Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/72121
BETTER COMMUNICATION, BETTER PRACTICE your body get the most from our session," helps maintain a positive dynamic. The more aware you are of Dos and don'ts for communicating with clients • Clients respond to therapists who treat them as equals, speak to them honestly, and include them in the planning process. • Be responsive to clients' needs. For example, it is not professional to make a client wait two days before returning a phone call. Return phone calls within 24 hours. Therapists regularly require 24 hours' notice from clients to cancel an appointment. Show the same respect for clients and give them 24 hours' notice when rescheduling is needed. • Therapists should never use profanity or slang when speaking with clients and should strive for professional language. Eliminate the "yep," "nope," "like," "kinda," and "ya-know" from your professional interactions. • Although you use medical terminology with peers and other health-care providers, always be careful to speak in layman's terms to clients. For example, the client is unlikely to know what the cubital fossa is. Instead, use the phrase "inner elbow" to describe this region to the client. communication, the easier it is to remove unhelpful, moralizing statements from your language. Then, when you recognize them in the language of others, you can choose not to react. AVOID LABELING People also have a natural tendency to label each other, which reduces understanding. A man in a group says, "I wish our clinic would do more to conserve energy and recycle. I'm really worried about global warming, and I'm afraid that polar bears will become extinct in my lifetime." Others in the group evaluate his statement from their own perspective (filter). One of them thinks, "I never knew Robert was such a left-wing radical." Another says, "Robert, you're a big softy, but don't worry, the polar bears will be fine." These two people both just missed an opportunity to know Robert better. Instead of asking him more about his concerns and thoughts, they labeled him. Instead of seeing, hearing, and honoring him as a complex individual, they reduced him to a "left-wing radical" and a "softy." When people fall into labeling, they often miss the point of the communication and get stuck on the label and how they view it (good or bad, right or wrong). Even labels with positive connotations (beauty, hard worker, intellectual, etc.) can cause fixation and not allow people to be understood as their perfect, imperfect, dynamic, multifaceted selves. With labels, people are convinced that they already know someone else and lose the opportunity for greater depth of understanding. Extreme forms of labeling include bigotry, prejudice, racism, and stereotyping. We would like to think that these do not occur in the massage profession, but they do. In one example, a therapist was very physically fit and ate a vegan diet. He labeled anyone who was not physically fit or vegan as "carnivore," "fat," "lazy," and "undisciplined." His