www.thebodyworker.com

I seem to be getting a lot of questions from people wondering if they should go to massage school and change careers in this economy.  What the economy is doing is their business.  You economy is not the worlds economy.  I am not saying it will be easy.  Nothing will be easy in this economy.  It will definitely challenge you to become more aware of your beliefs about money and making a successful living doing whatever you want to be doing.

The stress and fear that is being spread across the country is even more reason to start learning massage and working as a massage therapist in any capacity.  I saw a PBS Documentary last fall from  National Geographic: Stress – Portrait of a Killer that was done by a Robert Sapolsky a researcher on stress.  He studied Baboons for over 30 years and watched a tribe of baboons die because of stress.  The group had gotten into some bad garbage from a village and contracted tuberculosis.  The dominant and aggressive members died.  The members who were more nurturing, less aggressive and were more involved in their social groups and also grooming lived.  It was very straight forward.  Stress Kills.

Massage Therapy Jobs while they are becoming more common, it is difficult to find a job that pays $35 or more an hour.  Realistically it is difficult to make a living on that wage and support a family.  In a massage job you usually only are able to work 25-30 hours tops.  You also only get paid that amount when you have a client.  If you don’t have a client you get paid minimum wage.  Most massage jobs don’t have any benefits such as vaction or sick pay or holiday pay nor do they offer retirement plans.  Out of that $35 an hour you have to be able to save for vacations, for slow periods and for retirement. With the way the economy is and the way jobs are you still have to engage in the job enough to get and keep clients.  You will still be doing sales of products to clients to increase the income of the business and yours.  Most massage jobs you still really have to do most of what a self-employed massage therapist will be doing.

It is much more profitable to open your own massage office and has much more potential for making a great living and even making $100,000 a year as a massage therapist.  It does require that you learn about setting up a business and learn how to get clients.  There are also other ways to make money as a self-employed massage therapist.  You can use your website to make money while you work by referring people to affiliate programs and writing articles and using Google Adsense on your site.

Your success will depend largely on your underlying beliefs about money and being successful.  Being self employed will bring up those issues so that you can clearly see them and begin to change them.  Your underlying beliefs are mostly unconscious meaning you aren’t aware of them.  The way to get in touch with them is by paying attention to what you are feeling.  Your feelings will tell you what your beliefs are.  If you are writing a massage business plan and you are planning on working on 20 clients a week for $100 a session notice what feelings come up.  Most likely it is something like “I can’t charge $100 a session.  No one will pay that or I am not worth that.”  These little thoughts are the key to your beliefs.  Is it true that no one will pay that?  You don’t know really.  Is it true that you are not worth that?  You don’t know that really.

Working to uncover your unconscious beliefs about money and success will allow you to become conscious of them and make different choices.  It is a process.  It isn’t easy.  You will have to do it no matter what career you choose.  The econonmy doesn’t really matter.  If you think that changing careers in this economy will make it more difficult to be successful than it will be more difficult.  If you know you want to do it more than anything else in the world right now you will be motivated to do whatever it takes to be successful.  Will you eat macaroni and cheese until you get enough clients?  Will you put in long hours learning and creating marketing programs?  Will you keep at it even though you will have ups and downs?  Will you have the persistence and patience to make it happen?  These are some of the things to think about when you are considering opening your own massage business in the face of a challenging economy.