A new year with a new calendar makes for a new chance to grow in your practice. As 2015 winds down, it offers all of us an opportunity to look back over the year and take stock of what we have accomplished, where our challenges lie, and how we can improve over the coming year.
Sure, we all know that we want to be good at our job—not to mention successful. But, what does that mean for you? Take a few minutes to consider the quality of your clients’ experience at your hands, and see if some goals or resolutions for 2016 reveal themselves.

Of course, you’ll want to consider the quality of massage that you offer:
• Beginning with the first touch
• Massaging the full muscle
• Setting the right speed
• Keeping your skills fresh

Beyond your touch, there’s your massage space and the feeling & atmosphere that you create:
• Maintaining your massage room
• Managing music

The empathy you give and your clients’ sense of connection with you are part of it, too:
• Empowering client communication
• Creating space for clients to speak up
• Clarifying their real needs
• Even on bad days

All of those, together with getting great results for your clients and having a positive effect on their well-being, contribute to a sense of being “good” at what you do. Being “successful” can be as simple as enjoying that effect, knowing that you’ve benefited your clients. It can also be a matter of keeping busy and growing your clientele so that you get to keep enjoying having that kind of positive influence on people’s lives:
• Inviting clients to return
• Seeking referrals

However you choose to measure your performance and satisfaction, we hope these best practices, shared courtesy of Dreamclinic Massage, will present new opportunities for growth and development in 2016.

While you can’t change or fix the fact that holidays can bring on extra stress for your clients, you can choose to give them the greatest gift of all this time of year—peace. You can choose to consciously make your practice a place apart from such. That doesn’t mean you skip hanging up some twinkly lights. With these dark days, we all need a few extra photons, wherever we can get them. It just means that you keep to your healing intention, knowing that you are holding a space for your clients where nothing is expected of them, where there’s no agenda, where they can really relax and freely receive the nourishing & healing treatment you have to offer.

Just consciously reminding yourself of, and holding to, that intention to be a haven helps you to embody that healing ideal. You may find that keeping your focus on holding that space for your clients, paradoxically, helps you stay more grounded and centered, better able to channel away any of the harried or frenzied energy they may be carrying.

When you talk with your clients:

• Engage them with questions about how they are doing, rather than about what their holiday plans are.
• If they do go into the difficulties of their plans or family dynamics, help direct their awareness back to themselves and their own well-being. After a couple words of empathy, ask them how they are feeling in the midst of all that & whether they notice a physical response to the stress.

As massage therapists, we have a unique opportunity to be a “holiday haven” for both those craving connection at a lonely time & those who might need some space from the chaos of their family connections, giving them (and us!) a much-needed gift of seasonal serenity.

Holiday fuss can so easily intrude on your practice. In all the hustle and bustle of places to be and errands to run, it can be easy to skip your simple self-care. After all, you had to use your lunch break to run to that one shop for that special gift, right? It’s important to know, that when you do self-skimp, it shows. Clients can not only tell, but they can feel, when something in you isn’t wholly stable.

One time, I was receiving a massage from a therapist whose hands were actually shaking as she worked on me. I waited a couple minutes, thinking that it would pass, but it just became more pronounced. So, I requested that she pause, and I asked her what was the matter. She admitted that she had skipped lunch and was feeling a little low blood sugar.

“Did you know I could tell?” I said to her. “I could actually feel you shaking.”

She was surprised—and also a little bit embarrassed. Who wouldn’t be? We ended up working it out where she stepped out of the room for five minutes and had a quick snack. She came back and finished the massage, and it felt a lot better.

As a fellow therapist, I was glad to see her rally like that, but as her client, though, I was a little bummed that I received what amounted to a sub-par experience given those five minutes, as well as what had come before. When we come into the massage room, we need to be ready to present our best selves to our clients so as to give them the best, most effective massage that we can.

Beware the dreaded hangnail that subtly, but painfully lacerates an invisible path through your client’s skin! Of course, we’ve heard about it, or maybe even experienced it (ouch!), but no it’s never happened to us; we’ve never been the perpetrator of the hangnail crime. At least, we think we haven’t..

Fingernails, like hair, have no nerves. So, unless we check—or have a client willing to object, which many aren’t—we’d never know. I know I’ve received a massage more than a few times where the intermittent presence of a ragged tiny bit of nail was an impediment to my otherwise enjoying a good session.

What to do? Well, one simple habit that many good therapists develop is to check their fingernails against their forearm before each massage begins. Simply rock each of your fingers side-to-side, brushing them against your bare skin to feel for any irregularities, hang-ups, snags, or anything else that will get in the way of a delightfully soothing massage session.

To take care of them when they do turn up, make sure you keep not just nail clippers, but also a good, fine file in your self-care kit to smooth down the sharp edge of the clippers’ cut so that you don’t just trade one impediment for another.  It’s much better to be on your clients’ “most wanted” list for giving excellent, effective massage than to be guilty of the dreaded hangnail crime.

Massage therapy can be a very fulfilling career, but it can unfortunately end up being a short one for many of us. That’s because certain energetic self-care is absolutely indispensable, but often overlooked. Most of us who practice massage find a way to mind our body dynamics, but do we take care to maintain good hygiene needed to keep our ‘energetic field’ clean?
The same openness and sensitivity that allows us to feel pain points on a client’s body also make us vulnerable to what is called energy transference, where we take on aspects of the pain body of the client we are working on. Massage therapists can develop soreness in their arms or wrists after a day of massage, which they think is just normal fatigue from the work done. Sometimes, though, it can come from this energy transference. Without having a way to clear that, it’ll wear us down.
The best suggestion I have is to make a routine of rinsing your hands all the way up to the elbows in super-cold, ideally ice-cold, water after each client session, with the explicit intent of releasing and shaking off any energy that you have taken on that is not yours. If cold water is not available, you can also briskly wipe each arm from the elbow down and off past the fingers several times as if you were brushing off dust or crumbs.
Whichever method you use, it’s most important to do it with the intention of clearing out anything that’s not yours. Afterward, you could even put your hands together and take a few deep breaths, feeling your own warmth and energy coming back up to the surface.

One of the most challenging things for a lot of therapists can be finding themselves in an intake with a new client where the connection just isn’t happening. Maybe they look at their shoes the whole time, or they’re sighing and looking out the window. You know, no click. It takes a real dedication to our profession, and a certain level of maturity, to be able to put that non-clicking, or non-connectedness, aside and still provide somebody with a thorough and caring intake to craft a massage plan that meets their needs.

It’s vital that we remember not to take that disconnect personally. Being healers, it helps to realize that our clients, as they are in front of us, are not necessarily in their best state. That’s why they’re here. They may be distracted or grumpy due to whatever’s going on in their life, or from the pain or stress that has brought them to us in the first place.

When we can be in a compassionate state of non-judgment and continue to be dedicated to our healing profession, or to our healing intent, it allows us to bridge that gap and hold a space of healing around our clients, when they can’t hold it for themselves. In doing this, we show up as truly caring human beings, available at our best for each client, and our practice becomes a space where they can trust that their needs matter.

Are you looking to build your client base? When you already have some happy clients returning to see you, but you still have lots of empty slots in your appointment book, the best way to fill those empty slots is through the slots that are already filled. One of the easiest, but most overlooked marketing tips of all is to turn to those clients who are already coming to see you.

Just letting your clients know that you are working on getting busier and that you’d appreciate any referrals is all it takes. A lot of us shy away from doing it because we don’t want to appear desperate or pushy with our clients. It’s important to remind ourselves that they’re already our friends and fans, or they wouldn’t be coming back to see us.

If your client knew that you were thinking of closing doors and going back to that other career—house-cleaning, writing code, waiting tables, or whatever it was—or that you may have no choice but to abandon your massage practice, they would say “No! Hang on. I’ve got some friends I could send your way.”
Why not give them the opportunity to do that before it’s too late? You’d be surprised how not just willing, but delighted clients are to get to help contribute to your success. Try one of these approaches:

• “It was really great to work on you today. Is there someone you know that you think might benefit from this kind of work?”

• “I’m looking to grow my practice by adding 3-4 new clients this month. Is there anyone you can suggest me to?”

• “I’m working on getting busier in my practice, so I’m looking to take on some new clients. Would you be willing to pass along my card to some friends or coworkers?”

Before you know it, those empty slots will be a thing of the past.

Time management in the massage room can be tricky. Even with a thorough intake, you never know what you’re going to find until you get your hands on someone. It’s important, though, to keep your word to your clients. If, somehow, you can’t do what you said you would and you need to alter the plan, it’s vital that you keep the client in the loop and have them make the call.

It can be so frustrating when a massage therapist says they’re going to do something for me in a session that doesn’t happen, and some of the areas we discussed never even get touched. When I’ve asked therapists why that happened, commonly what I hear is, “I’m so sorry, I was so focused on your shoulder (or your back, or your neck, etc.), that I ran out of time.” That’s a common challenge for many therapists, of course, but as a client I’m left wondering, don’t I get a say?

So, while of course it is best to stick to what you told your client you would do, if you find that the time has gotten away from you and you won’t be able to deliver on your stated plan, my advice would be to get the client involved. Don’t just keep going and hope that they won’t notice. Honestly, you know they will. After holding an expectation based on your conversation during the intake, they’ll be disappointed, which can break their trust. They may not say anything, and they might even tip you, but you’ll never see that client again.

If you know that you are struggling with this, develop ways to recover gracefully, and always keep the client involved. You can easily say something like, “I’m sorry, it looks like we won’t have a lot of time to address your arms and your legs. If I were to spend more time on one of those areas, which would you like it to be?” That way, you preserve your relationship with the client, even if you don’t get to all the work you’d discussed.

Clients can seek massage for stress relief and relaxation, or for therapeutic work on a specific problem. Sometimes a client with an acute problem comes for general relaxation and stress relief. You can’t assume that just because they have a chronic issue that that’s always why they’re there.

I have a chronically unhappy left shoulder due to car accident that I was in over a decade ago. My shoulder loves work, and my shoulder is perennially a thing of curiosity to every massage therapist because it’s so clearly adhesed, plus it moves around when it’s receiving massage work. What this can do, though, is cause some therapists to get “lost” in my shoulder area at the cost of doing work in other areas where I also would like to receive massage.

While therapists often feel that spending extra time in a problem area is part of doing more effective work for the client, the truth is that sometimes clients are also looking forward to other areas being worked. So, how do you strike a balance when you know that you just hit “the mother-load of all muscle problems” and yet you only have an hour? The answer is communication, communication, communication. Ask questions like:

“Do you feel we have worked this area sufficiently?”

“Should I spend more time there, or is it time to move on?”

“Would you like me to spend another 15 minutes here? It may mean that we don’t quite get to cover your arms or legs (or whatever other area is not a primary complaint).”

Share with the client what you are feeling with your hands and what would be the benefit of the additional work, but let their priorities guide your massage plan for the day. If the issue feels like one that would benefit from a more targeted session, go ahead and suggest that the client schedule a time to come back in and focus on that specific area. Make sure you give the problem areas their due, but take care to avoid getting “lost” in a body area.

In today’s digital age, with so many of our clients (and ourselves!) spending so much time hunched around our smartphones, curled up with our tablets, and bent over our laptops, a new syndrome, which I call “computeritis,” seems endemic. It may be common for massage therapists once they hear of a client’s heavy use of such devices to jump to conclusions as to the culprit of the client’s pain. It’s important that ‘Computeritis” not be our first or only assumption when a client presents with neck or shoulder pain and tension. It’s vital that we get a fuller picture of our client’s lifestyle, without which we could very well be assuming and jumping to incorrect conclusions and to an incorrect treatment approach.

I’ve been working in a massage clinic for 12 years now. One time, I saw a therapist go in to do an intake with a client and come out only a minute later to give the client a chance to disrobe and get on the massage table.  Shocked to see that the therapist was back out so quickly, I quietly observed,

“that was a quick intake.”

“Oh yes,” said the therapist. “The client seemed eager to get on the table. So I did a few questions, but kept it short.”

“Great,” I said. “What’s the problem with the client?”

“Well, they do a lot of computer work, so they have a lot of tension in their neck and shoulders.”

“I see. And does the client have any hobbies?”

“I don’t know,” said the therapist. Oops!

Years ago, I had a client with a lot of shoulder pain. He worked with software, so it would have been easy for me to assume that, like everyone else, he was also suffering from computeritis and treat him accordingly. But I asked the patient when he felt his pain and tension the most, and he answered, “when I’m on the field.” Wow, that bit of new information provided the missing piece of the puzzle and completely changed my understanding of his condition. It turned out that he was a pitcher on a baseball team and his pain was due to his pitching technique. I learned from that experience never to assume that someone’s job sums up their lifestyle and to always get a little more information, even if it means taking an extra minute or two during intake.