Fertility Awareness Training for Practitioners (Episode 350)

Full Transcript: Episode 350

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: This is the Fertility Friday podcast, episode number 350.

Welcome to the Fertility Friday podcast, your source for information about the fertility awareness method and all things fertility. I’m your host Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of the fifth vital sign and the fertility awareness mastery charting journal. I’m a certified fertility awareness educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys. I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I managed to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility and your overall health. And I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

Today marks the 350th episode of the fertility Friday podcast, and if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I enjoy celebrating these milestones. I think it’s really interesting, I always take these opportunities to reflect back, and that’s a lot of episodes, that’s a lot of time. This is in year six, I believe, of the podcast, or no, year seven, we’re in year seven now, so it’s been six years, and then at the end of this year would be year seven, so yeah, quite exciting. So the topic of today’s episode is fertility awareness cycle charting, but with a twist. Today, for the first time on the podcast, I’m going to be talking about some of the challenges involved in incorporating fertility awareness into your existing practice. Now, specifically thinking about women who have professional practices in the area of women’s health, where they’re already working with women, and many professionals now are learning about the menstrual cycle as a vital sign and how important the cycle is in terms of being a tool, a diagnostic tool that can help you to learn and understand and identify a variety of different challenges. But it’s still a burgeoning field. Few professionals have received professional training as to how to really reliably use the chart as a diagnostic tool in a specific way. And so I have recently announced the new program that I’m starting, Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship, and this is a program where, for the first time, I’m offering mentorship to professionals so that they can incorporate fertility awareness charting, chart interpretation, and essentially using the menstrual cycle as a diagnostic tool into their practices. And this is something that is certainly a challenge for a number of reasons, and I think, before a program like this one has come out, one of the main roadblocks is that the only professional training available typically is fertility awareness educator training, meaning that if you are already a health professional, do you also want to become a fertility awareness educator and take a two-year training program? I mean, you already have a professional designation. What you really want to do is incorporate the practical aspects of charting into your existing practice. And so that’s essentially where I’ve been taking, where I am taking this training, so to really fill that gap.

And I, so just to put it out there, when I first started the podcast, I really didn’t have any intention of ever branching out and teaching professionals. My heart is and has always been with women and supporting them in understanding their menstrual cycles. And what has happened is that over the past almost decade of doing this work publicly, it’s just become more and more consistent that the most frequent request that I’m seeing in my inbox is, I want to learn how to do this with my clients, where can I go, where can you refer me? And so that is essentially a little bit of background there. So if you would have asked me when I first started if I would have ever done anything like this, I would have probably said, no, what are you talking about? But I can see that the need is great to have that practical ability to really jump in and understand what’s happening. And so, these are not the only challenges that health professionals face when they’re wanting to incorporate fertility awareness into their practice, but certainly these are some of the challenges that come up. And so without further ado, let’s jump into today’s topic.

So I’ll jump in with the first challenge, and I briefly mentioned it in my introduction, that when you are a health professional with an existing practice, you’ve already gone ahead and done your certification, different types of programs. When you discover fertility awareness and you want to be able to incorporate that into your practice in a meaningful and professional standardized way, there are very few programs available, first of all, in general, but there are even fewer programs that are designed specifically for professionals. And so that’s a challenge, because for anyone who’s looked into this, you quickly discover that the most scientific, thorough route of achieving this is to go ahead and do a full two-year fertility awareness training program to become essentially a certified fertility awareness educator, when that may not be what you want to do. I mean, if you’re already a professional, then attaining an additional certification, if you’re not planning to completely change your practice, may not be the best thing for you. And so then what do you do? So I think that’s one of the challenges, and also the time commitment. If you’re already a busy health professional doing a program that is the equivalent of another degree, another certification, for some it’s completely worth it and they’ll go ahead and do it, and for others it makes them take pause because maybe that’s not exactly what they’re looking for. And so then you’re kind of faced with the challenge of, do I get the certification, do I try to offer some sort of support to my clients without being trained and risk not really having a full understanding of what I’m doing and not feeling comfortable and confident about it. So I would say that that is one of the first challenges when you’re looking to incorporate fertility awareness charting into your existing practice.

So the second challenge, I would say, is that many health professionals overestimate their ability to teach their clients charting in their practice, because they’ve already taken a professional training program. So if you have a certification in a different area, if you’re a health coach, if you’re a nurse practitioner, midwife, if you are a naturopathic physician, then naturally you have obtained a significant amount of training in the women’s health field, and naturally it would make sense that, well, this is just charting, so I must already be qualified to do it. And what I would say is that even myself, when I first, very first learned charting, you kind of have an idea, like for example, when you chart your own cycles, and that’s really your experience, then you may have the impression that if you were working with other women that their cycles and charts are going to look similar to yours, right? Like how hard could this be? But this is why training is important, because like anything else, like any other field, any other health field, what you experience often has nothing to do with what the clients who come see you seeking support will experience. And so having your own cycles, even if you are a very experienced charter, so you have charted for years and years and years, that is not the same as attending a training program and seeing all the different challenges that women may face. And because oftentimes, like I mentioned, when you are working in practice, for example, if you’re a doctor, your patients don’t have whatever you have. Like if you’re a doctor and you’re in pretty good health, you’re helping people who are sick, and so they have very different health concerns and challenges and things than you ever would. And so obviously, if you didn’t go to medical school, you wouldn’t be able to even know what is going on with the things that people come to you with. And so it’s the same with charting, and I can’t overstate that, because certainly as an educator, being that fertility awareness educator education and being a certified educator in this field, it’s a designation that in many ways is relatively new in a sense and certainly isn’t widely known of. Certainly, when I explain to people what I do who are not in this field at all, they’re kind of like, oh wow, I didn’t know that was a thing. And so I think that with that comes sometimes just a bit of a misunderstanding, or kind of an overestimation, like, oh, how hard could this be, right, this must be pretty simple, it’s just charting. And that’s something that I would say can be a challenge, because if you overestimate your knowledge based on your own personal charting experience and then dive into helping your clients with their charts, you will very, very quickly recognize that you don’t know what they’re talking about, right? Like they’re coming to you with questions that you just do not have the answers to, because you just didn’t know that this was a thing, or you didn’t necessarily think that you would see that particular issue because you didn’t know that was a thing, and certainly then when you see that particular issue, you just wouldn’t have a context to know what it could be about or what it could relate to. So that certainly would be a challenge. And so this is to say that when you’re working in a professional field and you’re wanting to incorporate fertility awareness charting into your practice, it is essential to have some sort of training and background to really be able to help your clients to the best of your ability. So I’d encourage you not to overestimate your own experience. You know, if you have years and years of your own personal charting experience, I would encourage you not to make the mistake of thinking that that means that you’ll be able to help all of the different women with all of the different challenges that will come to you.

Okay, so the third thing, the third challenge that I’ve certainly seen, is that there are many different charting methodologies, and more every day, so there are different charting apps, different practices. And often when talking about fertility awareness, you’ll hear people talk about the fertility awareness method. And so just to be clear, there’s no such thing as the fertility awareness method. There is not one method that everybody agrees on and that everybody uses that is all the same. There are multiple fertility awareness based methods that are based on the same underlying dynamics of the menstrual cycle. So certainly fertility awareness cycle charting is based on the interplay of hormones that happens throughout the menstrual cycle and how that relates to the three main fertile signs. But there are multiple different ways of tracking this information. And so there are methods that rely on cervical mucus only, there are methods that rely on basal body temperature only, there are methods that rely on cervical mucus and basal body temperature and sometimes the cervical position, there are methods that rely on the clear blue fertility monitor. I’ve had a few episodes on the Marquette method, that certainly teaches their clients about mucus but primarily relies on tracking the actual fluctuation of hormones by using this fertility monitor to measure for the estrogen surge. There are multiple different resources, so of course, I’ve written a book on the topic, the fifth vital sign, taking charge of your fertility is the most popular and common book on fertility awareness that teaches a certain methodology of charting. And then there’s all the apps, so there’s a lot of different apps that use different algorithms, there’s a lot of different devices that track certain fertility signs in different ways, and then we also have the ovulation predictor kits and all these other things and saliva testing, so it just goes on and on. So my point here is, and this is something that ties through into some of the other points that I want to get to, but what this means is that when you have a client who comes to you with a chart, you don’t necessarily know how she’s charting or tracking her information. And so for me, because this is what I do, I design my programs the way that I do. So for anyone who’s been curious about working with me or looking at my programs, like fertilityfriday.com/workwithme, you’ll notice that I’ll offer a one-off session like a strategy session or a fertility assessment, but primarily I work with clients through programs, and part of that is because in order to use the menstrual cycle as a vital sign, we need to standardize how you’re checking your fertile signs. Honestly, when you’re going at this in a professional specific way, if you are trying to support a client to understand what’s happening in their cycle and use that cycle as a vital sign, we can’t have ten clients charting in ten different ways. There has to be a standard, there has to be a specific way that we’re tracking these signs so that we can first of all be sure of what we’re actually seeing. So when you’re seeing the chart, if you are able to support your clients to chart in a certain way, then when you are having a conversation with them, you know what they’re actually talking about. So first of all, you’re both talking in the same language, and from that place, then we can use that sign as a vital sign to really identify what’s happening. And so I would say one of the big challenges is that with so many different apps, so many different charting methodologies, so many different technologies to help us track these different signs, when you’re going into it without necessarily training or experience, and literally just trying to read what they’re providing you without even knowing that there are follow-up questions and background questions that you need to know and ask, and the fact that you could be seeing something that’s actually totally normal, but just because of the way that they’re tracking it, it’s making it look a little bit different. That is a challenge. So I would say that’s certainly a challenge, the fact that there’s just so many different ways people can chart, and when you have a client coming in with their charts, you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking at.

Okay, so challenge number four that I’ll talk about today. This kind of goes into some of these, it basically is me expanding on number three, but I thought it would be helpful for me to break it down. So number four, I put cervical mucus. So that’s a challenge, right, cervical mucus is one of the most challenging signs, I would say, for women themselves who are charting, and also for others to interpret. And similar to my comment about all the different charting methodologies, there are multiple different ways to track cervical mucus and there are multiple different apps and all of those types of things, and each woman has a different level of understanding of how to track it. So again, this can make it difficult if you’re wanting to again use the chart as a diagnostic tool, if each woman coming to you has a different level of understanding of her mucus, she’s charting it in a different way, and depending on how she’s charting it, she could be missing information, she could be overestimating or underestimating what is happening. And again, so this just speaks to one of the challenges, is quite literally that you can gather information from a chart, and certainly I have clients who I’ll work with and they’ll provide me with their charts, and it’s always helpful, it’s always, always helpful to have the charts to have, as many as you have done, however way that you have done it. And so there’s always helpful information that you can gather from a chart, but when you want to move into using the chart in a kind of diagnostic type of way, then it becomes helpful to standardize how you’re checking, how you interpret, and in order to first of all be able to help someone to do that, you need to understand that, and you need to be able to chart your own mucus in a standardized way. So that’s kind of like the first step. What is it, those that can’t do, teach, I’m not sure, but I’m trying to think of, I think you know what I mean though, it’s that if you can even do it for yourself, you certainly can’t help someone else to do it. So having a firm, solid understanding of this for your own self, is, I would say, very important before you help others. But certainly there’s a limit to how much you can help somebody when you have multiple clients coming at you with multiple different charting methodologies doing things in multiple different ways. Like you can very quickly see that it would be difficult to offer any type of standard of care with all of those different methodologies coming at you.

Okay, so number five is basal body temperature. So again, same idea. It’s very, you don’t have to spend much time on the internet and in fertility awareness charting groups to see people jumping to conclusions. So you see a chart and it’s like, oh my gosh, the temperatures are too low, they must have this problem, or oh my gosh, the temperatures are too high, they must have this problem. So something that I talk about on the podcast a lot, in my episodes, reality episodes and all those things, is literally standardizing how you take the temperature, holding the thermometer in place for ten minutes and all that kind of stuff. And it’s not just me saying it because I’m bored, certainly there’s a reason for that. And so that just gives an example of, there’s a difference between charting and having a general sense of when ovulation is happening and wanting to just have that general kind of understanding, because you can chart and you can take your temperature in whatever way you want, and you’ll still, most of the time, be able to identify ovulation to some extent. You may have some challenges from time to time, but still ultimately you can do it, and many women do it that way for years. But when you shift into wanting to provide specific support to use the menstrual cycle as a vital sign, then there comes a need to standardize what you’re seeing, as I said. And this is what I say to all of my clients. So I just recently, well, let me see when this episode’s coming out, so when this episode comes out I’ll already have been well through, I think about halfway through my most recent eight-week Fertility Awareness Live program. So every time I start the program, we go through a lot of these specifics so that everyone can be on the same page with how they’re doing it. And it’s always like really the ten-minute thing, and I’m always like, yes, and certainly because this is data-oriented, I encourage all of my clients to test me, to see how it works, doing it either way, put both numbers on your chart and see if it makes a difference. Anyways, so the point going back to number five, being basal body temperature, is just another example of, if you are wanting to support somebody from that health standpoint, then you can’t simply take everything on the chart at face value. When you’re working with a client, there has to at some point be some sort of standardization of the tracking procedure so that you can really understand what you’re seeing on the chart, so that you can be very clear on what is really going on, because there are many situations where if you don’t do that, you can jump to a conclusion when really the person isn’t necessarily taking their temperature correctly, or something like that. So that’s number five.

Now number six kind of relates to these things as well, but it expands upon it a little bit. So number six, I would say one of the challenges is that you may begin to take a person’s chart out of context. For myself, this is not a new thing, working with clients and reviewing their charts, I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and I’ve worked with hundreds of people, I’ve been charting myself for decades. So I’m not saying this to brag, what I’m saying is that similar to any profession, when you have an experienced person working in the field. So if you have an issue with your, let’s say you have some sort of misalignment in your spine and you go to a chiropractor, if you go to that chiropractor, and that chiropractor, I have a really great chiropractor and he’s been in practice for like 25 years or something, and he can, it’s the strangest thing, I go in there and he can look at me and poke his finger in a certain area in my back and I’ll just be like, oh, how did you know it was there, and he’s just like, I can see that your hip is like, so what I’m saying is, anyone who’s been working in the field for a long time has a different perspective. Okay, so what can happen is when you first discover fertility awareness and you discover that it can be a vital sign, then when you start to see things like a lower temperature or an elevated temperature or a certain type of mucus pattern or a certain type of thing, then you can very easily jump to the conclusion that, oh my goodness, you have this sign, you must have this corresponding endocrine disorder, and it can be very alarming, you can just jump straight into this situation where you’re making these conclusions about a person based on what you see on their chart. So when you are, again, a professional who’s been trained in this area, who is working with clients in a very serious and professional sense, the chart is part of the picture. So the chart would make up part of the overall picture, you would need to have background on the client, just like any other health professionals. So all health professionals listening right now are nodding their heads, like of course, if someone comes in and says they have an issue, you do an intake process, you have serious background of what’s happening with this person, and you put their symptoms and situation and chart into context with all of the background, and before jumping to conclusions, there’s certain things that you would want to make sure are in place when you are approaching a client from a holistic perspective. And so I would say that when you don’t necessarily have the training and background in chart interpretation, it would be very easy to get, it’s like you get really excited, it’s like, oh my gosh, you have this, it must mean this. And I would say the chart is essential, from my perspective, my perspective is biased, because of course every single client I see, the chart is a central part of the diagnostic protocol, but the chart is part of the picture. And with menstrual cycle charting, one of the things I always say is that it’s a vital sign, so it’s responding to a lot of different factors, some of which are not as sexy, like basic self-care and taking care of yourself and all of the basic things that ensure that we have healthy cycles. Again, one of the challenges can be that you can take the chart out of context, and if you don’t know what all of the factors or at least the majority of the factors that could be contributing to some of these cycle fluctuations, if you don’t take, what I always say to my clients is that one chart by itself doesn’t give us the be-all and end-all information about your life. If you have a true issue, condition, endocrine disorder, etc., then you are going to see patterns over time. It’s not just going to be like one weird cycle, and then we can make all these sweeping conclusions about the state of your health. When there’s an underlying problem happening, you are going to continue to see that pattern in the chart. So essentially the pattern sometimes is more important than that one weird chart. And so this is where, again, training and experience is very, very important, so that we’re not looking at a person’s chart and jumping to all these conclusions, so that we’re really understanding how the chart can be used to help us create an overall diagnostic picture of the person in front of you.

Okay, so the last one really I think kind of brings it all together. So the last challenge I would say is understanding the fifth vital sign. And so this basically kind of ties it all together. What I always say is that menstrual cycle charting, it is, in my opinion, essential. It is this incredible tool and piece of information that can really give us so much important information about our health. But by itself, the chart, without any context, without understanding how the cycle works, and without understanding the basic normal baseline fluctuations of the cycle and how it can relate to day-to-day events, it can really lead us to jump to conclusions, it can really lead us to make certain judgments and things like that outside of the context. And so I’ve always firmly believed that before you can support other women to chart their cycles, you need to chart your own. And I recognize not everyone would be in a position to do that, depending on their age and situation and all of those types of things, but I would say that when you have the ability to do that, it’s essential, there is a different perspective. Now anyone who’s listening to the podcast who has charted their cycles for more than a year, or more than two years, or more than five years, anyone who has charted for a long period of time will know this, because there are certain things that you just can’t really, you can learn stuff in a book, but until you start to see it, it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it or same meaning to it, but there are just certain things that you see over time, and it really helps you to put it all into context. You don’t want to be like, I’m pretty sure we were driving the other day, I think we drove to the farm again or something like that, we get our milk from a farm so we drove to the farm, anyways, and at some point there was like a squirrel running around and one of my kids is like, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, and every time, it happens pretty regularly, squirrels are always running around in the backyard or whatever. And so I feel like being grounded, first of all, in your own experience with charting can help prevent you from running at every squirrel. And I think that that’s one of the things that in my client work, my clients appreciate from me, because when you first jump into this, everything is exciting and everything, you must be the end of the world, like I saw this kind of mucus on this day and then I didn’t see it the next day, like it must mean something. And there becomes then this need to be able to identify what signs truly are going to identify health problems and issues, what signs are really relatively normal, like what types of fluctuations are relatively normal, basically when we should be freaking out and when we should not be freaking out. And I think that that is a huge part of understanding the fifth vital sign. So back to my example of everyone who’s listening who’s charted their own cycles for more than two years or five years, ten years, but when you have done that, and especially if you’ve had the opportunity to chart in different phases of life, so for myself, I charted in my early twenties all the way up until I had my first child when I was thirty, and then I charted through postpartum, and then I had another baby and charted through postpartum again, and now I’m well past postpartum, and so there are certain things that I was able to see and experience. And I’m not saying everyone has to chart for twenty years to help anybody, obviously that’s not what I’m saying, I think you get what I’m saying, but I’m saying that when you actually chart through different phases of your own life, even if it’s just charting over two years, you see that the cycles aren’t always the same, you see that there are phases of your life where maybe your health was a little bit out of balance or something was changing and certain things were different and then they shifted back, you see that we are not robots and it’s not just the same thing all the time, and you see that sometimes that delayed ovulation doesn’t mean that you have PCOS, sometimes the delayed ovulation just means that something was really stressful or there was something that was out of alignment, or something like that. And so I guess this is what I’m saying, I’m saying that number seven, understanding the vital sign, it’s important to have context. And there’s different ways to gain that context, of course one of the ways is through charting yourself over a duration of time, but certainly another important aspect and piece of this puzzle is that before you help others, training is essential, because without that training and background, you really can’t have that full context, and to really understand, I suppose you could say, just the background. So going back to the example that I gave, if you’re a medical doctor and you’re pretty healthy, the clients that you see are not going to look like you, right, people come to see you when there’s something wrong, they come to see you when there’s something that’s going on. And so the training piece of it is essential so that you can understand what to do with all of these women whose cycles look nothing like yours, because they’re going through challenges that you are not. And so that’s something where your own experience with your own cycle is very helpful in the general sense, right, it’s grounding, it helps you to understand and it helps you to help others chart in a certain way, but there’s a limit to that understanding, and you bridge the gap through training.

So just to kind of review the seven challenges that I talked about in today’s episode, and like I said, these are not the only challenges, there are certainly other challenges. Actually, I thought of another challenge that I could add to it just on the fly here. But I would say one of the challenges for practitioners as well is that if you have an existing practice and you’re wanting to support women through charting, one of the challenges is that you already have an existing practice, and your sessions are already involved in the work that you’re doing. So, if you’re a body worker and that’s what you do, then your session with your client is about bodywork, right, so when would you teach the person to chart and monitor their chart? So I think another challenge that I’m just adding here on the fly, because it just came to me, is that charting in and of itself is its own thing. So when I have a client who needs bodywork, fertility massage therapy, or something along those lines, for whatever reason, I refer out, I refer to someone who does that. Now it’s certainly very helpful for me to have a good understanding of that and to have a good understanding of how it works and how it fits in together, but I am not, I work with clients all over the world, so certainly I’m not getting on a plane and pretending to offer that, and secondly, I wasn’t trained in bodywork, so that’s not something that I can offer. And so I think one of the challenges as well would be realizing that to actually work with someone in this capacity could take a bit of time, because if you’re really wanting to incorporate the charting, there has to be some degree of the client charting in a certain way, using a certain charting protocol, and you having the time in your sessions to be able to incorporate that. These are just some of the challenges, I think, and I think anyone who’s listening who’s thought this through, and who’s really thought about how I can incorporate these aspects into my current practice, I’m sure that many of these topics have come up, and I’m sure many more that I didn’t talk about today. But I did want to shed light on these, because, like I said, this question of teaching and offering support for professionals has come up in my practice more and more, and my inbox and DMs and emails are more and more filled with these types of questions.

And so just to kind of go through, the challenges that I shared with you today are: the first one, that there are not that many training programs available, again, I think part of it is because it’s a newer field, and previously, historically, the only way to learn about these topics in depth would have been to go down the road of becoming a certified educator, so there is, in many ways, a limit in terms of the professional development programs available for those professionals who really do want to incorporate this into their practice. The second one I mentioned is that training is important, charting your own cycles is not enough to be able to then offer support to women who have cycles that look nothing like yours, so the background information is key. The third I mentioned was the multiple different charting methodologies, and how, you can certainly support anybody who charts, there’s always value in the chart no matter how it’s done, but when you really want to get into a professional way of using the menstrual cycle as a vital sign, it does become important to have a standardized way of gathering that information. So then I mentioned in number four, cervical mucus, and number five, basal body temperature, and kind of further elaborating on the need for a standardized way to both track and interpret these signs, so that you’re not interpreting something or drawing a conclusion when really it could be an error of noting the sign properly, or something like that. So number six was taking the chart out of context, so again, having a comprehensive understanding of how the chart works within the context of the whole client, and not really just looking at the chart in isolation, so really looking at the chart in the context of a professional relationship with the client, detailed intake, so you know where the chart fits in with their history, etc. And understanding the fifth vital sign, so really it’s similar to putting everything into context, but really understanding how different fluctuations of the menstrual cycle, when my example was like, when you need to freak out versus when you don’t need to freak out. So really being grounded in a good understanding of how it all fits together, so that we’re really interpreting what we’re seeing correctly, and really understanding how to identify when there’s truly an underlying issue happening. And then the last one that I threw in there was a more practical challenge of, how do I actually literally incorporate this into my practice, because if you have a certain specialization, there are times when incorporating this into your practice would potentially be a combination of you being able to interpret, if you’ve had the training to be able to do that, what the client is bringing you, but also a collaboration with certified teachers who can actually then take the time to teach the client what they need to know so that they can come to you with the standardized charts. And there are different methodologies that already do this, so I’ve interviewed a number of NAPRO technology professionals on the show, so I’ll include those previous episodes. And there’s an interesting way that it works, where you have a practitioner who teaches the client how to chart, you have a medical doctor who does not teach the client how to chart, so the medical doctor sends the client to the charting instructor, who then teaches the client how to chart in a standardized way. The client then comes to the doctor with the standardized chart, so the doctor is well-versed with reading, and the doctor can then give support to the client, but you see, the doctor is busy, the doctor has a burgeoning practice, so the doctor is actually not the one actively teaching the client to chart, and then you have the surgeons who then work on a different level. So that’s just an example to show that there’s different ways that this can be done. And one of the challenges for professionals would literally be, well, how am I going to find the time to teach someone to chart in a specific way if they want this service from me, and finding then creative ways through referrals, having a short list of practitioners who teach in a certain way to then be able to send your clients to that person to be the one that teaches them to chart.

So I think a big piece of tying it all together is, first and foremost, when wanting to incorporate fertility awareness charting into your practice, I think it’s really important to recognize that fertility awareness charting is its own specialty, it’s its own field, it’s not something where you can kind of expect to do a one-hour seminar and be able to then go ahead and work with all these clients. It is its own field, and there are multiple ways to do this. The good news is that it’s possible, and that it can really transform your practice in so many different ways. It can really deepen your understanding into how important and crucial this vital sign truly is. I would say it can empower your clients in so many different ways, because you’re giving them a tool that they can monitor themselves, and once you teach somebody how to monitor their vital sign and how it really is affected by all of these different things that can happen in their lives, this is basically a self-navigation tool that your client will have for the rest of their lives. And so it’s an incredible tool. And if you’re able to find ways to incorporate it into your practice, it’s certainly worthwhile, but of course I would encourage you to do it in the most professional manner so that your clients are getting the absolute best from you.

And so with that said, I want to thank you for tuning in to today’s episode. Certainly if you are a practitioner who’s really passionate about fertility awareness and have been looking for a way to incorporate fertility awareness charting into your practice in a standardized way, really being able to pair the science with the practical so that you can support your clients in these ways, my upcoming Fertility Awareness Mastery Mentorship program, I’m really excited about it, because it’s really addressing that need for practitioners who have looked into this and have found that question of, am I going to go ahead and do a two-year training program to become a teacher, when that’s not exactly what I’m wanting to do, I’m wanting to be able to offer this as a service in my practice, but I’m not necessarily wanting to switch my practice to becoming a FAM teacher. So this program is designed for you if you have found yourself in that situation. From details you can head over to fertilityfriday.com/famlive, and certainly you can apply there, as we’ll be starting in March. And so I want to hear from you, what you thought of today’s episode, if there were specific challenges that you have been facing as a practitioner that I did not cover today, and I’ll post about today’s episode on my Instagram page @fertilityfriday, so certainly chime in there with your comments and let me know what I missed. You’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode over at fertilityfriday.com/350. So with that said, I hope you have a wonderful week/weekend whenever you are tuning into today’s episode, and of course, as always, until next time, be well and happy charting.