I teach elementary school (advanced academics K - 6th) by day and manage my massage therapy practice during the evenings. The two careers dovetail better than you might think! The common thread is advocacy and empowerment of the self. 

I love the process of guiding others to the revelation that they know more, can do more, can accomplish more, already are more, and can be successful with any goal. Mostly I want my students, especially from underrepresented populations, to know how to be an active participant in learning. That they aren’t passive recipients of something getting dumped into their brains. Kids are not sponges and that analogy is outdated and inaccurate in a professional education setting! It’s also a shallow understanding that a massage is a ‘happening to you’ event. When clients learn what it means to actively participate, their healing is more profound. 

My biggest accomplishments in both fields come when anyone has a lightbulb moment regarding how to figure it out. For kids that means I didn’t provide a version of facts that they repeat. It means posing questions or data around an issue or an event and then tasking them to write or converse about the connections they uncover - the how and why. (The process leads them to factual knowledge as well.) For clients, the process is different, but the lightbulb comes when connections are made regarding how specific habits might be contributing to neck pain and what is going to move it out. Watching that self-empowerment unfold for my kids and my clients is fabulously rewarding.