Whether you are looking to boost your income or renew your enthusiasm for a career as a manual therapist, massage therapy continuing education can provide a vehicle for all kinds of positive change. However, in order to make the most out of your CE experience, it is important to get clear on what you need to do in order to achieve your goals as a professional massage therapist or bodyworker. Of course, before you can map out a strategy for reaching one goal after another via massage therapy continuing education, you must first define your goals in a fairly specific manner. The main requirement here will be a firm grasp on what is going right or wrong within your daily practice, as well as any external factors that may play a role in your goals.
An example of an external factor one may need to figure in when it comes to setting and achieving goals would be the need to earn massage therapy continuing education credits if working in a state or region where a certain number of CE units is required to renew and maintain one’s license to practice. If this is the case for you, then one recurring goal will be to make sure you take the appropriate massage therapy continuing education classes within the appropriate period of time, because keeping your license to practice is often a necessity that must be in place before you can even begin achieving bigger dreams in the realm of professional massage therapy and bodywork.
Be sure to find out if the area where you work has any specific requirements when it comes to earning CE units to renew and maintain a massage license. For example, the governing board in your state may require all massage therapy continuing education units to come from an NCBTMB approved provider in order to count toward the credits you need to keep your license. If you find this to be true in your region, try using an Internet search engine and the phrase “find an approved CE provider NCBTMB” to begin looking for upcoming massage therapy continuing education classes that could fit the bill. Along these same lines, an athletic trainer who is looking for qualified CE courses may need to search for a BOC approved provider to ensure the class will meet the specifications for continuing education.
Once you have pinned down these outer goals, you can get down to defining your own personal goals and figuring out how you can use continuing education classes to achieve them. This is where it may be crucial to get real about what is working and not working in your current career. For example, if you find you are not satisfied with your ability to provide clients with long-term relief from chronic pain, then you may want to begin searching for a CE program that will teach more effective techniques for pain management in a manual therapy practice.
If this is the goal—to get better at providing your clients with lasting pain relief—consider any one of the massage therapy continuing education courses created by Erik Dalton. These classes are based on Dalton’s more clinical massage method, which is called Myoskeletal Alignment Techniques (MAT). Along with in-person seminars and home-study programs, manual therapists also can sign up to take massage therapy online continuing education courses on the topic of MAT. Earning a massage online CEU through one of Dalton’s MAT programs can be a fantastic way to start working toward the goal of providing more effective pain management in your own practice as soon as possible.
The decision to enroll in massage therapy continuing education to learn all about MAT also can help manual therapists achieve other important goals. By teaching valuable assessment protocols and hands-on skills for unwinding stubborn pain patterns, MAT classes can help practitioners boost their income as well. This tends to be the case because clients who are in pain usually are desperate for relief and willing to pay the person who can deliver it, particularly if it can be delivered in a noninvasive manner. Besides creating the potential for a more lucrative practice, the power to provide clients with pain management can leave practitioners feeling much more satisfied with their chosen profession.
