Soft Skills: More Important Than You Think

By Jason Erickson, BBA, BCTMB, CPT
March 7, 2017

Soft Skills: More Important Than You Think

By Jason Erickson, BBA, BCTMB, CPT
March 7, 2017

In the 1950s the American Cancer Society had a Committee on Quackery; today it has a Committee on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Over the decades massage and other forms of "complementary" and "alternative" practices have become increasingly popular and more frequently recognized as forms of integrative health care.1

Growing evidence of how strongly the client-therapist relationship impacts therapeutic outcomes demands our attention. Massage therapists and clients benefit from the "soft skills" (AKA "people skills") of listening, empathy, civility, focused attention, and good interpersonal communications. Both medical science and massage therapy have strong proponents of these as a foundation for practice.2,3

More Than Just Your Massage Technique

In medical practices around the world, hiring decisions and workplace assessments include soft skills. In the United States, patient satisfaction is now a key metric in the evaluation of hospitals and medical teams.

Massage therapists have the advantage of being able to spend long periods of uninterrupted time focusing on just one person. Learning to understand people, earn their trust, and hold their confidence while touching them in a therapeutic way is one of the cornerstones of ethical practice.4

Holding Space

Being present, or "holding space" with a client is a critical soft skill. It contributes to a positive experience, and therapists who do this consistently may find it easier to build their practices.

Facebook massage groups contain hundreds of negative comments about therapists who talked too much, or too loudly, or about themselves, and angry posts about being massaged with one hand because the therapist was texting or taking a call. Poor communication skills, indifference to the client's concerns, and distractedness are common complaints.

The person Within the Body

Learning, practicing, and improving soft skills should be part of every massage therapy curriculum.

In an interview I did with Diane Jacobs she said, "Humans are awake and alive and conscious in their body. We're not just treating the body of that person, we're also treating the person inside the body …We have to continually communicate with that human being that lives inside that body, explaining things in a manner that is congruent with what we're actually physically doing with their body."

The Research and Pain Relief

The American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) Massage Profession Research Reports state that roughly 90 percent of Americans feel massage is effective for treating/managing pain, and that pain relief/pain management is the most common reason for Americans to seek massage.

Pain science has evolved to recognize pain as a biopsychosocial (BPS) experience, a subjective psychological state in which biological, psychological, and social factors all play a part in what we feel and how we respond to that.

Thus, a stressed-out person with little/no spinal issues might have severe back pain and limited mobility, while a relaxed person with herniated disks might have no pain and normal mobility. This provides tremendous opportunities for massage therapists to be a part of integrative medical care for their clients. Manual techniques (compression, traction, gliding, etc.) are just one part of the puzzle. Our soft skills are needed to address the rest.

"We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak."
— Epictetus

Listen Up

Listening and observing enable us to be fully present with clients. They facilitate empathy and mutual understanding. Employers are more likely to hire applicants with excellent soft skills, and raises/promotions may depend on how well therapists interact with clients and coworkers. For independent practitioners, good people skills contribute to business success.

Schools are recognizing a culture shift in programs dominated by younger students. Some massage students pursue vocational training without first acquiring the soft skills they will need in professional practice. Educators are looking for ways to help their students learn and develop soft skills before graduation.

Communication & Critical Thinking

Continuing education instructors and textbook authors are also starting to respond, including more discussion of BPS concepts and how they impact professional ethics and practices. Emphasizing the quality of our communications skills as much as the quality of our technical knowledge and hands-on skills is opening doors to think about what we do in different ways.

Dr. Jason Silvernail, DPT, DSc said, "You need a critical thinking process to everything you do. Learning cognitive biases and common errors of thinking and rigorously applying them to what you do every day in every way. This takes an investment in time and effort and an intellectual commitment to humility and honesty. It must be a personal commitment to self-examination and change."

San Diego Pain Summit

The importance of soft skills is a recurring topic at the San Diego Pain Summit, and it was featured in the 2016 International Massage Therapy Research Conference panel discussion on "Approaching Pain with Manual Therapy". Research demonstrates the influence of placebo in all forms of therapy. Nocebo, the harmful opposite of placebo, may also play a part in client-therapist interactions.

Since discussion of MRI findings may negatively impact patient recovery even when they do not correlate with pain/dysfunction, there are now new guidelines regarding when/why magnetic resonance imaging is used. Better people skills contribute to a heightened placebo effect, and poor people skills can result in worse outcomes and lower client satisfaction.5

When people feel cared for, listened to, and receive undivided attention, they tend to feel better. If massage is going to be a part of integrative medicine, our soft skills may be our most important contribution.

References

  1. Sierpina VS, et al. "The Future of Integrative Medicine." The American Journal of Medicine, Aug 2013;126(8):661 - 662.
  2. Mendel D. Proper Doctoring: A Book for Patients and Their Doctors. NYRB Classics, 2013.
  3. McIntosh N. The Educated Heart. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Publishers, 2003.
  4. Dorko B. Shallow Dive. Slack Inc., 1996.
  5. Lambert C. "The New Ancient Trend in Medicine." Harvard Magazine, March-April 2002.