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 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 »

Working as a massage employee

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.

Posted in Ethics, Massage Therapy Jobs, Peer Supervision, The Code of the Caretaker | 2 Comments »

Countertransference for massage therapists

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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