Buckets O' Stress

Well, it's been kind of tense around my house lately, largely because my honey has spent the last three months on the jury for a creepy serial killer accused of five murders.

I must say, I ran out of jokes and quick subject changes when it all came down Tuesday with the death sentence. Not much one can do but console. A little TLC. I ignored all the crabbiness and just tried to be there for my honey.

This has been a life sentence for the jurors in stress.. they've had sleepless nights, nightmares from the up-close, color corpse photos and the extremely annoying defendant, acting as his own attorney, who couldn't speak above a whisper or phrase a question right. The judge and prosecutor had to help him out a lot.

So I came home from the office last night to see my honey lying in bed, snuggled in a blanket, with a headache, a backache and an incredibly irritable mood. No, no massage. No warm bath. No ice cream. No. Leave me alone.

Here I am, a massage therapist who can pretty much deal with anyone's barrel of stress, and I get ordered out of the room.

Around 11:30 that night, honey finally appeared, and decompressed by telling me how frustrating it had been to be a juror, to listen to all the testimony, to see the families, the testimony of two girls who survived.

"I know we did the right thing."

Sometimes the right thing sucks, and there's not much one can do about it.

I told honey that civic duty now being over for the next decade, we should now turn to the future and never think about Mr. Creepy again.

This is going to be hard.

Thanks Sincerely

At my place of business, we've instituted the practice of writing thank-you notes to new clients. A brief thank-you note really adds a special touch and shows clients that we are genuine both in wanting to help them and in being grateful for their business. Sounds like a fairly simple task, right? Apparently not for everyone :-) Given that my upbringing and my Southern mother and grandmother demanded that I know how to write thank-you notes, I can do them in my sleep. So after my boss asked me to address the situation, I sat down and thought for a few minutes and came up with the following tips and examples:

1. Start with a more formal greeting like "Dear Mike," instead of "Hi there!": they don't know us that well yet, so let's not talk like we're all buddies.
2. Write at least 2-3 lines (see examples below).
3. Use an appropriate closing such as "Thanks again" or "All best" or "Yours in health" and then sign your name.
4. Use cursive unless you absolutely must print; it looks much nicer and more formal.
5. Try to give your note a "personal touch" whenever possible (see examples below).
6. Do your thank-you note after you see your new client or at the end of your shift: if you wait to do it until another day, you're likely to forget. And thank-you notes always need to be timely.

Here are some examples:

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Dear Karen,

Just a note to let you know how much I enjoyed having you as client today at Blank! I hope your neck will feel much better in the coming weeks, and we look forward to seeing you again in the future.

Best,
Lynna

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Dear Inez,

Thank you so much for choosing Blank for your first massage ever! I hope you found it wonderfully relaxing and will be visiting us again in the future.

Yours in health,
Lynna

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Dear Nancy,

It was wonderful to have you as a client today at Blank. I was happy to be able to help you with your neck pain, and I hope that now you're feeling better, you'll really be able to enjoy your visit with your daughter.

Many thanks,
Lynna

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Dear Bob,

I really enjoyed having you as a client today at Blank. I know the elevator repair business will keep you very busy over the holidays, but remember to take breaks and take care of yourself. I hope to see you on my schedule again soon!

Happy Holidays,
Lynna

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This short list of tips and examples seemed to help amazingly! I actually got several verbal thank-yous for the tips and examples. Not that anyone will ever really love the task. As the truly tasteless joke told at many Southern universities goes: "Why do sorority girls hate orgies? Because they have to write all those thank-you notes!" But, well . . . . at least it's getting easier :-)

Massage Music We'd Enjoy Hearing Again, Again, and Again….

Okay, so no whining or anything this time, because I have been pretty busy lately. Busy enough I’m starting to get a little silly. So Saturday I did like 500 massages in 10 hours and I left the I-Pod in the car and had to play my CD player, antique that it is, all day and I didn’t have time to change the CD.

Yeppers, by the end of the day I was pretty tired and quite a bit mental. The CD was fine the first few times. And, best of all, it was exactly 60 minutes, no small feat when you have about a thousand CDs specially designed for massage music and no one actually bothers putting the total minutes on the label so you have to add up each individual track and see if it comes close to 60 minutes and if it doesn’t….well, you get what I mean. The darn thing did the job, and folks seemed quite relaxed and happy when they left.

But by quitting time I needed an aural deprivation tank. Good Gravy there is nothing like new agey, non-climactic, easy listening la-la music to make you feel like you will never nap again.

Silly la-la me, I thought of some neat-o massage CD titles on the way home. It kept me awake, and I imagined it with rippin’ graphics on late-night TV. I like Jay better, but I love the Top Ten. Hopefully the phrase is trademarked and I will get a frame-able threatening letter from a cute, gullible intern.

So here goes: My Personal “Top Ten” List of Massage Music CDs I’m Sure All Therapists Would Like to Hear Because We Are Convinced We Have Already Heard Them Three Times Today:

Number Ten: “Running Water Makes Our Clients Pee” by the Bivalve Machine

Number Nine: “Please Don’t Play This Again Indoors” by Whales Who Sound Like Distressed Infants

Number Eight: “Nobody Knows the Stretch-Marks I’ve Seen” by the LMTs

Number Seven: “Really Slow, Sad Classical Music that Reminds People of Beloved Dead Pets”

Number Six: “Where Did I Leave the Oil Bottle?” By the Gingko Bilobas

Number Five: “Loosen Up My Trigger Points So I Can Go to the Batting Cages and Imagine My Boss’s Face on Every Ball” by the Chronic Clients Who Won’t Go Away

Number Four: “High-Pitched Female Voices Singing About Lost Loves” by the Most Annoying CDs Ever.

Number Three: “No Clean Sheets!”

Number Two: “Who Farted?” by the Psychedelic Tubas

And the NUMBER ONE massage therapy CD we would like to see because we think we have heard it three times already today:

“Fall Asleep Standing Up” by the Elevator Music Company!

Sleepy Time

When I have a client in pain, either from emotional or physical issues, I ask a lot about the pain, but I also ask other questions such as "Are you sleeping?" Often the answer is "no" or "not well" or "sometimes." And since sleep time is the body's healing time, not sleeping or not sleeping well can be a big problem in getting rid of pain.

My nutritionist, Sam Zeiler, often gives free weekly seminars to clients on various topics, and last week we talked about sleep. According to Sam--and apparently a lot of studies as well--good sleep requires darkness. You're probably thinking, "Well, duh . . . "

Actually, I was thinking that myself, until it hit me: my room is not dark. My room is deeply dim. But with all that light seeping in through the shades from the streetlights and security lights, my room is not actually dark. Not BIG dark. Not dark like when you're driving across nowhere New Mexico at midnight, and there are about a trillion stars you never knew existed, and the edge of the road ends at pitch-freaking black. Now THAT is dark.

The second most important thing for good sleep is quiet. No TVS, no computers, no radio shows. Again, duh, right? I don't have any of those things. I do, on the other hand, have road noise, cars beeping, and the occasional person talking outside or dog whining in the living room. So if you can't get true quiet, there are some great machines for "white noise."

Now that I'm having this realization about true dark and true quiet, I'm looking forward to building my bedroom into a cave. And I'm hoping I sleep better so that I can recommend measures to my non-sleeping clients that might actually work.

Practical Plotting

My business has been doing a lot of interviewing lately, so I've been doing a lot of practical massages. Or having them done to me, as the case may be. Which is not, perhaps, as delightful as it sounds. In a practical massage, I can't just zone out: I have to listen, feel, weigh, measure, and think about how this person and her massage might add to our team.

In addition, since I'm most interested in adding another "true" deep tissue person to the team, I've been asking specifically for deep tissue massage, and not always getting it. Now, telling someone she's not what you're looking for in a delicate and sensitive way is sometimes a challenge, particularly since I have a lot of empathy for often anxious, interviewing therapists. And even if I asked for deep tissue and still got a massage that felt like I was being skated on by dragonflies, I'm still sensitive to the therapist's feelings. Up to a point . . .

The point in one massage came for me when in "letting her down easy," a therapist got very upset, stating that she thought she already had the job. This honestly concerned me, and I asked her what we had said to lead her to believe this, so that we would have no such misunderstandings in the future. She said it was because we had said in the first part of the interview that we needed someone immediately. I replied that we did indeed need "someone" immediately, but we had to do practicals before we could determine which "someone" was right for us. She then made a veiled suggestion that some massage businesses (perhaps even us?) used practicals as a way of "getting free massages." As you might guess, that was when my empathy well ran dry. I remained polite, but stated that we were much too busy trying to run and staff a business to plot ways to get free massage.

In my opinion, all but accusing a potential employer of trying to get a "free massage" is not a good way to endear yourself to said employer. But I can't stop wondering: Does that really happen? Are there some businesses out there using practicals as a means of getting free massage. Surely not . . . right? If anyone has an opinion on this, feel free to weigh in.

The Coffee Joint

Saturday one of my clients was asking about aromatherapy, and I gave her a few pointers for home use and recommended an aromatherapy reference book I thumbed through at Barnes & Noble. "Wow, you really have a lot of knowledge about this," my client said. I love those ego boosting compliments. It’s a great part of the job being a massage therapist. But I was taken back to just the Sunday before...

It’s about 8 a.m. and I am driving from my home in Orange County to Encino, for an all-day Sunday continuing education class in massage therapy. It’s not the far side of the moon, but for many people living in greater Los Angeles, driving to the Valley is like driving to the far side of somewhere.

I had a cup of coffee at my house which had really worn off by the time I drove through downtown, passed Universal City and found my exit at Sepulveda Blvd. I have been to enough continue education classes in massage to know that if they have any snacks at all, it’s going to be all soy milk and raw veggies. I wanted a stiff coffee in hand so my colleagues could silently disapprove.

Just down the street from the class, they had a McDonald’s. Yuck. Too hot and too weak. Then I saw a big sign: “The Coffee Joint.” Underneath it, a big neon sign that said “Open.” I pulled in to the parking lot and found myself looking at a decidedly unusual brew stop. The windows were blocked by floor to ceiling vertical blinds, kind of like the kind I have in my therapy room at the office.

There were three signs in the window that said “Open” I got out of the car and tried the door. It was locked. I’m not too awake, of course, so I’m standing there for a minute or two pulling on the door handle just in case it’s sticky. Then I’m trying to peer through the closed blinds. A couple drove up in a tiny rental car and parked right by the door. I looked. The man was sitting in the passenger seat. He looked like a ‘hood rat. The woman was driving. There was just something about her that said ‘hood princess. We stared at each other for a minute.

I tried the door handle again while they stared at me. Befuddled and irritated, I went back into my car and left so I would not be late for my class.

Odd as all that was, I didn’t think much of it at the time. Later that week, the 11 o’clock news was announcing a new ordinance by Los Angeles County. The video included a picture of businesses coming under the ordinance. “The Coffee Joint” flashed by on the screen.

I’d been pulling on the door handle of a medical marijuana dispensary.

I kind of like the compliments I get from clients, and the ego boost and all that. But I must admit I am capable of eating the occasional helping of humble pie. My spousal unit really enjoyed that story. I’m still working on that slice of pie.

Connecting, Communicating, and Becoming the Drop of Water that Forms a Canyon

Miscommunication. It happens sometimes. A client recently told me about how her poor little toy poodle accidentally feel in the icy cold backyard swimming pool the other day. Rushing him into the house wrapped in a towel, she shrieked up the stairs to her husband, "Hey!! Dottie fell in the pool!" To which he called back, "Okay, bring me back a coupla bear claws will ya?" More shrieking followed on her part, to which he replied, having finally heard her and run down the stairs, "I thought you said you were going to the store!" As awful as all this must have been to poor shivering Dottie, you have to admit the humor in it . . . frankly, I laughed so hard, I almost swallowed my tongue.

Miscommunication in massage can be awful too, and much less laughable. Or perhaps I should say "lack of communication" instead of "miscommunication." Someone asked me once what I thought was the most important factor in building clientele and retaining clientele outside of giving a damn good massage. "Listening," I replied. "Listening to the client, and what she says to you about her pain, about her life, about her stress. Listening to the eyes in your head and to the eyes in your palms and fingertips. Listening to your gut. And then when you're done listening, there's the caring. Because if you listen and they sense that, and you care, and they sense that, then they will come back again and again. And their pain will improve, their lives will improve, in both direct and indirect ways. And you as the therapist will be like one of the little drops of water that over a millenia carve a canyon.

I truly believe that to be successful, true to your life's purpose, you must communicate and connect with clients. There are a zillion massage therapist in Washington state. Why should any given client "land" with you? Communicate, connect, and find out. I've been lucky enough to work with many excellent therapists each as different as one snowflake to another. But the ones who had large, loyal clienteles were communicating, connecting, listening, caring. Not all in the same ways, mind you. Loud and bright, quiet and subdued, strong and light handed, etc., etc. All different. All wonderful with human beings. All diggging out a canyon of healing with drops of water in an often parched world.

For a caring, involved therapist, communicating, connnecting, listening, and caring are generally not that hard. But everyone has bad days, tired days. Everyone occassionally ends up with that client that makes her think, "Good lord, why is this person being such an ass?" When I find myself in such places, I pray, "Goddess, take my hands and work through me, because you know things I don't and I am emptied out" or "Universe, this guy is really being mean, but I love him if only as a child of God, and so please let me give him the best massage I can." In this way, there is still a thread of communication and connection. The recipients of "tired" massages are still thrilled, and even "mean people" are feeling much more benelovent at the end of the session.

There is a last part to caring that I don't want to leave out here: ask the client to come back. And don't just ask her to come back, tell her honestly how often YOU think it would be good for her to come back based on the results of all your listening. It's the same as having a potential friend over for a visit. If you say, "We should do this again sometime" and mean it, it'll give that person a warm glow that, "Okay, I need to go to bed now; drive safe" just won't.

Communicate, connect, listen, care. Do these things and your clientele will flow to and keep on flowing to you. And you will not only make a living, you will make a difference.