Bringing Joy and Hope Into Your Doula Business
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Transcript
Welcome to doula tips and tips. This podcast is a place where we answer one question about doula work, both to support you and to help you support your clients. I'm Kaylee Harrod. I've been supporting families in this perinatal space since my oldest was born, 12, nearly 13 years ago.
I am a birth and postpartum doula childbirth educator, La Leche League leader, and a doula coach. I love guiding and supporting doulas as they work out their doula business. It is a tremendous joy to be trusted in this way.
Thank you for joining us on this journey. Welcome back to doula tips and tips. How are you incorporating joy into your business? So today I want to talk about how we think about the grind, the daily grind of business and joy because I think what often happens as a there's so much to get done and there's so much to grow and there's so much to do that it is very easy to forget about being joyful or hopeful or even having like big wild dreams, right?
It is really easy to just be like today I have 1700 tasks to get done, you know, and I think that's easy in lots of areas of life. It's certainly easy in the midst of birth for sure easy in the early postpartum time but as a business owner I think it's unique because in the early days it feels like when you get to a certain point joy or hope or dreams or whatever will be easier and isn't that like life right where we're like okay but next season is going to be so much better than this one if I can just get there then I can celebrate or then I can rest or then I can be joyful but the reality is that life has to include that in every season and that is also true in business like our business needs us to rest it needs us to be joyful needs us to be hopeful in every single aspect and I'll be honest with you today this episode is for me just as much as it is for you because I also need joy and hope in my business and sometimes it's really hard to find that right like and I think I say that because I want to normalize the fact that you if you look at me and my business and you think like oh one day maybe I'll like arrive at where Kaylee is that is not going to somehow be an easier place to dream and hope and have joy like there's still a level of grinding that happens at this level of business just like at your level of business and it's not something that's just going to inherently come as your business grows I think the important thing there is normalizing the rhythms in our business from the very beginning one thing that I talk about so often is sustainability and I think the reason this matters to me and the reason I talk about it so much in my coaching and my teaching is that I think doulas wait too long to build that into our business and then we burn out so I can't tell you the number of conversations I've had that go something like I started doing overnight care and then I got a whole bunch of people referred to me for overnight care and now I kind of hate doing overnight care and it takes a huge toll on my body and I don't want to keep doing it but that's the only customer base that I have.
right? Or I'm attending births and you know, I started out thinking maybe I'll attend only three or four a month but now like really to make the money that I want to make I need to attend like five or six and I've been doing that for a couple years and I'm like kind of losing my mind and feel like this pace is not sustainable and I'm not sure how to dial it back without completely losing my revenue, right?
And so these are examples to kind of give you a sense of what it looks like to have not thought about sustainability in the beginning, right? And I think it is so easy to do. It's so easy to be like one day I will have balance, one day I will have rest, one day I will take time off, one day, right?
Because right now I can't afford to do that or like maybe I shouldn't do that yet because I don't have a good rhythm of work yet or I don't have a big client base and so what I want you to hear me saying is that is not something to put off for the future.
I want you to plan in joy and hope and rest and balance in your business from the very first day of ever having a business and please, please, please do not wait until your business is years old or thousands of dollars of revenue or whatever to have that as part of what you're doing because that is not sustainable.
You are going to burn out potentially, right? You have the high potential of burning out before you even get to the point of having joy, before you even get to the point of having rest. And I will tell you one of the things that this brings up for me is that I build in at least one month of being off call.
Now I've talked about this on the podcast so and I want to be transparent about it because I think that matters in terms of you having a good context of how business runs and just normalizing the ups and downs of business.
So this year I broke my ankle. I know that you probably know that if you've been around for any length of time but if you're new to the podcast go back to February -ish and hear about my broken ankle saga.
It has taken a toll on my business and on me and on my family, right? It was expensive. Like when you are a business owner that your body does the work that you're doing something like a broken ankle that keeps you from doing your work costs a lot of money.
So earlier in the year I talked a lot about really wanting to be off call from July until the end of the year. That's been a goal of mine for a couple of years because I have been kind of in the grind of birth work for a while and I haven't had many seasons of being truly off call.
And I think my body and my kids and my family like everybody could could do with a few months of not being on call. So that was my thought. I was kind of dreaming like this this year is the year you know.
It's been three years now. Well this summer will be my third summer of taking the entire month of July off. So that is still my plan for this summer. I don't have anyone do in July. My family, my kids and I are going with my parents on a vacation and we are and some of my siblings and we're gonna have some awesome like days at the pool and sleepovers and pizza nights and all that.
And so that is what July is gonna look like. However with the broken ankle it became clear to me like probably in April that revenue just was not going to allow for me to be off call for the whole of the fall.
And so I had had a couple people reach out already for September and October and one was like a dear repeat client couple that I adore and so I was like obviously I want to say yes to them you know. And so I decided financially my family and the business needed me to do births in the fall and a few births in the winter potentially taking off from like mid -December through maybe early February after my birthday but we'll see you know again like I'm not sure what that revenue will look like at this point right.
And so what I think is important is to think about how you balance pivoting and kind of pushing through, right? Because when we think about the grind of business, we think about like, okay, we're recording podcasts and putting them up and putting up social media content and sending out emails to clients and making sure that contracts are updated and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Like there's just an endless grind of stuff that needs to get done, right? But when we think about business as like a whole, like as a lifetime kind of, then we can't just think about like endless social media posts, right?
Or endless podcast episodes or endless client contracts, right? We need to have some balance there where we're also thinking, you know, okay, but in a few weeks, I'm going to go on vacation with my kids and we're just going to have fun.
Like we're just going to relax and have fun. And that can also be part of your business. Like you can have that at the same time and thrive kind of in both places at once. So I really want to encourage you to think about how you can build some joy into your business and some hope into your business because I think it matters.
And I think that in the midst of building a business, there's got to be some space for hope and joy. All right, I hope this episode was encouraging to you and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Dula Tips and Tits podcast.
If you learned something today or had an aha moment, we'd love for you to share that on Instagram and tag us at hiradula so we can celebrate alongside you. If you found this podcast helpful, we would so appreciate you taking a second to leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app.
That helps other doulas find us as we do this work together. This podcast is intended as educational and entertainment. It is not medical advice or business advice. Please consult your own medical or legal team for your own needs around your health and your business.
We'll see you again soon.
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Are you holding yourself back from having a business that you love and loves you back? Joy, Hope and rest need to be a part of your doula business from the very first MOMENTS!
Quote from the show:
“It is really easy to just be like today I have 1700 tasks to get done, you know, and I think that's easy in lots of areas of life. It's certainly easy in the midst of birth for sure easy in the early postpartum time but as a business owner I think it's unique because in the early days it feels like when you get to a certain point joy or hope or dreams or whatever will be easier and isn't that like life right where we're like okay but next season is going to be so much better than this one if I can just get there then I can celebrate or then I can rest or then I can be joyful but the reality is that life has to include that in every season and that is also true in business like our business needs us to rest it needs us to be joyful needs us to be hopeful in every single aspect and I'll be honest with you today this episode is for me just as much as it is for you because I also need joy and hope in my business”
CONNECT with Kaely on TikTok or Instagram
https://www.tiktok.com/@doulacoach
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If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me @harroddoula
Kaely Daily is produced by Kaely Harrod of Harrod Doula Services
It is sponsored by The Birth Prep Blueprint Childbirth Class
Music by Madirfan: Hidden Place on Pixabay
