One of the most important things we help our parents understand in their preparation for birth is how they uniquely see the world, how they interact with it, and how that very thing will influence their birth in many ways. Once they have clarity on how they see things and how their birth partner see things, we explain that each member of their birth team will introduce a new set of views based on their own life experiences.

Knowing that they will have different expectations and visions of their birth than their care team based on their experiences and reactions in the world better prepares our parents for the conversations they may need to have with the birth team.

As you have lived your life, your childhood, adolescence, adulthood and so on, you have adopted an approach to living your day-to-day life, beliefs about the state of your environment and how you fit into it, and preconceptions about the safety of birth and your ability to have the birth you envision.

What we often forget is that every member of your birth team has undergone the same process throughout their life, and they have developed their approach to day-to-day life, their own beliefs about the environment around them and their own preconceptions about birth, and they will project all of that onto you. Depending on how aligned those thought patterns are with you and your birth, your birth team's patterns can be exactly what you need or exactly what you don't need.

Sometimes, you don't have a choice in your birth team, sometimes you don't realize the misalignment in your birth teams beliefs and preconceptions until you are going through labor and their true preconceptions are revealed. Regardless, if you have done the exploration into those aspects of our lives that ultimately result in how we each view the world, you will have an unlimited box of communication tools to reach almost anyone because you now have insight into something fundamental about human nature.

This power to understand another human being at this level of human nature is the most powerful tool you can carry into your birth room. This gives you the leverage of words, using the right ones at the right time, and those words can change the whole atmosphere of a room in a sentence. The right words can give you time, resources, support, understanding.

How do you learn how to connect to others, even someone you have just met in this way?

It's not as hard as it sounds!

There are four core types of personality developments, with subtle fluctuations within each of them. By learning some basic traits of each one, you can identify nearly anyone's type within a few minutes and have key insights into how to approach a conversation to have the most success in connecting with them.

In the Natural Birth Compass program, we have a simple framework, something like the Enneagram or Myers Briggs, but it is based on thousands of years of Chinese philosophy and study of human nature, the basic core of who we are, how we live in societies and how we interrelate with our environment and others in it.

It's not a fancy framework, and it is simple to understand, but don't confuse simple for simplistic, it is very profound and provides amazing results for our students.

Learn more in Episode 16, How to Identify Your Birth Type on the Unschooled Homebirth podcast, wherever you get podcasts!