Welcome to The Aspiring Hypnobirthing Instructor podcast. I’m your host, Liz Stanford, Hypnobirthing instructor, Hypnobirthing trainer, hypnotherapist mindset coach, author and owner of The Calm Birth School. In this podcast, we get to explore all the reasons why you should train to teach hypnobirthing. You’ll understand more about what the training actually involves, what it’s like to teach hypnobirthing, and also what it’s like to run a business in the birth world. I can’t wait to take you on this journey and give you all the information you need.
Right? Let’s get started on today’s episode. So what I really want to talk about this week is the potential elephant in the room, the reason why you might not train to teach hypnobirthing. So really, I want to explore the biggest concerns that you might have about really stepping into your passion and your purpose and following your dream of setting up your own business and training to teach Hypnobirthing. So I’m just going to outline, go through what those four concerns are, and then we’ll go into a little bit more detail about them. So number one is the idea that you don’t know enough or you are not the right person. Lack of prior knowledge or experience can be a really big blocker for some people. Cost and time commitment potentially people rule themselves out before they’ve even explored how much it’s going to cost.
Are there any payment plans, and how flexible is the course as well. Number three is the idea that there are already too many Hypnobirthing instructors, and perhaps you’re going to end up competing against other instructors in your area. And then number four is the fear around setting up your own business and finding clients and everything that comes with that. So let’s break it down and see how we can help you to resolve some of those concerns or issues that you might have. So number one, lack of prior knowledge or expertise. So this seems to be one of the biggest concerns that people might have. They tend to feel like they perhaps need to have a certain type of background or expertise to be really effective at teaching Hypnobirthing. But if you listen to my podcast from last week, which was called, Who Can Train to Teach Hypnobirthing, then you’ll hear that it’s not really about the qualifications that you might already have or the other training that you might have already done, or even the experience that you have when it comes to birth or giving birth or working in a birth related field.
It’s really about the kind of person you are, the qualities you have, the characteristics that you have, your values and beliefs when it comes to birth. And what’s really important as well is the passion that you have for birth, the passion that you have for supporting women, pregnant people and helping them to create a really positive pregnancy, birth and on into the postnatal period as well. It’s definitely more about that than the knowledge or experience you’ve got right at this moment because we’ve designed the course to give you all the knowledge that you need to be able to get out there and start teaching and start transforming people’s perceptions about birth and ultimately transforming, how they’re going to experience birth.
Number two is the cost and time commitment. People worry, is it going to be too expensive? Is it going to take up too much of my time? How am I going to juggle those two things, the cost and the time against my personal and professional responsibilities that I already have? So in terms of the time commitment, when I first wrote the program, which was four years ago, it has been updated and turned into a diploma and several other changes it has undergone. When I first developed it, I really did have in mind that the people who are going to be training to teach Hypnobirthing are generally going to be very busy. People like moms, people with full-time jobs, people trying to balance lots of different things in their lives. So I didn’t want to make it inaccessible right from the start.
The way that I’ve structured it really allows a lot of flexibility. So our first phase of training is all online and it’s all self-paced, so you don’t have to turn up for any particular time or date or find babysitters or make sure that your partner is home or any of those sorts of things. You can watch the materials, read the materials, absorb the materials, listen to them, however you prefer to learn in your own time, whenever is convenient for you. And what goes along with the lessons are activities and quizzes and written assessments. And myself and my team are there to support you as you work through the activities, the quizzes and the assessments to ensure that you are embedding that learning, that you are processing, that learning. We give feedback, we ask questions. Even though it’s online, it’s self-paced and it’s flexible, it’s incredibly interactive, and you get loads and loads of support.
So there’s very little chance of you feeling lost or alone at home as you’re trying to work through this online part of the course because we are literally there helping you move through it all along the way at your own pace. And then phase two are, there are two dates that you need to have free or available in your diary. And if you’re in the UK then we do a two day face-to-face. If you are overseas, then it will be on Zoom. It’s usually over two dates as well. And in terms of cost, I offer a discount to doulas, to midwives, to hypnotherapists. And I also offer payment plans over 10 and 12 months. Often if I’m running a masterclass or something like that, I will also be offering a discount to attendees who come to my masterclass. So watch out for one of those in the near future.
If you want to know the full breakdown of the costs and what it involves, then please head to the show notes where there’ll be a link to take you to my website, which will give you all of that information. So number three is competing with other Hypnobirthing instructors. I know that sometimes it can feel like maybe there’s too many instructors and that, you know, you’ll be competing with already experienced or already established instructors. And so it might feel like, oh, what’s the point? But honestly, if you think about how many people are giving birth across the world at any one given moment, at any one given minute, 250 women or people give birth every minute. So if you think about that, just think about how many pregnant women or people need support and preparation. Of course not all of those people are going to be interested in Hypnobirthing, and not all of them are going to be aware of it or able to access it, but there is a big pool of potential people needing our services, needing hypnobirthing, needing support as they prepare for birth.
So even if you look in your local area and you think, oh my goodness, there are, you know, I can already see that there are five Hypnobirthing instructors close to me or something like that, it could actually be a good thing because if there are instructors already in your area, then the model has been proven. So you can assume that people will train to teach Hypnobirthing because the demand is there, and that can be a really comforting thing. It also means that Hypnobirthing is more likely to be well known or known in your local area. So there is less work for you to do in terms of marketing and promoting. If you are in an area where there are no Hypnobirthing instructors or very few Hypnobirthing instructors, that can also be a real, real positive because it gives you the opportunity to establish yourself as the expert in the area as the first or one of the first Hypnobirthing instructors in that area. And although you might need to do more marketing than if there were more Hypnobirthing instructors in your area, that in itself can be a really good and exciting project because you get to, you get to, like I said, establish yourself and really become the go-to person in that area.
And the added thing is that you don’t have to teach in your local area. You can access a much wider scope of people by teaching online. So one of my lovely Hypnobirthing instructors, Josette, who’s based in Germany Urban Birth Plus shout out, check her out on Instagram. She is based in Germany, but she teaches Hypnobirthing all across the world. Like I could reel off the different countries and continents that she has delivered Hypnobirthing via zoom straight into, you know, somebody’s living room, which is, you know, super exciting. And lots of people, lots of instructors do that and lots of instructors do a hybrid. So they might teach a group online and they might do one-to-one in person, or they might do a group in person and a group online. There’s so many different ways to, to structure it in a way that feels good to you.
And it’s also not just about full Hypnobirthing courses. We can offer Hypnobirthing refreshers. We can do Hypnobirthing intensive courses for people who’ve found us later on in their pregnancy and don’t have time to commit to the 10 hours plus education. We can run specific workshops, maybe about birth planning or about breathing for birth or maybe relaxation techniques or relaxation classes. There’s so many different types of classes you can create from the training that you are, you know, that you are, you are going to be undertaking. And also products as well. You could have an ebook in the background that could be bought. You could do a podcast like this. You could create affirmation cards or, or other birth related products. There’s lots of different things that you could do that could establish yourself and that could differentiate yourself from other hypnobirthing instructors and also help you to provide an income.
And then number four is the difficulty finding clients or difficulty with running a business and marketing and, and all of that side of it. And I really understand this and relate to this because when I did my training over 10 years ago, over 11 years ago, actually, I didn’t have a clue about business. I’d always worked in an office, I’d been to university, then got a job in an office, done a bit of traveling. I hadn’t had any experience being self-employed or marketing or, you know, running my own business. It was pretty daunting, to be honest with you. But over the last 11 years, I have invested so much in training and in courses and in working with coaches and because I’ve been in a blessed position to enable me to do that, I am able to pass all of that information on to the people who train with me.
So we have a marketing and mindset course, which I’ve written called The Business of Hypnobirthing, which helps get you started with a Hypnobirthing business. We also have a back catalog of different training, some of which are about business, some are personal, some are press professional development. But in terms of business and marketing, things like you know, how to use Google ads, how to use social media. We’ve got a two hour power hour about social media, about Instagram. There’s so much for you to access to help you on that side of your journey. And we’ve also got a wonderful community where we will support you if you have any questions about the business side of things. We also run challenges. We do all sorts of things to help you to, to progress and to really make the most of your training and your investment, your time so that you can get out there passing on what you’ve learned and ultimately changing people’s lives.
That is the biggest goal of the calm birth school, is to train people to teach hypnobirthing who then go out there and start teaching it and start finding clients. So I do give a lot of help and a lot of support along the way with that aspect as well. So I hope that by addressing those four biggest concerns or those four things that might be holding you back from training to teach Hypnobirthing, that you might maybe be feeling a little bit more reassured or a little bit more able to to take that next step. And something that I read recently, which I just want to mention, is that 75% of women regularly experienced doubt in the workplace. Nine in 10 women opt out of important life activities because they don’t think that they’re good enough. And I could go on and on with statistics and I think that the root cause of that is self-doubt.
Women are, the way that society has, or what society projects to us is that women, you know, we’re never, we’re never quite good enough. We’re, you know, we look at advertising on tele or on social media and it’s all about, you know, making our hair look better, making our skin look better, our face look better, our bodies look better. It’s, it’s all about trying to be better in the way that we look and, and in the way that, that we are. And so it’s no wonder that when we are projected all of those different images and ideas and ideals in this patriarchal society, but I won’t go down that route that we end up feeling that we are not good enough or we are not capable. And as someone who has always suffered from anxiety and have had depression in the past and also suffers from self-doubt, imposter syndrome, all of those kind of things, I want to as assure you that if I can follow my dream, pursue it and make a success of it, I I have full confidence that if you have the desire and the motivation and the means and the support, that you have a really good chance of being able to fulfill that dream and to have your own business and to teach something that you are really, really passionate about.
Okay, so that was episode three done and I think it went pretty smoothly, although I am sat in between a cupboard and a chair trying to find the best acoustics. So hopefully I’ll find a dedicated space next week to really improve the sound quality. So I hope that you enjoyed this episode and that it really gave you some food for thought about those concerns or worries or niggles that you might be having about training to teach Hypnobirthing. And if you wanna talk about any of the things that I’ve discussed with me in more detail, then please feel free to send me a DM on Instagram. My handle is at the calm birth school, or send me an email, Liz at the calm birth school.com. Or you can visit my website. I’ll put the link in the show notes so that you can take a look at that and I’ll always be happy to answer any questions that you have. But I’ll leave you to it for now, and I’ll see you next week.
