110. My Client Asked for a Refund...and Doula.. It Devastated Me

My coaching client asked me for a refund. And it devastated me.

At the time, I thought it meant I needed to become a better coach. Give more.  Work harder to make sure no client could ever leave my world disappointed again.

Years later, I realize I learned the wrong lesson.

Because there’s a massive difference between someone who wants the transformation and someone who is willing to participate in creating it.

In this episode, I’m getting vulnerable about that first refund, what unexpectedly brought that experience back to the surface, and the realization that’s changing who I want to coach and how I want to build this next chapter of my business.

I'm getting honest about why I’m becoming far less interested in reaching more doulas and far more interested in going deeper with the right ones.

I’m also sharing why I’m simplifying everything and why I believe established birth, postpartum, death doulas, and other in-person perinatal professionals need a path to greater income that doesn’t automatically require more births, more overnights, more clients, and more of their physical time.

Because I don't want to help doulas escape the work they love.

I want to help them build businesses that make it possible to stay in this work for the long haul.

>>>>This episode is going to feel very, very personal. And when it does, don't fight the urge to book a free Clarity call with me here. <<<<

Struggling to grow your doula business? Tired of chasing prospects online? Imagine effortlessly attracting your dream clients and consistently generating a steady income month after month. 

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Transcript

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I'm gonna talk about my very first coaching client that ever asked me for a refund. Okay. I was new, I was trying to prove this could work. I wanted so badly to be good at this, and someone trusted me enough to pay me. Somebody believed I could help her. And then she wanted out. And it devastated me. Not like that's an unfortunate thing. I was devastated. I didn't have enough evidence yet to separate an experience like that from my identity. I didn't have hundreds of clients behind me at this point. I didn't have years of testimonials built up. I didn't have all this proof saying, Lisa, you're really fucking good at this. So when that first client wanted a refund, my brain didn't go, oh, this is an interesting data point. What can we learn from this? My brain went, maybe I'm not good enough for this. Maybe I can't create the transformation. I'm not a good coach. Welcome to the six-figure doula podcast. This is where confidence becomes currency. If you're a birth worker who's ready to stop overthinking, stop undercharging, and start leading like you mean it, then you're not here by accident. Every week we talk sales without the ick, money without shame, and building a business that actually holds you and your clients. Welcome home, Dula. We are back, and I want to address an elephant that is in the room and it is so damn big, and its butt is like in my face, and I just need to acknowledge it. And that is that I didn't release a podcast episode last week. And I have a feeling I can like picture your face right now. I know that probably sounds incredibly insignificant. Like people miss podcast episodes all the time. Life happens, right? Business gets busy, kiddos need you, things get pushed. But I want to tell you, and I think there's room for some vulnerability here, because I've been sitting in this for about a week now, but in 110 weeks of this podcast, I have only missed two episodes, last week being one of them. Two times this has happened. And I wasn't gonna talk about this because there was an immediate part of me that wanted to just brush it off. It's fine, it's one week. Nobody cares as much as you do, Lisa. And logically, I know that. I know that. But emotionally, it bothered the shit out of me. And then the fact that it bothered the shit out of me bothered the shit out of me. So it's not because I think that missing a podcast episode is some catastrophic business failure, but because I was set, I said I was gonna do something, and I didn't do it. And that is extremely uncomfortable for me. And I've been thinking a lot about why it put me in this state of discomfort as much as it did. Because truthfully, I have had such an incredibly full season. There are some seriously legitimate reasons that I didn't get that episode done. Some of those reasons I actually plan to come here and share with you at length. I have been reflecting on how I want to approach those conversations. I actually am feeling an immense amount of relief about being able to bring that to you. I'm not quite ready yet, but we're getting very, very close to that, I promise. I could really give myself a mile-long list of those reasons. But underneath all of that was this feeling of that's not who I am. And that thought has kind of stopped me in my own tracks. Because isn't that interesting? It has nothing to do with this podcast. It has everything to do with my identity. I see myself as someone who shows up. And this goes really deep. In fact, I posted a reel recently that did surprisingly well. And I it was just something I did like for self-expression and fun to be truth, truthful with you. And it was about how my parents have actually taught me some of the biggest lessons that have brought the most money into my business. And a lot of those lessons revolve around being dependable and consistent, moving, executing, figuring shit out. And the truth is, I don't need everything to be perfect before I take action. In fact, I don't ever wait for things to be perfect before I take action. And so when my behavior did not match the identity that I have for myself, even for one week, I felt that in my soul. And instead of immediately trying to make that discomfort go away, I've just been sitting with it and looking at it and doing things that feel healthier. And this is the, this is the progress, this is the work, right? The old Lisa would have stayed up until one in the morning. The old Lisa would have skipped the opportunity to go and celebrate my husband on his and his birthday on the water and blow off the afternoon because I had a cancellation. And it revealed something that I think is changing rapidly in my business. And this simple thing of just like missing one week of podcasting has helped me understand with more clarity who I want to work with moving forward. And more importantly, who I do not. And I have spent ample time defining my ideal client based on what she does. And that is what we are taught, right? And so there's no shame in that game. I mean, I've been there. Um, I have even taught that in the past. I think that is pretty universal, right? So, like in my instance, I would define my ideal client as a birth doula or a postpartum doula, a death doula. Maybe she's another perinatal professional whose bread and butter comes from in-person work. She's on the ground, she's in the trenches, she's serving actual human beings. She is established enough to know that she loves this work and this is her calling, but she is starting to realize that she can't simply keep adding more clients, more births, more overnights, more hours if she wants to create more income. And all of that matters, those are key components to my very specific niche. But what I am realizing is that is still not specific enough. Because that is demographics. That is not necessarily her identity. And I think some of the most powerful niching happens when you stop asking, what does my ideal client do? And you start asking, who is she? Who is this person? How does she operate? What does she value? How does she respond when something doesn't work out? What does she do when she's terrified? What does she expect from herself? How much responsibility is she willing to take for the life and the business that she wants? Because two doulas can look almost identical on paper, right? Both attend to the same number of births, both making the same amount of revenue month after month, same credentials, certifications. They might even live in the same city. They may struggle with the same roadblocks, right? Their goals may look very similar. And I can be absolutely freaking electric coaching one of them and completely drained coaching the other. And the difference comes down to their identity. I am putting this out into the world with full certainty. I want the woman who moves. Not recklessly, not without fear even, but she moves. She has enough self-trust to make a decision without needing 17 people to validate it first. If she says she wants something, she is willing to participate in creating it. She does not expect coaching to remove discomfort. She understands that sometimes the discomfort is the damn work. She can get disappointed, but not disappear. She can have a bad month without deciding that her business is broken. She can hear something that doesn't necessarily, you know, feel good, something she doesn't really want to hear, and she can still get curious and not defensive. She is an implementer, she's willing to do experimentation, and she comes back. She is here for the long haul. She is in this for the long game. She is building generational wealth. And maybe that's why missing last week's episode bothered me so much. And let me be clear, that is embarrassing for me to say out loud. Because I'm realizing that the qualities that I expect from myself are increasingly the qualities that I want surrounding me in my business. No longer perfection. I came from a world, a lifetime of perfection. Not even relentless productivity. That, my friend, is a massive shift. Not hustle for hustle's sake. Ownership, consistency, self-trust, resilience, actual follow-through, a willingness to move. And that realization is simplifying so much for me right now. I am overhauling things behind the scenes with so much intention. So again, my offers, my anchor messaging, my content even, the way that I am starting to see my own growth, because I don't think your niece should only become the person, the descriptions of that person who could buy from you. Your niche should describe the person you do your best work with. That is such a different thing. And it took me a minute to figure that out. And today I want to talk at length about what happens when you stop building for everyone who technically needs what you want, and you start building for the specific kind of woman, the specific kind of person that you want to go all the way with. And I am realizing are you ready for this? I am realizing I don't want more. I want deeper. And that is requiring me to get so much more honest about who I'm building all of this for. So there is this phrase that keeps coming back to me. And it's something that I literally started my doula business centered around. So when let me be more specific, and also if you can hear my toddler screaming downstairs, apologies. But like if we don't do it messy, it doesn't get done. So just disclaimer. But when I made the shift from doing predominantly in-person doula work to predominantly mentoring in-person doulas, I worked everything around this phrase. Simplicity sells. And I didn't mean it just through a marketing lens. I meant across the board in your business, simplicity sells. So I want to talk today about one core message for one specific person, a clear next step to get them into your orbit. And one thing that we are calling someone to do, we are asking people to take an action. Because I have spent a lot of my entrepreneurial life proving how much I can do. And I'm not even really that proud of that. Right. So for a really long time, it was like, let me show you how much I can create. Let me show you how quickly I can move, how many ideas I can execute on, how many problems I can solve. And lately, it that ain't it for me. I am so much more interested now in asking what actually needs to be here. So what if growth isn't about adding another offer, another funnel, another audience, another platform, another training? What if the next evolution is becoming brave enough to choose? Because choosing means excluding. And I think that's the part we don't talk about enough because that's the part that is scary as shit, but it is powerful. So here it goes. I want to work with the doulas who are not trying to abandon client work and sell a course about childbirth education in lieu of their in-person work. I want to work with doulas that love the work. That's an important distinction. I'm not saying that we can't supplement your in-person income, that we can't diversify the different revenue streams, that we can't make incredible bundles that are based in your own method and approach that make so much sense and increase your revenue. But I want to work with the doulas that do not want to escape the work. Instead, they want the work to stop owning them. These are women that have built or are in the process of building something so real. They have clients, they have experience, people trust them. They know that they are so good at what they do, but eventually they hit this point where they realize I cannot just keep adding more clients. I cannot take another postpartum overnight. I cannot just keep adding hours to create the next income level. There are only so many hours. You only have one body, you only have one nervous system. There are only so many years that we get with our little babies, and there is only so much being on call that one human can sustainably hold. So the person that lights me up doesn't necessarily need more clients. I mean, she probably wants more clients, but at the end of the day, she needs more leverage from the business that she's already built. And that comes down to better positioning and higher value offers and better sales and higher conversions and more predictive, more predictability across the board and her demand in her income, in her conversions. So that's more depth, fewer people. Scalability, where scalability actually makes sense. I also have a story that I want to share with you because I think it's relevant. And I and my hope is that with me being vulnerable as hell right now, you can take something from this that will give you that clarity, validate you in a way that maybe you didn't realize you needed, and essentially just help you trust yourself. So I'm gonna talk about my very first coaching client that ever asked me for a refund. Okay. I was new, I was trying to prove this could work. I wanted so badly to be good at this, and someone trusted me enough to pay me. And I remember how much that meant to me because it was after I'd increased my prices for the first time, like significant increase. So this was evidence, right? Somebody wanted what I had to offer, somebody believed I could help her, and then she wanted out, and it devastated me. Not like that's an unfortunate thing. I was devastated because when you're new, or I don't want to generalize, when I was new, I didn't have enough evidence yet to separate an experience like that from my identity. I didn't have hundreds of clients behind me at this point. I didn't have years of testimonials built up. I didn't have all this proof saying, Lisa, you're really fucking good at this. So when that first client wanted a refund, my brain didn't go, oh, this is an interesting data point. What can we learn from this? My brain went, maybe I'm not good enough for this. Maybe I can't create the transformation. I'm not a good coach. Maybe I should just give the money back and quietly go do something I'm already good, I'm already good at, which to be honest, was me considering going and just selling, selling for somebody else and making a commission. Um, and deep down, I knew that this client, when she started with me, just wanted results. And I believed that she wanted that transformation that we talked about. But wanting a result and being willing to become the person capable of creating that result are two very different things. So this person wanted things to change, but she wasn't willing to do the work required for things to change. And I could feel myself wanting to compensate for that at every turn. Maybe I need to give her more. Maybe I need to explain the homework differently. Maybe I need to check in with her and take that initiative every single day. Maybe I need to give her another resource, motivate her more. Maybe if I become a better coach, she'll become a more committed client. And that was one of the earliest lessons that I learned about coaching. I cannot want someone's transformation more than she does. I can create an extraordinary room. I can tell you the truth and not sugarcoat it. I can see your blind spots and I can help you build a strategy that actually revolves around your gifts. I can coach you through your fears. I can hold belief for you on a day when yours gets shaky. I can challenge you in the most loving way to help you grow beyond and stretch. And I can walk alongside you, but I cannot walk for you. And when I tried, we both lost. And for a while, I think that experience made me want to prove myself even harder, give more value, give more access, more everything. Because maybe if the offer was undeniable enough, nobody could ever be disappointed. That's not how transformation works. Man, was that a messy time? More information does not create a more committed human. And that's where I now feel like this becomes a full circle. Because I'm stripping things back in my business. I don't want 37 trainings so someone can look at a portal and think, holy shit, look how much I just got from her. I don't want 12 different call to actions so that every single doula and every single season has somewhere to go. I don't want six different audiences. And I don't want to build offers that attempt to solve every possible problem a doula could encounter between certification and retirement. I want precision, one powerful anchor message for my one ideal dream client, one primary, undeniable transformation and a clear invitation to step into that space. And I want to go incredibly deep with those women. So I want the doula who's already moving. That's important to me. Not someone who never gets scared or has it all figured out already or doesn't need support. No, no, no. That's literally why my coaching exists. But I want a woman with enough self-trust that when we uncover the next move, she moves. She doesn't need me to drag her. She doesn't need six months of convincing that she's allowed to want what she wants. She doesn't need me to care more about her business than she does. So she's coachable and curious. She can tolerate discomfort and she can hear something that challenges her without immediately making it mean she's failing. So this woman understands that business requires trial and error. Sometimes the real flop, sometimes the launch doesn't create the revenue you were hoping for. Sometimes the sale call ends in a no. Sometimes we raise the price and we have to sit in some serious discomfort. Sometimes we discover that the thing that she's been doing for three years is the exact thing holding her back. And she does not disappear when that happens. She stays with me, she learns, she adjusts, she keeps moving. That's the woman I'm interested in. That's the woman I am here for because she's here for the long haul. And so am I. And maybe this is the biggest evolution for me. Like I used to want everyone to like me. I wanted every client to get the result. I wanted every duel to see herself in my content. I wanted every person who entered my world to think Lisa's amazing. That first refund cracks something open in me. At first, I thought the lesson was become so good nobody ever asks for a refund ever again. Years later, I think the lesson was completely different. Stop trying to build a business where everyone belongs because the deepest transformations that I have witnessed in this work have not happened because I finally became good enough to transform someone. They happen when the right coach meets the right woman at the right moment and they're both willing to do the work. That's what I want more of. I want women who have enough self-trust to make decisions. They are willing to practice and implement before things feel absolutely perfectly aligned. You know, they can be supportive. Without needing to be rescued. And they're not looking for the magic sentence that's gonna make entrepreneurship easy for them. These are women, mothers, doulas who understand that we're building skills they'll use for the rest of their careers. So I want the doulas who love this profession enough to build businesses capable of keeping them inside of it for the long haul. That's the work I want to spend the rest of my life doing. So maybe the next level is not more. And let me be really clear: I don't mean I don't want more money, but I don't want more hustle. I want one incredibly specific identity. I want a message that calls to her, a simple invitation because I'm not chasing, and a transformation that I am willing to become exceptional at creating. And enough self-trust to let everything else become background noise. I am not here to build the widest business anymore. I'm interested in building the deepest trench possible. I don't want more clients simply for the sake of more. I want the right women. I don't want more offers anymore. I want stronger offers. I don't want to create way more content. I want clearer ideas. Forget the noise. I want resonance. And I definitely don't want to build a business that requires me or any of the women that I coach to keep doing more and more and more just to maintain what we've created. I want sustainability. That's longevity, that's leverage, that's depth. I want businesses that hold the women who build them. And maybe that's what I've been trying to say all along when I say I don't want to build it like anyone else, and I don't want to build it like this anymore. I don't want less. I want to know exactly what matters, and I want to have the courage to build around that. Here's what I want to leave you with today. If you've been listening to me describe this woman and thinking to yourself, fuck, that is me. Stop denying yourself. If you're already doing the work, you're supporting births, you're working postpartum, you're serving families in person, and you know you're damn good at what you do, but you are also starting to realize that more clients cannot be your only strategy for making more money. I want to exclusively invite you to book a clarity call with me, especially if you're ready for more sustainability, more predictability, and more simplicity. You want a business that can grow without requiring you to give more and more of your body and your nights and your weekends and your time. And let me be clear, this is not a call where I'm going to convince you to want your business more. I'm not going to talk you into being ready. I am looking for women who are already ready to move and they want someone in their corner who can help her figure out where to go next. So we will look at where your business is right now, what is keeping you from that next level, and what needs to change specifically to build the business that you want for the long haul. So if that is you, book the call. Book your clarity call using the link in my show notes. You don't need to have it all figured out, but you do need to be ready to do something with what we uncover. So if you're that woman, if you're that person, if you're that human, that mother, I want you in my world. Click the link. Let's make some moves.