Ethics

Educating Massage Clients is one of the best ways to create awareness and acceptance about massage.  Education is not talking at people telling them about massage, about what you can do and why they should get a massage.  The root word of Education is the Latin word educare, which means to “draw out.” To educate, therefore, means to draw out something that fundamentally is already there. In the process of education, you actually become aware of yourself.   In most of our standard examples of education like in public schools and in massage school it becomes just a memorizing of information and a regurgitation of that information.  It isn’t education.

To educate clients and potential clients it is more about building a relationship with them.  It is about setting aside your own agendas to even get a massage appointment and showing a real interest in them.  It begins with asking people questions to find out their needs.  Then if you find that their needs match what you have to offer you can then easily talk about what massage can do for them.

I have heard a few massage therapists say things like ” I have sent many letters over the years to doctors and others trying to educate them and it didn’t work.”   While I don’t know for sure what was in the letters I would guess that it wasn’t educating and it was more about them. It might have been more along the lines of presenting information that the recipient wasn’t interested in.

To educate others you need to forget what you know about massage – all the big terms, the name of the muscles and things like that.  The ‘Curse of Knowledge” from Chip and Dan Heaths Book “Made to Stick” says:

Once we know something it is hard to imagine what it is like to not know it.  Our knowledge has cursed us.  And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t really create our listeners state of mind.

• Make sure your website and communication is about the client and what is in it for them. So often massage therapists make the mistake of making everything about themselves. Assume that people know little to nothing about massage and what it can do until you find out otherwise. Keep it simple and in plain English.
• You need to understand what your client/potential client wants. They start with saying they want to feel better or be out of pain – but why? So they can play a sport better? So they can play more with their kids? So they can enjoy their work, home life, vacation? Ask questions to get to their why? Tell them how you will help them solve their problems and help them achieve their goals.
• People want to know that you are the expert and can handle whatever health issue that they have and that you will be able to do the right thing to help them. Let them know that you understand by sharing a story about other client situations (without names or client ID) or let them know a story about you. You are the EXPERT! People want to know that. Google wants to know that too! Google wants your website to be good enough to pass their E-A-T guidelines that were just released by Google in 2014 and recently updated
  
  E-A-T  (“Expertise, Authoritativeness or Trustworthiness”
• Believe in what you do. Understand what you do. Be always learning about what you do. But more than that, make sure you know how to express that belief without sounding like a used car salesman.
  

Example: I started my business renting a room out of a health club in downtown Seattle. I used to sit at the front desk and greet club members and hand out towels and locker keys. One guy would go out running when he was there and he did his stretching by the front desk and would stop to talk. He kept saying “Oh I need to get a massage someday” etc etc but never would book. One day I asked him why he was running so much – did he have a personal goal or was he training for some event. Turns out he was training for a marathon. When I was able to make the connections to how massage could help him run better and train better, he signed up for a massage….not just one massage… but one massage a week for about 10 years.

Yesterday on Facebook I saw this post from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills show that showed just how much people do not know about what massage is and who massage therapists are. We have lots of work to do.

Originally written on June 5 2010. Updated May 18, 2019

 

The word ‘energy vampire’ seems to come up every so often in discussions about massage sessions with clients.  What is an energy vampire?  Is there even any such thing? How can you protect yourself from these beings and run a successful massage therapy business?

What is an “energy vampire“?

I found many definitions of them:

• Psycentral.com says:  “Energy vampires are emotionally immature individuals who have the sense that the whole world revolves around them. They are almost incapable of seeing things from another person’s perspective. They often lack empathy. They believe that they must take everything they can get from others and that giving anything will deprive them of essential resources. It’s as if the whole world exists just to serve them and you are the latest object upon which they have set their sights for exploitation.”
• Judith Orloff, author of   Empaths Survival Guide and Emotional Freedom and  says in her article What is an energy vampire?:
  “Energy vampires exude negative energy that drains you. Energy vampires range from the intentionally malicious ones to those who are oblivious to their effect. Some are overbearing and obnoxious; others are friendly and charming. For example, you’re at a party talking to a perfectly nice person, but suddenly you’re nauseous or weak. Or how about the co-worker who drones on about how she broke up with her boyfriend for the tenth time? Eventually, she feels better, but you’re spent. The bottom line is that on a subtle energy level these people suck you dry.   Types of energy vampires include The Narcissist, someone who is self-absorbed and has empathy deficient disorder. The Victim, someone who wears you out with their wining and lack of willingness to find solutions. The Passive Aggressive, someone who is angry with a smile and gets you with jabs that you don’t see coming. The Rageaholic, someone who dumps anger on you and spreads toxic energy in their general vicinity. The Drama Queen or King is someone who wears you out with exhausting drams.”
• Christiane Northrup, MD, author of the recent book “Dodging Energy Vampires,” explains that energy vampire characteristics do tend to map to “cluster B” personality disorders — the ones where people tend to have dramatic, overly emotional or erratic thinking or behavior -Cluster B includes people with antisocial, borderline and narcissistic personality disorders

Types of Energy Vampires

You probably have come across various types of so called energy vampires and have seen how they work.

• People who talk too much in a session especially about topics that annoy you – politics, religion, how they cheated on their spouse or they consistently talk about themselves.
• People who try to control the session and tell you what they think YOU should be doing and massaging and HOW you should be doing the massage.
• People who consistently arrive late to their massage sessions.
• People who arrive late and still want their full session time.
• People who consistently no show their massage sessions.
• People who consistently cancel their massage sessions within the allotted time in your cancellation policy, but it still leaves you at a loss.
• People who tell you all about their other massage therapist that does something different/better than you are doing.
• People who don’t do anything obvious that you can put your finger on, but they just drain you.
• You come home with headaches, shoulder, neck pain or with some of the symptoms that you saw in clients that day as you worked on them.

Getting upset about these things is the energy drain.

Here’s the thing…. most everyone is an energy vampire at one time or another.

All of these scenarios are really about your boundaries, how you set them, how you inform clients about them and how you enforce them.  The energy drain that these things put on you is just telling you that you do not have a boundary in place to protect you from this loss of energy.

First off, that isn’t how energy works.

The use of the word vampire in this expression brings in the added drama of fear and mythology of vampires that started in the 1800’s.

By calling someone a vampire, you are trying to elevate yourself as being better than another.  Calling people energy vampires is very unprofessional and uncalled for.

What we do have is people and interactions with those people who drain us if we are not taking care of ourselves and doing the internal work of becoming aware of ourselves.

We have People.

What we do have is people…people with issues….people who just had a bad day at work, people who are narcissistic and controlling, people who didn’t get enough touch and nurturing in their early life so they are fearful and defensive.   What we do have is people who just want a massage and they don’t want us telling them what to do.  What we do have is people who are depressed, isolated, fearful and alone.

What we do have is people who are touch deprived and insecure.  What we do have is people who want to control their massage session and may take that to directing the massage session.  We have people who want to talk too much.  We have people that didn’t have the support that they needed to feel heard and to feel good enough.  We have people with attachment issues of all kinds.

Trauma, stress, pain – these things create a void or need in people that needs to be filled/healed and they try to do that in any way they can which often makes them into an ‘energy vampire”.

People may have busy lives and need to constantly reschedule.   They are late.  They have drama filled lives and experiences that they bring with them to the table.

How people like these affect you or your massage work is up to you.

Just stop and refuse to offer up your neck.  These people are not usually doing this on purpose. They have something inside of them that needs attention and some empty part that needs to be filled or healed.  They are pushing your buttons and triggering old parts of you that also need attention or healing. Don’t react. Give them nothing. Just stop feeding them.

It’s about YOU…not them.  They are not energy vampires.

A massage session IS all about them!  Why should it matter to you how they want to spend their time?

People don’t ‘steal’ your energy or put their ‘energy hooks’ into you.   You let them in.  You let them ‘steal’ your energy.  You let them carry on with their drama and incessant chatter that bothers you.   You let them come late without penalty.

It is about knowing your boundaries and knowing when it is starting to happen in a session.  Is someone’s incessant talking or directing you making you feel stressed?  Bring them back to their body by asking them something like ‘What do you feel here under my hands where I am working?”.

Set your boundaries and stick to them and be professional about doing so.

Take care of yourself and your own needs so that the ‘needs’ of clients to be controlling, always late, demanding or whatever it is that is draining you or that you are saying is being an energy vampire don’t bother you!!!

If something a client is doing or saying on the table, it is also another great opportunity to turn things around and learn more about your own judgements about this behavior.

People’s behavior will only affect you if you let it.  That being said, it isn’t always easy of course and it does require some support and awareness of when this is happening in your practice and learning what to do about it.   One of the best ways to do that is in the process of supervision.  It is also just about taking care of yourself enough so that the things people do don’t affect you or trigger you.

I am not saying that there are not drama issues or attention issues that you may find challenging when dealing with clients.  It is also about taking responsibility.  It isn’t that the client is the problem and is draining.  It is more that I am too tired, I am not able to deal with the clients needs for attention, I am not able to deal with being controlled by clients.  It is setting boundaries around your time and your sessions and if that still doesn’t work,  letting that client go is also part of having good boundaries.

Plugging the drain.

You may have been taught in massage school that the way to deal with things like this is to smudge the room, think positive thoughts, put a wall up around you, karate chop your wrists to imagine that the energy stops there, ground yourself, protect your hands/body with energy, garlic and texas toast, wear a silver bullet around your neck.  The big one is fire clients and just move on.  Firing clients should be the very last resort after you have worked to communicate your boundaries and worked to enforce them.  What schools are not teaching is that it isn’t the actual situation that drains you – it is your response to the situation and what it does to your body and stress response system.

People are people and they just do their own thing.  They have busy lives.  They don’t understand the value of massage. They haven’t been told that their incessant chattering takes away from their session that they are paying for.  They are not taught to respect others.  People do crazy things.

It is YOUR reaction to these things that drains you and brings you down.  The more adult, professional thing to do is first to recognize the things that drain you and learn to become aware of what those situations really mean to you?  Do they invoke anger, make you upset?  You might get mad and upset but honestly – what is the problem? Did it really hurt anything/anyone?  Everything that happens in our lives is usually a part of our preprogrammed perceptions of reality that start at birth. Our anxiety and response to these situations is usually an attempt to avoid the feelings of anxiety that these situations have created for you. Anxiety and anger are usually automatic survival reactions.  You can’t control what others do/say but your reaction to them can be controlled. It is your angry reaction that drains you.

1. Become aware of your own needs and work on becoming more aware of your own issues that trigger you.
2. Keep your energy up and your mind clear by doing your own work.
3. Don’t engage with ‘energy vampires’ when your energy is down. (Lack of sleep, poor diets, not getting massage yourself, etc)
4. Practice compassion.  Respond to people who are late, talk too much, drain you by telling them (in a nice way) what you need – what your boundaries are and learn to enforce them with consequences.  That is done by having policies around canceling, arriving late.  It is done by telling them to stop talking – it is a massage and that is what they are there for.

Or yes you can stop seeing them all together.  That is part of boundaries too.

But remember: We all have a little big of energy vampire in us at one time or another.

 

First Published on: Jan 25, 2014 @ 12:57  Updated Nov 3, 2018 @12:35

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How can I help? Stories and Reflections on Service” Is the title of a book by Ram Dass written about the helping professions. I was first introduced to this book in massage school in 1987 and read it through briefly and didn’t really think much of it.

It is now the center of what is really some of the core issues in the massage profession and is the most tattered book on my shelf.

The main theory of the book is that there is a deeper reason as to why people help or feel a need to help. We need to boost our self esteem, we need approval and appreciation, we need to feel needed. But helping for the purpose of getting our needs met often leads to burnout and in the massage profession – a failing practice.
Because we work in a profession that works very closely with people, it is important to begin to always be working on ourselves to become more aware of our issues and blindspots.

It feels good to be working in a profession where we can ‘help’ others. But helping is different from being of service. Ram Dass says in the book

“Can we see that to be of most service to others we must face our own doubts, needs, and resistances?

What do you get out of helping? What purpose does it serve for you?

When you can begin to unlock the deeper meaning of ‘helping’ you can begin to uncover the unconscious beliefs that are usually the cause of our need to help others. When we come from a place of ‘needing’ to help others it gets in the way of the therapeutic relationship. It starts to become a massage session that is all about us and not the client. We are less likely to be able to really listen to a clients needs and concerns. We are more likely to bend our boundaries to accommodate clients thinking we are giving when in reality it is about much more than that. We give so we can get. We give up ourselves so that clients will stay clients because we fear not being able to make a living. We don’t have cancellation policies that support us – we let clients come and go as they please while our income suffers.

When we work to become more aware of our own issues and work through them with a counselor or in peer supervision/supervision our work changes.

As Ram Dass puts it:

“Our service then, is less a function of personal motive and more an expression of spontaneous, appropriate caring”

We get caught up in doing for others thinking it is what they need. We get caught up in giving advice or sermons thinking it is for their own good. When people don’t get better, we say we did all we could do and told them everything we knew. We forget to really listen and witness the process of healing.

We get caught up in thinking that all of our training, all of the extra hours of learning new techniques, all that you know is what makes you a ‘good helper’.
When you help from a place like this it becomes an addiction – like eating candy or drinking alcohol. You get your high from helping and like to think you are being useful. But when does that ‘helping’ begin to hurt more than it helps?

The more you can look at this act of helping and all of the needs and feelings associated with it, the easier it will be to fill your practice with the kind of clients who are nurturing and respectful of you and value your time and efforts to pay you what you are worth.

Questionnaire to further explore helping issues in the massage profession.

One common theme I see in the massage profession is that many massage therapists think it is much better to care and charge less or not promote themselves enough so they have enough clients than to make money.  Yup…me too.  Been there, done that and still struggle with issues around making money myself.  Who doesn’t?

Money is the one thing that touches everyone’s life in some way, shape or form.  Money is where we project all of our issues about self worth, being worthy and being good enough.  When it comes down to basics – money really doesn’t mean anything.  It is a math problem of life to be figured out so you can eat, drink and be merry and pay the bills, take vacations and yes – even continue to stay in business and do more great massage!  Maybe even retire one day!

Often when people say it isn’t about the money, what they are saying is that they are not making enough doing this work.

Noble Poverty

The first time I really started thinking about this was after reading a book called “Why Women Earn Less: How to Make What You’re Really Worth
” by Mikelann Valterra (which could really be called “Why Massage Therapists Earn Less).  She uses the term “Noble Poverty” :

“The continual practice of earning less than one needs based on the belief that there is virtue in not having money.”

It is when people think that by choosing to be a massage therapist makes them more ‘noble’ and that money is somehow evil.  It really comes from whatever beliefs you developed about your own self worth and money in your early childhood.  It is almost like you choose a profession where you can’t make as much money as you need so that you can be more ‘Noble’ than others it keeps you from making more money – a vicious circle of pain, underearning and life draining work.   But the reality is you can make as much or as little as you want in this profession – just like any other career choice really.

You can make money and still care!

A good place to start understanding your underearning issues or at least start becoming aware of them is by looking at what you think about people who do have money.  What do you think about people who are millionaires or have more money then they really need?   Do you think things like ‘ they must have had to sell their soul to get that money? or that people with money are somehow evil?   What do you think when you see people driving a Bentley?  I had a client who owed one for a few years but he sold it because he said people kept keying the car – dragging their key down the side of his car for no reason other than he owned a fancy expensive car that most people can only look at in magazines.

When you don’t make as much money as you need, you really are not doing anyone any ‘good’.  If you are not able to stay in business because you don’t market yourself enough or you are not willing to learn how or to pay someone to market your business – what ‘good’ is that?

I do know that part of the issue is that many people come into the massage profession just seeing dollar signs – I can make $65-$100 an hour????  Well you can’t.  That is what you can charge for a massage but you usually don’t make that much.  They somehow forget to tell you that you will have business expenses to pay as well as you have to get clients on the massage table which means you have to promote yourself to make that happen.   The schools often will not tell you that jobs in massage start at $12-$15 an hour which is hardly a living since full time work in massage is usually about 25 hours a week because of the physical demands.

Massage therapists cringe at the entry level pay in franchises like that and the low fees that they charge clients saying that it ‘devalues’ the profession.  It does I guess in a way do that but it really is just business basics.  The owners of most franchises are not massage therapists so they DO care about making money and it is their main focus!  They do like salaries of $100k or more and want to be able to sell the business for more than what they paid which is usually $150K-$300K or more!   How do you think they will make that kind of money?  By paying the therapists less and giving themselves more! They took the financial risk and are responsible for getting clients in the door and they need to get as many as they can.  It is just business.   It isn’t anything personal.  But stop taking the low paying jobs if you can’t make a living at that rate!  Take the job if it is a nice supplement to your other income or family!

Most massage therapists start their own business which makes them responsible for getting clients in the door.  It takes promoting yourself – telling people that you are out there!  Some people will call it sales but I just think of sales as high pressure tactics to get people on the massage table and coming back.  I won’t go that far really because high pressure sales tactics aren’t really need in my opinion.  You do need to ask though!  You need to ask people to refer to you.  You need to ask the people who come in to refer to you as you are building your business.  You have to ask them when do they want to come back…You just have to tell them and ask!    It is just marketing!   Sounds simple right?  Then why are so many massage therapists struggling?

Is it this idea that it is somehow better to not have clients and live without because doing massage is so absolutely fabulous and amazing that it will surely get you to heaven because you are so good to be doing this work!

And yes, this is one of my own personal demons too but I have been working on it for many many years.  It still will hit me like a ton of bricks when I find myself complaining that I don’t have enough clients.  The way I deal with it is by tracking my income and expenses to the point where it all just becomes a math problem to be solved.  If you don’t know where the money is coming or going – you may be in a money fog.  When you are more aware of the money coming and going, it no longer becomes about am I good enough to charge what I am worth, or good enough to charge people when they don’t show up or good enough to put myself out there (market myself!)

What you charge for is your time – Your time away from your family and your life.
You charge for your experience and your skills.   The Caring is Free!

 

It’s a Business.

Massage therapists have to remember that it is a business that they are running.   To stay in business you need enough money to pay the rent and make a living.   You don’t have to be a business major to run a business.   You do have to show up and work to get clients.  To make it a business you need to have set hours and set days that you work.  Your schedule is part of the therapeutic relationship and also part of self care for you.  I see so many massage therapists leaning away from same day appointments saying that they aren’t at people’s beck and call and that they have a life.  Well it’s fine to have a life, but if you need money and clients, you have to show up on the days/times that you have set up and be there whether you have clients or not.  It’s business.   Just let people know your hours.

Technology is here to help you run a massage business and to manage your time more effectively.  The more time you spend working on office work and getting clients scheduled and in the door, the less time you have to give massage where you make the money.  Don’t be afraid of technology.  Having a really really good website will do most of the work of getting people on the table.  It will also be so full of information and content that people will trust you right off the bat when they make the appointment.   Online scheduling is a necessity these days.  Saves hours of time trying to get people on the phone and get them scheduled.  If you really really don’t want to work on your website and get it to the point of doing all of the work for you, then you will have to be an expert at networking and getting people to refer to you.

You won’t have to ‘sell’ clients on your services.  Selling is really just telling people what you do and what massage can do for THEM.  It is a natural process of educating people and giving them the best massage that they ever had in their life.   Just be yourself.  Share what you know.  Learn to write and talk about massage.  Be a big fan of massage and get massage weekly yourself.

Some massage therapists will say that they don’t like being a sales person.  The word sales conjurers up used car salesman trying to sell you a junker car for way too much money.   That is not what you need to do!  Start with my 5 step process.

Resources:

Why Women Earn Less: How to Make What You’re Really Worth – Mikelann Valterra   Getting to the core of your beliefs about money takes some work to examine your own beliefs and issues around money.  It is such an unconscious process!

Financial Recovery: Developing a Healthy Relationship with Money – Karen McCall (Mikelann’s Mentor!)  The Plan for recovery is in tracking your income/expenses and getting to the point of knowing that it is all just a math problem.

 

 

Originally published Jan 18, 2015.  Updated Dec 10 2017

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