As you embark on your next adventure in continuing education, whether that includes taking a course on a new technique or one that covers a less tactile topic such as marketing or ethics, there are several steps you can take to ensure your continuing education experience turns out to be valuable for you and your practice.
Most of these steps toward a positive continuing education experience are ones that can and should be taken prior to signing up for your next continuing education class. These guidelines focus mainly on you and your own wants and needs as a professional massage therapist or bodyworker, and the ways in which certain continuing education courses may be able to help you meet and achieve those wants and needs.
To begin the process of attaining a valuable continuing education experience, you must turn inward and become a bit more aware, through observation, of what is happening in your massage therapy or bodywork practice. For example, the first step toward your ideal continuing education course tends to involve a personal reality check, where you take time to figure out whether there are specific topics that intrigue you or specific issues that concern you.
In terms of intriguing topics, this might include a modality you read about somewhere that sparked your interest. For example, if the practice of shiatsu keeps coming up in your world, and you feel intrigued, then you would want to take note of that and potentially seek out a continuing education class on beginning shiatsu.
As far as issues that may be concerning you, this pertains more to weak spots that may have cropped up within your practice. An example of this could be the massage therapist who feels anxiety every time she has to do anything associated with accounting, because she feels confused and overwhelmed in this area of her practice. In this case, the massage therapist might do well to remember this concern when it comes time to take another continuing education class, and search for a continuing education course on the topic of accounting for massage therapists and bodyworkers.
Once you have started observing and making note of topics that intrigue you or issues that concern you, you should be well on your way to figuring out which continuing education classes might be most valuable for you and your practice at this point in your career. Your next step, then, will be to determine how you would like to take your continuing education class. There tend to be three categories of options when it comes to how one can take a continuing education class: online, in person at a local site or in person at a destination continuing education seminar.
Of course, getting the chance to take a continuing education class on your desired topic may outweigh the method in which that continuing education course is offered. However, if you have a preferred method for taking continuing education classes, check first whether the continuing education class you’d like to take is offered via that method.