“Think and Grow Rich” is the timeless classic by Napoleon Hill written in 1937. I hadn’t read it until a few weeks ago and now am writing the “Think and Grow Rich for massage therapists” based on this book. As I was reading and researching I did come across some interesting findings one of which is that there are various versions of the original classic. I found this out from reading the first part of a new book by Ester and Jerry Hicks called “The Astonishing Power of Emotions”. They mentioned that they were being interviewed for the movie “The Secret” and somehow or another got cut out in the end. They think they got cut out because they focus on the concept of vibrations and how your thoughts and feelings carry different vibrations. They talked about how “Think and Grow Rich” original version got the word vibration taken out of it too. The movie “The Secret” doesn’t tell you what the secret is just like the edited versions of “Think and Grow Rich” didn’t focus on the actual ’secret’.

The Secret is the vibration of the feelings and emotions that you have that tell you what you are thinking. I’ll get into that in another post.

One of the first things that “Think and Grow Rich” talks about is having a passionate determination. In the first chapter he says:

Thoughts are things and powerful things at that, when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence and a BURNING DESIRE for their translation into riches, or other material objects.”

He talks about how having this ‘burning desire’ and a definite purpose will drive you to success. He gave a few examples such as a ship taking soldiers into battle and dropping them off somewhere and the ships being burned so they couldn’t leave, leading the men to be more determined to succeed.

After reading about being determined and having a purpose, I realized that the massage profession itself is keeping massage therapists from believing that they can be successful in this business. Most massage schools will tell students to not quit your day job when just starting out. This is telling people that they won’t be successful!!!!
I am sure they rationalize it by saying you have to be realistic - but what is that really. Nothing more than their own beliefs. So massage schools don’t even believe in what they are doing to prepare a student enough that they can jump right into creating a full time practice. Sure it takes time to build a practice, but you have to be prepared to go the distance. You have to be willing to do what it takes. You have to believe in yourself enough to not go back and take the giant leap.

That’s the way I did it 18 years ago. I actually quit my job before I even graduated from massage school as I couldn’t stand it anymore. (Actually I was so miserable they laid me off so I could collect unemployment!) I finished massage school and went right to work setting up my practice in a health club with a friend of mine right out of massage school. I never looked back. It was sink or swim…and since I am such a good swimmer - I dove head first into it all not knowing what I was really getting into - but I knew I loved the whole concept of being healthy and working with people.

So the massage profession itself is showing how it doesn’t believe in itself. How else does the profession actually hurt us and hold us back? By not standing up to the plate and defining the profession? By not setting standards of education? More blog posts to come!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Building Your Practice, Massage Schools/Students, Recommended Reading, Starting Your Practice, 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.