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.
Well, hello there. Coming to you a day later than planned this week because, well, I’ve had a very busy old time. I was in London for a couple of days and also training over the weekend. And so now is my first opportunity this week to sit down and think about what it is that I wanted to talk to you all about this week. And that topic is what happens when you complete your training. And I think this is really important to know because obviously sometimes you are engaged in hypnobirthing your passion for birth is the thing that’s kind of motivating you and driving you forward. It’s like you want to learn, you want to consume, you want to be able to pass on all of this information. And, your desire to support people who are pregnant is the motivation that you have to continue through the training.
But how do you maintain that motivation once the training is over? How do you start making this into a business? And that’s really what I wanted to focus on today. So there’s many elements to this conversation. I’m going to try and keep it as short and sweet, as usual, as possible. I can only talk in terms of the calm birth school and what we offer here. So as you’re coming to the end of your training at the Calm Birth School, we recommend that you get your case study in place before you’ve even completed the training so that you’ve got an end goal. You’ve got a goal, a date, you are motivated to go out there and deliver your hypnobirthing course for the first time. And I did a podcast a few weeks ago, which was called How to Get Your First Client.
In terms of The Calm Birth School, that’s your case study client. So if you are struggling with how on earth would get this client, have a listen to that podcast from a few weeks ago. That’s the first mission, really get that person in place. And beyond that, you, or in the background, you also want to be doing things like setting up your insurance, which I mentioned on last week’s podcast when we were talking about rules and regulations. You also want to look at registering self-employed, which is going to differ depending on which country you are in. And, so you need to, become aware of that as well. You need to look into registering with the ICO, the Information Commissioner’s office, because you will be handling people’s data, people’s information.
To be completely honest with you, when people contact the ICO as a hypnobirthing instructor, you often get different information. You get different responses. So it is always best to contact them yourself, tell them your situation, the information that you intend to gather from your clients moving forward, and what you’ll be doing with that information. And then they’ll let you know if you need to register. If you do register, it’s something like, for a very small business, it’s something like 30 to 40 pounds a year. So it’s not hugely expensive, but certainly something to look into and to consider as well.
By this point, when you’ve completed your training, you may or may not have decided upon a business name and a logo and your branding and all of that sort of stuff. So that might be something that you want to get working on when you’ve finished your training, depending on how you feel.
I have a lot of people who do my training, who are just so inspired during the training that they come up with the name and the concept behind their business. And they start promoting themselves as hypnobirthing instructors in training. And it’s really down to the individual what capacity you’ve got. You know, what time you’ve got. We don’t want you to get overwhelmed, if that’s your tendency, there’s plenty of time to work on those things. But once you’ve completed your training, it’s certainly something you might want to consider. You, you don’t need to put off getting clients until you’ve got it all perfect and you’ve got, all nailed. You can be spreading the word through family and friends through your personal social media profiles in order to maybe get that first client or those first few clients whilst you are creating your business or how your business is gonna look and what it’s called in the background.
And when you are creating that name, I think it’s also really important not to really feel the pressure to get it just like nailed and a hundred percent right, because you can always rebrand in the future. You can always pivot and change your name, if you need to in the future, but it’s just about getting out there, getting started, creating a presence on social media. And as you do that and as you progress through business and you become more experienced, then it makes sense that you may actually want to change your name or your logo or your colors or, or make your business feel something closer to you, more authentic, something that you are, that you have grown into. But we all need to start somewhere. And in terms of a business name, it’s a great idea to think of something that is relatable to people.
So if you’re only going to be delivering hypnobirthing, you might want to have hypnobirthing, in the title. If you’re going to be doing something other than hypnobirthing, but it’s all birth related, then you might want to have something, you know, just birth in the title. If you are thinking that you’re going to be branching out into other areas, maybe breastfeeding or maybe working with parents and their babies like baby massage or baby yoga, then you might want a name that can incorporate that. Or you might want to just go for a name that has a personal meaning to you that’s really reflective of who you are, and then have hypnobirthing, breastfeeding, baby massage or whatever it is, as different services underneath that name and underneath that brand. So there’s several routes that you can go and I would just recommend that you do a bit of brainstorming in terms of the names.
You can ask people who are your target market, maybe in a Facebook group, what they think of the different names. You could ask friends and family, you could do a bit of a survey and see what comes up as being popular. But ultimately you have to feel good about what your business name is. So when you introduce yourself as like for me, hi, my name’s Liz. I’m from the calm birth school. You want to feel proud of the name and the business. So bearing that in mind, maybe actually just practising that, hi, my name is X and I’m from whatever business or company name you come up with. So that’s a few things to be thinking about and to be getting started with. And then you might want to be looking at marketing and the different aspects of that.
And I think we will do some podcasts over the next few weeks to really break these things down. But you might want to be looking at networking with people in your local area who’ve got a similar audience to you. You might want to be looking at attending some pregnancy or baby fairs. So you might want to create some leaflets, some business cards, for networking and for attending those kinds of events. You might want to be networking online and just connecting with people with similar audiences to you online if you feel like you are primarily going to be working on Zoom. So building those relationships with people, connecting with people. I’s likely that you’re going to want to use social media to promote your business.
So beyond the training, that’s something to start to get familiar with. And at the Calm Birth School, we provide a marketing and mindset course, which is written by me specifically for hypnobirthing instructors called The Business of Hypnobirthing. And it really kind of gives you a great introduction to the kind of mindset you need to develop to and maintain to work in this business or what kind of mindset would serve you and support you as you work in this business or in this area. And then also the kind of marketing activities that you want to consider and that you want to try out as you are expanding and building your reputation and growing your business. We also have a back catalogue of previous training because we run free training pretty much every month, if not every other month.
Often with an outside expert, who’s coming to share their experience and their knowledge with us. So we have a social media power Hour, which is actually two hours long, which is a really good introduction into using social media for your business. We also have a workshop on Instagram specifically. We have one on using Google Ads, one on sales, so many different things. We also have a workshop, which is all about creating a hypnobirthing taster, which can also be a great way to build your client base to attract people to, to to come to you to learn more about you, to learn more about what hypnobirthing is. And I’ve run a workshop which is recorded, which really breaks down the different steps that you can take to have a really successful hypnobirthing taster.
There’s just so many different workshops that you can have and that you can access that will help you with your business. On top of that, we’ve also got our community group of instructors, and in there we’re always available to chat and to help people, if they are having issues with their clients with teaching or with business. You can come to that group and you can ask any questions and benefit from the experience of instructors at various different stages of their business, which is obviously very useful. Often people want to have a website, and I think that websites are brilliant, a really great idea, but again, I wouldn’t put off getting out there and teaching until you’ve got a website. I think sometimes people can put the teaching off until everything is perfect, all the branding, all the logos, all the website, all of that sort of stuff before they can really announce themselves as a hypnobirthing instructor.
But it’s more important in my opinion that you get out there delivering the content of the hypnobirthing course, while it’s still fresh in your memory while you’ve got that energised feeling, that motivation. And while your confidence is high, get out there and start delivering that course and then everything else can kind of come after that. So often my instructors don’t have a website for the first six to 12 months. Once they start earning money from teaching hypnobirthing, you can then start to put that, save some of that, or reinvest it into creating a website. You can pay someone to do it or you can invest the time yourself into doing it, which obviously is going to require you to learn, probably learn some new skills. So, there’s lots of different things that you can do once you’ve completed your training to really start to establish yourself as a business and also to start to develop a reputation to create some social proof.
So the sooner you start teaching people, rather than waiting for the perfect website or the perfect name, the sooner you are able to create some social proof to be able to have some testimonials, some birth stories, and to generate some excitement around what you’re doing. Particularly if it’s in your local area and people are talking about you and passing on your name to friends and to relatives who are also pregnant. So it’s a very exciting time once you’ve completed your training to move onto this next phase and to start getting into the business element and the marketing sides of things. And like I said at the calm birth school, I am very passionate about supporting my instructors to create successful businesses because I felt like that was missing for me when I first started my business.
I completed my training and I didn’t have any kind of idea really, about how to run a business. And this is over 11 years ago. So I tried to make it as easy as possible for my instructors to have access to the knowledge and the information that they need so that they can become successful as quickly as possible or, or as quickly as they want to. And also successful. We must define that in our own terms as well. It doesn’t always mean, you know, teaching hundreds of clients. It can mean something so different to everybody. Okay, so that’s me for this week. Short but sweet and I hope that was useful. If you have any questions, please do send me an email. I’ll leave all of my contact details on the show notes. Have a great week.
So before you head off today, I have got an exciting opportunity for you. If you are a birth passionate person, you are really interested in starting your own business and making a difference in the world, then maybe you would like to come to my free masterclass, which is called Are You Ready to Teach Hypnobirthing? And that masterclass is going to help you understand the different skills, qualities that you need to teach hypnobirthing. It’s going to help you understand a bit more about how the course is arranged and how it all works. You also get a behind the scenes of the course as well and loads of information about what hypnobirthing is from the perspective of the calm birth school and why it’s so, so needed as well. So that workshop takes place on the 28th of March, 2023, and it’s at 7:30 PM so it would be so, so great if you were to sign up and to join me. I’d love to meet you. Just sign up here you’ll get all the information that you need.
