Creating a Thriving Doula Business Through Nervous System Health with Nicole Pasveer
Have you ever wondered how prioritizing nervous system health can transform your journey as a birth doula and business owner?
If you are ready to unlock the untapped potential of your doula business by integrating nervous system health care, then get out a pen and paper, this episode is for you!
In Episode 63 of the Birthworker Podcast, I'm joined by Nicole Pasveer from Becoming Mama Bear who is sharing her insight and experience from leaving her people-pleasing nursing career, becoming a mother, and shifting into a career that aligned with HER desires of helping new moms transition into motherhood through nervous system regulation.
In this episode, we dive into the following:
How Nicole abandoned her “good-girl conditioning” and started the career of her dreams…
Why giving yourself room to fail is the key to personal and professional development…
How mastering nervous system health is the key to a transformative birth experience for your clients (and success in your business)…
… and a whole lot more!
If you're tired of feeling disconnected from your passion as a birth doula and craving a renewed sense of purpose, then you wanna listen up! Discover the transformative strategies and practices that can revolutionize your career and well-being as a birthworker.
Nicole Pasveer: I should start with the fact that growing up, I was always, how do I put it? I never identified as a good girl per se, but I was always that friend that everyone's parents always wished their kid was more like. Like, "Oh, why can't you be more like Nicole?" Or I would be the friend that, like in high school, my friends would tell their parents they were at my house because those parents didn't think they could get into any trouble if they were at my house. I was the good kid. I always got good grades in school. I always just did the next thing that was expected of me.
And so that continued on past high school once I went into university and I got my nursing degree, and then I got a job as a nurse, and I thought, "Okay, like this is it. This is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing." Not from, I feel like this is my purpose and I feel really fulfilled, but more of a, I'm being successful from what society's definition of success is. I'm doing all the right things. I've gotten a respectable career. There's job security. I've gotten a job right out of university, which is exciting in itself. And then on top of that, I've also, at this point, been dating my boyfriend at the time since we were in grade nine. So we were now this model couple that everyone in our friend group was always looking up to and always wanting to be like us and have the relationship we had.
At this point in my life, I was carrying a lot of hats that I felt like if I dropped any of them, I'd be letting someone down. And then fast-forward to, I guess COVID really, COVID was really a turning point for me in the sense that it allowed me to actually stop and question what I was doing. I guess it allowed me to actually slow down for a second and look around and be like, "What is going on right now?"
Kyleigh Banks: Did you have that thought growing up, like these hats aren't mine?
Nicole Pasveer: No, not at all. I definitely thought I'm doing the thing, like I am doing the thing. Actually, I do remember having moments, this would've been the first year of being a nurse, we had already bought our first home, we got our first dog. I thought, "Okay, this is supposed to be it, right?" I have the fiance at the time, we're about to get married, I have the dog, I have the house, I have the career. I remember thinking, "I'm still not happy." Like, "What is this?" I thought I was promised happiness if I reached all these milestones, and I still really wasn't happy. I didn't even know what happiness was, if I'm being honest. I didn't know what it would feel like to just be content and experience joy, because I was very much in this, go, go, go, must get the next best thing, must achieve something else attitude.
I think when you're in it, it's really hard to see that there's another way. And so I think that's why COVID, just being in the pandemic and having the world around us shut down, and me being in nursing and dealing with just everything that was going down in the hospitals and stuff, it forced me to slow down, and it forced me to actually take a look around and start questioning things. I remember the whole time just thinking like, "This doesn't make sense. None of this makes sense." And having a hard time picking a side. I feel like during COVID everyone was either over here or over here, and I had a really hard time picking a side. Because I felt like if I went to the other side that my peer group was in, I wasn't going to belong anymore, and I was going to lose my sense of identity in that regard.
And so I was really stuck in the middle. I could see both sides, and I was just like, "This doesn't make sense. I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what I believe. I see that people think this and other people think this, and I don't know where I am."
And then I got pregnant. And pregnancy for me was a massive opportunity for unlearning. Again, being a nurse and having that medical background, I knew I didn't want to have a medicalized birth, but I didn't necessarily know what I needed to do to achieve that. So for me, pregnancy was this opportunity of unlearning all the things I had learned from nursing school, from being in the hospital, from society and the media, and from everything that our culture teaches us around birth right now.
I really went back to the basics and was just going back to, "Hey, this is a natural thing. How do we do it and follow nature's design in the process?" That was also another opportunity for me to slow down again and really start reconnecting with myself and starting to ask myself some of the tough questions instead of outsourcing those decisions to other people. Because I definitely understood that in birth specifically, if I was to continue to follow my trajectory, which was doing what was expected of me and being that good girl and being that good patient, I was going to get stuck on that conveyor belt and have the birth that is so common nowadays that I really didn't want.
Yeah, so it became very clear to me that I needed to step outside of the system, and I had a midwife and a doula, and I committed myself to preparing for a home birth, ended up having that perfect home water birth that I was dreaming of. But really that's not the point of the story. The point of the story here is that was really the first time in my life that I actually slowed down and I actually started connecting to myself and listening to that inner voice that I honestly didn't even know I had. I remember in birth prep there's so much, "Oh, just trust your intuition," and all those things. I'm like, "What's that?" Like, "I don't have an intuition. I thought my gut was just for digestion. What's that?"
Thankfully, I was obviously open enough because I was able to kind of figure it out, and I was able to make some hard decisions that looking back, I was definitely following my intuition. I just didn't know I was, and I wasn't able to name it back then. But anyways, I'm glad I did because obviously the outcomes worked in my favor by doing that.
And then after having a baby and being a brand new mom and kind of realizing that okay, again, my old strategy of doing life in the sense of just trying to work harder and be more strategic and learn all the things really wasn't serving me. Obviously, it didn't help in pregnancy. I had to do the complete opposite. And new motherhood was no different. It was really about, forget everything I've been told, forget everything I'm watching, forget the strategy. I just need to look within and keep checking in with myself.
Actually, one of my midwives, literally within hours of my daughter being born, gave me some of the best advice that I've held onto. And that was just literally imagine that you are on a deserted island or in a cave, and there's no one else around. There's nothing to Google. All you have is yourself. It's kind of forced me to keep checking in with myself as opposed to looking to outsource my decision-making and my research and all of that, because it is within me, and I know that I've proven that to myself.
And so, yeah, that was kind of my journey through nursing, into motherhood and just kind of shifting my own way of making decisions and all that stuff. And then I quickly realized that motherhood was changing me, and I feel like I had the option of, okay, I can either resist this and clench onto my old life and try to get that back, or I can just lean into it a bit more and see where it takes me. And so I chose the ladder and I started leaning into it, and I started just trying to go with the flow. Even though that was insanely uncomfortable. I literally felt like the ground beneath me, my entire foundation was crumbling. Everything that I knew to be true, I was now questioning, I was challenging. I was literally challenging my own thoughts and my own beliefs. I literally felt like there was nothing stable in my life anymore because I was allowing it to evolve. And it was almost like I couldn't be mad at anyone because I was doing it, right? I was the creator of this evolution, and that's like a wild ride just in itself.
And then through all of that, it became very clear to me that there was no way I was going back to my job. Again, I think COVID put a really bad taste in my mouth just with the politics of the healthcare system. So there was that, but I also recognized how much working in that environment was taking a toll on me mentally. I think for the first time, I was actually able to realize that this is what it feels like to not be anxious. I literally didn't know that because my entire life, because I've lived in this basically on autopilot and almost on overdrive, literally bypassing any communication from my own body, I didn't even know that I was anxious and that I was experiencing stress. I literally had no idea. I didn't start feeling the opposite of that until actually being off work and being alone with myself for the first time. Funny how that works.
And so yeah, just kind of in this process of slowing down, leaning into the identity shifts that were happening from motherhood. It became clear to me that I was not going to go back to work so I needed to figure out a way to, not replace my income, but I also didn't... I feel like some people, once they become a mom, they're like, "Oh, yes, I want to be a mom." Like, "All I want to do is stay home with my kids all day." I wasn't feeling that either. So I was like, okay, I need something to kind of replace, I don't know, I need to find a passion because I really didn't have passions before. And I decided, okay, well, I really thought this whole birth thing was cool. Like birth is cool. I want more people to know how cool this is. I want more people to experience what I experienced. I want more people to go through the process of unlearning and reconnecting to themselves and basically have the transformation that I had.
So I thought, "Okay, cool, I'm going to go be a birth doula." Enter The Autonomy Mommy's first cohort of the doula training program, and I thought, "Okay, this is perfect." because I don't actually want to be an attend your birth doula. I really didn't know what I was going to be. I knew I wanted to be involved in birth preparation. I knew I wanted to be coaching or mentoring women through that process. I wasn't really ready to call myself a childbirth educator. And through that period, I had a really hard time trying to identify myself.
On top of the ground beneath me, still feeling like it was crumbling, and I didn't even know who I was. I literally felt naked. I was just continuously shedding old parts of me and slowly coming to this truest version of myself. But that is just very uncomfortable to do when you're in the process of it.
So through my time in Birthworker Academy, I realize now that I was trying desperately to fit inside this box of either a doula or a childbirth educator because that's what I was seeing other people do, that looked like it could be successful for me. It kind of checked some of the boxes of what I was interested in, but there was still so much resistance. It was just never clicking. I know I said on multiple calls with you guys that I just don't even know what to call myself. I don't know what to put in my bio. I just had a really hard time having clarity on what I was doing.
It wasn't until the past couple months where I finally realized that I was clenching on so tightly to trying to fit into this box of birth educator that I was never really meant to be in that box in the first place. And it was my own, I guess, protective mechanism to keep myself safe because that's what I saw as successful. And again, my old tendencies being wanting strategy and wanting to just know exactly what to do next and wanting to be able to people please and exceed someone's expectations. I was literally doing all the same things. I just didn't realize I was doing it.
And so it wasn't until the past couple months that I finally found more clarity, and that's not what I'm supposed to be doing. I still don't exactly know what I'm supposed to be doing, but I'm continuing to allow myself to evolve and allowing myself to pivot. And I've really, really, really given myself a lot of permission to let go of the need for strategy and to let go of this need to, I guess, impress other people because I realized that's something that I was doing for a long time. That's part of a lot of the good girl conditioning and the good girl programming that I've kind of been victim to is feeling like I need to be a certain way in order for people to respect me or in order for people to accept me.
So all of this to say now that I'm kind of moving through it and coming out of it and on the other side, I am experiencing business and building a business in a lot more... I'm just feeling a lot more expansion, and it's feeling a lot more easeful and peaceful. It doesn't feel like I'm continuously meeting resistance. I'm also finding myself getting really good at noticing when the shoulds pop up. That's something that I've been practicing a lot, is when I'm shutting on myself. So anytime I'm hearing the mind chatter say, "Oh, you should be doing this, or you should be sending an email, or you should make sure your welcome sequence is a certain way or your launch strategy should look like this, or you should, you should, you should" I catch it and I really dissect, "Wait, is this my truest desire or is this just because someone else told me to do it?"
Looking back, that's exactly kind of what I was doing in preparation for my pregnancy or in preparation for birth. And that's kind of what we teach our clients in the birth world, is to stop doing things just because that's the way they've been done and instead do them because you want to do them. But yeah, it's become clear that I wasn't doing that while I've been building my own business. And so that's kind of been where the evolution has taken me now is now I'm finally doing that and I think it's going to pay off.
Kyleigh Banks: I do. I think it'll pay off. I really do. I've felt the same thing where it's... So I have plenty of mentors and I'm in plenty of memberships myself, and it's like when I can finally ask for my coach's advice and say, "You know, that's interesting, but I'm not actually going to do that." That's actually when my business started clicking. I really think just you have so much wisdom to share because it's hard when you're starting. You want someone to tell you what to do because you think, if I just do what someone else did, they're successful, therefore I'll be successful. But it simply doesn't work like that at all.
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah. When I think, there are so many... I'm realizing this now. There are so many parallels between business and motherhood, and you just said it. Whether we're a new business owner or a brand new mother, we are already feeling so inadequate and lacking confidence in ourselves that it feels like we need to clench on to someone else's strategy, to someone else's roadmap because they've shown us that it's successful. I think we fail to remember that we are on our own path and we are experiencing life through our own lens, and it simply isn't going to work that way. And the problem becomes when we hold on so tightly to that other person's recipe, let's call it, well, two things. One, if we fail, we start telling a story about what that means about ourselves. And instead of it just being, well, their strategy didn't work for us, it's like, "Oh, well, I'm this, that," and then the negative spiral continues.
Or the other thing is you realize, "Wait a minute, the recipe that they gave me to bake whatever we were cooking isn't even what I wanted to bake in the first place." I think that's kind of what I experienced is like, "Wait a minute, I'm running my tires here, but this isn't actually the direction I want to go. What am I doing?" I think for me, so after going through Birthworker Academy and then being part of Birthworker Membership, I think being in the community was really what helped me realize, okay, we all have very similar goals here, we all have very similar values. I can belong with these people, but do something different. That's really hard when you are feeling you don't know what you're doing. It's just so much easier to want to do exactly what someone else is doing because there's that proven track record of success.
I think the other thing that, for me at least, what I have realized now that we're several months through it is you kind of said this already too, where you're looking at other mentors, and obviously you trust your mentor. That's why you picked them. You trust your coach, you trust whatever program you've invested money and time into, but it's a very fine line of outsourcing the decisions to them and still following your heart. I didn't do a very good job at that in the beginning. I definitely thought, "Okay, well, if I just do things like exactly the way Kyleigh has taught us, then I'm going to be successful." I think one of the pivotal moments for me was back at the end of 2022 when I was launching my first mini course, I was doing so alongside you and your support, and there were moments where you even said, "Well, you're doing it, but it's not working. We're just going to have to pivot." And I'm like, "Okay, but Kyleigh, you, I did exactly what you told me to do. Why isn't this working?"
And it was, I guess just a turning point for me in the sense of, "Oh, yeah, my way isn't going to be Kyleigh's way, it's not supposed to be. And Kyleigh's not telling me that I have to do it this way. Kyleigh's just presenting me all these options to try different things on and see how they fit." And when you're a new business owner, it's really hard to be comfortable with trying things on because you just want success the first time. Again, looking back, I've realized I didn't give myself room to fail. I wasn't even willing to expand those edges and try different things.
Kyleigh Banks: It's so similar with birth. Like my birth prep, it was not only learn hypnobirthing, and that's the one thing I'm going to do, and that's it, and it's going to work for me. No, it was like, I'm literally going to read every book I can get my hands on. I'm going to learn every method. And when I get there, I'm going to try them all. And if one doesn't work, I have another. If one doesn't work, I have another. It's like the exact same with growing in business. So I love that you made that parallel just how entrepreneurship is preparing for birth. Okay, tell me when you started learning about the nervous system.
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah. This would've been back in the earlier months when I decided, okay, I'm going to start a business because I knew my previous tendencies to just allow myself to go on autopilot and overdrive my system, I wanted to be really careful to not burn myself out. I knew motherhood was hard enough as it is. I also realized that starting a business was pretty crazy to do with a not even six-month-old. And so I was desperate for learning the strategy. Again, I was still looking for strategy at this point. So I was desperate for some sort of strategy that would keep me from burning out.
Anyways, on Instagram, I found a, I think at the time she was calling herself a nervous system coach. And basically she was running a group program where the promise and the transformation was embodied success. I didn't really know what embodied meant. I was like, "Ooh, that sounds like good. That sounds deep. I probably need that. It sounds better than just success. I don't want superficial success. I want embodied success." And so I just went down this rabbit hole. And again, looking back, this was totally my intuition guiding me the whole time. I didn't know what I was looking for. I didn't know why I was clicking on this person's page or interested in her program. Anyways, I signed up for it. At this point, this was actually the most expensive training I had ever invested in. So that was a big deal on itself.
Long story short, it ended up being this wonderful introduction to understanding my nervous system and understanding how to actually connect my body and understanding the communication and signals that my body's constantly giving me if I choose to listen. It also helped me understand how culturally, we don't really give ourselves space to do this. Really, we're running on this go, go, go, be super productive, check the next thing off your to-do list attitude and our nervous systems don't really like that fast-paced. So it gave me some of the tools and strategies to actually start slowing down and some of the language to actually start understanding it. That was actually when I started understanding the different nervous system responses. I mean, we're all familiar with fight or flight, rest and digest, but what often isn't talked about is on the more social engagement side of things, when our social engagement nervous system is under threat, we will either fawn or fit in.
Fawning is basically people-pleasing. And so once I started learning all this, I'm like, "Oh my goodness, this makes so much sense. This is what I have been doing my whole life." And I actually had to slow down a bit and grieve the fact that I had been in a survival state the majority of my life, and I just didn't even know it. Thank goodness, COVID, pregnancy, birth, all of the changes that were happening in the past couple years of my life had forced me to slow down because my body desperately needed it. Looking back, I can see the vast amount of signals my body was trying to communicate with me. Everything from just digestive issues and other health things that a lot of people don't always have answers for. We know it can be from stress, we know it can be from lifestyle, but nobody's really talking about the fact that it could just be from a dysregulated nervous system too.
I think that was my experience because once I started actually learning the tools to regulate and soothe and nourish my nervous system, everything else in my body started to align as well. In terms of motherhood and business, it really allowed me to learn how to be my own resource and not only connect and check in with my body for some of the answers, but just being able to know that I can always lean on myself and be my own cheerleader and deepening that level of self-trust and self-worth. That's something I'm still working on, is this self-worth piece and practicing this radical self-love and doing the soul care and self-care that we all need. But as moms and business owners, it's so much easier to just be putting our babies and our business first.
Everything has really come full circle for me in understanding that I am the root of all of it. My baby cannot thrive if I am not thriving, much like my business can't thrive if I am not thriving. So gone are the days where I am subscribing to mommy wine culture, and feeling like we have to be these selfless over-givers. I truly do believe that you can't pour from an empty cup. And so yeah, I've been really pouring a lot into myself, and I've been just really deepening that self-worth and self-love and that's really uncomfortable because again, our society doesn't really encourage or give space for it. I mean, the patriarchy is part of it, but also just the masculine energy that's involved in growing a business and the bro-marketing and all of that. It was really easy to get caught into that too. Instead, I've really tried to lean into the more feminine side of mothering and following your intuition and community and all those things, and letting that expand into my business.
Kyleigh Banks: I love it. It's almost like if you're listening to this now and you have some sort of underlying subtle angst of just like, something's not right, I'm not happy, but I'm not quite sure what it is. Honestly, you're a doula, so you're probably pretty mindful. I feel like most doulas kind of fall into this mindful, natural home birthing, home-setting type of person. So you're probably doing a lot of the mindful natural things. You're probably eating pretty healthy, you're probably limiting screen time for yourself, but there's still that underlying angst of something is not right. I really, really recommend that you look into your nervous system. Yeah.
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah. And I think, to bring it back to birth workers, one of our roles is to be able to co-regulate with our clients. Just one of our mothering roles is to co-regulate with our kids. In order to actually benefit the person that we're serving, we need to be regulated ourselves. I think that's why it is so important to understand your nervous system. Start understanding what your default survival state is. Start actually using your triggers as an opportunity for healing. Instead of just being, "Oh, like that's knocking me down again." Or, "That's why I had a bad day, or that's... " whatever. Instead of using it as an excuse, allowing it to be an opportunity for healing, using the things that pop up for you, almost the things that keep coming up and you're like, "Well, I thought I've worked through that." Using that as a GPS for, okay, this is the direction I need to go in terms of working on myself, and this is where I need to start paying attention and dissecting and getting deeper and actually meeting myself for where I'm at and working through that resistance.
Because I think you can be mindful all day, and you can be practicing affirmations all day, and you can be eating the right foods, but if your body isn't actually feeling safe, none of it is... It's honestly almost all a waste. Our nervous system is constantly asking one question, and that's simply like, "Am I safe?" And so we need to start learning how to show our bodies both internal and external safety. In my own experience, one of the biggest sources has been myself. And so when I made the comment about myself being my biggest resource, that's what I mean. I'm able to now check in with myself, find wherever is most expansive in my body, lean into that, breathe into that, ground myself. That honestly has been one of the biggest game changers in terms of just finding that equilibrium is the word that's coming to mind in terms of our body's state.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah.
Nicole Pasveer: It's crazy because there are things going on subconsciously that I mean, we often don't have awareness of, right? And so again, one of the biggest things is starting to deepen that awareness and almost heightening our senses and understanding that our body is constantly picking up on everything in our environment and just starting to notice, "Oh, okay, like I have butterflies in my stomach. What might be going on here?" Getting super curious while also being extremely non-judgmental. This is the catch is like it's one thing to be curious, but if you're constantly judging the sensation you're feeling, then you're not going to get anywhere either. You need to be extremely non-judgmental and almost detach from the sensations your body is experiencing so that you don't let your mind make meaning and write a story about what it means about you. That's the hardest part.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. Some people hear the detached part and they're like, "Oh, no, that's like not good." And it's interesting because it's detached in a way that actually leads to more authentic attachment to who you really are.
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah. One thing that's helped me when I think of detaching from the sensation, even detaching from the pattern that I noticed keeps coming up is you want to pay attention to it, but you don't want it to know that you're watching it. And so I think of it an African safari where you're watching a tiger off in the distance. You don't want the animals out in the safari to know you're there. You are just existing. You are just cautiously observing. It's kind of like that. Or if you're looking at birds outside, it's the same thing. You're not watching them like a hawk, you are just being a very casual observer and just showing up with curiosity, this gentle non-judgmental curiosity. And that's hard.
Kyleigh Banks: It's hard. Some of the people that I... I follow very few people online, on social media now on my personal accounts because it just got too noisy and I was like, "This is not helpful." But even some of the people that I follow that I really look up to that really they get this 99.9%, but there's a little bit missing, and I'll explain what I mean. Someone that I absolutely love posted recently that the only thing wrong with your anger and your rage is that you are attempting to dull it. And I'm like, "Yes." And let me take it one step further. Also, trying to stop dueling it is also trying to, I guess, yeah, be in charge, right? Try and control it. So it's like, you don't want to try and duel it, but you also don't want to overly do it where it's like, "I'm open to this." It's literally, like you said, can you just let it be and have that awareness? It's very hard.
Nicole Pasveer: And it's hard. It's really hard. It's like, yeah, this very intricate dance that you're constantly doing. The thing is, it's like feelings are supposed to be felt. And many of us have grown up in times where our feelings were suppressed, or in my case, noticing how good girl conditioning has shown up for me and noticing how I've basically been sidelining my own feelings and putting someone else's ahead of me because I don't want to rock the boat. And so for the first time in my life, I'm actually able to just do something differently. And it's like constantly, there's choice points in front of me where okay, I could continue doing what I've always done here, or I can try something different. And so that's been really cool. And when I talk about this evolution and transformation that I'm on, I guess what I'm speaking to there is I'm just consistently choosing a different way and trying it out. I'm just seeing how it fits, seeing where it takes me and yeah.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah, it's the balance of finding a community of people where you feel safe to do these things, but also not finding a mentor, like we've talked about, where you're going to feel like I have to do these certain things.
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah.
Kyleigh Banks: Write your own rule book.
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah.
Kyleigh Banks: Yeah. All of this comes to this point where you've created a new program called Recalibrate. Could you tell us a little bit about what led to you creating it?
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah, I would love to. The birth story behind Recalibrate, if you will. I mean, yeah, like everything I've just talked about has kind of led me to this point where I've kind of realized, okay, there's other people out there just like me who are experiencing the same kind of resistance that I've been working through. They are starting to lean into the more feminine, motherly, intuitive self and stepping away from the more masculine, productive, overachieving, perfectionist self. For many of us that's making it really lonely is probably the best word I can think of. It's lonely because you just don't even know where you belong anymore because first of all, your identity is shifting. And so there's, at least for myself, there's a part of me that fears, if I actually jump into this new version of myself, then everything in my past, all of my relationships and the way everyone used to see me might not accept me anymore.
So there's that underlying fear there. And then there's also the, I don't actually know what I'm becoming. I don't know what I'm going to be evolving into. And the fear of the uncertainty and fear of the unknown is huge, and I think we all experience that to some degree. So all in all, it's just a very lonely place to be, and I think it's really, really important to be surrounding yourself with community of, I feel like the word like-minded women is thrown out all the time. Yes, that is what it is, but it's deeper than that. It's women that are literally in the same trench as you and recognizing that we're all on our own path. So instead of trying to fit ourselves into the same path and go in the same direction with the same goal, no, we're all in the same trench, so to speak.
We're deep in the trenches of motherhood, but we recognize that motherhood is just one hat we wear, and obviously we hold it with high priority, but there's other hats and there's other rules that we carry in our life, and we're just at this place where everything is shifting. And so it's an opportunity to recalibrate and start learning new ways to think and new ways to be and new ways to do in all of these different roles that we play. So motherhood is a big part of it. And motherhood is, I think, going to be kind of the common thread between us. The other thing is also we are all juggling other things. So whether we're aspiring entrepreneurs or we already have our own business, we are experiencing different passions and we're navigating how to balance our priorities and how to balance our lives and still show up as the best version of ourselves with each hat that we wear.
The thing with this is like, I'm not the expert here. I am literally just in the trenches with this community. And so I'm seeing it more as a mastermind and less of a, I'm the expert, I'm going to teach you these things. It's going to be a mastermind where we can basically meet and don't love the word strategy, but we can meet and strategize how we're going to level up in life. Whether that's talking about the things going on within our own motherhood experience or the things going on with our business or our relationships or whatever it is, that's an opportunity to just feel seen, feel heard, feel supported, and be held by this community that gets it.
Because that's the thing is I think it's really easy to just go show up in these online business spaces or mom groups or the Facebook groups online, and we think we're going to be seen. We think we're going to be held. But the thing is we have no idea what path these people are on. We have no idea where their priorities are, where, what their biases are, what perspective they have, where they're at in their healing. It really isn't the best place to try to find that connection.
So yeah, I am creating this intimate community where it will be like-minded women at similar stages of their life. I mean, that doesn't mean that we're all the same stage in motherhood or business. It just means we're kind of experiencing the same points of resistance and working through it together and shining light on each other's blind spots, but then also illuminating each other's strengths, because I think that's really hard too.
The other thing that I'm hoping for this to become is a place to actually complete the initiation of maiden to mother, because I think that's something that society is interrupting. There are so many people that I think are in this incomplete initiation, and they are bombarded by things like bounce-back culture and feeling like they need to go back to this previous version of themselves and maintain the same relationships and go back to the previous career and all those things. And so I would really love for this space to be a place where we can complete our initiation and again, just be held by women who get it and women who have very similar priorities.
Kyleigh Banks: Man, it is so needed because I keep coming back to this thought of like, "Where did Kyleigh go?" Like, "Kyleigh got lost in motherhood." My motherhood and my entrepreneurship journey start at the same time. So now I'm sitting here like, "What happened to that girl, I guess?" And of course, yes, she shifted into mother, and it's different now, but there are certain aspects where I'm like, I kind of miss this, or I kind of miss this inner peace, or I kind of miss the chill or whatever that is, and I just know that I can absolutely pinpoint it to a nervous system regulation.
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. And so a big part of this group container will be about meeting our own nervous systems and understanding how do we actually soothe ourselves and how do we give ourselves nourishing self-love and taking radical responsibility in our mothering and our business and not outsourcing our healing to other people. I think that's another thing, and that was a big part of my own experience and why I want to create this community is it can be so easily to be on this pendulum. And on one side of it is outsourcing our healing thinking. Thinking if we can just do the right course, read the right book, hire the right coach or therapist or whoever it is, we're going to be whole again.
And then on the other side of the pendulum is thinking, "Okay, well no, I just need to almost become a hermit. I just need to look inwards. I just need to be with myself. I just need to work through it. It's all in me already, I just need to do it." I think there's harm in both extremes. I think we need to find a place in the middle. We need to recognize the nuance in between both of those extremes. While yes, we do have everything within us, it's no different than if you were going to go run a marathon. Of course, you're going to allow yourself to have a coach and a cheerleader and have someone to help you pivot and know what meals to... I've never ran a marathon, so I don't know why I pulled this example. I have no idea what it would be like to have a personal trainer, but I imagine that they help you kind of just, like I said, shine light on your blind spots and illuminate your strengths and just help you brainstorm where to pivot and what to do next.
But the thing is you are running the marathon, right? You are the one doing the training day in and day out. You are the one eating the healthy foods and saying no to the things that you know aren't going to serve you in the long run. And so I think really life is no different. So I think it's really important to have a community that is your cheerleading squad and is your people. You're not supposed to be doing this stuff alone. We know you're not supposed to be mothering alone. We're supposed to have the village. So many of us are waiting for this so-called village to show up and recalibrate can be that village for motherhood, for business, for healing, for all of it. And it all starts with yourself.
Kyleigh Banks: Okay, when does this start and where can people find you?
Nicole Pasveer: Yeah, so actually doors open tomorrow, on June 1st. So that's really exciting. We're going to start on June 21st, the summer solstice, and it's going to be a six-month-long container. So we'll meet together, this is all virtual, but we'll meet together for six months. So you can find me on Instagram, @NicolePasveer and DM me if you're feeling called to join this group or Kyleigh will leave the link in the show notes if this is like a hell yes for you and you want in right away.
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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.