Impossible Thoughts About First-time Motherhood
Author: Sherwood Fleming

How could changing how you think enrich your experience of first-time motherhood, expand your possibilities for action and contribute to your newborn now and in the future? While it’s clear how a motherhood book could give you all sorts of helpful tips dealing with the logistics of baby care, the book I’m reviewing may not seem at first glance like an obvious choice in the first year of first-time motherhood: The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business by Jerry Wind and Colin Crook.

As a coach, I know that adapting to change requires the client to revamp her mindset. The greater the change, the greater the adjustment required. The coaching training I received taught me a methodology for the possibility and process of transformation when a client feels stuck or confused. Wind and Crook’s book deals with that kind of transformation.

Their opening question is “Are you having trouble making a needed transformation?" Their answer is “Transforming your mental models can help you think impossible thoughts and overcome the barriers to change your life.”

Wind and Crook define mental models (or mindsets) "...to describe the brain processes we use to make sense of our world.” They hasten to add, “This does not mean that the real world doesn’t exist, just that we ignore much of what we see in it.” How this happens according to them is that “We walk through the world and don’t pay attention to it. We see without seeing... we are prisoners of our own islands of thought until some foreign intruders come to our shores. Then we realize the wonder and the perils of interacting with this ‘brave new world’ outside the scope of our former mental models.”

I agree with Wind and Crook that the direst consequence of not experimenting with new mental models in a new situation is that it limits what we can become because we miss opportunities along the way. In the case of first-time motherhood, how we as modern women learned to make sense of the world before motherhood basically makes no sense after the baby is born.

Are we failing to see the “true threats and true opportunities” during the early days of first-time motherhood because we’re locked into mental models we can’t even access? And if we could access them, would we find that we are operating out of mental models that limit us? Ones that have us seeing motherhood as closing possibilities in our lives? Ones that have us perceiving ourselves as diminished by becoming mothers? I have experienced first hand while coaching clients that we all possess more adaptive and innovative power than such limiting mindsets would give us credit for.

My impossible thought is that as first-time mothers we seize the opportunities for the transformation possibilities inherent in first-time motherhood. Why not explore how motherhood opens more doors than it closes? Imagine if we celebrated our role as mothers regardless of what we do or don’t do in conjunction with it? Could what we learn along the way put all the other relationships and domains of our life into clearer focus? What if it’s possible to do all that while caring for our newborns?

Since you think, why not choose to think about thinking? It takes hardly any additional time but yields rewards beyond what you can currently envisage to enrich your experience of motherhood throughout this year and beyond. With such incentives, do you dare to think impossible thoughts?

Copyright Sherwood Fleming, 2005. All rights reserved







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Sherwood Fleming is an ontological coach, with a special interest in the concerns of new mothers. Her Nipple Confusion site features a blog, forums and twice-monthly coaching-based explorations for new moms.

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