The notion of doing what you love for a living is familiar to most professional massage therapists and bodyworkers, who chose to go to school to become professional healers, working one on one with clients to improve their sense of well-being and overall quality of life.
For these people, working with others to bring about positive physical and mental feelings in a noninvasive way—through healthy touch—is the basic definition of doing what you love for a living. However, there are ways to hone your career as a professional massage therapist or bodyworker in order to derive even more joy from your daily work.
This goal can be achieved by taking the necessary continuing education classes to steer your massage therapy or bodywork practice toward the type of clients and conditions you most enjoy working with as a hands-on practitioner. Before you pick out these specific continuing education classes, it helps to know which types of clients or conditions truly spark your enthusiasm.
After you have been in practice for a while, you may begin to notice certain patterns in terms of how excited you get to help particular clients or clients with particular issues. For example, you might find that your level of enthusiasm rises to whole new level when one of your more athletic clients presents with an overuse injury, seeking your help to speed healing and get back into action.
In this case, your enthusiasm may be pointing toward the fact that you would derive greater joy from your work as a massage therapist or bodyworker if you could see more athletic clients who are looking to you to help them stay in top shape and speed the healing of any overuse issues or injuries.
Using the example, you could then begin to seek continuing education classes geared toward sports massage techniques and methods of addressing common issues among athletic clients. If you do not yet have much training in sports massage therapy or bodywork, then begin with the most basic continuing education class on this topic.
If you continue to feel that this might by your niche, then you can take more advanced and specific continuing education courses on massage therapy and bodywork for athletic issues and injuries.
This same example can be applied across the board, to all sorts of other clients or conditions that seem to stoke the fires of your enthusiasm for the practice of massage therapy or bodywork. Perhaps you feel your excitement rising when you get a chance to work on clients who are pregnant, or maybe you go home feeling supremely satisfied when you have completed a session with a breast-cancer survivor or another client coping with serious medical issues.
In these scenarios, you would then seek a continuing education class for massage therapists and bodyworkers who wish to work with pregnant clients, or for those hands-on practitioners interested in more medical methods of massage therapy or bodywork.
The bottom line is that continuing education can be the perfect place for you to test out a new niche and see if it may make your daily work even more rewarding and enjoyable.