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Welcome to the birth prep podcast. I'm Taylor, your birth bestie, who's here to support you as you plan and prepare for the unmedicated birth of your dreams. If you're ready to ditch the fear, conquer the hospital hustle, support that bump and bod, and walk into the delivery room like the HGIC you were born to be, then buckle up, babe.
This is where it all goes down. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the birth prep podcast. First and foremost, I hope all of you beautiful pregnant ladies, glowing mamas to be, are feeling amazing today.
I hope you're taking wonderful care of yourself, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, all the things. And I'm also so glad that you're here and taking your time to do this work. I'm very proud of you, seriously.
Today, I want to talk to you guys about why a hospital birth requires more than just a plan. I see it all the time. If you think your For You page has a lot of pregnancy and birth stuff on it, just imagine mine.
I've been doing this for years. That's all that I see ever. There is so much obsession about making the perfect birth plan and putting all this emphasis on the plan.
I hope you already know this because if you're following me, you should. If not, I'm not doing my job very well. But if you make a plan and you never actually prepare for said plan, you wasted your time.
I usually compare this to two girls who signed up for a marathon. They signed up, they were super excited, they made this whole training plan. And one girl didn't do the training plan and the other girl totally learned everything about how support her body.
She practiced a bunch, she really went for it. When it comes time to race day and both of those girls are at the starting line, having made the exact same training plan, who has the higher odds of success? I know we're never guaranteed to win the race, right? We're never guaranteed to pull off the plan no matter how hard we prepare. Anything can happen that day.
But whose odds are higher? Like exponentially higher? Obviously, girl B who put in the freaking work. I was chatting with my best friend today on Zoom and her son was watching the great British Bake Off in the background. So I was hearing little bits and pieces of it.
And I've watched that before. And if you haven't watched it, there's this part of the episode, I think it's called the technical challenge. And they're given this piece of paper, usually with some ingredients on it, maybe a couple recipe directions, but it is not a full recipe.
It is not a full how you do it. Here's how much you need of this, this and this. It's got a lot of holes in it, you know? And if I were to show up and do an episode of the great British Bake Off, you best believe I would not even know where to begin.
I do not have the skills. I do not have the knowledge. I do not have the practice.
Based on the names and the information they give you, like I couldn't even tell you what it's remotely supposed to look like in the end product, let alone what the first step is. And that is a perfect analogy for going in with a plan, but no preparation. The people on that show mostly know what they're doing, and their stuff looks pretty similar by the end of it.
And I'm like, oh, wow, that's crazy. I didn't even know what that was. But it's because they put in so much work before they actually got there that day.
So when it comes to pulling off your unmedicated birth, writing down, I want an unmedicated birth on a piece of paper, and calling it a day is not going to cut it. What happens when your provider suggests something that you weren't expecting to be asked? What happens when the nurse asks a question that makes you second guess yourself? What happens when you hit a tough contraction and suddenly that epidural that you swore you'd never get starts sounding real good? If all you have is a it's so easy to freeze. It's so easy to start doubting yourself and let then the fear, tension, pain cycle begins.
And now you've got pain to manage that you weren't expecting to be that bad, that early. And then when it's all said and done, you might be giving into pressure that you didn't even see coming. But when you have a strategy and the information and tools that you need, you know how to handle each of those moments.
You're going to know how to read between the lines when your provider starts pushing interventions on you. You're going to know exactly what to say when a nurse questions your decisions. You're going to know how to manage contractions like a boss, mind you, because you've practiced it.
You've trained for it and you're ready for it. And that my friend is what makes the difference between hoping for an unmedicated birth and actually having one. So if a plan is not enough, what is enough? At the core, there are three key things that can make or break an unmedicated birth in the hospital.
First and foremost, the right mindset, AKA training your brain to work with you, not against you. If you don't train your mind for labor, that fear is going to take over. It's your brain's job to keep you safe every day of your life.
And fear is how it does that. Your brain wants to keep you in your comfort zone and keep you doing the same things you've always done because that's how you stay alive. And that's your brain's job.
When fear enters the chat, so does tension. That tension creates the pain that we feel. And usually once that goes around a couple of times, we end up with interventions that we didn't actually want.
Now, I believe that every single ounce of birth prep contributes to your mindset. I believe the information you gather. I believe the conversations that you're having with your providers and your family and your friends.
I believe the content that you're consuming on the internet contributes to your mindset. Your past birth experiences are contributing to your mindset. So mindset goes way deeper than just a few little mindset tricks.
You'll find scroll on Instagram, everything you are working on, everything that you were consuming, everything that you were doing during your pregnancy experience is going to be contributing to that day. And I know that sounds like really serious. And honestly, that's because it is.
I'm not trying to put a bunch of pressure on it. I'm not trying to tell you it's going to be tons and tons of work. It's going to be really hard because it really doesn't have to be.
I have a lesson in the birth prep course called mindset magic. And that's where I teach you all the tricks and how to work through your mindset and how to tackle those fears and all that stuff. But honestly, the entire course is for your mindset.
The second key is learning the skills to actually manage labor because we're not just going to suffer through it. Like birth isn't something that happens to you. Birth is something that you do.
And spoiler alert, it doesn't have to suck. Can I tell you a quick secret? I literally cannot wait to give birth again, not just have the baby to give birth, to go through that experience. Because honestly, once I learned how to do it in the way that it was designed to be done, it made me feel amazing.
Like I was riding that birth high for days. Like I was like, oh my gosh, like let's do that again tomorrow. And I know not everyone will have that same experience and that same mindset about it, but that's possible.
I am not special. I did the work. You are totally capable of doing it too.
I'm literally here teaching you all of the things and guess what? I didn't have me. So you're already a step ahead. So it is not just about dealing with the pain.
It's about working with your body. I really, truly think that all women should understand how birth operates, what hormones are at play, what coping techniques actually work, how positions and movements can help make labor easier, how to keep labor progressing. If you do not know how your body operates during birth, how are you supposed to support it well? And let me tell you something I have yet to meet an OBGYN who actually knows what the woman's body does during a birth experience.
They are not taught that stuff. I've met some wonderful midwives who know what they're talking about, even some nurses. And let me tell you what I've been in this space again, for years, I've been doing this stuff for a hot minute.
I've talked to lots of people about this. If you are counting on your care team to be able to support your body in the way that it needs to be supported, just know that a natural birth does not make money. So the people who taught your doctors, who taught them how to do things, they taught them how to up the bottom line.
And before you write me off, some conspiracy theorist, crazy girl who thinks everything's against everybody and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just please know that I have done my digging and you are welcome to do it too. I actually invite you to do it.
You will quickly find that the same people who fund ACOG, the people teaching our doctors, are the same people that own most of the hospitals in the United States, the same people that are producing Pitocin, the same people who are creating the curriculum for the birth prep classes at the hospital, teaching you how to be a complacent patient, the same people who are producing the leading postpartum anxiety and depression drugs. They have their hands in every little piece of the pie. If you think that they care more about you than their bottom line and their profits, I would think again.
Unmedicated, uninterrupted births do not make money. But that cascade of interventions makes bank. You are entering into a system that quite literally sets you up for failure.
It's truly, honestly not going to take much for you to position yourself as the expert in physiological birth in your delivery room that day. Okay, do you still love me? Are you still here? Okay, I gotta tell it like it is. That's what you're gonna get here.
You're gonna get unfiltered truth, okay? Okay, key number three, the tools to advocate for yourself so that you stay in control no matter what. We're talking HGIC vibes, head girly in charge. Again, the hospital system is not designed for unmedicated birth.
We've already been over this. You need to know how to handle pushback, how to navigate policies that are totally against you, and how to stand firm in the decisions that you made for yourself and for your baby. In the birth prep course, I call it the hospital hustle because honestly, we're just trying to out-hustle the hustlers at this point.
The wonderful news, because I've seen it time and time again, once you learn the game that's being played, you can learn how to win. So make your awesome, perfect for you birth plan. Get excited about it.
You can totally obsess over it, not a problem. But please back it with the action, back it with the preparation work. Your birth depends on it.
If you're feeling a little overwhelmed, you're not sure where to begin, you're like, okay, great, Taylor, that's awesome. I hear you. But also, I don't know how to do any of that stuff.
I've got you. That's what the birth prep course is for. I kept it very simple and strategic and all the stuff in there is actually useful.
I'm not trying to waste your time like those hospital birth prep classes. I have it broken down into three separate phases, the groundwork, the nitty-gritty, and the day. I also have a bonus trainings in there.
I have the Merry Method for my Jesus girlies, teaching you how to birth with faith and surrender. The newborn crash course, it teaches you all about how to make informed decisions for your newborn, what decisions you're actually going to need to be making, and what to expect during those first few weeks of life. There's a postpartum prep training as well, and also a really juicy one about birthing after trauma.
That's a must watch for my girlies who have had previous traumatic births. There's healing to be done, and you do not want to carry all of that into your next experience. On top of all that beautiful education, you're also not going to be doing this alone.
Every single week, I hang out with my students and answer their questions. I give them pep talks. We talk about strategy for their next appointment.
We role play conversations. We talk about fears and how to process those, because with the right education and support, you can truly pull off amazing things. You can head to the show notes to enroll or to just check out all the details to decide if it is the right fit for you or not.
If you're still on the fence after checking it out, slide into my DMs. We'll have a conversation about it. I will be straight up and honest with you if it is not for you.
I am not here to fill this course. I am here to get women results. Thanks for listening to my little spiel on that.
That kind of turned into a whole thing, but I love this course, and I really truly think that it is the game changer for your unmedicated birth in the hospital. If this episode brought up any questions, I would love to hear from you. I have a submission form in the show notes for you guys to submit questions.
Every week, I pull three of those questions for HGSE Hotline and answer them right here on the podcast. Until then, as always, happy prepping.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
