the world and teach fertility awareness. But when you start working with clients, you realize they have deeper issues. You start to see advanced charting scenarios. And the vast majority of fertility awareness training programs don’t adequately prepare you for what you’re going to see.

The menstrual cycle is connected to health — it is a reflection of it. Many women seeking support from a trained instructor have a cycle that is not straightforward. That’s precisely why they need help. If a cycle is pretty straightforward, many women can figure it out on their own. There are certainly women who value speeding up the learning curve — particularly those using the method as their primary birth control, who don’t want to spend six months to a year learning on their own and risk an unplanned pregnancy. But there is a huge subset of clients who say they’re having issues with mucus — and you might think as an instructor that they’re struggling with interpretation and you can teach them something. But what they’re really saying is: I don’t have any mucus and I don’t know why. Or I have mucus all the time and I don’t know why. And you find that it’s about more than charting.

The myth that completing a training program means you’re good to go — that it’s all about charting — is not the experience. We’ve had many certified and trained fertility awareness educators who’ve been working with clients take the FAMM program to learn the specific strategies to take their practice to the next level. We teach a variety of protocols that go beyond simply charting. And I think there’s a myth within a myth: that when we start working with clients, our clients are going to be kind of like us. When fertility awareness has helped you personally, it’s natural to want to share that wisdom. But the key challenge is that most of your clients will have cycles that look nothing like yours. Most of the scenarios you encounter, you didn’t see in your training program — you didn’t even know they were possible. They weren’t in the textbook. And you’re left asking: what do I do now?

Most instructors find out eventually that they thought they were going to be doing one thing — just teaching charting, which would be wonderful — but the clients who are coming have challenges they weren’t anticipating. They’ve never seen a chart like this. They’ve never seen a scenario like this. Their training program didn’t tell them this would be the bulk of their work.

Now, myth number four. Imagine you’ve taken your initial training, realized the limitations of what you were taught, jumped into the FAMM program, learned all the protocols, and now feel equipped. Myth number four is that your main job is now to fix your clients. No — it’s not.

Think about your own experience in the conventional medical system. We’re often set up for certain expectations because of how that system works. You go to a doctor or other health professional. They went to school, got a download of knowledge, and they essentially hold all the information. You’re there as an empty vessel. You’re the patient who doesn’t know anything because you didn’t go to med school. The health professional has all the answers before you even start talking. Appointments are five minutes long. You get ten words out and they’re already telling you what to do — because they obviously know everything and you don’t know anything. That’s the model. We are not aiming to replicate it.

The model I just described assumes the health professional knows way more than the client. If we flip that and assume the client is actually the expert in her own body — and she is — the whole approach changes. She may not have specific clinical knowledge, but about her own body, her own cycle, what has worked for her and what hasn’t — she really is the expert. So the approach we take as FAMM practitioners is not to say “I know all this and I’m going to fix you.” The approach is to empower and educate. We create a situation where clients now have more information, a greater understanding, and are able to make much more informed decisions about how to move forward. Instead of “you have this issue, so you do these five things” — the approach is to provide education, information, and empowerment so they have what they need to make an informed decision.

Think about it this way: if you’ve purchased The Fifth Vital Sign or Real Food for Fertility, something happens when you engage with that information. All of a sudden you have additional information at your fingertips. When you’re thinking about concerns with your cycle, you have better footing, more knowledge, more confidence. That’s the model.

Using the cycle as a vital sign and diagnostic tool, it becomes less about you being a guru — going back to that medical model — and more about you being a shepherd. You’re providing your client with the skills and knowledge to chart her cycles and understand what’s going on. You’re helping her see where she started from, what her first chart looked like, what concerns and challenges she has, and then as she makes changes — maybe improving her nutrition, addressing insufficient protein, whatever needs addressing — you’re seeing how her cycle responds. That’s the difference.

With the conventional approach, you often think: if someone has this issue, everyone with this issue does these five things. But when you use the chart as the vital sign guiding you, you may have four or five clients with similar symptoms and try the same thing. It works amazingly for one client. The other client does the same exact thing and sees no relief. The chart prevents you from thinking you can take a cookie-cutter approach to every single person. We have foundational things that generally support clients — but when it comes to nuances, charting shows you in real time how effective your interventions are based on actual cycle changes. We have our protocols and fundamentals, but we also know that we may need to tweak and adjust. That’s not a weakness — it’s true science. It’s not about what you think. It’s about what’s literally working for this person in real time.

This approach is the opposite of what most of us have experienced in the conventional medical system. Imagine having support that is literally customized to you — because it has to be, because you’re using this charting modality rather than walking into an existing system and being told everyone with this problem takes this pill or has this surgery.

That doesn’t mean there’s no place for the conventional system. We all need doctors, and sometimes we need specialists — endocrinologists, fertility specialists. But I don’t believe it’s a one-approach situation when it comes to women’s reproductive health. I always use the boardroom analogy: think of yourself sitting at the head of that boardroom table and ask, who’s on your healthcare team? We may need someone looking from a functional approach, someone looking at the menstrual cycle, someone looking at nutrition — depending on the specific challenge we’re facing.

To wrap up and recap the four myths: Myth one — clients are coming primarily for charting support. Myth two — the main service you’re offering is teaching charting. Myth three — your fertility awareness training program is sufficient to support clients with advanced cycle issues. Myth four — once you gain knowledge and protocols, your primary job is to fix your clients.

Lumped together: your clients are coming to you — even when their stated goal is simply to learn charting — because they’re looking for a solution to a greater problem. Charting is the vehicle helping them get there. Most fertility awareness education programs are not equipping their graduates to go beyond the basics, leaving practitioners on shaky ground when they encounter cycles and charts that go beyond what they’ve been shown. And once you do gain knowledge and information — the role of a FAMM practitioner is not to be another version of a broken system. We put clients front and center, educate and empower them, so they’re in a position to make more informed choices suitable to their unique situation and individual cycle. Charting allows us to tailor protocols based on what’s actually happening in real time. It’s a totally different way of looking at things — and a genuinely refreshing one.

No one will ever know your body more than you. The practitioner’s role is not to be the guru who fixes everything. It’s to empower and strengthen the client’s knowledge and confidence so she can make the best decisions for herself, now that she has far more information than she did before.