Whether you wish to clean up your accounting procedures and draw in more clients or learn a new modality and improve your body mechanics, continuing education classes for professional massage therapists and bodyworkers offer the opportunity to improve your practice from every angle. The secret to making the most of continuing education seems to involve knowing exactly which aspect of your practice needs improvement and also figuring out the ways in which you learn best.
When we talk about figuring out which parts of your practice need improvement through continuing education courses, this can mean different things to different practitioners. For example, one massage therapist may be pretty clear on the fact that the financial side of her practice is a bit of a mess. In this case, seeking to improve this area might mean enrolling in a continuing education course geared specifically toward accounting procedures for massage therapists and bodyworkers.
However, for another touch therapist, the weak spot in his or her practice may not be very obvious. In fact, there may be no weak areas. Instead, this practitioner may be noticing that he feels sort of bored or stagnant in terms of the skills he is applying during each session. In this case, the weakness is simply the need for new and fresh techniques to keep his career and skill set moving and growing in the right direction. In this scenario, enrolling in a continuing education class to learn a new and intriguing modality may be the best bet for improving his practice.
The examples of potential improvements can go on and on, but the important part to remember is that selecting the best possible continuing education classes usually depends on having a keen awareness of what is going on in your daily practice. Notice if you are starting to feel especially sore or fatigued after a busy week, and then consider a continuing education class to refresh your knowledge of proper body mechanics. Pay attention to the feeling of anxiety that accompanies a particularly slow month, then think about a continuing education class on marketing for massage therapists and bodyworkers.
Once you understand how to pick out the areas of your practice that could benefit from improvement through continuing education, your next task is to hone in on the ways in which you feel most comfortable learning. For example, you may find that you are perfectly content to learn about accounting procedures via an online continuing education class, but when it comes to learning a new or more advanced version of a hands-on modality, you feel much more comfortable with an in-person continuing education course.
By selecting the continuing education topic that seems best suited to improve your practice and the method for taking that class that best complements your preferred learning style, you can feel secure that you are taking the necessary steps to derive the fullest benefits from your continuing education experience.