Samantha Nolan-Smith – Birth Confidence Summit
Samantha Nolan-Smith is the founder and CEO of The School of Visibility. Through its classes and programs the School supports women to speak up and be seen and heard in the world.
After studying at the School, women find they're able to:
- - recognise their own worth and feel confident in sharing their unique perspective with the world
- - put themselves forward for opportunities they'd previously shied away from,
- - confidently speak up about topics that others might consider controversial, and
- - step forward as a new type of leader in their industry.
Time Stamps
Women have a huge amount of conditioning about not using their voices. Samantha shares how for her this was strong conditioning against questioning authority.
5.20 Being confident in one area doesn't mean you are automatically confident in another areas such as birth.
8.00 Coming up against the system and how it can knock your confidence and send you into Good Girl Mode.
10.00 The Good Girl in patriarchal systems must be nice, do as she is told, be kind and compliant and all of this can work against you in birth.
12.50 The rise of Caesarean sections and the link to that being the way doctors have the most control over the process. When you challenge this you are challenging an entire professions ethic and way of managing risk and the human body and we tent to be very hesitant and it doesn't get heard correctly.
15.56 Doctors are unused to be questioned but they are providing a service.
18.22 You are the epicentre of whole universe and everyone else is there to help you. Samantha created this atmosphere for her second birth.
21.20 The key to making the system working for you is to have your own navigation system finely tuned. Be clear on what you want to be feeling throughout the process.
24.20 Samantha's empowered Caesarean birth story including how she navigated the change in birth as the labour progressed.
30.14 Defining confidence - The embodiment of self worth. Live your value in every cell and every moment , there is no question of your value in this place.
34.31 Exposing the Good Mother Archetype and how we can learn from our own mothers and let go of a lot of conditioning that may have been passed down our family lines this way.
42.15 Transferring your life skills to the birthing room. You have gold in your experience to now that you may be overlooking. Draw on it.
44.30 Is this a jail or a hospital? Samantha advocates for herself about when to leave the hospital and other decisions she made for herself.
50.40 Samantha's vision for the future of birth and motherhood. where our wisdom is respected, acknowledged understood ,shared and that everybody understands the most important person is the woman.
57.00 Find confidence by learning to love your own body and overcoming this particular conditioning of the patriarchal society we live in.
Finishing with a discussion of sexual assault and if this is in your history it is important to have healing work and check your conditioning as you may be living the story that you do not get to choose what happens to your body. You can give yourself permission to be the one to choose and to set boundaries around that.
