My Adoption Story

So you want to match your adoption quickly, but aren't sure how to do it? 

Well, hello, my friend. My name is Amanda, and I'm an adoption profile expert that has helped over 1000 families match their adoption quickly. 

In fact, 95% of my clients have actually matched their adoption in less than a year. 

This week is my daughter's birthday. To celebrate, I thought I would throw it back and walk you through my own adoption journeys, and how we matched our adoptions twice in less than 30 days. 

Treat Your Profile Like A Story, Not Just a List of Questions

The first thing I did in my own adoption journey was really focusing heavily on creating a profile that would create an emotional connection. The real secret there is creating a profile that tells a story of your family. 

You see, when you're working with someone else to help you create your profile, they're going to give you a list of questions. Those questions are going to seem pretty simple to answer.

You're just going to answer your favorite color, or your favorite TV show, or things that you like to do. 

But if you are just answering those questions, you're missing out on a prime opportunity to create an emotional connection. When you create emotional connections with your audience through stories, you become instantly more memorable. That is one of the big things that you have to think about when you're creating your adoption profile. 

In my own case, I was given a list of questions. Because I have marketing training and have worked for some of the biggest brands in the world for over the last 25 years, I knew that answering those questions in a specific way really meant a huge difference in my profile. So when they asked us about things that we liked to do, or our hobbies, I took that as an opportunity to tell stories about what we do as a family. I talked about how we love to travel to professional football games. That is one of the things that my husband and I love to do the most. As a matter of fact, we kind of have a bucket list going of all the different professional stadiums that we could go to and see the Pittsburgh Steelers play. He's a big Pittsburgh Steelers fan and I love to shop. So it's worked out really great that we can take a long weekend trip to go see these games. 

Now when I told a story like that, rather than just saying, we like to watch football, or we like to travel, that really created a different connection with you. Right? You know me a little bit better now. And that's exactly what happened with our daughter's birth mother. She thought it was really interesting that we were Pittsburgh Steelers fans, even though we live in Arkansas. She grew up in a family who had Pittsburgh Steeler fans as well. So that was something that allowed her to create a connection with us on a deeper level pretty instantly. Now, it all stemmed back from the simple question of what do you like to do for fun? What are your hobbies? But telling that in a way that really created a story there created a different type of emotional connection. Creating that connection with her allowed us to engage in different ways for us to become more memorable. Because remember, when you just answer questions, and just provide information at a surface level, you're actually engaging with two areas of the brain: the area that organizes the information and then takes in the information. 

Take for example when I told you the story about how we have a bucket list where we like to travel to different stadiums in different cities and see a game, and how that's something fun that we like to do as a family. When I really brought that to life, that allowed me to engage with seven different areas of your brain that are really different. When I engage with seven different areas of your brain, I instantly become more memorable as a result. 

So the story of who we really are connected with her in a different way. 

Script Your Profile Like a Movie

One of the different things that we did in our profile than what I see a lot of hopeful adoptive families doing is that I scripted our profile like a movie. I sat down and I thought intentionally about the things that I wanted to tell expectant parents about our life. Then I curated photos and videos to go along with those stories. 

Let me give you an example. When we were going through our profile, one of the most benign questions you could ever think of is “what's important to your family or what are your family values.” For us, education and quality time together were two things that were really important that we wanted to share. Those were values that we each had growing up in our own individual households that we wanted to bring together to our family. 

When it came to education, I had to get creative to explain education in a way that doesn't sound pretentious and off-putting, but rather welcoming and inviting. That's what I wanted to really convey. So we actually borrowed a friend's child and we went to a playground. We sat on a park bench and we read a book to him. That was a way that we could talk about education being important to us, how we were going to support our children through their own educational journey, and that we would support them going to college or vocational school or whatever might really best suit their interest. That really gave us a different way to incorporate that into our overall profile. 

Next, we talked about how family time became really important to us. Again, that same friend allowed us to borrow her child and we played on the playground. We were swinging, we were sliding, and all of the things, and we talked about how even though we are a dual-parent working household, that we really value quality time together. We shared how we make intentional efforts to carve off time to spend together as a family. That was something that really resonated with our son's birth mother in particular, actually. She thought it was really interesting how we could find a way to balance it and to provide the educational resources that, quite honestly, she didn't have. 

Another really important storyline for us was the fact that we had pets. We wanted to incorporate the fact that we have dogs, because that may not be something that every expectant parent is drawn to. We talked about our quality time also by  showing us playing in the backyard with the dogs and playing fetch. This allowed us to share how we would really spend time together in big ways and small ways.

Tell Everyone About Your Plan to Adopt

The third step that really made a difference in our adoption journeys was the fact that I was willing to tell every single person I came in contact with about our desire to adopt. Now, listen, I know this can be something that feels a little embarrassing. At first, it felt embarrassing for me, too. 

Honestly, that was something that I realized that I needed to talk with my therapist about. I needed to work it out. But when I overcame that fear of judgment and embarrassment and really began sharing our desire to adopt with everybody, you wouldn't believe the opportunities that came out of the woodwork. You see, everybody knows someone else, right? We all have this kind of extended network outside of our one-to-one interaction with people. You never know who they might know that would lead to an adoption opportunity. 

We actually had an adoption opportunity through our OBS office. I shared with him where we were on our journey. He had been painfully aware of all of the failed IUIs we had been through and the fact that we had moved on to fertility treatments. Then I shared with him that those were actually not an option for us anymore, and that we were pursuing private domestic adoption. 

He said, “How can I help?” I said, “You can share with anybody that's interested in placing a child for adoption with us.”

Just a couple of months later, his nurse reached out to me and said, “We have someone that is considering placing their child for adoption. Would you like to learn more about her? And can we share your information with her?”

So they simply introduced us by giving us each other's phone numbers, then we began texting. Now ultimately she decided to parent, which is absolutely her right. But you never know where those connections can come from. So sharing your desire to adopt with absolutely everybody is really, really important. 

When you're sharing your desire to adopt with people, one of the biggest lessons that I learned is you've got to make it easy for people to communicate with you. When I got that phone call from a doctor's nurse she said, “Do I just give her your phone number? Is that how this works?”, I had a panic moment because I didn't know how it worked. I had never done that. 

Honestly, all I thought about was telling everybody, but I had not thought about that next step. That's something that's really important for you to learn from my own story. After that, I rushed out to Walmart and bought a burner phone. I dragged it around with me so that anytime she texted I was able to respond back. It's one of those tricky things that happens in adoption. It feels like you’re dating again. But it’s the most important date ever. It was really a unique situation that I hadn't prepared for in advance. So that’s one of my tips for you, my friend, is to think that through. Which leads me to my next tip.

Make It Easy For People To Communicate With You

How are you going to share your information with somebody? What information are you going to share? When I'm working with my one-to-one clients, we actually make business cards. I advise them to figure out ahead of time how they want to stay connected. Do they want to use a Google Voice number? Or do they want to get a burner phone that they pass back and forth between each other? How do you want to handle that? That is something that's really important to think through ahead of time. It can be a really, really simple solution. It doesn't have to be overcomplicated. It doesn't have to add unnecessary stress. 

So now you've learned why it is important to make an emotional connection through your story in the way you tell it in your profile and to make it easy to share your information about your family so that someone can get in touch with you. 

Want to see an example of how another couple uses the same strategies to match their adoption? Click here to watch this video so that you can see how quickly it can be to match your adoption!

Remember, my friend, you are worthy of support, and I'm here with you every step of the way.