In Session Webinar with Nancy Griffin

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Expose Ageism Webinar Transcription

Hi, everyone who's joining us today for this Massage Magazine webinar.

This is on the global movement toward positive aging.

I'm Karen Minnehan, editor of Massage Magazine, and our guest today is Nancy Griffin, CEO of

Glowing Older and founder of Exposed Ageism.

Nancy's Glowing Older podcast features experts on life's third act.

She also founded Senior Trade, a business-to-business platform for senior living and aging services.

A recognized expert on the business of aging well.

Nancy is also an industry scholar with the Cornell School of Healthy Futures.

To combat ageism in the beauty and wellness industry, Nancy launched the movement and hashtag

Exposed Ageism in March 2023, and more than 40 companies have pledged to eliminate

the phrase anti-aging in product descriptions and marketing by 2025.

In today's webinar, Nancy will discuss the global movement toward positive aging.

Participants will learn why the promotion of youth culture is rampant in wellness, how

massage therapists can help change the narrative around aging, and practical strategies to

attract the growing market of older adults.

So if you have any questions for Nancy, feel free to type those into the chat.

And I wanted to remind you that all of today's registrants will also be emailed a recording

of today's webinar.

Welcome, Nancy.

Thank you so much, Karen.

I'm so pleased to be here today with everyone in the massage industry.

And I appreciate all the support that Massage Magazine has given us for Exposed Ageism.

Your massage therapists get the changing of the narrative around aging.

So let's dig in.

I'll just give you some brief background about myself.

I was in the wellness and spa industry for 30 years.

I started at Cornell Hotel School in the mid-90s studying the spa industry.

There were about 50 spas back then, there are more than 22,000 as you may know today.

In March 2020, I lost most of my business because of COVID.

So I had a lot of time.

My grandfather had helped found a life plan community for older adults outside of Baltimore.

So both my grandparents had aged out there.

And it also always been fascinated with what happens when you age.

So I started a podcast called Glowing Older.

We have 15 seasons under our belt and 150 episodes.

I founded Seniortrade.com, which is a B2B platform.

And then as you heard from Karen, I founded Exposed Ageism based on the 150 interviews that

I did.

Ageism was a topic that came up again and again as being a real detriment to aging well.

And I looked back at the spa industry and wellness industry that I was involved in and

said, hey, we can do better.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about that later.

But what we'll cover today is how to target the 50-plus market and what are the things

that we need to think about, the shifting demographics.

Ageism is near and dear to my heart we need to talk

about why it's important to promote positive aging in your business and your personal life,

how to overcome ageism, and then we'll dig into how to attract the 50-plus market.

I'm sure that as you look at your clientele, you're thinking more and more, how can I get

more older adults in?

Moving wellness from me to we is something that we talk a lot about in the older adult industry.

Nancy, are you on mute?

I suddenly can't hear you.

I can't hear you.

Matt, can you hear Nancy?

I can't hear Nancy.

You cannot?

I cannot.

Okay.

So why don't you go ahead and see what you can do about your volume there?

And I will just mention again that Nancy today is going to cover the importance of the shifting

demographic.

I mean, a lot of baby boomers are getting older and older.

I'm a baby boomer.

I'm almost 60.

Nancy is as well.

And you know, everyone is aging.

She's going to talk about how aging kind of changes our perspective of ourselves and each

other and ways that people in the healthcare industry can help mitigate that.

You know, there's a lot of unconscious bias around aging just as there are other things

that we imagine make us different from each other.

She's going to talk about some of the proven antidotes to attitudes around aging as well.

And she explores a lot of these things in her expose ageism.com page where anyone can

sign up to take the pledge to help eradicate the term anti-aging in their marketing and

wellness communications.

Yeah, Nancy, we still can't hear you.

So what you could do is, you know, you could always restart your computer and come back

in.

A lot of times that works for me.

And no worries, you know, we'll have technical difficulties sometime.

So Massage magazine joined the anti or excuse me, the expose ageism initiative back in I

think it was April of 2023.

And so we've taken the pledge to not use the term anti-aging in any of our marketing or

other types of communication, massage magazine insurance plus join the pledge as well.

Hi, I see that you're back.

And if you would like to say no, yes, we can.

Hi, welcome back.

Yes, I am so sorry about that.

I have no idea what happened.

It happens to everybody.

It's the age of Zoom.

No worries.

So I was just kind of talking about the Expose Ageism initiative and I know that you can

jump back in on that page.

Oh, gosh, well, I am so sorry, everyone.

Can you hear me now?

Yes, ma'am.

Okay.

Thank you.

Well, let me know if I go out again.

So we're going to go into talking about why it's important to attract the 65-plus market.

So one in five Americans will be over the age of 65 by 2040.

And the number of Americans over 65 will more than double in the next 40 years.

So clearly it's super important to think about older adults and why we should target

them.

One of the global aging trends is that we're living longer.

As a result, we have a lot more time to think about our health span as it relates

to our lifespan.

There are fewer family and caregivers.

And so a lot of people are extending themselves by being family caregivers and oftentimes at

their own expense.

Ageism is a huge trend that we're going to get into.

There are more people living alone and more people living with chronic conditions.

So let's talk about some of the challenges and obviously, the biggest one that comes up

is the idea of ageism.

And really what we're talking about now is that people over 50 hold 70% of all the personal

wealth in the United States.

However, the majority of older consumers are not depicted well in the media.

And AARP found there's seven times more likely to be portrayed negatively as younger ones.

So there's a heavy stereotype against older adults.

And so I think this stems down to ageism.

So we're going to dig into ageism and why it's so detrimental.

So let me define ageism.

So ageism is stereotypes and discrimination against older adults.

This is a definition from the World Health Organization.

The World Health Organization has a huge campaign against ageism globally.

I can share that link with you at the end.

But basically, you can Google World Health Organization and ageism and find out what they're doing

to overcome it.

And I'm going to refer to this several times during the presentation.

So why is ageism so detrimental?

So it causes earlier death.

There's a book by Becca Levy from Yale University called Breaking the Age Code.

I'll show it to you right here just on the screen, my screen.

And Yale University did a study that ageism takes seven and a half years off your life.

And it increases risky behavior.

So if you don't think, if you buy into this myth that aging is just an inevitable decline,

then you're not going to treat yourself as well.

You're not going to eat as well.

You may drink or smoke.

And it also erodes the solidarity between generations.

And we'll get into talking about how multigenerational interaction is so crucial to overcoming ageism.

So there are also some hard costs associated with ageism that there's been a lot of research

around this.

So obviously I mentioned the health impact that it creates stress, which contributes to

many types of health outcomes which cost the US and our world a lot of dollars, hard dollars.

And healthcare costs are associated with $63 billion annually the Yale study finds.

The health costs associated with ageism are significant.

And bias against older workers.

I know that many of you on this call are probably over the age of 40, at least.

I know there's a site called Spa Space that has a lot of massage therapists who are participating

in that.

And the average age of their massage therapist is 43.

So I think there are a lot of people that are having careers in massage therapy.

And you don't want to be discriminated against.

And ageism is a big reason why.

So just this number from AARP puts into perspective $150 billion a year due to age discrimination

in this country.

So obviously it's important to address ageism.

And really for me, it's like if we talk about wellness, which we all do in the message

therapy industry, in the spa industry, it is anti-wellness.

So if it takes seven and a half years off your life and reduces your quality of life, increases

your risky behaviors and influences negatively influence your relationships with the generation

of patients, then clearly it's anti-wellness.

So that's really why I started to expose ageism I just couldn't fathom that we as an industry

were promoting these negative perceptions of aging and this youth culture that is so discriminatory.

So I'll dig into that a little bit later.

I also wanted to address this and I don't want this to discourage you from marketing to

the 60-plus market.

But in my research about massage and older adults, I found this statistic from AMTA that only

one in 10 people over 65 has had a massage compared to 21% of the general population.

And I think there are several reasons for this.

One of the reasons is we're still on the cusp of baby boomers infiltrating the older

adult market.

And I think baby boomers anecdotally, baby boomers are interested in wellness and everything

to do with wellness.

But that older generation doesn't get, I think the benefits of massage, I have a

friend that works who worked as a spa director and now works in senior living.

He says even wealthy older adults who have two homes and a lot of discretionary

income will say, oh, you know, I had a massage once for a special occasion or I don't feel

like it's part of my overall health plan.

And I think that's going to change and we're going to talk about some of the ways that you

can get over those types of philosophies about why it's not important because 

we all know, I know I get a message every other week as part of my overall health plan.

We all know how important massage therapy is to overall health.

So we'll get into some of the solutions on this as we move forward.

Does anyone have any questions at this point, Karen, before we move on to some solutions?

There aren't any questions.

I know that I'm looking forward to finding out, you know, why that anti-aging or discrimination

against older people takes seven years off someone's life.

You know, is that like because people have less access to resources like jobs and money

in health care or is it just the emotional impact of discrimination?

I think that's a great question and Becca Levy addresses that in her book.

I think there are many reasons why, but a big part of it is just this perception of vitality

that if you buy into ageism, then you are thinking of yourself as being someone

who is on a path to inevitable decline.

The research shows that's not necessarily true, but we tend to buy into this myth of

aging.

And I think that you know, the placebo effect is a big part of human nature.

I think if you believe something to be true, it's true.

So I think that's why education is so important in talking about some of these issues.

Just demystifying the whole process of aging.

I think that people think they don't understand like if you're aging, you might not be able

to run the quarter mile as fast as you could.

You might be losing your hair.

You might be getting wrinkles.

But the positive aspects of aging, there's something called the happiness you curve,

which means that our forties are when we're the most unhappy and as we get older,

we get happy.

We're happy when we're young, and then there's a decline in happiness.

And then the happiest time of our life is really in our seventies.

And we get a lot of cognitive benefits that we don't necessarily see as we age.

So I think that that's a lot of it.

And I have, we have a question, do you want me to address that or at the end?

Yeah.

You choose.

Would you like me to read it now?

It does dovetail with something you just talked about, so it might make sense.

Sure.

Yeah.

Let's address that.

Yeah.

So Laurie asks, you know, you mentioned that 70% of wealth is held by people in this country

who are over age 60.

And so she asked, does that take into account the wealth hoarding of the 1% because in general,

10% of seniors live at poverty levels?

Well, that's a really good question.

And I don't have a direct answer for that.

I wouldn't want to give an answer that's not true.

I think it's worth taking a look at.

I think that there is a divide in our country of wealth.

And I do know that some of the statistics say that 50% of older adults will run out of money.

So I do think that there is an inordinate amount of money being held by the wealthy.

I think that that's an inevitable result of our nation and maybe the world having this

discrepancy between the wealthy and the poor, unfortunately.

Yeah.

And while you continue, I'll just see if I can drop a couple of links into the chat that

might provide more information in that regard if that's OK.

Oh, yeah, that would be great.

OK.

Appreciate that.

So let's dig into some of the solutions here.

So when it comes to ageism, the best thing that you can do to overcome it is to start with yourself.

I love this quote from Ashton Applewhite.

I highly recommend her book, This Chair Rocks a Manifesto Against Ageism.

She's sort of our guru when it comes to information on ageism.

And there's a wealth of information in her book.

But it's prejudice against yourself, your future self.

And one of the ways that you can overcome.

Nancy, your audio cut out again.

So Nancy's working on her audio.

She mentions that starting with yourself regarding your aptitude for aging and what you think about aging is important, you know, especially with the health ramifications.

None of us want to assume that we're just going to decline as we get older.

Even if we do notice that there are wrinkles or gray hair.

And how important it is to notice ageism, just like any other ism in our society.

You know, ageism is something that creates an us or them sort of attitude among us.

It's something that diminishes our regard for other people.

If we think that people are lesser than us because they're older.

And again, you know, when we turn that on ourselves, it diminishes our experience of our own life.

So Nancy, why don't you say something and we'll see if your audio is working?

It's not. Yeah, we can't hear you.

So it looks like Nancy has gone out and she's coming back in again.

So we do apologize for the technical difficulties.

But it's just something that we all experience in life, especially as we're more and more on Zoom and other types of platforms.

Sounds like Nancy is coming back in. Hello.

We see you on the screen.

Hi, am I back?

You're back and your voice is back. Welcome back.

I apologize to everyone. I don't know what is going on here in Oregon.

But I'm going to go ahead and pull up slides again and I apologize profusely to everyone.

It's okay. You know,

terrible to the best of us.

So it looks like everyone is still here and the webinar is really interesting. So.

Well, I'm very, very sorry.

I'm going to share.

So can we see my screen again?

We see you. We don't see your screen being shared.

Okay, hang on.

It's hard to get a little bit discombobulated with all this. I apologize.

Yeah. So your screen share is back up now.

Okay. Well, then I have to.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay.

I'm so sorry everyone. I apologize. This is terrible.

I don't know if it's about whether here in Oregon, but this is not okay.

I apologize.

So yeah, back to this. We all have unconscious bias. So it starts with our cell and looking inward.

So as I mentioned, I started exposing ageism because I felt that the wellness and spa industry could do a better job. And so really, the goal is to promote positive aging.

And then to.

To include ageism in your policy and your diversity equity inclusion policies.

And then to take a pledge to eliminate the phrase anti-aging by 2025.

Can you all still hear me?

Yes.

Good.

Sorry about that.

So yeah, to date, Karen mentioned we have 40 companies that have signed up to take the pledge. I will say the massage industry has been very open to accepting this, whereas the skincare industry has been a little less interested in eliminating the phrase anti-aging.

I think that they hang their hat so much on correcting defying and promoting youth all all purposes.

Whereas the massage mag massage people are really about health and wellness.

And so, um, that is one of the reasons and I am so grateful to Massage magazine that has been so incredibly supportive of this effort.

And there's an article in Massage magazine. I don't know, Karen, if you wanted to put that in the link about exposure ages and people who want to learn more.

Yeah, that's a great idea. I'll put that into the chat.

Now I'm like paranoid that you're going to lose me talking.

Well, we'll let you know if we can't hear you. And, um, you know, somebody Cheryl, Cheryl mentioned that we have an eclipse coming in solar showers. So, who knows what's going on energetically out there?

I don't know, but I love massage people for bringing that.

That's why I'm such a, I just love massage therapists so much. They're so great.

Anyway, these are some strategies from the World Health Organization to reduce ageism, and policy and law are one of them. And although we can't change policy, local or otherwise.

We could certainly promote it and write a letter to our Senator or whatever and bring it up when we see it, I think, is a good way for that.

Education is, is one of the best ways.

We, I'm glowing older, we're doing some events at some country clubs and spas that we call better with age, where we talk about things that get better with age, which are wine cheese and, and then we, we add information about aging well to try to debunk some of these myths about aging

that are so intrusive in our culture. And then intergenerational interventions are so, so important.

Cross-generational friendships, combat social isolation and aging. So, maybe some of the things that you can do if you are an older adult massage therapist is you could mentor some younger people and, vice versa.

If you're younger, you could reach out to some older adults in massage therapy and get together and talk about how to promote to older adults and, and share, share some stories about, your struggles because ageism goes both ways.

I mentioned prejudice and discrimination and younger people can sometimes be discriminated against as well for not having enough knowledge I don't know if you've ever if you're a younger person had clients that like you're not experienced enough and you don't have enough

knowledge about the different treatments and modalities. So I highly suggest that you reach out to people from different generations.

There's a company called generations over dinner and they host dinners where you have people from four different generations and then you have some prompting questions.

And so you can look up generations over dinner if you want to talk about getting a dinner party together for that.

So, as I mentioned seven and a half years get taken off your life for negative perceptions of aging. The other side of that is positive perceptions of aging can add seven and a half years to your life.

I know you mentioned one of the previous questions about why that is the case and I don't know why exactly there are many reasons and it's a complex issue.

But as I mentioned all those things that that take away from your quality of life that that also if you have positive perceptions of aging, you have a better quality of life.

One of the things that we talk about all the time that you might have been hearing about is that that young the youngest generations one and two will live over 100 years old.

But it's like who wants to live decades longer without the hof of what we call health span? So I think the goal is to match health span to lifespan.

So, what we want is to have everyone get a massage so that they can live better longer. That's my goal.

So moving wellness from me to we. This is an expression from a man named Dr. Bill Thomas who's written 12 books and is an expert. He's a geriatrician and an expert on aging well.

So I think one of the things that you should think about as a massage therapist is how can you move your wellness approach outside of the four walls of your massage treatment room.

And one of the best ways to do that is through education and also interaction client to client so if you work in a private practice where you only have a treatment room available to you.

Maybe you plan a walk with your clients and let them interact with each other.

But as Dr Bill Thomas says, aging is a team sport. And I think that there's been a lot of talk in the industry about moving wellness out of the four walls of the treatment room.

Retail is another way I know that massage therapists are not really into promoting products and pushing products on their clients.

You have an educational event where you let people talk to each other about the products., another thing is self-massage you may want to do some education on how can massage my partner or do some self-massage to carry over in between my treatments.

So I think there are different ways but I think that moving wellness outside of the treatment room is something that every massage therapist should be thinking about in their marketing approach.

And one of the reasons for that is this epidemic of loneliness and social isolation. I don't know if any of you have seen the report from the surgeon general on his advisory against loneliness and the importance of social connection and community.

So, you know, in his report, he talks about how loneliness has a health impact similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and increases premature aging.

Social isolation and loneliness can increase all kinds of different chronic conditions from heart disease to obesity, anxiety, depression, and even dementia.

Lonely people are 50% more likely to die prematurely.

And then as I mentioned in the global aging trends we've got a whole nation of caregivers and Rosalyn Carter, Jimmy Carter's wife has a quote about how you'll either be a caregiver, need a caregiver, or be a future caregiver.

But this whole crisis of family caregivers is especially prevalent in what we call the sandwich generation, which has also been called the panini generation because you're getting squished.

So, I think that there's there's statistics that say that caregivers are often extremely lonely and isolated.

So, massage therapy is a great anecdote. I talk a little bit later about some of the benefits of massage therapy that you can share with your clients.

But I would think about this client-to-client interaction, whether it's, it's a walk an educational event a meal, or some way to let your clients interact with each other.

I think it's a new way of thinking about your practice. I think most people think about marketing and they think about how do I get people into my treatment room.

But I think that there's a certain loyalty in combating the social isolation within the community.

Wherever that may be, whether it's in, it's in the park, or whether it's a restaurant. I think it's something to think about only because it's an epidemic in our country and globally.

So, how to market to older adults? I've been a marketing person for 30 years and I've done a lot of thinking about this.

I love this picture of this woman because, as you know, in the industry, we have so many pictures of 20 things with cucumbers over their eyes, and the turbine on the head, you know, they think there are very standard images.

So, a few things that you can take a look at are the language that you're using when you reach out to your clients and the images that you're using.

A lot of stock websites are getting better images. I would say that the pool of images, especially stock images for older adults is not been great, but I think there's more of a focus on getting better images.

So, also looking at your website. I don't know how many of you have websites, but make sure that there's an actual ADA-compliant website process where you can make sure that people can read your website, and that it's friendly to people with eyesight that's not as great as younger people.

And then the second thing that I would say is, don't make wellness unattainable, and I would say that the skincare industry is more guilty of this than the massage industry.

If you're promoting youth at all costs, and that stay young, stay strong, all this, that you're shutting out a big portion of the population that may have some sort of physical disability or some cognitive disability that makes them not feel welcome in our industry.

So, I would take a look at how you're reaching out to people and the language that you're using. Along with that, make sure that your table is comfortable and that you have, I'm sure most of you have the right bolsters and all that kind of things that you use in the treatment room.

But people change when they get older, their skin changes.

And interestingly, in the spa industry, we talk a lot about body treatments and how much product you use.

And I was recently working with a client that said, well, we have a little container that we use for this serum that we are going to use in our body treatment.

And I brought up, well, you know, people's skin changes as they get old, they lose elastin and collagen.

And what might be an appropriate amount of product for a 25-year-old might not cut it for a 55-year-old.

So, I think that just thinking about older bodies, how people might change, is it accessible to get on your table?

You have stairs, you know, that kind of thing. If you want to reach the 55, 65-plus market, these are some sort of considerations.

Concerning how to market, we have marketed a lot in this country and probably globally, I'm not exactly sure, but I would say probably globally, based on age and generations.

And if you looked at a lot of surveys, one of the things that bugs me is you'll see a lot of people say, here's the age groups, and then there's the 65-plus age group.

Well, the reality is, that as people get older, they get less homogeneous. They become more individualistic.

And a 55-year-old could be at the same point as an 85-year-old.

So, I think that you should relate to your clients based on stages of life, their values, their goals, and their interests.

And there's a lot of talk with Ashton Applewhite and Tracy Gender and Becca Levy, all these age-ism experts that marketing to generations is a really bad way to market.

So, how can you look at your clients differently based on these things, values goals, and interests?

That's going to be crucial.

And so, along those lines, marketing for massage therapy based on conditions, I think is a great way to market.

As we get older, some things change, and they're normal.

Aks and pains are normal. A change in sleep patterns is normal.

So, you might want to think about marketing for pain sleeping, or energy for different conditions.

So, the second thing on this slide is about personalized programs.

Customization is really big. So, I know most of you are thinking along the lines of how can I create an experience for my clients.

I had someone talk the other day about how they got a treatment and they said two or three things that were bothering them.

They had some Achilles pain, Achilles heel pain, and my shoulders, this and that.

And I think that you want to listen and have an intake where you're addressing each person's personal needs.

Performance and recovery are really big in the spa industry.

I'm not sure if many of you work in the spa industry or if you're in private practice.

But people want to be able to do what they love for as long as possible.

So, if I'm a golfer, then I want to be able to play golf as long as possible.

And recovery, I'm sure that you've all heard about a lot of there's salt therapy, there's cryotherapy, there are flotation tanks and all these kinds of things that relate to recovery.

So, you may want to think about partnering with other organizations that offer some of these,

whether it's a cryotherapy, wellness center, or some other things.

It's like how can you combine different modalities in addition to massage therapy to market to this.

I want to play tennis or golf as long as possible.

Stress management, as we all know, stress contributes to a lot of chronic diseases and mindfulness is a great way to overcome it.

So, maybe you think about at the beginning of your, of your treatment with a little mantra to put somebody in a centering place to get them prepared to receive the treatment in the best way possible.

And then education, education, education, education, I'm going to say it again and again. So, on the benefits of massage therapy.

And I think that back to that other slide where I told you how few people are getting treatments that if you if people understood how powerful massage therapy was,

that they would make it a part of their health team of their wellness protocol.

Because as you all know, loyal repeat clients are your best clients.

And so I wrote an article. It's on my site senior trade. It's about the power of touch therapy.

I interviewed the Touch Therapy Institute. I'm sure you're familiar with that.

They've done so many different studies that massage improves every single chronic condition, every health benefit you can think of is a benefit of getting a massage.

The AMTA reports that nearly 50% of all massages were health and wellness-related.

So that's great news. People aren't getting a massage for their birthday or their because they're on vacation. I think more and more people are thinking about massage therapy as an important part of their overall health.

So I don't know if you've all researched how powerful massage therapy is, but as you know, it increases circulation decreases all the bad hormones, and increases all the good ones that contribute to quality of life.

So it improves your immune system. It reduces stress from a mental health perspective.

So many people, especially post-COVID are suffering from different types of mental health conditions. And they might not know that massage has been proven to lessen depression and anxiety.

And as I mentioned, reducing stress improves your sleep.

And mentioning the social aspect again.

One of the most powerful things is the touch of another human being. And Tiffany Fields from the Touch Institute talks about how, especially in the United States, we're a touch-deprived nation.

We don't touch each other nearly as much as other countries like France.

And just getting touched by someone and then of course touched in such a professional and powerful way is important, especially post-COVID.

One of the things that's so frustrating to me in researching senior living communities is that people will get their hair done all the time and their nails done, but they won't get regular massages.

And there's a company that does salon and wellness services that does that's done like 2 million treatments.

Most of them are haircuts and styling, but like one less than one-half of percent are massage.

And he says, Oh, people don't want it. And I think people don't want it oftentimes, because there's a certain amount of fear, as you know, there's always that fear of taking off your clothes and getting on a table.

And the unknown. So I think the more that we can educate people on the power of touch, the more that people will realize that it needs to be an integral part of their overall wellness program.

I'm chair massage is something that I'll mention too is being powerful and getting out into the community that that's changing that wellness from me to we if you're looking for more clients.

You might just want to get out there and start touching people outside of the treatment room. I think that might be one of the best ways.

I remember going to a Zumba conference with one of my clients a decade ago taking our lotion around and just starting to touch people and the power of that.

So the last thing that I'm going to mention before we get into the Q&A part is your plan for aging well.

So whether you're even if you're in your 20s 30s 40s and you haven't gotten into thinking about aging.

Think about what matters most to you with what we call the Japanese call ikigai, which is that that gets you up for breakfast.

You can start planning for what you want as you get older. You have a much better chance of getting it.

So I highly suggest that you all just start thinking and glowing older our website has a free 30-minute consultation.

We also have a white paper there on how to have difficult conversations with aging loved ones, because many of you on this call might be part of that sandwich generation where you are feeling squished.

And you're looking at being a caregiver or currently being a caregiver. So it's really about what we call home health and heart, which is thinking about where you want to live, how you want to live, and what matters most to you.

So I'll leave you with that thought. And I would love to get into this quote about life plans that they're living documents that change over time.

Only you can decide the next chapter of your life and how you will get there.

Wellness is not and has never been an accident. I love that. So plan to have the most healthy long happy life that you can. And I just want to thank you all for being part of improving the quality of life for everyone, including older adults.

Thank you, Nancy. This has been fascinating and wonderful information. We do have some questions that have come in and chat and email.

And one of them. Can you hear me right now?

I can just check in. Oh my goodness. I'm feeling paranoid.

So you mentioned the wellness from me to we. And you talked about, you know, massage therapists, maybe like creating events where clients can interact with each other.

Is there anything more that you can say about ways that a massage therapist might add social or community aspects to their massage practice?

Yeah, you know, I think one of the things to think about is your website.

People might not have thought about the website and email as being a place where you can share more information with people.

And then, you know, maybe there's the website there's email and then there's what I mentioned about hosting a live event. So the client-to-client interaction because there's a good chance that.

The people that you're servicing have some things in common that there's some commonality. And so, whether it's participation online.

Or maybe you let people online ask each other questions about, well, where do you go for this? So where do you go for that?

Where do you like to go on vacation? But I think that the client-to-client interaction is one of the best ways and then you can do that either online or.

Or in real life. So, I think the real-life thing is really powerful.

But thinking about the educational aspect through either information on your website or email would be a great way.

Okay, thank you.

And then you, you spoke as well about how, you know, like some of the stock photography is improving in terms of showing, you know, older people enjoying spa therapies and that kind of thing.

What are like more broadly, what are some of the types of images that a massage therapist might use to help market their massage business?

Yeah, I mean, I think that looking at stock images, a lot of people don't have time or money to do a photo shoot to get their images.

So when you're looking, I would, I would call them lifestyle images and people interacting with other people, whether it's women and men, you know, I think obviously that both women and men are interested in massage but just trying to get away from that fountain of youth and having all your people be in their

twenties is that you can look at the gray hairs. I'm, I'm one of them.

I'm doing different lifestyle activities, smiling, laughing, participating with each other, doing yoga, going on hikes, those sorts of images.

I think that the treatment room images there that you certainly want to focus on older adults. I will also mention that I think it's really important to get different cultures and different races.

So because I know the spa industry, when I started studying it back in the mid-90s, that it tended just to be young white women, you know, that image as I mentioned of the turban and the cucumbers on the eyes and all that.

So I would say that diversity in your imaging is crucial and just like living in your best life images, the smiling, laughing part of it, I think is crucial.

Great. Thank you. We have a question that came in that kind of circles back to the concept of bringing clients together in the community and just regarding client confidentiality.

And I would, I would imagine that the massage therapist would put, you know, a statement, a disclosure, and agreement on, their website. Would that be correct to protect client confidentiality?

Well, I don't think you're just closing any of your client's private information. I think you're allowing them to share what they want to share.

So, you know, I don't think that sharing personal information from one client to another is never okay.

So I'm, I'm not sure you would know Karen better than I do if it's important to have disclosures on the website.

I believe it would be important to have a client sign an agreement there volunteering, you know, voluntarily engaging in an activity.

And I haven't done research into that, but I think it can make a really interesting article in the future. So look for an email from me and Nancy about that.

Yeah, I know, you know, it's just like, you may find that as you're working with different clients, some sort of commonality of challenges that people are having caregiving, I think we're going to see more and more of it.

And there's a book that I would highly recommend by a woman named Empty Connolly called The Measure of Our Age. She talks a lot about elder justice and within that caregiving and she said that a lot of caregivers will come out of their year two year seven years

it is caregiving struggle and they'll think I would rather commit suicide than put my kids through that. So I think there are more and more people that will have caregiving challenges.

So if you, I know that a lot of massage clients share personal information with you, the therapist that you would never want to share with other people, but bringing people together and saying, Hey, I think you have a commonality and you might want

to talk to this person. I don't think that that would cross over into sharing personal information. Do you Karen?

I think there's some concern just about disclosing any sort of contact information about any client to another client. And that's why I think it would be best for this to be like a voluntary invitation to clients who might want to participate in an event or on a website,

you know that they would need to to initiate that contact rather than being put in contact with each other. Oh, yeah, I mean, I agree with that. But I think that education is the key.

And that if you were to say, bring a caregiving expert, then people would self-select whether they wanted to come to that or not.

Or if you were having a hike or a walk or some sort of another event, then it would be if that information or that expert were interesting to me, then I'd show up and then the interaction between the two clients would be organically understood.

Thank you.

So we're getting down to the end of our webinars or anything else that you'd like to add.

I think so just a huge apology for my computer going sideways twice. That was terrible.

Sorry. It's okay. It's okay. It's not your fault. Like I said, you know, it happens.

It happens all the time. So, I want to say thank you, Nancy, for this enlightening and illuminating webinar.

And thanks to our attendees, you will receive a link to a recording of this webinar and you can go to glowing older.com to learn more about Nancy's projects and opportunities. So thank you so much.

Thank you all.