Hey, welcome to the Aspiring Hypnobirthing Instructor podcast. I’m your host, Liz Stanford,hypnobirthing instructor,hypnobirthing trainer, clinical 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.
If you have found this podcast, it’s likely that you are someone who’s interested in teaching hypnobirthing, or perhaps you’ve just completed your training or are training right now. Or maybe you are somebody who trained in hypnobirthing a few years ago, and you’ve maybe lost some of the love for what you do, or you’ve had a break and you’re not sure how to get back into it. And so for those of you who fall into those categories, I think it’s best to really start at the beginning. And the beginning is, oh, why, so why do you want to become a hypnobirthing instructor? Or why did you want to become a hypnobirthing instructor? What was so important about hypnobirthing that it compelled you to make the investment in both money and time?
And what difference do you think it will make to yourself or to the world? Now obviously, I’ve, I’ve got myself as a reference for this, but I’ve also got hundreds of hypnobirthing instructors who have, who I have trained all across the world over the last four years. But my own personal story might help you to reconnect with your why. It might help you to reflect upon why you want to do this work or why you are doing this work. So I found hypnobirthing when I was pregnant with my first child, so that’s over 15 years ago now. So it’s, it’s been in my life for, for quite some time. And the reason I found hypnobirthing was by chance, really, but I was looking for something, I was looking for anything that would help me feel better about my pregnancy. So I think I was, I think I was about 32 weeks pregnant when I first started looking for a solution to my problem, which was I was terrified of the pain that I was told I was going to experience in labor.
And I was also really scared of taking any drugs to mask that pain. I just didn’t like the idea of putting something else into my body, or I didn’t understand or know, like, how I was gonna respond to those drugs. So I really felt like I was in a bit of a no man’s land and I didn’t know what to do or where to turn to. And I remember getting into work early one morning, heavily pregnant, and I was the only person in the office, had an office job at the time, and I just started googling. Yes, we did have Google that long ago, and I don’t remember what the search term was. I think it was probably something like natural birth or, you know, how to give birth easily without drugs. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. I don’t think the term pain free had come into my mind, and that’s what was associated with hypnobirthing 15 or so years ago.
So that would’ve been a good search term to use, but I definitely did not associate childbirth with anything that could be anything remotely close to pain-free. So I wasn’t googling that. And then amongst all of the search options that came up, there was a link tohypnobirthing. So I started reading about it and I was just like, what, what is this? I’ve never heard of it. It was not particularly popular in the UK back then. But I found a hypnobirthing instructor who, who lived probably about an hour and a half away from me, and for myself and my husband at the time, it was a financial investment for us. I don’t think we, you know, we’d thought to spend that kind of money on birth preparation at that point at all. And also it was, it was an investment in time in terms of traveling there, spending the time there, traveling back, et cetera.
So it was something to really think about, but honestly, I didn’t, I didn’t think about it too much. I saw it. I was like, yep, I’m gonna do it. And we did it. And I honestly never, I never look back. It really changed how I felt about the rest of my pregnancy. It felt, it changed how I felt about my birth, my body, my brain, my, my mind. It just changed so much for me. And I didn’t go on and have this perfect pain-free birth, which really was what hypnobirthing was kind of marketing at that point. I was very much very much empowered by the experience, though it was an experience which involved intervention. And even though initially I felt such a sense of exhaustion and such an acute sense of disappointment initially, I was able to really rally myself and see how amazing I had I had done and what I’d navigated during that birth experience.
So then I went on to have my second child two years later, and I hadn’t, I hadn’t, wasn’t even thinking about, you know, training to teach hypnobirthing or doing anything like that. And I think it was after probably our second hypnobirthing session in my second pregnancy. We went back to the same person, the same instructor. My husband said to me, you would be so good at this. And I was like, what? What are you talking about? He said, you’d be so good at teaching hypnobirthing. And honestly, I’d never crossed my mind, I thought he’d gone absolutely bonkers. I was just like, I don’t think so. Never done anything like that in my life before. So I sort of put that out of my head for a little while, carried on with the, you know, being heavily pregnant and looking after a toddler and gave birth to my second child, my son, and had the most wow, wonderful, wonderful, straightforward birth that I could have imagined.
It was everything that I wanted and that I could have imagined. Dare I say, dare I say, and I don’t use these words lightly because we all interpret birth and sensations of birth differently. This was my perfect and pain-free birth perfect because it was exactly what I wanted, but may not be perfect to anybody else. And when I say pain-free, I don’t mean that there were no sensations or that it was easy or that I, you know, didn’t have any wobbles and I was, you know, singing kumbaya or anything. I just wasn’t focused on what I guess I should have been interpreting as pain. It was definitely more power, and it was empowering, and it was amazing. I just love thinking about it. It’s just wonderful. So it was after that experience that I reflected on both births, and I thought to myself, I can’t believe how instrumental hypnobirthing has been in those two very different types of experiences.
And how without it, I just don’t think, I don’t think, I know I wouldn’t have had the same experiences, or I wouldn’t have been able to navigate what I had experienced. So it just felt so important to me. It felt, it was, it felt like it was the first time I had ever had a true pull or purpose or passion or calling towards something. I was propelled to really sort of look at hypnobirthing as something that I could pass on. But of course, I was a busy, busy, busy mom with two small children and a job, which I had become part-time at that point. So I didn’t pursue hypnobirthing training for a, for a little while.
That’s probably mixed up in my postnatal depression story as well, which is one for another time. But eventually I did decide that now was the time. And the reason was because I read an article in a newspaper about how the NHS had started to become interested in hypnobirthing. And I, I was just, I was thought, crikey, it’s not just me then <laugh>. It’s not just me who thinks that this is amazing. And I just thought to myself, I’ve got to, I’ve got to, I’ve got to get on this. I’ve got to do it. So there were definitely a lot of reasons, a lot of, yeah, a story attached to why I trained to teach hypnobirthing. It’s definitely to do with my own personal birth experiences. So perhaps you can relate to that, but you definitely don’t have to have had a birth experience or hypnobirthing experience in order to teach hypnobirthing, have plenty of instructors who fall into both of those categories.
I was definitely looking for a purpose. This was my other reason. I didn’t even know I was looking for a purpose until it landed me smack in the face and I was like, wow, I’ve never felt this way before about something. I have to, I have to follow this feeling. I have to do something. So that felt really, really powerful to me. It just felt so important to, to tell other people about hypnobirthing and to help them to have positive, good empowering birth experiences so that they can start parenthood feeling as good as they possibly can, and they can look back on that experience and feel at the, at that time, I wanted people to feel like I did, to feel really good and confident and powerful. So that was definitely another reason. Another reason which really kind of again, propelled me on to do the training was that although I loved my office jobs, I really, really wanted to do something in my life that was more parent friendly so that I could be around for my children when I wanted to be so that I could experience more of them and more of what they were experiencing.
And I just thought, if I could run my own business and manage my own hours and my own time, then you know, I can make that possible. So Hypnobirthing just really seemed to be the thing that would help me with all of those issues. It was really, really important to me. So perhaps you can relate and connect to some of those points that I’ve made there. Maybe you are looking for your purpose or you’ve found your purpose, perhaps it’s birth or it’s specifically hypnobirthing. Maybe you are looking for something that you can build a business around and that you can develop into something that you are in control of that gives you flexibility, that helps you to live the kind of life that you really want to live. And also just to say, you know, you don’t have to teach hypnobirthing with the intention of running a business or making it successful financially.
A lot of people want to teach hypnobirthing because it fulfills them, and the additional money that they get from that is, you know, goes towards extra money for holidays or experiences with families or, you know, towards the household bills, et cetera. Doesn’t have to be something that you rely on financially, but you can also work towards that being the case as well. So I’d love to know what you think of this podcast episode. I’d love to know if you could resonate with any of those points. If you are thinking of training to teach hypnobirthing, perhaps I’ve struck a chord with you. And if you’d like to talk about hypnobirthing training, then please do get in touch. I’ll put the contact details in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll be back soon.
Woo. Well, that was my first podcast episode and although maybe not the most perfect podcast recording, I don’t think it was tea, but if you would like to know more about running your own hypnobirthing business, you could sign up to one of my freebies, which is essentially a business plan. The link is in the episode notes, or if you are wondering about the kind of questions that you should be asking training providers in the hypnobirthing world, I have a freebie for that too. So you’re welcome to sign up to that as well. If you would like to know a little bit more about me or to understand a little bit more about the calm birth school, then please do follow us on Instagram. You can find us at the Calm Birth School. But I’ll be here next week and hopefully I’m gonna just gonna get better and better at this.
