The #1 Mindset Shift Doulas Must Make Before Creating a New Offer
What if I told you that I know the secret to getting over the BIGGEST hurdle of creating a new offer in your doula business?
If you’ve been wondering how to create a childbirth education course, ebook, or workshop the *easy* way, then get out a pen and paper, this blog post is for you.
Things you’ll learn in this blog post:
What held me back from impacting more women’s lives as a birthworker…
Why your current mindset is keeping you from achieving financial freedom…
How to stop wasting your time on all the little details of creating a new offer in your doula business…
… and a whole lot more!
Thank you so much for all of your support this past week. After publishing episode 39, where I shared about my current miscarriage situation, I received so much love from you all. Any hesitations I initially had about sharing my story publicly immediately vanished. You are the best group of humans I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Between my blog readers, like you, my podcast listeners, my students, and my community on Instagram, we have tens of thousands of women and birthworkers cheering each other on. It never stops blowing my mind that I've built a community that is so supportive of each other, and especially each other's autonomy.
Since I started my journey as a birthworker, helping women have an autonomous birth has always been my number one goal. Autonomous birth, autonomous miscarriage, and autonomous motherhood. This means we can make every decision for ourselves, free from coercion and without feeling shamed for our choices. If that's what you're striving for too, you are in the right place.
What is the #1 mindset shift that doulas must make before creating any new offer?
PS– When I say “new offer,” it could be anything from a new doula package, a 1:1 private coaching session, a mother's circle, a printable birth plan, a mini video series, affirmation cards, or even a full-on comprehensive online childbirth education course.
If you've heard my story, you know I’ve created 8 childbirth education offers in the past 4 years. Each course was wildly successful, but looking back, I have realized all the ways I majorly dropped the ball, and I now understand all the ways I could have impacted more lives (and made more money) had I made one mindset adjustment.
The first online course I created was a $400, 8-module, 8-hour, comprehensive course. It took me 6 months of full-time work to create. I scripted every single word, bought all the fancy software, and when I was recording, put on all of the makeup, had all of the fancy lights, and had the teleprompter running. I did everything I thought I “needed to do” in order to create a successful program.
In reality… I was just trying to mimic my business coach. AKA a CEO with 20 staff members and a multi-million dollar production budget. Not only did I not have 20 staff members, but I didn't have a single staff member! I was doing it all myself. On top of that, I was a full-time stay-at-home mom to a baby under 12 months old with a full-time working partner who was putting in a ton of overtime. I didn't even have a budget. The $10 per month I paid for the teleprompter app made me cringe.
I used my iPhone as my camera, propped it up on a stack of books, attached my $80 microphone from Amazon, and read my word-for-word script robotically. After every video recording, I stayed up super late editing out every single mistake, every hiccup, every time you could hear my daughter in the background or my dog bark, or if I said the wrong word and corrected myself, I edited that out.
I thought I had to make my course the highest quality thing that the birth community has ever seen because I thought that that was what was necessary for success.
Six months later, I had this comprehensive course with A+ content that would completely transform anybody's birth. It was phenomenal. But the presentation of the material felt inauthentic. Looking back, I realize what happened. (Promise me that you are going to avoid this!) I spent too much energy, time, and effort trying to produce a top-quality course because I felt like an imposter. I thought, “If the lighting looks perfect, I have a perfect script, edit out all the mistakes, then maybe they won't know that I'm new to birthwork. They won't be able to tell I've only been a doula for a few years, and that this is my first time teaching childbirth education…”
I was trying to compensate for an internal feeling of lack. A feeling of I'm not good enough. Now, after creating this course, I have realized that I spent way too much of my time on things that didn't matter at all. I will be proud of the course material itself until the day I die. It's so high quality that I’ve made it a significant part of the Childbirth Educator Program. In the program, I am giving students the entire curriculum to teach their own clients (they get to put their own spin on it) so they don't have to start from scratch creating their own curriculum.
Whenever I go back and watch those curriculum videos, it reminds me of when I focused way too much on how people are going to perceive me. It’s also time with my daughter as an infant that I’ll never get back. I learned so many lessons from creating that course, it was my stepping point into what this business has become.
That course made me my first $10,000 month and my first $100,000 year. It's the course that took my impact worldwide. I supported students from across the entire globe with the goal of helping them have their dream autonomous birth. So there were so many amazing things that came from that course, but if I could go back, I would do it completely differently.
I would have started with a much smaller course so I could work out the kinks. Instead of spending 6 months planning, scripting, recording, and editing all of these video lessons, I could have created something smaller, maybe closer to 1 hour instead of 8, and then created additional subsequent mini-courses. Then improved between every single course.
I also look back and wish I didn't edit the videos. I would've saved so much time, and it would've felt so much more authentic and relatable. I know you might be thinking, "Kyleigh, but I want a high-quality course.” And to that, I’ll ask you, is that actually what you want?
If you had to choose, would you rather have a high-quality filmed course or a course that helps your students achieve life-changing transformations? Do you think that life-changing transformation isn't possible for your students if you fumble on a few words, don't have makeup on, the lighting is dark, or you can hear your baby crying in the other room while their father plays with them?
I've now done this enough times to know that women are tired of the 100% perfectly curated videos, perfect lighting, and word-for-word scripts. It's not relatable. Women want to learn from real mentors with flaws because that is relatable. The good news here is that it's a lot easier to be authentic with all of your beautiful imperfections than to spend all of your time making perfectly curated content from the get-go.
So let me be very clear.
Spending all of your time trying to create a perfectly produced childbirth education course on day one is a waste of your time.
It's only going to delay your launch date. Not only are you going to miss out on serving women because they're going to have their babies, but you're also going to miss out on potentially a lot of income. All because you have the fear of judgment, the fear of not being enough, the fear of someone purchasing your program and saying, "This video quality isn't worth the money I paid."
But guess who doesn't say stuff like that? Someone whose life you legitimately transformed through your teachings. They don't care about the video quality. Messy action is 100% more valuable than creating an A+ offer. An A+ transformation is the only thing our clients and students actually care about. If you can help your students and clients achieve their dream birth/postpartum and achieve all of their goals while your baby is crying in the background, your dark circles are in full force, you sometimes have low lighting and you keep in a few mistakes here and there, those clients will still continue to come back to you and they will send all of their friends.
They value the transformation, not the way your course looked. I know this from experience because yes, that perfectly edited and scripted course with the perfect lighting led me to my first $10,000 month. But my first $100,000 month came from spending zero time thinking about how I'm going to be perceived by my students, and instead, serving hundreds of students with only them and their goals in my mind. That means that I'm teaching with my toddler on my boob, or my toddler screaming in the background, or my dog barking. Or like recently, laying on my belly on my couch because I threw out my back and that's the only way that I can record a video.
I'm not thinking about me anymore. I'm thinking about them.
My videos inside my programs (that cost as much as $4,000) are loaded with mistakes. Sometimes they have bad lighting, and I am usually wearing zero makeup. And guess what? My students still come back and purchase every other course that I've ever created. 60% of the women who joined our CBE training program are past students. That would not have happened if I did not help them get the transformation.
Those women are not thinking, "I'm going to buy Kyleigh's next course because she was wearing beautiful makeup, her lighting was perfect, and she made no mistakes." Of course not. That sounds ridiculous. My students still send all of their friends even with all of the flaws. 80% of our current doula students came from a direct referral from a past client of ours.
They even leave reviews like, "Kyleigh, you could have charged $10,000 for this course." Or, "Kyleigh, I've paid so much more money for courses that didn't help me nearly as much as yours and I just joined your program last week." We get reviews like that because we help our students achieve their goals. So let's stop making it about what people think of us and let's start spending our time focusing on what we can do for other people.
If you've been thinking about making your own childbirth education offer, whether that's an ebook, workshop, mini-course, or full-on comprehensive program, you should check out our childbirth educator training program. It's launching on April 10th, 2023. Right now you can join at the early bird rate and save $500, but just for a few more weeks!
The very best part of the program is that the entire thing is rooted in autonomy. There's none of that “blindly trust your doctor” BS that runs rampant in the mainstream birth education communities. When you join, you're going to get total access to use our entire curriculum inside your own programs. You can take our templates, scripts, PDF handouts and presentation slides and use them exactly as they are or completely customize them to make them your own. Just like everything else I do, you are going to be getting all of my best business tips all along the way. You'll learn how to record a high-quality course on a budget. (Without pretending you have 20 staff members or a multimillion-dollar production budget!
You will learn how to name, price, and sell the course that you create, and you'll get a ton of other lessons straight from me. I’m not some huge corporation that's out of touch with the reality of growing a birth business, I’m a real human who's doing the dang thing right alongside you. I am just a few steps ahead of you, and I want to show you exactly how to take your impact worldwide and how to create an income bigger than you ever dreamed possible. Click here to learn all about this amazing, first-of-its-kind, Childbirth Educator Training Program. Save your spot today to score $500 off before the program launches on April 10th at full price.
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Meet your host, Kyleigh Banks, a side-gig doula turned CEO of a multi-six-figure birth-focused business. Her passion? Teaching birth nerds, like you, how to build an incredibly successful doula business that allows you to quit your day job, stay home with your kids, and most importantly, make a lasting impact on the world.