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Regardless of why you're using Creighton Model, whether to achieve pregnancy, avoid pregnancy or learn more about your fertility, we want you to be successful in achieving those goals! We are here to walk alongside you. Through years of experience, your Creighton Practitioners have been able to identify key characteristics that we see in women and couples that tend to be the most successful in achieving their fertility goals.
We can teach, guide, correct, advise and accompany. But at the end of the day, you're the one that has to do the heavy lifting (no, seriously, the end of the day is when you should be charting... wink!)
Couples that succeed with Creighton tend to:
Attend follow ups together and learn the system together. This is number 1 for a reason - its hugely impactful! If you're engaged or married, you will be far more successful if you do this as a team. One of the things that is so incredible about marriage is how well spouses tend to compliment one another. We all have strengths and weakness and many times, your spouse is strong in areas where you are weak. This makes your team so much stronger! Follow ups are an awesome opportunity for the men to ask questions. The most successful couples that I've taught are the ones where the husband knows the system just as well or even better than his wife. What a beautiful way for him to lay down his life for his wife and show her that they are in this together.
Chart together or have the man do the charting. Only the woman can make her observations - and that's a huge undertaking. Charting at the end of every day is an incredible way that the man can share the load when it comes to family planning. It also keeps him fully "in the loop" with what is happening on the chart. It also helps drive home the point for you as a couple that this is "our chart" not "her chart". This facilitates communication, SPICE, and more opportunities for intercourse in alignment with the couple's fertility goals.
They read the book. That book that you got when you first started - you might have cast it aside in your excitement over those stamps (stickers) - it's a treasure trove of information! Years ago when I first started learning the system for myself, I didn't have the book for the first few months of charting. When I finally got the book and read it, I couldn't believe how much better I understood the system. Your practitioners are here to help and answer every question that you have and although we spend lots of time in follow up, there's just no way to cover all of the information in the book in our sessions together. Read your book. Husbands, read it too! I had a couple tell me once that they took turns giving each other shoulder rubs and back scratches while the other person read the book aloud to make it more enjoyable. You can incorporate some great SPICE ideas and learn more about the system - I'm all for it!
They're proactive in scheduling follow ups and keeping the follow up schedule. There's great wisdom in the way the follow ups are structured and how they are spaced. It becomes a stumbling block and impediment to learning when couples are unable or unwilling to get through the first 5-8 follow ups on schedule and then maintain long term follow up after that. We're here to help and want to meet with you and will do anything we can to work through anything holding you back. One benefit to working in a group with multiple practitioners is that if one of us doesn't have availability that jives with yours, we can help connect you with a practitioner that does. If cost is prohibitive for you, please bring this up with your practitioner. We can help find a solution.
They follow the instructions on the back of their chart. Ok, I know this one seems extremely obvious. But I wanted to throw it out there because if you are doing the above things 1-4, this one comes so much more easily!
"If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you."
(Zig Ziglar)
Hopefully this list gives you some summer motivation in your fertility journey. Reach out to us- we are here to walk this journey with you.