How to Guide Your Team Through the Hardest Moments

In 2019 I had just hired a therapist named Katsunari, and I could tell from the first few minutes of the interview that he had the makings of a great healer. He was deeply caring, he had wonderful hands, and he had that quality you cannot teach, which I wish I had the words to describe. What he did not have yet was confidence, or a settled sense of his own style, and so much of my early work with him was simply helping him see what I saw, and guiding him to learn more. I did not know then that within a few months I would be guiding him through one of the most demanding things you can ask a massage therapist to do.

Fast forward a few months. Kats had been seeing one half of a couple, two older men who came to us together, devoted to each other in the easy and unmistakable way of people who have been together a long time. One of them was Kats's client, and the other saw a different therapist at the same hour, and for a while these were ordinary, contented sessions. As the months wore on, though, we came to understand that Kats' client's husband was dying of stage four cancer, and that the life these two men had made together was moving toward its end.

They asked Kats if he would care for the dying man and if, when the time came, he would help him through the cancer and through the last stage of his life. It was an enormous thing to be asked, and Kats felt the size of it immediately. He wanted to say yes with his whole heart, and at the same time he had no idea how. Nothing in his training had prepared him for a body in the final months of cancer, and beyond the practical questions he was not even sure he could do this work, or whether he was the right person to do it. So he came to me, the way many of my therapists have when they feel stuck, and he told me that he did not know if he was equal to what these men were asking. I still remember feeling so much admiration and care for how humble and thoughtful Kats was (and still is). So I said if he wanted to, I would help him through it. So we began.

Why we didn't start with technique

What I want you to note is that as we prepared him for this big undertaking, we did not begin with technique. I did not start with contraindications or pressure or positioning,( though all of that came in due time). I started with him. I asked him who he was and why he had become a massage therapist in the first place, and I told him plainly what I had seen in him from his first week, the care and the presence that were obvious to anyone paying attention. I reminded him that these two men were not asking for a flawless clinician. They were asking for him because of who he innately was. He was someone who would show up, who would be gentle and unhurried and fully present, and who would treat the man in front of him as a whole person living the last part of his life rather than as a diagnosis.

I knew that Kats already was that person. He did not need me to turn him into someone new, what he needed was for me to help him trust that who he already was would be enough, and to understand that the impact he was about to have on the lives of these two men would stay with all of us for the rest of our careers. Once he believed that, the fear did not vanish, but it gave him the fortitude to say yes.

Doing the work together

So we did it together. I guided Kats on how to adapt his work for a body that was becoming more frail, on how to support the man's comfort rather than a session plan, and on how to simply be with someone who is dying instead of trying to fix something. The client came into our office for as long as he was able, and when the day came that he could no longer make the trip, we sent Kats to him, on behalf of Salvation Wellness, and continued the work at his bedside. I just want to take a moment and really acknowledge Kats. Because that is not something he ever anticipated, and Kats never once treated it as anything other than a privilege.

When the man passed, his husband kept coming to us, and the gratitude he showed Kats and our whole practice was among the most moving things I have witnessed. He had been given something in those final months that he would carry for the rest of his life, and so had we.

Why this is what Leadership should b

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As of this writing, that was seven years ago. Katsunari is still with us, and the uncertain new hire who was not sure he could do this work has grown into a singular and remarkable Healer. He is one of the most requested therapists in our office, and is a leader that many of our staff look up to. Like so many of the therapists on my team, he does his finest work with us because he trusts that I will always guide him and always do what is right, and that is exactly what allowed him to walk toward something he felt unsure of, instead of away from it.

If there is a lesson in this for me, it is that mentorship is mostly about knowing your people intimately enough to remind them who they are at the moment they most need reminding, and about being the person they can come to when they are handed something they do not know if they can handle. The technical guidance matters, and I give plenty of it, but it almost comes second to finding that kernel inside each therapist and helping it grow.In my 12 years of employing people I have come to understand that none of this is unique to massage. When Google set out to study what actually made its teams effective, in the research it called Project Aristotle, the single strongest factor was not talent or seniority but psychological safety, the sense that you can admit a mistake, ask a question, or say that you do not know how to do something without fear of being judged for it. That is precisely what allowed Kats to come to me rather than pretend he had it handled. Gallup, looking across millions of workers, has estimated that something like seventy percent of the difference in how engaged a team feels traces back to its manager rather than to pay or perks or a mission statement on the wall. I do not share those numbers to turn a tender story into a business case, but because they name something I have felt to be true for many years, which is that the person guiding a team is very often the difference between the people who grow and the people who leave. In the case of massage therapists, “leave” usually means the industry as well as jobs.

If you are a newer therapist or a student, I want you to know that a day like this may find you too, and that not feeling ready is not the same as not being ready. The most important thing you can do is build your career somewhere you will be guided rather than left on your own, which is much of what I am working to create both in the massage therapy program at Hudson County Community College, and the massage CEU’s I teach.But more than anything, experiences like this one are why I am trying to build a different kind of wellness center, one where therapists are guided rather than used up, where caring for the practitioner and caring for the client are treated as the same task, and where the work is allowed to mean as much as it truly does. That is the place I want every therapist to be able to practice in, and it is the place I am doing everything I can to create.