The Mosaic Life

Building a Thriving Wellness Business in Challenging Times

• Laura Wagenknecht / Annebritt Birkeland

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How can understanding the structural reasons behind your discomfort transform your daily life? Tune into "The Mosaic Life with Laura W." as we welcome Annebritt Birkeland, a health and wellness veteran with over 20 years of expertise. Annebritt shares her revolutionary approach to massage therapy, which focuses on holistic wellness, stress management, and injury recovery. She emphasizes the power of educating clients about their bodies, enabling them to manage their daily lives more effectively. From advanced structural work to her nine-month apprenticeship program, Annebritt offers a comprehensive look at elevating massage therapy to integrate mind, body, and spirit.

In our candid conversation, we uncover the importance of a non-sexualized, therapeutic touch in fostering mental and emotional well-being, especially crucial during the isolation brought on by COVID-19. Annebritt discusses the challenges of meeting the soaring demand for such practices and the intricacies of building a business that honors these needs. She shares invaluable insights on mentoring new therapists, fostering adaptability, and overcoming financial constraints. Reflecting on how we've navigated the pandemic's hurdles, I express heartfelt gratitude to Annebritt for her support and wisdom. Don't miss this enlightening episode, and revisit this conversation and more by visiting Bizradious and exploring our shows.

Website: https://lightenupmassages.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LightenUpMassage
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightenupmassage/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annebrittbb/

A Mosaic is a bunch of pieces, put together, to make up the whole in a beautiful way. Here at Mosaic Business Consulting we discuss the various pieces of a business throughout the course of its life, and throughout all industries, and how these pieces, when put together, can help develop a better, more efficient, and effective running of YOUR business.
Find our more or register for a course today: Mosaic Business Consulting

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Laura:

Good morning. I'm your host, laura Wagner-Konecz, owner of Mosaic Business Consulting, and you're listening to the Mosaic Life with Laura W. A mosaic is a really beautiful bunch of pieces that, when put together, make up the whole in a really beautiful way, and this show plans to discuss the various pieces of a business throughout different industries and how these pieces, when put together, can help develop a better, more efficient and effective running of your business. To reach me, contact bizradious.

Laura:

Today, my guest is none other than Anna Britt Brooklyn, and Anna has over 20 years of experience in health and wellness industry. Her massage therapy skills, emt training, private care provider and patient advocacy work experience pair well with her radiography experience, advanced radiation science studies and three years of hospital internships, enabling her to provide highly skilled direct client care from a strong base, a strong knowledge base, my apologies. Passionate about lifelong learning, anna fosters results-driven care or instruction for her clients, students and apprentices, and I think what makes you so different, anna, is the fact that you have not only a massage therapy practice, but one that actually is a continuation education model, so that the students that you are helping are folks that have already gotten their massage certification and licensure stuff and then now you're getting them to another level of education. Maybe you want to first of all welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you, yeah, yeah, and maybe we could talk about that model of yours, that that you have in your massage practice the same same wheel, same story.

Annebritt:

Basically, I found in my own practice that clients these days are very well educated. They understand the need for natural wellness overall and they ever, particularly since COVID, have really come to understand that taking care of the body naturally and prompting it in its own recovery process is very, very important and actually preferred more natural wellness and are much more cognizant or aware of the need for sleep, hydration and just helping the body function better, more optimally. We have all these new supplements on the market that are really focused on helping the brain and the body integrate more, and it helps. It helps the business professional, it helps the senior citizen, it helps the everybody right.

Laura:

Yeah, and to that you brought up brain and body, and I think that when you were talking about COVID, the first thing that came to mind was the surge, if you will, of the need for mental health care. Surge, if you will, of the need for mental health care. Absolutely, that helped us to understand that there were other methods that we need to use. I think yes. Right and so yeah, so tell me more about that, yeah.

Annebritt:

Yeah, so. So basically what what I discovered with my career in massage therapy is I had higher and higher level demand, not only for the advanced structural work working with athletic athletic people or people who are recovering from injury but more and more people were coming in saying I really need to feel more connected to my life, I need to manage my stress better, I need a, I need a, a. They needed a partner in their wellness. That was part of the overall team, just like more and more people are recognizing that mental health therapy and awareness is is important. Therapy and awareness is important. Advanced massage therapy is really starting to bridge that gap of helping people be able to stave off surgery or prevent surgery, incorporate the stress and the overall tension in their lives and manage themselves better. But it's not the necessarily the feel good spa type of massage that people are looking for anymore. They're looking for a higher level of feedback and skills, and I found that as an instructor at local colleges.

Annebritt:

The basic skills techniques that therapists are taught initially are more geared towards spa wellness, which is great, a wonderful modality. Having relaxation therapy is important, but getting the relaxation response and also getting the sense when you get off the table that I'm better in mind, body and spirit, because my my aches and pains are not affecting me. I was really able to learn about breathing. That helps calm my body down. I come away with techniques that my therapist has helped educate me in to help me deal with my daily life, and I didn't run into therapists who also were incorporating that much in the integration of their work and and so in seeking out other therapists to work within my practice, I realized, oh you know what, maybe I should work on trying to foster this education and therapists who are generally interested in this, in this scope of practice, and and work towards helping to create an in-depth, intensive program. So we have a nine-month apprenticeship program that we work with. That's really cool.

Laura:

And can I just ask? You know, I'm wondering, like about the entrepreneurs and thinking you know, how does that help a business owner? How does massage improve my daily activity? How is that going to improve my business? How is that going to improve my life? What are things that it does?

Annebritt:

So our reviews often say things like you know, I have a profound and deep sense of peace when I'm able to get a high quality massage that also addresses my physical and relaxation needs. So also, people feel better when they feel like they are more in touch with their body. So they understand when they wake up in the morning with an ache or a pain, they understand where it comes from and they also understand how to work with it. So, as you know, you can wake up with a crick in your neck that can really hurt and it can restrict your movement so that you can't do much with throughout your day.

Annebritt:

And so I think that, especially for anybody who's out there working in any sort of industry or service relatedrelated field my desk sitters, my computer typers, everybody who is actually doing more physical labor and they're utilizing their body that way to be able to understand not just, oh, I have this discomfort, discomfort, but understand structurally why they have the discomfort and then what to do for it. What we say in our practice is we want to teach you how to be your own therapist, how to really have a deeper connection with your own body, so that come to us for the major tune-up, but in between you are empowered to care for yourself and to really understand yourself at a much more intimate level, when you feel that you feel more connected in life in general and you're overall more calm because you feel essentially less overwhelmed.

Laura:

Your nervous system isn't overwhelmed.

Laura:

So many of the things that you were talking about. I was just thinking. You know, it feels like when I'm, when I'm calmer, then I feel like my brain can be more active, in the sense that the flow is easier, I'm not absolutely strained and therefore I'm not feeling without the stress, I'm able to really focus and and and I'm also feeling like it gives that maybe that more stimulation is happening that allows me to be more creative, more innovative, more, you know, more opportunities in my work to, excuse me, be productive.

Annebritt:

I don't know what. Yes, without getting too technical, there are two, two, essentially two components of your nervous system, in your body. We all know about the fight or flight response that's generated by adrenaline, epinephrine, cortisol. We hear about those hormones as the stress inducers. Right, massage therapy, listening to birds, singing, breathing deeply, yoga, lots of different things, walking in the forest.

Annebritt:

That brings on your parasympathetic nervous system and that is where you're going to see your vagal nerve start to have more response and upregulate, as they call it. And what that does is it does exactly what you just described it frees up your resources, it frees up your brain, your breathing rate, it eliminates that cortisol driven, adrenaline driven ah, I got to go do something, I've got to run from the saber tooth tiger. And it gets you into that calm, centered flow that everyone is looking for. And when you are able to allow yourself the time, as we're learning now in modern society, it's really important that we give ourselves the time for that downtime, for that de-stress time, for the ability to really allow ourselves to get centered. We can then make much more efficient and effective decisions and we're just nicer to be around, so we have much more productive interactions.

Laura:

Yeah yeah, and I was wondering you know you had mentioned in the beginning about COVID and I know that you had to have your business go through COVID and all that and you know, as a situation where it's brick and mortar, where you have to physically be there kind of like a store, what was the impact on COVID and what, what kind of lessons did you learn?

Annebritt:

or or maybe more like, what challenges were you able to overcome to rebuild, if you will, Well, I learned how vital it was to really identify your purpose, my purpose in my profession, and I learned how important it was to provide a service that was deeply needed. Covid did shut us down. And that was scary and but but. I had clients who were pounding at the door to get back in, and the reason was because the level of care that they were getting was such an important component of their life.

Annebritt:

And very humbling. It was also a little intimidating. I went back to work with full gloves, mask, shield, apron, like I looked like I was getting ready to go for hazmat, but that's how important some of this work really was. Now obviously those are more of the clients who needed more of the heavier structural work. But so many of them expressed if I didn't have this connection, if I didn't have the sense of being cared for we all have touch receptors for a reason and touch is so now kind of taboo in our society, unfortunately.

Annebritt:

And healthy touch, I mean non sexualized touch. That is about really helping people feel well, our nervous system. The minute we get into a relaxed state where someone is helping to soothe our nervous system, that through those little receptors in the skin it facilitates the release of oxytocin and other hormones that create that bonding sense, that sense of community that we had back in the day when we had a full family with grandmothers and cousins and large families or tribes around us, and it was that sense of connection that my clients felt with me that really many of them expressed.

Annebritt:

I needed this to help me mentally and emotionally cope in this sense of separation from everyone. It was very overwhelming for many people and the challenge there was, honestly, that while many other therapists were shutting down, I started getting overwhelmed. I had more demand than I could keep up with and Because of the blend of the different things that I started putting together from that history that you mentioned, I realized that there was a niche need here. But it's not a tiny niche, it's a huge one. We have 10,000 people retiring every single day right now.

Annebritt:

Exactly day right now and in a few years it's not going to be oh, I can't get in with that specialist until you know, october or December it's going to be.

Annebritt:

That waitlist is two to three years long. We have many medical professionals who come into our practice and these are some of the discussions we have and we're finding that more and more people are really wanting that greater care continuum and something that is an intervention level between general wellness and advanced health care. I started looking for other team members and other people who could come in and work, and I found that I couldn't follow the standard massage or industry model, which was booth rental where I'd say, hey, come in, join the practice, here's your office. You know, let me know if you need anything. Here's how we break down pay structure. What I needed was somebody who could speak that same care level language, and so that was a real challenge and I just I decided to take it one bite at a time and worked a lot of hours to juggle my own and thankfully very busy practice during a time when not many people could say that and I was still deeply humbled and overwhelmed. But when yes, yes.

Laura:

So when you go back to that, I'm kind of curious what did you find? I'm kind of curious, what did you find? What have you found? Building your business? That has been a challenge and we're on a short time clock. You know we've got less time available, but just you know what was the biggest challenge you found setting up your business and how did you overcome that? Just you've got like two minutes tiny budget.

Annebritt:

I was a single mom, you know, and and I had walked away from massage therapy. I thought I was going to work in radiation therapy and in radiology and when COVID hit the massage, the demand on the massage side was hit. The massage, the demand on the massage side was, was huge. So I just found that I couldn't walk away from it. And yet I didn't really have very many resources Because I had given everything up and I had gone back to school in my late 40s. So I I I've done everything from scratch and everything has been a very grassroots, and I'll tell you what it dials you into what works very quickly and it dials you into what doesn't work very quickly. So that's an advantage and a challenge. I think there would have been a lot more waste if I had had ample resources initially, while I was figuring it out and I had to learn to accept mistakes as teaching moments.

Annebritt:

I had to get over the concept of wrong, right and to get excited about the mistake, because it actually showed me where to go, where to pivot, right and pivoting.

Annebritt:

Pivoting the concept of pivoting being a lifelong learner, being excited about learning and pivoting when you run into an obstacle or when you run into a stressor or something that isn't working, being willing to let it go and pivot to what does work.

Annebritt:

So I had to hopefully knock on wood, get that ego out of the way and I'm still working on that and being willing to allow other people to come in and watch them go through their own process and learn how to pivot, to be more of the listener, the guider, the mentor, the coach. It's one thing to know a skill set, quite another thing to try and teach it. Know a skill set quite another thing to try and teach it. And it takes being willing to really get out of the way of the process and allow others to really help you understand how they best learn and what their voice is. When I find out what those therapists need in terms of what their unique voice and their skillset is and what jazzes them up and what they want to bring to their client base, that's where I get the moment of oh great, this is where we can work. I don't want to turn anyone into a puppet of me, and I think, a lot of times, as managers, we run into that.

Annebritt:

We run into like this is the process. Well, no, this is just a toolbox and you're going to use tools in a different way than I am, and I can't wait to see what you create, right.

Laura:

Well, and I'm so glad you mentioned that, but if people wanted to get to know you more or learn more about your practice, how can they reach out to you? What's the name of your business and things like that?

Annebritt:

Oh, thanks, lighten up massagescom L, I, g, h, t, e, n and U, p, m, a, s, s, a, g, e S and you simply can go there. We have everything's pretty easy and very clickable. Um, very, I've worked very hard to make it a simple website. Um, and I think that's very important. In today's business, people have click fatigue, um, so you know, um, hopefully you can get it into what you need and want to see within one to two clicks. Uh, their contact information is right on the front page and then my email, if you want to reach out to me directly, is Anna at LightenUpMassagescom, and thank you very much for this opportunity.

Laura:

Well, it's been great to have you and I'm so glad you helped us get out of COVID together and move into calmer and more peaceful ways of being. Excuse me, I'm so sorry and we're having a little gloomy day today, but not that you could tell by the picture. But this is why I have this picture behind me, because I like to see sun and shine when there's cloudy skies outside. So, anyway, I really want to thank you, anna, for showing up and for helping us out and learning more. Thank you, oops, and I also want to thank you, the audience, for listening to the Mosaic Life with Laura W. You can listen to this episode again and get this great content and listen to other great hosts and their shows by going to bizradious and click on shows. And thanks so much for having for listening and have a great rest of your day.