We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nicolas Sorensen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nicolas below.

Nicolas, appreciate you joining us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

The story is when I learned about physical and metaphysical health integration. A number of years ago, I started to struggle with physical body pain. It was with my wrists, which was a big concern since I knew that wrist pain was one of the top reasons why massage therapists quit the industry. And I could see why, every time I gave a massage it was mild torture. I tried many things to various degrees of success: massage, adjustments, supplements, medications. But yet the discomfort remained.
Finally I started looking into my own emotional state. Something else about me was that I had struggled for an even longer period of time with something harder: my own sense of self-worth. Perhaps this came from my upbringing, but it showed up in my life and especially in my career. I had certain beliefs that the massages I gave were not great, or even good. I would see validation in my negative experiences, like when clients wouldn’t return, but of course overlook the positive feedback from others.
The moment that everything changed was when I was thinking about my wrist pain as it related to my self-worth. It was almost like my wrists were speaking to me:
“If you don’t think you give a good massage, then you should stop doing it. And I will help you by manifesting pain until you do.”
After this point I looked into how I could change my mind about myself and worked hard on changing my thoughts. I changed a lot since then and have never experienced that same amount of chronic wrist pain that I once had!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’ve been working as a massage therapist for over 18 years. Since my time in massage school, I have always had an interest in helping others’ with their health. It started with a focus on physical health and I worked first with those type of modalities within massage, like deep tissue and sports. After a number of years, however, I started to see how people could benefit from more meta-physical services. For instance, I would see clients that came in regularly with the same patterns of tension in their bodies. It would be a lot of work to resolve the tension, with frustrations that these patterns would simply come back to greet me the next time I would see them. But when I would talk to the clients about their stress and emotions, the tension patterns would get disrupted and be lessened in following sessions. My sessions now include a pairing of massage that focuses on the physical body and more energetic work that focuses on emotions and spirituality.
Over the years I have also worked on developing a massage technique that will be taught to other massage therapists as continuing education. It embodies this philosophy of bringing these two worlds together to serve the client as much as possible with whatever they need at the time. With the technique, named “Somatic Weaving”, I hope that this service can offered to people all over, not just in my area.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

I think what is needed in addition to the training is passion. I have had many clients talk to me about other massage experiences they had that were not great. Sometimes these massages would take place in fancy resorts around the world and would be usually quite expensive. What I see as the problem is a lack of passion in other massage therapists. They might know how to give a technical massage, but they don’t care enough to make it great.
But when you meet a therapist that cares, that can become magical. That is when people seek you out and tell all their friends about you, because they want you to keep doing what you’re doing!

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

This may not be 100% transferable to all professions, but I would say being authentic. And by this, I mean mostly to yourself. You need to feel or believe in something for it to work effectively.
There were many times that I would be swayed by others’ experience with building business. I would try these things only to find them not as effective. I also knew this before trying the marketing strategies, but went through the motions anyway. Then, I started to alter what I would try based on how I felt about it, meaning how it would present me and my practice. After that, I would see more success with my business and, most important, I would be happy with myself in those results.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.embodywellnesscenter.com
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