The Best Teachers

I've been thinking about teaching a lot lately. I'm still very excited to be teaching Business Plans Deciphered in October at the AMTA national convention (and I'd love to see any of you there!). I'm working on promoting the workshops of The Healing Core and the very first workshop we're offering is Create Quality Continuing Education. I keep coming up with courses and seminars I want to offer next year and I get excited by the possibilities.

Teaching is on my mind.

I am also in a group with a few other MTs who meet monthly to work our way through Twelve Months to Your Ideal Practice. This month's exercises are all about marketing, starting with writing a newsletter for you practice. Well, don't I feel pretty smug about that, what with being a professional writer and having written a newsletter for my practice for 10 years now!

Then my "teaching" brain and my "writing" brain collided. I started contemplating whether I should offer a workshop on writing newsletters for your practice. And I quickly realized I am the wrong person to teach that class. I, literally, do not know how to teach people how to write.

We often assume that the best teachers are the ones who are the most skilled at a certain task. However, some of my worst training experiences were with teachers who were excellent at their craft....and always had been. Therein lies the problem.

When something has always been easy for you, has always come naturally to you, it is very difficult to put yourself in the shoes / mind / heart of someone who has never been adept at a thing, who is struggling, who just doesn't get it. A teacher who teaches from their own personal experience of a subject or task rather than from the student's experience with a subject or task is rarely a good teacher.

The best teaching is less about the data than it is about empathy with the student. It's about the instructors ability to recognize and appreciate where the student is and help the student move from a place of discomfort / ignorance / inexperience to a place of competence, comfort, and knowledge. A great teacher is as much a guide and a mentor as they are the resident expert, especially when a workshop is geared to beginners.

I think this happens a lot with energy work. The teachers are often people who have always been able to feel chakras / see auras / feel energy / etc. and they genuinely want you to have and enjoy that experience too. But they've never had to learn to feel chakras, see auras, or feel energy so it's difficult for them to teach that part of the experience.

I can't teach writing because I've never had to learn how to write. Oh, I've had to learn how to write well and I've had to work at honing my craft but words have always come easily to me. I was a writer in the first grade! I never had to learn to write, I could always write (well, once I learned how to read). I do not know how to put myself in a non-writers shoes, to feel that experience.

Think about your favorite courses and instructors. Think about your least favorite courses and instructors. How often was the difference between them an instructor who genuinely understood where you -- as the student, as the novice -- were coming from?

And if you're thinking about taking up teaching, honestly ask yourself if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone who genuinely does not know how to do the thing you want to teach. (And if you want to ensure you design a great course, sign up for our workshop! You really will be amazed at how much goes into creating a truly great course.)

No Better Teacher

I had a friend visit this weekend from Lynchburg VA. She loves to come to DC to visit art museums. We spent Saturday in Baltimore and this is a shameless plug for the American Visionary Art Museum. Best four hours I've spent in a museum lately. It just lit up my imagination. Even the gift shop was fun and inspiring!

ANYWAYS (back to the topic at hand), my friend runs a house cleaning service. Like me (and many of us), she's a one-woman self-employed operation. Always working on managing her client base (enough but not too many), finances, marketing, lugging equipment, transportation, working with people from all walks of life, dealing with people who have the wrong idea about her work, even dealing with unwanted advances (yes, it happens to cleaning people too!). It all sounded very familiar.

She's casually contemplating other career options (carrying vacuum cleaners is getting old) and asked me about massage therapy. I talked about the two biggest challenges I find in this profession:

*  being a business owner and taking that seriously

*  becoming the kind of person who can meet the interpersonal, psychological, and spiritual aspects of our work

She was completely unfazed by the business challenges. They are no different from what she's experienced running a cleaning service. In fact, the best training for running a small service-oriented business is....having run another small service-oriented business.

In our drive to be taken seriously, we compare ourselves to other healthcare providers:  doctors, nurses, acupuncturists, chiropractors, etc.  How do they earn respect, get paid, set up their practices, etc.?

I suggest that if you want to learn practical business skills you also need to talk to self-employed cleaning ladies, plumbers, car mechanics, dog walkers, home inspectors, and house painters. Talk to them about how they set their rates, advertise their services, maintain a client base, save for retirement, do their bookkeeping, etc. Their challenges are, in many ways, more like ours than a doctor's practice ever will be.

There are teachers everywhere. You just need to learn to recognize them and find opportunities to listen to them.

Looking At Pay-What-You-Can Like A Hippie

I'm discovering that there's a small but steady drumbeat that business can be done with heart, specifically the heart of healer. Mark Silver is one of those putting some great stuff out. I recommend you check him out.

Mark has come out strongly against "flex pricing" (sliding scales, pay-what-you-can, etc.). What I admire about him, even though I disagree with him, is that when he encountered a cogent argument in favor of pay-what-you-can (PWYC), he listened, he liked what he heard, and he changed his mind! More than that, he put the word out among his considerable network about this new way of thinking.

The PWYC defense was put forth by Tad Hargrave, who does what he calls "Marketing For Hippies". He's all about the alternative economy and he has used PWYC in his workshops and classes. Along the way he's worked out how we communicate with our clients around PWYC to make it work and not be a burden on our clients.

I'm adding a few things to my website in response to what Tad has to say. Mark interviewed him (in 4 segments, for some reason) and posted the interview online. If you're interested in being creative and open in your pricing, I strongly recommend you listen to the interview(s) and read some of what Tad has to say. I know I signed up for his emails (while I'm unsubscribing from almost everything else!).

There's good people out there defining a new better way to do business, a way more in synch with healer values. Have a listen.

There’s Employment and Then There’s Employment

I’m a word geek. I find words fascinating -- their different meanings, how we use them, how they evolve, how to carefully express an idea or a sentiment with them, the beauty of a well-constructed sentence -- it all speaks to me.

It’s why I can get a bit testy about people using words too carelessly. Masseuse vs. massage therapist. Impact as a verb. Impactful under any circumstances. Employment...

Wait (I hear you saying) that's a good word! Yes it is. The problem is that too many people use "employment" when they should be saying "contracting". The difference matters. A lot.

In the February 2012 issue of Massage Today, columnist Angie Patrick suggested that our two work choices as MTs are entrepreneur or employee. We work for ourselves or we work for others. The problem with this either/or categorization is that there is a third choice (there's almost always a third choice) and it's the one masses of us find ourselves in: independent contractor.

Am I splitting hairs? Absolutely not.

Angie is right that, very broadly speaking, we can work by ourselves or we can work with other people. When we work with other people, however, we aren't necessarily working for other people.

When we work with an organization as an independent contractor we are not an employee. (Approximately 99% of the MTs I know here in DC who work as part of another organization [spa, group practice, chiro, etc.] are independent contractors.) We don't have the privileges of an employee -- paid time off, regular salary, medical benefits, etc. -- but we also don't have the restrictions of an employee -- employer decides when, how, and where you will work using what tools, processes, and procedures, etc.

There is a balance of power inherent in working relationships. When you are an employee, the employer has more control but they also have more responsibility. When you are an independent contractor, you negotiate more of the details of your working relationship and the balance of power is less one-sided.

Here's another sneaky little truth in our industry: even when we are officially employees, we often don't get the goodies we assume come with employment, such as paid time off or medical benefits. I have learned from talking to a number of MTs who are officially employees that even when companies offer these benefits, the rules governing what it takes to actually qualify are usually not written in our favor.

In one case here in DC, an MT could be scheduled to be at work for 40 hours a week but the only hours the company would count towards qualifying for benefits would be the hours the MT was actually in session with a client. If you had 25 one-hour sessions in a week (a completely full schedule for most of us), the company would say you were only "part-time" so you weren't eligible for benefits. Yes, despite the fact that you were scheduled to be on-site for 40 yours and might actually be getting paid for 40 hours. For the purposes of qualifying for benefits, you were only "working" 25 hours, not enough to get benefits.

Is that fair? In an official employment relationship, remember, the employer has more control to go along with their greater responsibility. I don't think it's fair but it's within their rights as an employer.

The IRS is very particular about the difference between contracting and employment. You and your "employer" can get into trouble if your working reality and your contractual arrangement are not in synch with each other.

I get frustrated by how casually writers in our trade pubs use the word "employment" when they really should be saying "contracting". I suspect this happens most often when the writer is not an MT and has never been self-employed. The difference between the two words is enormous for us and using the words incorrectly has led way too many MTs astray.

Your Client Or Mine?

I read several massage trade pubs but my favorite is probably Massage Today. I find them more honest about conflicts and changes in our industry and their columnists are more likely to be addressing my reality than the columnists in the AMTA Journal often are. I’m also always up for a good rant by Ralph Stevens even when I don’t agree with him!

Cary Bayer has a business coaching column in Massage Today and this month I agree with half of his column but disagree with the other half. Both halves are about referring clients out to other therapists:

Cary's Rule #1: Don’t automatically refer a client out because you can’t book them right away. They may have the flexibility in their schedule to wait a week or 3 for you. Ask them. I think this is good advice.

Cary's Rule #2:  Don’t refer out for free. You should always get a cut -- in perpetuity -- for every (potential) client you refer to another MT. In fact, you should establish an ongoing relationship with one other MT who will pay you a percentage of everything they ever make from clients you refer to them.

Yes, that second perspective is the one I have trouble with. His argument, laid out in numerical detail, is that this referred-out client is worth possibly thousands of dollars over the course of several years, and you are losing out every time that referred-to MT touches them. You deserve a piece of that action.

He calls this kind of thinking “prosperity consciousness”. I call it living from a “position of poverty”.

Here’s the problems with Cary’s rules, in my opinion:

1. I can’t lose what I never possessed. This is like asking me if I miss my pony....the one I never had. (This also applies to the "you're losing equity by renting!" argument).

2. I don’t “own” clients, even the ones who see me weekly and never see anyone else. Thinking you “own” them often leads to complacency around service and marketing and that will come back to bite you in the ass, trust me!

3. If my schedule is so full that I can’t take on any new clients, what do I gain by calling “dibs“ on one more? Didn’t Aesop wrote a fable about this, featuring a dog and a bone?

4. Focusing on the money someone else is making (and I’m not making) is living from a “position of poverty” (that is, seeing the situation only through the lens of loss or 'not enough'). Nobody lives well living from a position of poverty. It’s just another way to make yourself anxious.

5. What service am I providing -- in perpetuity -- that I’m being paid for? What effort, work, skill, or talent am I being reimbursed for? I think it is reasonable to expect some goods or service in exchange for a payment. (Yes, I know this is a common practice in some other professions. That doesn't make it relevant to us.)

6. How can I (reasonably) ever confirm that I’m getting paid properly? How can the other MT not come to resent paying me for not doing anything? How can we end up with any relationship other than one of suspicion and resentment?

Cary does make one reasonable argument in defense of his position: most of us have a physical limit to how many sessions we can do in a week and that may not generate as much income as we’d like. I agree with him, especially as I get older! Are there ways to respond to this situation, though, that honors the kind of values many of us hold dear -- cooperation, communication, abundance, etc?

Imagine the following scenario instead: you have a full practice and can’t take on any new clients. But you’re still getting phone calls from potential new clients and this has been going on for a while.

You realize you have a valuable resource. You “adopt” a new therapist, sharing office space with them, mentoring them, teaching them how to build their own client base, while you also refer your overflow to them.

In exchange for the office space, the mentoring, the referrals, and sharing resources (linens, oil, etc.) the therapist pays you a percentage. You are clear that you are acting as an incubator and that this arrangement is time-limited (for, say, 2 years). After 2 years, you expect the “adopted” MT to be able to move out on their own (and maybe one day adopt their own new MT). If you still have overflow, you “adopt” a new MT under the same arrangement.

That’s not the only possible response to the “schedule’s full but the phone keeps ringing” scenario but it is a response based on a “position of abundance”; that is, a position of having enough to share (and experiencing the joy of sharing and helping someone else grow). I bet you could come up with a different response but one still based on a “position of abundance”.

Which way would you rather do business in this world: from a position of poverty or a position of abundance?

Crap Happens

I spent the weekend in LA with my husband, who has to be there several weeks for training. We had a wonderful weekend and I came away with a much more favorable impression of LA than I'd had before (though, admittedly, my primary involvement with LA before this was LAX airport, which probably isn't fair).

When I boarded the flight home early on Monday morning, I realized I was feeling kinda punky. As the plane lifted off, I realized I was genuinely ill and there was a good chance it was the flu. Oh, the joys of being trapped on a plane when all you want to do is throw up (oh, the joy of being the seatmate of the woman who only wants to throw up.....).

I managed to hold everything together till I got home, sleeping 13 ininterrupted hours that night. I dragged myself out of bed Tuesday morning for one purpose only: to cancel my 4 appointments that day.

Four appointments! Oh, how painful to have to cancel the most full day I've had in 6 months! Yikes, that hurt.

Which brings me to the biggest disadvantage of being self-employed: I don't work, I don't get paid and I simply have to take time off sometimes. Continuing education, illness, vacation. How do we plan for that?

Try this.....

Question #1: 
How much money do you need to make from your massage practice in a year?  Is it your sole support? Do you have income from another source? Let's say....$45,000 for this little exercise. 

Question #2: How many weeks will you work this year? This will help you know as you go along whether you're bringing in enough income. So, you'll divide $45,000 by 52 (for your weekly goals) right?

Woops! No. Because you won't work 52 weeks a year. You need to subtract the number of weeks you are likely to be unable to work. This is how I usually work it out:

Vacation:  3 weeks

Sick:  1 week

Training:  1 week

Crap happens:  3 weeks

What is "crap happens"? That's the stuff that you can't plan for but still happens. Snowstorms that shut the city down. Having your car (and travel table!) stolen. Winning an unexpected trip. Having a parent die. I've had all these things happen to me. Hell, I've had all these things (and more) happen to me in one year (2005, if anyone is interested).

Crap happens. You might as well budget for it.

So that’s 8 potential no-income weeks. We're down to 44 income-earning weeks. Divide your annual income goal ($45,000) by your estimated income-earning weeks (44). The answer? $1,023.

To make $45,000 per year, you need to average a little more than $1,000 per week. If you are, on average, bringing in $1,000 per week, you will be able to pay for your vacation, sick leave, continuing education, and the lovely "crap happens".

Just remember to set some of that $1,000 aside every week for the weeks you'll need it.

(By the way, I'm feeling much better today, thankfully.)

Reality TV: Business Primer?

I'm not much into reality TV. I think I've made it through one whole episode of "American Idol". I've never watched "The Housewives of mumblemumble".  I've never even started an episode of "Survivor". I last a little longer with the cooking reality shows but I often don't make it all the way through them either.

I am, however, fascinated by two reality shows: Restaurant: Impossible and Tabitha Takes Over.

In "Restaurant: Impossible" the host is invited to save a failing restaurant. Update the look of the dining room, revise the menu, address management problems, overhaul the kitchen staff (often hiring a new executive chef). In 48 hours and with $10,000.

In "Tabitha Takes Over" the host has a whole week to makeover a community business, often hitting the same issues -- appearance of the physical setting, services, management, staff.

I'm fixated on these shows because they are all about running a small business! Most of the issues are the same from one business to the next and most of them can also apply to a massage therapy practice. Hours, prices, physical environment, customer relations, services, etc.

Also, the problems aren't solved with the injection of magic amounts of cash. The shows often pay to spruce up the workspace but not with hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the restaurant show, they are limited to $10,000 to completely renovate a dining room. In Tabitha's show, I'm not sure what the budget is but a lot of what makes a difference is a new coat of paint!

There are a lot of places to learn important lessons about running a business, not all of them from "official" channels. Pop some popcorn and pull up to business school!