Podcast

Weekly Roundup

• Chris Brogan - Sometimes You Can Just Chill

Discussion Topic 

• Family, Boundaries, and your Business

Quick Tips

• Use a shared Google Calendar to mark off your work times (as blocks)

Sponsors

• ABMP 
• The Original Jojoba Company 
• Jane  enter MBB1MO at signup for a 1-month grace period on your new Jane account.

Transcript: 

Sponsor message:

This episode is sponsored by Jane. Jane is a complete practice management software that makes it easy for you to book, chart, get paid all online. While Jane is an all-in-one software that's fun to use, they also focus their attention on the challenges that come up for practitioners in day-to-day practice. We know what these are. The biggest one, the most costly one, my friends, is the prevalence of no-shows and late cancellations.

With the help of Jane's features, you'll be able to significantly reduce no-shows and late cancellations, but also avoid a loss in revenue when they do happen. Some of these features include online booking payment policies, a cancellation policy, unlimited SMS and email reminders, and wait list management features, which excites me. Wait list management features, I'll say it again. You can learn more at Jane.APP. That's Jane.APP.

Michael Reynolds:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Massage Business Blueprint podcast, where we help you attract more clients, make more money, and improve your quality of life. I am Michael Reynolds.

Allissa Haines:

This here is Allissa Haines.

Michael Reynolds:

That was fast. I was saying it fast today. I don't know why. I feel energetic.

Allissa Haines:

Now we're all pumped up.

Michael Reynolds:

I feel high energy today. So hey, welcome everyone. I'll calm down. Don't worry.

Allissa Haines:

Michael, what have you been reading?

Michael Reynolds:

I have been reading Chris Brogan's email newsletter, which we mentioned repeatedly on the show because we're a fan of the Chris Brogan. But this latest newsletter was titled, Sometimes You Can Just Chill. And this theme has come up a lot and I think it's always good to revisit. He was basically talking through, "Hey, you know what?

It's good to work hard. It's good to be passionate about the stuff you're doing, all that stuff, but sometimes you need to give yourself permission just to do nothing, just to regroup, just to relax, just to step away from work." And that was it. There was no earth-shattering message beyond that. But I think it's worth bringing up consistently because I think those of us that are driven, especially us as business owners, it's very difficult for us to do that.

Whenever I'm not working, I feel guilty. When I'm not doing something productive, I feel guilty and I need to intentionally remind myself that relaxing, stepping away, taking time for myself, taking a nap, playing a video game, obviously being with my family, going outside, all this stuff that is non-work helps my work because it recharges and rejuvenates my energy and just my whole wellbeing. So that's what I've been reading, and I appreciate Chris Brogan reminding me too that sometimes I can just chill.

Allissa Haines:

Man, I do not have that guilt anymore. I think probably because I'm not the primary breadwinner in my family anymore. So when I was my family was just me. So I don't have anybody counting on me to keep them alive, other than my dog now. And so yeah. But Chris Brogan, I mean, he just spent a couple of weeks in India recently too.

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah.

Allissa Haines:

So he's been super like, I don't want to say woo woo, but he is been very into the stuff lately.

Michael Reynolds:

Yeah.

Allissa Haines:

Into the woo woo stuff. And good on him. I don't have anything that I've been reading. I've just been watching a lot of dog training videos and which translates into Instagram, their algorithms just feeding me more and more dog videos. So I'll go to check something and that's it. Two hours later, I have watched all manner of dog videos on Instagram and it's all over. So that's what I've been doing and reading.

Michael Reynolds:

I wouldn't be mad about that.

Allissa Haines:

No. I mean, it's fine. It's also not. Listen, I'm enjoying having a dog and lately my dog's been sick, so it's been a lot of work. I just told you, Michael, I spent most of yesterday making a homemade bone broth for my dog that had to be, I bought beef bones for the first time and I made a bone broth for them, and a little concerned it didn't come out dark enough.

If you have experience making bone broth, so I'd like you to email me at podcast@massagebusinessblueprint.com to give me some info. My dog can't have chicken. So anyhow, that's where I've been at, but I don't want my entire identity to be like this dog owner thing.

So I'm trying to back off a little bit. So I'm going to put some rules and restrictions into my social media usage coming soon because I've been saying this for months. I've been spending far too much time scrolling and not enough time actually doing something of value. So anyhow, that's what I have not been reading.

Michael Reynolds:

Nice.

Allissa Haines:

Who's our next sponsor, Michael?

Michael Reynolds:

It is our friends at The Original Jojoba Company.

Allissa Haines:

Yay. This episode is indeed sponsored by The Original Jojoba Company. I love them. It is winter here. I am using Jojoba on my hands a couple of times a day. It is keeping my hands from shriveling up and falling off. It's great. The Jojoba Company is the only company in the world that carries 100% pure first press quality Jojoba. It doesn't go rancid, it doesn't contain triglycerides, so it's not going to go bad. That bottle can sit on your shelf for a couple of years.

It can sit in your car and get hot and cold and hot and cold, and it's not going to get gross. And I'm going to say I've seen it in our community and on Facebook a couple of times in the last few weeks. People who are like, "I used X, Y, Z and my sheets are not coming clean." Let me tell you that using a very high quality product like Jojoba and especially pairing it with cotton sheets, they are going to rinse clean.

It is so great and you don't need to use very much of it. A couple of drops on an arm is really all you need. So you're not going to have a lot of extra products soaking into your sheets and it's just going to make your sheets last longer. It is the best thing ever, and you can get 20% off the price of the product when you shop through our link massagebusinessblueprint.com/Jojoba.

Michael Reynolds:

Thanks Jojoba. All right. Family, boundaries, your business, how does it all work?

Allissa Haines:

We've covered this before, but we're going to cover it again because it's been years since we've dived into this. And let's just lay out what the problem is here. For a lot of us, if you've got a family, and especially if massage has been your part-time job or you're trying to get back into massage after taking some time off, or you're just as a massage therapist, the person in your family, in your home, in your circle with what people think is the most flexible of jobs, that can be a problem.

It can turn into doing people a lot of favors, taking on a lot of commitments that are not letting you and you're not letting yourself spend the time in and on your business that you should be. So I want to talk through a little bit of this, how to potentially get yourself on track to be spending business time on business and how to maybe work through and express some thoughts with your family and friends who maybe are asking too much of you and pulling you away.

So first of all, the bulk of us have business hours. And even if you work a whackadoodle schedule or you do on call massage on a whackadoodle schedule, I would encourage you to set some kind of business hours. And that might mean three days a week you get a three-hour block of time. And if you have clients, great, and if you don't, you're still going to work on business stuff.

Or it might mean saying, "I'm going to put 10 hours into my business this week." And then if you're mobile and you have on-call at a hotel for eight hours, that's what you do and you don't do other things. But most of us in some way or another can at least declare a number of hours and or some set times on particular days over the course of a week or two when we can be working on clients and on our business.

So loosely, let's say I want to work 15 hours a week in my massage business. I am going to set aside those times and I'm going to schedule clients in them. And if I don't have clients, I am still going to spend those hours working on my business.

I might be doing bookkeeping or just businessy admin or marketing work or networking or more detailed charting and client follow up, doing a little bit of research on a particular client's issue that you want to work with, watching some training videos about it, cleaning your office, learning.

And finding a way, and I say finding a way, I don't want to say forcing yourself to work during these set hours is super important, but you can't force yourself to work. You have to want it. And everybody has different personalities and attention spans and ability to do certain things at certain times.

So you got to figure out what makes most sense for you. But I would firmly suggest if you actually want to have a successful business and boundaries and people infringing on that time are an issue for you, set some hours even if it varies a little bit week to week, set some blocks of time that are specifically to massage people and do other business work. Now the next step, it's good to do a little self-examination here.

Are you allowing infringement on your time? Do you have, you're supposed to be working in your business from noon to four on Wednesdays, but this morning someone calls and says, "Can you run by the grocery store for me? I'm not feeling well and I need this." And instead of saying, "You know what? I can get it to you after four o'clock, or you can use Instacart." You're like, "Okay."

And you blow off the afternoon you had planned to work on all of your social media advertising. We want to help people, but I'm trying to give real tangible examples of how sometimes we let stuff poke into our work hours when we shouldn't. Are you allowing the infringement? Are you taking your business seriously or are you knowingly scheduling things over what should be your business hours because you're using this as a form of procrastination because working on your business can be scary?

Are you making it a priority or are you not? And if you do want to make it a priority, let's work on your boundaries. So get that straight in your head. Do you really want this thing? And if you don't want this thing, if all you want to do is procrastinate, not work on your business, dude, shut down your business and go work for somebody else a couple shifts a week, that's totally legit.

But don't spend six years pretending like you want your business to work and then not actually putting boundaries in place to make it happen because you're not going to succeed. If you do, it's going to be super annoying. You're going to have bad relationships with the people who have been pushing you. Anyhow. Okay. So you need to know your work hours.

You need to actually prioritize your business over other things and find a way to make it all work. But do the people who tend to infringe on these boundaries or the activities that tend to in infringe on your work area hours, do they not know your work hours? Do people need to just be informed? Do you need to say, "I cannot go pick up that soup for you between noon and four so I can grab it for you right now or I can drop it off after four.

Or you can use Instacart." People might not know. If you have just always said yes to doing things, if you have always just had a flexible schedule, people aren't going to know. It is okay to announce as if it is a brand new thing, "My schedule has changed" and proactively informed people of this. I got some more examples of that in a minute. Are you making your time decisions based on guilt?

And I touched on this already. The world is still going to revolve if you can't do all the people all the favors all the time. It is okay to stop doing something you used to do because now you have work. There have been times in our lives where our work schedules change and our responsibilities change and other parts of our life have to adjust around it. And maybe that's time. So set this schedule so your boundaries might look like I am working on my business until this time.

And so when someone asks you, "Can you do this?" Or when someone in your house assumes you're going to be able to do all of the laundry last minute because they didn't put it down the laundry shoot over the weekend, you can say, "I'm going to be at work until 10:00 PM tonight." No, that's late. But okay, let's get more realistic. "I'm going to be at work until 8:30 PM tonight, so I am not going to be able to get that laundered for you.

You're going to need to do it yourself." Or start using those business times in your responses to people who might be pushing those boundaries. Because again, they might not know. If you are dealing with a family member, a parent, a sister or whatever, who might be a little bit overbearing like, "You don't even have clients tonight. I saw that you online schedule is empty." Or you're dealing with a spouse who's never been self-employed and doesn't get it.

It's okay if you want to. I'm not saying you have to, to be more specific. You have to say, "I need to get my bookkeeping done tonight. There I have a hard deadline on that." Now, maybe that hard deadline's just in your head because you wanted to do it. You can also be vague, but sometimes people need, especially if they've never been self-employed, they need a little bit more of an explanation to back off.

You can try that if you feel okay about it. You can say, "I have a new work schedule and I am not available at that time." Or, "I've increased my work hours. I cannot help with that anymore." And I will say this, when I decided to step back from a lot of volunteer activities, formal and informal, it took about six months of saying no to get off of things and have my responsibilities reduced or eliminated.

So start saying no right away because it's going to take a little while to kind of back off, especially if you have been in a leadership position in some kind of volunteer thing or whatever, it can take a little while to step back from certain things. So start using this now. Say, "I have a new work schedule. I cannot do that. I have changed my work hours. I have increased my work hours.

I am no longer going to be available to help with this thing after this date." Families might need some warning on this. Again, any kind of structured volunteering or other stuff you do might need some warning on this, but say, "I have increased my work hours. I am no longer able to help with that anymore." People understand work schedule changes and sometimes it's a way to relate to people who've only ever had jobs versus being self-employed.

My work schedule has changed. And you can say it is if you don't have control over it. And you do, but sometimes just that verbiage is helpful to deal with. Can you tell that I have a lot of people in my life who've never been self-employed and just absolutely don't get it? And I've had to find ways to relate so that they back off or give me what I need. Family's going to need some warning.

And it's also okay if your schedule is not actually changing, but your dedication is. Your dedication to your work is a change in your work hours, and that is legit. People don't need to know if you're massaging or doing other business tasks. And this is directly contrary to what I said a minute ago about you could name your specific tasks. I would say only get specific for people close to you that really need that.

But you can be vague. Work is work and people don't need to know specifically what that is. It is okay to say things like, "I need to spend time on my business or it's going to fail." It's okay to say that straight out because that will again kind of shock and surprise people in the same way that if I don't show up to work, I'm going to get fired will relate to people who have actual jobs. To say, "I need to be at work or my business is going to fail."

And when people push back, should people push back? Should people who love you, who you love push back? It's okay to say, and it's helpful to say, "I really want my business to be successful. It is important to me to have a good career and I need your support to make this happen. So what adjustments can we make that will allow me the time I need to build my business? What needs to change?"

This can work with getting out of a former babysitting agreement. This can work with your partner in household tasks. This can work with other family or friends that you have been a caretaker for and needing someone else to step in and help with that care-taking. I really want my business to be successful and I need your support. When you say things like that, people will often realize that they have been overstepping because you're kind of telling them they're overstepping.

I need your support. Because then if they resist that, they're being unsupportive. And in general, people who love you don't want to be unsupportive. Now again, myriad of family issues and boundaries and stuff. There's a very good reason why I don't have close relationships with bulk of my family, but some of this might need to be worked out into more structured therapy with an actual professional.

But say the things, and I guess that's what I really want to say is, say the things out loud. I need this to make my business a success. It is important to me that I spend this time on my business. Say it out loud and hold those boundaries as best you can. Because if you pair that with actually wanting to focus on your business, the time will come. There's 1,000,010 things that are going to get in the way.

And I understand that in a lot of situations you can't just spend a block of time on your business if you're not massaging because you're also paying childcare or all these other things. But there is of all of this, even if you're still rolling your eyes and being like, "That doesn't apply to me," you can probably find one nugget in the last 12 minutes that what I have said that will be useful to you in getting a little more support to be active in your business. That is all I have to say.

Michael Reynolds:

Oh, this is so important.

Allissa Haines:

It's so crazy important.

Michael Reynolds:

We can never talk about this enough.

Allissa Haines:

I know.

Michael Reynolds:

It's true. Yeah, it's all true. As business owners, yeah, people think our time is totally flexible and it's not like a real job, but it is a real job.

Allissa Haines:

It is.

Michael Reynolds:

And this job is important. Yeah.

Allissa Haines:

And I found in my life when I feel like I'm not getting enough of the time and freedom to work on my business, it's usually my fault. It's usually because I've been procrastinating. I'm really lucky I have a partner who gets it. So if I say at the beginning of the week, "I have a really busy week, I'm not meal prepping or doing laundry," they can take over and that's helpful.

I have older kids who can also do their own laundry if they need to. And I know you've got a really supportive spouse. So we're super lucky. But even with that, there have been times where I've had to be like, there's been an assumption that I could be flexible for someone and I've had to be like, "No, I'm sorry. Their mom's got to call out of work because I'm not canceling a client to take care of the sick child. I'm sorry." But again, not my kid so there's a different boundary there, but we all got our boundary issues.

Michael Reynolds:

Love it. Thank you.

Allissa Haines:

Thank you.

Michael Reynolds:

All right. Well, speaking of helping work on your business, a great resource to help you work on your business is ABMP. So let's talk about what they have to offer.

Allissa Haines:

They indeed are. Let's see, ABMP education center that they're going to give you everything you need to know to learn and run a successful hands-on massage practice and all the business side. We've done a couple of business classes for them. You can see the myriad of classes, over 600 hours of CE courses included with ABMP membership at ABMP.com/learn.

They also have ridiculously affordable prices for non-members, all kinds of topics, hands-on techniques, ethics, self-care, cultural competency, and a whole new set of courses for massage educators. I guess, it's not that new anymore, but it's new-ish. ABMP members get CE free for all the courses with their level of membership. And it is a great way to meet CE requirements, try out presenters, and save your CE budget for big onsite things should you choose to. It's a really nice way to get to know new presenters, to take an online class with them and decide if their vibe matches your vibe. You can learn more at ABMP.com/learn.

Michael Reynolds:

Love me some free CE.

Allissa Haines:

I do. I love a lot of CE.

Michael Reynolds:

And free things. All right. You've got a quick tip about Google Calendar and marking off time and stuff.

Allissa Haines:

Yeah. So this kind of goes right along with my topic where if you are struggling to get those blocks of time and to have other people see those blocks of times that you're supposed to be, I'm air quoting this "At work" or "Working," try a shared Google calendar.

Or if you are like a paper big on the wall, spatial calendar kind of family, you can do this with a highlighter. But make blocks of times that are your work times so that other people who share that Google Calendar or the paper calendar can see that. Use a highlighter in say, Jane, work four to 8:00 PM. And make the block on the Google calendar so that people won't schedule their crap over your work times.

It takes a lot of practice to get a family calendar on a calendar with multiple people to work. It takes a lot of practice to get people actually putting things in there, but it's a really good start. And if you're already using a calendar, a shared calendar for people around you who might be pushing on your boundaries, this could be a great way to make them more aware of how much you actually work and need to work.

Michael Reynolds:

Love it. Thank you.

Allissa Haines:

It's visual. I like visual things.

Michael Reynolds:

Great tie in there. All right, anything else to add or should we call it a wrap?

Allissa Haines:

We are done.

Michael Reynolds:

All right. Well, hey everyone. Thanks for joining us today. As always, you know where to find us. Well, actually, I shouldn't assume anything. Maybe you know where to find us. If you don't, I'm going to tell you. That's massagebusinessblueprint.com. Feel free to check us out there and email us any comments or questions to podcast@massagebusinessblueprint.com. We love to get email. We will answer your questions. We will lovingly read your feedback and we will respond. So thanks so much for joining us as always. And have a great day. We will see you next time.

Allissa Haines:

Bye.