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Empowerment lies at the heart of birth professionals’ work and is one of the primary goals in supporting expectant and new parents. Empowering means instilling confidence, fostering autonomy, and equipping individuals with the tools to make decisions about their birthing and parenting experiences. Empowering expectant and new parents is about letting them feel seen, heard, and engaged—trusting they have the knowledge, strength, and autonomy to navigate the challenges of childbirth and early parenthood. However, sometimes empowerment misses the mark and bears pitfalls. Empowerment takes more than encouraging and informing; it’s about cultivating internal authority and ownership. That’s precisely what Transformational Birth Support Coaching helps individuals undergoing childbearing feel.
In 2006, after a decade of practicing as a labor doula and while training as a transformational life coach, I realized that transformative prenatal coaching must be the foundation of successful labor doula support. I understood that the coaching principles and strategies can be a game-changer when integrated into birth support practice. This understanding, which I almost missed due to lack of training, became the cornerstone of my career. Since then, I’ve developed an innovative framework for prenatal and postpartum coaching that has helped many students and me achieve impact, satisfaction, and increased income. Dedicated to doulas’ success, I want to shout and invite all doulas and childbirth educators to join me and learn how to practice transformational prenatal and postpartum coaching. However, since doulas and childbirth educators are traditionally called “Labor coaches,” I am continuously called to clarify the following: What’s the difference between a labor coach and a transformational birth support coach?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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 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!
