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Educating ClientsOne of the best ways to market your massage practice or other service business is to Educate your clients. Educating them is more than just telling them what you think they should do. Education is a process of "drawing out" someone, exposing them to different ideas and concepts, inspiring them to look further inside and out side themselves and allowing them to make their own decision based on that information. We often think that educating is just a matter of hammering information into someone - repeating concepts until they see your point of view. What we experienced in formal schooling is not education. It is more of a process of just sharing what information we thought was true at the time. Most schooling requires that we give up ourselves to comply with the rules and regulations
Most information and knowledge is really inaccurate and often not the truth. It is just our opinion and belief about the way things are. We feel that we just need information to feel secure. The more information, the better we feel. Educating clients to me is more of a process of sharing our stories and what we think we know without being attached to the outcome. The best education happens when a person is allowed to take information in and make it their own. They "draw forth" an experience or idea that is their very own. How can we draw the client out and allow them to feel and know what it is that they need to heal? Just look at some of the things we thought we knew from our history... working with cancer patients was contraindicated 10 year ago, shamans work the body from the core out to the extremities - the exact opposite of swedish massage, working on the pectoral muscles in women was contraindicated when I first started 17 years ago. Most of the things that I initially learned in massage school were thrown out when I learned Zentherapy. One type of massage says one way of doing things while another says the opposite. Who is right? They all are. How can we create a profession of massage therapists based on wisdom rather than knowledge? How can we step out of the box and take the profession beyond to the next realm of healing through becoming authentic? How can we "educate" or draw out massage therapists to really focus on each individual massage student (and current therapist) to become the best they can be, bringing out their unique talents and experiences rather than forcing Swedish massage down their throats? I don't really have an answer, but I know that what we do have in place is inadequate.
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