A positive birth experience can mean different things to different people. Your birth should be safe, empowering, and fulfilling according to what you feel is safe and empowering.
Here are some key elements that can contribute to a positive birth experience:
- Empowering birth Education leads to being informed and in control: Knowledge allows you to know what to expect during labor and delivery, and feeling like you have a say in how things go, can help you feel more in control and less anxious. you techniques like breathing exercises, massage, and hydrotherapy can help manage pain and reduce stress during labor.
- Supportive caregivers: Having healthcare providers who listen to your concerns, respect your wishes, and provide personalized care can help you feel more supported and confident during labor and delivery.
- Minimal interventions: For women with low-risk pregnancies, avoiding unnecessary medical interventions like induction, episiotomy, and continuous fetal monitoring can help reduce the risk of complications and promote a more natural birth experience.
- Positive environment: Creating a calm and soothing atmosphere during labor and delivery, with low lighting, music, and familiar items from home, can help promote relaxation and reduce stress.
- Supportive partner: Having a partner or support person who is present and attentive during labor and delivery can help provide emotional support and encouragement.
It's important to remember that every birth is unique and that you know you are in charge and you do not need to fear your birth.
Resources:
Grab a Free Pregnancy/Postpartum Checklist Bundle
Connect w/ Trish:
For more pregnancy & birth education, subscribe to The Birth Experience on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Next Steps with LNM:
If you are ready to invest in your pregnancy & postpartum journey, you are in the right place. I would love to take your hand and support you in your virtual labor room!
If you are ready to dive into a birth class and have your best and most powerful birth story, then Calm Labor Confident Birth or The VBAC Lab is your next step.
If you have a scheduled cesarean, take our Belly Birth Masterclass and own that experience.
If you are a newly pregnant mama or just had the babe, you want to join our private pregnancy and postpartum membership, Calm Mama Society.
Remember, my advice is not medical advice. Always discuss what you learn with your team. See my Disclaimer here! Also, We make a small commission from some of the links (you don’t pay any more for using our links); however some of the recommendations, we do not earn anything; we love ’em and want you to know about them.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Trish Ware: My name is Trish Ware, and I am obsessed with all things pregnancy and birth, and helping you to navigate with the practical and the magical seasons of this journey called motherhood. I'm an all day coffee sip and Mama of seven. I've had the amazing privilege of delivering mini babies in my 15 plus year career as a labor and delivery nurse, and as a.
[00:00:28] Trish Ware: Seven. I'm here to help you take the guesswork out of childbirth so you can make the choices that are right for you and your baby. Quick note, this podcast is for educational purposes only and does not replace your medical advice. Check out our full disclaimer at the bottom of this show notes. Good morning.
[00:00:52] Trish Ware: So today's gonna be a little bit different than our normal routine around here [00:01:00] because I am going off script. I do not have a script for this. I just want to talk to you guys about something I am passionate about. Now, I don't know when this will air, but we just got finished with a. Of free birth classes.
[00:01:18] Trish Ware: We call it Five Days to a Fearless Birth Experience, and we do it about every eight weeks. So if you missed it, sign up for the next one. Get on the wait list. During Fearless Birth Experience, we open up the birth classes for special live enrollment and do all sorts of things. However, one thing that.
[00:01:37] Trish Ware: Guaranteed is when I teach live and I'm hanging out with you guys and this happens inside the membership. So my girls can vouch for me here. I get super wound up because I am so passionate about the topic that we're gonna talk about today, which is mindset and how you [00:02:00] view your upcoming birth. I know for a fact it can make the difference.
[00:02:07] Trish Ware: All the difference in the world. So we're gonna talk about your mindset and how it can affect your birth experience, because I want you guys to have an amazing birth experience. Now, can I guarantee that if you are. Educated. You take an amazing birth class like mine, or you come into our mama membership, you attend our weekly workshops and our hangouts.
[00:02:33] Trish Ware: You've taken my birth class that you're gonna have the most perfect, incredible textbook birth. No, I can't. I can't guarantee that. However, I can guarantee that by being educated, you can cut down a lot of the fear that you might be experiencing when you think about your birth. Because here's what I want to tell you, and I'm just gonna spoil it [00:03:00] all because I'm gonna tell you what I want you to know by the end of this, right?
[00:03:04] Trish Ware: You can actually enjoy your birth. You can actually love your labor. It doesn't have to be something you dread. It doesn't have to be something that you just get through or endure. It can be something you actually love. So we're gonna talk about how do you get there? How do you get to a point where you're excited?
[00:03:27] Trish Ware: The pain of labor, excited about the actual process of labor, not just getting to the end, not just getting the baby. And this is something I talk about a lot when I'm teaching and with my mamas when I'm hanging out with them on our weekly hangouts. I want you guys to stop thinking. Negatively. I know we all hear these horror stories everywhere you go.
[00:03:52] Trish Ware: Everyone wants to tell you like the worst thing ever, how terrible their experience was and how bad [00:04:00] it's gonna be and how, oh honey, you just have to get through it cuz then you'll get to the baby. But I'm gonna tell you that it doesn't have to be that way. You don't have to view your upcoming birth that way.
[00:04:10] Trish Ware: So whether you just found out you're pregnant, Or you're about to give birth, I want you to start working on what you are telling yourself because by doing that, by changing your mindset, by working on your mindset, you can change everything. And I have some key steps that you have to do to be able to continually change your mindset, and of course, education.
[00:04:37] Trish Ware: Is number one, because if you don't understand what is happening to your body, what changes are happening, what the stages of labor are, and how best to work with them, if you don't know the tools to pull out of your tool bag, then you're going to find yourself going back into that fear mode again and again during labor.
[00:04:59] Trish Ware: As [00:05:00] the pain gets more intense because you're gonna be surprised by the changes. So one of the things I asked my mamas last week during our live classes, how many of you guys have had this wait and see attitude and the wait and see attitude shows up? Oh, my doctor will tell me what to do. My doctor knows my doctor went to school for this.
[00:05:21] Trish Ware: My nurse knows what she's doing. Delivered all these babies. She's attended all these births. She'll tell me what to do each stage of the way. And so a lot of mamas have that wait and see attitude. And instead of empowering themselves with knowledge and understanding, they go into their birth with their heads stuck in the ground and they end up.
[00:05:45] Trish Ware: Regretting that, and then they come and find me for their second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth baby, because they don't want to have that same experience. So number one, to change your mindset, you have to be [00:06:00] educated so that you won't be surprised so that things won't take you for a loop. So you won't be knocked off course.
[00:06:08] Trish Ware: Right? So you have to have educat. Because unrealistic expectations can screw up the whole thing. Can it totally affect your pain? Tolerance can affect your mindset. It can affect your will, your grit. I call it your birth grit. All of it can be thrown for a loop if you have something happen that's unexpected.
[00:06:31] Trish Ware: So what we try to do through education is to prepare you. All the things now, we can't prepare you for everything, but having a good, solid educational foundation for birth will allow you to be able to understand most things and then trusting your provider. And your team, which is so important. This is why choosing your provider, if you just found out you're pregnant, [00:07:00] make sure you download my free resource about choosing a provider.
[00:07:06] Trish Ware: All the questions you need to ask. That's why that is so important. The beginning of pregnancy. It's one of the most powerful things you can do so that during your birth, when you are educated, along with trusting your provider, you'll be able to navigate the twist and turns of your birth journey. So important.
[00:07:26] Trish Ware: Okay, so how in the world do we change our mindset? How do we work on our mindset? How do we change our thoughts from fear? To excitement. So what I wanna tell you is there are actually things you can do to change your thoughts. I've learned through a lot of mindset study and mindfulness that what we think, what we tell ourself, On a daily basis, we can [00:08:00] actually manifest.
[00:08:01] Trish Ware: So if you are telling your yourself things like, oh my god, birth is outta control and my birth is gonna be crazy, and it's gonna be me screaming, yelling, and chaos, you can manifest that for yourself. So on the flip side, I want you to start changing what you tell yourself every day. So when you wake up, I want you to tell yourself things like, I am a birth queen.
[00:08:26] Trish Ware: Am powerful. I am going to birth this baby in a powerful way. I am going to conquer labor contractions. My labor contractions are coming from my body and nothing can overtake me. Nothing can overwhelm me. I will handle these contractions like a boss. I want you to remember, one of the things that I teach in my classes is that this is a pain that is like no other.
[00:08:59] Trish Ware: If you [00:09:00] stub your toe, and I know y'all know what I mean. Or even better if you step on a Lego, if you're not a parent, maybe you've stepped on your own or your brothers or someone in your household. But you wanna scream, you wanna yell, you jump up and down, you run away. It's terrible. That is a pain coming from an outside source.
[00:09:21] Trish Ware: Labor pain is completely different. It's coming from inside of you. It is you. It's a part of you. So instead of mentally running, when it starts to get intense, I want you to run to it. And how do you do that? By learning tools of coping. That's one of our free classes that we teach during Fearless Birth experience, which we call F B E.
[00:09:46] Trish Ware: That's one of our main core free classes, and we teach a few. Of the coping tools that we teach inside of our community, because we really wholeheartedly believe that you [00:10:00] can take it, girl. You can handle the labor pain if you know what to do and when to do it. Labor pain, it changes, it morphs when you first go into labor.
[00:10:11] Trish Ware: It's not the same as, let's say, transition. Transition is a. Whole different class all in its own, and you can't use the same tools that you used when labor first showed up back in early labor. You have to pull out different tools. What tools. If you don't know, you don't know. And I say this all the time in every single class that I teach, and if you've heard me say it a thousand times, I want it to keep sinking in until you take action.
[00:10:42] Trish Ware: But if you don't know your options, you don't have any. This is why education is critical. And I say this all the time, my husband stops saying that, but here's the. You have to take a birth class. You have to do not wing your birth. This is not a time you want to wing, [00:11:00] because guess what? This event with this little person, with this baby only happens once.
[00:11:06] Trish Ware: Yeah, you might have more babies, but this baby, this birth happens once. Educate yourself. I think you should take my class. I think it's the best one out there. But you need to take a birth class. That's what my husband says. Stop saying take a class. Any class, but I believe you have to take a class. I don't think you should take a hospital based class.
[00:11:27] Trish Ware: Because I feel in my experience, that they teach more so according to their policies. Yes, they teach you things you need to know, but they infuse policy into it. And I'm not a fan of. Women have to having to follow hospital policy per se, we need to change those policies. They're antiquated, like not eating during labor.
[00:11:50] Trish Ware: That's stupid. You should be able to eat. You are working hard. That's a whole nother podcast episode. However, back on track, you have to be [00:12:00] educated because by being educated, being prepared, having understanding that can increase your threshold to labor pain. And I teach this inside of my classes how you can actually.
[00:12:15] Trish Ware: Change your threshold. Your threshold for labor. If you don't know what that is, it's like that minimum spot like above your head, right? That minimum threshold intensity where you're like, oh crap, this hurts. Like you start thinking whatever the stimuli is or the stimulus is, it's hurting, it's painful. So when we're talking about labor pain, That's where you start flipping from is this real labor contractions to, oh shit, this really hurts.
[00:12:50] Trish Ware: It really is labor that is your pain threshold, and yours is different than mine. Mine is different than. Someone else's. [00:13:00] So there are actual ways that you can raise that threshold where you start sensing it as painful and difficult, can get higher and higher, so that you are able to tolerate more pain and get farther into your labor experience and farther into the stages of labor without.
[00:13:26] Trish Ware: Needing like extra help. And that looks differently for everyone depending on if you're going unm, medicated or medicated. And there are different ways you can do that by having a support team, by taking a birth class, by having a filled tool bag. We call it the labor tool bag. Fill it up with your coping tools and your positioning.
[00:13:45] Trish Ware: And that's one of the things if you join one of my birth classes we have decided to do as a team is instead of. Our classes individually. When you buy our birth class as a bundle, you get three other classes [00:14:00] for free plus 30 days in our support membership where you have access to birth professionals, baby care specialists, NICU nurse, we have a public fuller specialist and more.
[00:14:11] Trish Ware: And one of those classes that you get for free is our positioning class, which teaches you. Proper positioning during pregnancy to help get your body in alignment to try to get rid of some of that pain and the different discomforts you might feel, how to get that baby into good alignment for birth, cuz that is key.
[00:14:29] Trish Ware: That is critical. Then I teach you all of my labor movements and pushing positions for medicated unmedicated because when you're in labor and when you start getting to a point where you. Your pain management plan, we want you to have a plethora of tools to pull out of your bag because again, what works for me might not work for you.
[00:14:55] Trish Ware: And guess what? What worked for your first baby might not be your [00:15:00] go-to for your next baby. You might need something different. So you wanna know different things, different ways to cope. So I really want you guys to focus this week every. Maybe get some index cards. Go to Walgreens, go to wherever. Buy some old school index cards.
[00:15:20] Trish Ware: Create some pretty ones. We have some affirmations that you can print out, but print out, write down different affirmations so you can start working on what you are telling yourself every single day. If you tell yourself you won't be able to handle it, guess what? There are high chances that you won't.
[00:15:44] Trish Ware: But on the flip side, if you start telling yourself that you will, that you are capable, that you are powerful, that you can birth this baby, that your body built, your body is building an actual, factual [00:16:00] human being. That is beyond incredible. Give yourself some credit. Write that out. I built a person. A person.
[00:16:09] Trish Ware: Come on. That's amazing. So incredible. I'll never ever get over the miraculous thing that pregnancy birth is like you're building a person and you're gonna bring that person out of your body, whether it's through your vagina. Or through a belly earth, doesn't matter. You're still bringing a person into this world.
[00:16:28] Trish Ware: So I congratulate you. You're amazing. Start changing the fears and the eliminating beliefs into power. If you don't know what a eliminating belief is, something that you may be believing that you don't even realize has been planted inside of you. Something like all the women in my family have C-sections or women in my family are short and have a hard time birthing babies, or, my husband's really tall and I'm gonna have a big baby, so I'll probably have a [00:17:00] cesarean.
[00:17:00] Trish Ware: Or just something that has planted in itself inside of you. Maybe it's something you've heard from the women in your family since you were young and you've just believed it about your upcoming birth. I want you to remember that this is your birth. This isn't even your, this is your second birth. This is not the other baby's birth.
[00:17:21] Trish Ware: This is yours and this baby's birth. So don't allow anything else to come into this birth. Educate yourself, empower yourself. Believe in yourself, and let go of those limiting beliefs. Let go of those fears and embrace your power. You are powerful. You have the choice to know, yes, this is gonna be so. That is painful and something that is hard, but it's going to be something incredible that I have the [00:18:00] honor of experiencing with this baby.
[00:18:04] Trish Ware: Me and this baby and my partner get to experience this birth and it's going to be. Incredible. I want you to remember that and not see it as something as a burden or something bad or scary. It's something amazing that your body is so incredibly capable of, and it's going to be an amazing experience. And I want you to remind yourself every single day, know that you're powerful.
[00:18:36] Trish Ware: Tell yourself that you're powerful. Put sticky. Everywhere your partner is gonna be like, have you lost your mind? And you're gonna say, no, I'm building a human. What are you up to today? And you're gonna remind yourself and everyone around you how incredible you are and remind yourself that this experience, this upcoming [00:19:00] birth, it's.
[00:19:01] Trish Ware: Deductive pain that you know is coming, that you're prepared for, that you have a plan for, that you have tools for, and you're ready to take it on because it's you. It's a part of you, and you're gonna be ready for it when it does happen. I promise I'm gonna read a quote that I love, and if you've been around here long enough, you've taken one of my classes, my free classes, whatever you've.
[00:19:28] Trish Ware: That's okay, because I want you to let it sink in. And I'm going to be doing some series of mindset podcast episodes where we're gonna work on different things that you guys can do to mentally prepare for birth. And as always, I want to invite you into our inner santum to become an l and m mama. Inside of our membership, we have weekly workshops where we work on all aspects from pregnancy to one year postpartum.
[00:19:57] Trish Ware: We hang out with our girls. I go [00:20:00] live in there. I hang out with them in the mornings. We have coffee on the way to work, talking about real things. And we really embrace this journey together and you are all welcome to join us. It's amazing there's more information in the show notes, but one of the things that I love to ha to, and I have the honor of doing with my l and m mamas is helping.
[00:20:25] Trish Ware: Embrace their power and who they are as women and as mothers. And so this quote is just, it's everything. So I'm gonna read it to you guys. What if through birth, mothers around the world connected to their infinite value, immense power? And let go of every limitation and thought of self-doubt that has ever held them back.
[00:20:51] Trish Ware: I truly believe that birth is designed to help you claim your power as a mother and rise to your greatest, most alive and [00:21:00] joyful self. And that's Susie Verel. I love that. Quote, birth is not scary. It is powerful, and you are powerful. What you think matters, what you tell yourself matters. So I want you to leave this episode.
[00:21:19] Trish Ware: Go grab your index cards, go grab whatever, and remind yourself how powerful you.
[00:21:28] Trish Ware: I hope you enjoyed this episode today on Mindset and affirmations, reminding yourself how powerful you are. As always, hit subscribe. Leave us a review. We love it and appreciate it. It means so much to us when you do, and I will see you again next Friday morning. Bye for now.