www.thebodyworker.com

I just released my new ebook “The Massage Therapy Career Guide - the truth about becoming a massage therapist” and one of the sections in it I talk about how to get a job in massage therapy. I refer to this example in the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.

Think and Grow Rich Job finding process of Napoleon Hill.
First. Decide EXACTLY what kind of job you want. If the job doesn’t already exist, perhaps you can create it.
Second. Choose the company, or individual that you wish to work with.
Third. Study your prospective employer, as to policies, personnel, and chances of advancement.
Fourth. By analysis of yourself, your talents and capabilities, figure out WHAT YOU CAN OFFER, and plan ways and means of giving advantages, services, developments, ideas that you can successfully deliver.
Fifth. Forget about “a Job”. Forget whether or not there is an opening. Forget the usual routine of “have you got a job for me?” Concentrate on what you can give.
Sixth. Once you have your plan in mind, arrange with an experienced writer to put it on paper in neat form and in full detail.
Seventh. Present it to the proper person with the authority and he will do the rest. Every company is looking for men who can give something of value, whether it be ideas, services, or connections. Every company has room for the man who has a definite plan of action which is to the advantage of that company.

I am not sure if it is just because you only hear the horror stories or complaints and if someone has a good job and they don’t complain about it - you don’t hear about it, but more often than not, all I hear are stories of massage therapists feeling like they are being taken advantage of by employers- whether they are chiropractors or spa employers.

Massage therapists or any employee for that matter seems to think that working for someone entitles you to a never ending paycheck, constant raises and continuing praise for your work. As I have been reading a series of books called “Diamond Heart” by AH Alamas, one of the things he says we search for in jobs and relationships is really our essence.

He says:

You continue to pursue your career as a physicist, a gardener, a mother and so on, but all of the time you remember and realize that it is only a reflection of something else, that what you wish most deeply is to actualize a part of yourself…..your purpose is not to be the physicist, the gardener or a mother. Your purpose is find the precious pearl, your personal essence.”

He goes on to say;

Once you know your personal essence, what you do doesn’t matter much. You choose what will enlarge you and enhance your real self.

That something else is really our attempt to find that totally merged feeling we were supposed to or once had with our mothers. We continue to seek that out in all that we do - unconsciously for the most part.

So why massage therapists are choosing to work for chiropractors or others who take advantage of them to me makes me think that they are still really thinking that they are looking for something or someone to take care of them. So they go to work feeling resentful and are hesitant to ask for raises or what they need because they fear they won’t have any job at all. This will come through loud and clear to the client whether you are aware of it or not.

I am not saying this is every one. I am sure there are massage therapists who go out there and work hard at their jobs because they love every moment of it and don’t feel like they are being taken advantage of even when they have to do the cleaning and are getting paid only $10 an hour.

I also have been getting emails from readers saying things like “they just want to make money in this field because they have heard things like you can make $60 an hour. They of course are not getting the whole story. They don’t have any love of massage or of health or the amazing body. They want to pursue a career just for the money. While you do need to make money to live, just doing something for the money is the work of your ego and not your essence.

Your essence is that deep, vulnerable part of you that gets covered up by society and growing up. It is that part of you that gets set aside when you think and act in ways just to get love and attention. Learning to open that part of you often requires feeling all of those feelings that were buried in order for you to please others and be a good person. It is a painful realization to come to but that is what really being an adult is all about. Our neediness is what tells us how much we have to grieve - not really how much we need.

The thing is that you can have that state of complete merging but not with another person or not with a job. You can have it all by yourself when you learn to let your guard down and feel those feelings of not getting those needs for early bonding and attachment met.

It is what massage is really all about - creating that container where people can get their needs met. Getting it for yourself first will help you to be a better therapist and be a stronger person so that you can give that gift of your essence to others - making it easier for them to find theirs.

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I am trying something new and learning to have multiple authors on the blogs.  If you are interested in writing for the massage profession. please contact me and let me know what your interests are - what topics would you like to write about and any past experience with blogging and/or writing.  ( It isn’t necessary but I am just wanting to know what level you are at.

Thanks

Julie

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The Holidays are here and it is a great time to think about selling gift certificates and promoting your massage practice.

There are many templates and pre-made massage therapy gift certificates available or you can just make your own with word processing programs.
Each gift certificate should have on it a blank place for the name, amount of the gift certificate in hours and any expiration dates if they are allowed.

You should also set up a gift certificate page on your website and allow users to pay with paypal or google checkout and get their address to mail out gift certificates. I sold many gift certificates for my regular clients from out of town friends and relatives.

Gift certificates may or may not have expiration dates on them. Here is a list of the various states and their regulations regarding gift certificate expiration dates.

You will need a method for keeping track of the gift certificates you sell by either putting some sort of numbering system on them or just getting the persons name and keeping a list of them and who you sold certificates to.

You will also decide if you want to offer a special offer to encourage people to get them -like selling 3 and getting an half hour free, getting $10 off of each when you buy 5, or something. It isn’t necessary to do this. Some think it sells more. I sometimes think that offering such specials devalues our work.

The thing about selling gift certificates is that many do not get redeemed because the people who are giving them are usually trying to give them to people who are not regular massage people. Most give gifts to others that they would really rather have for themselves. I once had someone who came in to redeem a gift certificate who was so ornery and did not really want to be there and had never had a massage before. She didn’t want to fill out the intake form or do anything. It was only for a half hour massage. I got her on the table and she hardly said a word the whole time. At the end she was so very thankful.
I also had another person who got a gift certificate and he had never had a massage before. He brought a book with him to read while he was on the table ( I am not joking!) I am not sure if he enjoyed it or not but he never did come back.

Bosses will also get gift certificates for their employees. I had a guy one year who bought a few thousand dollars worth and gave about 5 each all to his employees. Some of those people never came in and they ended up buying them from each other. Most employees would rather have the cash at Christmas time unless they are already massage regulars.

There are those who do enjoy getting massage gift certificates.

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As a massage therapist, clients come to you to help them find a solution to a problem they are having - whether it is pain, stress, an injury or other disease. They are seeking an expert to help them with their condition.

Whenever someone is seeking another for help, it creates a power differential in the relationship meaning that the client perceives the massage therapist as having some answer or solution to their problem. It starts from the second they make the effort to find someone to help them. The role of the massage therapist is to provide massage as a solution - to meet the clients needs.
Often in a relationship where there is a power differential it creates a dynamic called transference - the person tends to think of the authority in the way they related to their parents or other significant caretaker early in their life. Without knowing it, a client will often be acting or speaking from an early childhood wound where their needs for attention, nurturing, appreciation and respect were not met. It is an unconscious process and it happens in all relationships. Some signs of transference include but are not limited to:

a client tells you their whole life story in the first session

a client wants to see you socially as a friend or even as a date

a client asks questions like “how many massage have you done today?” or asks more about your personal life.

There is another short list in this article in which
Ben Benjamin defines transference as

In transference, unresolved needs, feelings and issues from childhood are transferred onto the helper

The thing with transference is that it happens constantly in relationships like the one that is created between the massage therapist and the client as well as with other relationships where there is an imbalance of power - boss/employees, teacher/students. Because we have the added influence of touch and how it can relax a person along with the fact that people take their clothes off and feel more vulnerable from the start, the transference is really high in the massage profession. While massage therapists are in no position to do psychological therapy with a client, what they can do is learn more about themselves and understand your own issues around being a massage therapist which are not often clear and straight forward.

Countertransference is when the therapist transfers their feelings and issues from childhood and transfers them onto the client and tries to get their own needs met through the client relationship. Countertransference begins the minute one starts thinking about becoming a massage therapist. The reasons that someone chooses the massage profession where they take on the role of the expert or person of power are usually filled with deeper agendas that are usually unconscious. Countertransfence is what usually brings many to the massage profession. They want to find a job that they are more appreciated in, that they can find more meaning in and help caretake others. Feeling like you need to always have results or you are not doing a good job can be a sign of countertransference along with these other things:

wanting to be friends with clients

thinking you have to take every client that calls

working with cancer patients exclusively because of your past with cancer or any other specialty (working on abuse victims because you were abused, working on sports teams because you wanted to be a athlete or were one)

thinking you need to work longer on a client than the assigned time to get better results
or make them happier so they will come back

feeling resentful of not getting a tip or gift

feeling unappreciated after all you do

thinking your work is better than everyone elses and if people go to other massage therapists it will be their loss

feeling drained after a session or day of work

thinking you have to resolve the clients issues all in one session.

Transference and Countertransference are a natural part of the helping relationship. It isn’t a matter of if it is going to happen - but when is it going to happen.
It isn’t that doing these things is bad in any way for either the client or the massage therapist. It is just that these old ways of reacting and thinking are just that- based on old beliefs that just aren’t true. It is important to become aware of both sides of the dynamics of transference and countertransference and learn to get your needs for appreciation, attention, to be needed and nurturing met outside of your massage practice.

As a massage therapist we can best serve clients by becoming more aware of ourselves and our own countertransference issues which will allow us to stay more present with clients. In doing so we can serve their needs better as our own are taken out of the picture and met in our personal life rather than in our practice.

Peer Supervision is the best way to get in touch with this other part of being a massage therapist. Group or individual sessions are necessary to help become aware of these issues and it is also a place where the massage therapist can get their needs for appreciation and other needs met.

The Wounded Healer What’s in Your Baggage? By Arlene Alpert

Transference by Ben Benjamin

How Countertransference Jeopardizes the Therapeutic Relationship Nicole Cutler, L.Ac.

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I feel a little frustrated writing on here about Site Build It! and it’s many benefits and am wondering if you would take a moment and give me your feedback…

Are you sick of hearing about it?
Have you never heard of it?
Are you skeptical and don’t believe me?
Are you afraid to invest the money in yourself and your business?
Do you already have a website and it’s working out great for you getting you new
clients every day?
Do you have all the clients that you need?
Are you booked solid?
Do you think you don’t have anything to write about?
Have you just spent a few thousand on a website and it isn’t getting you any clients?

What exactly is it if anything?

The reason I promote and use Site Build it is that I was once like most of you- struggling massage therapists. Actually I wasn’t struggling - I just lived really simply and didn’t really care about making money. I of course just wanted to help people. When I started my first website -www.thebodyworker.com in 1999, it was only a hobby. I had been thinking about creating an apprenticeship program for massage therapists and had started collecting information to use in teaching. One day I decided I would just put all of the info online and see what happened. Back in 1999 I didn’t know anything about websites and even less about computers.
What started as a hobby has now turned into me being able to double my income in 2 years. I am making more than I ever could with massage and am reaching more people than I ever could by just doing 4-5 massages a day. Now I do massage only 2 days a week and most weeks see only about 6 people…that’s right. After nearly 20 years of doing massage, I am now writing all about everything I ever learned and experienced and making more by working less. And the thing is that the money from the websites will continue to come in whether I am writing or not. I guess it will gradually diminish over the years if I never do another thing.

The thing is the whole reason for my success is because of Site Build it! While I do make a small amount reselling the website business systems, the real reason I promote them is that I want everyone else to have the success that I have. And I guess a part of me wished someone would have told me about things like this and all of the other things I write about when I had started. Of course times were different then. We could bill insurance companies without any problems and they paid much more than they pay now. There wasn’t much confusion over masseuse/masseurs and prostitution as we were the masseuses/masseurs and prostitution was just that. There were only a few hundred massage schools compared to over 1500 today. I didn’t have any problem finding a place to start my practice and I jumped in having quit my day job almost a year before I actually started my practice. I believed in myself and knew I had to do it. I couldn’t go back.

Now with so many massage therapists, so much perceived competition, so many more things to learn about - transference and countertransference, dual relationships, new techniques, more skepticism - the internet is fast becoming our resource for all things. Massage therapists websites need to provide information - When people come to the internet they are looking for information. A simple site with 8 pages that include the history of massage and the benefits of massage will no longer cut it. People want to know if you can handle the problem they have. They are seeking a solution - not you (sorry to say). ABMP reports that:

Among the positive wave of response was the information that 16 percent of U.S. adults visited a massage therapist in 2006 and 38 percent have received a professional massage sometime in their life.

That is really not a lot of people getting massage - How do you reach the other part that has never received a massage or only had one in their life (and may have had a bad experience). Educating clients and the general public is needed. AMTA and ABMP have not stepped up to define our profession leaving us to do the explaining - but not many really are yet - at least not publicly.

What is by having a SBI website you could start writing about all of the things that you really do- not the standard increases circulation…what you really do from your heart?
What if you could get one new client a day who became a regular weekly client for life? What is that worth to you? $60 x 48 ???? x 18 years (as some of my clients have been regulars for this long?) What would you pay to get that?

Does $299 a year still sound too high or the whole concept seem undo-able?
or how about $299 for one site for your massage business and $100 to start your second site that will create for you that residual income that I am making? (No, it doesn’t happen overnight, you don’t have to create 200 pages today or even this year. SBI! is a process)

So be sure to let me know if you have any questions…

Thanks!

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