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.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Building Your Practice, Peer Supervision, The Code of the Caretaker, The Wealthy Massage Therapist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.