Did you make enough this year with your massage business?

Article: Did you make enough this year? (And how do you feel about it?)

How do you feel about the money you earned this year? Is it more than you thought it would be? Is it less then you thought? Do you know?

It’s important to take the time to figure out exactly what you earned this year. If you use accounting software, what is your total revenue? Perhaps you can look back at your deposits and other statements. Maybe you are salaried and you know exactly what you earned. But you simply must be clear on the number.

Once you know your 2007 income total, take a moment and reflect on how you feel about it. Given how much you worked this year, does it feel like a good payoff for all your life energy? Did you get ahead this year or does it feel like you are simply treading water?

Remember that “underearning” is the pattern of earning below your potential. When you look at your 2007 income total, does it feel like underearning or are you earning at your potential? When people underearn, they begin to resent their work. It’s important to get in touch with your “resentment number” —how much money do you need to earn in order to not resent doing your work?

Do you know what “enough” would be for you? Knowing what you need to earn in the first place goes a long ways towards hitting that number! It’s very frustrating to walk around simply saying, “I need to make more money!” How much more? Be exact. Give your creative mind a specific number to work towards.

If you are frustrated with your earnings, take heart. When you take the time to really look at your earnings, it is a huge step. Frankly, many people are unclear as to how much they make. They simply go month to month, doing the best they can. Clarity is the first step. You can’t change what you don’t know.

If you earned less then you thought, or you are unhappy with your earnings, answer this: what is one thing you could do to increase the amount of money you make? Quick! What is the very first thing that came to mind? Is it time to ask for more? Are you in the wrong career? Do you need to raise your fees or start working with a different type of client who will pay more money?

Some of these answers feel harder then others, and that is why people often don’t ask the question to begin with. Sit with this question over the next few weeks. A new year is coming. And with it comes new possibilities. It is possible to earn more money.

© 2007, Mikelann R. Valterra and the Women’s Earning Institute. Empowering women to earn what they’re really worth, www.womenearning.com.

Mikelann Valterra may be available to speak to your group/ organization. As a specialist in earning issues, she speaks and consults widely on how to earn at your potential and overcome self-sabotaging beliefs about money. Mikelann@womenearning.com.

Posted in Building Your Practice, Ethics, Recommended Reading, The Code of the Caretaker, The Wealthy Massage Therapist | No Comments »

The Gift of Pain

How often do we look at pain and try to get rid of it. Most of our lives we spend trying to get away from pain.

In our work as massage therapists we are faced with so many people in pain - back pain, neck pain, injuries, car accidents, foot pain, hip pain, pain from inflamed muscles and joints, pain from arthritis, headaches…we don’t usually think of the gift of pain.

Insurance companies make the client focus on the pain by making them report it constantly to us and other health care providers.

We try to deal with the pain by fixing it for the client when maybe fixing it isn’t really the best answer. Do we try to fix the pain because we can’t bear the pain that it brings up in us to see someone in pain? Do we keep the client focused on getting rid of the pain by chasing it around the body? If we ‘fix’ the pain do we miss the message?

What if pain were just the messenger. Like the old saying - “Don’t shoot the messenger”.

Pain is different from suffering. You can have pain and live with pain but it is the suffering from the pain - wanting or expecting things to be different causes the suffering. We keep focusing on the pain and getting rid of it causing suffering. We can get easily hooked into fixing pain and trying to ease other pains instead of looking at what is coming up for us in relation to seeing others in pain.

How can we accompany clients in turning toward their pain?
Learning to address our own pain first before being able to go there with others is needed to be able to be present with others in pain.

I actually think this is one of the main reasons for massage therapists having such a hard time building a massage practice. They want to leave when the work becomes to difficult or demanding and can’t bear the pain of others. They end up always trying to fix clients which leaves people feeling like massage is not valuable to them. We look for new techniques or research that will make us better fixers when we already have all of the tools needed to witness others healing process. Our hands are what help the client connect or reconnect with their bodies which are the messengers. Our hands help people interpret what the pain is to them. Our hands support the client in seeing themselves clearer. The best massage therapists see themselves as guides and fellow travelers- not experts on another’s situation.

When we are reacting emotionally to a client in pain with giving advice, trying to rationalize and explain, we are usually trying to provide solutions that are really for us and not the client -not physically for us necessarily - but what makes us feel the best- like we did everything we could do to help this person in pain. It is often confusing to decipher whose needs are whose.

This role of fixing is really the shadow side of helping. The thing is that when we help others it reveals the parts of ourselves that really need healing (or help.) We hide behind masks as our role of a massage therapist - the healer, the pain fixer, the one who the client can’t live without, the one who can give the client relief when no one else or no medication could - the all knowing “Oz”. A mask actually produces the exact opposite that it is intended to create. As we tend to our own pain and dis-ease, we can begin to be present for others and witness their pain. Much of presence is about listening. We listen with our hands, our heart and our ears.
The more we can become aware of our own pain and attend to our own suffering, we become more available at deeper levels and we are less likely to project suffering on others.

Part of the problem is that we are taught to ‘fix’ pain in massage school. We keep seeking more knowledge and training and diplomas and it makes it harder to keep things in perspective. With our new knowledge we often develop a vested interest in being right. It takes us farther away from our precious essence or true self. We create more separateness with our institutions and will find ourself in ‘prison’.
We seek to get our own needs for acceptance and acknowledgment from our clients when they are not really in a position to give it or we lose patience or get bored and move farther away from our own pain and end up burned out or leaving the massage profession for something more exciting.

It is pain that allows one to change and grow. I can’t say I ever really grew or expanded from feeling joy or happiness. So why do we work so hard to get rid of pain? What if pain could be eliminated by facing it and going through it? How can we be more present for those who come to us in pain? How can we learn about our own pain from working with clients in pain?

Posted in Ethics, Massage Schools/Students, The Code of the Caretaker | 1 Comment »

Massage Therapists Fight Back

Or do they???
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that Massage therapists warn state: Hands off our rights!

A group of health-care providers are suing state officials over a law prohibiting relationships with former clients.

For once I am agreeing with the law in some respect. Massage therapists are in the role of power whenever anyone makes a phone call to make an appointment that person is looking for help - whether it is for stress reduction, to help with pain or an injury - whatever the reason for visiting a massage therapist - the client is automatically placed in a role where they look up to the massage therapist as the one who can help them or solve their problem. The act of looking to others often is hidden with many agendas and projections. Clients look to the massage therapist as if they were their parents. It is a very unconscious process and many would say that it just isn’t true. The thing is you don’t really know when it is true or not.

Dating a client who is in the state of transference would be like dating your child. The client sees the therapist as their parent who never gave them what they wanted or met their early childhood need. The client who finally gets seen by the massage therapist projects their feelings onto the massage therapist.

This is a common law for psychologists and doctors who are engaged in therapeutic relationships.  While it is a case of the law getting into your personal business, it does bring up the fact that massage schools do not teach boundaries or the therapeutic relationship effectively. I am sure the client/therapist who married don’t think it is a problem and it may work in some relationships to keep projecting parent figures onto each other, it is really something to consider carefully and not take lightly.

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Massage Mentoring

Mentoring in the massage profession is just starting to be talked about. When I first started 20 years ago, it wasn’t really talked about although I do have a friend who learned massage in an apprenticeship training of 100 hours who is still practicing today. I never had one mentor but my friends that I shared office space with would usually always help each other out in learning things like insurance billing and sharing thoughts on working with clients and different diseases and conditions that would come up.

There are many challenges for a massage therapist who is right out of massage school - figuring out where to work or how to set up an office, how to find and keep clients, how to make enough money and also how to have a rewarding massage career. Massage therapists also are usually concerned with their technique and learning about how to work with clients.

Mentors in the past have shared their knowledge and expertise for free, but it is also becoming acceptable to charge for your time and knowledge. There are also other ways to share your knowledge and expertise like I have done with my websites.

My website www.thebodyworker.com is basically everything I ever learned in massage school. It is over 800 pages of content and I have probably another 1000 of pages I could be putting up as time allows. It started out as a way for me to recover from burnout and has come to be a way of making a living and reaching more massage therapists than I could just working one on one.

Mentoring networks can be set up in schools right from the start or implemented in spas or other shared office spaces. We did that in our office actually when we had some space open and were looking for someone new to join us, we set up a program of meeting with that new person to help them build a solid practice so we didn’t have to keep looking for new people. It did take a few people to find the one who fit our practice the best.

The other thing that is really interesting in this field is that there is all sorts of help and resources like books and websites out there for people to learn about marketing and building a practice but it is hard to actually go out and do some of those things and implement the ideas. What is lacking is inspiration that a mentor can provide. It is really about the fact that we can not do it all alone.

Through the years I have also seen many massage therapists - myself included- who want to do every thing themselves or think that they have to do every thing themselves. We are so caught up in helping others that it is difficult to ask for help for ourselves. It is part of what I call the ‘Code of the Caretaker” which I am working on writing an ebook on. We do for others what we really would love for someone to do for ourselves. It comes from our early childhood years where our beliefs and self worth were developed. We are told that we aren’t good enough or smart enough so we stop trying and stop reaching out. Our early childhood needs for appreciation and nurturing aren’t met sufficiently so we adopt the belief that we are not deserving of getting those needs met. We give up ourselves trying to find that love and attention.
While a mentor cannot replace that early childhood nurturing we never got, having the support and acknowledgment of another can help us create a new belief system.

Posted in Building Your Practice, Peer Supervision, The Code of the Caretaker, The Wealthy Massage Therapist | 1 Comment »

Massage School Websites

I have been doing some research online trying to find massage schools in various states and cities. I am shocked to find that you can’t find some of them just by doing a websearch. What comes up first are the numerous college and university and other school directories.

These same directories have been hounding me to put their ads on my site. Some promise $40-$60 per lead. I can’t imagine what the massage schools are actually paying for the ad and service.

The thing is that most massage schools websites are so pathetic they just are not getting found by the search engines or by potential students. If they do get found the amount of information that is offered is pathetic. Massage schools would do much better if they told something about themselves, why they are doing this, who is the owners, why do they think that becoming a massage therapist will make a difference. They need to provide information about the classes, what people will be leaning, what they will be responsible for, what help will they get in getting a job or opening an actual massage business. They need to provide information that will build trust and inform potential students about their programs and the massage profession so that they can make an informed choice about becoming a massage therapist. The students also need to have a support system/network or peer supervision in place to help them become a massage therapist.

The massage schools are being held hostage to the online directories and clearing houses.

It is about time that massage schools start creating Websites that work- websites that get them to the top of the search engines without paying for any listings or adwords or yellow pages ads…ones that help readers make an informed choice about becoming a massage therapist and ones that also educate clients and connect their students with potential clients…

Posted in Websites for Massage therapists | No Comments »