Welcome to the Aspiring Hypno Birthing 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.
In today’s episode, we are going to be talking about how to get your first client, and then we’re also gonna be thinking about general ways in terms of how you can build your client base moving forward. So I often find that one of the reasons why people might delay doing their training is because they’re worried about the marketing or the business side of things, and underneath that might be this kind of fear or limiting belief or worry about promoting themselves, marketing themselves, advertising themselves, telling people, you know, what training they’ve done and asking for what they need i.e a case study to be connected with pregnant people, et cetera. That can bring up a lot of worries and fears and concerns. And people often worry like, what, what are people gonna think of me? Are they gonna think this is ridiculous? Et cetera. Like, I’ve been through all of those kinds of emotions and concerns and worries.
And the first thing I would say is that, you know, your, your friends or your Facebook friends or the people on Instagram, unless they’re actually pregnant or interested in hypnobirthing for the future, they’re not your ideal client. So it doesn’t matter what they think or if they’re, you know, if they’re saying things that are negative, who cares? That is their issue. That is their problem. The thing that I think is also really important to remember is the likelihood is that they’re probably not saying anything or discussing anything about you. And what they are more focused on is themselves. I often tell this story to my instructors when they’re feeling a little bit like, you know, everyone’s watching what they’re doing, or they’re kind of, you know, thinking, oh, who does she think she is? Et cetera. Once they start on social media and they start promoting themselves, and it’s this.
So I have a friend, and a few years ago, not a few years ago, actually, it was about 20 years ago, so I think I was kind of, you know, just in my early twenties or perhaps still in my teens, and I was having a paranoia moment and saying to her, you know, oh, so-and-so is talking about me, and so-and-so’s doing this. And she just looked at me and she said, Liz, it’s not all about you. And I was like, what? What do you mean? And she quantified it. She said, people are too busy worrying about their own problems and their own issues to be sitting there waiting for an opportunity to discuss whatever it is that you are doing or, or have done, or to be, you know, to even bother with you <laugh>. It’s like, oh and harsh as it was, I really took that conversation to heart and it really helped.
It meant a lot to me. And it’s something that I remind myself of even now, is when I get into that kind of like, oh, if I’m doing something new or different, oh, what are people gonna think? And then I think to myself, you know, it’s not all about me. They’re not sitting there waiting to point their finger or tell me that what I’m doing is ridiculous and to stop promoting myself, et cetera. Most of the people that I come into contact with are, you know, tell me how inspired they are by what I’ve achieved and that they’re so interested in, you know, what I’ve done and how I’ve developed my business. And that should be a really, really positive thing. So in terms of the first client at the Combat School, we recommend that you get your first client in place before you’ve completed your training.
So that can be a little bit terrifying for people. They’re often like oh my goodness, how do I do that? What should I do? And so we just keep it really, really super simple. So by this point, by the time they start working with that case study client, that first client, they will have completed all of their training. They’ll have been signed off by me and my team. They’ll have their level three hypnobirthing instructor training diploma. And, you know, effectively they are good to go in terms of their knowledge base. And the reason why we want them to have that client in place so quickly is so that they don’t lose their motivation or get stuck in this kind of fear cycle that I was describing. You know, have that client booked in and that’s your goal. You’re gonna be ready to deliver the first session to them, perhaps two weeks after the training has completed or, or something like that.
And so often what comes up is, so how do I, how do I get this first client? What should I do? And at this point, they might not have their social media platform set up. They might, but they might not. And they might have no experience of marketing or promoting themselves at all. So we are just keeping it super, super simple. And the way that we do that is we suggest to them, well, who do you know? Who do you know that might be pregnant? Who do you know who might know someone who’s pregnant, who might be interested in hypnobirthing? And that is the place that we start. So if you look in your phone, in your WhatsApp groups, if you look on your Facebook friends you know, who follows you on Instagram, and you can take a look at like, who are these people that I’ve got to reach out to who are in my maybe inner circle, and then your external external circle.
And then, you know, they sort of the connections get looser and looser as you, as you work your way out. But who do I know that I could let them know what I’m doing, what training I’m doing, how passionate I am, and if they could pass my details onto somebody? So it might be super easy, it might be that your cousin, your sister, your best friend is pregnant, and they’re like, yeah, sign me up. I wanna do the classes with you. And, and that’s great. So get them booked in and they can be your first client. And sometimes people feel like, oh, what should I do? What should I charge them? Because they’re a friend or a relative? And that’s really, really up to you how you feel. Remembering that delivering this first round is gonna take a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of investment from you.
And also, you know, you’ll be providing them with materials, which might come at a small cost to you, depending on what materials you are providing them. You might be hiring a venue, but the likelihood is you’ll go to their house or they’ll come to your house if it’s just a private client. So really thinking about what the time investment and the costs are gonna be for you. And you might decide to charge them a full, the full price, half price, a nominal amount, whatever feels good to you, or you might decide to do it for free. So normally I don’t advocate doing your case study for free because sometimes the investment isn’t there from the other side, from the case study, from the person who’s agreed to sign up for this free, amazing, hypnobirthing teaching experience. They might not be as invested as they would be if they were actually paying, but if it is your friend, a close friend and or a relative, they’re gonna have an investment of another kind.
They’re gonna be invested in you and wanting you to succeed and to be able to go on and, you know, create the success that you want and to create the transformations or help to create the transformations for other people as well as wanting it for themselves. So in that case, the motivation is usually there on both sides. And so doing the, the, the course for free usually works out pretty well. Whereas when you don’t know somebody and they’ve just signed up to do your hypnobirthing course and they’re doing it for free, they haven’t got the same buy-in or investment in you. And so you might find they might not be as invested in the hypnobirthing course. I remember one of my instructors she had put a post in a Facebook group like a kind of, you know, one of those sort of moms and dads kind of Facebook group for her local area.
And she’d said that she’s running a case study for her first client, and if anyone was over 20 weeks pregnant, would they be interested, et cetera. And so one person was like, yes, yes, I’d love to do that. So she agreed to do it for free, and the person turned up for the first session, loved it, gave great feedback, but then kept putting her off for the next session, and kept canceling the dates that they had booked in. So this person was arranging childcare, she was doing all the work she was getting ready for, you know, the next sessions and doing any background reading that she needed to do, et cetera. And then this person was just canceling sessions. And this went on for a while, and in the end, they had to sort of draw a line under it because the investment just wasn’t there from, from the person who’d signed up to do it.
Whereas if she’d invested some money in it, I mean, even if it was a small amount, she would still, she would’ve had more reason to turn up to those sessions and to, to really really give it a go. So that is something to think about, to be aware of as you are kind of navigating your first client. So think of other things that you can do if you could reach out directly to people, family and friends. You could create a Facebook post and put it on your personal profile on Facebook if you’re a Facebook user. And you could make that post quite descriptive in terms of the training you’ve just done, why, why you’ve done it, and you know how passionate you are. And then also that you’re looking for a case study client. So recently one of my trainees who finished her training towards the end of last year, she was looking to get her first client and she was not at all worried about the teaching, or she felt really confident about the knowledge, but she was just, oh, I don’t know how to get this first client.
And she was feeling a bit nervous about it, especially about, you know, what, are people gonna be receptive? Are they, are they going to want to, to do this? And she didn’t know anybody that she could directly go to who was pregnant. So me and her had a conversation and she decided that she would go ahead and post on her personal Facebook profile. And she got her first client that way actually really quickly within posting that post which she created. And I helped her tweak it so that it felt just right for her to post. And there was enough, there was enough sort of urgency and enough enough for somebody to, to spark their interest about hypnobirthing. And somebody, yeah, signed up within hours, paid immediately as well. Because she wasn’t willing to do it for free.
She wanted somebody to pay. Because obviously it does take a lot of time and energy and effort like I’ve explained before. And so now she’s deli, she’s, she’s delivered the course to her first client and feels really, really happy about it. Now she did have to get out of her comfort zone to do that. But it absolutely paid off. So sometimes the easiest way, the simplest things are the easiest ways to, to go about getting our first client. So perhaps you could start thinking about, hmm, who do I know that’s pregnant? If you’re thinking about doing your training, or if you are indeed doing your training right now? Cuz getting that first client booked in is so important so that you don’t get up in your head and you can just move through to the next stage. And really that’s the best bit, you know, when you start delivering the content and seeing the light bulbs and seeing what a difference you are making that just, you know, really makes a difference. It’s really, really, really powerful and wonderful.
What’s also important to remember is the reason why we take this approach of asking people who, you know, taking a look in your phone, at your contacts, putting a post on social media, on your personal profile. The reason why we take that approach is because of the lack of trust factor. So somebody is much more likely to agree to do hypnobirthing with you, be your case study, be your client, pay you, et cetera. If they have got that no, like trust factor. And the easiest way to have that is to already have a relationship with somebody or for somebody that you know, who trusts you to tell somebody who’s pregnant, you know, oh, so and so is really passionate, really trustworthy, really, really brilliant. You should definitely do this with her. Like that’s a surefire way of getting somebody to sign up.
So it is essentially a referral and that is like gold dust and that will become really important as you develop your business and you develop your marketing, those referrals that no, like trust factor that should be threaded through your entire business. And you can do that in many different ways. So keeping it super simple for that first client, for that case study. If you’re ever struggling, you come to me or to one of my team and or, or the community, and we will help you, we will help you get your first client by giving you lots of ideas, motivating you, and before you know it, there you go. Your client is signed up and you are ready to go. Okay? So beyond that, and you know, I’m not going, I don’t wanna sugarcoat it, and I, and I never do. When someone phones me to chat to me about the training, I’m always really open and really honest about the fact that the easy part of the training or the easy part of this whole process is actually doing the diploma itself, actually doing the training course itself.
Because you’ve already got the passion, you’ve already got the desire, you’ve got the motivation. You, you love the topic, so you want to explore it. And I know that we give lots of support and encouragement, so we’ve got you covered in that respect. So that’s, you know, fairly easy to navigate and to move through. And we also support any learning issues or any learning needs, et cetera. The bit that comes after. So the business bit, the marketing bit, the social media side of things. If you want to explore that as an avenue for promoting your business, that can often be something that people find more challenging because it’s like learning something completely different. It’s like doing another training course itself and, and like hypnobirthing and birth, you know, when it comes to marketing and business and promoting ourselves, we are always learning.
There’s always new things to try, there’s always things that are performing better than other things. And you know, you have to be able to move and navigate those, those changes. So it does take some commitment to learn how to promote and market yourself as a business, but we give a lot of support at the combat schools. So for example, you’ve, you’ve got the community support anyway, you’ve got the support from me. You’ve also got a marketing and mindset course, which is called the Business of Hypnobirthing, which is specifically for hypnobirthing instructors, which is a great place to get you started with developing that mindset for having a business in the birth world, and also get you to explore the different marketing options and understand them a little bit more as well. Then we’ve also got a setup checklist for your business.
Things that you can tick off as you move into this next phase of setting up your business and getting going with things. We also have a back catalog of training that you can access when you’ve completed your training. So we’ve got a two hour social media masterclass. We’ve got a class on Instagram, we’ve got a Google ads masterclass. We’ve got so many different things that you can access if you’re thinking, how do I do that? I don’t even know where to start. Well, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s usually something in our membership vault for you to access that can help you to get going with that and to, to move through it. Because I remember when I first started out over 11 years ago, and I had never run a business before, I didn’t know what I was, I didn’t know what I was doing, and it was all trial and error for me.
And I’ve done lots of training. I’m now a business coach myself and a mindset coach. And over the years I’ve worked out all the different things that, you know, that work and the things that we can try and there’s no one formula. Like I can’t say to you, do this and you’ll get loads of clients because what works for one person might not work for another person. So it is, like I said, trial and error and it is exploring different things, but with the, with enough passion and motivation, you can enjoy that and you can, you can enjoy the marketing and the business side of things and before you know it, you’ve built up a client base and you’ve built up a reputation, which is great. So I’m just gonna go through some of the things that you could do beyond your case study to start building awareness and getting a flow of clients, but I think it’ll be another episode to really go into depth with those.
So firstly, building your online presence. So that might be a website, but I do suggest that you, you, you don’t need that for the first six to 12 months. You can focus on free tools that will help you get clients, but a website is a really good to have at some point. So create a website or a social media page on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok whatever social media is your preference at the moment. I would start there and start with one rather than, you know, really overwhelming yourself and going with lots of different social media presences, presences networking with birth professionals as well, making connections, building relationships with local doulas and other people who have got the same audience as you. It could be pregnancy yoga teachers, it could be people who work with pregnant women like chiropractors, reflexologists, acupuncturists, et cetera.
Getting to know them, not sort of, you know, dropping into their inbox and going, hi, I’ve just trained to teach hypnobirthing and can you promote me to your clients? That’s not gonna work. You know, it’s all about creating a relationship and building that no, like trust factor, et cetera. And so that you can, it can be reciprocal and you can support each other. You might want to offer a free consultation, sometimes called a free discovery call, or maybe you might want to run a free taster session either online or in person. And in our membership vault, I have a whole session about running a free taster with a format that works really well. So one of my instructors actually yesterday got in touch to say that she’d used my format for running a free taster and she had 12 people turn up and four people had signed up like on the night.
So then she was just following up the rest of the people. So amazing. It was really, really good. So you might wanna think about doing that, maybe attending baby fairs or events or anything kind of birth specific. So depending on what area you live in and what you have access to, some big like shops and stores like Mamas and Poppers or John Lewis, they sometimes do baby events, which you might be able to attend to promote your services or you might be able to you know, give some leaflets, et cetera that they might be able to use at their fairs. Then once you’ve started teaching a few people, a few clients, then you know, pregnant people know pregnant people. It’s almost like it’s catching. So asking your previous clients to refer you on and staying in touch with them as well so that you know, they, so that you are in, in, in their mind when their friends become pregnant, et cetera.
And then you might also want to think about placing advertisements in like local parenting magazines or on relevant websites or, you know, putting your leaflets or brochures somewhere, but being really specific with that because it’s doesn’t, it’s no good, you know, getting 2000 leaflets printed and then just dropping them through doors because you don’t know if the people in those houses are pregnant or, and, and it could be kind of wasting your money and your time. So using those leaflets to put them in targeted places or to use, to give to referrals or people that you meet is always a good idea. But remembering that building a busy successful practice sometimes takes time and effort. Some people are straight out there, flow of clients off they go and sometimes it takes time for other people. So really being patient and persistent and just keep going and keep promoting and trying different things and just trying to enjoy it as you go. So that’s the end of today’s episode. I hope you found that helpful. If you were thinking, I would have no idea how to get my first client or you know, how to explore getting clients in general. And I’d love to hear your feedback if you have any.
So that’s another episode done or hope that you found that helpful or useful and I’d really, really appreciate it if you would hit the subscribe or follow button on your podcast provider. And if you felt inclined to, I’d really love you to leave a review. If you are interested in training to teach hypnobirthing, please drop me a message so that we can have a chat about it or I can get you booked onto our next course. All the information about the Level three Hypnobirthing Instructor Diploma course that I offer is on my website and I will drop a link in the show notes. Have a wonderful week. Bye.
