Self Care For Doulas Is Not a Luxury

ASK A QUESTION!!! My plan is to start Friday Q&A (we need a new name, I know!) but first I need your questions! Submit them using the form below:

https://www.harroddoulaservices.com/ask-me-a-question

Self-care is not a luxury item for doulas! It is a vital part of our work so our body, brain, soul and spirit are all able to show up authentically for this work with our clients. As business owners we can fall into the trap of overworking ourselves and as doulas we do that too…so imagine how bad doula business owners are at this! 

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Doula Tips and Tits is produced by Kaely Harrod of Harrod Doula Services

It is sponsored by The Doula Biz Blueprint Self-Paced Class for Doulas Launching Successful and Sustainable Businesses! 

Music by Madirfan: Hidden Place on Pixabay

Transcript

0:04

Welcome to Dula Tips and Tits, the podcast where we cut through the noise and get real about what it takes to build a sustainable doula business. I'm Kaylee Harrod. I've been a doula informally for 14 years and full time for seven. Around here, we don't sugarcoat stuff. We talk autonomy, owning your worth, creating a business that works for you. No fluff, no burnout, just the honest truth on how to be your own best boss. Let's get in. Hello and welcome back to Dula Tips and Tits. It's weird that it's been a whole week since we've been hanging out together because we're in our new trial of once a week podcast. Remember that my hope is to start a Friday Q&A episode, but in order to do that, I need questions from you and there is in the show notes a link to a form called Ask Me a Question that literally has a space for questions. It's super simple to fill out and you're going to get asked for your name, your email and a question only because I want to respond back to you and I want to be able to tell you when your question is being answered on the podcast. Once I get some questions in, I will start that Friday thing up and then also if you have a fun and creative name for it, let me know. So today we're kind of on the same lines of resilience and self-care. My general rule of thumb for self-care is that it is not for, it's not luxury, right? It's not a nice thing to do, it's a necessary thing to do. Now part of this is because I think this work is so emotionally and physically taxing and so I want you to take that seriously. Like if you were a bodybuilder, right, you would work out because. that would be your job. But because you're not a bodybuilder, maybe you don't work out. It's up to you, right? Excuse me. But when you are doing something repetitively with your body, you need to kind of prepare and recover from that thing. So things like movement, stretching, yoga, all of that can be wildly beneficial. But also things like setting emotional boundaries so that you don't get compassion fatigue, right? Having things like, I try to eat as close to my regular schedule as possible. Those are all really important things because the reality is that it's really easy to fall into a pattern of not taking care of ourselves, both in life in general, but also with clients as well. So one of the things I want you to think about today is what... What piece of self-care are you currently missing? Do you need to work on self-care in the midst of your client time? Do you need to work on self-care before and after your client time? Do you need to work on self-care just in general in all of the areas? And really to take a minute to not shame yourself, but to be brutally honest with yourself about how you're doing. And if you are giving away too much of yourself and your energy to your clients and not replenishing yourself in a way that's needed. So when we think about self-care, I think part of what I want you to think about is generally speaking, like how are you? And I know that's a heavy question, right? Like there's lots of layers there, but also like on a basic level, if someone like one of your really close people were to like look you in the eyes and be like, how are you doing? And like those people that can get you to cry because they're asking you so authentically, like that's what I want you to think of. If that person is asking you, what are you saying to that person? Like what comes up when there's that kind of connection? And I think it's different for each of us, right? Like sometimes there's tears, sometimes there's like relief, like the feeling of being seen is so healing itself, right? Sometimes we are like, I don't even know. Like something is wrong, but I don't know what it is, right? Or something is like off, but I don't know what it is and I'm not sure how to get my finger on the pulse of that. So when we're thinking about self-care, I think we have to be very particular about what that looks like. So sleep is a huge part. If you do anything about doula care, that requires you to miss sleep. So if you're on call for births, if you're on call for siblings, services if you do overnight care with doulas, with doula clients. Any of those things mean that you have to protect your sleep outside of those times. Now I am preaching to myself today because I kind of suck at this one. Like sleep is not my, it is not, I love it. It is my favorite thing but it's not something that I do very well and I don't always prioritize it well. So one of my best friends that you all have heard on this podcast, if you hear my teenagers, that's what that noise is in the background. One of my best friends, her name is Kim. She teaches about sleep. She's a sleep coach and so she's always telling me like how crappy I'm doing. That makes her sound really awful but she's always telling me that she like wants me to shift things about my sleep because it's important, you know, that I am getting sufficient sleep and that I have good sleep hygiene outside of my doula support. So I'm getting reminded of that constantly. Speaking of, I don't know why that just made me yawn. But what I want you to think about when you're thinking about sleep is, are you getting enough sleep? And is your sleep as restorative as it can be when you're getting it? And so those are two different things, right? Like enough is not always the only piece. It's also like your sleep environment, your sleep hygiene, how that's doing, if you're restorative, et cetera. I also want you to think about, are you eating enough food when you're with your clients and when you're not with your clients? And I think, in my mind, eating while at a birth, for instance, falls into a category of, it depends on how it goes. I don't think there should be a time when you eat nothing at a birth, unless that birth is less than a couple hours long, which is, you and I both know, not that common. But I think having an understanding that sometimes your eating pattern is going to be weird. Sometimes your actual things that you're eating is going to be weird. That's fine. As long as you are eating, it's a big deal to not give yourself enough food. And it's a major issue. And so I want you to think about, how are you bringing food into this space? And how are you managing taking breaks to eat and things like that? Because all of that matters a lot. Sometimes that is just a matter of get over yourself and eat something in the room. But also, take a bathroom break and take, I love applesauce pouches for births, because you can just stick them in your mouth like a straw and literally suck them down as you're walking to the bathroom. So when I'm at a birth that requires my near constant presence, something like that is really powerful. But also, the reality is, you need to be fueled. And so I'll often say to a partner, hey, I'm going to eat. run to the bathroom and I'm gonna eat a quick snack while I'm there and I'm coming back like just you know I'll be back in a minute because you also want them to do that like you want that to be normal and to be normalized and honestly like everyone needs to go to the bathroom and take snacks right like that's a part of life all the time so do it even when you're at a birth I think in terms of movement my firm practice it my firm belief is that movement should feel joyful and it should feel amazing and it should feel restorative and that looks different for all of us so there are times where my body just like needs to be moved around like I need to like stretch or like do some gentle swaying and like some of the squats that I teach my clients and things like that there are other times where I feel like I need to like beat up a punching bag right and and I love swimming. So like that swimming and walking are two of my favorite forms of exercise, but also I really love yoga and stretching and myofascial release and things like that. So I try to balance all of those different things and give my body space to kind of tell me what it needs. Could I do better at that? Sure. Sure. I could do better at that, but I am doing pretty good at being like when I feel stiff, when I feel tired, when I feel like my body needs something, listening to that and responding. Even if I'm at a birth, right? Like even if I'm at a birth and that means I'm like stretching and whatnot at the birth, my clients don't care. They're fine with it. You know, like they're like, Oh, amazing. You're taking care of your body just like you want me to do. So it is not something that I think has the negative impact I used to think it had. Like I used to think like, Oh, it has to be all about them. And the reality is no, it also is about you because you are an actual human being who needs to be taken care of as well. And it doesn't mean that you make them take care of you. It means that you show them how you take care of yourself. And that matters in all of life. So I want you to think about this. Oh, the last one that I forgot to touch on again is setting boundaries to prevent compassion fatigue. So when you're thinking about compassion fatigue, I think anytime you care more about how other people are doing and how something is impacting them than about how you're doing and how it's impacting you, you run the risk of compassion fatigue. That means our job puts us at very high risk of that, right? Because we have a lot of times where we are mostly concerned about someone else who's dealing with birth or dealing with postpartum or whatever this like very intense physical and emotional time, right? However, I think how you nurture yourself emotionally and how you show up for your clients. and the way that you internalize how their time and their postpartum and their birth go, has a huge say in how you do in terms of compassion fatigue. So if you're going to a birth and feeling like, I got to make sure they have a birth like X, you are first of all putting yourself on this kind of God like pedestal that is not possible, my friend. Like if you are thinking to yourself, I have to make sure this vaginal delivery happens, you can't actually do that. Like that's not within your control. Right. And I think the more that we live in the reality that that is not what we're supposed to do as doulas, like that's my job as a doula is not to make your birth go a certain way. My job as a doula is to support your birth as it plays out and yes, help it go as smoothly as I can. But I don't control how it goes. I can't keep emergencies from happening. Right. Like I can help prevent them to some extent, but I am not solely responsible for how your birth ends up. That is a burden that you cannot bear. Also it's a burden that doesn't belong to you. You can't live with that weighing on you as you do this work. When you think about setting boundaries, part of that might be pre and post birth rituals. If you go back a number of episodes, I don't remember what number, but I can link them in the show notes. I have episodes about what I do before I join someone in labor and what I do after a birth so that you can kind of get a sense of what my rituals are. At this point I think I do a pretty good job of keeping myself, not keeping, but helping myself re-center after a birth that's long and hard to know whether or not my clients feel good about it. It wasn't my fault. Obviously, if you're treating people like crap, it is your fault. Don't do that, but if you're showing up serving the heck out of them and they're having some crappy things play out in the midst of birth that no one can control, that's just exactly what it is. They can control this and the scenario is crappy and that's what it is. Most humans aren't going to blame that on you. Some might, but honestly, I would say that goes back to the red flags when people are hiring you. Someone is like, how do you make sure that my birth happens how I want it to? Don't let that person hire you, friend. No, no, no, no, no. That's not your job. That is not your job. That's not why you're here. That's not what doulas are for. That's not what doulas have ever been about. That is not a burden that you need to shoulder. I want you to take a second. If you have not done this yet, open the show notes, I'll wait. open them up. You can open while you're listening to me. Find the link that says, ask me a question, click on that sucker, and submit a question. Because that is how we're going to have Friday episodes that are Q&A episodes. Without those questions, I can't answer them. So go do that now, 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.