You’re pregnant. . .and if you’re anything like most of the people I work with, you’ve already been down the rabbit hole – the Amazon lists, the ‘must have’ reels, the influencer hauls. You’ve probably spent more time comparing travel systems than you have thinking about the birth itself.

And that makes complete sense – because that’s what we’re told to do.

But after 20 years of working with pregnant people and their families, I want to tell you something that might feel a little uncomfortable: the coming home outfit will last a day or two. The travel system might last a couple of years. But how you feel about your birth? That stays with you forever. And it stays with your baby too.

So here’s what I actually think you need – and I’d bet it’s not on any of those lists.

1. Education – and not just any education

This is the one almost nobody thinks about, because we’ve been sold the idea that pregnancy and birth are “the most natural thing in the world, so why would you need to learn about it?”

Fair question, and in a different world – one where we grew up surrounded by birth, watching it, hearing it talked about calmly and honestly – maybe we wouldn’t. Our bodies do instinctively know what to do. The problem is that our thinking brains have an enormous impact on what our instincts are actually able to drive us to do. Fear, tension, outdated information, horror stories absorbed over a lifetime – they all have a very real effect on how labour unfolds.

So education matters. But not all education is created equal, and this is worth thinking carefully about.

Consider learning a language. You can use apps, tapes, workbooks – and you might come away understanding the grammar. But can you hold a conversation? Generally not. It’s the guided practice, the doing it with another person, that takes you from understanding to actually being able to use it. Birth preparation is no different.

When you’re looking at what’s out there, here’s what I’d suggest watching for:

Avoid anything that promises you a specific type of birth – whether that’s positive, pain-free, drug-free, or any other version. Good preparation isn’t about guaranteeing an outcome. It’s about preparing you for all eventualities, so that whatever happens, you’re ready.

Avoid pre-recorded courses that have never been updated. The birth world changes – the evidence, the guidance, the way our maternity systems work. Even if birth itself doesn’t change, the context around it does.

And please, don’t underestimate how important it is that your education covers the maternity system itself. There is genuinely no point doing all the preparation work and then walking into a hospital not knowing how to navigate it. The people working within that system want to support you – but they’re working under enormous pressure, and knowing how it works puts you in a much stronger position.

2. Fear release work

Let’s address something head on, because it comes up over and over again: the worst thing about hypnobirthing is the word “hypno.”

People hear it and immediately picture a stage show – someone clicking their fingers, a volunteer clucking like a chicken, the audience laughing. That kind of hypnosis is about performance, about spectacle, about someone else taking the wheel.

The hypno in hypnobirthing has nothing to do with that. It comes from hypnotherapy – and we use it in two specific ways.

The first is learning how to get into a deep state of relaxation. This isn’t about switching off or losing awareness – it’s about giving your body the conditions it needs to do its job. Labour and birth work best when your nervous system feels safe. Deep relaxation is how we get there.

The second is more traditional hypnotherapy work – releasing fears. And this part matters more than most people realise, because most of us have spent our entire lives absorbing horror stories about birth. From films, from family members, from overheard conversations we weren’t even meant to hear. It’s completely rational to be scared of birth. You’ve been quietly collecting evidence for years that it’s something to be terrified of.

Good education can do a lot to shift your thinking mind, but you can feel completely prepared in theory and still have something sitting at a subconscious level that interrupts labour without you ever knowing it was there. A memory, an image, a fear you didn’t even consciously register as a fear.

Hypnotherapy tools work on that level. Releasing those fears – even the ones you didn’t know you had – so that when labour begins, your body isn’t fighting itself.

You stay completely in control throughout. That’s not a reassurance – it’s just how it works.

3. Your birth partner

Let me tell you something about my own husband first.

Before I trained in hypnobirthing, we had already agreed he wouldn’t be at the birth of our children. We knew his own fight or flight response ran hot – more fight than freeze – and the thought of watching me in pain, feeling completely helpless, was something he genuinely couldn’t get his head around. So we’d written him out of the room before we’d even considered what he might bring to it.

I tell you this because I suspect a lot of birth partners feel exactly the same way, even if they’d never say it out loud. They think birth is something the mum/birthing person does, and they’ll just be in the way. They’ve heard the stories. They’re worried they’re going to witness something that looks more like a medical emergency than anything else. They often don’t want to come to the class because they genuinely don’t think it’s for them.

It is absolutely for them.

Here’s something that most birth preparation doesn’t tell you: during labour, your neocortex – the thinking, talking, reasoning part of your brain – needs to go quiet. That’s not a problem, that’s the design. But it does mean that when you’re deep in labour, you cannot also be the one negotiating with medical staff, asking questions, holding the thread of what you wanted and why. You’re busy. You’re doing the most important work of your life.

Someone else has to hold all of that for you.

That’s what a prepared birth partner does. Not witnessing. Not hand-holding – though that matters too. Protecting your space. Advocating for your wishes. Knowing enough about the system to ask the right questions and push back calmly when needed. When birth partners come to my course and do the work alongside mum/birthing person, the difference is remarkable. Time and again mums tell me they couldn’t have done it without them.

So – choose your birth partner carefully. Make sure they do the preparation with you. The education, the fear release work, all of it. Because their fears about birth are just as real as yours, and just as worth addressing.

And then, once you’ve done all of that together, it’s worth thinking about whether you also want a doula.

I say also – because a doula isn’t a replacement for a prepared partner. It’s a support for both of you. Being a birth partner is a big responsibility, in a situation most people have never been in before, while being deeply emotionally invested in the outcome. That’s a lot to hold. A doula who knows the landscape means your partner can focus entirely on you – and you both go in with a much stronger team around you.

4. The practice

This is the one people are most likely to skip. Not because they don’t want to do it – but because life is full, and things that don’t have a fixed slot in the diary have a habit of quietly disappearing.

So let’s talk about that.

First, you are allowed to slow down. I know that might sound obvious, but for many of the people I work with it really isn’t. You’ve probably been running at full speed since the moment you saw that positive test. Still working, still delivering, still being the capable one in every room you walk into. Your baby is already here – growing, listening, responding to you – and you haven’t really had a chance to just… be with them yet.

The practice gives you that. A few minutes each evening that belong entirely to you and your baby. Not productive minutes. Not ticking-things-off minutes. Just quiet, intentional time where you are doing something that matters enormously, even if it doesn’t look like much from the outside.

Think about an Olympic athlete preparing for their event. They don’t turn up on the day and hope for the best. The race is won long before they get to the track – in every training session, every early morning, every repetition that felt unremarkable at the time. And here’s the thing: when they’re actually running, they’re not thinking about technique. They’re not consciously managing their breathing or their form. All of that has already been absorbed. The work was done. The body just does what it was prepared to do.

That’s exactly what we’re building during pregnancy. By the time labour begins, you won’t need to think “what was I supposed to do?” It will already be part of you. The breathing, the relaxation, the ability to drop into a calm state – it shows up because you practiced it, quietly and consistently, weeks before you needed it.

Now – the practical bit, for those of you who need a system to make something real.

The reason most people struggle with practice isn’t motivation, it’s decision fatigue. If “do my practice” lives as a vague intention somewhere on your mental to-do list, it will always lose to whatever else is happening that evening. So we take the decision out of your hands entirely.

We suggest attaching your practice to something you’re already doing – winding down for the evening, getting into bed. Something that happens anyway, every day, regardless of how busy things have been. Slot the practice in there, keep it short and achievable, and suddenly it stops being another thing to remember and becomes just part of how your evenings end.

Little and often beats occasional and heroic every single time. You’re not cramming for an exam the night before. You’re building something into your nervous system, quietly and consistently, so that when labour begins – it’s already there.

5. A birth plan – yes, really

I know. Eyes are rolling. I’ve seen it a thousand times, and I get it – birth plans have a reputation for being the thing that naive first-timers create and experienced midwives quietly set aside.

But here’s the thing. How many significant things in life do we actually do with no planning at all? Would you get married with no planning? Even eloping to Gretna Green involves a plan – even if it’s just how to get there.

The problem isn’t the plan. The problem is that most people are trying to write one without the information they actually need to make it meaningful.

The lists you find online ask you things like where you want to give birth, whether you want pain relief, who you want in the room. And those feel like reasonable questions – until you realise that you’re answering them based on assumptions. What you’ve seen on television. What you’ve heard from other people. What “everyone knows.” You don’t know what you don’t know, and nobody is telling you what the real options even are, let alone what the evidence says about them. So you fill in the boxes as best you can, based on a picture that might be missing some rather important pieces.

A genuinely useful birth plan comes after genuinely useful education. Once you understand your options – really understand them, not just the surface version – you can start to make choices that are actually yours. Not defaults. Not assumptions. Yours.

And even then, it’s not a contract. It’s more like planning a holiday somewhere you’ve never been. You look at what’s there, you think about what appeals to you, and you create a loose sense of what you’d love – knowing full well that when you arrive, things might look different to how you imagined. If it’s raining on Monday and you don’t fancy the hike you’d planned, does that make the hike a bad idea? No. You adapted. Birth is exactly the same.

The power of a birth plan isn’t the document. It’s the process of making it – because if you don’t know your choices, you don’t have any.

Ready to talk?

If any of this has landed – if you’ve found yourself nodding along, or feeling that quiet pull of “I think I need this” – I’d love to have a conversation.

A discovery call is just that. A chat. No pressure, no hard sell. Just a chance to talk about where you are, what you’re hoping for, and whether working together feels like the right fit.

You can book yours here