Notes on Being a Professional Psychic Reader, part one
Who is your professional practice for? Whom do you want to serve?
When I first started my own journey as a clairvoyant student, learning the art of seeing energy and reading it for myself and others, one of my underlying thoughts was that I could use this to help.
I saw my newly acquired skill as a tool I could use to more effectively help the numerous people I’d been (mostly unconsciously) trying to heal over the years. I had no thought of having a professional practice, not at first. The information and knowledge I was gathering through practicing and studying my new art form was fascinating to me. Being a healer, I could easily imagine the possibilities of what I could do for others with this tool of clairvoyance.
After I finished my clairvoyant training, I decided to start my professional practice, gradually at first. As I gave readings to people on my own, outside of the safe space of the school I’d studied at, a number of questions and concerns came up for me. In order to give these readings, I had to address a lot of what was going on inside of myself.
I started to learn that my professional practice didn’t work at all, if it didn’t work for me.
Over the years, I’ve given thousands of readings to countless people. As I’ve progressed and grown my practice, the underlying truth for me is this: if my pro practice doesn’t work for me, it doesn’t work. I won’t want to do it, and I’ll unconsciously shut it down. Which has happened a few times, until I reset the energy in my reading practice to work for me again.
This included learning how to set boundaries within my practice, becoming clear about the agreements I was making when I’d agree to give a reading to a client, and a lot of energy around responsibility - my own personal Achilles heel!
Another part of this is that I have the right to decide whether I want to work with a particular client, or not. I’ve let go of a number of people over the years, either because they wanted me to tell them what they wanted to hear, or because I wouldn’t validate their victim pictures. I told some of them I wasn’t the person for them, and others just went away because I wouldn’t give them what they wanted. Nobody’s wrong here, and I wasn’t making them wrong either - they weren’t the right fit for me.
Being a professional psychic reader is first and foremost about you. Who is setting the tone in your professional practice? Is it you?
The customer is not always right.
Years ago, during a session with a new client, I saw at the exact halfway point during the reading that she’d stopped having the hello I was giving her, and started getting angry. That point came when I wouldn’t validate that she was a helpless victim, instead I read a picture of her taking a step out of her conundrum by looking inside herself. she was more powerful than she was allowing herself to be in this situation.
She was not having this hello. She’d gone from warm and fuzzy to icy cold in the space of a heartbeat, and when she left my office I knew she wasn’t happy. Sure enough, I heard from her the next day, demanding half of her money back, or she would leave me a bad review.
I knew enough by this point in my career to know that I had no interest in ever reading this person again, and I immediately offered to refund her entire payment. She took offense at that, and restated her demand for half of her payment back. So I refunded half the money. She had half the reading.
I knew that there was something I was doing that she got in on, and I wanted to learn from this, to avoid attracting any more like her.
I read the energy of this whole interaction for myself, and saw that I was holding onto an old outdated picture that I was somehow responsible for taking care of my clients, and had to make them happy. This was not a conscious thing on my part, and once I saw it, I wasn’t going to unsee it!
The way I resolved this for myself was to make a new picture for myself, a new agreement about who was allowed to come to me for a session. I was quite done with those who wanted to use me as a therapist, grounding cord, and punching bag because they wouldn’t do their own work and grow.
This wasn’t me judging these people, it was me discerning who I was willing to work with. So you could say that this halfway-disgruntled client helped me find an answer for myself about what I was deciding to have.
Every client, even and especially the tough ones, has helped me grow and expand - myself. Growing my practice has helped me to grow in more ways than I could have foreseen.