Tag: training

Sneak Peek at My Virtual Workshop: Rock Your Virtual Birth and Postpartum Coaching

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. 

Continue reading

Doulas’ Success Inspirations for 2023

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.

Continue reading

How to Craft Your SMART Doula New Year Resolution

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.

Continue reading

Supporting Millennials throughout Pregnancy and Childbirth

Do you know your birth clients? Does your philosophy of care resonate with them? Do you employ the best strategies to support them? Rather than the optimal pathway to maternal care, Transformational Birth Coaching puts the birth client at the center of the support process. In doing so, we find that there is a generational gap that might be interrupting us in supporting millennials throughout pregnancy and birth. Halt! Take a deep breath…I’m not calling out on millennials. I raised two millennials myself and I love and admire them. I’m simply drawing attention to the generational gap between those who established the field of birth support – their attitudes, philosophy, lifestyle, and collective concepts of pregnancy and birth, and current birth givers. Can this generational gap mean that the philosophy, desired outcomes, and birth support strategies we practice do not resonate with current birth givers, or might not be a good fit? It might be the time to pivot.

Continue reading

Naima Beckles’ Professional Revival with Transformational Birth Coaching

What brought us here

“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.

Continue reading

Facilitating Alignment of Expectant Individuals’ Visions, Beliefs, and Actions

When doulas provide prenatal coaching sessions they can help clients be better prepared for the birth of their child and demonstrate a higher level of accountability for their childbirth experience. This is not done by means of education. Prenatal coaching goes beyond teaching and delivering evidence-based knowledge. Its purpose is to help couples discover hidden gaps, resistances, or inner conflicts, and work together as a team to resolve them.

Continue reading

Transformational Birth Coach vs. Labor Coach (Doula)

In 2005, while I was trained as a transformational life coach (see final subsection below), it became clear to me that prenatal coaching has got to be the foundation of successful birth support practice. I am certain that the coaching principles and strategies will help birth support pros to gain impact and generate more income. By integrating transformational birth coaching strategies and exercises, birth pros elevate birth givers’ ability to cope and conduct themselves throughout the journey of pregnancy and birth. Prenatal birth coaching helps expectant individuals overcome internal resistance, remove fears and overcome personal challenges. It elicits birth clients’  accountability to their desired experience, and as a result, will increase their satisfaction levels with the whole journey. I began integrating transformational coaching strategies into my doula practice in 2008 and have since led many couples toward their positive birth experiences with great results. About a decade after implementing coaching into my birth support practice, I felt ready to publish this method in my book The Art of Coaching for Childbirth, and shortly after I began leading the year-long program to become a certified Transformational Birth Coach.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

Evidence-Based Studies on the Side of Birth Support Coaching

Are there any studies about the benefits of coaching for health improvement?

While working on my new certification course, Coaching for Pregnancy and Birth, I researched studies that will provide the scientific data to support what I already knew – coaching provides the most beneficial strategies to lead expectant couples toward a healthy and satisfying journey of pregnancy, birth and early postpartum. I assumed that the best research strategy would be found in the field of health and wellness coaching,  which has been growing rapidly over the years as more people have become conscious of their health and well-being, and guess what – I was right!

Continue reading

Hey Doula, Can You Handle My Husband?

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.

Continue reading