(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
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 bum 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. Today I want to talk about what I believe is the missing piece of birth prep.
We spend so much time talking about birth plans, education, providers, pain management, all the things. And I love talking to you guys. I love my students so much.
I love that you guys slide into my DMs and shoot me emails. I love it. And I love talking about this stuff with you.
I truly do. And the practical stuff is so important to talk about, but there is a piece of preparation that you guys are overlooking that I'd say 99% of you are totally ignoring, and that is identity. And identity is at the core of everything that I teach, especially inside the birth prep course.
You guys hear it all the time. You guys hear it not as identity, but as me trying to get you guys to be the head girl in charge or HGIC. And that is so important.
And there's a reason why I root everything in that, because who you believe you are when you walk into the birth space is far more important. You can be a birth expert. And if that piece isn't there, then that education is going to fall short.
How you see yourself impacts everything. It impacts what you research, what you consume, what questions you're asking, what decisions you're making, what conversations you're willing to have, and how you're having them. You cannot separate your identity from how you experience your birth.
And before we dive into this, I just want to take a second and acknowledge the fact that I know that this is such difficult, uncomfortable, dumb work. I get it. I've done it.
I am still doing it in lots of areas of my life. It is something that I think I'll be doing for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, it is uncomfortable.
It is stupid. It is hard, and I'm sorry for it. And I also really want you to do it because I know how life-changing it is.
So please don't feel any shame for having not done it yet or having ignored it so far. Most of the people that I know, most of the grown adults even, especially the ones older than me, never touched this work in their life. It's uncomfortable work, and so many people avoid it for good reason, right? It's hard, and it's uncomfortable, and it really forces you to look at yourself and take full responsibility for how you're operating and how you believe and how you think about yourself, how you literally do everything in your life.
So I'm not coming from a place of condemnation. I'm coming from a place of love. I want you guys to do this work.
I know how important it is. I know that it has quite literally changed my life and know that it can absolutely change yours too. And I want to walk alongside you in this, okay? And we're going to start with the head girly in charge and the passive patient thing that I teach in my course.
And that is not like different personality types, right? It's like you either got it or you don't. No. These are two very different identity postures.
We have the HGIC, head girly in charge, versus the PP, the passive patient. And no one wants to be a PP, but 99% of us are, right? I absolutely was. I was for years.
I was in everything that I did. I was a PP. I still am in some ways, and the Lord's still working on me, right? And there are things that are hard to really get to the root of, right? There are things that are like, wow, I thought I was done with this, right? It's like, I've been doing this work for years.
When will it end? It probably will never. But the difference between those, a PP is operating from the belief that birth is something that is happening to her. Someone else knows best.
Someone else is making decisions. Someone else tells her what comes next. And an HGIC understands that she's an active participant in her birth.
She has agency. She has authority. She has responsibility.
She is the one. She's the one. She's the authority figure in that space.
I think so often we are taught, and we believe, and even the providers walk in this way too. They think that they're the authority figures. They're not.
You don't need them. You do in some situations. It's nice to have them, of course.
I understand why you want to have them there. I also want to acknowledge the fact that they are hired help. And that's not to be condescending to them at all.
The work that they do is great. They are an expert in the medical understanding of birth, but not physiological birth. Not in your body.
They're not experts in your plan and what you want. They're not experts in the way that you've walked through this pregnancy. They're not experts in your promises from Christ.
They're not experts in any of that. They're experts in the medicalized management of birth. And that is fantastic that you want them on your team.
But they are a part of your team. They are not the leader of the team. You are.
And you can say that all day long. Oh, I'm the HGAC. Oh, I'm the leader.
But if you don't believe that you are, it doesn't matter. And this isn't about controlling everything. It's not about being demanding.
It's not about refusing help. It means understanding your role and refusing to disappear from your own birth experience. And this is an identity shift, not just a change in behavior.
And I think a lot of us try to change the behavior in such a massive way that we can avoid the identity work, right? Because it's uncomfortable. Because gathering information is way easier. Because practicing and learning new skills is so much easier, right? And I think so often we're trying to avoid the actual work that is wrapped up in all of this.
And I want to bring it back to your identity in Christ, because that is where your authority comes from. You're not just a patient. You're a daughter of the Most High.
You're a co-heir with Christ. Your identity isn't assigned to you by a provider, or a hospital, or a medical system, or anybody else's opinion of you. God gave you a mind, a body, discernment, and the ability to make decisions.
Surrendering to God does not mean passively surrendering your agency to other people. You can be humble and teachable and respectful and still operate in your God-given authority. Identity work requires you to examine beliefs you've probably never questioned in your life.
Ones that have probably been there for decades. It means recognizing where you've been people-pleasing, where you've been avoiding conflict, where you've been seeking permission, where you've been outsourcing decisions. It's uncomfortable because it challenges the version of yourself that you've become accustomed to being.
I was talking with a friend the other day, and she was upset. She was stressing out. She called me.
She was like, I don't even know what to do. I said yes when I didn't want to say yes, and I always do that. I always say yes to these things.
She does a lot, right? She serves all over the church. She shows up for her kids' school all the time. She does so much, so much for other people, and literally hardly anything for herself.
She was asked to make cookies for one of her kids' class's parties, and she was like, I don't have time. I don't have money. I don't know how I'm going to do it.
I have to make these cookies. I'm on my way to the kids' practice. They're going to be at practice till almost eight o'clock, then I have to figure out dinner.
I don't even know what I'm feeding them, and then I have to figure out how I'm making these cookies, how I'm getting ingredients, and then I have to have them there in the morning, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I'm like, girl, I hear you. I definitely get it. I used to do that too.
I used to say yes to everything, and now I have to create space. I'm like, I can't serve everybody. I can't do it.
I wish I could. I'd love to serve. I'd love to help, and she does too, and I know that, and I know that's at the core of everything.
She wants to do it, and we have capacity, and all that to say, I'm not going to get off on a side tangent here, all that to say, if you can't say no to something like that, how are you going to say no to someone in a hospital setting who is speaking with authority? Not that they have the authority, but they are speaking as if they do, and you just, like, if you are giving people, even like the teacher's assistant, if you are giving them authority over your schedule, over your time, over your capacity, over your bank account, if you are giving them that authority just because you don't want to say no, how on earth are you going to do that when you're having contractions, and you're in a space with strangers, right? A lot of you aren't meeting your doctor still that day. You aren't meeting the nurses until that day. You're in this space with strangers, and you're just going to think that saving those scripts for advocating that you saw on Instagram in your saved folder is going to actually save you that day.
If you struggle to communicate your needs in everyday life, do not assume that you'll suddenly become comfortable doing it in labor, which is arguably far more uncomfortable and far higher stakes than what you're encountering in your everyday life. Birth doesn't magically erase your existing patterns that you've been operating out of since probably childhood. Neither does education.
Neither does consumption. Those things that you're thinking are just going to get you there probably aren't going to get you there. I say this with so much love, and I know it's blunt, and I know it's direct, but I need you guys to hear this because I'm so tired of seeing women put in so much work and then being so disappointed the day of their birth.
Then you guys are walking away from those births being so disappointed, but then also making it mean all these things about you that you must not have prepped hard enough, that you must have missed a piece of information, that you must have not spent enough money on your birth education, that you must have not asked enough questions, that you must have not picked the right provider. I get it. I've been there.
When I prepared for my first birth, I did everything. I'll just tell you the story very quickly. When I found out I was pregnant, that morning, I left the house.
I got a dress for a wedding we were going to, and I got a pregnancy test. We were leaving that day, that afternoon, to go on a major road trip all the way up the East Coast. We live in Florida.
We were going to Massachusetts for a wedding, and then we were going to spend a week in Delaware for my husband's sister's graduation. We were going to be gone for a long time. I took this test literally right before we got on the road, and I was like, holy cow.
We had hours and hours and hours in the car to talk about it, to think about it. I was searching everything I could even think of. Even just that first day, I spent probably 15 hours on my phone.
I was searching and searching and searching for... I don't even know why. I don't know what I was searching for because what I was really searching for wasn't going to be found in a Google search. I was searching for peace, and I was searching for comfort.
I was searching for something that Google couldn't give me, that Instagram couldn't give me, that a birth book or a podcast couldn't give me. I spent my entire birth doing that. I spent my entire birth seeking preparation.
I did the hospital birth class. I asked all the questions, and I did everything that I was taught to do. I talked with other women who had given birth before me.
I talked about their experiences, what they did, how that looked like. I talked about so many things, right? I spent my entire nine months of pregnancy seeking answers and never actually faced myself in any of that. When I walked into the birth space that day, things were happening around me and to me, and I was not participating in any of the decisions.
I showed up that way and paid the price for it and left feeling like it was all my fault. I felt like, gosh, I must have missed something, or I didn't have enough information, or I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know what the options were.
There were a lot of things that I didn't know, for sure, because you can only Google what you know to Google. The hospital birth classes, honestly, the one I took at least was a joke and just not what I needed at all in any way, shape, or form. I didn't know what I didn't know.
I truly thought I walked in incredibly prepared to that experience. Having believed that, when I left having the experience that I had, I said, oh, well, that must mean birth will always be this way for me. I had three kids under three, so I had another child very quickly and another child very quickly after that.
I continued to learn and to prepare the only way that I knew how. I continued gathering information. I continued asking questions.
I continued getting curious. I continued trying to find the piece that I was missing, because maybe possibly I could get this to a better spot. I did.
I had better births. They weren't great, but they were better than the first time. That's for sure.
They slowly got better and better. Then I started working with a business coach when my third baby was two months old. I had started an online business, and I was seeking support and help and coaching through that.
She was teaching me all these things in relation to business, of course, and how what I believed about myself was showing up in all the ways that I was operating inside that business, how I was showing up online, creating content, how I was talking to my students, how I was supporting my students. She really helped me realize how much work I had, internal work I had to do, and in my identity, and how things needed to shift in order for me to actually see the results that I was looking for. That was really important to me.
It was helpful in all the things. I know like, oh, she's talking about business now, but I took that core identity work that I learned through business, and I applied it to another area of my life. That's why I say this stuff is so important, because you can apply it to literally everything that you do.
Everything that I teach in the birth prep course is applicable to your motherhood, to your marriage, to all these areas of your life, and it all impacts how you operate at your core. I truly believe that literally my business coaching helped me have a better birth with my fourth baby, because it opened my eyes to the identity work that I had to do. And I'm like, if I can do it here, I can absolutely do it in the birth space too, and so can you.
So I did. And of course, I continue to educate myself. I am still doing that to this day.
I am never going to believe that I know everything about birth, because I don't. I don't believe anybody does. I believe there's always something new to learn.
There's always new information that's coming to the light, and there's always something more that I can get my hands on, and it's important to stay educated and to stay informed, of course. And at the same time, I don't believe that the shift in my birth came from more education, because I already had a lot of education at that point. I had been doing it for years straight, literally.
Shifting my identity was the biggest determining factor in what shifted my birth experience. It wasn't just my birth location or my birth team. It was how I saw myself and the role that I actually got to step into inside of my birth experience.
I stopped viewing myself as someone that things happened to, and started operating as the head girl in charge. I made decisions. I wasn't suddenly like fearless or in control of every outcome.
I'm not promising you that that's what's going to happen for you, but I shifted my identity and changed how I showed up. Like everybody in the room knew that I was the one making the decisions, because I made it clear, because I had the conversations, because I talked about the difficult stuff, because I talked about the fears that I had. And that's the birth where as soon as I had him, he was supposed to be our last baby.
I was like, I can't wait to do that again. That's how good it was. But enough about me.
Let's talk about what identity work actually looks like practically. There's a lot of layers to this. I think I said it earlier where I was like, I, every time I think that I'm like done working on this area, it's like, there's another layer.
It was like, oh, wow. I thought I was done with that. It's like, yeah, that was underneath that, but this is what's underneath that.
And it's like, it's like, it's like an onion. It's got a lot of layers. The process is pretty much the same.
It's really just getting curious about why you're doing something and why you're doing it that way, what you're making it mean about you. It's just like really getting underneath. It's like, I was talking about this the other day with somebody in my DMs and she was like, I, I, I'm so scared of tearing.
And like, I'm trying to figure out how to not tear and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It's like, okay, that's great. I love that you're educating yourself.
I love that you're trying to secure a certain outcome. I love that you're trying to do everything in your power to get that for yourself. Great.
Fantastic. We love that. Um, but why are you so scared? Like what's underneath that? Why are you trying to, to work yourself to a certain outcome? Like, what is the fear here? What's going on? Are you scared of what that's going to look like afterwards? Are you scared of the recovery? Are you scared of the lack of support that you're going to have afterwards to recover from something like that? Like, what does that actually look like? What does that, what are you making that mean about you? If you do tear, what are you going to think about yourself? If you did all this work and you still tear, what, what, what then? Like, what does that mean? And how are you prepared for that? And it's like, it's getting underneath these things that, that look so surface level.
Like, of course nobody wants to tear, duh. But like, what, what is underneath all of that? Like, why is she going above and beyond to try to control the result of not tearing? So let's look at these few areas real quick before we hop off of here. Education.
Are you learning to make informed decisions or are you just collecting information and hoping that somebody else tells you what to do? Your consumption. Are you internally choosing what influences your beliefs about birth? Or are you absorbing every fear-based story, every opinion, every tip, every single thing that you get your hands on? Conversations. Are you asking questions? Are you expressing concerns? Are you having uncomfortable conversations with your provider? What about your boundaries? Can you say no? Can you disappoint someone? Can you tolerate someone disagreeing with you? Decision-making.
Are you taking responsibility for your decisions or are you waiting for somebody else to make them for you? Are you outsourcing your decisions? I have so many people ask me, well, how do you do this? Well, I like, I know I need to educate myself, but like, how do you do it? There's a reason that I don't give you guys a list of decisions to make and to put on your birth plan. You guys are the ones that have full responsibility over those decisions. And me giving you like a little cheat sheet does not help you.
And then finally, are you anchoring your identity in what God says about you rather than what the world and the medical system and other people say or think? These are just things I want you to sit with this week. Even like little simple things throughout your day. Like, like your husband asking you, Hey, what do you want for dinner? And you're like, I don't know, whatever you want is fine.
But you really wanted something, but you just didn't say it. Like that is an identity issue. And like, like the example I gave earlier, like just saying yes to something without checking your calendar, saying yes to something without thinking about what you have going on that night.
That's an identity issue, overthinking how you're standing or sitting or how you're dressed or how your outfits laying on your body or how you're being perceived by other people. Like that's an identity issue, how you are consuming information on the internet. Get really curious.
What am I, why am I saving this piece of content? What for? So it makes me feel better. So I know that it's there if I ever need it so that I'll come back and practice it so that maybe I'll feel better by saving this and feel like I'm doing something identity issues. You don't become the head girly in charge when you get to the hospital, you practice.
Now you practice at home. You practice in those little moments. You start noticing where you automatically defer, where you people, please, where you shrink, where you avoid discomfort, where you're trying to appear a no, um, practice expressing your preferences, practice making decisions, do the internal work before you're in the middle of labor.
That is not the time to do it. I guarantee you're going to fail. If you get to that point and you're like, Oh, now's the time.
No, you're a little busy. You don't need to become a completely different person overnight, but you do need to be willing to examine who you've been operating as. You can have the birth plan and the affirmations and the perfect provider and all the education in the world.
But I want you to ask yourself this, who are you actually showing up as in your birth space? Because that identity shift is worth doing the uncomfortable work for. If you want help doing this for your birth experience, that's literally what the birth prep course was made for. This is the core work of everything that we do inside the birth prep course.
And of course, yes, there's education and there's tools and skills that you need and there's conversations to have. And there's all of that. Like I, all of that is in there.
Of course I need you guys to have all that too, but this is the foundation that all of that rests upon. When you're ready to join us in there, you can head to the show notes to enroll. And I would start working on this work now.
I'm like, I love when people come to me and they're determined to get a bunch of stuff done at the end of their pregnancy. And it's great and awesome. And I love that.
But if you can get in there first trimester, that is well worth your time and energy. You guys don't lose access. You guys get lifetime access.
You can have it next pregnancy and everything, revisit whatever you need to. And it is designed that way because I want you guys to be in there for as long as it takes to become the head girlie in charge. I'll chat with y'all again soon until then as always happy prepping.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
