Ep 417 -Why Do You Even (Self) Care?"The Rebel MT"with Allison Denney

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0:02:41.7 Speaker 3: When I was about five years into my career, I met a couple who were both massage therapists. They had been practicing for about 20 years at the time, and I asked them how they liked it, like a gut punch. They launched into how miserable they were. The list of miseries was expansive. They struggled physically, emotionally, and financially. They complained about their clients and they griped about the profession as a whole. Needless to say, I was fully and completely uninspired. Cut to 20 years later, here I am. That is crazy to me when I say it like that, it sounds like it was so easy. Like I snapped my fingers and I had zero issues along the way. Of course, that's not how it went. I was miserable too for a while. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. My hands hurt. I charged too little. I was wholly unsure about what I was doing with my clients and I was even more unsure about what I was doing with my life.

0:03:39.3 S3: These are not helpful feelings if you wanna be happy. I did not care about my job. That was the big picture. My chosen career was not giving me what I wanted. It was not paying me much money. It was not offering me a whole lot of respect and I wanted my weekends back, not that I ever had them. I waited tables for a long time before going to massage school, but I had an expectation that my job was gonna give me happiness and then I would start to care about it in the same way that it's easy to love a cute puppy. The puppy would be cute and then I could love it. Not the reverse that puppies are actually hideous until you love them and then they are cute. I stuck with it though. It offered me flexibility. I was a new mom and needed that and then about 10 years in, I decided I wanted to teach.

0:04:26.3 S3: And the thing about teaching is this, it's not so much about the content as it is about inspiring people. I mean it is also about the content. I had to know my stuff and that was an exciting challenge, but I also had to convince my students that this is a worthy career. How was I supposed to do that when I was feeling so uninspired myself, huh, this was a doozy. I didn't even really understand that this was such a big part of teaching until I was at least a full year in. I was way too consumed with making sure I had my lessons nailed down. The funny thing is what I realized was that if I wanted to teach content, I had to know content and like a mirror glaring back at me 'cause life has a way of doing that. I also realized that if I wanted to inspire, I had to be inspired.

0:05:16.0 S3: It sounds so simple in hindsight, but not so simple in the moment. When I teach a subject, I will often dive deep into that subject like, why do we have this anatomical component to begin with or why does our physiology act this way? This helps me grasp the whole picture and my brain loves this because I'm super attached to the big picture. So when I had to figure out how to get others to fall in love with this career, I analyzed what I actually really like about what I do. That was the big picture. Why am I in this? What is it that is good about being a massage therapist? And honestly, when I pointed this question at myself, boy, howdy did I get some answers? Before I get into that though, let me ask you this. What is the anatomy of caring? This is an anatomy podcast after all, so let's take it apart. How is it that we come to care about something, anything? Does it just happen like loving cute puppies or is it a lot of hard work like a long marriage? For me and for this podcast, the very first and most fundamental beginning to figuring any of this out is self-care.

0:06:31.8 S3: Self-care, care of and for the self. There is no doubt in my mind, triggers all the upward spirals. Self-care begins the climb out of hate and anger and into happiness and love. Self-care inspires inspiration, but I will tell you this, self-care is not easy. It can be like gearing up to climb Mount Everest with zero background in mountaineering. Thank you. No, thank you. This is a twofold issue. How do you get to a place where your career is booming and you love what you do and also how do you get your clients to get their bodies performing at their best and loving how they feel? For those of us in the field of body work, this is the ultimate question, is it not? Most commonly self-care looks like this, eating healthy, incorporating some sort of exercise in your routine. Massage, of course, breath, hydration, icing, heating. You I am sure are familiar.

0:07:27.9 S3: But self-care can also look like this. Dinner with friends, a night of binge watching your favorite show, ice cream, a glass of wine, live music, a good book. There are truly pros and cons to both of these lists. Yes, the cons of eating ice cream and savoring a glass of wine might be more obvious and heartily researched, but there are also cons to that first list. It is very possible to over exercise, over hydrate or over obsess about nutrition, and each of these lists targets different parts of who we are and what self-care can feel like. I'm not standing firm in one or the other of these camps, but I will point out that because the second list, the one that includes ice cream and wine, is so much easier to put into practice. It is the one that more often gets abused.

0:08:15.7 S3: Clearly we can overdo whatever it is and overdoing ice cream and wine very quickly slips from self-care to self-indulgence. The whole point is to get to a place of liking your life and what you do. And overdoing any of these can feed a domino effect that keeps us convinced that our jobs, our bodies, our lives are just not worth loving. This changes the definition of self-care. It takes a long time to fine tune those boundaries around the logistics that are right for you and not the person next to you. Keep trying. It's worth the effort, but also in the meantime, think about this. Self-care is about caring for the self, but what if it's also about defining why you care. When I was trying to answer this question for myself when I was teaching and forced to really look at how to get my students engaged when I was depressed and trying to find a way out when I was angry and blamed everyone around me, I kept thinking somewhere in the back trenches of my brain that someone would come along and pick me up and get me going.

0:09:19.8 S3: I wanted it to be as easy as loving puppies, but that was not happening. I wasn't waking up and loving my job even though I really wanted that to happen so I could just innately feel motivated. My job was not a cute puppy. The answer I begrudgingly eventually came to is that if I don't care, no one else will. No one would care about my job and my life to the point that they would pick me up and keep me going, and if they did, if that was even possible, what, I was going to hang on to their care for the rest of my life. No, I had to care. I had to dig deep into my self-care and care about me and how I live my life. Self-care doesn't start with buying healthier groceries or going for runs. Self-care starts with teaching the self to care.

0:10:08.8 S3: Why do I care about my job? Because no one else will care about it for me. Why do I love my job? So many things. I love that I know anatomy. I love that I make my own schedule. I love that I don't work in a corporate office. I love that I help people, seriously. I looked hard at these incredible aspects and then funny thing, my job started to feel more like a puppy. I loved it and as a bonus, I began finding it easier to practice the more mainstream forms of self-care because puppies. My point is this, self-care really is the best way to love the world around you. Yes, partially because if you do the things that create better hormone responses, better sleep patterns and better gut health, then yes, you will actually be a little happier. But it can sometimes be impossible to do those things if you don't first care about yourself.

0:10:58.9 S3: What is the big picture? Why do you care? Here's the kicker. Once you get this ball rolling, getting your clients to fall in stride comes a little easier. Caring about yourself and the work you do inspires others to do the same. Being the smartest or the most technique savvy therapist falls on deaf ears if there is no passion behind it. Creating a practice of care of the self begets a practice that blossoms. I get a lot of requests to make content about self-care. My short response is this, sleep better, stretch, more hydrate, eat good food, move your body, get massages often, and laugh a lot. My long answer is this podcast, don't care for yourself. Care about yourself. The advice to love yourself may come across like a woo woo science list, rally cry. You might hear from a stage at a music festival, but it is also the very beginning of how to actually care for yourself.

0:11:55.8 S3: Try this, write down the top five reasons you love what you do. Then write down the top five things you appreciate about your life. Then believe them. You do not have to convince anyone else to believe them, and no one else is going to walk up to you and convince you to believe them. That only happens in stories made for screens or pages. This may take some time. Of course, you can't just believe that puppies fall from the sky and then they do. But I will wrap things up by pointing out that this podcast has been released the day before, Valentine's Day. Buy yourself a box of chocolates or some flowers, or treat yourself to a long walk or a good coffee, but also show up for your clients. Take care of yourself by caring about yourself. Charge what you deserve, create schedules that keep you sane and hold boundaries that protect you.

0:12:46.4 S3: Take a ton of continuing ed classes and listen to a lot of bodywork podcasts. Hey, wait, you just did that last one. Nice. Enjoy your newfound self-care routine. It will take you far.

0:13:01.6 S1: And here we are, the end of the episode. Thank you to the extraordinary crew over at ABMP for helping me get my words into your ears. And if you wanna get any of your words into my ears or more accurately into my brain via my eyeballs from a computer screen, drop me a line @rebelmt@abmp.com. That's R-E-B-E-Lmt@abmp.com. I always wanna hear your questions, comments, suggestions, or salutations. Also, if you're interested in checking out anything else I'm doing, head over to rebelmassage.com where you will find all sorts of fun things to click on, like homemade organic products for your practice. Cool links to continuing education classes. Thoughts I have typed up and posted here and there and other rebel massage dabblings.

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