Becoming a Massage Therapist

I got this idea for a story about becoming a massage therapist after reading Sean Sloviks story “Is Becoming a Massage Therapist like Becoming a Merchant Marine?” that is posted on www.massagetherapycareers.com

When you first start out in massage school, you will be studying for a year or so, learning all sorts of things you never imagined - anatomy, physiology, pathology, massage techniques - all of which are preparing you to be the best massage therapist in the world. By the time you get out you have massaged many people in the student clinic and all of your friends and family call you all the time for a massage. You are ready to take your State Board Exam or if you are in one of those last states that don’t have any exam, you are jumping right into a practice or job in massage therapy.

You of course pass the exam in flying colors because you spent all of that time studying, memorizing and learning.

You are now on to working at your first job or building your massage practice. You are quite nervous - the changes you have been through are quite amazing. You have grand visions for a job in a fancy spa that pays you $60-$100 an hour (isn’t that what they said in massage school that massage therapists make?) You tell yourself, this isn’t about the money. You just want to help others. You can live cheaply. You don’t really need much. You cherish your freedom and flexible hours.
You show up to your first job or office, and of course, you are a bit nervous. You take a deep breath and look back at your schooling and say to yourself, “well gosh, I shouldn’t be too nervous. I know where all those muscles are and all of the things to watch for not to do. You console yourself that you actually know a lot, maybe even feeling you know everything.

After a year at working at a Spa that hardly pays you much or struggling to start your practice and not getting very many clients, you start to wonder what the heck did you do by choosing this career? You find that working at the spa wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. You are working more hours than you agreed to because they can’t find anyone to work. You don’t have any benefits or vacation pay, and are starting to feel resentful that you are working for such low pay. If you have your own practice, your ideas of changing the world don’t seem so grand - you can’t pay the bills. Do you go back to work doing some menial job that you know you will hate?
But you stay with it and start learning about marketing, sales, customer service, finances, the therapeutic relationship. You take a part time job to help pay the bills. You join or start your own peer supervision group and find solace in knowing that there are others in the same boat. You start reading and learning. You keep learning new techniques. You keep working with as many clients as you can. You are learning so much about yourself as you go.
You can begin to see that everything that is happening to you is really a reflection of your own beliefs about yourself, but at the same time you think it is all about everyone else- your teachers’ didn’t show you enough, you don’t feel like you know enough, clients are getting more difficult health issues, money is slow to come in. You see clients who have physical health issues and are at a loss to help everyone. What you thought would be fun in helping others, now seems like a drain. You keep giving free massages away and start at a really low rate thinking that it will get you more clients. When someone doesn’t show up, you are disappointed and just think you are out the money- you don’t bother to charge them just thinking that you are doing them a favor because after all- they had a last minute appointment that was much more important.
“well, I thought I knew it all back when I was in massage school, but now I realize there’s actually a few things I don’t know.” You somehow thought clients would just show up at your door begging to get a massage. You just want to be doing the massage part- you don’t know anything about marketing, sales or running a business.

You begin to wonder if you made the right choice in becoming a massage therapist. You now are in about year 3-5. You can’t live like this much longer, yet you hate the thought of giving up what you love doing. You stick with it all and move up the ladder at the spa, getting better hours, more pay, maybe a managers position. Your practice is beginning to finally have ends meet. You are beginning to think about hiring other massage therapists. Your training and experience now brings in even more difficult clients. You begin to understand that healing is really not about the techniques that you have learned. They don’t really work on everyone or as quickly on some people as they do on others. You have worked on many clients with serious health challenges- cancer, mastectomies, serious car accidents. sports injuries. You have watched people with constant headaches for a year, suddenly get rid of them when they quit their job. You see people with chronic pain patterns resolve themselves when they start cleaning up their diet. You see people grieving who have lost their parents or other loved ones. You have seen people with post traumatic stress syndrome from accidents, war and trauma. You stand in awe of what the body, mind, heart and soul can do when they finally truly connect to each other. You learn that healing doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is paid free or disease free. You see that death is an inevitable part of life and can’t be avoided no matter how healthy we keep ourselves. You see that health is really about connecting to our wholeness- something that we always had inside of us but we just didn’t know it. You understand that saving the world is about saving yourself. You understand that healing others is about taking care of and healing yourself.

Your once ‘massage can fix’ all vision is quietly put in it’s place but a new vision has arisen. Knowing your place in the world allows you to be present for others to experience their healing and wholeness - still touching one person at a time - but you know that you don’t even have to touch them physically. Your presence is enough - but the massage is the icing on the cake. You see that the more you think you know about the human body, mind, spirit and healing the less you really know…

But there is a new employee at the spa or you are looking to hire other massage therapists. You wonder if you will continue to be successful because you don’t really know a thing anymore…but that brand new massage graduate must know everything so you don’t have to worry.

(How does this story end for you? )

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Massage Therapy Licensing and Legislation Issues

One of my pet peeves or rather passions is writing about the licensing and legislation issues that are occurring in the massage profession.

The problem is that we as a profession have not defined ourselves so now there are insurance companies and legislators who are doing it for us.

I have been collecting information from the government websites on massage licensing and have found such a discrepancy in how massage is licensed. Some states regulate schools, some don’t.  Some still require fingerprinting and STD testing.  Massage is generally defined using terms that imply Swedish Massage is being done.  Some include modalities like Reiki, Reflexology, Structural Integration.  Why does someone who does the energetic work of Reiki have to know about Swedish Massage?

On my website www.massagetherapycareers.com and on this blog I am attempting to gather information on just what it means for each different kind of massage therapist to practice in each state - not just what the laws are but what are the implications and how does licensing or the lack of licensing influence the ability to be a successful massage therapist where you live?

By collecting this information,I hope that we can learn as a profession just what we need to do to define ourselves in a professional matter.  I actually think if we did that for ourselves we wouldn’t need licensing at all.  (Yes I know that is only my opinion and it is very different from everyone else thinking that we need more education and more laws to protect the public.  It is the massage schools and associations creating this idea without anything to back up their theories.

So if you are so inclined to partipate and provide information on what it is like to practice in your state you can go to

www.massagetherapycareers.com

and select your state and fill out the form there.  The form will create a separate page on the site for your information and others will be able to comment on it.  It is totally private and you don’t have to leave your name.

I am also going to be using this form system to build a directory of schools that can be rated and reviewed by students/grads.

Posted in Licensing and Legislation | 5 Comments »

Opposition to massage licensing

A recent movement that opposes state massage licensing is finally here.  Brandon Raynor , a Naturopath and massage school owner from Austraila is here on a nationwide tour to show his opposition for massage licensing.  Why is someone from Australia opposing licensing?

I think the main reason is that he has created a massage school empire and has a few schools in the US in unlicensed states.

I think what he is doing is great but it is very interesting that it takes someone from another country half way around the world to do this for us.

Here is an article from Salem OR newspaper and his blog - The Freedom Ride which does need some serious help and promoting which I have offered to help with if he can provide more information.

What he is opposing (which I do agree with) is that :

From the news article:

“We want the laws to be less restrictive so that they allow practitioners of other forms of massage therapy to practice according to the traditions and standards of their particular form of massage therapy. Right now, the current state of affairs standardizes all massage training into one particular philosophical and cultural approach that many massage practitioners find to be unfair.”

One example he cites is Thai massage. “Thai massage, as taught at the Wat Po temple in Bangkok, where Thai massage has its origins, is taught in the traditional Thai manner focusing on learning the Sen or energy lines and also on practical application, rather than on Western anatomy.”

He says people can practice this technique effectively after only 10 days of instruction.

“Raynor massage, which I teach, can also be learned effectively in 5 or 10 days and in many people’s experience around the world is a far more effective form of therapy than many conventional forms of massage therapy.”"

From his blog:

“Change the massage laws to ones that don’t discriminate against Thai, Shiatsu, Raynor and other forms of massage therapy and massage therapy training methods.”

Posted in Licensing and Legislation | 3 Comments »

Outcome Competencies

“Show me your outcome competencies” is the latest article from Keith Grant on what is needed in the massage profession.

Here’s the recipe: Insist on differentiating between “high requirements” and “high standards.” Standards lead to observable outcomes while requirements don’t have to. Define a job specification for an “entry-level practitioner.” Define all of the contexts in which you believe the job is done. For each context, break the performance into tasks. Get feedback from the stakeholders in each context. For each task, create a list of required observable competencies or, if covert, competency indicators. Define the needed proficiency levels. Get more feedback. Merge the individual lists of competencies into a master list of competencies, taking the highest proficiency level at which each occurs. Implement a plan to identify applicant learning gaps and teach them what they aren’t doing. Assess the results, and modify definitions and teaching methods to obtain the outcomes you want. Reward yourself for creating something that meets specific goals for stakeholders and is a clear guide to schools and students in reaching them. Then go back and assess the results again. The beauty of this method is that all levels are explicit. If you compare your competency standards with someone else’s, you can track down the exact source of differences.

To begin with I didn’t really even know what outcome competencies meant and am still in the process of figuring it out.

Here is what I found online that helped me understand a little more:

Definition of Competency from this website
A competency refers to an individual’s demonstrated knowledge, skills, or abilities (KSAs) performed to a specific standard. Competencies are observable, behavioral acts that require a combination of KSA’s to execute. They are demonstrated in a job context and, as such, are influenced by an organization’s culture and work environment. In other words, competencies consist of a combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities that are necessary in order to perform a major task or function in the work setting.

Keith also explains it a little further :

“These are what the trainee should be able to do/demonstrate after the training, not the process of the training. It gets away from the pervasive idea in the massage world that the results of training are defined by hours. Several weeks ago, I put together a few notes and an example of some very rough XML. “

In other words - what does it take to be a massage therapist and how can we develop schools that teach this and a system for credentialing or licensing massage therapists?

From what I have seen and can decipher - schools have added hours of training without any real basis for needing more training. One of the reasons why the number of hours of training has increased over the years is mainly because students can get more funding in the form of loans and grants when the cost of school is higher. It that a good enough reason to say that it takes more hours of education to become a successful massage therapist?

What does it take to be successful? I don’t think it has anything to do with anything we learn in massage school. Monica Roseberry in her book “Marketing Massage” did an interesting study and drove around the US and interviewed massage therapists to find out what they thought made them successful or unable to be successful as a massage therapist. What she found had nothing to do with any academics or learning or number of hours of education - but how committed the therapist was, a desire to serve, being professional (setting boundaries) and customer service.

What can we add to Keith’s collection of competencies?

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Massage or Bodywork?

One of the issues in the massage profession is how we define massage and bodywork.

Each state that is licensed has a different definition of what massage is and who can do it. I am not sure where the term Bodywork started but it is also used to describe structured touch. The difference between what is massage and what is bodywork is very unclear since we don’t define either for ourselves and let the licensing boards do so.

Is Bodywork a type of massage or is massage a type of bodywork?

When I hear the word massage I think of only Swedish massage which is what is taught in basic massage school.

Bodywork is thought to be more therapeutic than massage and works to make changes in the physical alignment and function of the body. Those who are bodyworkers such as Rolfers or other structural integrators believe that there is a big difference between massage and bodywork.  I agree with this having been trained in a structural integration offshoot -Zentherapy.  When I learned Zentherapy I had to unlearn most of what I learned in basic massage school.  We didn’t move fluids toward the heart and worked in places such as the mouth, armpit and behind the knee and other endangerment areas that were not allowed in basic massage. I also learned to work on inflamed area of the body that were recently strained or sprained (within hours of occurring) with positive results.

And what about all the other different types of massage techniques?  Is Bowen therapy massage?  Is polarity therapy massage?  Is Reiki massage?  Is cranio-sacral therapy massage?  Is Berry work massage? Is the Rosen method massage?

Also as I research the different ways massage and bodywork is defined by the various states for licensing purposes there is a great variation in what is allowed and what is not. We can never have reciprocal licensing that allows you to practice in every state until everyone agrees on a definition of massage and bodywork.

So how do we as a profession define Massage and Bodywork?

What do you think???

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