I’ve been hearing from birth professionals who are struggling with finding clients and getting hired. These women are very actively marketing themselves. They’re putting themselves out there, making contacts, getting interviews, following up, but they’re just not closing the sale, or they’re not attracting the kind of clients they want – namely, paying clients.

In almost all of these stories lies a similar, underlying message – I’m not good enough.

Today is “What You Think Upon Grows” Day (not sure who made that up, but it’s a good theme to go with!), and it got me thinking about working with women during pregnancy and birth. Early on in my work as a doula, I began to encourage my clients to focus on what they wanted for their births. If they were fixated on what they didn’t want, I’d have them turn it around. What DID they want?

You’ve created your vision for your family life and business. You made a list of goals, and you’ve identified systems that can help with efficiency, time management, and overall household peace. Now it’s time to break down your systems and goals into smaller tasks and start implementation.

As much as I use my Outlook calendar and love my iPhone to track my appointments and important dates, there’s something about using a paper-based planner that just works well for me.

About a year ago, I found a great website called Productive Flourishing that’s run by Charlie Gilkey. He writes great articles about time management and getting organized, but what I really love is that he offers, for FREE, great printable planning calendars. And, he updates them each month. If you subscribe to his newsletter, you’ll be invited to visit his “secret lab”, where you have access to the month’s planners.

Are you writing these emails from scratch every. Single. Time? If you are, consider creating email templates from those old emails so you can recycle them from here on out. Then when you need to send out responses or new emails, all you do is select your template, personalize it a little bit, and hit the send button!

I love my iPhone, and I’m always searching for great apps to make my work and my life more efficient. Here are the apps that I use most frequently for work, life and play

Are you going mad because you spend lots of time searching for files on your computer? Here are some steps to getting your business files under control.

New subscribers to my newsletter receive an email from me asking if they have any burning questions about starting or growing their birth business. This morning, I received a letter from Rebecca. She is thinking about becoming a doula, and she wanted to find out some ways to keep herself informed with up-to-date information. Here are some resources I offered to her.