Dear leader,

Stop shrinking your vision before you have even let yourself see it.

There is a version of your transition - your relationship your pregnancy, your promotion, your return from parental leave, that you have already started writing. You may not have noticed you were writing it. It sounds reasonable. It sounds mature. It says things like, I will not ask for too much. I will be flexible. I will go along with what makes sense for everyone else.

You think this is you being kind but here’s what you do not see.

That version was not written by you. It was written by every quiet message you absorbed about what a good, easy, grateful woman is supposed to want. You picked up the pen, but the words were not yours. And the most generous-sounding choice you can make, wanting less so no one else is inconvenienced, is the first place you betray yourself.

But what if that vision is real?

I recently supported a woman through the birth of her second child. Months before that day, while she was still in her second trimester, she wrote down what she wanted. Not the birth preferences checklist yet. A vision. She wrote that she and her husband would welcome their baby into a calm space, that they would feel confident in their preparation, that they would advocate for the birth they pictured and trust themselves to navigate it together.

The first thing I work on with every family I doula is to set your vision. It’s the first part of The S.M.A.R.T. Journey to Parenting® framework. Name the emotions you want to feel during your birth. Then write your vision statement from those feelings. That is the whole shift.

Most of us were taught to do the reverse. We start with what we think is realistic and we let that quietly shrink everything else. We call it being practical. But practical is not the same as honest. When you skip the step of naming what you want, you do not get a smaller, safer version of your vision. You get someone else's version, handed to you, and you spend the whole experience reacting to it.

When you name what your want first, every decision after it has something to measure against.

That is what carried her through. Her pregnancy went past 41 weeks and ended in an induction, but that did not unravel her. She had already decided who she was and what she wanted before she went into that room. Clarity creates confidence. Her husband wrote afterward that words like “stress”, “fear” and “cannot” were never part of their birth. That was not luck. It was the vision, named months earlier when they had time to see it.

This is not only a birth skill. It’s also a leadership skill.

I have been using it in my own work. I recently made the decision to step away from social media. From pouring my energy into platforms that do not value my work and instead turned toward building what I own. That came from naming what I wanted for my business first, instead of accepting the default everyone says you are supposed to take.

Here’s how to start:

• Name the feeling before the logistics. Before you research a single option, write down how you want to feel during the transition you’re planning to experience. Just list the words on a piece of paper, whatever it is for you. On the other side of the paper, write down the feelings you don’t want. Those feelings then become the test every later decision has to pass.

• Catch the version you did not choose. When you notice yourself saying I probably should not ask for that, or I will just go along with a particular decision, stop. Ask one question. Is this what I actually want, or is this the easy version I am writing so no one else has to adjust?

• Say it to one person. A vision kept in your head is easy to shrink. Tell your partner, your provider, or one person on your team what you want, out loud. The moment you say it to someone, it becomes real, and you can be held accountable to making it a reality.

A leader who cannot say what she wants gets handed someone else's plan. Being kind to everyone around you is not the same as being kind to yourself. You are allowed to do both. But you cannot do both while you keep writing the smaller version of your own life before anyone has even asked you to.

Name what you want first. Say it out loud. Then build toward it.

From my desk to yours,
Dr. Michelle El Khoury

P.S. Setting your vision is the first thing we do together inside my digital course Pregnancy to Parenting: A 35-Day Path to Confidence. If you are preparing for birth and want a place to start, I invite you to enroll here.