Brand Pillars: Inclusion
Here at Mental Push Plan, one of our brand pillars is INCLUSION. We believe all birthing people deserve to feel confident in their innate ability to give birth. We welcome you as you are, and aim to provide a safe space in your journey to parenthood.
In this blog post, we dive deeper into what inclusion means to us and the process of incorporating it into our product and brand.
What is a brand pillar anyway?
When we started Mental Push Plan, we (Carolyn & Lauren) were newbies to creating a digital product, designing a website or creating a marketing strategy. We were literally googling “how to start a business”. It seemed like, in order to be a successful brand, you had to post to Instagram multiple times a day and write regular blog posts that were 5,323,638 words long, and don’t forget to record everything on camera for the vlog! Not only did that seem extremely overwhelming and time consuming, it also just felt like something neither of us were excited to do.
We wanted to be super intentional about the content we were creating to make sure that it aligned with our core values as people and as a company. We brainstormed all of the things that were important to us and our brand. After narrowing our list, we then categorized it into pillars that represent who we are and what we stand for. These pillars act as guideposts for our decision making in the products and content that we produce. They also inform our language and how we communicate to our customers and anyone else we interact with. We landed on the following four pillars that represent Mental Push Plan: inclusion, education, community, empowerment.
It felt good to write our values down on paper and clearly explain why we started Mental Push Plan in the first place. The bottom line? We got into this business to help birthing people. More specifically to help ALL birthing people. Which is why one of our brand pillars is INCLUSION.
What inclusion means to us
To us, inclusion means: we welcome you, wherever you are at in your birthing journey. We’ve designed our products to support you in your birthing journey, whatever that may look like. Our language and products should feel applicable and comfortable to you no matter what your situation.
This includes:
Race
Cultural background
Sexual orientation
Gender identity
Physical ability
Socio-economic status
Birth preferences
Parenting preferences
Partner preference, family makeup and support network
Listing different groups to be more inclusive of is, of course, the easy part. The real work begins when actually trying to incorporate it into our brand. While we tried to think about different kinds of women (yes, at that point we were thinking solely about those who identify as female) giving birth and how their situations might be different when we initially developed our product, we admit our lens was not as wide as it needed to be. Remember, we are business newbs. We don’t always do things in the right order. So, as we really sat with our pillars and took a deeper look at how we were fulfilling our pillar of inclusion, we realized we had a lot of work to do. This means there has been a lot of back tracking, reading, re-reading, editing and then re-reading again, not only of our programs, but of our website, our blogs and social media.
Incorporating inclusion into our product and brand
When examining how to incorporate inclusion into our brand, we had to look closely at our own biases. As white, straight, cis females, we have a certain lens through which we view the world, and we acknowledge that lens is privileged. So, we started to ask ourselves how that privilege was influencing our work. What words that come naturally to us, may prohibit someone else from reading and relating to our material? Or even worse, what words that we currently use may outright offend someone else? How do we pay attention to and honor the experiences of others?
Here are a few ways where we had to check ourselves and get better.
Mother, mama, female and she/her were all words we had used to talk about birthing people in the past, but we now know this is not everyone’s reality. There are people all along the gender spectrum that are birthing people.
Words we originally used to describe community (tribe) or a mental tool used during labor (mantra), we realized, disrespected and/or appropriated marginalized and indigenous cultures.
Referring to the physical body, for example directing specific attention to hands, feet, sight or hearing, assumes everyone has the same body, which we obviously don’t. This leaves out the already underserved disabled community.
There were no clear considerations made with regard to trauma, birth-related or otherwise. Not acknowledging trauma and adjusting for proper care and consideration can further contribute to feeling unheard and unhealed.
Talking about the role of a birth partner, there was the assumption that the birthing person has a partner. This does not apply to everyone, and a support network can look different from person to person.
If you read that list and thought, ‘Wow, that’s A LOT’, it’s because it is. It is a lot and it showed us how much work we needed to do and continue to do to make our pillar of inclusion more than fluff. Having a lot of work to do doesn’t mean we should throw our hands up and say it’s too much, it means we roll up our sleeves and do the work.
The bottom line is this: if we leave one person out by using certain language, then we’re not achieving our goal of helping ALL birthing people. Period.
Racial disparities in birth outcomes
While the inclusion work that we are doing is meant to provide all birthing people with mental tools to use during labor, birth and beyond, we recognize there is FAR more work to be done when confronting the current health crisis affecting birth outcomes for people of color in America. This topic is something we are continually educating ourselves on, and we are committed to being part of the solution.
Working through the discomfort
Have you ever been in a fitness class and the instructor says, “if you’re shaking, that means your body is changing!”? I hate it when they say that. BUT, after class you feel so much better right? It is through discomfort that we start to change. We start to better ourselves. We start to better our communities. And we start to make the world a better place for those babies that we’re birthing. That’s what it’s really all about right?
We realize now that our excitement at the new venture, not really knowing how to start a business and just trying to get something out there meant we weren’t as critical as we needed to be. This critical lens of our work, our company and ourselves is something we will continually strive to maintain and improve upon, even when it makes us uncomfortable.
We’re a work in progress
That being said, we very much realize we’re not perfect, many of the language examples above likely had some of you rolling your eyes at how obvious they were. But we are committed to continually examining our business practices to make sure we are aligned with our core values. Those who buy our product and join our Push Circle deserve that from us. The kaleidoscope of people that bring life into this world amaze and energize us, and we want each and everyone of them to feel valued here.
And because we can use all the help we can get, we invite you to call us on our sh*t if you see something that needs correcting in our content, or even if it’s something that just doesn’t sit right with you. We want to hear from you, we want to keep an open dialogue and we want and need to keep learning. Hit us up anytime at hello@mentalpushplan.com or DM us on Insta.
Sending you love,
Carolyn & Lauren
P.S. If you’re wondering about our other brand pillars, we’ll be sharing more on those later!
