With that introspective time of year right around the corner, your clients likely have their New Year’s Resolutions on their minds. Those resolutions can include everything from flossing more to working harder to seeing more of the world. New resolve to eat a healthier diet or to exercise regularly is somehow easier to summon as the calendar flips. As massage therapists, we’re in a unique position to support our clients in these efforts.

So many aspects of well-being come together on the massage table: stiffness & aches are worked out; old toxins are dislodged from their hiding places; and stress & tension melt away. What better way to buoy up one’s efforts at increased health & well-being?

This is a wonderful time for you to offer to be an ongoing source of support and encouragement for your clients as they live into the new year and their newly chosen good habits. By booking them for a regular massage appointment, you can help them hold the space for those resolutions. Follow these easy steps to engage with your clients about their goals for the new year:

1. Inquire – Find out whether your client has resolutions in mind that include their health and well-being by asking and listening. Even if they haven’t made specific goals, a statement like “Ugh, I know I need to take better care of my body!” reveals their underlying desire to do something.
2. Invite – Tell them you’d love to be a source of ongoing support as they make these positive changes and that you’d be happy to book a regular appointment for them so they know that they have at least that one good thing for themselves set.
3. Ask – Ask if it’s ok to give them some encouragement through a call, a text, or an email if you haven’t heard from then for a while in the new year.
4. Follow up – Keep a list of the clients interested in ongoing massage care being part of their lives, check it against your calendar regularly, and reach out to anyone you haven’t heard from in a month and a half, or so.

How clients choose to improve their well-being is as unique as each person choosing. Whatever your clients choose, you can be there with them in the coming year.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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