On The Spot Featuring HeHe Stewart; Maternity Concierge, Doula, and founder of Tranquility by HeHe

On today's episode of On The Spot with Melinda Garvey we sat down with HeHe Stewart, the founder of the Boston-based Tranquility by HeHe.
Tranquility by HeHe is a Maternity Concierge, Doula and Birthing Service whose mission is to provide high quality, holistic, individualized doula services to families in an empowering and nurturing environment. As a doula, HeHe says she got into this line of work because she wanted to see women take control of their pregnancies, births and postpartum experiences.

"Just because you choose a birth option that isn't what the people around you want you to do, first of all listen to that sentence, but just because the people around you aren't getting what they want from you in your birth, that doesn't mean that you don't have choices or that you can't take control of your birth."

She wants birth to be a gentle and empowering process, rather than one of fear and anxiety. HeHe has been in Early Childhood Education for many years, and saw that parents entering the work force after their maternity or paternity leave felt lonely and unsupported, prompting her to look into how she could bridge that gap. HeHe says one of the biggest challenges of her business is educating the general public on what a doula is, the support they provide and what benefits can be achieved by using them. HeHe says if she could go back in time and start over, the only thing she would have done differently is to do deeper research into the industry both in general and her region of Boston. With better research, she says, she could have spent more time reaching her target market and specializing in her particular areas of expertise.

"I've always been this person that challenged the norm and I always was that child that [asked] 'but why?' If you can't do something, why can't we do it? Is there a way that we could do that? As a child, adults try and squish that, right? They want a really obedient child. Luckily, there are children like me for whom that only fuels our fire. So I was obedient and I knew if I could just get out of high school I could do my own thing. If I could just get to college, I could do my own thing. If I could just quit my job and open up TBH, I could do my own thing. I've always been that person."

Key takeaways:

"If you don't believe in yourself, nobody else is going to. If you don't believe in that thing that you're selling, in your program, in your product, in your idea, who is going to believe in something that the creator doesn't even believe in? You have the believe in yourself."

"Find your tribe, love 'em hard, it's my whole life's motto - life was not meant to be lived alone, surround yourself with people."

_"Be intentional. Be intentional about everything. Think about your choices. When you let go of the intentionality in your life, you're letting go of the control. You're putting that power into someone else's hands. If you're comfortable doing that, go for it, one-hundred percent, but don't ever forget it's never too late to pull that power back in and say 'actually, I want to explore my choices here, I wanna see.' Be intentional, it's never too late to change your mind. Listen to your gut and do your work because you get to control your life in more ways than a lot of people realize and it starts with intention." _

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