Ep. 45 Celebrating Individuality in Massage Therapy and Letting Go of Competition with Julie Alexander

 [00:00:00]

Introduction and Purpose

Julie Alexander: Hello, handcrafted Therapy podcast listeners, thanks so much for joining me today. Today I am gonna be talking to you, just you and I.

I wanna

I wanna talk about a particular subject that me really happy. It makes other people really confused.

So

The Concept of No Competition

Julie Alexander: when I talk about my massage, I generally say that I don’t have any competition.

And you guys might be offended by that. I don’t know. You might feel like you’re my competition. I don’t know how you feel, but I’m gonna say this, that the reason I believe. None of us have competition is because we’re all in this world together, helping each other out. We’re not working against each other.

We’re all moving towards the same goal and that’s helping others. Helping others get outta pain, helping others through the human experience. That’s life [00:01:00] because it’s hard. So. If you can take anything away from this podcast today, it’s that you are uniquely qualified to do what you do. Nobody else dance.

I’m here to tell you that and I don’t even know you.

Embracing Your Unique Experience

Julie Alexander: So when you’re born, you are given the beautiful gift of life and a body that has. Its own unique and special qualifications and unique and special obstacles and pain points and problems. And some of them are delightful, right? Some of the benefits of having a human body and a unic experience are really kind of awesome.

So I wanna talk a little bit about how. You are uniquely qualified to do your job. So because you have your own set of bodies out there that you live [00:02:00] in and that unique human experience that belongs to you is only yours. So if you fell and hit your head as a kid, or if you’d got in a car accident, or if you were a stunt double or if you know, you were abused if you were an athlete, if you were competitive, if you had siblings.

You’re

getting my point, right, that every single human body experience is unique and yours is no different. I mean, it’s unique as well, and what you have learned, the accumulation of your knowledge about your own body is uniquely yours and nobody else can take it away.

Nobody else can teach you that. What you’ve learned in your own body, about your own body, that is uniquely not, that is unique knowledge to you and you only, and same for me [00:03:00] now, not just is my. Bodily experience unique to me, but also the way I consume knowledge and the way I become wise, become comfortable in the knowledge that I know.

So

I’ve

Learning from Personal and Professional Experiences

Julie Alexander: taken lots and lots and lots of classes, awesome classes. Some are good, some weren’t so good. Some, I learned a lot from some, I might have taken something from maybe I learned what not to do or that that’s not something I am interested in, and that’s okay too. You know, your preferences and your knowledge and your education background, I’ll make you uniquely qualified to help somebody and pro hopefully a lot of people.

In the massage business. The good news is that there are so many out there that need help and so many people that we can help [00:04:00] in a way that, you know, most medical professionals can’t. I just wanna encourage you to be confident in your skin. Know that your human experience that you’re having in your body.

and

What you’ve learned from that experience is so valuable and so necessary to use in your own massage practice.

‘ cause

your own experience can help facilitate some really remarkable healing in somebody else and your pain points and fears that you’ve had in your body. It probably can relate to somebody else’s body.

Julie Alexander: How many times has a client come in and said, do you understand how I feel when I have plantar fasciitis, or do you understand what it feels like when my knee hurts, or when my neck hurts, or when my back hurts? And you know, they’re looking for some [00:05:00] empathy and they, they’re really looking for somebody who’s been through what they’ve been through.

And some of the best massage therapists that I’ve interviewed on this very podcast have said, you know, I obtain most of my wealth of knowledge from my own bodily experience. So I really want to set yourself free in the fact that you are brilliant.

and

Can really hone in on your skills as a therapist if you really lean into your own human experiences and understand that every time you stub your toe or throw a ball or do a, an exercise class or push your body a little further or even do maybe a one more massage a day.

We learn something from that experience. Maybe it’s, I can’t do that many massages per day. [00:06:00] Or maybe it’s, I did that too hard. I tried to throw that ball too hard. You know, those are the kinds of things that we need to remember so that next time we throw the ball, we know we don’t overdo it and throw our, you know, ball and socket at a joint, for instance.

Or maybe we realized when we played tennis last time, that it was really hard on our knees. And our knees swollen. We’re swollen now, so should we try something other than tennis to play?

It’s all about like really listening to your body and teaching your clients how to elicit to their bodies.

Right? And as a massage therapist, you’ve probably gotten pretty good at it.

Even if you’re a new therapist, I bet you’re pretty good at it because you were called to this adventure, right? I mean, that’s part of what we do is help people interpret what their bodies are saying, and [00:07:00] sometimes we don’t wanna listen to what they’re saying, but being kind to our own bodies and kind to our clients’ bodies and letting them know.

we hear

you. We know you’re upset. We know you’re not feeling good. It’s okay. Little muscle. We got you. You’re in a safe place. We’re gonna make you feel better. We don’t want you to be angry anymore. We’re so thankful that you told us that you’re angry. I mean, how blessed are we to be able to have a body that tells us these and.

How blessed are we to be able to say, thank you me, for telling me that you’re in pain. I’m not angry at you. I’m so happy that I have this knowledge to help you move forward. Knee. I know it’s gonna be a little bit of a adventure, and it might be scary and it might be painful, but I’m here with you and we got this.

I know it’s really weird to talk to your body like that. It’s not [00:08:00] comfortable. For some of you, it may have felt uncomfortable to even listen to me say, but let me tell you how effective this has been because I do this in my massages while I’m practicing massages with my clients is I’ll tell them, um, you know, I’ll talk to their muscles.

I’ll say, man, I know you’re really causing this person a lot of pain. Thank you so much for working so hard for her. I’m so thankful for you, and I know you’re angry and overworked, and I’m gonna try to make your life feel a little better right So if you can just relax that would be And nine times outta 10, if we, if I just talk to the muscle, the person on the table will relax that muscle unconsciously.

So I wanna just encourage all of you out there to know that you are special. To know that your human experience can be used to help [00:09:00] others, um, take all the classes, take as many classes as you need to take to help forward your knowledge and your career as a massage therapist. That’s one thing that I really like to do.

I like to drink from a fire hose, you know, take all the classes. That’s hard to do. It gets really expensive really quickly, and you don’t really know what you’re doing when you take all the So finding like what you’re passionate about, what your specialty may be and going down that path and really honing in on like what you want your expertise to be like.

You know, I would focus like as a marketing professional, right?

Specialization and Target Markets

Julie Alexander: What I usually teach is figuring out who, what kind of problem you like to solve.

So like for instance if your, my target market when I first opened my [00:10:00] business was Dennis. Because I knew they were off on Fridays. I knew they had expendable income. I knew they needed massage. And I knew there were a bunch in my area, so I targeted them. And because I targeted dentists, I knew that the problem that I was going to try to solve for them was when they held up their arms and their hands cramped and their arms.

Hurt, you know, their back hurt, their shoulder shirt from holding up their arms all day that I was gonna become an expert in arms and shoulders. And in hands. And I did. Thanks to Peggy Lamb. I’m gonna call out my mentor Peggy Lamb. She is in Austin, Texas. She does great work for Shoulders. She has a whole program online for, frozen shoulder and, you know, problematic shoulders. And I’ve had some really big successes in that area because of her technique. So, thanks [00:11:00] Peggy. So yeah, I mean, take some classes. Think about like. What your body has experienced, and think about what your body could use to help with those experiences to make those experiences better for you.

I mean, maybe you don’t play tennis. Do you want that to be your target market? If you don’t play tennis, if you know, if you don’t know anything about it, you might not be a good candidate to be a therapist for athletes. If you’re not an athlete yourself, in other words, but if you have passion around it, you totally could.

It does help to have like complete experience, like I’ve had plantar fasciitis before, so it’s really easy for me to sell that as a service I provide for my clients. ’cause I can say I used to have that too, but now I know how to fix it. I know how to fix it myself. I can [00:12:00] probably help you too, or show you how to fix yourself, right?

I mean, how empowering is that when you can empower your own clients to help By the way, that doesn’t take away business from I know you may think it does, but it actually will invoke trust in your clients more, and that you’re not withheld withholding information just to get the sale for future.

If that makes sense. So be free with your knowledge with your clients, because that will come back to you in spa. I do wanna go back to the idea of

not having any competition. You had no competition against q. Your only competition is yourself. Nobody else has the same experiences as you. Nobody else has process knowledge the same way you did in massage school.

Nobody else has felt all the feelings, [00:13:00] emotional or otherwise physical, um, that you have. So. Just know you are unique in every complete way. You are a unique therapist in every complete way from your basic knowledge and education. I mean, just starting there, um, no massage school is created equal, thank goodness.

Um, and so your massage school from, from mis massage, actually from birth, like I said, from your God-given. Or whatever you believe in your earth given right to have a life, a human body. I mean, what a cool experience we get and you get to have a body that heals itself and protects itself. And compen overcompensates for itself.

And it’s beautiful, isn’t it? I mean, gosh, look at how [00:14:00] many times. You have been able to help people on a massage table. I know it’s been so many. And being able to be in that moment and really like help somebody and being able to empathize with them and know how they feel, and then be able to do soft tissue body work, manipulation to be able to get them.

Out of that pain loop. It’s so incredible the work that we do, and I’m so proud of you. You are the light of the world, and we all need to love on each other. That’s why we don’t have any competition because it’s all about love and light, and you are not the same as me, and I am not the same as you. And thank.

goodness for that.

Right. I mean, gosh, if we all were the same, wouldn’t this be boring? I mean, there are days when I need a really deep tissue massage. [00:15:00] Massage. Like, you need to put your elbow in me and don’t look back. And then there are days when I need some comfort. I need some sock tissue manipulation, right? I might need some craniosacral technique.

I might wanna cry a little bit. I, you know, I might need a little comfort. Right there might, I might need some lymphatic drainage. Maybe I’m swollen, maybe my body’s enslaved different days. I need different things just like your clients, and I’m just so proud of the community of therapists that we have.

If you’re listening to this and you’re a massage therapist, thank you for your work.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Julie Alexander: Thank you for making the world a better place. Thank you for your light and your love and your empathy. We need that more than ever these days. And I’m so blessed to be a part of this community and show my love and my light to you because it’s so [00:16:00] fulfilling to be able to give back to a group of people who are giving back themselves.

My healers, my my caretakers. My lovely therapist, my friends, thank you for being you and know that there’s no com competitive nature within me, and I hope that you can find a way to thrive and move forward. Without feeling that weight on competition. Now, if you use competition to your advantage to give yourself a little boost I want you to continue to do that.

I understand that if you know, thinking that you’re competing with the other person down the hall helps you strive to be a better therapist, then let that be your motivation. I get it. Use whatever you can to be better person. But if you need some boost and self-confidence and you wanna really like [00:17:00] take you to the next level, my recommendation would be put a mirror to yourself and give yourself some praise and

and

love on yourself.

A whole bunch. Give yourself all kinds of hugs and praise and love every single day. High five yourself in the mirror. You know, you’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re kind, you’re successful you’re killing it in life. You’re lovely, you’re empathetic. We need all those things in the world from us.

Human beings, inanimate objects are not gonna do it. Thank you friends for listening. I’m off to a couple more massages this afternoon, but until next time, please love yourself and know that there’s no competition for your, your personal uniqueness. Thank you.

 Thank you so much for [00:18:00] joining me on the Handcrafted Therapy Podcast. I would love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected], or you can come by the store. It’s at 33 0 3 North Central Expressway, suite number two 40 in Plano, Texas, 7 5 0 2 3. Or you could connect with me on social Instagram, Facebook hashtag can crafted therapy.

I’m Julie Alexander and I wish you a very happy and healthy day.