Today we’d like to introduce you to Aubrey Gann.
Hi Aubrey, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I always envied professionals who talked about discovering their calling and turning it into a career. By the time I was settling into my 20s, I just assumed something like that wasn’t in the cards for me. But after having my second daughter during the pandemic at a stand-alone birth center, I realized I had a desire to support families during pregnancy and birth, helping them feel seen, heard, and safe. I became a certified birth doula 18 months later. It started as a small dream: what if I could get a client a month and cover our grocery bills? As I invested my time in this dream, it quickly grew into what I would now call a fulfilling, heart-driven career. In addition to being a doula, birth photographer, doula mentor, and childbirth educator, as of this year I am also an author, having written and published a children’s board book about birth — “When You Arrived”. One day a few years back, I looked around and realized I’d become one of those people who could honestly say they found their calling. And what a privilege it is to have turned it into a career!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Definitely not! As I’m sure anyone who has started their own business can attest to, I invested time and money in those early years without many immediate results. I had to trust that my own consistency and drive would eventually lead to my definition of being successful. Over time, I finally started to see that hard work gain momentum. Even four years after starting this business, it’s still not always a smooth road. But the same principals of consistency and hard work continue to carry me through harder seasons.
In addition to the struggles of most entrepreneurs, birth work has a lot of unpredictability. When will your clients go into labor? How long will they be in labor? What important things will I miss in my personal life? How will their labor go? What kind of support will they need postpartum? Because of this, it can be really easy to “burn out” as a birth worker, so I make it a huge priority to plan my calendar in a way that I can “check in” on my own physical, mental, and emotional batteries and try to adjust my availability as needed. I can’t show up for my clients 100% if I’m not taking care of myself first!
We’ve been impressed with Nurturing Dawn Birth Services, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
My business provides a variety of birth services. First and foremost, clients hire me to be their birth doula and/or birth photographer. I walk alongside families throughout their pregnancy, labor, birth, and postpartum. I document the sacred moments of their births through photos and film. I provide additional services such as childbirth education classes and placenta services.
I also felt there was a need for a book that celebrates birth to exist. I had always imagined a book I could give to my postpartum families that celebrated and honored their birth experience (regardless of the outcome). But it seemed there wasn’t really a book out there that sought to represent a large variety of birth experiences, such as home births, cesarean births, hospital births, babies in the NICU, etc. So I decided to write my own! “When You Arrived” has been a passion project of mine since last year, and I’m so excited with the success of the book and how many families its pages have resonated with!
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
I’d say a big one is that I wouldn’t expect instant gratification and instead trust that delayed gratification will be worth it.
And most importantly, stay in-tune with what made you start in the first place because it’s that authenticity that will set you apart and help you find your ideal clients. It can be easy to look at how others in your market are doing it and want to just copy it. But I’ve found that the more I stay true to myself and what fuels my passion, the more my business thrives and the more happy I am doing this job. I’ve learned the hard way that trying to be like “everyone else” or be money-driven only pushed me to burn out and caused me to lose focus on why I was doing this work from the start!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nurturingdawndoulaservices.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nurturingdawnbirthservices/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nurturingdawndoula/
