Believing Beliefs You Actually Believe

written by Colleen Truax, LMT

Have you paused to consider what it means to BELIEVE something?

Having significant control over what we believe is a defining characteristic of being human.

Did you hear that?

You have significant control over what you believe. 

The challenge is we get so wrapped up in doing before pausing to ensure what we’re doing is consistent with what we actually believe. 

Your business will demand several hours of your life so pausing NOW, and clarifying your beliefs about your business NOW will help ensure you spend those hours on something you firmly believe.

Let's go big picture for a bit and explore what constitutes a belief.

There are at least five characteristics of a belief:

• Content

• Strength

• Proportionality

• Centrality

• Plausibility

 

Content of Belief

Content is simply what you believe.

When you're thinking through your beliefs, definitions provide more clarity, even if not perfect clarity, of what you believe.

Definitions are boundaries. They clarify what you mean and what you don't mean by certain words. 

In any serious discussion, a lot of time should be spent on defining, clarifying and agreeing on a definition.

One of the difficulties of judging my children’s debate competitions was the competitors often defined the issue differently in the beginning.

I didn’t know which definition I was supposed to use or if I had to judge each competitor’s argument based on their own definition which was cumbersome to do in such a quick competition. Having an agreed-upon definition would have significantly eased the process.

The same is true in the massage industry.

More than once in a Facebook group, a massage therapist asked whether “intuitive massage” was real.

My answer would largely depend on how intuitive was defined.

Are we assuming there's a universal understanding intuitive? Should we make that assumption?

No, we shouldn’t.

Care should be taken to first define what our words mean and ensure we agree on a definition.

If there's no agreement on the definition of terms, it's probably best not to proceed because it should be your goal to bring clarity to a conversation, not confusion.

With regard to your business, being clear on what you believe about your offerings will help you explain them more effectively in marketing.

Just as important is knowing how your ideal client defines your offering.

If you say you do "deep tissue", is the client's understanding of "deep tissue" the same as yours? 

If you do the work of defining your offerings carefully and clearly, having clear messaging in your business is more likely, and you'll be more prepared to educate, or re-educate, your clients about what you offer.

Defining your services should be first priority when thinking through your business.

 

Strength of Belief

The strength of a belief is the degree to which you believe something to be true.

When you say you believe something, it doesn’t mean you believe it with 100% certainty.

Some beliefs may be held with that level of certainty but it's important to know NOT ALL beliefs are held with that level of certainty.

This needs repeating . . .

Some beliefs may be held with 100% certainty but it's important to know NOT ALL beliefs are held with that level of certainty.

We share a complex world so uncertainty is a common human experience and we must respect that in one another.

The difficulty this complexity poses in a healthcare setting would be difficult to overstate. While you're still discovering the truth, people have a problem now and they come to you to help them with their problem now.

By having a service-based business,

• you're claiming on some level you can help.
• At the same time, you may not be absolutely certain you can help for various reasons
• or the current understanding of why something helps is the actual reason it helps.

For instance, you may have used Janda’s theory of upper cross and lower cross syndrome in your clinic and as a result, have seen improvement in your clients.

What if someone showed you evidence the theory isn’t predictive of how the muscles are recruited? Will that evidence be enough to make you not use the theory in your practice?

Maybe, maybe not.

It might be wise to adjust your belief downward but perhaps not enough for you to stop using it as a way to understand how the nervous system recruits since you have seen results by referring to that theory of muscle recruitment.

If the person insists you consider their evidence DEFINITIVE, they may not be acknowledging their own vulnerability or the researchers' vulnerability to confirmation bias. (Remember: You aren't the only one capable of confirmation bias.)

One study doesn't necessarily disprove something; it simply adds to the collective understanding.

For more serious medical issues, this lack of certainty in how to help or why something helps can be troubling.

This is important to understand when interacting with the medical community. Agitating medical professionals about complex issues by claiming you "read a study that disproved such and such" won't impress medical professionals with whom you would like to network.

It's important for you to understand that medical advancement is slow and imperfect because the body is complex and because testing on in-vivo subjects has serious ethical considerations and practical constraints, and yet, people want answers now.

Medical professionals make decisions often in uncertainty, the strength of their belief being less than 100% and sometimes only slightly more than 50%.

The good news for you is massage therapists don’t manage severe medical issues so the lack of certainty is more tolerable because there’s no serious, irreversible downside when wrong. And I say "when" deliberately.

Still, understanding how strongly you believe in aspects of your massage treatment is important so you can align your massages and marketing with those beliefs. 

 

Proportionality of Belief

Proportionality is adjusting the strength of your belief based on the evidence you have for that belief. With more evidence, the degree of belief increases. With evidence to the contrary, the degree of belief decreases.

One difficulty when attempting to collaborate or discuss is you might have a different understanding of what constitutes evidence.

And the evidence you source may be different because your desires for your practice are different.

Let's pause and appreciate how complex this gets.

It's layer upon layer upon layer of beliefs drawn from life experiences, research, and assumptions about what’s real and what’s not real.

In a lifetime, you won’t be able to fully explore all that’s available to know yourself so it's not surprising when it proves difficult to come to an agreement with another therapist. So what should you do?

Focus on what YOU believe given the information you have at the time and your desire for your practice.

Don’t ignore others, but they also deal with the same complex world with the same moving parts. Listen to them, weigh what they have to say, but ultimately, this is your life and your business. 

If you, for instance, desire to preserve a traditional practice of Thai massage so you deliver a cultural experience as much as a healing one, then you'll source your evidence for what you believe in your practice differently than someone whose primary purpose is resolving medical issues.

And that's fine.

Embrace that fully.

If people want to pay for a cultural experience, and I'm sure some do, then don't withhold that from the marketplace. And don't be deterred by those who have differing desires for their offering.

Since our desire for this site is to help equip medical massage professionals, the source of our evidence is science. 

In the medical world, the assumption is that you harness science to ensure that your biases are not pronounced in your decision-making for others.

Proportioning your beliefs to scientific research means that you take the quality of evidence triangle into consideration. 

The assumption is that the higher you move up the triangle, the more likely bias has been removed so the more authority the evidence should have in your practice.

It doesn't matter if you want or feel like a certain treatment helps, or even if you think you observed it working in your practice; if studies at the top of the triangle show that your treatment has positive, neutral or negative results, this should factor heavily into how you practice.

This is a commitment the medical community makes in order to guard against personal biases from sectarian and cultural belief systems as well as profit motives.

It doesn't always succeed in preventing bias, and may even be harnessed to foster bias, but it's the best we have. As someone once said about democracy, "it's the worst system . . . except for all the other systems."

In addition to the potential to perpetuate bias, there are other practical problems with evidence-based medicine:

• It's costly in time and money for all involved.
• It requires the cooperation of people to be involved in research and to remain involved until the research is concluded.
• The most accurate experiments are in-vivo. How many people choose to be part of in-vivo medical trials? Not many and typically, when they are, they have a serious condition and being part of a trial is the only option they have for treatment. So, was it a choice if the options were so limited to begin with? No and yes, but really no. 

I have twins and we attended the Twin Festival in Twinsburg, OH. As you walk into the festival, there's a prominent area with RVs arranged in a circle. It's where twins can sign up for medical research.

What other celebratory festival has a prominent place to sign up for research?

Are there any?

Why is this?

Twins are the closest we can get to a control in medical research so they're heavily recruited.

The bottom line is that medical research is complicated. It's one of those unalterable realities that is-what-it-is and as long as we care about biomedical ethics, it will continue to be difficult.

The tragic part, of course, is that while medicine is still building a body of reliable information, people are suffering from mild to serious conditions and want help now.

Thankfully, massage is not a career that directly involves acute loss of limb and life when wrong. Meaning, it would be difficult for you to cause the acute loss of life or limb with a biased, ineffective massage, particularly with the skills we teach in the Massage Medical Collective.

Still, quality of life can be directly affected by massage and if you knew that your personal biases were impeding you from maximizing your help to your client, you'd want to know, right?

In Mentor Live, we discuss medical research about anatomy and physiology and how to proportion what we believe in our practice in light of scientific research.

 

Centrality of Belief

Centrality is the degree of importance the belief has in your life. The more central a belief is, the more significant it would be if you were to abandon the belief.

Keep this in mind when discussing difficult issues with people.

If you're challenging something that's central to them, the evidence required for them to no longer hold those beliefs will need to be overwhelming and as just discussed, the person may have a different idea of what constitutes evidence so even if you consider the evidence overwhelming, they could have a very different viewpoint.

Remember that life is short and you're only given so many hours to live your life and grow your business.

You don't have time to convince someone else.

In a business, it’s important to center those beliefs that actually serve people such that they will want to return for more and refer their friends for more. Simply because it's central to you does not mean it's helpful to others.

For this reason, it's very important that you

• get very clear on what you actually believe,
• how strongly you believe it,
• center the beliefs that you strongly believe in your business,
• ensure your strong, central beliefs are supported by positive customer experience; in a medical massage clinic, that means results.
• understand the latest about how the body works because that will help you get better results.

This ensures that you're building your clinic on solid business ground, that it won’t shift abruptly, and that people will pay you for your offer.

There was a recent article about how physicians aren't suffering from burnout as much as moral offense. Practicing medicine wasn't what they thought it would be when they went to school.

There are many reasons for this, some of which are centering issues: electronic medical records, efficiency over compassion, reactive not preventative, . . ..

I asked my husband who is a Family Practice Sports Medicine physician if he felt burnout or moral offense and he said he didn't.

One of the reasons is because when he was practicing Family Practice 5 years ago, he didn't like having only 10-15 minutes with each patient. It didn't allow him to center Osteopathic Manipulation in his clinic.

What did he do? He looked for a clinic that would allow him longer appointments and he found one. Had he not found one, we may have created one. He now has 30-minute appointments within the same hospital system, in their alternative medicine department. 

It's difficult for physicians to come out from under hospital systems because of their high liability and expensive overhead so this was my husband's best option at the time. 

Longer appointment times ensured he could center what he believes is his most effective skill to help musculoskeletal issues - Osteopathic Manipulation.

It's a skill that is in high demand and low supply, partly because of how the medical system is set up. This is his blue ocean. And this is good news for you.

As a massage therapist, you

• are already positioned to have long appointment times.
• have the potential for very low overhead.
• have low insurance costs.
• have a scope that allows you to do more than you may realize.

You're in a great position with the potential for a great offer.

All you need is to know how to use that time efficiently and effectively. This is what we teach in our programs.

 

Plausibility of Belief

Plausibility refers to your willingness to even entertain a certain belief as potentially true.

An example that comes to mind right away is the spiritual dimension. You might believe there's a spiritual dimension while someone else has completely ruled it out.

Since our focus is on building your business, let’s set that application aside and think of how this is relevant in other ways.

There might be some beliefs about business that you think are implausible in general, or implausible to you, in particular.

It's helpful to examine this occasionally so that you're aware of beliefs about business that you're ruling out. You might be mistaken about the belief not being plausible and are missing out on great opportunities.

Have a brainstorming session occasionally where you entertain ideas that you have considered implausible.

It's good to start fresh every once in a while and allow all the ideas to be considered before ruling them out.

What once seemed implausible can become plausible with changing resources, perspectives, social support, skills,  . . . don’t rule anything out before considering it in light of new circumstances.

The recent shutdown due to COVID is an example where the world shifted and activities that were once seen as implausible online were being done online. Some jobs may never return to in-person.

Look for these pockets of your business where perhaps it's better if you delegate or imagine it differently. No need to wait for an event like COVID.

 

Beliefs Workbook

To help you think through your beliefs about massage and apply it to your business, I created this workbook. Download it here.

 

Touchpoints

• Be clear about what you believe by defining it as concisely as possible.
• Proportion the degree of your belief on the strength of the relevant evidence.
• Don’t fear contrary evidence because new information will only make your practice more precise in its goals and serve your clients at a higher level.
• Also know that because isolating variables is so difficult in medical science, very rarely does one experiment rule out a belief; it just adds to the collective understanding.
• The beliefs central in your life/business should be the beliefs that are most strongly supported by relevant evidence. This ensures that you have a firm foundation and don’t build on shifting sand.
• Brainstorm and don’t rule anything out forever. Notice what you have ruled out, make time to reconsider it, and then decide to once again dismiss it, or embrace it.