Written for the Touch for Health Association Conference Journal 2016
How confident are you that you are using the right technique at the right time with each person you work with? By the time you have gone through four levels of Touch for Health, you have acquired a huge new skill set filled with tools and information that can help those around you. Despite all of the tools available to them however, new students and practitioners often struggle with how best to apply their knowledge when actually working with someone. When do you use all 42 muscles, and when is 14 enough? When would you use something like a sound balance? Because they can’t answer these questions, students get into a routine, using only the techniques that appeal the most to them and forgetting the others. In North America, very few practitioners use only Touch for Health — it seems like most people who want to work professionally take TFH as a prerequisite to get into other courses and then leave TFH behind. I am hoping that GEMS (Goal, Element, Mode, Stack) offers a way to streamline the tools and techniques from the TFH world and integrate them with techniques from other Specialized Kinesiology systems so that they find their rightful place in the kinesiology tool kit again. Creating practitioners who are flexible and able to think outside the box means that they will have an easier time integrating new information, rolling with whatever a client throws at them and succeeding in general.
Touch for Health should be the way of the future. At the 2016 Conference, we will spend some time together discussing how to use this in your life everyday, integrate it with other techniques as they are learned, and create a business model that will allow you to help others and make money with full integrity.
It has been suggested to me recently that our field is a competitive one and that there is an unwillingness sometimes to instruct or help others. In the spirit of collaboration over competition, I have put together the GEMS website with information that can be useful to anyone wanting to work with these amazing tools and the idea that “we are all in this together”. When we examine closely the actual goals of each practitioner: who they want to work with, how and what values they keep central in their practice, we find that each one has a group that they will appeal to and enjoy working with and there is such variety in these groups that there is very little overlap at all. The idea of ‘Touch for Health for Everyone’ is real in that there are techniques in this program that will benefit absolutely anyone you run into, it’s just a matter of finding the correct one. The GEMS flowchart helps with this process by offering a simple and intuitive way to sort the information available to you and arrive at the priority for correction. It works as a bridging class, spanning the gap between the TFH full self-responsibility model and the more diagnostic model used by many practitioners in other modalities. It allows for integration between all modalities, which might be a good way to bring practitioners back together and establish common ground.
I understand that TFH was originally designed to be used by laypeople on family and friends, not as a career, but many people today are using it as a stepping-stone to move into the brilliant world of Specialized Kinesiology. The process of actually moving from ‘friends and family’ to a career can be daunting however. GEMS Business helps to move people into this brilliant field easily. At this Conference, we will discuss some ways to do this, starting by determining the core values you will build your practice on and who precisely you wish to work with. Once you know what is most important to you in your work-life, it is easier to begin marketing and branding — one of the most overlooked facets of our industry as a whole. This marketing piece is an extremely important and overlooked subject. Let’s face it, as an industry Specialized Kinesiologists are stunningly bad at marketing. There are individuals who shine, but as a group there is a lot of room for improvement. It doesn’t matter how amazing a practitioner you are, if no one knows what you do then you can’t help anyone!
For more ideas about how to push your Specialized Kinesiology business to the next level or to contribute information that might be helpful to others, visit www.gemskinesiology.com or take a class to join the group of people around the world who are using GEMS to get amazing results.
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