Welcome to the Aspiring hypnobirthing Instructor podcast. I’m Liz Stanford, your host, hypnobirthing instructor, hypnobirthing trainer, hypnotherapist, mindset coach, author, and owner of the Calm Birth School.
Before we get into today’s podcast, I really wanted to just send you all some gratitude for listening to my very first episode last week. I had 43 downloads of that episode, which I’m sure to Steven Bartlett might not seem like very much, but to me it means absolutely everything to think that 43 separate people, separate people downloaded and listened to my very first podcast episode. So thank you so, so much. If this is the first time that you are listening to a podcast episode, then I would really, really appreciate it if you would click follow or subscribe on your podcast provider. Okay, thank you. And let’s get into today’s episode.
In my last episode, I started at the beginning and we explored why you might decide to train or want to train to teach hypnobirthing. And I shared with you my reasons why I had over 10 years ago decided to train to teach hypnobirthing, what kind of led me there, how I found hypnobirthing in the first place, and what a difference it made to my pregnancies and also to my life, and how it’s ultimately led me to where I am now, which is really in a position that honestly, I couldn’t have imagined being 10 years ago at all. So hopefully from that episode you were able to connect with my why and also explore your own reasons for teaching hypnobirthing, whether you are thinking about teaching hypnobirthing or you are exploring the idea of it, or maybe you are training at the moment or perhaps you’ve been teaching hypnobirthing for a little while and you’ve disconnected from the reason why you trained to teach in the first place.
So it’s always good to bring yourself back to that passion, that purpose, that desire, that motivation, because it really does drive you, gives you the courage and the confidence to take the first step or to keep going. So in this episode, I would really like to focus on who can train to teach hypnobirthing, because this is something that I get asked really regularly and I think there can be a bit of a misconception out there about who is the best type of person to train to teach hypnobirthing. Something that I get asked a lot is, do I have to be a midwife, a doula, a hypnotherapist or have some kind of antenatal education qualification or some kind of, therapeutic style qualification before I actually enter onto a, a hypnobirthing training course? And the answer is no, you absolutely don’t.
I do get a lot of midwives and doulas and pregnancy yoga teachers, for example joining my course, but it’s definitely not a requirement. It’s not something I am looking for before I allow someone to join my course. What I’m looking for in someone is that they are very passionate about birth and that we share the same kind of values and beliefs when it comes to birth and birth preparation. So ultimately, the people that train with me would consider themselves to be birth passionate. And so, what does that mean? Well, if you are the type of person who on your Instagram feed, for example, you’ve just got loads of different birthy type accounts and, you’re really interested in watching birth video clips that you might see on Instagram or Facebook or, maybe you follow some YouTube accounts that are, always giving advice and support about pregnancy and birth and motherhood, and you just find yourself gravitating towards those kinds of people or businesses.
And you find it really interesting. It might be that you have a stack of pregnancy books under your bed and you’re maybe you’re not even pregnant or not even thinking about getting pregnant again, but they are all just there and you’re just, “oh, I’m just not ready to throw them away”. And maybe you have a little glance through them occasionally, or perhaps you are the type of person that your friends or your colleagues all come to for advice when they’re pregnant, because they know how you feel about birth and they know that you have maybe had a positive birth experience or an empowering birth experience and they want to know how did you do that? How do you feel that way about your birth experiences? So maybe you can relate to that in terms of whether you are a birth passionate person or not.
But also it’s really important to say that not everybody who does hypnobirthing training is somebody who has previously given birth. So for example I have a man joining my hypnobirthing training course in March. That’s the first man that I have ever trained. He does just so happen to be a hypnotherapist as well. And him and his wife used hypnobirthing during their pregnancy. So he has, obviously insight and an understanding and that’s possibly where his motivation is coming from it because he saw how beneficial it was to him and his wife. And I also have lots of instructors who aren’t pregnant or haven’t been pregnant and haven’t given birth, who also do the training as well.
And their passion maybe isn’t coming from their own experiences, but possibly coming from this inner knowing that birth should be something that we can feel really positive and good and empowered and, and be able to celebrate as well. It is also important to note that you don’t have to have had this perfect pain-free or even positive birth experience in order to want to train to teach hypnobirthing. I also have people who’ve trained to teach hypnobirthing who have had a negative experience or an experience where they may feel that they, were traumatized by. And their reasoning for doing hypnobirthing is that they don’t want other people to experience birth in the way that they did. And that they really want to make a difference because they can see how potentially different their own birth experiences could have been for whatever reason.
There’s always so many different factors or reasons that come into a negative birth experience or an experience where someone feels traumatized and ultimately it is how that person interprets the feelings and the experience that they’ve had. That makes me think about a instructor of mine who was actually a hypnobirthing client originally and she had had a traumatic birth experience the first time round. She signed up to do hypnobirthing to prepare for her second birth, and obviously was very nervous, anxious, worried about what, laid ahead and just really wanted to feel more in control and to experience birth in a different way. And I will never forget when she gave birth to her second child, I woke up to a text message that said, I feel like Superwoman. She’d had such an completely different experience because of the way that she had reframed birth from doing hypnobirthing. She had changed how she felt and how she’d planned and how she was supported and so many different factors.
She recently went on to train to teach hypnobirthing as well because of the experiences that she’d had. So very similar to myself having had, one experience with intervention, which I actually don’t label as traumatic. And then one experience being, you know, pretty blooming amazing. This particular person had, you know, a similar experience, although she did label her first birth as as traumatic. And that kind of varied birth experience can also be really valuable as a teacher as well. Not because we are passing onto our clients that, “your birth will be like this or it won’t be like this”, but because we come at teaching hypnobirthing from a slightly different gaze or approach because we’ve seen it in two different ways. So definitely somebody who’s had a traumatic experience isn’t ruled out from doing the training at all.
I would really want to ensure that that person felt that they had worked through the trauma so that they weren’t re-traumatizing themselves whilst we were working through the information that’s in the training course. And so that they felt in a really good position to be able to support themselves but also support others in the future as well. So another thing that I think is really important when we are thinking about who can train to teach hypnobirthing is, is that person really fixed on their opinions when it comes to birth? Like, do they believe that birth should be perfect and pain free and that’s possible for everybody? Or do they believe that everyone should be birthing at home or that no one should be accepting induction? If they’ve got really strong opinions like that, they’re probably not going to be suited to the calm birth school.
Like obviously you can have your own opinions, we shouldn’t be imposing our opinions or beliefs about the what type of birth experience our clients should be having. We shouldn’t be imposing them on them. We should be supporting them, guiding them, sign posting them, giving them the information that they need, the tools, the techniques, empowering them to make their own decisions and make their own choices as well. So if you were somebody who felt very strongly that, everybody should have a perfect and pain-free birth, then I would probably say, well, I don’t think you’re quite right for our program and maybe you should go and look at another training school. That’s not because I don’t think that perfect and pain-free exists because I absolutely do, but I don’t think we should be that that should be the goal or the aim when it comes to hypnobirthing.
Another thing that’s really important, which I look for when I’m speaking to people who are interested in training to teach hypnobirthing is listening skills. Their ability to listen and be empathetic. And also to how to reflect back what they’re hearing as well. And so sometimes that’s easy for me to pick up in a phone call that I have with somebody, but also I’m aware that listening skills are something that we can develop as well. And so we do support you with that throughout the training. And if we feel that it’s something that you could expand on then or that you need to work on that skillset, then we would be encouraging you to to do an additional training. So other things to think about when you are considering training to teach hypnobirthing is, for example, like how confident you feel in processing information and organizing yourself and multitasking.
I mean the majority of people who do do my training are women and we’re very good at those kind of things. Multitasking and organizing ourselves. As my course is a level three diploma, having the confidence in yourself that you’ll be able to progress through that. And I’m always happy to have a conversation with people about how the course is structured and, what’s involved so that they can feel really confident before actually making a decision. My training comes in a few different formats to appeal to different learning needs. We have video with PowerPoint, we have some audio involved. We have we have it in written format as well. There are workbooks, there are quizzes, there are activities for you to do which you get feedback for all along the way to help you to progress.
And because we really don’t want you to feel stuck on anything and we also are able to adapt to any learning needs as well. Or rather we do our very best to be able to adapt to any additional learning needs that people may have because we really want the experience of training with the calm birth school to be an immersive one, but one that is really, really positive. We do everything that we can to ensure that you feel good and happy and that you are understanding & processing the information and we can see if you are by checking in with you with your activities and your assessments and your quizzes all the way through as well. It’s very well supported by myself and my team. I have Sabrina, who is a hypnotherapist and also Jemima who’s a midwife and we help you to work through the course and feel good and supported and safe to progress all along the way.
Okay, so that’s episode two done. Slight hiccup about seven minutes in. So thank you for bearing with me there. And again, if you’ve enjoyed this episode, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a review or if you would follow or subscribe. And I’ll continue to deliver these episodes every week for the foreseeable future. So if you are interested in learning more about training to teach hypnobirthing, then please visit my website, which is www.thecalmbirthscore.com, or you can hop over to Instagram and give me a follow and perhaps download one of my freebies there to give you a bit more information. My handle is at the calm birth score, but for now I’ll leave you to it and I’ll check in with you next week. Thanks for listening. Bye.
