Category: Social Media

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Daylight’s Burning

I hit the floor early every morning, so early that I’m usually on my second cup of coffee by 5 am. “Daylight’s burning,” my Granny used to say…meaning get up and get at it. It’s been my lifelong habit. I’m pretty worthless after 9 pm.

I’ve been feeling more than a little paranoid lately. As my schedule gets busier and there are more demands on my time, I find myself constantly looking at the appointment book on the desk at the office, the calendar on my computer, and the calendar I carry around, and hoping I’m not forgetting anything. Yes, I have been one of the last people on the planet without a smartphone, but I just ordered one a minute ago. It’ll be here in a couple of days. So I will be carrying around an electronic calendar, but I’ll still be checking it against the appointment book at the office, where I also record my activities for the benefit of my staff, who might wonder where I’m gone and when I’ll be back. I also record Chamber meetings, local events I’m attending and so forth in the appointment book, because staff members are sometimes involved or might want to be. I will also have to keep the Google calendar, because it is shared with the other members of the North Carolina Board or Massage & Bodywork Therapy, so that we can all keep up with committee meetings and the tasks that we have all been assigned to do and we are supposed to check in on it when we’ve completed our assignments. It’s a balancing act and I keep worrying about missing something.

I get to my office at 7:30. I handle the housekeeping chores, like cleaning the bathrooms, catching up any laundry left over from the night before, vacuuming and making sure all the trash cans are empty. People sometimes act shocked to hear that I still scrub the toilet at my office…well, if I didn’t do it, I’d be paying someone to do it, and I have the cleaning there down to a fine science of about 15 minutes a day. I’d have a hard time finding someone who only wants to work 15 minutes a day. When I’m there, I’m also the receptionist. I file all the insurance. I answer the phone. I schedule appointments and check clients in and out. When I’m on the road teaching, I pay someone to do the job…and frankly, nobody does it better than I do. It’s my business. It’s hard to find someone who will care about your place as much as you do and take care of it in exactly the same way. When I get back from a trip, I have to keep myself in check not to be too critical about how things were taken care of while I was gone. I know the clients got good service, I don’t have to worry about that part of it, but as for the mundane tasks of running the business, I will be pouncing on everything with my eagle eye, noticing that the blinds are dusty, or that the office helper entered a cash transaction as a credit card on the daily log or that the insurance was filed incorrectly and got kicked back.

In between all this, I try to keep abreast of the legislative and regulation activities going on that relate to massage, write my blog and work on the articles I am writing for the various magazines. For the past six years, I’ve also almost continually had a book in progress that needs my attention, too. I check in on my FB and YouTube channel and make posts or upload new videos. In accordance with my own advice, I spend at least 30 minutes a day on marketing activities for my business…working up new ads, sending out the email newsletter, updating my website, calling clients, sending out birthday cards, or whatever it is I’m focused on that day.

Out of the estimated 50-60 times a day or more that the phone rings at the office, at least a half-dozen of them will be someone who wants me to answer questions about the massage board, continuing education requirements, or what they should do about some ethical dilemma they’ve found themselves in. Or I’m asked to do some project for someone, that in the end turns out to be a total waste of my time because they didn’t like the way I handled it. My e-mail is the same way, as are the messages in my FB inbox. I listened to Michael Reynold’s great e-mail ninja presentation this week, and implemented the “requires action” folder, and it is already stuffed full.

I’m participating in a lot of webinars and live events, which I’m grateful to be doing, but along with those also comes the accompanying responsibility of publicity. In addition to just getting ready to teach my own classes, there are radio interviews and video commercials to make, and of course the organizers would like those posted every day. I have to look back on my FB page and Twitter to make sure I’m giving everyone equal time. I also have this paranoia about not appearing to be fair and impartial, and I don’t want to give one event more coverage than another. I also try to help my friends in the massage profession advertise their events, and I worry about that…did I post Gloria and forget to post Felicia, or was it the other way around? I’m always checking back to see, and I’m afraid when other things take precedence, I feel bad when it doesn’t happen at all, especially if they’re helping me, which they usually do.

Like everyone else, I also have a household to maintain, laundry to do, meals to cook, a spouse to spend time with, bills to pay…I am childless, and those people who are parents have my admiration for doing all I do and more.

In the past ten days, my husband’s best friend died at the age of 61, another friend survived crashing his private plane although he did sustain some serious injuries, one of my brothers flipped his truck on black ice and thank God didn’t get hurt but it was still scary, and yesterday the wife of one of the musicians I play with on Sunday nights passed away, also at the age of 61.

None of us have the guarantee of drawing the next breath. So what if I don’t get everything done that’s on my to-do list everyday…I can’t take it to the grave and in the general scheme of things, the world isn’t going to come to an end if I don’t post a blog or make a new video. At the end of the day, all I really want is to think I did the best I could. Daylight’s burning, and I’m pedaling as fast as I can.

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Perspective

I always seem to get in the mode of reflection during the holidays…taking stock of my life, business, my accomplishments, my shortcomings, my failures, my plans that fell through, and those that exceeded my expectations. This past year has been one of ups and downs for me. On the upside, it’s been a good year for my business in spite of the recession. On the down side, my husband’s construction business has taken a huge hit for the past couple of years, and it’s affecting our finances and my attitude. I need a swift kick in the pants, because in the final analysis, it’s damn inconvenient, but it isn’t going to break us.

I spend a lot of time on social networking, mainly Facebook, and besides being good for building business relationships and keeping up with friends, it has provided a reality check for me on an almost daily basis.

I have a fair amount of followers on Twitter and a lot of FB friends, many of whom I’ve never met in person. Most are massage therapists who read my blog or have read my books, attended a class or listened to a webinar. I get little glimpses into their lives on Facebook. I see a lot of massage therapists struggling with their businesses and some who are jobless altogether. I see tragedies every day; somebody loses a loved one, or someone’s beloved pet dies. I see the posts of several who are battling cancer, and a couple with children that have cancer, and the positive attitude they keep amazes me. I read about the comings and goings to Afghanistan and Iraq, and sometimes about the deaths, of soldiers whose family members are my FB friends. I’ve seen people announcing their weddings and engagements, and I’ve seen a few divorces play out as well.  Facebook isn’t all about Farmville. It is a journal of the human collective.

I’ve also been obsessed recently with looking in our local paper to see how many job openings are listed vs. how many foreclosure notices are listed. Today it was one job opening, 6 foreclosures. It’s depressing, but it’s also a wake-up call for me. I’m not in any danger of losing my house. We can survive on my salary–I had to put the kibosh on collecting guitars and we might have to skip a vacation, but we’ll be fine.

In perspective, I don’t have any problems at all.

Peace on Earth, and may you all be blessed.

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What’s in a Name?

I’m abandoning massage politics for a moment to have a little rant about something else: modality names.

Rolfing®, Feldenkrais®, and Trager®, for example, are what I would describe as old classics. They’ve been around for many decades, and came about when bodywork and/or movement therapies were still in their infancy, at least in the Western world.

I’ve seen a trend recently, though, that I have to confess bothers me, and that’s the plethora of people naming techniques after themselves.

Last week, I made a post on one of my networks that I was looking for instructors for next year’s lineup of continuing education. I was a little bit shocked that half of the respondents sent me proposals for modalities that they have named after themselves. I’m going to be nice and not name any of these people, or their modalities. I must confess, though, that my first thought whenever I hear about a “new” modality that someone has named after him or herself, is usually that they’re being pretty presumptuous to think that they have actually invented something new, or that they’re on an ego trip.

A rather uppity young man who needed taking down a few notches told my chiropractor the other day that he had invented the “muscle elongation technique.” The chiropractor laughed out loud and said, “Son, don’t kid yourself, I learned that in chiropractic school in 1984.”

I can think of a number of modalities that are kind of unusual that actually could have excusably been named after their developer, but they aren’t, and even a number of massage therapy instructors who are internationally well known, that have resisted the urge to name their techniques after themselves. Kudos to them.

Everything old is new again, as the saying goes. But when I think back on all the things I learned in massage school and all the CE classes I’ve taken in the years since, I think about the basics…the movements of Swedish massage, the trigger point work, the myofascial release techniques, the joint mobilization modalities, and even the energy work. It is what it is.

In my opinion, we’re all standing on the bodywork path because someone trail-blazed the way for us years ago. I tend to take all those things that I’ve learned over the years and roll them into an eclectic mixture of whatever I’m led to do with a specific client on a specific day. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another.

And don’t hold your breath waiting for “The Laura Allen Method.”  It isn’t on the horizon.

Update: I’ll consider it one of the high points of my career that Paul Ingraham of Pain Science.com fame included the following piece of snark I wrote in an article he authored, called Modality Empires.

Join me for a class in the Laura Allen Method, where you will learn how to slap the hell out of people claiming to invent new modalities. How many more do we need? Is there any real possibility that no one has done it before in the history of the universe? As an added bonus I will throw in my special class in Redneck Massage, where I will simultaneously perform cryotherapy and roll out those stress knots with a cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon while I use duct tape to train your muscles. Whenever I perform a particularly impressive move, I will yell “Hey, watch this shit!” so you’ll be sure to repeat it exactly.

Laura Allen, Massage Therapist, sassing about modality workshops on her Facebook page, which racked up a whopping 230 likes, plus many dozens of supportive and appreciative comments

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