What is the single greatest determinant in the success of your massage practice? The economy? Your skill set? How many people you know? How well you market your services? If you answered none of the above, you are correct. So, what is the answer? I'll get to that in a second.

First, let me tell you a story about how I built my acupuncture practice (the same principles apply to your massage practice) in a few short months and have continued to grow for the past several years. First of all, let me say up front that I am not a networker. I am fairly introverted and would never consider standing on a street corner handing out 1,000 cards to everyone who walked by or introduce myself to strangers who are in obvious need of my services. Some people have become successful using such approaches, but I have not.

Second, I also should say that I have not spent thousands of dollars on marketing my practice. I have never done display ads or direct mailings. I have always managed to keep my marketing costs extremely low. While I have made a commitment to market my services in a variety of cheap and creative ways, I don't really see this as the single greatest determinant for my success.

The single greatest determinant of your success is what is taking place in your own mind. How you perceive yourself and your services will set the foundation for how successful you are as a massage therapist. If your core belief system is that you are the "go-to" person for massage therapy in your area, this will be reflected back to you in the form of clients who eagerly seek out your services. If you believe the market is saturated or it's really hard to make it then guess what the universe will reinforce back to you?

What we are talking about here is the law of attraction, which has been accepted as a universal truth in quantum physics. The basic idea here is that the universe always is mirroring back to us what we believe to be true. If we believe in abundance, we will attract abundant circumstances. If we believe in scarcity, we will attract circumstances of hardship.

Whatever its cause, a crucial step to boundless success is relinquishing beliefs of scarcity, competition and struggle. There are many massage therapists out there who have done all the right things to market their practice; know they are good at what they do; and have a passion for their craft. But they still haven't even scraped the surface of their actual potential for practice success. This endlessly frustrating trend drives many healing arts practitioners out of business, convinced that it's simply impossible to make a decent living. Their beliefs are sending out an energetic frequency that attracts back to them the opposite of what they really want.

So, how do we cultivate a prosperity mentality and align ourselves with the magnetics of abundance and success? First, we have to be really honest with ourselves and identify any tendency we have to sabotage our success based on our perceptions and beliefs. This is a huge part of healing this core obstacle to success. If we are aware of deflating beliefs, their hold on us is immediately weakened. The next step is simply choosing to adopt a radically new perspective on our situation regardless of what is showing up in the external world.

Keeping it practical means that if we are only seeing two clients per week, we visualize, feel and expect 20 clients per week. We take our focus off of how frustrating and stressful it is to be seeing so few clients and we put our focus on the potential of 20 clients per week as if it is happening already.

Visualize, feel and be the fruition of your practice goals as if they are happening already. No separation, no point in the future when it may happen - it's here already. If you do this all of the time and combine it with the right marketing strategies, you inevitably will attract a flood of clients to your practice. This is the ultimate source of your practice success.