** Enrolment is now OPEN to train with Baby Sleep the Night ** Click here to find out more and apply here.**
So let’s get down to it, completely honestly.
What’s it REALLY like being a sleep consultant?
You may have seen some popping up in your area or in your newsfeed and wondered: Is it for me? I want to answer that question brutally honestly (it’s ALWAYS the best policy – as any good coach will tell you).
Transforming lives feels AMAZING.❤️
A large part of this job is downright wonderful. Having done it for over ten years, I can tell you there is nothing on earth like the feeling it gives you.
It makes your heart SING when you transform a family from desperation to elation, when you watch a depression disappear in the space of two weeks and when you often witness a baby go from clingy and miserable to happy and smiley.
It makes you cry real tears when you receive every single email from a parent telling you that they have just been on the first date night in 3 years… and every testimonial hailing you as an absolute miracle worker.
Every single day, every step of the way you feel your clients’ joys at their successes. I’m talking ‘fist punch the air on the end of the phone’ feel it!
I lead my life with LOVE and CARE in every area and this work is made for people who get their joy in life from loving and caring.
So how can any of that be hard work? They say that if you love what you do, you won’t ever work a day in your life… I think most people will tell you that’s never entirely true… right?
Supporting exhausted parents can be challenging.
So here it is… being a sleep consultant can be hard work!
You are working with families who are often:
- At the very least exhausted
- Very often at the end of their tether
- And at worst – at absolute rock bottom and deeply depressed.
And here it is…
That isn’t always easy.
…especially for someone who leads their life with love and care.
The A-MAZING bit doesn’t always happen overnight (it does sometimes!) but these are human beings you are dealing with. Little human beings who are all different and who are learning, and parents who are learning too!
You share the highs and the fist punches in the air at the incredible moment they report to you that their child has just slept 12 hours, often the first time that they ALL have experienced that since becoming parents (and sometimes for the first time in years!) but like any skill it can take time to learn.
Like some children manage to ride a bike in a day or two others may take a week and there are a lot of variables to get right when the skill you are learning is sleep. With expert knowledge, they always get there if the parents can keep lovingly guiding them in the right direction.
As a sleep consultant your job is guiding the guiders… who are just as likely to fall off of their bike as their 3 year old is – often more so!
You’ll need to balance love, support and gentle arse kicking.
These parents are going through a really difficult, and what can be an emotional time in their lives, when sleep debt has built and built to the point that they don’t know what to do and they are turning to you for ALL of the answers – and it’s ok, you have them.
But memories aren’t great when you have sleep debt… parents make mistakes and those mistakes usually have some degree of fallout and that can result in frustration for them – and confusion for the child.
They have usually been struggling for a while before consulting with you and will have second guessed themselves a thousand times.
They will have told themselves so many stories about why their child can’t sleep well as all of their efforts to soothe them/beg them/bribe them or even chastise them just haven’t worked.
And they have come up with a different answer each and every time; often multiple different answers in any given night!
And so they can second guess you too, even though they have come to you for answers that they know you have!
You will become a real life sleep ninja…
Learning to guide them well is an art form (of such beauty when done right!).
I’ve done it with over 2000 families trust me, and now I teach others to do it just the same way.
Being a caring person is essential for this work, but it takes the perfect balance of teaching, love and support – and equally loving arse-kicking when they need it too! (No one goes to a personal trainer to get fit expecting to be given only praise and handholding, even if they’re not doing the work… well anyway, not if they want to achieve results, right?!)
You’ll need to hand hold and coach effectively to keep moving in the direction of success
It can be hard for an empathetic person to not take it on board themselves when parents don’t stick to the plan or when progress takes a little while.
Becoming a really excellent coach involves knowing how to work with that, and that learning curve is just as important as knowing about sleep.
This is a job which should only be done with a great amount of skill and knowledge – which comes with investing in learning everything there is to know about sleep, and how to offer the kind of very specific heart centred and effective coaching necessary to do it really well.
I loved it, I nailed it – and I became so damn good at it that I had a 6 week waiting list of people wanting to work with me. It was too much for me to handle alone… and that’s why I made it my job to move from teaching parents to teaching women to do exactly what I did.
The benefit of my decade of experience thankfully means that those I teach work through the, somewhat uncomfortable, learning curve of having to be straight talking SO much faster than I did!
It is THE best career for work-life balance.
This is a quick one, and it’s actually so simple if family and work life balance are things that are important to you.
- It’s incredibly flexible work that fits around family life. You can work as many or as few hours as YOU choose, and whatever time of day you choose.
- You can work entirely from home, consulting all over the world and feeling like you are in the same room with families… which they love!
- And it’s well paid. You can earn a very healthy hourly rate, as anyone who works hard and offers an excellent service deserves to. But hand on heart, it’s never about the money, it’s all about helping people. What you can earn is just the cherry on top that means you get to have more time with your children than many other jobs allow.
I train and mentor THE most incredible group of Certified Consultants running their own sleep consultancy businesses. We’re the largest group in the UK.
One of my clients had this to say, and I echo her comments myself:
“The most rewarding part of this new career is without a doubt being able to help people and hear about their quality of life being so vastly improved as a result of the Baby Sleep the Night sleep plans. I have received fantastic training and mentoring from Karen during my first year as a certified Baby Sleep the Night consultant, I am so happy to have learned this amazing skill to bring the gift of sleep into people’s lives.”
If you think this might be for you, what’s the next step?
To find out more about becoming Baby Sleep the Night™, and the incredible work the certified team of baby sleep consultants do, click the link below.
** Enrolment is now OPEN to train with Baby Sleep the Night ** Click here to find out more and apply here.**