Doula Imposter Syndrome, Birth Coaching, and Selling Birth Courses Through Webinars
Do you struggle with imposter syndrome as a new doula, wonder about offering one-on-one coaching, or want to host frequent webinars in a sustainable way?
If you want to show up confidently for your audience, then get out a pen and paper, this post is for you.
The 3 questions we answer in today’s blog:
“Do you have any tips for getting over imposter syndrome as a new doula?”
“What do pick-my-brain sessions look like when you’re just starting out as a new birthworker?”
“How do I approach monthly or even weekly webinars for my high-ticket coaching offer?”
Every Friday, I answer your biggest questions right here on the Birthworker Blog AND the Birthworker Podcast.
To submit a question for next week’s blog, click here.
Question #1: I struggle with imposter syndrome as a new doula and I hold back when it comes to my social media posts. I have so much to say, but I'm still afraid to say it. Do you have any tips for how to get over this so I can really start making connections with my ideal people and build my email list? -Tiff
I don't know if I ever struggled when it comes to holding back for fear of what other people are going to say. I think a big part of that is because I really trust and believe that everything I'm doing comes from love. Even if someone's offended by something I said, I know the intention was love. And I'm always willing to have a conversation with someone even if they're offended.
I don't want to make decisions based on the perception of what other people might think, because all of that is subjective too. There will always be people out there who think you are the meanest, dumbest, worst birthworker in the world. It’s ridiculous, but there will always be people out there. I don't want you making decisions based on them, especially because birthwork is so important.
So if you are scared to share your passion and to share what you want to say, there are moms out there wishing you would say it. You're actually letting women down out there who need to hear what you have to say.
Another piece of practical advice is to surround yourself with other people who are saying whatever is on their minds shamelessly. This is something that I actually taught the moms in my childbirth education programs. I said, "If you want an autonomous birth, if you want to be able to stand up for yourself and tell people to kick rocks and to make intuitive decisions, you have to be surrounding yourself with other people that are like that because they’re going to wear off on you."
I'm sure you follow people who you're like, "Man, I wanted to say that. How did they have the bravery to say what I wanted to say when I'm holding it back?" Surround yourself with those users, and slowly but surely, you’ll start to post what's on your mind. I have a feeling that once you start, people are really going to resonate with it. You're going to get more engagement, more likes, more followers, and more people DMing you saying, "Oh my God, I just needed to hear that." When you get that positive feedback from people, it becomes so much easier to say what’s on your mind.
Question #2: "Can you talk about pick-my-brain sessions and what that offer can look like when you're just starting out as a birthworker?" -Elizabeth
“Pick-my-brain” sessions are what I’d call one-on-one coaching calls. This is something I teach my students inside Birthworker Academy, because I don't only teach women how to support birth in person, but I also teach them the other ways we can have an impact on women's lives. One of those that I think everyone should offer is a one-on-one coaching call, or the pick my brain session.
Where I see a lot of new doulas go wrong is when they try to fit these sessions into some kind of box. I made this mistake too. When I started, I had something called a birth coaching session. People would book on my website and then the automation would go off, it would send them some information to fill out and it would send them some emails that were perfectly curated for these birth coaching sessions.
What I noticed is that the majority of people who were booking these sessions with me just wanted to pick my brain. Sometimes people would DM me on Instagram and say, "Hey, do you do one-on-one coaching?" And I would constantly be like, "Yes, I do, but here's a link to my birth coaching. Just ignore the email you get and ignore the PDF that I want you to fill out, because all of that is for people wanting to do birth coaching calls. Ignore all of that and let's just jump on Zoom."
These people would come to me, maybe not even pregnant yet and wanted to do some preconception coaching, or even early on in their pregnancy and they wanted help finding a provider. Sometimes even in postpartum, they wanted to just process their birth. I was trying to fit all those people into a box, into a “birth coaching session.” One day I thought, you know what? That's actually not serving me and that's not serving them.
It's the same with my business coaching now. When people book business coaching with me, I do 1 or 3-hour sessions. I literally show up and I have no agenda, except to help you with whatever you want help with. I don't make anyone do homework before. I send very basic emails with reminders. My booking page talks to all different kinds of pain points. It's not specific to one type of person. And I do that because I want to really be able to serve whoever wants my help.
Something else that I do is make the call last 40-45 minutes. This gives me a little buffer at the end. It's a little bit different when I coach doulas, but when I coach moms, it's 40-45 minutes on Zoom, and then immediately I spend the next 15-20 minutes writing up an email with notes from the call and I send it to them. So the entire process is about one hour.
The email is really important to send because if you're working with pregnant or postpartum moms, everything might go out in one ear and out the other. You could either record the call or take notes and send it to them in the follow-up email. Most of the time I also include any resources that we talked about. So if someone books a pick-my-brain session for birth support, I might send them a link to a video from one of my courses. If they're looking for referrals for therapy or something else, I send them the links.
Question #3: "I would like to do monthly or even weekly webinars that lead to my high-ticket birth coaching package. How should I approach the email sequence since the webinars will be so frequent? Should I do a vague welcome sequence or a whole new sequence each time with each different topic?”
-Alexis
The way to make recurring or frequent webinars sustainable would be to do the same topic over and over. If you're doing weekly calls, I would absolutely do the same topic over and over. If you're doing monthly calls, it definitely allows more time to go in and change the registration page and the email so the copy actually reflects what the topic is.
Something else that might work well is hosting a mother's circle or something like that because then your copy can always stay the same. The invitation emails, the registration page, it can all stay the same. Then once people actually get into your virtual mother’s circle, you can open up and chat with them, but then you can also do somewhat of a webinar. I love the idea of frequent webinars, but I don't want you to set yourself up for failure from the beginning.
If you’re thinking about running a webinar, I teach my students that webinars are fantastic for that mid-level offer, meaning anything over $100, up until $1,000. For anything below $100, you don't need to do a webinar. You could just sell that straight from your Instagram. When it's a little more expensive, $200 to $1000, you're going to need something extra like a webinar. Then actually, once we go above $1000, that's when we get into the space where we should be doing some sort of sales call.
I'm absolutely obsessed with webinars, and they’re something I host pretty much anytime I launch a new offer. I'll host like three in one week typically. I find webinars really fun and they’re something that I've honestly perfected. Over time, by running the same webinar and tweaking it each time, I’ve gotten to the point where I know if 1000 attend my webinar, I know that at least 100 people are going to buy the program that I sell at the end of it.
It's not that easy at the beginning. A lot of times, the conversion rate is not very good at the beginning, but that's okay. That's something that I teach everybody in all of my programs. The goal is not to be a wild success at first. The goal is just to do it, because after the first run, you’ll have a baseline and something you can compare to. Each time after that, we're just going to try and get a little bit better.
And let me tell you, it’s so much easier if you have a mentor helping you understand what's working, why it's working, what didn't work, what you can get rid of, and how you can actually make your life easier going forward.
And so not only do I help my students pick the perfect strategy, track their analytics, and tweak things to be better and better, but I help them make it easier by implementing things like automations using Zapier. If you're interested in what other tech and tools I use, I actually have a free resource on my website. It's 13 of my favorite tech and tools that I use in my business. Nearly every single one of the platforms are free. Click here to download the Tech Stack!
I hope this blog post was helpful. Don’t forget to click here to submit a question for next week’s blog, I love answering them all! I’ll see you here next week.
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.