Meet Kaila Matthews

We recently connected with Kaila Matthews and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kaila, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Resilience is an inside job. Losing my mother at a young age taught me the power of a good rebound. I wholeheartedly believe that even bad things that happen only happen for me and not to me to propel me closer to my north star.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

WhatTheDoula is a local Doula Agency I run as a Doula and Student Midwife. My 5 years of experience in birthwork, reproductive justice, and advocacy has allowed me to support more than 120 families through birth, postpartum, lactation, and yoga services and has given me the honor to train over 20 Doulas nationally. As a certified Doula, I increase awareness amongst minority women around their unique birthing experiences educating them on their bodies, their rights, and their role in advocating for themselves and their babies through birth, postpartum, and lactation support. I serve families in Memphis, TN, and across the United States virtually in their homes, hospitals, or birthing centers. As a cross-trained yoga instructor, I use my knowledge of movement and breath to help birthing people relax and meet pain in a manageable way. WhatTheDoula’s mission is to improve health outcomes and address inequities in maternal health in Shelby County by ensuring that all pregnant, postpartum, and post-pregnancy people who want access to a Doula can have one. Our contribution is expanding access to sustainable, equitable, and community-driven Doula training to build the local Doula pipeline and improve birth and postpartum experiences.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Three of the most important qualities are optimism, social intelligence, and curiosity.
The advice I would give is if you lead with the right answer or need help letting go of your own agenda to elevate the client’s wishes and desire, then you need to tune up your curiosity muscle. Developing question and answer stems to help you dig deeper with clients to find out their ‘why’ is beyond important to their livelihood.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I am looking for long-term contracts and collaborations with major hospitals, medical practices, and maternal health-centric organizations to teach my childbirth, breastfeeding, and yoga offerings to more families across our Memphis Area.

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