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.
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.
Does an ‘Expert Position’ benefit professionals in the field of birth support?
Do you consider yourself an expert in ‘How to have a healthy birth’? Whether you are a childbirth educator, a birth doula, a midwife, or an L&D team member, I’m almost certain that you believe your practice cracked the formula of the right way or even the best way to a healthy childbirth. But do we all agree on what the phrase healthy birth stands for? And how would you feel if I threw in just one more word – experience. How confident are you now that you have mastered the best way, or the right way, to achieving a healthy birth experience? Perhaps it’s time to rethink our position. Can we give up the expert position and hand it over to our birth clients?
“Impression without Expression Causes Depression. Study without Service Leads to Spiritual Stagnation”. I recently came across this saying by Rick Warren, and it has reminded me of how depressed I was some years ago. I was feeling that my birth support practice is no longer impactful, nor sustainable. I wanted to quit because I found it impossible to provide the service I was trained to provide. As a doula trainer, it made me think of all my lovely doula students who had never established a doula practice or served birth givers because they found it to be irrational in its demands and not sustainable. This is not longer the case. I was blessed to reinvent and reclaim my passion for birth support by developing transformational birth support coaching. The miracle grew even bigger when my students began offering transformational birth coaching exclusively, without being hired as a doula. Some decided to stop providing doula services completely. Naima Beckles is one of them. Soon after Naima graduated from the course, she wrote to me thanking me for the inspiring training and shared that she was now exclusively coaching birth clients. I felt inspired and interviewed Naima to learn about her professional revival.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is talking about coaching for childbirth; join the discussion!
There is a buzz!!! “Coaching for childbirth is what everybody is talking about,” I was told a couple of weeks ago, when Betsy Schwartz invited me to co-host Birth Blab, and the Birth Lady, Michal Klau-Stevens Joined us. The intuitive concept of coaching for childbirth, which I began developing two years ago, has evolved into a powerful method with solid theory and a substantial variety of techniques and exercises practiced by more and more doulas. The more doulas join the new paradigm of coaching for childbirth, the more evidence is being accumulated in support of the tremendous benefits of this practice.
Were you ever hired by an expectant mom to “handle her husband”?
In my sixteen years of practice, I have had a few clients who hired me in order to do just that – handle their husbands. There could be various different explanations that come along with this request, such as: “I do not want him in the room at all, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so please make sure he is busy, give him tasks” or “My husband is taking over any situation, I can’t have him take over my birth”, as well as “He thinks he can take it, but I know him, he can’t, so I need you to be his doula and keep him calm”.
Coincidentally enough, my doula students and I have had more than a few encounters with the request to ‘handle husbands’ lately, and I believe many other doulas might have too. Couples’ dynamics can be challenging in childbirth; it can challenge our support efforts and can have an impact on couples’ satisfaction level with their experience and our service.
