Finding the Time to Grow Your Massage or Bodywork Business | Business and Marketing for Massage and Bodywork Therapists

Episode 3.

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.

Hey, Hey Mindy Totten here.

Today is the day I want to help you find the time that you need to work on your practice and not just in it. I want you to be laser focused about building your business. This will allow you to work less and to live more.

I've got a bunch of Ninja productivity secrets that I'm going to share with you that helped me to be what people and friends have told me is weirdly focused and productive.

I'll share those with you and the first step to getting things done on your journey to business growth is to be present. I go back to this time and time and time again.

There are so many times in my day that I realize I'm simply not present. And when I was researching this, I found out that the word presence actually comes from a Latin word meaning “being at hand.” Being bodyworkers and using our hands.

Being present means being at hand, and as bodywork therapists, you know the importance of being present.

You offer huge therapeutic value to your clients simply by holding space for them and being in the moment with them.

But you might not realize the importance of being just as present when you're working on your business. What does that look like? Well, between inbox alerts, social media, checking all your apps, you don't really stand a chance to get anything done in your business.

You end up putting off working on your business until you can really concentrate. Unfortunately, that time never comes, and you end up frustrated and beating yourself up for just not getting it or for not doing it.

It's not all your fault. Attachment to the digital world is probably one of the most difficult habits to break as you try to get more done in your business. And you know these apps and emails, they’re all set up to keep us engaged, to keep us clicking, to keep us going to the next thing, to keep us scrolling.

So it's not that you're weak, it's not that you're a bad person, but you need to make a conscious effort to pull away from that digital world where you're not present.

You want to be present not only for your clients, but also for your business.

So say you've closed everything down and you feel like you're really present not only for yourself, but also for your business. You're really ready to work on your business.

How do you get to work? There are two different types of work that we all do: Deep Work and Shallow Work.

To engage in Deep Work, you need to be able to focus and have a larger chunk of time -- around 90 minutes or so to get into the meat of whatever it is that you're learning or that you're creating.

For bodywork practitioners, Deep Work includes things like creating new programs or courses, studying for certification exams, or delving deep into the anatomy of your modality.

Shallow Work can be done without intense focus or much of a time commitment. It's not cognitively demanding, but it can end up taking huge amounts of our time.

Things like answering emails, updating social media business pages or scanning professional journals to see what you might read later. That's all Shallow Work.

You might think, oh, I only need to do Deep Work. That's not true. It's important to schedule time for both. Deep Work is not necessarily better than any Shallow Work.

You simply have to realize which you are doing and when. If you're spending all of your business development hours in Shallow Work, you're not going make much progress growing your business.

If you're scrolling through Instagram pretending that you're going to grow your business by posting a workshop you’re offering, that’s not true Deep Work.

Similarly, if you are in Deep Work crunch all the time, then important Shallow Work tasks like returning client requests for appointments won't get done.

You need a healthy balance of both, which brings us to one of my Ninja skills: mending nets.

I am often asked when I find time to keep up to date on recent research or to write copy for my website.

And the answer is mending nets. When traditional fishermen couldn't go out to sea because of bad weather, they stayed in their villages and mended their fishing nets.

I learned about this process when I was teaching in Istanbul. There was this wonderful teachers’ lounge there and everybody would go and have their tea in between classes and chit chat. And I really enjoyed it too. I loved being with people and hanging out with them. But I started to realize that a lot of the talk was negative.

I would leave there feeling discouraged or distraught sometimes.

Soon I discovered that if I didn't go there every single 10-minute class break, I got so much more work done. Those 10 minutes added up and I was able to grade papers, plan lessons, and create wonderful things for my students.

We bodywork therapists all have days when we can be doing those things that can only be done when we don't have appointments. So when you don't have a full schedule, your first response is often panic, right? Instead, I invite you to take a breath and do what you can do.

This is the time to engage in both Shallow Work and Deep Work – work that will move your business forward. For example, you can return client calls between your appointments. You can read through research or bodywork articles to be sure that you're always moving toward mastery like we talked about on the last episode. Maybe you have a last minute cancellation? Challenge yourself to use that hour to “mend your nets”.

Is there a class that you want to teach? Can you reach out to other therapists in your area so that you can set up referral programs?

Once you're in a clear head space and completely present, I'm going to suggest that you go old school. While I am no luddite, I try to stay away from the digital world as much as possible. And my favorite old school strategy is writing. Yes, actually pen or pencil. And a piece of paper.

Writing by hand is a complex cognitive process, meaning we use several different parts of our brain that engage neurological and sensory experiences and fine motor skills. So we're not only thinking cognitively, we're also feeling the pencil feeling the texture of the paper.

Writing by hand is linked to an improvement in critical thinking, in creativity and in problem solving skills. So that's one thing I want to throw out to you this week. As you're going through your week and working on your business -- whether it's business development or something simple like scheduling -- try writing on a piece of paper and see how that changes the experience for you.

I also encourage you to fully engage your creativity and higher order thinking skills by keeping any notes or materials from the Do It With Intention podcast in one place.

This will help you to strengthen your organization muscles. I've had lots of students who are terrific therapists who really need to work on their organization. They can't find things. Things get lost, and that really hurts that safe container that we were talking about.

The safe container for your clients in your practice has got to be solid so that people feel safe and continue to come back to see you.

So how are you going to “mend nets” when business is slow and you're overwhelmed. How can you go Old School to carve out the time that you need?

What I want you to think about is one simple action step you can take this week to create the space and the time to begin to work on your massage or bodywork business.

I can't wait to hear what you come up with. Tag me over on Instagram @mindy.totten and let me know what's working for you.