Birth Support professionals are committed to providing essential care and support to pregnant individuals and new parents, helping them navigate the challenges of bringing new life into the world. Pregnancy and postpartum are times of heightened emotions and vulnerability. Amid the current political unrest, the transparent fabric of hope and optimism that subconsciously led our clients to conceive has been interrupted. Staying hopeful and optimistic is less intuitive and demands intentional practice and awareness. At this time, birth support pros must help their clients to repair it. We must expand our skills to facilitate something beyond proper maternal care; we need to coach to evoke hopefulness and optimism. Transformational Birth Support Coaching Strategies are the path to this type of support.
Have you considered leading a prenatal or postpartum support process through questioning instead of providing information? Are you ready to consider making a difference in your clients’ lives by facilitating a transformation rather than delivering information? The post-pandemic era gave way to a profound transformation, reshaping every feature of our lives and society. Shouldn’t new practices for birth support be ushered in? Let me show you five key differences between informative and Transformative birth support.
My FREE virtual workshop, Rock Your Virtual Birth and Postpartum Coaching, will take place in just a week, on April 11, at 11:00 am Pacific. I plan to go LIVE for an hour and 15 minutes daily and lay down the pathway for birth support professionals to achieve great results with virtual or in-person coaching conversations while gaining impact and income.
If you’ve ever been in a push-pull relationship with your doula practice, this training is not to be missed. It took me years to realize that doula support can be expansive, easy, aligned with my values and wish for work-life balance, and lucrative! And I can show you virtual birth and postpartum coaching strategies with which you gain impact and income, especially during times of broad change on the planet.
Every January, I experience a dramatic increase in aspiring doulas’ inquiries, requesting a 20-minute discovery session with me, and …registrations. As a result, every January, I feel called to inspire doulas to fulfill not only their passion but their professional success by claiming their thriving practice. As a doula trainer and coach, I’m committed to helping doulas elevate their status as a professional community and their individual financial and professional success.
These are my three points of inspiration for doulas as we welcome 2023:
Lead your clients to achieve the results they hired you for
Use strategies that empower both you and your clients
Establish a viable and successful practice by focusing primarily on verbal coaching prenatally and in the postpartum period.
Are you bummed or frustrated when clients’ actions don’t match the birth or postpartum vision they said they hired you for? This gap, or misalignment, is their limiting beliefs and is the #1 reason for birth givers’ undesired and unhealthy experiences. Do you know how to engage your clients in coaching conversations to identify and remove their limiting beliefs? When you don’t engage expectant clients in coaching conversations that help reveal and remove their limiting beliefs relating to their childbearing process, your satisfaction and success in your birth support practice can be significantly damaged.
As a doula trainer and leader of doulas’ communities on social media, I am convinced that the three most significant challenges to having your thriving doula practice are client enrollment, client engagement, and client empowerment. And if you’re open to adopting a new framework for birth support, I know I can help you achieve these three Es with ease. You can learn new strategies for Enrollment, Engagement, and Empowerment in my upcoming Three Keys to YOUR Thriving Birth Support Practice 2-day workshop.
This post is not about your career. It is not about your professional development as a birth support provider, or how you can better serve birthing individuals and their families.
It’s about something happening in America right now.
Birth activists like us have worked hard for decades to guarantee women’s right to choose in childbirth:
Silence is not neutral and it is not an option
The freedom to choose one’s preferred place for their birth.
The freedom to choose one’s support group for their birth.
The freedom to create one’s birth vision and receive maternal care that acknowledges the vision as equally important as the caregiver’s clinical knowledge.
The freedom to give birth and have intact perineum.
The freedom to autonomy in L&D by rejecting medical advice that does not align with one’s beliefs and values.
It is time to humbly admit that this birth activism is privileged and not enough.
“I would like to experience a natural birth” vs. “The idea of taking an Epidural scares me more than childbirth itself”.
“I feel safe and confident at home, and that’s why I would like to have a home birth.” vs. “I’m afraid of going into the hospital because of the outbreak of Coronavirus”.
“Being intimate with my partner is what’s most important to me in terms of my ideal birth experience” vs. “I’m afraid a doula in the room is one more opinion to deal with”.
The statements above show that more and more expectant individuals are aware of their choices and options, and this is great! For many decades, birth support professionals have worked hard to promote the notion of birth givers’ right of choice and to spread the idea of advocacy throughout the journey of pregnancy and childbirth. Our goal was to empower birth givers so they don’t feel they have to obey experts who confuse being knowledgeable with being an authority. At the same time, we might have overlooked the motivations behind expectant individuals’ choices or goals. You may wonder why is this important? You may think that as long as you understand clients’ desired birth experiences or their visions for their birth, the “why” doesn’t matter. Well, just keep reading.
