S1E3 – SeeBaby Founder: Dr Bootstaylor aka “Dr. B” – S1E3

S1E3 – SeeBaby Founder: Dr Bootstaylor aka “Dr. B” – S1E3 – powered by Happy Scribe

It’s not to say that the customer is always right, that is not what’s going on here. They want to be heard.

Boss Uncaged is a bi weekly podcast that releases the origin stories of business owners as they become Uncaged Trailblazers, Unconventional Thinkers, Untethered Trendsetters and Unstoppable Tycoons. We always hear about overnight success stories, never knowing that it took 20 years to become a reality. Our host S. A. Grant conducts narrative accounts through the voices and stories behind uncaged bosses in each episode, guest from a wide range of backgrounds sharing diverse business insights. Learn how to release your primal success through words of wisdom from inspirational entrepreneurs and industry experts as they depict who they are, how they juggle their work life with family life, their successful habits, business expertise, tools and tips of their trade release. The Uncaged Boss Beast in you welcome our host S. A. Grant.

Welcome to the Boston Case podcast on today’s show, we have none other than Dr Bootstaylor, better known as Dr. B. Dr. B is the founder of SeeBaby Maternal Practice out of Atlanta that specializes in birth options, that supports pregnant women in the community by giving them choice, shared decision making. But more importantly, from a client standpoint, clients don’t want to be right. They want to be heard. No more spoilers. Let’s jump right into the show. Without further ado, Dr. B

Welcome to the podcast Dr. B

Good Morning. Thank you.

First question we have today is who are you?

Who am I? One dollar question. I am a maternal field medicine specialist, Obstetrics Gynecologist. I’m a believer in autonomy, autonomous thoughts that a mother should be able to make in regards specifically to her pregnancy journey and birth options. And so that’s what I have been about for years. And I think I’m poised to continue to promote that and support it.

To find yourself in three to five words,

stepping out on faith in that with shared decision making and the ability to bring out from the mother patient her preferences, someone who could be the vehicle to help engage that, to bring that forward, bring it from the person, and then to be able to support the journey together,

if you don’t mind define shared decision maker. What is that exactly?

Wonderful questions. Shared decision making is a philosophy now that I’ve adopted over the years, and I’m crystallizing it now more than ever. But it’s one where the patient and our mother in this situation or scenario can have her understanding of what she is seeking, her understanding of the process, the scientific explanation or references, and to be able to have those conversations with her provider, be a midwife or obstetrician to where when there are certain decisions to be made about the care and management of the pregnancy and especially the birth, she’s able to share in that discussion in a balanced way to where she can exercise her choice for certain options about how she wants to see the pregnancy, go see the journey. So the ability to have a balanced discussion about the process that she is in the middle of, that’s the essence, I believe, of shared decision making. Now, mind you, having said that, shared decision making also comes with another component which is equally critical and that’s shared responsibility and with shared responsibility, it puts the provider hopefully at ease because they’re not necessarily telling someone to do and taking responsibility for that recommendation, but they’re sharing in the decision making and thereby everyone is responsible for or let me rephrase that they are responsible to that decision than that the provider needs to be responsible for it, but they are responsible to it. So if, for instance, mother is choosing to not take antibiotics because of a certain risk for an infection, because she believes and feels and knows that it’s good not to take the antibiotic, and if it turns out that the antibiotics were needed, she can be responsible to that decision she made and the provider can be responsible to it in the sense that they were able to explain the risk and benefit of the antibiotics. And thereby there’s a shared responsibility. There’s no finger pointing, I want to emphasize that, but it’s more so being responsible to the choices that were made. And then there’s a third critical component to share decision making, which I think encapsulate the whole piece in that’s called guided discovery, where you truly may have an expectation, even a preference for certain things. But as events unfold or new information is brought to the situation, you discover that you may need to change courses. You may need to. In the instance I gave about the antibiotics, you may need to backtrack and go and take the antibiotics. But in discovering that, you don’t necessarily have to feel embarrassed by it or doesn’t need to be, I told you so situation it can be. While I initially had this preference, I discovered that there are certain things going on that I need to now and take on in my decision making. And I’ve guided myself in another direction and I’m going to choose something else differently. So guided discovery I think makes help share. Decision making and shared responsibility, a healthy process so that there’s no finger pointing, there is this responsibility to it and you can discover some things about yourself.

Just by the way you answer that question, it sounds like you’re more of a teacher and a philosopher. Well, what actually is your business? What do you actually do on a daily basis?

I think that on a day to day basis, I’ll get to the nuts and bolts of it. But on day to day basis, I think encourage people to think beyond what’s inside their head and having a conversation and dialogue about processes and preferences. In my day to day, it happens to be attached to pregnancy. And so when I’m speaking with the majority of the time, it’s them verbalizing questions of ignorance or questions of expectations and allowing that moment or that element to be unmask and to discover it and to say, OK, yes, this is what I was thinking. And then what’s the practicality of that with this science support, that option or preference? So I think as a as a person who’s able to have those conversations, I can listen to people with their preferences are what their expectations are, allow them to feel ignorant about something without being embarrassed about the ignorance of it. And there’s no judgment, if you will. And so in doing that and believing in that and being agency to that, I’m able to do what I do regarding the birth and pregnancy and the happen to be doing that with pregnant mothers.

We definitely hear your passion about birth in general and just pregnancy all around. How did you even get into this business when it comes from how to start, you know?

Right. Well, I guess everything is a process of evolution. Begin somewhere and you find yourself somewhere else and you look back and say, wow, I didn’t. For myself, the nuts and bolts of it is that during medical school, I was able to work at a hospital in New York called Jacobi Hospital with a adopted J.J. Smith, who was a full time curmudgeon, I think stoic, silent, pimping your questions about birth and all that stuff and giving you no wiggle room to feign ignorance. So you had a personal expectation about what you needed to be understanding. And then when you had we call them Jayjay rounds, you have rounds patients with J.J Smith. You needed to be on your P’s and Q’s. And he would dive into clinical application of the knowledge, not necessarily book knowledge and taking tests and passing them. But how do you apply this clinically? And it is I guess with that platform, I guess you would talk about a mentor with that platform. I carry that through my learning and training with obstetrics to include maternal fetal medicine, which is the field of obstetrics that you specialize in, the science of what goes on. And so I’ve always been one where how do I apply this clinically? And so fast forward to many of the things that I’ve done over the years. It leads to this point where if I can support it scientifically and clinically and I could have a conversation with a mother about what that looks like and feels like, then share decision making becomes a natural evolution of that. And I just happen to have, I guess, enough clinical experience and scientific background and temperament to live in that space and not be intimidated by and not be fearful of it, not be afraid of the patient and all that stuff, but able to apply clinical medicine and science in a shared decision making model. And all that is based on all the years of training. But it started, as I think about it here today with JJ Smith as as a mentor and as a third year medical student, actually, when I met Dr. Smith so.

Is There’s definitely some back story which leads you to we always hear about the overnight success stories that took 20 years to become a reality. How long did it take you to get to where you are now?

Great question. It probably started long before college where I was selected, selected to be on a Special Forces eighteen. And I mention that only because on an eighteen and the Green Berets, the training is challenging, if you will, physically. But there’s another component to that, to where you see attrition rates from class sizes. And I think in my classroom, as was a hundred and fifty people, thirty of us graduated where the mental peace was the ability to contextualize fear, because if you cannot do that, it could be hazardous to your health. And if you can contextualize fear, then you can probably achieve the mission, achieve the goal, the ability to contextualize fear is the ability to process real information and make real decisions. And if you can imagine taking that in the realm of obstetrics, where it’s literally all about fear, what’s going to happen? This is the best for the baby. What do you think was the best you you to see? It is a fear leaden field. Should I have a circle of men that is afraid to put a cerclage in? Because in my closet, fear, fear, fear for everywhere, science in obstetrics, if you can look at it, actually allows you to contextualize risk. And if you can look at the science and put aside the fear, then you can have a conversation with a mother about the risk and then proceed down that road. And that’s how you’re able to do battle Bridgeboro, support vivax, do share decision making. Have moms go over there? Do they put cerclage then they do that because you use science, but you don’t introduce fear into the discussion, In my view, the overnight successes, the clinical training and experience of going through those scenarios in the real world with patients, mothers, their questions, their ignorance of the process, their expectations and your ability to support that management for the long ball is taking that template of contextualising Fear and Special Forces, Green Berets, getting some training in obstetrics, that’s with the residency program is about the Maternal Fetal Medicine Fellowship, which involves publishing scientific papers, thesis defense. I did a lot of animal work with sheeps for the catheters and sheeps and the heart rate patterns of the baby and gave medication and all that stuff I did about twenty sheep. It’s hard to do sheep work these days because large animals a lot of money to care for large animals. So I did a lot of sheep physiology and wrote a paper on it, by the way, giving sheep nitroglycerin to see if it alters the heartbeat. Because you want to use nitroglycerin as a medication to stop contractions and preterm labor. It relaxes the muscle quite well, by the way. And that’s for you, for your audience members is used for patients who have with angina heart attacks. So you give nitroglycerin over the muscle they live. They have beautiful outcomes. You can also use nitroglycerin to slow down contractions to prevent preterm birth, which is still the high rate in this country. It’s about 10 percent of free time. And medications have come and gone regarding country preterm birth. So you go to your fellowship and get your scientific background training. And then I got a chance to teach residents as an assistant professor of maternal freedom medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, and I taught residents two or three years, obstetrics is a resident here and that resident she’s attending. Her name is surely Riegle Eckles, who was my intern, I think, back then. cesareanAnd I taught her how to do cesarean births. And I bring her name up because when I was teaching her we were doing an emergency caesarean, I said, never do one. You could do a skin incision either up and down or the bikini clad and people were teaching her how to do it up and down incision, which is pretty long, up to the arms, above the navel and all that stuff. It looks kind of unsightly, to be honest, but I was taught how to do one and the bikini cut so that the incision is more statically pleasing. cesareanYou can do it in an emergency situation. I bring that up because she still brings it up to me to this day, twenty five years later, that I taught her how to do a caesarean and I was able to teach you that based on science. And she was being taught differently based on fear. So I thought I had the bikini clad. She still doesn’t to this day. She reminds me of it every time I see her. So the long road to give the short answer here is that going through those clinical experiences and applying science in a balanced way allows me to kind of get to my relation to the patients and the work that I do and to be able to support it.

So collectively, how long you’ve been doing it?

My first birth was as a medical student, I was able to attend, I think it was in nineteen eighty seven. That’s a third year medical student. And as a third year student, you kind of don’t know what’s going on, to be honest. But the miraculousness of it all was overwhelming. It was really in a situation where you went from expectation and waiting and not knowing what was going to come of anything to now seeing a baby come on to the plant. And so that was really profound. I can recall this scenario, if you will, and that was doing my last rotation as a. Student was called obstetrics and gynecology, and I had gone to the various other rotations, general surgery, radiology, psychiatry, things like that, pediatrics. I was happy to review it, but wasn’t initially moved by the experience and the ability to take care of a patient in those disciplines. So after that first birth, I decided to do what is called a sub internship. I mentioned JJ Smith. He was the director of sub internship and she was an honor to get to be able to do that with him. he only selected like two medical students every two months. And you had to be a fourth year medical student. And during the internship, which was two months of movie acting as an intern, so as a fourth year students, I was able to run a labor labor suite and help manage the patients with the residents in the attendings. So it was a badge of honor, if you will, to be a fourth year medical student selected for JJ Smith’s sub internship and things just compounded from there. So as far as being able to do Bursztyn attend things take care of patients, learn about the empathetic relationships constellation and maybe the human, in all fairness, started back then. And I went on to do my surgical residency. That’s another four years. And then I did another two years as a maternity field medicine fellow. And then I mentioned before, Beth Israel.

So what is one thing you would do differently if you can do it all over again to get you to where you are a lot faster?

I guess going back to your second or third question is not an overnight success. I guess there are some things I could do without. I’ll say to you that I thought that if I had enough providers in my space that we could as a team promote shared decision making, if you will, on a wider scale. So instead of it being one on one myself, if I had four or five different mid-level providers working with me, that we can open up the access to many mothers to have options. I thought that if I had many midwives working with me that we can provide choices and options on a broader scale. What I come to realize with that is that midwives of people, too, and they have their fears and their self editing and maybe to some degree ignorance of certain processes. And in some of those work relationships, there was a struggle to achieve a common goal. I always thought it was clear what the goal was, which was to open up choices for moms to have both options. Something around this office we call Bring Birth Back is to bring back those choices to mothers. But I thought I can do it on a broader scale. And what I come to find out that is that not everyone can have that awareness or understanding of that vision. So I went through maybe a few iterations of these midwifery teams to try to bring a shared decision making model to support both options to as many mothers as I thought would be feasible. And it just became almost a repetitive challenge to maintain that temperament and discipline across with several team members. And so if I had to do something differently this go around to get to this point, I probably wouldn’t have spent as many years as I did trying to get that team together so I could could be building that team and rebuilding that team when I should have realized that it’s not necessarily the goal. That’s pretty obvious, which is both options, supporting mothers so they can have a shared decision making. But it’s hard for some people to bridge that gap, even though they may say they want to.

You mentioned bring Burke back from like tag line. And when it comes to businesses, it’s always a hard and difficult thing to come up with tag lines. And you’ve had that tag line for a long period of time. How did you come up with that tag line?

Yeah, I’ll give you two answers to that story. I was involved with a small group of people trying to open up a birth center here in Atlanta, Georgia. And at the time, there was only one of the birth center in Georgia and it was in Savannah. So you can imagine a state as big as Georgia having just one birth center. Meanwhile, there are some states that have probably tens of percent of 60, 70 of them here. We had in Georgia one. So I was working with a group of individuals and we were trying to do fundraising. We were trying to do something call appeal to the state to get a certificate of need to open a person. And that’s a political process with a lot of red tape. And so we were trying to figure out a way to get people to notice that this was a need for this birth center that was having dinner one day with the two of the people involved at the time, Angela Auroral and Kelly Wright. We were bouncing ideas off for another. And I said, you know, what we’re trying to do is which. To bring back these options of birth, the people that really should not have gone away and I said we need to call it green birth, that that’s going to be our campaign and even trademarked it. And with that process of getting the trademark, you’ll see it on on many things now, at least in regards to the person which finally did open, by the way, actually four or five years of struggle. But remember, back is a phrase that came to mind to me in that it was something we were trying to do. And it pops a question of people. When I say giving birth back, we always ask, where will they go? And then I get a chance to talk about my experience one, but also the birth options that they may not this person or mother would have. You may not even be aware of, like the ability to go over their due date, the ability to have a vaginal birth after a previous cesarean, the ability to opt for an induction. How about that? You can deliver it early. So bring birth back. Just speaks to bringing back birth options and I can support that. Relatively easily,

Considering that you’ve been in business for seems like decades at this point in time, but your own personal practice has been around for just over a decade, anniversary recently. did you come from? An entrepreneurial background. I mean, how did you even get the intuition to even know you could run a business that come from your mom, your dad? I mean, where did the hustle come from?

Yeah, the hustle and grit. I don’t have an entrepreneurial background in my family. Everybody have a business per say. But I will tell you that my Green Beret Special Forces experience taught me that working as a team with a degree of grit, determination and hustle, if you will, can allow you to achieve goals that you didn’t think possible. And so it is that background that is in my DNA. Now, with that said, fast forward a little bit. When I left Beth Israel Medical Center, where I was on faculty and I came to Atlanta, I worked for a maternal Field medicine specialist and I spent the year there. And I did not necessarily like the lack of teamwork that was involved in that particular practice setting. And I did not like that there were patients who weren’t having their option supported. And as a medicine specialists on Gynecologist, you about discussing options and getting pros and cons. So I did not like a philosophy or how that was being practiced then. So I left that practice to me and a good friend of mine at the time decided to start our own practice. And we didn’t have a dime in our pocket, but we knew that what we were doing was not in alignment with how we felt. So the grit and hustle to start my own practice started then, and that was in nineteen ninety seven point ninety eight excuse me, because I was here for a year so in nineteen ninety eight open the doors. Got some funding from a local bank, begging and pleading, essentially gave us some seed money. And I didn’t view it as an anxiety provoking process, but I in reflection I guess some of the people did and we got it done. I mean, it was you know, it was fun for me. It was really like we’re doing this and other bills to be paid and people joined us on faith. Long story short, we ended up opening the seven offices, opened up two offices in a year and was happy to do the work, enjoyed it experience. And it just kept growing and growing and growing. And I was with that practice for about 12 years. And so it was with that I want to do something different because it had had its most things do evolved in a certain direction that I was not comfortable with. There was a lot of I wouldn’t say. Shifts in the goals, like how we got to be almost you had to feed the beast, whereas you had to make patients come back for certain things that they may not have had to come back for, but it was a little wiggle room there. So you mean come back? I didn’t have that temperament, like make my decisions on facts and those kind of things. So I decided, well, let me do it one more time as an entrepreneur, open up SeeBaby. And so maybe the practice name today is really in line with my philosophy and what I can do to support mothers. This is share decision making model that we’ve been talking about. I do that with ease, happy to do it, love it, grateful for it. And now I guess I’m in a position to where I can take this entrepreneurial journey and now scale it up to others. And I hope to learn to be able to do that this next year. The decision making philosophy that I want to start promoting.

You had mentioned that you had to get some seed money, some capital going into banks. Is that one of those situations where you had to come in there with a business plan, a business proposal to kind of sell the idea?

Yes, we had to do some homework. I do some writing business plan, which I’ve learned don’t necessarily go the way they are written down. You hear that often enough, but had to sell the goods. I mean, there was a lot of doors closed, by the way, and meeting with those bankers and lending institutions. With that being said, there was one individual in particular, similar quarrels, Sydney Williams at the time, who was a banker at one of these local area banks. She was able to push our application through to where we met with her, Cynthia Williams and her associates and me and my colleague at the time we sat there had this interview and we put our best foot forward. And so Cynthia Lynch was able to get us the loan to start the practice. It was a small loan, but there was a lot of money then. It was a small loan. And we were able to having that loan, which was a line of credit, essentially being to a timeshare in an office space with another doctor, Olby, who have faith in us. And we time-Share that space for about six months. And from there we were able to generate some income and go on to sign our own leases and purchase our own equipment and things like that. So, yeah,

that’s a very interesting back story. Speaking about interesting back stories, you and your wife are both doctors.

Yeah, my better half.

And I think the first time you kind of told me about the story of your last name, if you don’t mind sharing that. I mean, it was definitely a great merge.

My wife’s name is Lisa. Lisa Boots was her name, in all fairness. And we met in medical school. She’s a year behind me in medical school, by the way. So I was one of those students who always like to give tours. And so she says she came to our medical school, which is Albert Einstein in New York. I was one of the tour guides and she saw me as one of the tour guides. I got to come to this medical school. So so she got in the medical school mind, I guess. And then I didn’t know this, of course, till later. And, you know, the small group of students in medical school that can really, really bond with each other. So we had actually a small cooking group. It was about ten of us. We would cook a meal once a week at each other’s dorm rooms or something like that. And so the small cooking group, everyone would try to outdo one another and learn different styles of dishes and certain cuisines. And so we were in a cooking group together, our first year medical students, I mean, my second year, but her first year. And with that, our relationship grew and became best friends to Lisa. Boutte’s got married to Brad Taylor. With that said, we decided I decided I wanted to take on her history and her name. And so I did a legal name change to Boots TAYLOR And then when we got married, Lisa just became Lisa Boots Taylor. So it’s pretty quick when you’re a woman. So I changed my name legally to Boots Taylor so that we can share in our histories. And we’ve been married now going on thirty three years.

Oh yeah. That’s a hell of a legacy.

This is pretty cool,

So how do you guys juggle the work life, family life. Both you guys have doctors schedules are crazy. You guys have three kids. So how do you how do you manage.

Yeah. Yeah. And I guess I guess like most things in the Honestly probably relate to this when you’re in the middle of the the moment you’re juggling and dealing with it. You know, I hear about, you know, did the whole carpool juggling act, sick kids, E.R. visits, midnight, runny noses and all that stuff. So, you know, like most people, you’re pushing through it and you realize how you get through it, but then somebody else hits you. In the moment, you’re not necessarily trying to appreciate the difficulty of it. You’re living it in your. Coping with it is stressful moments is lots of joyous moments, if you will, but with that said, being on the same wavelength, in the same feel, we can understand the commitment to the field of medicine. It’s not one where if we were I think we were in different or different arenas, it would be hard to fully understand why am I going to do a birth at two o’clock in the morning, eight days in a row when everyone else is off at five o’clock, having beautiful dinners and all that stuff? So she can understand that. And I can also understand what she’s doing when she has to be one of the few women in her specialty, which is plastic surgery. And she started with a male dominated field where she had to wear the daily prove herself even to newcomers. We could relate to each other background in our professions, more so as support as opposed to anything else. And then with that, like you mentioned, you had three children. People always ask me, let me answer this now. I did not deliberately think kids the hardest part actually is being a coach, a support person in a birth as opposed to delivering it, because as I tell a lot of people, taxidriver can do can do a delivery is to support peace as hard. So we have three kids, the wonderful people, and none of them are going into medicine, having seen our work life balance, which is cool and glad choices, if you will. So it’s great our three kids equally chase changes.So chances are number three, because it was our last chance to get it right. So we call them chance.

Interesting thing that you just said is that you were in a birth support group. So it kind of makes me think of undercover boss situation like you’re in the room. You do this for a living one side of the house. Somebody probably could have recognized you and the other side of the house, you know, exactly the way it should have been done. Was that a conflict of interest during your birth?

I mean, when I was in the group, that was we had to shoot us just because the group that we had evolved into from two people to about five maternal fetal medicine specialists.

Why Not to talk about your wife’s birth.

Oh, those are interesting births, is what I will say. I’ll take some time to kind of go back a little bit of that without boring the audience or grossing them out. But with our daughter, Chloe, we were both residents. She was in general surgery, by the way, which is pretty tough residency to go through. And I was at the end of my BO Gyn residency and we didn’t think of birth as a challenging dynamic. It was we thought it was going to have a national delivery. We didn’t really get into options. And all the things you had to fight for today, it was more so. OK, let’s work. Until we went into labor, I missed the majority, the prenatal visits. She went by herself. We were birthing at the place where she did her residency in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York when her water bag broke. We went out to dinner. When I talk to patients today, somebody just last week told me where I would have. They got to come to the hospital right away, don’t I? So back then, we just kind of looked at it like a natural process. And yes, I was in an O.B. resident, but I didn’t view it as a potential time bomb. Something’s going to happen. Oh, my God. Monitor what a bad girl went to dinner and went to sleep. Got up, I think at two o’clock in the morning. A few contractions call me OB. She’d be coming now. Coming in the morning. She said, come on, boys, you got there and did our thing. And we had a beautiful vaginal birth. Yeah, it was wonderful to see my daughter and all that stuff. I didn’t think anything of it. And I keep saying it like that because when I talk to patients who say, did you do the delivery? And I keep say no, the hard part is coaching. I can see now how for the patient, the hard part is just sitting by and watching it all unfold because there’s so much information coming at the practices of the nurses that will be OB who may want to do the words that is there, the kind of heavy you hear the word death mentioned all the time, or you know what’s best for your baby, don’t you? Almost accusatory condescension when we had our children. We need to say I’m almost embarrassed. We think much of it. It was like and that was a pretty anthologist with our second two kids. So didn’t think of all the potential things that could go wrong at all, but was in supportive environments with our with our obstetricians, our first and then our with our second baby. We were out in San Francisco. I was doing my fellowship. Lisa was doing research, looking at fetal wound healing. I remember that fondly because I had to collect a lot of blood from. Eighty percent of this winter, because she was learning how baby are in utero and was doing fetal healing work at the University of California, San Francisco. And so during that birth, get this, we’re at the home where OB anesthesia was developed, UCSF, they write the textbooks out there. She decided she wanted to get an epidural. I believe it wasn’t that. No, it was just a pain relief medication, fentanyl, no epidural. And she got an allergic reaction. And her allergic reaction was to be itching. She was itching to the whole labor. So as a support person and apparently anthologist, I could do nothing about the itching. But I had offer the support. And OB anesthesia team out there. It could do nothing about it. It’s one of the one percent of people get a side effect. So that was literally a miserable labor experience. And I was like, whoa. And we had a beautiful second child, our son Chase. quote-unquote And then with our third baby, we’re here in Atlanta in this building, in fact, and went quote unquote, natural nothing for pain medication to avoid the itching, went into labor and had our biggest babies, like nine pounds, something like that, nine fifteen and just didn’t think much of it really was still, the mind understands it as hard as I can contextualize all the potential risk. We really didn’t look at it like, oh my gosh, what could potentially happen? So as far as being in the room, to answer your question, there’s no push from me to the staff and all that. I just kind of went with it went with the flow people was MFM specialists. No one was trying to challenge me. Maybe they were giving deference to that, but there was no imbalance or the computations that had patients to share with me with their team and their providers and midwives. There was I didn’t sense or see any of that. So no drama off various

Definetly pretty interesting. Next up is what are your morning habits and what do you I mean, you’re always on call, but I’m still trying to figure out how do you get like eight hours of sleep, so.

Right, right. Right. Well, me and my wife say we should bank sleep, so. Meaning that you try to get a nap here. There. We don’t do that anymore. What I’m able to do is get a nice little solid blocks of sleep, which may total eight hours in pieces. But my morning ritual is one where I really move kind of slow in the morning because there’s a lot of you wake up to new thoughts. I kind of like absorb all the ideas that are coming in. I kind of project that what the day is going to look like. I don’t eat breakfast. I just have a nice cup of coffee for me. I grab some beans and that kind of thing. And I have a nice cup of coffee that has probably about eight packs of raw sugar in it. And that’s my one cup a day, to be honest. So I just use that as a fuel, but it only graphics intentionally because I want to have a sense of hunger by midday. But the coffee carries me and maybe the sugar in it that helps. I move slowly in the morning for sure, just to let thoughts process and to think about things and to think about what the day is going to look like, to reflect on what the last day was. Because I know once I get into the work environment, I got to kind of kind of hit it and I’m used to hitting it. All the time, so ironically for me, I just moved slower in the morning and then when I’m dropped into the zone, it’s on big time and I’m good with that because I’m used to stuff coming at me.

So that’s an interesting philosophy. If you don’t eat breakfast, you get a cup of coffee. And then what you just said was that you’re going to build up to the hunger. Is that more of an entrepreneurial hunger than more hunger executing a day? I mean, it’s not like you’re in a million a beast, right? So what kind of hunger you define?

Yeah, that’s that may be difficult to answer. I think some of the words you use to pose the question encapsulate that where you’re like this analogy, I can use that you’re kind of walking to the plains or the jungle or to a beach and things are slow and, you know, something is unfolding, something is out there and you know that. Let me enjoy this moment of introspection and quiet when what I drive to work. I’m always listening to this kind of spy music that plays here all day. But it’s kind of like you’re coming in to the fold because, you know, once you’re in it, it’s like the Super Bowl is like 14 inches. Is the final 10 seconds on the clock at the three point line, it’s the Olympics going for the gold. So I’d like that moment leading up to that. That’s when I think my eyes see more that my ears hear better. The brain, the neurons are firing on all cylinders, but it’s in that slow motion runway up to the event. So is that the entrepreneurial thing that The Hunger Games going on internally? I guess it gets so that I can I can’t put my finger on it, but I see it as helpful to my balance.

So in its own right. Yeah. You’re moving up into the like Keto diet. You know, you just kind of like Starbound just enough. So then you’re at the highest peak. Definitely interesting philosophy. So I mean, you definitely touched on how do you start your day? Well How you end your day?. When did your day end.

Well, because I’m Dubus. They can be interesting evening. So I was up New Year’s Eve with them all and didn’t mind it. The day is just more often do some administrative work. So I’m here in the office a few hours, an hour or two after work, if you will, but it’s kind of uneventful. Let me grab something, that kind of thing. But there’s no ritual like the morning that I can pinpoint. The day just kind of ends. So nothing in particular.

So it looks like taking my five minutes to go see or you just automatically crash when opportunity kicks in.

Well, I am laughing because sometimes I have a cup of coffee and I go to sleep. So like, I’ll be home and I say, Hey, Lisa, you want to make you a cup of coffee, tea, coffee? It’s ten o’clock at night. Are you crazy? And I drink it sometimes at night because I know I might go in at four a.m. and if I know someone’s out there kind of brewing in birth world, I call it so I know I’m in need to be up for that. So I’ll make a cup of coffee maybe at ten o’clock at night and I to sleep in five minutes, having just made it and consumed it. So I don’t have a problem with trying to fall asleep when I can because I also can get up and be running to go do a birth, driving to the hospital, jumping on an elevator and running, do a surgical birth, a cesarean and be alert and oriented and all game in. So I know I can be on when it’s time to be on that. I know so well.

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And just to add to that, and I was reading some quotes, some of you recently someone had an anniversary Facebook quote. They keep saying that when I was in the room this is this morning, that’s when I was in the room with them. When they were laboring, I brought a calm presence to that room. And that’s repeated a lot. When people talk about their engagement with what I do and that calm presence come from understanding that I’m in this zone, in the scene with things could fly off, but I’m taking all the information in and I’m processing that. So this ability to be in that space, in that project, anxiety and fear, but to bring a sense of this calmness is almost like before going to work. I mentioned this morning. Just being in that space, prepared for stuff to occur, and if it oes or does not, I can kind of handle it. So I bring that when I’m doing a three a.m birth or the three p.m birth. To bring that calmness into it, because I can appreciate the information I can take into the information that’s given to me in that wear on my sleeve, and I think that’s what patients get out of. I must say, the shared decision making philosophy,

we alI definitely agree with that across the board, both from a business standpoint. I think your personal point of view, you’re definitely like a Jedi. You pull a Jedi mind trick when you walk into the room. It’s kind of like this guy was in the military, right? He’s seen action. And now he’s like he walks in the room and everything becomes completely serene when he walks in. It’s like when you walk in. And so it’s definitely the fact that you could walk in a room and your patients could actually not even knowing who you are and your history, they can kind of feel that and they get that sense from you is definitely a beautiful thing.

Yeah. I mean, it reminds me of a patient who wrote a review you first time moms who were breech birth and came into the hospital laboring breach has breached is a loaded word in maternity care. And she describes in her post, and I’m paraphrasing a little bit, she’s like, well, he walked in like a bad ass and everybody just calm down. And I had a beautiful badge or something like that, but it was just coming into that space and everybody said, oh, bring it down, everybody. And she says, well, he came in like a bad ass and just sit this like a T-shirt, walking like a bad ass. Yeah. So anyway,

so I’ve had the pleasure of working with you like ten years right up to that point. Yeah. I know what my vision to the answer to this question is, but I talk to you directly and kind of see we have similar philosophies. Where do you see yourself in 20 years.

Yeah, I got you. We got a Covid Here podcast. This is called Metropolis. , to answer your question, I mean, we’ve done a few things together, which have all been wonderful experiences, enlightening and great stuff. And it’s been geared towards the goal of expanding the brand, I guess. And I think now with this recent iteration of what I’m trying to do is really expanding this brand to where it’s not just a philosophy and a mindset within my head about how I could provide care for mothers. But the long term plan, our goal is to make sure that mothers have this philosophy and awareness within their hands. Thereby they can take control of their circumstances without having things taken from them. reinfusionAnd so this rebranding, if you will, this re infusion of the idea using contemporary platforms, be social media, podcasting, even this ability to get this shared decision making into the hands of the consumer mother patient who can make the providers better. I’m talking about obstetricians and midwives and their hospitals if they’re having a baby at a hospital, a better place. So my 20 year goal is to see mothers have a voice in their birth, their birth processes, their maternity care, and to be able to practice their decision making. And those going to be a task because fear is in there. It’s in the mother’s head. And I can understand why there is it’s put upon her to do what’s best for your baby. Right. I hope that within the next 10, 20 years that it becomes a phrase, oh, that’s how we do it. Share decision making versus, you know, I need to listen to you, provided you tell me to do everything .

So and everything that you said, I think you touched on a good segue to let the cat out of the bag recently we’ve been working on developing a book series.

Right.

So why don’t you just tell us a little bit about that, the title of the book, What to Expect from that book, what to expect from the series?

Well, yeah. So how do you. Had to give some substance to this philosophy, the title of the book is called Shared Decision Making subtitle Brinkworth Back. And the platform that I’m trying to promote is what I experience daily within the office and in that purse. And so the ability to structure either a series of seminars, information based materials, the book itself, which may be a series of books, is to try to solidify that, to make it more tangible so people can touch it and learn it and grow with it and bring it into part of their lives as part of a lifestyle, if you will, especially with maternity care while they’re pregnant. And so shared decision making being the title is to really give the mother or customer the tools to live in that space. And if they can live in that space and breathe it, then they won’t be afraid to verbalize their desires or their preferences. They’ll be more empowered to encourage their providers to be better by them in a more respectful, dynamic or more respectful relationship. It won’t be an unbalanced relationship where the provider has all the information and the consumer or mother is afraid to ask the question of the provider. So to bring better balance to that relationship and ultimately making for a healthier process because they will have shared responsibility. Like I mentioned before, that’s one of the three legs of the stool. And so. The key is using my experience all these years, my ability to process the information regarding pregnancy, the ability to engage people and show them the tools that they can use to engage their providers is what this is all about. So the book will highlight that will give you the resources to begin to inculcate that into your personality and into your lifestyle, especially with pregnancy care and birth. So I think if moms have the tools in their toolkit, they can use it and they don’t have to look back with the regret for I should have asked the question. I should have done this differently. You can feel empowered by their journey and that’s share decision making is. And that’s what the book that’s what I hope to achieve in getting a book launched.

So in partnership with the book, I mean, where do you see the company you kind of outlined? Where do you see yourself? But what do you see the company in 20 years? You’re talking about stepping from not just delivering birds, but more so social education to both patients and to additional medical grown individuals as well.

Right? Well, the vision, I think, is to scale up the philosophy and the scale of the tools so that it becomes common knowledge. It is not a one off. And let me have a mom who join our practice from Florida two days ago, three days ago. She’s driving 12 hours. They have a birth with me in our prayers and she shouldn’t have to do that. And it’s been happening for years. People come from several states away so they can have conversations, shared decision making, shared philosophy. If the company could scale that up and create conferences and workshops to where the mother, the customer feels that they can take those tools into their environment, then you don’t have to drive from Florida to have a birth with a baby or myself. You can actually use those tools in your environment and make the people around you, the providers in particular, better people, better listeners, better clinicians, because they’re tuning into this shared decision making philosophy. And the philosophy is not meant that this is important. The philosophy is not meant to be antagonistic and confrontational. It’s also meant to make it a shared responsibility, more in alignment. Just something I described recently is called B score. How does your provider get better in alignment with you and you in alignment with your provider? So the company, I hope, can promote it on a larger scale. Conferences, seminars, workshops and things like that. So this moment, this kind of style of what we do is accessible to many, not just a few come across sitting.

So these are the people that come from on a national level, but you also touch on a global level as well to the people who have come from

Europe and a now from France who sought me out, actually. So it’s not like many people will be out of a telephone booth or out of a Rolodex and go to them. They were told to come here based on the either their personalities or what they expected. I had a twin birth, but you mentioned but last week she was told by people in Oregon that she needs to come to see baby to have a certain style of practice. And that was one where the one hates it, like a broken record, shared decision making, listening to the patient, encouraging their ability to ask questions, guided discovery cues. Somebody in Oregon, she needs to have her twin birth with me. And that was more so, so that she can have a twin vaginal delivery, which she did have. But she was happy to have a cesarean if it was necessary, but to have a respectful balance pregnancy process, because oftentimes it’s a lot of fear attached to twin pregnancy and there are some cautionary elements that should be there. But how you have that conversation is the problem, I think these days. To answer with thought, the idea is to broaden it up, scale it, to make it accessible. I want people to be able to say 20 years now, oh, that’s how we do it. Share decision making, not for it to be a one off. Got to go find it on top of the mountain. Look for some kind of matrix. Know this is how we do it.

So how does that work on my customer service side? I mean, if you have a people coming from different time codes, different regions of the world, I mean, how you got management?

must try to answer that beyond what I was going to Thailand to try to figure out how to do some kind of Middle Eastern meditation process. I guess I would go and adapt to being in time in 12 hour time difference. That’s so much the logistics of that. I mean, people call the office schedule appointments, those kind of things. But I think when you’re craving something or seeking something of value to you, you’re going to, as a customer, make the adaptation.

So secondary to that is so you’re talking about different cultures as well, too. So the viewpoint of birth is completely different on a global scale. I mean, the process of birth is generally the same, but different views, different nationalities, different personalities. How do you deal with that?

Great question.The single answer is a respectful encounter that transfers across all cultures and languages. And I see people with different languages and cultures. They can tell when they’re being disrespected, condescending to marginalized, being coerced, threatened, bleat, even if that crosses cultures. When is that? Respect is universal. Whether we speak language or not assigned to each other, it is as clear as day. And so I think the common thread is that how do you get respect, share in the decision making about the pregnancy, about the options and choices. And I want to emphasize, it’s not like someone comes from West Africa or Tibet or France and says this is how they do it in Tibet, France and West Africa and I need to have a Caesarean birth or I need to do this or I need to do that. They actually come and say, how do we get an understanding of this process? And therefore we can make the right choices for us based on the science and my practices. And that is a common sentiment that I get across all cultures. I had an integrative medicine physician who was Korean and a husband seek me out. They were twins. She was a little elderly. I apologize. She was over thirty five years of age. She’s actually young in spirit. My apologies. But she was being told that she was a high risk pregnancy. This was going to happen. They’re going to do it by C-section. She’s been told all of this versus having a conversation about it based on what are the risks for certain things. And then they came to me late in their pregnancy because they wanted to have conversations. So it wasn’t about me doing something magical on this end. I was adhering to the science and having a respectful dialogue with her in conversation about the management.

So people come to that,

you know, across all cultures and languages and sexual orientations, and so we have surrogates coming here,

all different types of people who want to be respected.So

Simple for us,

that’s a simple point that would translate into any business, really just really comes out to treat people the way you want to be treated.

Correct. With that said, no, it’s not to say that the customer is always right. That is not what’s going on here. They want to be heard.And if the customer is wrong, customer is wrong. They respect that and want people to think that, oh, we’re going to give everybody what they want need. And is Polyana a pie in the sky, rainbows and waterfalls and all that stuff? No, they want to be able to hear the information process it make choices and decisions based on real stuff and to be able to explore that.

So what’s one tool that you couldn’t run your business without?

Well, easy. The people, the people, the people who have who believe in the vision, who believe in what we do, make extra efforts to make sure that it happens yourself is one of them. If I can speak freely behind the scenes for years, that one on a decade in various avenues of the practice and media support, marketing, etc developing our current platform. So I acknowledge that Jim Odessa’s, who was in the room a minute ago, the office manager, will work with the while very astute, on point, thoughtful, forward thinking, diligent, can’t say enough about it, about her contributions that and various staff over the years as well. So the people make the process. They give life to a vitality. We just got to believe the tools of our current technology to take advantage of that.

So is that what is your final words of wisdom you would like to leave behind for the up and coming entrepreneurs that follow in your footsteps?

I’ve got to read your book. It’s a real it’s a real ironclad things. I want to, but I’m going to say that this may sound trite and bromidic, if you will, but you’ve got to find your passion and you’ve got to do less self editing and more belief into what you are trying to achieve. If you’re thinking about something differently, others don’t see it that way. And you’re going to get many people trying to offer words of caution, if you will, which could be a downer. There are certain realities to that, of course, but I think you’ve got to find your passion and go after it. It helps to have some intestinal fortitude or some grit because the mountain gets high and the doubts kind of flood on in. There’s a quote that I’m using these days called Raise Your Level, Raise Your Double, meaning that the more you become the guest viewed or seen, the more enemies you have. So as the entrepreneur, you’ve got to have the intestinal fortitude, grit, passion and a vision.

So Dr people find you online. I mean, Facebook, Instagram, the email address, DNA samples, phone numbers.

Gott you and probably facial recognition software,you go to SeeBaby.org. And then the Doctor B’s website is going to be coming out pretty soon. I’ve got to get the right name for that. And then, of course, calling the office at 442239306. Then we can talk to talk to the person and get more information. But our website for now, is www.Seebaby.org

I will list the other variables on there as well to the Instagram account or all the other social media’s on this Podcast. Is that right?

Well, I guess I got listen this myself and put in my phone.

The bonus question is, do you remember when we first met?

I do.But I have, like, mixed memories. We did the same thing to. I mean, I’m going to say we met here in the office. I think it was more of a project that we were working on and the exact nature of the project. But there was a grand opening we were going to do. And you were part of getting that grand opening together. So the grand opening involved finding places and venues. And then we couldn’t do it in the auditorium and they had to have it here. And so working through that process was good. There were some other things going on with that simultaneously, which is why I have this mixed vision. We were selling stuffed animals that had like heartbeat’s in them and there were some other things going on.We got poster boards and displays that. So as you can tell from my answer with Schnall, you got to be kind of like had this kind of broad acceptance of multiple things happening at once. And so, I mean, he’s definitely good for layering things in a great way, in all fairness and everything, so that things touch each other, these touch points versus one thing at a time. So our first meeting involves my vision of all these things kind of happening. We had a white board. We do some things and now we’re back in that relationship, I’m happy to say.But yeah.So that was it.

So I mean, for me was always you’ve always been like the Jedi is always been like, OK, once Dr. B starts talking, like everybody stops moving and they go completely silent and they’re all just like, listening. And you become this like voice of reason for any topic. I mean, birth is obviously your passion, but when you go from birth to just life in general, you talk about business. I mean, all three of those things are kind of under your Umbrella of your vision. And we start speaking. That becomes this. Everybody gets out.

So I take advantage of that.

I mean I mean, I think you do it without even knowing that you do it. I mean, once you start talking and then everybody is kind of like even patients, they’re all like,

yeah,

you saw you start writing a note, maybe a five minute thing that turns off 15 minutes, but it’s literally nine out of ten times.

Yeah, yeah. I got to I think that that’s why maybe when I talk to people, I think we want to ask people all the time having consultations, quote unquote. But when I come into the office, I meet with them. I think I’m going to have a conversation and that changes everything versus I’m going to be the sage on the stage talking to you. So I guess you’re right. I try to make it making conversation.

Well, I definitely appreciate you taking the time out to answer these questions and help on the podcast. And I mean, I’m looking forward to listening to your podcast as well, coming up in 2020. And a lot of items lined up for this year or so.

That’s wonderful. It’s been great taking the time to let me crystallize my thoughts coming up to this new year.2020 metaphors for saying clearly. And if they don’t have a clear vision, what are we going to do

Yeah on 2020 is the perfect year?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Thank you, sir.

All right. So I have a go .

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