Discovering methods to attach your private pursuits, skills and passions along with your therapeutic massage remedy model or enterprise will be energizing, satisfying and rewarding on many ranges. Consider methods you’ll be able to set your self aside from the opposite therapists you already know with a novel enterprise persona that can add to the richness of your life and that of your purchasers.
I’ve, and that is my story.
My Duck-Themed Enterprise Character
For those who informed me a number of years in the past that therapeutic massage, spa and wellness professionals throughout the globe would consider me every time they checked out a rubber duck, I’d have thought you have been loopy. I’m generally known as an writer, speaker and massage-and-spa business knowledgeable, however the image I’ve most frequently been related to is sunflowers, as two of my books characteristic sunflowers on the quilt and within the title.
However rubber geese? No.
Properly, till lately.
For those who’ve saved up with me on social media or attended any of the talks I’ve given for the reason that starting of 2020, properly, let’s simply say my life has modified a bit.
Within the blink of a watch I went from frequently touring to talk at occasions across the U.S. and seeing an everyday clientele on the profitable wellness spa I owned to sitting at house, as was the case for almost everybody. Throughout the pandemic shutdown, I spent a number of my time serving to former employees, purchasers and friends navigate a world through which therapeutic massage remedy was paused. This drastic change created vital short- and long- time period impacts on my enterprise, profession and psychological well being.
Enter rubber geese.
Initially used as a coping mechanism for the extraordinary nervousness and despair I felt in spring of 2020, a comical group consisting of 4 rubber geese and a whale paddled their method into my world via an unplanned rubber duck race in my yard creek. What began out as a foolish solution to spend a Sunday afternoon turned a lifeline that helped me get again to being somebody I acknowledged.
Quickly after the primary occasion, I started staging The Impromptu Rubber Duck Regatta every time attainable, taping the races and including commentary earlier than, throughout and after the competitors. As a result of these occasions introduced smiles, laughter and a way of hope to me and others, I started taking the geese, now dubbed The Dream Workforce, with me on highway journeys, kayaking adventures and nearly in every single place else I went.
On the identical time, I started writing concerning the geese’ off-course adventures and the life classes they have been instructing. Their knowledge and presence rapidly made their method into my courses and talking engagements.
Therefore, the rubber duck giveaways.
Now {that a} couple years have handed, I feel it’s truthful to say that rubber geese have change into my model as a lot and maybe greater than every other of my identities.
How did this occur, and why is it good?
Proudly owning My Enterprise Character
Rubber geese are cute, enjoyable, cheerful and take folks again to enjoyable moments or fond recollections from their childhood—or for that matter, their maturity. Rubber geese cross the borders of age, nation, faith and gender to achieve folks on all ranges. They aren’t particular to any explicit business, occupation or schooling stage, they usually convey a way of enjoyable to any occasion or event.
Proudly owning my model, or enterprise persona, of being The Duck Woman offers me permission to provide associates, colleagues and full strangers tiny, duck-shaped symbols of pleasure, simply because. It’s gotten me journal articles just like the one you’re studying, inclusion in a few books and even a tv look. It’s taken me to rubber-duck-themed occasions, picture shoots and highway journeys I’d have in any other case skipped.
And now, they’ve led me to do one thing even greater.
Though it took greater than two years to understand why I used to be constructing this enterprise persona, or model, or doing any of the issues I felt referred to as to do associated to rubber geese, I perceive it now.
The creativity, freedom and pleasure The Dream Workforce Geese™ have added to my life permits me to mix my passions of writing and serving to others in an entire new method: writing kids’s books and beginning a model new publishing firm. The first aim of Duck Buck Books is to lift cash for companion charities by donating one greenback from each e book offered.
The official mission assertion of Duck Buck Books is:
Giving again, via our books.
Fairly photos, take a look.
There’s a whale and 4 geese.
Each sale donates a buck.
How does this pertain to therapeutic massage? The very first e book obtainable to buy, “Marathon Marshall & The Dream Workforce Geese Go to Boston,” will donate $1 to the Therapeutic massage Remedy Basis. The e book is co-authored by Marshall Dahneke, who intends to run the Boston Marathon to honor his daughter, Jacquelyn Dahneke Penrose, who handed away from breast most cancers in 2022, and help the Therapeutic massage Remedy Basis. Funds raised by Marshall and our e book gross sales will profit massage-for-cancer-patients group service applications supported by the Therapeutic massage Remedy Basis.
Create Your Personal Enterprise Character
How can my story provide help to and your therapeutic massage profession? Properly fairly merely, regardless of your profession, what you do for a dwelling is an integral a part of you.
As a therapeutic massage therapist, your model, or enterprise persona, is an extension of you—your ardour, targets and wishes. Following the inside longings and pulls of your coronary heart, these issues that convey you pleasure and private satisfaction, and integrating them into your observe, will make you stand aside out of your opponents.
However what in case your ardour, targets and wishes don’t have anything to do with therapeutic massage? See my story above.
Additionally, what makes you assume they don’t have anything to do with one another? They each are part of you and will mix extra naturally than you at the moment imagine.
Listed here are three examples of how outdoors passions would possibly mix properly with therapeutic massage remedy or bodywork:
A few years in the past, I met a Florida-based therapeutic massage therapist who adored touring, and particularly cherished being on the water. She mixed this curiosity together with her observe by offering therapeutic massage to purchasers who owned or chartered seafaring yachts. This allowed her the chance to mix her love of water journey whereas offering therapeutic massage to others on the vessel. Though there have been instances she was very busy, she usually had free time throughout which she acquired to benefit from the view, meals and seaside places.
Therapeutic massage therapist Sally Spurgeon focuses on post-mastectomy sufferers in Las Vegas, Nevada, via her firm, Thérapie – Your New Breast Good friend. After being recognized with breast most cancers herself, she developed The Spurgeon Methodology to assist girls overcome the ache related to breast surgical procedure.
Spurgeon additionally has a ardour for beading, and began a program promoting beaded jewellery created by breast most cancers survivors and different purchasers to lift funds to supply free classes to girls who couldn’t afford therapeutic massage following their surgical procedure.
“Making one thing that brings pleasure to a different particular person is at all times rewarding,” stated Spurgeon. “When a buyer buys one thing I’ve made to assist fund a session for another person, it’s a win, win, win. Realizing that I’m paying it ahead and enabling others to take action too brings me monumental pleasure and satisfaction.”
Gaia Trojanowski owns Embodiment Therapeutic massage in Truckee, California, and has mixed her assorted creative skills together with her therapeutic massage and energy-work observe. Her web site presents galleries of digital, photographic and blended media artwork in addition to a number of poetry, permitting her to share imagery, phrases and instruments to help in purchasers’ meditation practices when they aren’t on her desk.
“It’s additionally enjoyable to make use of my ecstatic dance DJ abilities when prepping for a ceremonial lomi lomi session,” Trojanowski stated.
As one who has achieved a number of therapeutic work to really feel related to her genuine self and the world round her, she added, “Once I enable myself to be on this move, art work, poetry, and creation pours via me, my little woman is worked up with the magic that unfolds in a pure, playful and harmless curiosity.”
As a fellow traveler, I so admire the ingenuity of the yacht-bound therapist, and method instructing at conferences in the same method, as a car that enables me to share my reward of instructing with my pleasure of seeing new locations
In flip, Each Spurgeon’s and Trojanowski’s sentiments are so much like the way in which I really feel concerning the partnership with the MTF. It’s so rewarding that my genuine creativity is flowing from me in a method that may create a win-win-win expertise. It’s an unimaginable reward everybody can develop and provides.
Begin mixing the totally different aspects of who you’re and what you like to create one thing that may solely be discovered via you—and a enterprise persona, or model, you’re proud to be recognized for.
In regards to the Creator
Felicia Brown, LMBT, is a enterprise and advertising and marketing coach for therapeutic massage, spa and wellness professionals in addition to a speaker and writer. Her latest e book, “Marathon Marshall & The Dream Workforce Geese Go to Boston,” co-authored with Marshall Dahneke, will probably be launched within the spring of 2023. Every copy offered will donate $1 to the Therapeutic massage Remedy Basis in honor of Jacquelyn Dahneke Penrose and The Jacqueline Mission. Pre-order your copy right here.