Transcript: Welcome to the Do It With Intention Podcast with Mindy Totten | Business and Marketing for Massage and Bodywork Therapists

Episode 1.

Mindy Totten: Welcome to Do It With Intention, the podcast for massage and bodywork therapists. I'm your host, Mindy Totten, a mentor and coach for bodyworkers who want to turn their passion for the work that they do into successful businesses that they love -- all without burning out or selling out.

For the last 15-plus years, I've created a successful 6-figure Craniosacral Therapy practice in a small city in coastal North Carolina. During those years, I've met so many skilled, big hearted therapists with great hands who are struggling to make their bodywork businesses work for them.

Not because they weren't terrific therapists, but because they didn't know how to make the business side of their practices work. It became my mission to help other massage and bodywork therapists build practices that support not only your soul, but also your bottom line!

On the Do It With Intention podcast, we'll dive deep into what it actually takes to build and sustain a profitable massage or bodywork business.

We'll have honest conversations about what really works and what doesn't as you create the ideal practice for you. After all, you do great work in the world and you deserve to make a great living doing it.

But you've got to be intentional about it, not only in your modality but in your business too. That's how bodyworkers do it with intention.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Do It With Intention podcast! I am so excited that you're here, and I'm honored and humbled that you have taken this time -- in what I know can be crazy busy days -- to spend some time with me working on how to build your massage or bodywork practice.

In this first episode I want to share three things with you. I want to share who I am in case we're new to each other, what I do and how I do it, and what you can expect from this podcast in the weeks and months to come.

I'm Mindy Totten, as you heard in the show opener. My background is actually as a teacher. I used to teach English and humanities to middle school and high school students. And I've had people tell me that I’m a crazy person for doing that.

Actually, I absolutely loved it. I think that people who teach kindergarten and preschool, they're the ones who deserve special places in heaven.

But I loved doing that work, and the work brought me overseas. My husband, Ranald, and I were living in Northern Virginia right outside of Washington, DC, and all of our friends were getting married and taking out mortgages and sort of starting their lives.

We looked at each other and said, “Is this what we want?” And we both said no.

We decided instead to sell everything we owned, and we both applied for different jobs. Whoever gets the first job, that's where we're going to go — wherever it is.

At the time Ranald was working at USA today in the sports department. So he applied to newspapers all over the country and some outside of the country as well.

I decided to apply to teach overseas in international schools, and went to this international schools recruiting fair -- a whole different subculture that's fascinating.

This particular recruiting fair was in Iowa of all places. While I was there I was offered a job in Berlin, so we sold all of our belongings and we moved to Germany.

The plan was to be there for two years and travel around Europe and get it out of our system and then move back home and start our lives. Well, the plan totally backfired. While traveling around Europe, we realized there is so much more of the world to see.

After two years in Berlin, I took a job in Istanbul, and we moved to Turkey for three years. After three years in the Middle East, we went even further abroad, to Singapore.

During our three years in Singapore, I started to get sick. I saw several physicians and nothing seemed to help.

I know that some of you can relate to this, where it's kind of the wounded healer archetype. So I did what I thought was the most outrageous thing that I could think of at the time. Somebody suggested that I go see a chiropractor and I said, “Oh that's just crazy talk, that's so out there.”

Back then I had the mindset of: “just give me a pill, just give me something to make this better so I can get back to work.”

I’d go into the doctor's office nearly every weekend I'd see all the other teachers from my school were there too, because this school presented a very high stress situation. So nothing was working, and I was getting desperate.

I went to a chiropractor, and she helped a little bit. But while she was working with me, she suggested Craniosacral Therapy. Trust me, I was not the enlightened soul back then that you see before you or that you're listening to now.

I thought she was completely crazy. All my issues were in pelvic diaphragm area, and I felt like, “Hey, I don't need a head rub.” She explained that this was different, and that I should give it a try.

I gave it a shot. Initially, I didn’t think it was doing anything, and also thought her touch was too light to be effective.

And my body was just breaking down.

Soon I realized someone was holding space for me in such a delicate and profound way, and the feeling was so unusual.

I kind of had one eye open the whole time. I had been used to being poked and prodded with needles and everything else, and this was just different.

At the end of the hour I was relaxed and I sat up and realized that something had shifted for me. It wasn't a miracle cure, just something was different.

I knew that I had somehow turned a corner and started paying attention to little things like what I ate and how that might affect who I am and my energy and my health and my wellness.

And I started to feel better. So fast forward about a year and a half, and I knew that my husband and I were going to leave Singapore and return to America.

I also knew in my heart that I was not going to be teaching middle school and high school anymore.

I love the kids. I loved what I taught, English and humanities. I loved it all, but I knew that something else was waiting. I just didn't know what.

Deep down inside, I thought that if I ask for that guidance, I would be shown a path.

I somehow knew deep, deep down inside that I wanted to do this hands-on work, this CranioSacral Therapy.

I had a bazillion reasons why it wouldn't work for me, all the excuses: I was too old. I didn't know anything about anatomy or physiology. All of my degrees were in literature, teaching, writing, and this was not connected at all.

Something kept speaking to me -- a whisper deep, deep inside – that said I was going to do this work.

We left Singapore, returned to America after 8 years, and moved to the Outer Banks, the tiny strip of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina.

I spent a lot time just sitting at the beach and staring at the ocean. I didn’t know this then, but the ocean is really my healing, cleansing place. It's where I feel closest to who I am and who I'm supposed to be.

So I was staring at the ocean, sort of talking myself out of this thing that I wanted to do. And then I finally said, screw it, this is what your heart is telling you to do. So follow that guidance, follow that bliss.

I enrolled in massage therapy school with the sole purpose of practicing Craniosacral Therapy. Just after I received my massage therapy license, we moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, where we knew one person -- our realtor.

I was ready to practice Craniosacral Therapy in this new place where we knew no one. Sometimes you don't know enough to be smart.

My feeling was: If I build it, they will come, so I'm going to hang out my shingle.

I'm going to practice CranioSacral Therapy, even though at that point I had just started my specialized training.

I was a massage therapist primarily, but I desperately wanted to pivot to CranioSacral Therapy.

Of course if you're listening to this, you know that that just doesn't happen. And so I struggled for a while trying to find my footing. I did all the things that they tell you to do.

I went to Chamber of Commerce mixers. I got free business advice online and in person from so-called experts.

Nothing really helped move the needle forward in my business.

One day I realized that if I didn't make a change, if I didn’t reach out for the support that I needed to help me build this business, I was going to have to shut the doors because of financial insecurity.

So I reached out, got support, and things started to really change. I continued to grow and started leveraging my work, so I was not only doing one-on-one work, I was now also starting to teach some CranioSacral Therapy classes.

I found so many people in my classes who were just terrific therapists, but they were not able to make a go of it in their businesses.

They started asking me how I did it. How did I do something so specialized as CranioSacral Therapy in a smallish town and, and be successful at it.

I started to realize that maybe this is a way that I could reach out and help more people.

Because there gets to be a time in your practice where you cannot possibly see one more one-on-one person. You can't put another hour into your week.

How can I serve more people? I thought about hiring somebody to work for me and played around with that. It eventually didn’t feel right.

After noodling around with a few other ideas, I realized it wasn't just cranial work that intrigued me. I started thinking maybe I could actually help more people by helping therapists who are terrific keep their business doors open.

So that's how it led me here. And what I do right now is coach and mentor massage and bodywork therapists on the business side of their practices.

I've got a couple of programs. My signature program is called The Bodywork Project, a small group mastermind masterclass that I love, love, love, love, love doing.

I also do private one-on-one mentoring with people on the business side of their practices. And it's so rewarding to me to see these people who are terrific at what they do finally have the confidence in their business skills and see their practices flourish.

I know it sounds goofy, but it really, really makes my heart swell. So that's who I am. That's my journey and that's what I do.

I decided to create this podcast because I wanted to have a resource where massage and bodyworkers could come to get the information that will be truly helpful for them as they build their massage and bodywork practice.

The Do It With Intention podcast. The title. It’s hilarious because I have my own business coaches and others who help with my business, and a mastermind group of people who helped me and who support me. I decided I was going to do this podcast and they asked what I was going to call it.

I gave three choices and one of them was The Bodyworker Business podcast, one was The Bodywork Project podcast and the last was Do It With Intention.

I love this whole idea about bodywork therapists and everything is about intention with us -- what's our intention with the client, what's our intention with the modality, even down to the particular technique that we're using. What is our intention behind that?

So Do It With Intention. When I polled my business folks, they all liked Bodyworker Business podcast. They thought it'd be great for SEO, people will be able to find it when they're searching and all that.

But it just didn't really light me up. So I surveyed the people who are inside of The Bodywork Project and other students. What do you think the podcast name should be? It was unanimous. Do It With Intention was born.

Sometimes you have to tell the business gurus that I'm going to do what I know is right in my heart.

What's resonating with me? And that's where the title of the podcast comes from. So you're in the right place today.

If you are thinking of opening your own bodywork business, you want to do it right. So you're in the right place today. If you have a business already, you know you're a sole practitioner, you have a business, and you are struggling to really make it flourish.

You're struggling to make it profitable. Or on the flip side, you're struggling because maybe you're seeing 40 or 50 or 60 people a week. You're struggling to make it sustainable. You just can't do that much more work without burning out.

You're in the right place with this podcast if you are a sole practitioner and you're ready to make a pivot of some sort. Maybe you want to switch modalities or maybe you want to take the leap and hire someone, or maybe you want to change locations.

We are going to talk all things bodywork business on this podcast. We're not going to focus on modality. I hear all kinds of conversations out there on the web about which modality is best and which type of bodywork is best and that doesn't fly for me.

There are people who can benefit from all different types of bodywork and all different types of massages. I think that if everyone got the bodywork that they needed, we would need tons more bodywork therapists.

This is not a place of ego or of competition either.

You're in the right place if you are looking for support, if you're a big hearted therapist who has great skills or who's working on your skills and your experience, this is the place for you.

We are not going to be talking about the nuts and bolts of setting up a business in your particular municipality.

There's lots of information that you can get for free online and from your local business places that I was talking about earlier to help you with the tax code or to help you know what zoning issues are. We're not going to be discussing those on this podcast.

This podcast is about, first of all, mindset. What space do you need to be in to really be able to grow your business?

Even more important than mindset is taking small, consistent, actionable steps in the direction that you want to go. Almost every podcast is going to have some kind of an action step for you.

This is a way that you can take a baby step forward. We’ll talk about baby steps all the time because it doesn't have to be a huge ordeal for you to grow your practice. It just takes solid, consistent baby steps forward.

My hope is that the Do It With Intention podcast will be a wonderful resource for you as you build the practice of your dreams.

I'll be talking just like this, just you and me kid, sometimes going through different topics that I teach. But also topics that I have found with students through the years to be the most effective ways to move the needle in your business.

I'll also be interviewing other folks on the show. I've already recorded a couple of them and there are so many terrific people in the industry. So we'll be talking with other therapists who have done what you want to do.

They've created these successful practices and we'll talk to them about how they did it. And we'll also talk with people outside of the industry, experts who can help you in the particular areas that you're working on in the business and marketing of your practice.

We'll also have client or student spotlights. There'll be times when students who I've already worked with who will come on and share their experiences.

I'll also have live coaching calls. If there's something that you really want to work on, listen in because there will be a call for people to apply for some of these live coaching calls on the podcast as well. These are a couple of things that we have in store for you on the Do It With Intention podcast.

I am happy to report that there are several more episodes already waiting for you. So wherever you're listening to this, you can see a couple of the other episodes.

The next episode is all about the five aspects you need to have in place to have a foundation for your bodywork business.

I try to keep it really direct, really crystal clear. This is where my teaching experience comes in from all those years ago. I'm a teacher at heart. I know sometimes people are like, Mindy, don't talk to me like I'm in sixth grade. I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

So the next episode is about these five aspects to really get you thinking about what particular areas you need to work on next to start to move the needle in your business.

If you can't listen to the other episodes now, just hit subscribe and it will be there for you when you are ready. Thank you so, so much again for joining me on this little teaser episode. I am so excited to be on this journey with you and I can't wait to see what kinds of wonderful things you build.

Thanks for coming on this journey with me today. I know what it takes to make time for something like this in your busy day and I so appreciate that you tuned in and listened all the way to the end.

We've got all the links from today's episode in the show notes that you can find over at mindytotten.com/podcast.