I Am Approved

Effective April 11, I am an NCBTMB approved continuing education provider (through The Healing Core, with my buddy / Board of Directors / massage therapist / road trip companion / professional conscience / partner in crime / advanced tapotement provider Kitty Southworth).

I feel like I graduated to the Big Girl Panties!

For those of you who have no idea what the *bleep* I'm talking about....

....most MTs are licensed and have to renew those licenses every 2 years or so. As part of the renewal process, they have to prove they took xx hours of continuing education since the last time they renewed their license.

Therefore, when we are considering our continuing ed options, we always check to see if they offer CEUs. There are a lot of MTs who simply won't spend the time or money on a course that doesn't also offer CEUs (since we all are usually short on both time and money).

To grant CEUs, the workshop provider has to be approved by an agency recognized by your state's massage regulatory. NCBTMB is the leading agency for massage therapist. Hence, our application process.

In practical terms, being an "approved provider" means our workshops will attract more attention and, to be honest, we can charge more for our workshops. We are also free to offer them wherever we can find the space (and the students). We aren't restricted by the need to find a co-host who can grant CEUs. This expands our horizons dramatically.

I've been pondering whether my next 10 years should include more workshops -- both those developed by me and those I sponsor/organize for someone else. This makes that so much more reasonable and likely. I think I've found the new direction/aspect of my practice to take me to 2020.

In some ways, it only took me about 2 weeks to complete the application. In other ways, it took 5 years....

2006 - 2008

I kept meeting students and new MTs getting sidelined by the energetic effects of our work. I was becoming more and more frustrated that MTs weren't being taught the energetic body in a simple straightforward way like they were taught the physical body. More importantly, I was frustrated that most MTs weren't taught simple energetic self-care techniques (that's the equivalent of teaching someone how to do massage without teaching them how to avoid injuring themselves).

I began to picture a class that would teach the basics of the energetic body in an organized way, much like the anatomy classes I had in massage school.

As that picture solidified I realized such a class would be best taught by two people, one for the academic portion and one for the practical portion. The most obvious person to teach such a class with me? Kitty Southworth, since she was the one who had dragged me (kicking and screaming) to my first energetic self-care class. I pitched the idea to her in 2008 and she agreed.

While at the 2008 American Massage Therapy Association convention in Phoenix, I picked up the NCBTMB approved provider application package.

2009

April: Kitty and I went away for a weekend to fully develop the course outline.

It helped that I had been a technical writer for 20 years. Documentation and training are cousin disciplines -- we approach a subject the same way but tech writers deliver their information in writing and trainers do it in a workshop setting.

I'd used that same experience in developing my course material for the business practices classes at Potomac Massage Training Institute (PMTI). I taught those classes for several years.

As part of preparing the PMTI business practices material, I had a friend with a background in adult education teach me how to develop learning objectives and give me the basics on developing good courses.

Important aside: just knowing a lot about a subject does not necessarily make you a good instructor. There's a whole different set of skills (and, frankly, personality traits) that make a good instructor. The skills can be learned (the personality traits may have to be genetic, I'm not sure). If you want to develop a workshop, take the time to learn how to develop course content and how to teach adults.

May: Our initial plan was to convince our alma mater, PMTI, to include our material in their professional training program. We pitched the course proposal to PMTI.

They turned us down.

July: We decided we could re-work it as a weekend continuing ed workshop. It took us a few months to make that work.

2010

February: We had a course we could teach: Energy 101. We worked out the where and and when and how much.

April: We started promoting Energy 101.

August: We taught Energy 101 for the first time (a necessary prerequisite to the NCBTMB application process) in August to 11 students. We offered it at about half the cost we will in the future to (1) attract students and (2) in recognition of the lack of CEUs.

We also kept detailed track of how long each segment of the workshop took. We knew that would be required later for the NCBTMB application.

Four days later I moved to Australia.

November: I began reading the NCBTMB application that I'd had for 2 years. The application itself was about 35 pages; 20 of those pages were data entry pages.

I presumed the actual application could be done online. Well, yes and no.

NCBTMB offers the application in PDF form online. But you can't save the form and you can't save anything you enter online and you can't submit the PDF as the application (that has to be done on paper).

Remember that we had 20 pages of data entry? The odds were that I was not going to enter all that data all in one go.

I was so baffled by this, so convined that I was missing something that I called the NCBTMB (from Australia) for clarification. They confirmed that I was right -- I had to enter it all at once or (they suggested) I should print out each page as I completed it since I had to actually make the submission as hardcopy.

Need to make a correction? Re-enter all the data on that page and print it out, again.

I worked on the application pretty steadily for a week in November. I was using the Energy 101 course Kitty and I teach plus 3 other courses taught by Ben Risby-Jones, an Australian naturopath that Kitty works with (and is now my co-author for "Travel Guide for the Spiritual Journey") in the application. I needed some detailed info from both Ben and Kitty but we ran into the holidays....

2011

January: We moved into a new townhouse and Brisbane experienced massive flooding. Didn't get much done.

February: I got back to the application. It took about another week to get all the pages completed to my satisfaction.

I had to do most of this at the library because we don't have a printer at home. That meant making a reservation to get into the Learning Lab at the library for a 2-hour slot (all that's available) and pay to print each page. I'm delighted that the library had the services I needed but it was tedious to make the reservation and troop over to the library every time I needed to complete some more pages. $10 in printing costs.

Once complete, I had to make two copies, get them 3-hole punched, inserted into binders with dividers. I marked where Kitty had to sign (since we were submitting under her company The Healing Core). Another $15.

Interesting side note: 3-hole is not necessarily the default here in Australia. I found 3-ring binders, 2-ring binders, 4-ring binders, and 5-ring binders. The 3-ring binders were the hardest to find!

THEN I had to go to the post office and find something I could fit the binder in. Like Goldilocks, it was either way too big or way too small for most of the packing options available. I got it squeezed in sideways into a box and got it in the mail to Kitty, with delivery confirmation. $60 to mail it to Kitty.

It arrived in Kitty's hands about one week later. She made a copy for her files, signed in all the right places, filled in the payment info ($400 as an organization; $175 if I'd been submitting as an individual), and forwarded it on to NCBTMB at the end of February.

April: I expected to hear back from NCBTMB in about mid-April with a request for correction or clarification. I didn't expect it to go through the first time. When I got up this morning, there was an e-mail from Kitty asking me to call her as soon as I got up and she gave me the good news (she'd wanted to call when she opened the letter on Friday at noon in DC but that was 2 am here in Australia, so she held off -- barely -- until I woke up).

The best part? We couldn't offer CEUs to the students who took our classes last year. But as part of our approval, we can grant retroactive CEUs back 2 years! We'll be sending those out in the next month.

When I get back to the US in August Kitty and I will have to sit down and do some Big Picture and long-range planning for The Healing Core. What classes would we like to offer, develop, and sponsor? It feels today like the future is wide open.

And I'm walking around the house with a silly little smile saying, every so often, "I'm an approved provider!" (much to my husband's amusement).