“I’m done managing people”

After more than two decades working in the spa and wellness industry, managing spas, building teams and training therapists, I’ve realised … I’m done managing people. It feels good to say that. I’ve loved sharing my experience, watching therapists grow, teaching people new skills and helping them become more confident in their hands, but managing people has often taken me further and further away from what I actually love doing most — working one-to-one with clients, being hands on and working with the body.

I’ve been massaging and working with the body consistently for 23 years and I still absolutely love it. Your hands are an extension of your heart, and you can learn every technique in the world, but if you aren’t truly present with the person underneath your hands, something is missing. Over the years I’ve seen so many therapists come into the industry full of passion and then burn out immediately. I’ve seen therapists become so identified with being “the healer” that ego creeps in, and people who spend their days teaching clients about self-care while struggling to look after themselves physically, mentally and emotionally. I’ve seen therapists struggle with their own fitness, nutrition, movement and wellbeing, go off sick and become depleted, and as a business owner I would often find myself covering their clients as well as my own, which eventually made me realise how passionate I am about changing the way we train therapists.

I’ve been qualified to teach massage for years, but I never fully stepped into teaching because I didn’t want to simply follow the traditional college curriculum. I knew therapists needed more than techniques — they needed embodiment practices, tools to sustain a long and fulfilling career, ways to protect their energy, and most importantly, the understanding that you have to learn how to heal yourself first. I teach from a place of embodiment and lived experience because I was once that therapist — burnt out, not practising what I preached, not exercising, or prioritising my nutrition.

That’s why I created The Embodied Practitioner Course. I share my own method of intuitive massage, which has evolved through 23 years of experience and brings together holistic massage, indian head massage, Thai massage, deep tissue, energy healing, somatics, nervous system healing and sound healing integration. But the course is about so much more than the techniques. I teach you how to ground yourself, how to protect and manage your energy before, during and after working with clients, how to stay connected to yourself while holding space for someone else, and how to look after the body that is doing the work through simple nutrition, fitness, movement and yoga practices that you can actually incorporate into your everyday life.

I want to create a generation of therapists who don’t burn themselves out trying to care for everyone else but instead learn how to care for themselves just as deeply as they care for their clients. Because being a great therapist isn’t just about what you know or what you do with your hands — it’s about how you show up, how present you are, how embodied you are and how well you can sustain yourself in the work.

So yes, I’m done managing people — but I’m not done with people. I’m finally getting back to what I love: connecting, teaching, holding space and working with the body — heart first.

Applications open here: https://www.skyspawellnesscentre.com/education