Navigate the process of selecting the perfect doula on the Ordinary Doula Podcast. Uncover the reasons why new parents often seek the assurance of a doula's presence, while veterans of childbirth might venture solo in later pregnancies. It's more than just finding support; it's about crafting a birth team that harmonizes with your philosophy, values, and desires for this pivotal life event.
As we unpack the essentials of doula selection, we'll review key strategies for interviewing potential candidates and the significance of prenatal visits that bond your birth team. You'll gain insights into the critical role of your partner in this process and learn how to gauge a doula's adaptability—a trait that can significantly enrich your birthing experience. Remember, it's not just about expertise; it's about connection. By the end of our time together, you'll be equipped to choose a doula who provides not only comfort but also a profound sense of togetherness as you welcome a new life into the world.
Visit our website, here: https://birthlearning.com/ Follow us on Facebook at Birth Learning Follow us on Instagram at @birthlearning
Show Credits
Host: Angie Rosier Music: Michael Hicks Photographer: Toni Walker Episode Artwork: Nick Greenwood Producer: Gillian Rosier Voiceover: Ryan Parker
Navigate the process of selecting the perfect doula on the Ordinary Doula Podcast. Uncover the reasons why new parents often seek the assurance of a doula's presence, while veterans of childbirth might venture solo in later pregnancies. It's more than just finding support; it's about crafting a birth team that harmonizes with your philosophy, values, and desires for this pivotal life event.
As we unpack the essentials of doula selection, we'll review key strategies for interviewing potential candidates and the significance of prenatal visits that bond your birth team. You'll gain insights into the critical role of your partner in this process and learn how to gauge a doula's adaptability—a trait that can significantly enrich your birthing experience. Remember, it's not just about expertise; it's about connection. By the end of our time together, you'll be equipped to choose a doula who provides not only comfort but also a profound sense of togetherness as you welcome a new life into the world.
Visit our website, here: https://birthlearning.com/ Follow us on Facebook at Birth Learning Follow us on Instagram at @birthlearning
Show Credits
Host: Angie Rosier Music: Michael Hicks Photographer: Toni Walker Episode Artwork: Nick Greenwood Producer: Gillian Rosier Voiceover: Ryan Parker
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Ordinary Doula Podcast with Angie Rozier, hosted by Birth Learning, where we help prepare folks for labor and birth with expertise coming from 20 years of experience in a busy doula practice, helping thousands of people prepare for labor, providing essential knowledge and tools for positive and empowering birth experiences.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome to the Ordinary Yule Podcast. My name is Angie Rozier and I'm your host and I'm excited to be with you today. As you know, with this podcast, our goal is to help folks prepare for positive childbirth, whether you have a doula, you are a doula, you are using a doula or you don't have a doula. Hopefully you can take some things you learned from this podcast and incorporate them in your own experience. So today I want to take a minute and talk about what how you know if a doula is the right fit for you. So, as you are selecting a doula for yourself or labor support, how you know that's a good fit for you. So the doula landscape is different in different parts of the country. So, depending on where you live, you might find doulas working in a variety of ways. Some doulas sometimes there's a hospital doula program, so there might be a number of doulas that is volunteering with a hospital and within the program they kind of assign you to a doula. That could be pretty awesome. Sometimes there's an agency or a little group of doulas and you call into the agency and they will assign you according to logistics kind of of the business and sometimes they'll assign you to a small team. It might be two or three doulas that you would meet. Other times you might be interviewing individual doulas yourself and so you make that choice as to who's a good fit for you. You may be using a doula you've used before, but you don't have to. You can switch it up. If you want to change things about your childbirth, use a different doula. Sometimes, use no doula. It's interesting in our research and in our you know, years of data, um, people, we've helped up to six people. Up to six times, with six pregnancies is our highest number of times that we've helped folks. But the numbers drop off a lot after two babies. So first babies, um, you know, obviously, uh are the way we're helping.
Speaker 2:
With a lot of first babies, people are going into the unknown. They want to be well prepared. They might be a little nervous about it, so they seek doula support and then we help and ideally we're helping them have a good experience both with childbirth and with us, and then folks go on to have a second baby and they might hire us again. Sometimes we'll have a lot of folks who have moved in from out of town. They've worked in another state and they had a doula. There they're seeking doula support. They'll have a doula for the second baby. Some people had a negative experience with their first baby and so they're seeking for something different and a little bit better with a second. So they might not have had a doula, but that's one of their efforts to have a better experience is to hire a doula with a second or third baby or whatever. But those numbers kind of drop off.
Speaker 2:
Obviously there's not a lot of people having six babies. But in some of the research I did, people found that after the first and second time, if they went on to have third, fourth babies, they had the skills they needed. They had the skill set, they had the words they needed. They had the education. Some of them said I knew now how to talk to the hospital staff. I learned from my doula how to navigate things. My partner learned great coping techniques and so they chose on a subsequent baby second, third, fourth, whatever to not use a doula Totally cool.
Speaker 2:
So we saw that in our data that it kind of dropped off other people You're just an institution in their childbirth life. So they're like we need our doula. Every single time. I have gone to other states and followed people and traveled with people to be their doula because that is a very important part of their childbirth experience for them. I've you know some people want you there every time. It's kind of like a little talisman or a lucky rabbit charm or something, but but we do find that we're helping people, mostly one and two times and then it drops off after that.
Speaker 2:
So define how a doula is the right fit for you. I hope that you are able. I like the model that you're able to talk to the doula and get a feel for them and you make that choice as if this is your support person. So sometimes in community-based doula programs or hospital programs or agencies, we might have less choice, but you can still ask whoever it is you're working with. A lot of times they'll give you two or three names and so you can kind of touch base with those folks and say, yep, good fit for me, oh, maybe not such a good fit for me, and kind of make that decision. And a decision is an important part of choosing who will be with you. You don't want to be told who's going to be with you and support you. So if you find it's not a good fit, start again. There's other folks that you can explore and look at.
Speaker 2:
So I encourage face toto-face interviews and that doesn't have to be in person. All the time. Like for most of my career, we did face-to-face interviews. Sometimes I get hired off a phone interview, which was great, sometimes just off a website listing, but oftentimes people want to make a connection. The pandemic taught us a lot of things. It taught us a little bit more how to do things virtually and online. So I would say the vast majority of our interviews now are face-to-face online. So we're seeing the person right, we're seeing them. We can see their face as we have an interview, but we might not be in person with them. So I think I could say a lot of doulas are doing that type of interview now and that makes sense right Before you're hired not to drive half an hour each way and set up an interview and things like that. But I still do have clients that request an in-person interview and this can definitely be conducted with, of course, the birthing person and their support partner that that person may have may be interested in who they're going to be with right and have interest in helping make that choice as to who the doula is going to be. Some don't even care, you know, but always I like to always give that option that if the partner or, say, their mom or their sister is going to be with them, that they can be there as well.
Speaker 2:
So there's a there's a bunch of questions that are floating around on the internet there, um, from probably a variety of sources, to ask your doula um, I think I've heard all of them a hundred or a few times. Um, some of those are about your birth experience, like how long have you been doing this? What's your personal philosophy about birth? And and I'd say, yes, get a good feel for that. But it's not always about somebody's longevity or years of experience. It's more about the connection you get with that person, and your personality might connect really well with somebody who's only done three births, and that's okay.
Speaker 2:
Your situation might be a little more complicated for a variety of reasons and need someone who is very experienced in whatever, whether that's maybe it's techniques for natural childbirth, because you're not eligible to get an epidural. Maybe you have some high risk medical things and you want somebody who's pretty well versed in that. Maybe you're doing a home birth. You want a doula who's very comfortable and supportive of home birth, which I think most doulas are, but it depends on the part of the country you live in and the access people have to quality home birth care. So making a connection, I'd say, is the most important. So that's where seeing them, whether in person or on video chat somehow, is going to be important. I'd say these interviews are often somewhere between I don't know 20 to 40 minutes. In my early career I did have some interviews that were three hours long. Like that's a waste of time. You could get into a lot of prenatal preparation if you're spending that much time just in an interview but expect to spend a little bit of time.
Speaker 2:
So the question of what is your birth philosophy and what tools do you use I hear that quite a bit. So when I train doulas, I help doulas articulate their birth philosophy and that can look different for different scenarios. If it's my body giving birth, I have a specific birth philosophy for what I would choose. But then I have a different philosophy for my clients and by and large that is that they have autonomy in their choices, that they understand the options being presented to them and that their choices are supported by whoever they choose to surround themselves with whether that's doula, partner care providers in whatever hospital the member of the people, the policy and the place have a lot to do with how birth experiences turn out. So my philosophy for them is that they have a positive birth, and I don't know generally what that is until I talk to them for a while, get to know them, get to know what's important to them, get to know their past history with childbirth, get to know how they see their team coming together. So, yeah, that's a common question that people.
Speaker 2:
Again, you can ask your doula what's your birth philosophy and what tools are you going to use? How are you going to help me? You can also ask what are we going to do in our prenatal visits? It's important to spend that time together in prenatal visits a lot of getting to know each other, a lot of education going on, sharing of expectations but you want to go into that birth experience being a cohesive team. So you have spent that time together, so expect to spend some time.
Speaker 2:
Usually we will spend a good four to five hours-ish with our clients before they ever go into labor, and that might be a team of doulas there's usually two of us on every client, so that might be two hours with one client, sorry, two hours with one doula, two hours with another doula, but the idea is to be well prepared and connected before you go in to this childbirth. So, asking what tools you might have, really have an affinity for hypnobirthing and that's the techniques that you want to use during childbirth. So ask your doula do you, are you familiar with da da da? You know, and I think a well-experienced doula is going to be able to pivot and be familiar with a lot of the childbirth methods and techniques. I always like when I get asked these questions what tools are you going to use?
Speaker 2:
A huge variety of tools, a pretty eclectic approach. So we might use some hypnobirthing or hypnobabies techniques. We might use some definitelyobirthing or hypnobabies techniques. We might use some definitely some movement, huge on movement. But we're going to kind of customize. We don't know our entire comfort plan yet until we get to know our client and we can discover what works for them. So, as you ask your doula, what tools are you going to use? It's hopefully what tools work for you and you got to find out what those are. Um Know if your doula will be on call for you, like all the time Some doulas will have a window that they're on call like 38 to 42 weeks. In our practice we don't do that. We have some babies come seven weeks early and nobody knew that. Right, it's nobody's fault. So of course we'll still be on call for you, but understand kind of what their parameters are.
Speaker 2:
People I found over the years really have are drawn to doulas who respond to them, whether that's if if you're, you know, putting out feelers for a doula you want to hire a doula. Did they get back to you in a timely manner? Are they answering your texts? You want this person be available and that's a simple way. Just their responsiveness. Your partner may feel as strong. You know your support. People might feel like, yep, this is a great doula. I have had clients say my partner will be choosing who the doula is and the doula is mostly for this partner, for him to know what to do or whatever, and so I don't care as much who it is, but usually it's a combined effort and combined choice as to who the doula is.
Speaker 2:
So I would say the number one thing to know if a doula is the right fit for you, are you comfortable with the response rate? You can also check them out online. You can do a lot of quote unquote pre-interviewing by finding someone's online presence. When I train new doulas, I always tell them all of your online presence is an advertisement for yourself, so people will stalk you Probably. You can guarantee that you've probably been stalked a little bit before they talk to you if you have a presence online. But the number one thing is connection Finding that connection. You may have some things in common that create that connection. Your philosophies may create that connection, but connection is going to be important. You want to be comfortable with this person. You're going to be going into a pretty intimate event with this person. It might be a very long event, it might be short event, so make sure it's somebody that you and your partner feel comfortable with. Connection is important. So those are just a few tips on how to select the best doula for yourself. Those are just a few tips on how to select the best doula for yourself.
Speaker 2:
Lots of different ways to seek doulas out. A lot of it's word of mouth when you live. There might be online resources for doulas, hospital resources. A lot of insurance companies are picking up doulas now. So see who's out there, interview a variety of folks and find the right doula for you. Sometimes that may be no doula Every situation is a little bit different but we want you.
Speaker 2:
I think all doulas want the same thing is that you get the right doula for you, whether it's me or somebody else, hopefully. I've always said that to my clients that you want who you connect best with, and I might not be that person, but all doulas want you to have the best with, and I might not be that person, but all doulas want you to have the best possible and the most positive possible birth experience. Thank you for being here today at the Ordinary Doula Podcast. Hopefully you have a great day. Go out and do something to serve someone else. Lift someone where they are, and you will feel a whole lot better from that too. Thanks for being here Again. My name is Angie Rozier and we will see you next time.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to the Ordinary Doula podcast with Angie Rozier, hosted by Birth Learning. Episode credits will be in the show notes Tune in next time as we continue to explore the many aspects of giving birth. Thank you.