Balancing Infertility and Career Success with Dr. Sonia Ashok

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Hey, my name is Teresa Hildebrand and this is Organized Chaos.

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We take a deep dive into living with intentionality, focusing on what's important in our lives so we can truly feel our best.

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It may feel chaotic at times, but with a little organization, the right mindset and a ton of self-love we can still thrive.

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Join me as we talk to other busy moms and experts who will share tips and strategies to help you reach your goals.

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Hope you enjoy this episode of Organized Chaos.

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Now on to the show.

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Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Organized Chaos and if you're new here, welcome.

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So glad you can join us.

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Today we have another special guest.

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Her name is Dr Sonia Ashok.

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She's a career and leadership coach and the founder of Connective Coalition, a community to empower women in the workplace.

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She is a physician who pivoted into health policy and then tech startups.

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Her experiences in navigating career advancement and toxic environments inspired her to support those in recovery from workplace abuse.

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She also specializes in helping parents navigate going on and returning to work following parental leave.

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She's earned her bachelor's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins and an MD from the University of Florida College of Medicine, and an MPH from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

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We have a raw conversation about infertility and how that's impacted her business.

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She also shares how to advocate better policies for working parents.

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So, without further ado, here is Dr Sonia Ashok.

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Okay, thank you so much for joining us.

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It's such an honor to have you here on the podcast and I'm super excited to talk to you.

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Likewise, I'm so excited to be here.

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All right.

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So first off, before we get into your expertise, I really want to learn more about you, so can you share with us your backstory and how you got to where you are today?

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you so can you share with us like your backstory and how you got to where you are today?

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Yeah, absolutely so.

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You know, as you mentioned in my bio, I am a physician turned workplace abuse recovery coach, and it has been a really meandering path to that point.

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I don't think that, even if you would have asked me maybe five years ago, that I ever would have imagined that this is where I would have been.

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But you know, I always thought I was going to be a doctor.

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I always wanted to practice medicine and help people and I went through all the pre med, gotten to med school and very quickly realized this is not for me.

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But I ended up going through medical school, graduating and saying, okay, I'm not going to continue with this.

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I ended up getting another degree in health policy and management.

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So I got my master's in public health and then I spent some time working in the nonprofit space and the DC government and health policy and advocacy, doing a lot of work around women's health particularly.

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And then I transitioned into the tech space and I was working at a couple of work around women's health particularly.

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And then I transitioned into the tech space and I was working at a couple of different startups, which is what took me from the East Coast to the West Coast.

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And then I took my last corporate job in California and it was a huge move and I lasted for seven months and it was a really traumatic experience and it had come on the heels of another traumatic experience and I left that job and I took a step back and I said, okay, I need to figure out how to thrive at work, because right now whatever I'm doing is not working and I don't know that I can do this anymore.

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And I spent another year and a half looking for jobs.

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I couldn't figure out the right fit for me.

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And at the end of all of that I said you know what I've learned?

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How to find happiness at work and what I want to do is help other people to do the same thing.

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And so that's what really has led me to, you know, initially really sort of broadly career and leadership coaching, but really narrowing into supporting people in that experience of leaving their toxic job.

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What an incredible journey you've had and it's amazing to see so many people really understanding where they are in their lives and how they feel in the workplace, or even how you feel within your business.

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It's like we're more in touch with how it feels and our emotions and what it is that we truly want, how we want to live our lives, and I commend you for you know really kind of embracing that and then sharing that with other people right to help them.

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So tell me a little bit about your experience with infertility.

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Yeah, so I think that we really just don't talk about infertility and women's health in everyday culture.

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Right, it is sort of this taboo topic and even as a physician, I knew a little bit about it, but a lot of the women's health advocacy that I was doing was around reproductive rights and pro-choice being able to choose what your family looks like.

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There still wasn't a lot of information that I was receiving about what infertility looked like, and really at that time, there wasn't a lot of information that I was receiving about what infertility looked like, and really at that time, there wasn't a lot of advocacy around IVF and other supported fertility procedures as there is now, and so it really wasn't until I experienced infertility that I started my own journey with that Really into 2020, which is not the greatest time to be going through infertility, because, of course, I was completely isolated.

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Like I said, I had moved from the East coast to the West coast, so I didn't have a community.

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I didn't really have a lot of friends out here.

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It was just me and my husband, and in 2020, I experienced my first miscarriage and I I experienced a tremendous amount of grief.

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It was a health event, right.

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I had to go to multiple doctor's appointments.

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I had to have a medical procedure around it and I told a few people hey, I'm having this medical procedure because you never know what's going to happen when you're going under anesthesia.

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I wanted to make sure that I told the people who I loved that I loved them, that my husband had someone supporting him in the case that something went wrong and we needed more support.

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But I still was really keeping it very close to my chest and going through a lot of grief on my own, because once that medical procedure is completed, that doesn't mean that it's the end of that experience.

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And so I really had a long journey with grief and recovering from that, from my first miscarriage, and then in 2021, experienced my second miscarriage, and at that time I actually experienced a miscarriage right around the same time as a very close friend of mine, and in sharing that experience, she had even said you know what I expressed my sympathy to you on your first miscarriage and I truly had no idea what it was like until it happened to me, and experiencing that emotional trauma really can bond people.

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So that was the start of my infertility journey.

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Following that, I have completed some rounds of IVF and I'm still on my infertility journey.

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I still don't have a baby.

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I'm still not pregnant.

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I'm still hoping for that, but I'm very much still in the weeds in the deep end with it deep end with it.

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Thank you so much for sharing your story.

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It's um, and I really resonate with you, know you trying to like, keep it to yourself because it's such a vulnerable position to be in.

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You know you, there are things that you need to do that you can't really explain to other people and you have to cope with that, along with what you're going through, right, so thank you so much for sharing that and um, I uh well, my husband and I went through um similar circumstances and we actually had iui so we didn't go into ivf but, but I was working full time at the time and you feel like you going through it in a time like the pandemic is, you know, a compound right.

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So tell me, like, how has infertility impacted your ability to run your business?

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ability to run your business.

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It's interesting because I had started my business in March of 2020 and then experienced my first miscarriage shortly after, and so both of these things have been very intricately tied from the very beginning, and what I will say is that running a business while experiencing infertility has been a tremendous privilege, because it has given me the flexibility to be able to grieve, maintain my capacity when I don't have the energy to get up and do something.

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It's also given me the ability to say you know what?

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I have a doctor's appointment.

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I need to block off this day, I need to block off these several hours without having to ask for PTO or sick days.

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In my last corporate job, my company offered two sick days per year and, if you can imagine, I also have a chronic illness on top of experiencing infertility, and so I was hoarding those two days.

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Now, I didn't know that I was only going to be staying at the company for just a few months, but I was hoarding those days because I felt like I can't just use a sick day for a doctor's appointment.

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I need to be able to use a sick day if I cannot get out of bed, and at that time right, this is pre pandemic.

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There were no work from home days, allowances, right, you had to come into the office or you had to take PTO, and so running my business with infertility has been a privilege.

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It's also been a tremendous challenge, because I don't have colleagues who I can lean on.

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I don't have people who really know what I'm going through.

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In fact, one of the roles that I have as a career coach is supporting an organization that is coaching working families, and so much of my work is working with people who are pregnant or who have recently had their baby and are considering what their return to work from parental leave looks like, and so it can be really painful as well to see those people living the dream that I want to be experiencing, helping them, supporting them and not being able to have that reciprocation, of course, because it is a client relationship- yeah, and you know, going going back to your difficulty with the, the sick time and all of that, like it's really frustrating to still see that there isn't that support system within the workplace for, you know, parents and those who want to have a family so I experienced that as well but, like what do you think is like the biggest issue when it comes to this?

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where you know, because there are obviously corporations but there's also, you know, small businesses that you know how is it that they can manage that?

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Where they can, they can support their employees but then also continue running their business?

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Like what do you see as kind of like the biggest issue to really tackle this?

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The biggest issue that I see in corporate America and the business world is that employees are really seen as expendable, and their humanity hasn't been recognized in many, many cases.

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That's why toxic workplaces are so abundant is because it's been so normalized to treat people with disrespect.

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There is no foundation of trust or connection, and so not only are people scared to bring up anything that's going on with them, whether it be infertility or an illness, or supporting an ailing parent or supporting your kids you know if they're sick or if they need something, even if it's, you know their ballet class or soccer game.

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It's been really, really difficult to advocate for oneself in the workplace, outside of the things that you need to do to get things done and truly, just really thinking about what it looks like to be that supportive employer.

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Right, there is this sense of the bottom line what makes most sense financially for an organization, and many, many companies still don't understand that supporting working parents, supporting people who are going through any type of challenge in their life, is going to be beneficial to them in the long run.

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Not just from a humanity perspective, right, not just from the fact that we need to show up for one another as a community as people, but also from that business decision that promoting loyalty and allowing people to express their needs and what is going to allow them to thrive at work, it really is going to help all aspects of that business.

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Yeah, and what do you say to that?

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Or how do you express that, where there's a benefit for all if you go on the path of supporting your employees.

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What do you say to that?

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Yeah, one of the things that is so predominant in our workplaces right now is burnout, and burnout is defined as a workplace phenomenon where it's not an individual employee who is just not able to meet the demands of the company they're not sleeping enough, they're not doing enough yoga but it truly is an outsized demand from an employer toward employees, and so we are all looking at these sources of banishing burnout right Of how to support employees better, and the biggest way that anyone can do that is by recognizing an individual's needs, such as what does it look like for them to take time off, even if it is an extended time off, even if it is a parental leave, even if it is for fertility treatments, for example?

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Yeah, I love that.

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Speaking of support systems, how do you bring in your partner as a support system for your business and your life?

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Because, like you kind of alluded to is, you know there are certain aspects that we're going through something in a particular area of our life, but it also affects other areas of our lives.

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So how can you do that and kind of create that support system?

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Absolutely.

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I could not have done this without my partner and it took a while for my partner to figure out how to support me through this process Again, especially because we were in the pandemic, we were in close quarters, there was a lot of extra work that was happening at work, but I really subscribe to the fair play method.

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If you're familiar with the word by Ivarovsky, the fair play method, if you're familiar with the word by Eve Rodsky, and just the idea that you know, no two partners are ever going to be showing up both as 100% at any given moment and so really having the ability to share the tasks that are associated with the household and also to share the mental load of those tasks.

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So that has been a real big cornerstone in my relationship, in my marriage, to say I don't have the capacity to do it all.

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I'm going to need you to do it, I'm going to need you to take full responsibility of those things, because I can't show up for everything right now.

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I'm doing my best, but I'm just not at a hundred percent and the two of us can be at a hundred percent together, but we're just not going to get there If I don't have your full support as a partner, as a co-COO of the marriage, rather than sort of having to delegate tasks to you.

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So that was one big thing is really like understanding that fair play method and really sort of going back to those marriage vows.

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Right, you know, calling in this is the point where it's in sickness rather than in health.

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This is the point where it's for worse rather than for better, and he has really stepped up to the plate, which has been really amazing, and it hasn't always been that way.

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Right, we have to work toward that and figure out how it worked for our family.

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Yeah, I love that and I sometimes work on this with my clients when they're having a difficult time with their spouse or significant other about a particular thing, and starting that conversation is always hardest because you sometimes don't know how to even start that conversation, because you don't want the other person to feel defensive like they're doing something wrong.

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So I'm curious to know from you like how would you start that conversation with your significant other, your partner, to create this holistic support system?

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Yeah, I sometimes recommend reading the book together or watching the documentary or really going through this process.

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But I had to start with being vulnerable and, like I just said, I can't do it all.

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I am struggling, I'm in pain, I am in grief.

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I can't do this unless you help me.

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Partner.

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When you are with somebody, obviously you've gotten together with this person because there is a shared understanding, support system, love.

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They have to meet you there, they have to see you in that vulnerability.

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And that's really where I started to say I can't handle it all and in order to move forward, we need to do this together.

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So, um, so, absolutely starting with vulnerability, recognizing that they do care about you and they won't know what you're feeling unless you share that.

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And I think my husband didn't know the extent of my grief and my pain until I really sat down and said this is becoming very, very difficult for me and I cannot move forward without you.

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So I'm so glad that you were able to feel comfortable to do that, and even if it wasn't comfortable obviously having difficult conversations is not always comfortable but the fact that you felt safe to start that conversation and to be vulnerable and to share your experience is great.

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I do want to ask are there any encouraging words that you have for those listening that are possibly going through the same thing you were going through and they're trying to juggle all of the responsibilities that they have in their life whether it's business or their career or anything else and they have this heavy load of what they're going through emotionally, physically and mentally.

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What are some encouraging words you can share?

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Yeah, the first thing that I will say is to give yourself grace.

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You don't have to do it all in this season.

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And if you don't do it all in this season, particularly when it comes to work or your business, it doesn't mean that you'll never be able to go back to that again.

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It just means that you're taking a little time to step back and prioritize other things.

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I really appreciate the idea of recognizing what is important in a certain moment and recognizing that that priority isn't always going to be the most important thing and that those priorities can shift over time.

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But I would say that if you're going through this, reach out for as much support as possible.

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I am in multiple infertility support groups that have been very helpful during this time.

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I think when I speak to other people who are experiencing infertility, there's a lot of extra research and studying, becoming your own doctor in a lot of cases, understanding your own health and recognizing that those things can take a lot of time and a lot of money, which makes you feel the pressure of working a little bit more or being a little bit.

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You know more of a hustle in your business and that you can also know when the time is to decide that this is no longer the right thing for you.

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This is no longer the priority that you're setting for yourself.

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Thank you, thank you for that.

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So this was awesome.

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Thank you so much, sonia.

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And if people want, I know definitely people will want to check out your social media or anything like that to connect with you.

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Where is the best place they can connect with you?

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Absolutely.

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I'd love to connect with you on social media.

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You can find me on Instagram at connective coalition, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

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My name is Sonia Ashok.

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You can find my full name, sonia Magda Ashok, and I'm sure you can put that in the show notes and as well.

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If you'd like to look at my website, it's also wwwconnectivecoalitioncom.

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Perfect and yes, I will definitely put that in the show notes.

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Again, thank you so much for being here.

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This was an awesome conversation and thank you so much.

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Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

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It's probably the first time I've really been public about my experience with infertility, so I'm really glad that this is the space that you've provided the space for me to do so, and I'd love to be back to speak more on this topic.

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I appreciate it, thank you.