Episode 137: Steve Landells – From Bearings to Bodywork

Steve Landells on changing careers, finding mentors, and staying curious in massage

A career in massage does not always begin with a lifelong plan. Sometimes it begins with a difficult customer, a growing sense that the work no longer fits, and one conversation with the right person at the right time.

For Steve Landells, owner of Total Massage Care in Margaret River, the path into massage passed through a family dairy farm, a fitter and turner trade, and many years in the bearing industry. It was practical, physical work, but it did not give him the sense of purpose he eventually found in massage.

In Episode 137 of the Folding Towels Podcast, Steve talks with Jackie and David about changing careers, studying as an adult, learning inside a busy remedial clinic, rebuilding a practice in regional Western Australia, and continuing to adapt after many years in the profession.

Running through the conversation is a simple idea: qualification is the beginning of the work, not the end of the learning.

A career that did not follow a straight line

Steve is open about the fact that his earlier career did not unfold neatly. He enjoyed aspects of farm life, trained as a fitter and turner, and later worked in industrial sales. Circumstances took him from Bunbury to Albany, where he worked hard and built a life in a field he had never expected to leave.

At that stage, massage was not an obvious next step. He had received regular treatment and had been told he might be good at it, but the suggestion initially felt improbable.

The turning point came when the strain of his work became harder to ignore. After a confrontation with a difficult customer, Steve recognised that he had reached the end of his patience with the role and with the person he was becoming inside it.

He describes a deeper shift as well. He no longer wanted to spend his working life focused on products, margins, and transactions.

“I didn’t want to be a merchant anymore,” he says. “I wanted to do something for people.”

That distinction matters. Massage was not simply a more appealing job. It represented a different relationship with work. Instead of helping wallets or moving equipment, Steve wanted his effort to have a direct human use.

Many therapists enter the profession through a similar process of subtraction. They may not know exactly what they want, but they know what no longer fits. The next step is often less about finding certainty and more about being willing to test a different direction.

The right conversation at the right time

Steve’s decision could easily have stalled at the point of enquiry.

He went to Albany TAFE feeling nervous and unsure. Rather than handing him a course outline and sending him away, the head lecturer, Christine, sat with him for ten or fifteen minutes and talked through the decision.

Steve believes that conversation mattered. Had he simply been given paperwork, he may have walked out and never enrolled.

It is a small story, but it says something important about how people enter this profession. A student’s first meaningful experience of massage education may happen before the first class, assessment, or clinic session. It may be shaped by whether someone takes their uncertainty seriously.

Once he committed, Steve found that the decision felt unexpectedly right. He describes much of his earlier life as swimming against the tide. After choosing massage, several parts of life began to fall into place.

The first student-clinic treatment was still confronting. Like many new therapists, he felt nervous about placing his hands on someone in a professional setting for the first time. Once that threshold had been crossed, however, the work felt natural.

There is no guarantee that a career change will create that sense of alignment. Steve’s story is not a formula. It does show the value of taking the next practical step before demanding complete certainty from yourself.

Mentors, work ethic and learning in the deep end

Formal study gave Steve the foundation. Mentorship taught him how the work operated under pressure.

During a break between stages of his training, a lecturer suggested that he gain experience with a massage therapist named Mark. Mark ran a busy clinic focused on remedial, sports, and deep-tissue work.

The pace was demanding. Clients were booked closely together, the work was physical, and Steve saw a large number of presentations in a short period.

The clinic shaped his early approach. He learned to work hard, make decisions quickly, and look for practical outcomes. At that point, massage often felt mechanical: find the problem, work on it, help the person move forward, and prepare for the next appointment.

Then Mark became seriously ill.

Steve took on increasing responsibility for the clinic while continuing his studies. It was an intense beginning to professional life, complicated by the illness and eventual death of a mentor. It also gave him an opportunity that would have been difficult to reproduce in a classroom.

Steve later inherited the clinic and its clients. He is clear that this was both a personal loss and an extraordinary professional gift.

Throughout the episode, he returns to the influence of people who shared their time, knowledge, and confidence with him. Lecturers, chiropractors, osteopaths, colleagues, and friends all contributed pieces that shaped the therapist he became.

That broad exposure matters because no single teacher or modality can provide the whole answer.

One of Steve’s lecturers demonstrated this by covering most of his notes and revealing only a few words. The point was direct: the course could teach only a fraction of what was available. The rest would have to be found through further study and experience.

Steve puts it more simply: “You’ve got to dig.”

Changing the way you work without losing the work

Steve’s early practice was built around strong remedial work. He rarely attracted clients looking for a purely relaxing treatment. People generally came for maintenance, pain, restricted movement, sporting demands, or something that felt “busted”.

Over time, however, his approach began to change.

Now approaching sixty, Steve is thinking more deliberately about methods that are effective for clients without requiring him to grind through every treatment. He remains interested in remedial outcomes, but he is increasingly drawn to gentler approaches, including the EMMETT Technique and other forms of softer bodywork.

This is not presented as a rejection of the work that built his career. It is an adaptation.

A long clinical career requires more than passion. It requires an honest assessment of what the therapist’s body can continue to sustain. Techniques, schedules, pressure, appointment spacing, and the types of clients accepted into the practice may all need to change.

Steve’s aim is practical: more value for the client, with less unnecessary cost to the therapist.

His curiosity helps make that transition possible. He does not study merely to collect continuing professional education points. He studies because he remains interested in the body, in different ways of working, and in what he still does not understand.

After many years in practice, he still says, “I’m a beginner in this.”

That statement is not false modesty. It reflects the scale of the field. The more therapists learn, the more visible the unanswered questions become. The challenge is to let that awareness sharpen professional judgement rather than erode confidence.

The work is physical, but the client is a person

One of Steve’s strongest lessons came from a client whose shoulder tension changed during an unexpectedly emotional moment.

He had heard about emotional responses during treatment but had not encountered one directly. When the client began crying, Steve’s immediate task was not to explain the experience or force it into a theory. It was to remain steady and let her know she was safe.

The experience challenged the purely mechanical model he had absorbed in his early clinical work. People do not arrive as isolated muscles, joints, and symptoms. Their bodies come with histories, grief, stress, relationships, beliefs, and circumstances.

That does not give massage therapists permission to become counsellors, diagnose emotional causes, or make unsupported claims. It does require enough professional maturity to recognise when a human response is occurring and to avoid treating it as an inconvenience.

Another story shows the same principle from a business perspective.

A long-term client contacted Steve after receiving a breast cancer diagnosis. She wanted him to know before telling her family and later asked whether he could provide reflexology while she was undergoing treatment. Steve chose to accept a coffee rather than charge her for those sessions.

He does not present this as a policy every therapist should copy. It was a personal decision made within an established relationship and according to his own values.

Working for yourself creates that discretion. It also creates responsibility.

Flexibility can express care, but it needs to remain deliberate rather than becoming an unexamined pattern of overgiving. Steve acknowledges that kindness should not mean allowing people to take advantage. The judgement lies in knowing the difference.

Starting again in Margaret River

After being accustomed to a busy clinic, Steve found starting again in Margaret River daunting.

He began by working from a chiropractic practice and later bought a clinic room. Building visibility did not come naturally. He was used to relying on word of mouth and was uncomfortable promoting himself.

Chair massage at local markets helped him meet people and gain experience, although the tourist population meant it did not always translate into ongoing appointments.

The bigger shift came when another therapist challenged his resistance to online booking.

Steve had valued the flexibility of speaking directly with regular clients and fitting urgent appointments around a full diary. He worried an online system would remove that discretion.

The solution was simple: allow clients to book online while keeping a note on the website inviting urgent or out-of-hours enquiries.

The first day the system went live, two new clients booked.

For therapists who feel uneasy about technology, the lesson is not that every system is automatically beneficial. It is that a useful system should remove friction without forcing the practitioner to abandon the parts of the business that matter.

Online booking allowed people to act when the need arose, including in the middle of the night, without requiring Steve to answer a call. It also reduced the dependence on his availability as the only gateway into the clinic.

The broader business challenge remains. Steve is learning how to develop the practice, considering whether he may eventually employ someone, and beginning to think about succession.

That question carries particular weight because his own career was changed by a mentor who let him in, trusted him with responsibility, and eventually passed a clinic on to him.

What new therapists can take from Steve’s story

Steve’s advice to newer therapists is practical rather than glamorous.

Look after yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually. A therapist cannot keep giving from an empty vessel.

Do not finish a course believing you now know everything required for a career. Keep studying, but also look beyond formal courses for the places where professional learning happens.

Find a mentor. Ask whether you can observe or shadow someone whose work you respect. Work alongside chiropractors, osteopaths, physiotherapists, massage therapists, and other practitioners who can expose you to different ways of thinking.

Their knowledge will not transfer automatically, but careful observation and good questions can broaden your judgement.

Volunteer when useful opportunities arise.

Steve gained experience through triathlons, running events, fitness centres, and chair massage. These settings provided contact with different bodies, different demands, and different communities. They also helped him build relationships.

There is a caution here. Volunteering should not become an expectation that new therapists provide endless free labour. The opportunity needs to offer genuine learning, connection, or professional value.

Used well, however, it can help a new practitioner move beyond the limited range of presentations available in student clinic.

Most importantly, ask.

Experienced therapists do not all guard their knowledge. Many are willing to share it but may not know who is looking for guidance. As the episode notes, if you do not ask, the answer is already no.

Steve’s career has been shaped by people who made room for him. He is now considering how he might create that room for someone else.

That may be the clearest measure of a mature professional journey. The work does not end with becoming more skilled. Eventually, the question becomes what knowledge, opportunity, and confidence you can pass forward.

Listen to Episode 137, From Bearings to Bodywork, to hear Steve Landells speak about career change, regional practice, mentorship, business learning, and why curiosity still matters after years at the massage table.

Follow or subscribe to the Folding Towels Podcast wherever you listen, and tell another therapist about the episode.

Learn more about Steve and Total Massage Care at totalmassagecare.com.au.