Author: Neri Life-Choma

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.

Doulas’ Professional Status: Peers, Companions, Lay Women, or Birth Support Professionals?

I wanted to quit, but I discovered coaching and got excited again about being a doula.

After a decade of practicing as a doula and childbirth educator, I was about to quit. I was burnt-out. The rising rate of medical interventions led me to doubt my ability to fulfill my role and facilitate healthy and positive birth experiences. Additionally, the growing gap between doulas’ approach to childbirth and the approach held by the medical caregivers that our clients trust for their journey, triggered a lot of tension in me. These circumstances, in addition to the given hardship of the doula practice, made me reconsider my career path.

Ten years have passed since I felt under-resourced and I still enjoy practicing as a doula and training doulas. How did this happen? I discovered coaching!

In the last couple of years, I have come to learn that I am not the only one to have gone through this professional struggle. In spite of  ACOG’s recognition of doulas’  benefits and some big headlines reporting the many celebrities who hire doulas for their birth,  doulas experience a few major dilemmas that cause great hardship.

This uneasiness reflects in social media and doulas’ blog posts, and I can sense the confusion, frustration, and disputes that percolate within the doula community. Being passionate about doulas and our valuable stewardship position,  I’d like to share my  personal path that helped me resolve the three major dilemmas doulas face: 

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From Prenatal Yoga Poses to Desired Birth Visions

Prenatal yoga instructors, you are first in line

Out of all the birth support professionals, prenatal yoga instructors probably are the ones to begin supporting expectant individuals the earliest along their journey of pregnancy and childbirth.  From a coaching perspective, I see it as a huge advantage, so if you’re a prenatal yoga instructor, you can make miracles leading and empowering expectant mothers to strongly hold not only yoga poses but important convictions about their childbirth experience.  Just like the practice of yoga helps individuals to connect with their breath and their body, coaching strategies help them connect with their beliefs, inner truth, values, and needs.

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Fresh from the Oven: Sharing from our Birth Support Coaching Course

Are you curious about what happens in our Birth Support Coaching course?

It’s exciting to lead the first group of birth professionals who joined the Birth Coach Method’s first coaching course. We have participants from all around the globe: The Netherlands, Israel, and the US (East and West Coast). We all come together on consecutive Tuesdays for eight weeks using the Zoom platform. It is a group mentoring session in which I get to expand on the topic of the current lesson studied prior to the meeting. In addition to highlighting important concepts, we all brainstorm scenarios and engage in powerful coaching exercises.

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How to Use Hospitals’ Whiteboards as a Coaching Strategy

Exciting steps towards improved communication between L&D nurses and their patients

I’m constantly searching for coaching props and strategies that can help me coach expectant parents throughout pregnancy and childbirth. I have been developing tools and strategies for some time now and excitedly shared them with the community of birth support pros in previous posts and in my book. So, you can imagine my excitement when I came across a few resources affirming the use of white dry-erase boards in L&D for improving communication and maternal care.

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Beating Information Overload During Pregnancy with Coaching

Are your birth clients overwhelmed by the overload of information?

Being overwhelmed by the overload of information is a state of consciousness that many expectant couples struggle with. It disempowers and damages their ability to make mindful decisions and perform well. Beating it requires a shift in our practice rather than providing more information. You can help your birth clients beat this overwhelm by coaching them.

In my practice, I often encounter the overwhelm that my clients
experience being overloaded with information. Seriously, it feels like it enters the room when they do. How often are you being called to resolve this overwhelm as a childbirth educator or a doula? There are conflicting opinions and expectant parents don’t know what advice to take or what to believe while all along trying to do the right thing; they want to find what is best for the mother and the baby. The overload of information creates a ‘noise’ that interrupts our internal conversations with ourselves. Feeling overwhelmed is not only disempowering, but it’s also exhausting.

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The Birth Plan from a Coaching Perspective

Is birth plan the goal or the strategy? 

When birth workers, such as doulas and childbirth educators, first envisioned the birth plan in the eighties, the main idea was to help expectant parents prepare for the physical and emotional aspects of the birth process, explore how they want various situations handled during their actual birth, and provide a tool for parents to communicate with each other, their care provider, and the hospital staff prior to the birth (Simkin, 2007; Simkin & Reinke, 1980). As sometimes happens, the mean comes to be associated with the goal, and as such, expectant couples and some birth workers, associate writing the birth plan with achieving it. This association may evoke some unexpected outcomes: 

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Coaching towards a Successful VBAC

What are the additional challenges of birth givers who wish for a VBAC?

While the coaching strategies are valuable in supporting and leading every expectant woman who would like to give birth healthily and experience high levels of satisfaction, they are even more crucial when supporting and leading a birth giver who wishes for a VBAC because of the additional challenges she faces.

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Five Best Coaching Strategies for Childbirth’s Moments of Crisis

Do you know how to empower your birth client through moments of crisis?

The process of childbirth presents birthing women with some recognized moments of emotional crisis, as well as some unexpected ones, related to the unfolding of the birth. My experience has been that the known and expected emotional crises occur during transitions or changes occurring throughout the process. It is common knowledge that the transition from one phase of birth to another triggers an emotional reaction. For example, the transition from the early phase of labor to active labor is symptomized by the emotional change in which excitement and self-confidence give way to fear, despair, or self-doubt. Birthing mothers express these new emotions in a variety of ways: If they are talkative, they might express them by sharing their thoughts, such as: “Do you think it’s time to head the hospital”? Or “Do you think all these contractions are doing anything”?, “Do you think I’m progressing?” and “How much more painful will this be”? 

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The #MeToo Movement, Birth Activism, and the Future of Childbirth Support

Those who follow my blog and webinars know that I often question and challenge the current approaches accepted by many birth support figures. For example, I have been continuously stating in blog posts and webinars that contrary to the accepted notion,evidence-based studies do not empower women to own their childbirth experience because women base their decisions on a set of predetermined beliefs rather than the evidence. (If this idea sounds familiar to you, it’s only because you recognize it from the introduction to Henci Goer’s book “The Thinking-Woman Guide for a Better Birth”, in which she applies this decision-making process to OBGYNs). I also repeatedly urge birth support professionals to avoid the term ‘Natural Birth’, along with the idealization of the un-medicated childbirth over the choice to receive medical assistance for coping with labor. Perhaps this can explain my fascination with the debate among feminists around the #MeToo movement, and the tension around its possible outcomes.

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The Art of Coaching for Childbirth -New Printed Guide

You wished for a guide like this one, right?  

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The Art of Coaching for Childbirth is a practical guide inspiring every professional in the field of birth support to integrate the coaching principles, strategies, and relationships into their practice. From one blog post to another, and throughout my webinars, the coaching method has become a paradigm shift in the field of childbirth support. It has drastically changed the conversation from teaching about childbirth to individually coaching birth givers toward optimally performing throughout their journey of pregnancy and childbirth. Birth Coach Method has inspired birth doulas to shift from telling clients what they think is the best experience to asking questions, listening and exploring their belief system about childbirth, about themselves and their bodies, their strength and more.

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