This session brings together your joyful, creative playful mind and your analytical, organizational, goal oriented mind.  We will start with the concept of Ikigai or Joyful Purpose and the DTD Marketing Exercise in your training manual, and then use mind mapping techniques to tap into the creative part of your brain.  We will spend time visioning your end goal/result, and then creating steps to get from there back to here utilizing exercises from the Doula Business Workbook by Patty Brennan.  Along the way you will have individual and group feedback about your plans, reflecting back your own talents and affirming the good ideas you already have. 

Some of these techniques can be easily found in books or online. But it is the magic of actually doing them in a group with people who are experienced and want to help you succeed that makes the difference.  Our goal is for you to feel confident and inspired to take the steps you design that day.

This session is designed to be helpful for the novice doula just starting out as well as the experienced doula wanting to deepen their market penetration or expand their individual business into a partnership, collective, or agency model. 

Amy L. Gilliland, Ph.D., AdvCD/BDT(DONA), CSE (AASECT) is a research associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the first DONA International birth doula trainers, an adult sexuality educator, and an infant mental health expert with specialized training in attachment. Her work has been published in multiple peer reviewed journals and in her new book, The Heart of the Doula: Essentials for Practice and Life.

Cole Ramsey has operated her postpartum doula agency in Columbus, Ohio for over three years.  For over sixteen years, she has been supporting families during pregnancy, birth, and through the first year as a childbirth educator, birth doula, lactation counselor, and postpartum doula. Her passion is in teaching doulas and health care professionals the art of support, which she did for many years as a trainer for DONA International and ProDoula. She has also spoken at national conferences on fetal positioning in labor and doulas as facilitators of oxytocin. Cole is currently an independent doula and doula trainer. She spends much of her time mentoring and providing continuing education to over 2,000 doulas in The Tough Love Doula Group on Facebook.