Tag Archives: massage jobs

Therapeutic Massage?

My massage client had gone to a fancy resort spa with an extraordinary view of the ocean. The spa was world-class. The services were expensive, the atmosphere somewhat reminiscent of a place where Roman emperors might have gone for a holiday.
How was your massage? I asked him when the holiday was over.
I had the guy they said was the best there, my client said, and I probably had the worst massage of my life.
Okay, I was not-so-secretly delighted that the fancy place didn’t measure up. But what was wrong with the massage? Shouldn’t it be pretty good if not better than average?
My client thought so. His masseuse didn’t ask any questions and spent 80 minutes gliding his hands and forearms over his body, impersonal and disconnected. I asked him afterwards why he didn’t work more on my bad spots, my client said. The guy told me oh, you wanted a therapeutic massage. Remind me next time.
Yowza. Great moments in customer service. Of course there would be no next time. I felt bad for my client, worse for my profession. What had gone wrong here? Why would a supposed deep-tissue massage turn into an oil basting? Even more important, why would there be a difference if my client had spoken up and asked for a “therapeutic” massage?
Unimpressed, yes, but it gave us both a moment to consider what a therapeutic massage means. I have been doing massage for 21 years. My client is a connoisseur, having had two to three massages a week for a good 40-plus years.
The person we couldn’t quiz was the spa therapist. Don’t know if he was hung over, injured, overworked or just uncaring. Maybe he didn’t like working on old guys. Maybe he was a Johnny-one-note with a recipe for conserving energy. The great unknown.
Either way, he had insured that my client would never get a massage from this guy ever again. And my client was soured on the resort, too.
To my way of thinking, all massages are therapeutic, he said.
I could not agree with him more. I’ve had great massages from experts to the humble, self-taught therapists. The names of the massages did not matter. The caring connection matters most.

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Finding and Keeping a Massage Office

Many therapists could benefit from the use of a massage office. Your own spot saves your back from wrangling tables at house calls. Your own spot also offers a great learning experience – how to develop skills to negotiate and keep an office, handle bills and make more income.
At some point in every massage therapist’s career the question comes up: Would you rather work for yourself or someone else? Would you rather handle the details to enjoy the freedom? Does it suit your style and your abilities? If it does not, are you interested in developing those skills?
Being able to answer those questions thoughtfully is just the start. I’ve pulled together some tips from a long career; some of it spent working for others and some for me.
Find the Time: Lots of therapists I worked with at spas and medical offices talked about getting their own place, but most never took their first steps. You have to plot out your time. Will you spend every Monday and Tuesday looking at places? What about collecting equipment and décor on the second-hand market? Will you be spending full retail for what you need?
Study up: There are lots of online resources, most free, where therapists share their stories and advice. Tap in. I also looked at consumer columns on such things as commercial leases, tax advantages of an office and how to use your noggin to determine if potential officemates and/or landlords will be a good fit.
Work up you own agreement. If you find a place to share or rent full-time, you will get your best deal from your own hand. Sure, lots of landlords have their own agreements, but those agreements often turn back on themselves and nullify the very things you want or need. If you can use a one-page, simple agreement of your own design, you are better off.
Know your noise: Massage needs peace and quiet. The most common complaint I have heard from people is that they didn’t know the neighbors would be noisy. Or their landlord rented to a noisy neighbor just to fill space. You need some quiet neighbors, like accountants, other wellness offices, etc. Restaurants, machine shops and daycare are going to drive you crazy. Get it in writing that you won’t be subject to excessive noise incompatible with your business.
Have one-year’s rent in the bank before you leap. If your office is going to cost $500 a month or $5,000, you need to know you can pay for it while you figure out your business. Don’t rely on your hands to make paying clients magically appear.
Have more than one income stream available: If you run ads on Google, have a good website and your cousin the chiropractor sends you clients, you might make it. Most people forget to figure in the cost of marketing and keeping good referral sources in place.
It is also a frequent and fatal mistake to assume that if you leave your employer, your clients will follow. Most won’t. And your employer has paid money to get those clients in the door and the clients may just like it there just fine. How do you handle that? Trust me, it will take about 5 minutes for your employer to find out you are telling clients about your new venture. Ethics applies in business and in massage. Read up on how to leave gracefully. You don’t want to be one of those therapists who have to go to work for someone else a year later because you venture failed or created a lawsuit.

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Massage and Life Learning

Massage Opportunities and Life Learning

Massage therapists have an excellent opportunity not only to meet extraordinary people but also to learn from them. I have met many, and they have taught me many things.
After 20 years in massage therapy, many of my wounds have healed through touch, and I have tried my best to listen and learn from my clients. They have given me many thousands of gifts I might have otherwise missed.
I am very thankful for the opportunity to help people feel better through massage. We have had more than a few laughs and cries along the way.
Rarely, I am blessed with outright advice. A client celebrating his 103rd birthday told me “Never sell land.” We both had a laugh over that one. I practice in Orange County, CA, which in the past 60 years has gone from a stagecoach rut to an economic powerhouse with its own Riviera.
Early in my career I saved my money from massage and bought my own little patch of OC on the advice of another client. Good move. Wish I had bought two.
The visceral and the spiritual, of course. One client told me God inspired him to recite a psalm to me. “I don’t know why it is this one,” he said. “It just came to me.” (psalm 6. Boy was that one on the mark.)
Sometimes clients tell me exactly what is on my mind. Occasionally, I have told them. “This is grief,” I said to a client one day as I palpated the sternum at the 5th and 6th rib. It was as if I first heard the words as I said them. Where did that come from? It started her recovery from a long-suppressed tragedy.
When I worked at a big spa, a client asked me why I did not have my own shop. I admitted to being afraid of the nuts and bolts of business, such as books. “If you can add and subtract, you can do books,” she said. She was right.
How do we express gratitude to our clients? And how do our clients thank us? By being real people, present in the moment, sharing our journeys. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

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Massage and the Full Sixty…

When I was new to doing massage therapy, I had a habit of getting lost. Lost in the neck, lost on the back, lost in the space-time continuum. I’d glance up at my clock and see that I had spent 40 minutes massaging the back and I had 20 minutes to do the rest of the body. Or worse yet, 40 minutes just on the headache, and had 20 minutes to get hands on everything else!
And, learning point, most massage clients will be unhappy with that schedule. People will rarely complain, but they may decide not to come back. All my enthusiasm to erase that headache would cost me the opportunity to gain a client. Drat!
It happened often enough that I found a couple of solutions, which I will gladly share, and I developed some hacks – ways to get the client to forget that I had just given an uneven massage.
Fasten your seat belts.
Ask – Let the client decide – “Would you like me to spend all of our time today on your headache or do you also want a full-body massage?” Guess what the answer is 90 percent of the time…Full-body.
The clock – I drew a circle on an index card. The first 30 minutes was blocked in red, the next 10 in blue, the next 8 in yellow, etc. I hid the card behind my oil bottle, right next to my clock. The red zone was for the back and posterior arms. The next 10 minutes for posterior legs and feet. Eight minutes for anterior legs, eight for anterior arms. Four minutes for head and scalp.
Keep the card in view and practice, and you will run on time.
Okay, so what to do when space aliens have stolen your brain and you don’t have enough time to finish a full massage? When fudgsicles happen, make fudge!
Swoop – Big, long, slow, wasting Swedish effleurages. Three swoops to a limb will still trigger the parasympathetic nervous system. A timeless coma will result.
Hide – Stay in the room at the end of the massage and hold up the client’s robe in front of your face and conveniently stand in front of the clock. Offer to assist by holding the robe while they slip in arms and stumble out. “Let me help you with your robe.” It works.
I don’t recommend what one therapist did to me one day at an otherwise nice day spa. She carefully pointed out the clock to me to show that we were running on time. At the end of the session I got up and looked over at an empty space. She had removed the clock!

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Real Practice for Real Massage

On a massage therapist’s first day at work, the training starts with how to say hello to a client. Easy?

Oh heavens. I have had massage trainees stare at the floor. Roll eyes in a complete circle looking everywhere but at the client. Worst, a brief nanosecond of eye contact followed by staring over the head.

How would you feel to be greeted these ways? Would you go into a room, take your clothes off and figure everything is going to be fine?

Yes, sometime before massage therapists become overnight successes because of their fabulous hands, they need to learn the art of eye contact. Yet for many of the massage community, we’re introverts, looking for a quiet place to work in harmony. We didn’t think about developing eye contact because we are not social divas, by and large.

That first day of looking a stranger in the eye can bring out insecurity for a walk right across your face.

Here is the really bad news. When you cannot look someone in the eye they don’t see shy and humble. They see sneaky, dishonest, and even incompetent. Fear or loathing. Aloofness. Distance. Not the first impression anyone would want to make with a client, ever. The last impression a therapist wants is a wrong one.

With two or more trainees, it is fairly easy to practice greetings with each other. You do not know each other, but you are in this life raft together. We will go over it about a dozen times, and toss out those little things in our expressions and eyes that say the opposite of the greeting we speak.

It takes some doing especially when the new trainee is solo. One of my solo newbies was getting great feedback on her massage, but her surveys indicated that her greetings were getting in the way. The telling question – would you request this person again – was not going her way. If the survey says the massage was great, what to do?

We had a talk over mocha bobas, a drink invented by people who want to make me feel old.

It went something like this:

How are things going?

Great! I love my job!

Fantastic. How are you doing with building your client list?

I’m getting some people back. Not as many as I thought I would. It seems to take time.

Is there anything that you think would help you?

The dreaded open-ended question. A pause. This is the most uncomfortable time. But this new therapist was intelligent and gifted. She knew what I was asking.

I think I need more help with greetings.

Let’s practice now. Go up to the barista and ask for something more. Look her in the eye. Greet her like a client. See if you can connect with just your eye contact.

She tried it, and came back.

That was tough. I felt like I was staring at her, invading her space. It was very uncomfortable. I don’t like it.

Suppose that is the only way to get your coffee, or anything else in your life that you want. Can you make eye contact? Can you practice enough in the next week to get comfortable with it?

Yes, it was an assignment. When we met for coffee the next week, her discomfort was less, her confidence more. We can still both be shy, I said, we just have to learn how to connect with our eyes and our hands.

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Good Fences Make Good Massages…

The other day, whilst talking to massage therapist friends about the best and worst places to do massage, we came up with lots of candidates for best, but the worst won hands down: beauty salons.

Yes, it has happened to many massage therapists. It may have been a fill-in job during massage school or a way to circumvent crazy local regulations, or just a desperate attempt to pay the rent. We had all, at one time, worked in a beauty salon.

Going in, we all agreed it looked like a great opportunity. A room in the back of the place, a built-in foot traffic that might be interested in massage, and a few people hanging out there to talk to when it was slow.

My friend said: My first day I got a lecture about why I had to wear make-up. I don’t know a lot of massage therapists that wear make-up because it slides off in the first 10 minutes of a session. I actually had to tell the salon owner that we sweat.

My other colleague stopped mid-sip in her Starbucks. She said: I got to wear a Minnie Mouse uniform with cap sleeves and a skirt. I felt like I was about to parade down Main Street. Our salon owner thought all the spa people should wear dresses so we looked cute. Meanwhile, everyone in the rest of the salon wore black jeans and T-shirts.

This brought back my own memories. It was a part-time job during massage school. The salon was a seething cauldron of drama. The stylists liked to unload about their unhappiness in the area where they mixed color – right outside the door of my massage room.

Asking people to hold it down or take their conversations elsewhere led to chaos. After more than a few jabs about being too quiet for a salon, I fled shortly after graduation from massage school. Much to my surprise, a few clients found me. One told me she just put up with the salon because she liked the massage.

I left salon world, happily, for better-designed spas and medical offices. My spa kept the hair stylists corralled in a separate room with a real door. No drama.

Much to my horror a client confessed to me one day that he was a salon owner and wanted to develop a spa-salon combination. Would I be interested?

Been there, done that I said. But a salon needs separation from a spa environment. How about a real door and a real wall across the back half of the salon? That way the sanctuary could be established.

He asked me to visit the place when it was remodeled. Yup, a real wall and a real door. It was very successful.

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Plans, Practice and Control

It is a new world for the massage therapist, just as it is for many other personal services industries.

App companies are going whole hog into personal service. Rides, house-cleaning, errands, baby-sitters, pet-sitters, and yes, massage therapists. Where is it heading? For a big thumping collision as we struggle to define ourselves, our employers and our clients….

Oh yes, big questions. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. Hang on.

Are app companies employers? Are service providers employees or clients? Are clients users or beneficiaries? Who cares? Massage therapists care because the answers to those questions will determine how much money we make, how much we pay in taxes and how free we are to make decisions in our professional lives.

Here’s how it shakes out: Google is an advertising service that provides therapists with a way for people seeking their services to find a provider – and leaves the rest of the transaction up to the therapists and clients.

The app services are vetting providers, setting prices, presentation, times and even setting tips. The amount of control they have means they appear to be employers, not middlemen. If a therapist wants to provide more or charge more, they are not able to.

A therapist is not an independent provider of service when someone else sets the price and pay. If a therapist is not independent, then basic labor laws about employees apply.

The bottom line for therapists is that it is all about control. Control of prices, providers and policies such as tipping makes apps employers. That means the app gets to pay a lot more money in taxes for Social Security, payroll, disability, etc. that would otherwise be paid by the therapists.

There’s been some talk that the new services may yield a new classification of worker – the dependent contractor. That’s where the therapist would be a service provider who would pay less in taxes in exchange for less control. But will the apps pay the taxes? And pay for the benefits? Stay tuned.

In the interim, the people who may be the biggest targets are small businesses who have called their employees independent contractors to avoid higher costs. If the apps can’t have independent contractors, then spas and clinics can’t either. That will make major changes in the way multiple-therapist businesses operate.

Meanwhile, a massage therapist’s best bet remains Google or the other online search providers. People looking for a massage can find you in an efficient way. If they do not want your services, or don’t want to pay your price, they will find someone else who better matches their needs.

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Flames Climb Higher Than Hands

Those who do therapeutic massage are well aware of the statistics in the field. Burnout is a huge problem amongst therapists.

What I have often heard from people is that massage is too hard to do enough of it to be secure financially and take care of one’s personal needs as well. I’ve also heard from folks who don’t have much commitment to the field that they are surprised when it turns out massage is work, and they stay in the hobby-job cloud.

I have also heard the burnout complaint from therapists, who don’t charge enough, spend too much on frills or never take a vacation. I’ve never heard it from my core group of friends who have been practicing for nearly 20 years.

So I’m a bit surprised to say that this week I felt burnt out. Yes, dark and twisted like a used paper match. Done inside and out. Phhhht! burnout

There, I said it. I feel fried!

But I do take vacations – and the occasional mental health day – and I also vary the types of massages I do, and now I even limit the number of massages I do a week. I also coach other therapists and test them on techniques… what on earth is going on?

I think this tiredness is more than just needing a vacation. Next Steps: the self-audit, then the friend audit.

Here’s my list: Eating right? Exercising? Sleeping well? Time for me? Time for non-massage activities? Getting massage once a week? Going for acupuncture or chiro? Am I crabby?

OK, I flunked a bunch of those questions. I had a flood in my house early this year and my days off have been spent dealing with contractors, tossing, organizing and cleaning…my whole holistic schedule went phhhht. I realized the last time I did tai chi was at New Year’s break. So I have been rolling along thinking I was handling all this stuff, and it has caught up with me. One cannot be a balanced therapist without a balanced life.

My friend’s audit was a bit worse. I have been positively snappy when dealing with all the extra chores. Apparently I get up in the morning before work and like one possessed I crank right into my to-do list. Before work.

Well, the list is going bye-bye for now. I’ve booked a massage, a session with my counselor and my tai chi sensei. I’ve been acting like I lived on the kind of schedule my clients come in to undo. Lesson learned!

The Snooze Button

It’s a great compliment to a massage therapist when the person receiving falls asleep during a session.

Those little zzz’s say trust, relief, serenity and healing. And for this massage therapist, it most often happens during the Swedish portion of the treatment, when long flowing strokes push dream-like consciousness over the line into sleep.

So what on earth is going on when the therapist finds a knot to end all knots and the client takes a snooze?

Let me explain. In the midst of a treatment combining myofascial release and TrP release for adhesions and tension in the temporalis and masseter group. My client went from “that’s it”…” to total zzzz’s. During trigger point release!

I hit the Travell & Simons (not Simons & Travell) trigger point chart – I had touched, very lightly, above anterior TrP1 of the temporalis. Whatever happened next was totally weird.

The client went into sleep, snoring lightly and diaphragm breathing for perhaps the first time since I’ve been treating her. Y-reka! A minute later it was gone.

“I don’t know where I went,” she said. “No idea. But it was nice.”

“I’m not sure either,” I said. “But you relaxed beautifully. I think your whole body just did a reboot.”

I’ve been looking in a lot of my massage books, but only finding general points to induce sleep. I flipped to Wikipedia for help. In this region the skull bones are thinnest. It is the junction of the coronal, sphenoid-parietal and squamous sutures. This area is certainly a big player in the TMJ patterns of jaw clenching and imbalanced sutures. Craniosacral anyone? Polarity?

Baffling. This little spot is called the Pterion. Uhuh. Try saying that with a mouthful of granola.

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Field Trips, Diaries and Memoirs

The day after the Fourth of July I took time off from massage to see the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The museum is a living testimony – every day a survivor of a death camp speaks to visitors. Pictures, old films and recordings bring those times alive.

I was not thinking about massage, really, as we made our way through an exhibit on the life and death of Anne Frank. Our tour guide pointed out that Jews were one percent of the European population at the time, but were made scapegoats for many problems that occurred after World War I.

As the noose of fascism closed around their necks, no country would take them. No religious or political leaders spoke up for them. They were isolated and stripped of their humanity. What started as simple bullying transformed into organized genocide.

So what did it have to do with massage?

Pardon me while I answer my own question. I often see a substantial number of clients who have been bullied – something about them or their appearance or heritage – something brings out predatory behavior in some people. Often the bullying is public, and most people just stand by and observe.

It’s an unhappy facet of human nature and one that we all know and see at some point during our lives. And what of the ones who are bullied?

They often have chronic pain and stiffness leading them to the massage table. Sure it is not everyone who has ever been bullied, but a substantial number. I suppose some people who are made targets punch back and defeat their bullies.

Some thoughts to think about: Can people suffer the effects of aggression for many years after it occurs? Can we do something about it?

As a massage therapist, I think I already have those answers. Would it require changing the world? No, just letting people know when picking on others is not acceptable. I’d like to see fewer people for chronic tightness and pain caused by bullying and fear….

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