I am the founder of Birth Coach Method and am celebrating 20 years of leadership in the field of childbirth support. Throughout my career, I have been honored to provide doula support and teach childbirth ed. classes to hundreds of expectant couples, as well as to direct two birth resource centers. I am also a doula leader in my community in the South Bay area of Silicon Valley in California.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert in marketing, and as an introvert, I am pretty challenged in this field. However, as a pioneer doula, I had to not only sell my service but to initiate and engage in PR campaigns and give many interviews to spread the concept of hiring a doula. In the 24 years since then, I have overcome my resistance to engaging in sales conversations to enroll potential clients and have a thriving doula practice. I gained confidence by showing up for my potential clients, and in the last seven years, as a doula trainer and the founder of a new approach to birth support – Transformational birth and postpartum coaching, I am committed to helping my students get clients and manifest their thriving practices. So I can’t ignore the fact that although ‘doula’ is a term in the dictionary and a well-known support figure, the most asked question in my Facebook group “The Aspiring and Thriving Doula” is “How do I find Clients? Well, marketing strategies must change and adapt to time changes. For example, I endlessly talked about the benefits of hiring a doula in my PR engagements and sales pitch. But if you do it today, you repeat already known information, right? You don’t add value and leave no impression. So when you put yourself out there as a doula or any other birth support pro, you need to use optimal strategies that deliver the results you want – getting clients. I gathered a few strategies I teach my doula and transformational birth support coaching students here for you.
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.
If you want to begin the new year with a clear, positive, and achievable New Year Resolution, now is the time to start working on it. Whether you focus on personal, relational, or professional goals, crafting your clear and actionable New Year’s Resolution is a process that takes time. And when you master the art of clarifying your goals and visions, you can better serve your birth and postpartum clients by facilitating clarity about their desired experiences and helping them to commit to SMART goals.
Spiraling, rocking from side to side, shaking the extremities, curling the toes, changing positions constantly, chanting, moaning, and groaning, are just a few manifestations of birth givers’ state of consciousness. Do you know how to utilize mirror neurons to match birth givers’ body language, tonality, and representational system to deepen your connection, build trust and lead birth givers to optimally conduct themselves during their birth?
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.
Patient engagement, patient-centered care, and partnershipsamong patients, their support group, and medical caregivers are the qualities leading to safety of care and patient satisfactionin general healthcare and maternal care.By learning to lead co-active and effective conversations in L&D, you can help the maternal care system achieve these goals.
Studies show a dramatic drop in attendance of childbirth education classes since 2000. What used to be a right of passage for baby boomers and generation X feels redundant to Millenials. The main reason for the decline is the overwhelming abundance of information on many different platforms. In events and talks, I often say that expectant Millennials rely on Doctor Google, Doctor Facebook, and Doctor YouTube. But can you see how hard it is for them to navigate the preparation process? To distinguish ‘expert’ knowledge from ‘folk knowledge, or myths from reality?’ So how can we serve Millenials and help them avoid informational overload? How can we help them find their truth? How can we empower them to overcome internal resistance and challenges and have healthy and satisfactory birth experiences? Read and learn why Transformational Birth Support Coaching is the pathway to regaining childbirth instructors’ impact and prestige.
Doulas have heard this a hundred times: “I want a natural childbirth but I’m open to the possibility of getting an epidural”. Labor and Delivery nurses read it on birth plans thousand of times.
I leave myself open to… the possibility…
This opening can go both ways – it can lead your clients to triumph in moments of doubt and crisis or it can lead them to surrender to the fear and ask for an epidural.
This opening is where the coaching conversation begins. Coaches in many different fields, such as executive coaching, career coaching, relationships coaching, or lifestyle coaching are searching for this opening. And yet we, birth support professionals, are handed the opening so explicitly. This is our cue to begin to coach.
How do you engage the client in a powerful, life-changing, and results-oriented conversation, and not miss this amazing opportunity, this opening? How are you going to lead a coaching conversation with this expectant person or birthing individual who ‘leaves themselves open?’ Aren’t you curious to learn about the source of their hesitation – what is interfering with their ability to fully commit to their desired birth experience? Wouldn’t this be valuable to your support process if you understood what is the nature of the circumstances that will make them turn their back to plan A – having a natural childbirth, and choose plan B- asking for pain medication?
How do I get paying clients, launch my doula website, network, nail clients’ interviews, or lead prenatal sessions? How do I connect with a backup doula, do I join an agency or launch my solo practice? Which handouts do I share, and how do I write a contract? These are just a few common challenges beginner doulas face. And they are not unique to doulas. Everyone who has gone through professional training to become a solo practitioner must have strived throughout this transition from education to implementation. This transition triggers insecurity, self-doubts, uncertainty, frustration, and…loneliness. But there is, I believe, something unique to doulas as they transition from aspiring to thriving doulas. The short training, the lack of internship period, and the lack of follow-up mentoring and coaching for a successful implementation are in my mind historical mistakes that prevent many trained doulas from having a thriving practice. These are core ingredients that are needed to launch a thriving practice. And being a seasoned practitioner, I can share that having a solo practice can be a lonely experience in which you are the engine, the dynamo, and the driver. You need to recommit daily to doing what it takes so that your practice thrives and you’ll feel the way you want to feel.
