Often, it seems, clients will “prefer” a female therapist over a male therapist, and this is true whether the client is female or male. Doesn’t seem very fair to the male therapists, but before we address that subject, let’s look at some possible reasons for such preference:

1. Culture/Society: It’s no secret that some of America’s first settlers were Puritans, and that complicated view of sexuality mixed with religon mixed with any kind of nudity stills impacts clients in ways they probably don’t even realize whether they actively partipate in any kind of dogma. Therefore, it may seem more proper or safer for a female client to see a female therapist. To that slice of the culture, add the part where men don’t really touch other men often unless they are (a) very drunk or (b) very involved in winning sports events or (c) haven’t seen each other in 20 years and have been thinking each other dead. In parts of North Africa, straight male friends kiss on the lips when they meet. In India, men walk around with their arms around each other’s neck in a kind of half-embrace. In some countries, it’s even okay for male friends to hold hands. But in America, my father didn’t wear the color pink until the early 1990’s, and even then it wasn’t a PINK pink. Now, while things have changed somewhat, and lots of manly American men wear certain pastels these days, I think you see where I’m going here: to some male clients, seeing a male therapist may seem emasculating.

2. Trauma: I’m thinking mostly of female clients here, but male clients may have had traumatic experiences as well that may make them feel too vulnerable with a male therapist. And I’m not just talking about rape, although that and any kind of sexual abuse from childhood to the present can have an impact on gender preference. Most of us, especially women, have been subjected to countless advertising campaigns aimed at convincing us that we are just too ugly and weird for words: wrong shape, wrong size, too much hip, too little breast, etc. And when you feel that your body is anywhere from imperfect to just plain gross, you may be less likely to want a man–the gender that is often touted as the one who decides your worthiness for relationships, etc.–to massage you. I once heard of a blind male therapist who when asked how he thought he could sell himself to female clientele, simply remarked, “I can’t see them.”

This are two major reasons, and there are others, I’m sure. Now is all this fair to the average male therapist? No, not at all. So what can be done about it?

1. Give an Extra-Compelling Massage: It may not be fair that a male therapist has to work harder to “prove” himself to female clients, but I’ve often seen it work this way. I know several excellent male therapists who never have booking problems because their work is fantastic, promotes change, and hence their largely-female client base refers the hell out of them. One of my personal favorite therapists is over six feet tall, built like a bull, wears a utili-kilt, has long hair braided down his back, wears a full beard, and looks like he could win the blue ribbon at the local Highland Games. He’s also professional, treatment-specific, listens to my needs, and always promotes healthy change in my body with the type of great strength that I appreciate in deep tissue work. If he were giving fluff-and-buff massages, there would be no difference in booking with him and someone named Candi who dots her i’s with hearts.

2. Pour Out Good Intentions: I think both male and female therapists should do this, but it may be more important to for a male therapist to show a wavering female client that this is a workable working relationship by radiating a professional, caring, helpful aura.

3. Train the Front Desk to Promote Male Therapists: Self-emloyed male therapists are responsible for promoting themselves, but in a clinic or studio environment, male therapists may be no where near the appointment book when calls come in. Front desk staff need to know why clients may prefer females over males and be prepared to combat any concerns, mythologies, etc. in subtle ways. For example, “Are you sure you don’t want the 2 pm? Jim is the kindest man, and I love the way he always helps loosen up my bad right hip.” Of course this assumes that the front desk cares about both client and therapist welfare and gets regular massage (if not all of these things are true, they’ll need to be tended to as well).

Again, I sometimes feel that male therapists have to work a little harder to get appointments, and that’s a shame. On the other hand, it isn’t “racist” to ask for a female over a male, as I heard one male therapist say (personally, I was confused as the question has nothing to do with race, only with gender). It’s simply a function of preference, and as I’ve tried to point out, preference may not always be well-founded or logical. So it’s up to us, the therapists, and our support staff, to show clients that healing work is actually gender-blind.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Chris Korol, co-founder of Full Slate, which is a company that provides a popular online appointment scheduling solution for many massage clinics and other small businesses in the health and beauty space. I was really impressed with what I learned about Full Slate and wanted to share with our community. And for what it’s worth, if you are running a practice and do not yet offer online scheduling for your clients, Full Slate is real find and definitely worth checking out.

Before founding Full Slate, Chris was working full time, leading a busy lifestyle with a busy schedule. Making appointments for personal services like a haircut or massage was always a challenge. With a day full of meetings, it wasn‘t convenient to get on the phone during the workday so she usually tried to make appointments for personal services after hours. She recalls leaving a lot of voicemails, not always hearing back, and missing out on preferred appointment times once she did. The phone tag was a real obstacle to getting an appointment scheduled.

This is when it occurred to Chris that small businesses, especially those that didn’t have the luxury of dedicated phone staff, were probably losing out on a significant amount of business. With a background in online marketing she felt that service providers who have a website aren’t getting full value if their clients still have to pick up the phone. Consumers are beginning to expect that they can do everything on the web and they really want to be able to schedule appointments online too. So Chris decided to make it her mission to help small businesses serve their clients better by enabling easy and affordable online appointment scheduling.

After looking at some of the scheduling software that was already on the market, Chris and her team noticed that many of the existing solutions were un-intuitive and hard to use. Small businesses need to focus their time and energy on providing great service and taking care of clients, not figuring out how to use some software. So the Full Slate team set out to make the friendliest possible scheduling solution – for both businesses and their clients. For example, one drawback with some of the existing solutions is that clients of a business need to register and create and account before they can schedule an appointment. Recognizing that many clients would be turned off by this extra step, Full Slate chose to make registration optional for the clients. One more challenge the Full Slate team observed with the other solutions was that they were simply unattractive. To quote Chris directly “If I am a business and I offer online scheduling for my clients, I want this to be something that looks good, that I am proud to show my clients.”

Full Slate released the first version of its web-based scheduling software to the public in early 2009. The company chose to focus specifically on the Health and Alternative Medicine providers – like Massage clinics, Hair Salons, Acupuncture and Chiropractic clinics – wanting to do a great job for these businesses before considering others. Their strategy seems to be paying off handsomely. Chris shared with me that there has been more than a handful of users that have offered to start paying for the service even before the end of the trial period. Now that’s a testament that users are getting a lot of value from the software!

Chris says most businesses that sign up for Full Slate find that after a few months, up to 70% of their appointments shift to being booked online, which translates into huge time savings. There was one client, an acupuncturist, that had actually begun to resent her clients because she was so stressed with the administrative aspects of the practice. Full Slate completely alleviated her stress. In an email to Full Slate, the acupuncturist raved about how she went on vacation and upon returning, had lots of new appointments that her clients had booked online through Full Slate.

Another thing that users often say about Full Slate is that it feels “Mac like”. That’s a serious compliment because Apple does a great job of making software easy to use and it means something to be compared to Apple. The team at Full Slate prides itself on providing personalized customer support and tries to talk to every new business that signs up. This really makes a difference and re-assures the small business owners that there are real people at Full Slate, available and willing to help if and when there are any questions.

So what should you do if you are intrigued and wanting to learn more? Just go to their website and sign up for a free trial of online scheduling. The trial is not time-based. Rather it lets you explore and test all features fully and you can use the software for free up to the point where 10 clients have booked online appointments. After that, there is a very affordable plan to keep using the software. This is a nice way to try out online scheduling because when you see your clients actually using it, then you truly grasp the value of the software. Full Slate also offers a live tour for a fictitious massage clinic at http://massage.fullslate.com. So, without sounding like a broken record, if you have ever considered online appointment scheduling for your clients, now you have no excuse NOT to do it. If you do try out Full Slate, come back and share your experience on this blog!

All the best,
Larisa Goldin,
Find Touch Co-founder

My mother had a term for gifts given without a reason: love gifts. Unlike Christmas, Valentine, or birthday gifts, love gifts just come out-of-the-blue on any old day, for no other reason that you love someone. Not hearts-and-flowers love, necessarily. Just any quantity or variety of like, love, respect, admiration, etc.

For example, last week I picked up a used copy of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden for a long-standing client of mine. I often do guided imagery with her using a garden, and when I saw this $3 love gift, I knew it was meant for her. Another regular client of mine who makes jewelry left me an acrylic-encased butterfly wing pendant as a tip the other day. She did not know how much I loved butterflies or that I sometimes dream of raising them and releasing them as a hobby or of taking a Costa Rican butterfly tour. The unexpected surprise of the tiny beautiful thing, though, brought an unbelivable amount of joy to my day.

One of my recent favorite love gifts are the kodama labels with our names on them that a fellow therapist made for the “buckets” that hold our indivial supplies of oil, lotion, etc. Based on illustrations from Princess Mononoke (see image above), they are a delight and certainly much more inspired that the sticky notes we had been using as labels.

I think that love gifts are a wonderful way to support each other in all times, but especially the tough economic times we find ourselves in now. The rush and stress of doing our jobs well and compassionately in the face of paying all the bills and meeting the financial committments makes for quite a balancing act. A love gift is never expensive and often nothing you would think to buy or make for yourself. When you give it, you lead with your gut and you help someone to stop for moment and smell the proverbial roses . . . and when they smile, you smell them too.

A client asked me the other day if someone–a very wealthy person or even a celebrity–asked me to be his or her personal therapist on a yearly salary, would I take the job? She added that Bob Hope had a personal massage therapist and she was sure there were others out there who employed personal massage therapists. “Mmmm,” I said hesitantly, trying to picture myself massaging Bob Hope everyday. “I really don’t know…”

And I really didn’t know. What makes it an interesting question is that it is a job choice for a massage therapist, just like running a single private therapeutic practice or working for a large spa or working on a cruise ship or strictly doing chair massage at events and street fairs. Okay, it’s a choice that probably won’t present itself often, but thinking about it might help one solidify one’s thinking on the types of massage careers one does or doesn’t want to have.

Unlike asking “What would you buy if you won the lottery?,” the question “Would you become a personal, salaried massage therapist?” is not so simple, probably because it involves both societal and market norms. For example, could you work for someone everyday who threw screaming tantrums and hit her personal assistant in the head with shoes and cell phones (e.g. like a famous supermodel)? I couldn’t. What’s worse my personality doesn’t say “step away calmly” when hypothetically struck with a cell phone, my personality says “feed her the cell phone.” So great, now I’ve lost my salaried job from hell and am doing prison time for assault and battery.

Now the potential benefits of such a job are obvious: job stability, financial success, no worrying about marketing, the possibility of meeting Bob Hope’s friends for autographs, etc. But the potential drawbacks make up a much larger list, in my opinion: skill stagnation, feeling like a servant/slave, dealing with or dodging various kinds of abuse, dealing with having both a strong social and market-based relationship with a client, and–most importantly–not being able to reach out and help a large variety of everyday people because I’m all tied up with Bob Hope.

So I guess I would have to say no. Okay, maybe. If the contract and the person met a long list of criteria. So for example, if President Obama asked me to be his personal massage therapist, I could feel good that helping him was indirectly helping the entire country. He’d be too busy to fixate on our relationship, and he seems too polite to even consider hitting me with a cell phone. He has plenty of other employees, so he’d never ask me to house-sit (what a laugh, huh?) or cook meals for him if he gets cravings. He’s generally surrounded by people, though, and that might set of my claustrophobia like Mardi Gras Eve on Bourbon Street. He also makes a lot of far-reaching international decisions; and I have a fear of coming home worrying myself sick about the fate of peace talks with some small Asian country when “Mr. B” doesn’t have the most relaxing massage experience.

Yikes… guess I’m not ready to make any decisions on being a personal, salaried massage therapist anytime soon.

I think I’m becoming a Grinch about noise. Because it was the well-loved Grinchy-Claus who once worried,

…All the Who girls and boys
Would wake up bright and early. They’d rush for their toys!
And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!

Normally, I think total quiet is not only artificial, it’s too much to ask. Even in the most womb-like of massage environments, you’re going to get the occasional murmur of footsteps and voices in the hall, or the soft click of doors opening and closing. If the massage is compelling enough, both it and almost ever-present massage music should soften the effects of such normal every day sounds.

But lately, the noise in my studio has been increasingly annoying for both therapists and clients alike. On one side of us, we have a popular teriyaki restaurant. For a while, the merry Spanish music of the kitchen staff was invading us, though a kind request seemed to solve that. Unfortunately, we still have a vacuum cleaner advancing and retreating and slamming our walls everyday at mid-morning, as well as dining room noise in the evening (dishes clicking, babies squealing). On the other side, we have a cosmetics supply store, and their storage room backs up to our treatment rooms. After a kind request, they removed the doorbell that goes DING-dong, DING-dong, DING-dong every time someone enters their shop. On the other hand, they scuffle and stomp, sometimes assemble things with power tools, and occasionally bring in a small barky dog. And to complete the noise inventory, we have our own front desk noise that seeps through to my treatment room and our own breakroom noise which can invade the treatment room directly across the hall if the door isn’t shut completely.

So we definitely have a problem to be solved, but how? The break room is the break room for heaven’s sake. It shouldn’t have to be a tomb, nor really can it be with hot stone carts being wheeled in and out and therapists doing laundry and dishes and discussing treatment techniques. As for the rest of it . . . well, the reason I think I’m becoming a Grinch is that my first thought was to go the nearby grocery stor–which should have honey and most everything else needed but ants–and go find the contractor who put the studio together. I know, I know, I’m such a nice, sweet girl. In any case, not only would that not be kind, it wouldn’t be immediately helpful and because I doubt my boss is going to want to spend the money to break down and sound proof the walls, what do we do?

One therapist who deals with the teriyaki vacuum in her room, suggested white noise machines. She said she once worked with a talk therapist who used one to keep people outside the room from eavesdropping, whether intentionally or otherwise. So I did some researching on such machine and a lot of listening to shockingly wide variety of “white noise” sounds. Some of these sounds, I wouldn’t call “white noise” just “background noise” such as rain, thunder, birds chirping, etc. Those sounds won’t help. They’ll just combine with the music, sometimes in odd ways. Then there are interesting sounds like one might use for sleeping infants such as “heartbeat.” The sound of a heartbeat isn’t horrible, but I think some clients might find the peculiar pulsing creepy. After all, Edgar Allan Poe isn’t running the studio (thank goodness). The only sounds that I think might be helpful are “true” white noise, which from what I tell, sounds like different types of air rushing through fans. A fan sound without the chill breeze might combine with the music to almost eliminate our sound problem, though that’s only a theory. If anyone out there has used white noise to combat annoying noise in a massage practice (or has any other opinion on the problem) please let me know. Fire ants simply aren’t as available here as they were in Louisiana