Hey there birth nerd, you're listening to the Birthworker Podcast. My name is Kyleigh Banks and I am totally obsessed with birth and equally obsessed with business. This is a show where I help women turn their passion for birth into a sustainable, profitable, and most importantly, impactful career. All right, let's get into it.

Hey there. Welcome back to the Birthworker podcast. You are listening to one of our 3-in-15 episodes where I take three of your biggest and best questions and answer them in 15 minutes or less. We are doing these episodes on Fridays. They are new. We just started them in 2023.

I am so excited we really decided to go all in on the podcast this year. And I'm not kidding; there are people every single week that join my programs or message me on Instagram saying, "Oh my God, I found you on the podcast. I want to join your programs." That's really insane to me because podcasting is a long-term strategy. We talk about strategy a lot in Birthworker Membership specifically. That's my business focus membership for Birthworkers. Podcasting is not a just put it up and all the students and clients are going to come kind of thing. It is really a long-term strategy.

This is my second podcast. I used to have one for birth stories for moms. It was called Our Birth Wisdom. This podcast, like I said, is my second podcast. I launched it in July of last year, so six, seven months or so, and it has taken that long to really get rolling. Now we have hundreds and hundreds of people that listen to every single episode. We have people join our programs. And now I would definitely say it's a strategy that is so fun and I absolutely get a return on my time investment and financial investment.

I just wanted to share that with you guys because like I said, in the Birthworker Membership, we talk a lot about strategy and I share a lot about what's going on in my business behind the scenes because I know that's a lot really fun to see what other people are doing, especially people who are a couple steps ahead of you. I love hearing what my mentors are doing and what's working for them.

So anyway. Yeah, we went all in on podcasting in the last year or so, and it's definitely paying off. It's so much fun. The only way it's paying off is because you're here listening. So seriously, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. You make all of this worth it.

Shout out to Shea, who's my podcast manager. She does such an amazing job turning these podcasts into blogs for you guys. Every single episode is turned into a full length blog. It's not just the transcript. I hate that. I hate when it's just the transcript. No, it's a real blog format kick-ass blog. We've had students actually find us through our blog too, going to Google and searching like social media for doulas or something like that and our blog pops up. So very cool to see our strategies finally paying off, and very excited to see where we're going to be in the next few years, that is for sure.

All right, let's jump into the three questions for today. Hey, if you want to submit a question for next week's episode, just go to birthworker.com/ask or you can even just check out the show notes. There's a link right there for you.

All right, the very first question is from Dana. This question is, "How do I gain confidence in my doula skills? I often feel like I don't know enough or I haven't had enough experience. It's a hurdle I cannot seem to get over."

All right, buckle up everyone, this is going to be a rant. Dana said she doesn't really have confidence in her doula skills because she feels like she doesn't know enough and she doesn't have enough experience. So let's talk about those two things; not knowing enough and not having enough experience.

I want to ask Dana, I really want to ask her, why do you think knowledge and experience makes a good doula? From your question, you're essentially under the impression that knowledge and experience make a good doula, when in my opinion, that is absolutely not the case. It couldn't be further from the truth.

The most knowledgeable doula in the world can still easily sabotage a birth with her assumptions. And maybe even more so than a new doula because maybe the most knowledgeable doula in the world comes to the birth with her hero cape on, with her doula hat on, trying to fix everything. That's not like the doula for me. That is definitely not the doula that I'm looking for. Or the doula who's attended 40,000 births could also easily sabotage birth with her assumptions. Maybe even more so than a new doula because the more births you go to, the more biases you collect, the more assumptions you collect in your doula bag and you got to work to really let that go. And a lot of people don't understand that they need to be working on that.

So just because someone is knowledgeable, just because someone has attended 40,000 births, does not inherently make them a good doula or even a better doula than you, Dana, maybe who's someone who's just starting, maybe hasn't even attended a birth yet. There are situations where you are a way better doula than the person who's attended 40,000 births. Like I said, a doula with all the experience and all the knowledge can still rip away a woman's power. They can still coerce a mom into a corner, and they can still stand by and watch as a woman is assaulted by her medical team.

So yeah, a good doula is not about knowledge and experience at all. Being a good doula has way more to do with who you are as a person and how you show up in the world. And yes, I can teach you some of that, but most of that has to come from you. Most of that is literally who you are as a person. Are you a good person? And that is the foundation of my doula training program. That's why the foundation is that self mastery. I even tell my students that, "If you nail the self mastery stuff, you're already a great doula. Even if you don't know the first thing about birth, even if you have zero experience, if you can nail that self mastery, you're already a good doula.

If you can show up in a room and be aware of your triggers and aware of your biases, but also be able to set them aside to fully show up in support of the woman who's giving birth without trying to fix her, without trying to use all your experience to save her, if you can do that, you're already a good doula, even if you've never attended a birth before, even if you've never given birth yourself before.

So instead of telling ourselves, "I need more experience before I'm good," I want you to ask yourself, "What human qualities do you already have that make you a good doula?" If you're new to this podcast and you want to hear the longer version of this rant, just go back a couple episodes, go back to episode 22. I just released it a few weeks ago, and it is all about what actually makes a good doula these days. It is so good.

Thank you, Dana, for that question. That was such a good question. I get it all the time in my communities, especially the doula training program, because I would say about half the people who come into our doula training program have never given birth before. They've never been to a doula training program before. They are brand new. The other half has maybe already gone to doula training programs, and they just left those programs realizing they needed something more than a three-day online or in-person course.

A lot of people come to us and they have these same assumptions that I'm not good yet because I'm new. And so thank you for asking that and being vulnerable. I really hope that you know that you already have inside of you what it takes to be a good doula, especially if you're just a good human.

So hold on to that and then just watch how true that is. The more births you attend, you're going to say to yourself, "Oh yeah, I already have what it takes within me. I don't need to go to hundreds of births per year to be worthy. I don't need to be the most knowledgeable person in the world to be worthy." You are already worthy of finding clients, of being an amazing doula and of being proud of yourself and proud of the work that you do.

All right, question number two. This is a question I get all the time and I'm so excited I get to answer it on a podcast episode because people in my DMs are all the time asking this. This question is from Camira. She's actually a student in the Birthworker Membership. She's a member of our Birthworker business membership. Here's her question. She says, "I'm starting an email list. Is there a downside to using Squarespace's built-in email services as opposed to a separate one like MailerLite?"

Now, if you have downloaded, I have a free resource called the Tech Stack, and I forget the link off the top of my head, but go to the show notes and grab that link. We'll put the link there for you for my Tech Stack. It has all of my tech recommendations, all of my software recommendations. In there is a mailing service, a mailing software called MailerLite. I love MailerLite and I use it over something like Squarespace's built-in email software. The reason is is that there is really no such thing as an all-in-one platform that really does a killer job in all of the different areas.

Squarespace through and through is a website platform. So their mailing software is really not that good. Their selling software is really not that good. Their analytics software is really not that good. We want to go to other places so we can get the best of the best. And that doesn't necessarily mean we have to pay a ton of money, because actually Squarespace's email services cost money, whereas MailerLite is free for your first thousand subscribers.

The question is specifically about email software. So let's just talk about that. MailerLite; you can schedule emails. You can organize your audience into specific groups and tags based on what freebie they downloaded, based on their due date, based on if they're a paying customer of one of your programs. In MailerLite, you can send emails to specific people based on which group they're in.

I send emails to my students every week, and then I also send emails just to my entire email list every week. Some emails I actually don't want going to my students. Maybe I'm sending a sales email about the membership. I'm not going to send that to people who are already in the membership. These are all things that you cannot really track when you're using a low-end email service. And I include Squarespace's email service in that, okay.

Something else that MailerLite can do is set up automations, really, really in depth automations for free. This is something that actually Mailchimp doesn't even do on their basic plans. MailerLite, for instance, someone could get on your email list by getting a freebie. You can automate as many as a hundred emails on the back end of that. I tell my students to do five emails in a welcome sequence, completely automated in MailerLite. So cool.

Also, MailerLite tracks the open rate, the click rates. It tracks everything. You could add gifs to emails. You can completely customize them. It's just absolutely phenomenal. There's really no reason to not switch to MailerLite, especially when it is free for your first thousand subscribers. Again, we'll put that link to the Tech Stack down below, and so you can grab all of my affiliate links for all the software that you sign up for.

Okay, question number three is from Erica. This question is, "When I'm accepting new members into my membership, should I keep the doors open anytime? Should I open them once each quarter, or maybe once a month for a few days?"

Erica has a membership. Her membership is called the Mother's Club. I know Erica, and I love Erica. This is such a great question. She has a membership, and she's wondering, should she essentially allow new people to join her membership every day, or should she have specific times of the year where people can actually join?

My answer is that it really depends on the nature of the membership. If this is a group of pregnant women and you want it to be a really small group and you want everyone to be really close knit, you might want to actually just open it every quarter and then have it be a three month long membership that people join. So they just join for three months, and they're with that same group of people for three months. There's not new people coming in all the time.

But that being said, maybe you also say, "Okay, this is a membership for pregnant people, which means nobody wants to wait three months to join." If someone misses the cutoff, you don't want to have to say, "Sorry, it's going to be three months until you can join again," because this woman's pregnant. She's giving birth in the next couple of months. It's either now or never for her. So do you want to technically turn that person away when they would have joined? That's a hard decision. And it really depends on the nature of the membership, what kind of group you're actually trying to create.

I'll take my membership, for instance. The Birthworker Membership, it's a business membership for all Birthworkers, so doulas, midwives, breastfeeding pros, childbirth educators. And the reason that I... Well, first of all, I'll tell you that you can join the Birthworker Membership whenever. That's called Evergreen. I've set up this membership on Evergreen.

And the reason I did that is because I don't want to have to launch it. I don't want to have to go through seasons where it's one month I'm launching it, and then the next three months I have no sales because the doors are closed. No, I actually wanted this to be something where people can join every single day. My goal at the end of this year is to have about 20 new members join every single month. And that wouldn't be possible if it was on a launch schedule where I opened the doors just once per quarter.

The other thing that I'll say, and I think I said this in one of the other 3-in-15 episodes I did earlier this year, we chatted about should it be Evergreen or should it be a live launch method? Something worth mentioning is that I don't think anyone should create a product on Evergreen from the beginning, especially if it's more of a high-ticket product; above a hundred dollars or so. I do think you should live launch it first.

With a membership, and I know Erica already live launched her membership, but I would've told Erica, live launch your membership. Do a founding member's launch. Do another live launch, and then take what worked and then put it on Evergreen.

Scroll back. If you want to learn more about that and what I think about launching versus Evergreen, just scroll back to episode 23 and take a listen to that because I think I went into it pretty in depth in that episode, and I think you'll love that.

All right, those were some amazing questions. I cannot wait to see you guys right back here next week. On Wednesday, we are going to be chatting with Emily Edwards. She's on Instagram at the Good Birth Co. She's a trauma informed educator, and I just love her. I've hired her to come into the Birthworker Academy to teach. We've done collaborations before. I've promoted her products before. She's really amazing.

We are going to be actually chatting about doula certifications. Do you need a do doula certification? Are doula certifications all they're hyped up to be? Maybe there's actually a dark side to some of these doula certification companies. So a little bit, I don't know, it's a spicy episode, but I'm super excited for you guys to hear it.

Hey, if you love these 3-in-15 episodes where I get to answer your questions here on the podcast, you should really check out the Birthworker Membership. Because inside the Birthworker Membership, not only do you get access to my comprehensive business course specifically for Birthworkers to help you take your doula business and grow an online legacy, so we're talking everything from tech setups to websites to nailing down your online offers, to hosting workshops and growing your social media, it is really, really comprehensive.

You also get me as your coach. You get a community where you can ask me questions every single day. We hop on Zoom every week, either with me or with guest speakers, or just with the community. You can ask questions and get feedback, and really just have an entire hype team cheering you on every step of the way.

When you join the Birthworker Membership, you can actually work through the 10 module business course, completely transform your doula business, whether you're just starting or maybe you're already burning out from having way too many in-person clients. You can walk through that course, ask me your questions every single step of the way, and get coached by me and the other amazing guest speakers that we have every single month.

You can just go to birthworker.com/membership, or you can check out the show notes or shoot me a DM on Instagram and let me know that you've been thinking about it, ask me your questions, and I'll shoot the link and we'll get you set up inside.

All right, everyone, thank you so much for being here. Have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you next week.