Doula tips from an experienced doula to help guide you in your doula business and client support journey! Kaely shares from her 13+ years experience supporting families in the perinatal space in a raw and down to earth manor. This podcast is for the juicy tips and tits...no TMI here. It's all game!
Burnout - a topic doulas come back to often. We need to take it seriously before we are at its doorstep! How we recover and help support our own bodies has a direct impact on our future burnout possibilities. As doulas the work we do is exhausting. It is hard. It is beautiful. It is physically and emotionally taxing and we have to take that seriously and train and rest/recover before and after we are with clients!
Burnout Episodes:
95: Doula Burnout: What Do My Number of Working Hours Have To Do With Burnout?
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 into today's episode. Hello and welcome back to Dula Tips and Tits. This episode is a little late in being released because I once again had two babies come on the same day. I was able to be at both births, so it was a little bit of a different circumstance. But that happened on April Fool's Day, which means the day before I normally put out my podcast. And it just delayed everything for the whole week. So here we are. So you're getting a bonus weekend podcast episode and then you will get your normal Wednesday episode as well. So I want to talk a little bit today about avoiding burnout. And I think the thing that is really hard in doula business is the unpredictability of it. Right. And I'm talking about this in part because of my own week, but also because I think birth can be tricky in that. We don't know when it will end. We don't know when it will start. We don't know how it will go. And so there are lots of pieces there that can potentially bring up anxiety. They can bring up fear. They can bring up exhaustion depending on how they play out. And so being able to kind of roll with it as it happens is one of the pieces. But also thinking through what does it look like to prepare your body? for it and to recover well from it is a big piece. So I want to talk a little bit about the different dynamics of those because it it is a fluid scenario like I very much am NOT a doula who thinks every single birth needs to be recovered from in the exact same way and I've talked I have other episodes about you know what are what are the like my pre and post birth rituals and things like that I'll tag those in the show notes but when we think about recovery especially I think how the birth played out and what your body is recovering from is a major piece of it so I wanted to share a little bit about these two births that I attended so I had two babies come on April Fool's Day one I was with them in labor much of Monday well Monday like all the afternoon and evening overnight and then baby was born like really early in the morning. The second baby was being induced starting on Monday and induction kind of kicked off Tuesday or late morning, early afternoon, late morning I guess and then she progressed relatively quickly once things kicked off and so then I was with her as soon as she needed me but mostly just for pushing because she had gotten an epidural and had slept and then woke up 10 centimeters so that was kind of how that one played out. In both scenarios pushing took a while and was really challenging for the client, not for me obviously as the doula but the dynamic that sometimes happens at pushing which if you attend births you know this dynamic is if someone has an epidural they push through their legs into your arms if your arms are what's holding their legs and so for various reasons that was happening at both of these births and I was holding their leg with the opposite arm so they were like on opposite sides of the rooms that they were respectively in. I can't my English is not Englishing today very well and so they like one birth the bed was facing one direction one birth the bed was facing the other direction meaning that I was holding opposite legs which also means I was using opposite arms so the result for me was a lot of soreness in my arms upper back neck and shoulders especially because I did that for a few hours in the morning and for a few hours in the evening and then the proximity of those two things also made it more challenging right so now I'm this is Sunday day when I'm recording this right before I'm going to put this out for you and my body is still so sore and I know part of that is that I like need to stretch and my pelvis has been a little out of whack and I was able to go to the chiropractor last week but probably need to go again and so there's lots of different layers there but also my arms and neck and shoulders are especially sore due to these two births right and that's a part of this work like but it's not always the same like I don't always feel this tension in my arms and neck and shoulder shoulders but I do always feel some level of physical impact from a birth and some level of need to physically recover right. Tuesday both those babies came then I was like, I'm supposed to be having a podcast go out. It was Wednesday. I was trying to catch up on stuff and whatnot. And my husband, I started crying because I was like, I just have so much to get done. And he was like, maybe you're tired because you haven't slept because you had two babies come yesterday. And I was like, you think he was just like, yes, I think that's why I think that's why this is. Because I'm pretty sure you're just exhausted. And so he was like, the podcast can wait, go sleep. And so I think it's funny to me that at this point in my work, and even in the fact that I like tell you all to do that same thing, right? I think him being like, I'm pretty sure you're feeling this overwhelmed because of how exhausted you are was something that truly I had not even considered. Like I was just like, I'm overwhelmed. And he was like, of course you are. You had two babies come at once. And I was like, I don't think that's why it is. And he was like, I think it is, I'm pretty sure. And I was like, are you sure he's like, yeah, I'm sure. So that even just that of like someone else being like, you know what it is, is you're like really exhausted because those births were both really challenging in their own ways and because physically you did a lot of work. And so I say all that to say like, I think the way that we think about recovering from this work has to be a little bit fluid based on how the actual client support plays out. Right? And sometimes that means we reschedule more things than we think we need to. Right? My current rhythm is I try to reschedule everything that's not absolutely urgent. that happens a day after a birth so that I can rest because the need to rest is so high and I also don't want to show up half-heartedly exhausted to a client visit if I can help it right now sometimes I can't help it that's just how the day plays out excuse me but when I can help it I want to be able to not only show up well for folks that are in labor but show up well for my prenatal visits and my coaching calls and all of that stuff as well so that I am really honoring myself and my clients and the time that we're putting in together to do this work right so I want you to think today about my challenge to you I suppose is to think about how do you currently recover and are there things that are like massively missing from that Now I would say in a perfect world, body work should be a part of every recovery. So if you can afford to do massage or acupuncture or chiropractic or all of those things after every birth, that would be magical. But not all of us can afford all of those things after every birth and so I want you to have some kind of idea of what you can do and what is helpful and then also add in things as you're able, right? Like if you get to the point of being able to get a massage after every single birth, by all means, please for the love of goodness do that because that is going to ultimately lower your burnout rate overall, right? And when we think about recovery, we're thinking about now but we're also thinking about the next client, right? Like there's this like need to prepare for the future and also to recover in this moment and both of those are directly impacting burnout rates. And so that like preemptive body work, the preemptive recovery is just as important as the recovery because there's actual muscle soreness happening in your body if that makes sense. So that's today's bonus Sunday episode. It's not really a bonus since it was supposed to be on Wednesday but I am gonna start my regular cadence of Wednesdays. I apologize that that has been a little bit bumpy to get going and then I do have a few questions submitted for my Friday episode so those should start up soon and if you have a question for me, I want to hear it. The link to ask a question is in the show notes. I will get back to you directly so please do ask me a question so that we can discuss that and kind of see what would be. what's kind of the best answer for that and how we can address it for the whole audience on the podcast. So go ahead and click that link in the show notes, sign up for, to ask a question, don't sign up, just ask a question. I don't know why that is what I said. And then I will link the episodes that I've done in the past to pre and post birth recovery so that you have those to listen to as well. Okay. I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the doula 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 hara doula. 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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