Our question comes from a tarot student. She writes:
I would appreciate if you could tell briefly if there was one thing you wish you'd known when you started your professional career, what would it be?
At first the question seemed simple. It’s actually taken me a little while to figure out my answer; much longer than I thought it would.
I have very few regrets; my tarot business has been, and continues to be, successful. I continue to enjoy doing what I do.
But, I’ve thought of two things I really do wish I had known. One might be a cautionary tale for you. The other, well, the other is one that may be unavoidable.
I wish I had known just how much writing would be an important part of my business, and I wish I had treated my writings – class plans, handouts, articles – as the precious things they were.
When I had a new computer with just five documents in it, it never occurred to me to use proper naming conventions. I couldn’t imagine that, in a few short years, I would have thousands of documents and no way to sort through them.
I wish I had understood the subtleties of the way tarot speaks, especially when predicting the future.
There are some things you learn with experience, and there is no way around that. The good news is that we tarot readers just get better as we get older. The bad news is that there were times I had to get it wrong in the beginning to be able to get it right, now.
If I could narrow that bit down, it would be this. In tarot, there is something I call the “minority report,” after the Tom Cruise movie. You might be looking to predict an outcome, and get three cards. Two that strongly predict one outcome, and a third with a different message. As a young reader, I may have had a tendency to gloss over the minority card, and focus on what seemed like the stronger prediction. Sometimes that worked in my favor, and sometimes it didn’t.
The cards never lie. Sometimes the truth they tell is that there is more than one possibility for the future, or that the future is still up for grabs.
Tarot is a helpful tool for getting a glimpse at the future. Now, I know to pay attention to all possibilities, even ones I hadn’t considered. I know to ask more questions of the cards, even questions my client hasn’t verbalized. I know to use my intuition to expand the reading to include all possibilities, not just the most likely or the most desirable. I wish I had been able to do that in the beginning of my career, but I think sometimes skills and wisdom are born of experience.
Thanks for a great question. If you have a question about tarot, please email me!
Enjoy the video!