Chair Practitioner as Wellness Coach

by | Jun 1, 2013 | Business, Chair Massage, Marketing

Massage Magazine May 2013 CoverThis article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Massage Magazine. The focus of the issue was on the business of massage and I was asked to respond to the question:

“How can I best position myself as a wellness coach offering chair massage services to business?“

Here is my response:
In a previous article I discussed why becoming a wellness coach is a good strategy for marketing workplace massage. To position yourself as a credible wellness coach for massage I suggest getting a credential and a good rationale justifying your services. The established wellness industry can give you the first and some revolutionary research the second.

Credentials
Formal training in wellness is often as close as your local academic institution, which may offer degrees or certification in health, wellness and fitness. A quick search will also put you in touch with related academic extension and online courses.

You can also access professional training and specialized credentials through non-profit organizations such as the National Wellness Institute or The Corporate Health and Wellness Association, both of which offer online and in-person training, certification, membership and conferences.

Both the academic and professional credentials are useful paths for getting a broad-based foundation in wellness and developing credibility as a wellness coach. However, you will quickly discover that massage is rarely found in the curricula of the mainstream wellness industry. In part, this is because of our deep-seated cultural phobia regarding touch. Specific prohibitions about touching are still routinely included in many corporate sexual harassment policies.

This absence of attention to massage by the wellness industry is also indicative of an absence of good data justifying the benefits of massage in the workplace.

It wasn’t until 2012 that the first (and as of this writing, only) textbook surveying the field of massage research was published (Massage Therapy: Integrating Research and Practice. Edited by Dryden and Moyer). With chapters on cancer, fibromyalgia, scars, sexual trauma, anxiety and depression, low back pain, neck and shoulder pain, headaches as well as special populations (pediatrics, pregnancy and labor, athletes, and older adults) it appeared that there was little evidence to construct a proactive rationale for massage in the workplace.

Fortunately corporate attitudes are in rapid transition and positive justifications for massage are appearing.

Corporate attitudes
Thirty years ago only in my wildest dreams could I have imagined a business conference entitled Wisdom 2.0 that would bring together leaders from some of the most successful tech companies (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Cisco) together with academics, researchers, politicians and spiritual educators (such as Marianne Williamson, Jon Kabot-Zinn, Jack Kornfield) to discuss “how to live with greater wisdom, purpose and meaning.” Yet, that is exactly what happened this past February for four days in San Francisco.

Check out videos of some of these presentations. Listen carefully and you will hear the business jargon of future and it will contain words like presence, engagement, compassion and mindfulness and concepts such as conscious capitalism, the innovative mindset, places and spaces of intimacy and reclaiming our selves.

Another easy way to learn about the changing values in business is by tapping into the seemingly bottomless library of presentations offered up by TEDTalks (www.ted.com). One word you will hear over and over again in all of these discussions is connection. Companies want their employees to feel connected to themselves, to each other, to customers, to their work, to their communities, to their environment and even to the greater good of all humankind.

Of course, touch is the physical manifestation of connection and chair massage is a very safe container for a whole lot of touch. So, in the massage version of a wellness coach we are actually connection experts.

Revolutionary research
Why is massage so good at creating a sense of internal and external connectedness? In a word—oxytocin. In the past ten years, this hormone/neurotransmitter has risen from obscurity to take a leading role in the wellness narrative. Here is the short, somewhat oversimplified rags-to-riches story starting with some basic physiology.

The autonomic nervous system has two complementary branches: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which generally activates our fight or flight response, and the parasympathetic nervous system (PSNS) which generally promotes rest and recovery and makes us feel calm and connected.

We live in a sea of stress caused primarily by over-stimulation of the SNS. Too much noise, too many smells, too many people, too much work, too much email, too many perceived dangers. The fight or flight response, once the occasional visitor when a tiger crossed our path, has become a constant companion. This chronic stress response has been dissected in thousands of research papers and the conclusion is simple, we are overwhelmed physically, mentally and emotionally.

What has been studied far less, until now, is the PSNS that stills the waters and brings a sense of peace and calm, comfort and compassion, healing and health to our lives. Evidence is mounting that the primary chemical that triggers this parasympathetic response is oxytocin. Originally thought to be released only during childbirth and breastfeeding, oxytocin is now known to be produced by the pituitary gland of both males and females throughout our lives.

We also now know that the most efficient way to stimulate the release of oxytocin is through caring touch. This means that we have a scientific rationale for why massage makes us feel better that we can explain to companies and customers. For the last 25 years my key message was “Circulation is not optional” now it is “Oxytocin is not optional.”

When oxytocin kicks in employees feel better about themselves and each other, productivity and creativity increase because energy is no longer drained away by a hyperactive SNS, and the multiple health problems brought on by a chronic stress response are reduced, resulting in lower absenteeism and health care costs.

Conclusion
To become a serious wellness coach to business carrying the banner of massage, get a credential and become an oxytocin expert by checking out the pioneering work of Kersten Unvas Moberg (The Oxytocin Factor), Paul Zak (The Moral Molecule) and Dr. Gabor Maté (drgabormate.com). The latter two have some engaging videos on YouTube.

Four Ways to Market Workplace Chair Massage

by | Nov 11, 2012 | Chair Massage, Marketing

Outfitted with education, experience and selling points (see related article: 21st Century Workplace Seated Massage) for chair massage, how do you locate some likely business prospects?

1. Finding receptive companies can be as simple as reading the business section of the daily newspaper, or its online equivalent. Local business articles provide a wealth of information about new companies, growing companies and the changing circumstances of established companies. Make a list and call the CEO or human resources department of these companies to find out if they already have or are considering a program to support workplace wellness.

2. You can narrow your marketing even further by identifying companies who already have an interest in workplace wellness. Theresa Crisci of Total-balance Life Choice shows up every time her chamber of commerce invites local companies to describe their wellness initiatives at a health care council meeting. Invariably, four out of five of the companies will never even mention stress reduction as part of their wellness strategy, but are eager to hear her talk about it when she approaches them at the end of each meeting.

3. Piggybacking on firms that specialize in providing corporate wellness programs or Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) can save you a lot of legwork. Even if they don’t offer seated massage as part of their package of services, you can often get your foot in the door of local companies by offering to be part of the increasingly popular “lunch-and-learn programs where you can talk up the benefits of stress-reduction services.

4. The most targeted and cost-free marketing is word-of-mouth referrals. Yuki Takaishi, owner of Touch Wellness in San Francisco, California, found that former chair massage clients who had moved on to other companies would often encourage their new employers to incorporate chair massage services into the workplace. Friends, neighbors and religious or social club contacts can also help you advocate for wellness in their workplaces.

21st Century Workplace Seated Massage

by | Nov 10, 2012 | Chair Massage, Marketing

This article originally appeared in MASSAGE Magazine‘s October 2012 issue.

From the first days of professional seated massage in the mid 1980s, massage in the workplace has been a significant market segment. When my business was providing chair, or seated, massage at companies such as Apple Computer, the service was clearly positioned as a workstyle benefit that set progressive 20th century businesses apart from their stodgy, suit-and-tie counterparts.

While that motivation still exists and evolved, another trend has emerged, driven by a shift in the health care industry that, if seized upon, has the potential to completely reshape the face of massage and the workplace.

The tradition

For the past three decades, chair massage has ebbed and flowed with the growth and recession cycles of the economy. The high-tech and bio-tech sectors, in particular, typically lead the upswing and provide fertile ground for workplace massage. These companies are often created, managed and staffed by a younger generation more interested in quality of life issues. Benefits such as free meals, childcare, concierge services and massage therapy are often part of benefits packages.

Theresa Crisci, who has been doing workplace chair massage for nearly 20 years in Connecticut, identified a big shift in corporate attitudes over the past two decades “For the most part, we no longer have to worry about sexual harassment issues being a barrier for chair massage in the workplace.” Crisci believes that chair massage actually holds a certain cachet for the current generation of young people in the workforce and the companies who employ them.

Another two decade practitioner, Tom Darilek, owner of Seize the Day Energizing Chair Massage, in Austin, Texas, believes employers consider regular massage to be simply another tool for attracting and retaining top tech talent. Darilek also notes that in the past, while companies occasionally would give lip service to chair massage as a wellness tool, they basically treated it as a fad that would fade as soon as the economy began to tighten.

Now, there are significant signs that the wellness fad may finally be here to stay—and there is every reason to believe that chair massage therapists may benefit.

The revolution

The future of workplace massage is tied to the economics of health care policy. At long last, corporate, governmental and academic policy makers have come to the conclusion that a health care system whose primary focus is sickness care is doomed to bankruptcy. They have concluded the ultimate foundation of an economically viable health care system has to be prevention and wellness.

This radical paradigm shift is stamped indelibly into the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010. While the media and partisan politicians were obsessing about the constitutionality of ObamaCare and its new framework for financing health care, mostly overlooked was the fact that the 954-page ACA legislation specifically “directs the creation of a national prevention and health promotion strategy.”

The law created the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council (National Prevention Council), composed of the heads of 17 Federal agencies and chaired by the Surgeon General. This high-level federal action group works closely with a 25-member Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health, also mandated in the legislation. Both of these groups are developing plans and recommendations that will impact every strata of society, including workplace wellness.

Happily, massage therapy has a seat at the table of this health care revolution. One of the members of the Advisory Group is the esteemed Janet R. Kahn, Ph.D., a 30-year massage professional and the director of research of the Massage Therapy Research Consortium from 2003 to 2008. Her background in massage and integrative health makes her an ideal advocate for the inclusion of massage as these panels refocus the health care system on prevention and health promotion, two areas in which massage excels.

The National Prevention Council and the Advisory Group have already targeted the workplace as one of the primary arenas for implementing this new strategy. I will make the case that seated massage is ideally suited to lead the way in workplace wellness. Then, armed with a clear idea about how to describe and position the unique strengths of chair massage, I will make a few practical suggestions about finding companies ready to hear the message of chair massage.

This might be a good time to note that, while most of the following rationales could also be applied to table massage, the twin barriers of time and money make chair massage a far better fit for the vast majority of workplaces. Experience has shown that, in general, only the very largest companies include the option of table massage in their menu of wellness services.

The prevention intervention

The medical community has traditionally limited prevention to proven clinical screenings—mammograms, colonoscopies, blood pressure screenings, treadmill tests and the like. In the new health care model, prevention also includes dealing with lifestyle and pre-clinical conditions, a particular strength of chair massage.

Seated massage has always been good at preventing little problems from becoming big problems. The reason someone wakes up with a crick in her neck is never because, as she might claim, she “slept wrong.” Rather, it is because of weeks or months of accumulated psychological or physical stress finally reaching a tipping point that resulted in a muscle spasm. Regular chair massage alleviates the results of these minor stresses and prevents muscles from reaching that involuntary contraction threshold.

Too much mental stress is the primary or secondary cause of many medical conditions as well as an inhibitor to healing virtually all injury and disease processes. Most people will agree that high-quality chair massage is an instant stress reducer. While we don’t yet know all the exact mechanisms involved, there is sufficient scientific evidence to support the claim that massage is effective at reducing anxiety and depression.

Human beings were made to move. When employees are immobilized by their jobs at desks and keyboards, their bodies will eventually break down and rebel. The coin of movement has two sides: active movement where people move themselves, which we call exercise, and passive movement where someone else creates the movement, which we call massage. Regular seated massage moves the tissue, which enhances circulation, which lets the body’s own self-healing mechanisms work most efficiently. Neither movement nor circulation is optional and chair massage provides a heaping serving of both.

Immobilized bodies that don’t move result in what Thomas Hanna, the great somatics pioneer, more elegantly termed sensory-motor amnesia. That is to say, chronically contracted muscles which eventually stop giving feedback to the higher cortex of conscious awareness. When this happens we are no longer able to feel the imbalances we have created and we begin to think that our bad posture is normal.

Seated, or chair, massage restores the mind-body connection and we feel better in two important ways: First, we feel the relief of the multi-tiered rebalancing that comes at the end of a massage; second, our capacity for experiencing sensation inside our bodies increases.  We can now feel more and we can feel better. If we are not getting accurate feedback about the state of our health, we see no reason to change. Massage restores that feedback loop and shows us that we have control over how we feel.

This enhanced self-awareness brings us to the second set of rationales for seated massage in the workplace.

Making wellness work

Advocates of wellness and health promotion know in order for the health care paradigm to shift from treatment to prevention, people must be motivated to make significant lifestyle changes.

We have known for decades that five chronic diseases–heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes–are responsible for more than two-thirds of all deaths in the United States. We also know the progression of all these conditions is heavily influenced by lifestyle. Studies have repeatedly shown we would save billions of health care dollars every year if we ate better, exercised more, reduced chronic stress and didn’t smoke.

So why haven’t we change our lifestyles? Because change requires effort and motivation.

One of the unique aspects of chair massage, unlike any other workplace wellness modality, such as smoking cessation, dietary modification, exercise, Yoga or meditation, is it requires no motivation to change. It works immediately with no effort or intervention required on the part of the recipient. With massage, people also come to realize that they have far more control over how they feel than they ever imagined and thus become more motivated to change.

The frosting on the cake is that chair massage also supports every lifestyle change. No matter where you are on the spectrum of wellness, from couch potato to super athlete, if you want to break a habit, start a new one or support any transition in your life, adding massage will immediately make you feel better and positively reinforce your efforts.

Finally, seated massage is the most egalitarian of all wellness programs. You don’t have to be overweight or a smoker or have high blood pressure or even be stressed out to qualify and benefit from regular massage. The only ultimate contraindication for massage is an individual’s reluctance to be touched.

A major transition

Chair massage in the workplace is at a moment of major transition. In the emerging health care economy the time is right to position yourself as a serious wellness consultant who provides massage services. There has never been a better time to showcase the benefits of massage and create a true health care system, one body at a time.

For further marketing tips, check out Four Ways to Market Workplace Chair Massage.

On the Side of Angels

by | Oct 4, 2012 | Business, Chair Massage

There is a successful company in Australia, 3-Minute Angels, that started in 2002 providing 3-minute chair massages in pubs and clubs for free. Customers would pay whatever they thought the service was worth. Today the business has grown into a more conventional chair massage provider with hundreds of practitioners offering 5- to 15-minute massages at events and in the workplace.

A similar company in Europe, Ibiza Angels, has trained 200+ massage practitioners to perform 7-minute massages in exclusive night clubs and at high-end entertainment and sporting events.

What both of these companies of “angels” have in common is that most of their practitioners never went to massage school. Indeed, the initial massage training for both businesses is accomplished in about one day.

I can almost hear the outraged grinding of teeth in American massage schools, associations and businesses where the current standard in most localities requires that practitioners go through a minimum of 500 hours of table massage training before they can make a living doing chair massage.

“One day of training? These practitioners are a danger to the general public. In pubs and clubs? This will only lower the status of massage professionals and undercut the ability of massage “therapists” to make a living.”

We have seen the enemy and he is us. – Walt Kelly

I recently returned from two weeks working in Paris and London where, once again, I was struck with how out-of-sync North America chair massage training is with much of the rest of world.

In both England and France, people routinely take one day courses in chair massage and begin to work professionally. In fact, for the vast majority of countries in the world short courses in chair massage (under 100 hours) is the rule, not the exception. Some of the training is done by businesses training potential workers, such as Ibiza Angels. Other courses are offered by private trainers or schools. Consequently, chair massage is thriving.

Why is North America so different? I would argue that the problem stems primarily from the decision to define all “massage” as “massage therapy.” I have discussed the background of that decision extensively in other articles, but essentially, when you opt to define a profession such as massage as primarily a health care service, you automatically raise the training bar to a high level. After all, virtually all health care professions require a college degree plus some form of post-graduate training.

As I watched both Presidential contenders extol the wonders of a free market economy during the debate last night, it occurred to me that our industry could benefit substantially from that approach.

It’s not that chair massage was over-regulated in North America, its more that chair massage simply got swept up by the regulations that were already in place for table massage. There is currently no separate regulation for chair massage and there needs to be.

The idea that you must learn 500-hours of table massage before you can learn chair massage is patently absurd. The reverse makes far more sense. All practitioners should be required to learn chair massage before they learn table massage. It is chair massage that is entry-level for both practitioners and customers, not massage therapy. Learning chair massage first would be a lot less expensive way for students to determine whether they should invest thousands of dollars learning table massage.

In countries where there is little or no regulation of massage, most massage is inexpensive chair or foot massage. That is what the public wants and that is what they can afford. The reason that less than 5% of the U.S. population get regular massage is to a great extent because the regulation of chair massage is conflated with the regulation of table massage. Chair massage needs to be regulated separately to meet the pent up market demand for convenient and affordable professional touch. Better yet, let’s just exempt chair massage from all regulation. Here’s how.

To extract chair massage from table massage, you have to define it. Here is my definition:

Chair massage is non-remedial massage done on seated, fully clothed customers, performed on the upper body above the waist or on the lower legs (from the knees down), in an open, public space.

Note that this definition also includes foot massage as long as the customer is seated and it eliminates the problem of prostitution because it does not allow massage behind closed doors in private rooms. Note also that this excludes massage therapy/treatment from the chair. Only  massage with a wellness, prevention, or relaxation intention is allowed.

If this exemption was amended to every current massage law in the United States and Canada, our industry would explode with new businesses providing services to millions of new customers who would get in the habit of including a massage in their health lifestyle. A good portion of these new customers would then graduate to table massage and massage therapy ensuring our professional growth for decades to come.

Change is not easy

I understand that what I am proposing is not easy, but I do believe it is the only sensible course if we want to make massage truly accessible to everyone. The only reason we have massage regulation is to distinguish therapeutic massage from adult entertainment massage. But a clear and simple definition of chair massage eliminates that concern. Nobody mistakes chair massage for prostitution.

The only other rationale for regulating massage—that it is potentially dangerous—has never been demonstrated. To the contrary, the insurance companies who track these risks would never offer $4 million annual professional liability policies for less than $100 wholesale if there was a significant potential of harm to the customer.

Personally, I am not a fan of one-day training courses in chair massage. However, if a business can provide a chair massage service that people will buy, then why not let them? Just don’t let them call it massage therapy.

Unshackle chair massage and let it grow as it has in the rest of the world. The marketplace wants safe, convenient and affordable massage. Let’s finally let them have it.

How Culture Mediates Massage

by | Oct 4, 2012 | Business, Chair Massage

Whenever customers sit in my massage chair, I know that their subjective experience of my touch will be the result of at least four factors:

  1. Their genetic profile (Are they male/female? Do they have biological disorders such as autism).
  2. Their personal touch history (Have they had massage before? Have they experienced healthy touch or abusive touch in the past? Have they experienced touch at all?).
  3. The attitudes and experiences with touch they had in the family (Were they breastfed, or not? Was their family highly affectionate, or not?).
  4. The customs and attitudes toward touch that are emphasized by the culture in which they are immersed.

This fourth element is the subject of this article. As the world continues to shrink and multi-cultural societies becomes the norm rather than the exception, understanding the cultural environment in which a customer was raised is crucial to healthy professional touch relationships. In this article I will give two examples of how culture affects how we touch.

Defining pain

I began my massage career in 1980 working at Kabuki Hot Spring, a spa in San Francisco’s Japantown. I was the only Caucasian male working in a sea of mostly Asian, mostly female faces. While I had been trained in traditional Japanese massage at a school that was run by the owners of the Hot Spring, a majority of the other practitioners had been trained in Japan. It was at Kabuki that I began to understand why Japanese massage had gotten a reputation in the United States as “beat-me-up” massage.

While the Kabuki had private rooms, most of the customers availed themselves of the public baths and the communal massage room, which had 14 massage tables lined up in an open space. Doing massage alongside Japanese practitioners introduced me to what I have since come to understand is a differentiation in how cultures define pain.

I would regularly notice a poor customer at another table squirming uncomfortably under the strong thumbs of a Japanese colleague. If the customer tried to get the practitioner to ease up they were likely to get a slap on the back and be commanded to, “Relax! Relax!”

In the immortal line from Cool Hand Luke, “What we got here is a failure to communicate.”

In Japan, China and many other Asian cultures, if you are feeling a strong sensation while getting a massage, you are happy because you believe the massage is working. In the West, we often interpret the same strong sensation as pain and we think it is a bad massage.

The Japanese practitioners I was working alongside were clearly mystified that anyone would want a lighter massage. From their point of view the problem was not that the massage was too strong, but that the customer was resisting the benefits. To the American customers, the massage simply hurt.

This mistake is still being perpetuated by the flood of Chinese immigrants providing chair massage in malls throughout the U.S. Nobody has taught them that they need to regularly ask their customers for feedback about the pressure and there is often a serious language barrier making it difficult to do so.

For my part, every time I have someone in my massage chair born in the Far East I keep that cultural difference in mind. More often then not they like pressure on the strong side of the spectrum. In all cases, of course, I ask for feedback.

The French form of connection

I use a martial arts approach to teach massage through “Katas,” highly choreographed sequences of select acupressure points and Japanese massage techniques.

Over the years hundreds of people have used my DVDs and other curriculum material as the basis for training thousands of chair massage practitioners around the world. Last year, for example, I discovered that my basic chair massage Kata was famous in France and literally thousands of practitioners were using some variation. They even have a name for it: the Amma Kata.

When I saw a video of one chair massage trainer demonstrating his work, I was amazed. He had been trained by a person who had been trained by a person who had been trained by me. Despite this fourth generational relationship, I was impressed that my original Kata was plainly visible.

What caught my eye, however, was not what was similar, but what was different. The trainer had added two full minutes of slow, deep, luxurious scalp massage at almost the end of the 15-minute sequence.

Recently I had an opportunity to meet with this trainer, Xavier Court, in Paris and spend a week working on the Kata with him and the other trainers working with him. When I experienced his head massage in a chair, I loved it. He had given thousands of chair massages to French people in the workplace and at events and was convinced that the additional work on the scalp was essential to a satisfying experience for his customers.

I explained to him that, in the United States, we had almost exactly the opposite experience. If there is one part of the massage that people most often ask us to leave out, it is the scalp. Here it seems that customers want us to get to the parts of the body that they perceive “need” the work—most often the neck, shoulders and back. If we spent two minutes “just” doing the scalp, people would feel like they were not getting their money’s worth.

In France, on the other hand, there is a cultural recognition that deep relaxation is a goal in and of itself. This is the land dedicated to the 35-hour workweek, five weeks of annual vacation and dinners that don’t start until 9 p.m. Unlike its neighbors to the north (Germany, Netherlands, England, Scandinavia), France is an essentially Mediterranean country with all of the sensuousness and slow pace that implies. It was truly an eye-opening experience that reminded me of an analysis by Virginia Postrel about what is missing from American attitudes toward massage.

What do you see?

These examples highlight the need for cultural sensitivity when doing massage. There are many more differences in cultural perceptions of massage most obviously ones that stem from cultural attitudes and norms about touch and sexuality. Please share your cross-cultural insights in the comments section below.