Lady_Elaine
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Posted Tue Dec 12, 2006 4:21 am...
Going Pro
by James Wells
~from The Llewellyn Tarot Reader 2006
There comes a point in many people's tarot journeys when they decide to read the cards for a living, whether full-time or part-time. It's not for everybody. Many of my friends and students elect to use the cards only for themselves and their intimate circle of loved ones. However, if you've chosen to take the Fool's leap into the abyss of professional tarot counseling, this article is for you. As this is a vast topic, any tips and exercises herein are merely springboards, albeit important ones, based on personal experience. I'll focus on the qualities of a good professional tarot consultant, five key questions to answer before starting out, promotion, setting fees, and location.
Helpful Qualities
What qualities are woven into the fabric of a good tarot professional? Competence, curiosity, ethics, humility, and self-awareness.
Competence
A tarot professional knows his or her tool and craft well before offering any services to the public. It sounds elementary, bit I've seen some very shabby readers charge money for a skill they have not yet grasped. Read the best tarot books, join an internet group, attend workshops and conferences, take classes, practice on yourself and others, know your cards inside and out. There's no rush...I began to explore tarot in 1979 and didn't charge a professional fee until 1994.
Also, part of being competent is not scattering your attention. A client's confidence in your tarot abilities will not be kindled if they see you also "specialize" in tunes, palmistry, tea leaves, scrying, astrology, archangelic healing, and hepatoscopy. Focus! Do one to three things well rather than ten things poorly. It's also helpful to relate your tarot knowledge to, or derive more tarot knowledge from, other disciplines...psychology, mythology, literature, and so forth.
Curiosity
Curiosity is important. A good tarot reader aches to know the questions behind the questions. If you're curious enough to probe deeper, it will rub off on your clients. They'll ask richer questions, which will lead to more constructive answers and a more enjoyable interaction for both parties. Your curiosity should also prompt you to explore what's new in tarot. Investigate the latest books, newe4st decks, most recent historical theories, and twenty-first-century applications.
Ethics
The Compleat Tarot Professional is ethical. Be conscious of what you do and don't do as a tarot reader, and be comfortable saying so out loud. As an ethical reader, you quote your fees and stick with them. You're clear about session durations before the appointment begins. The ethical tarot consultant does not predict death or dire illness. Period! Nor does she or he offer unsolicited intuitive information. Several times, people have walked up to me (usually in metaphysical bookstores) to tell me there's a spiritual message that they absolutely have to convey to me. My response has generally been, "No, you don't." It's bad manners and a bad ego trip. Don't do it. Period!
An ethical tarot reader only does what she or he is qualified to do. If you're not a trained lawyer, psychologist, homeopath, accountant, physician, or other non divinatory professional, don't dispense advice that is better left to those who know what they are doing. Keep a list of names and the contact information on non-tarot practitioners so that you can refer querents to these resources as needed.
Ethical tarot consultants do not make judgment calls on a client's choices, behaviors, lifestyle, financial status, sexual orientation, gender, and so forth. It is not your job to convert people to your spiritual or moral worldview, but rather to simply provide helpful information. Neither is manipulation a good thing. To use a reading to push your own agenda will have the Karma Police on your butt so fast, it won't be funny.
An ethical tarot reader knows his or her boundaries around third-party readings. Will you or won't you read for an absent person that a client inquires about?
And lastly, ethics demand that you don't blab about people's sessions behind their backs, no matter how juicy the information may be. Confidentiality is always courteous.
Humility
The ideal professional reader is humble. Anyone who declares that he is 100 percent accurate (whatever "accurate" means) is either lying or deluded. We're human, we make mistakes, and we're not perfect. Get a hard helmet and deal with it. Humility also incorporates the realization that a tarot session is not an epic dog-and-pony show with you as its reigning star. A reading is a co-created experience made up of you, the client, the cards, the topic, the questions or spread positions, and the presence of whatever you believe your source of wisdom to be.
Self-Awareness
A self-aware tarot practitioner is a good tarot practitioner. Work on yourself. Healers and counselors need healing and counseling too. If you plan to be of any use to those who seek guidance in your consulting room, you need to be as clear and healthy for them, and for yourself, as possible. Go to analysis, see a therapist from time to time, talk with another professional, explore your dreams, do honest journal work, go for a massage and energy work. Your clients will thank you for it.
Five Key Questions
Before opening your professional tarot practice, go through the list of questions provided below and respond to them in writing. Answer them in the order presented. Be honest. Ask and answer these five questions once a year to check in with yourself and your business. For extra clarification and inspiration, turn these questions into a tarot spread and pull cards for them. Do this only after you've answered them on your own.
1) Who are you as a person? List your strengths and weaknesses, personality traits, people skills, philosophy of life, likes and dislikes, etc.
2) As a tarot reader, what do you do? What special trait, technique, or tool sets you apart from the rest? What's your consultation style? Some readers are interactive while others do all of the talking. Some are predictive while others are therapeutic. One mat be peppy and another colleague may be very quiet. Some consultants enhance their tarot practice with other modalities in which they've trained, such as flower essences, herbs, essential oils, movement, dance, energy healing, or guided imagery. One might work methodically, card-by-card, while another might simply toss a bunch of cards on the table to trigger psychic insights.
3) What is your mission statement as a tarot professional? Be clear, in one sentence, about why you do this. For example: to facilitate the process of choice through a blend of intuition and intellect; to assist people to see symbolic patterns and how they play out in their lives; to yank people's thinking out of the box in creative yet practical ways.
4) What benefits do/can people derive from a session with you? What's in it for them? Make a list of these benefits. For example, people experience a focused sense of direction; they realize how wise they truly are; clients are forewarned, therefore forearmed; they feel relaxed and lighter; people see their options more clearly, so they can choose more efficiently.
5) Who would benefit from your tarot services? Brainstorm a list of people who would resonate with your personality, your reading style, your mission statement, and your benefits. Take into consideration age, gender, profession, income bracket, hobbies, location, and so forth. A few hours later, go back to your list and narrow it down to three or four. These people are your target market.
Promoting Your Business
Your answers in the previous section are the building blocks for promoting yourself. You now have a target market: a specific set of people you want to reach out to. This will save you a great deal of time, energy and money, because you won't scatter your marketing efforts willy-nilly. You'll be focused. Your business cards, brochures, classified ads, flyers, and display ads will contain words, phrases, and imagery which not only reflect the essence of your services, but will also appeal to the three or four groups you've chosen.
In all of your printed literature, be sure to highlight the benefits, not yourself. The general public is not interested in your life story, scintillating though it may be. Neither do they care that you're a ninety-third generation psychic trained by ascended Pleadean tarot masters at the Egyptian Academy of Timeless Truth. Keep the bio to a maximum of three or four sentences. People want to know what's in it for them!
The general public is also lazy. Don't bombard them with too much text. Keep your written material brief and to the point. Fonts should be clean and easy to read, so no frilly pseudo-Gothic scripts in varying shades of pink. Leave enough blank space to keep it tidy.
Find out where your target people shop, live, eat, and socialize. Leave your printed materials in or near these places. Also find out which publications they read. Place ads in them. Know their favorite radio and television stations. Get yourself an interview on them. What organizations do these people belong to? Send a letter of introduction suggesting that you give a talk at one of their meetings. What causes are close to your potential clients' hearts? Donate gift certificates to their favorite charity auction. Speak at their local library. Be omnipresent!
Setting Fees
This is simultaneously everybody's most and least favorite topic. Some people say that one should not charge a fee for what believe is a "spiritual" service. Fie on them! The day that landlords don't charge rent, supermarkets give away food, and university education is a gratis is the day I won't charge for a tarot consultation.
Part of knowing what to charge is based on your target market's income bracket, but it's also based on whether you're in an urban, suburban, or rural area. It also depends on how much money per year you'd like to earn your tarot work and how many clients you're willing to work with every week. Remember too that the only things people are paying for are your time and expertise, not the content of the reading. A person recently asked me, "What do I get for $150"? to which I responded, "An hour of my time."
A rough formula for setting your fee is:
desired yearly income divided by 52=x
x divided by number of desired number of clients per week = y
round off y to the nearest number ending with five or zero.
Here are a couple of examples. Madeleine decides that her target market includes bank CEOs and architects. She figures that $100 to $200 per hour is an appropriate fee range. Madeleine would like to earn $50,000 per year from tarot consultations and work with up to eight clients per week.
$50,000 divided by 52 = 961.53
$961.53 divided by 8 = 120.19
Madeleine decides to charge $120 for an hour-long consultation.
Herman wants to work with college students and stay-at-home parents. He feels that $60 to $100 per hour is a fair range for his desired clientele. He's willing to work with a maximum of 10 people per week and would like to earn $40,000 per year.
$40,000 divided by 52 = 769.23
$769.23 divided by 10 = 76.923
Herman chooses to charge $75 for his hour-long sessions.
If you'd rather not do all of that math, then a fair price to begin with is one dollar per minute.
Where?
You now have your well-honed tarot skills, promotional material, a set fee, and a clientele. Where do you intend to offer your consultations? I work in my home, seeing clients and students in the living room where I also do sessions over the phone for out-f-province or international querents. Three or four times a month, I offer "meet-the-public" readings at a large metaphysical bookstore. It suits my personality to work from home, with the occasional excursion elsewhere. Many other options exist, though.
The plusses of working at home are that there's no extra overhead to pay, you're in your own familiar space, it's easy to make people feel at home. It's private and safe (assuring confidentiality), and you don't have to schlep across town. Potential pitfalls might be inviting total strangers into your home, not getting out of the house enough, household distractions such as laundry (ha! Not in my house), housemates or significant others who inhibit a sense of privacy and having to keep the place somewhat presentable.
Some readers like to do house calls. It keeps their home address unknown, it gets them out of the house, and they get a better feel for the people in their own surroundings. The down side of house-calls is having to get there, especially if you're in a northern clime, in midwinter. There are also safety issues around visiting a new person's home. If you decide to do house calls, leave the name, number, and address of the person you're visiting with someone you know.
A metaphysical book store has the advantage of being a neutral space. You're more likely to find a sympathetic audience here and meet new people to add to your client base. This option also gets you out of the house. Problems include not being able to charge as much (proprietors want people to buy products, not blow all their money on a reading), being subject to the store's policies and rules, less privacy (even with a curtain or booth), and the fact that metaphysical bookstores occasionally attract whackos who want to explain to you they're the product of a half-human half-Venusian marriage.
Another possible workspace is a coffeehouse or tea room. One of my colleagues does quite well by doing readings in upscale hotels during afternoon tea. It's an enjoyable and elegant way to work. Draw-backs are the lack of privacy and the need to charge a lower fee. One generally can't go as in-depth during these consultations either. No maitre d'hotel wants to see his paying guests breakdown at some profound, soul-shaking discovery.
You could also rent office source shared by another professional - masseur, psychotherapist, astrologer, etc. - on certain days of the week when it's not in use by them. This has the plusses of lower rent, potential for cross-referrals, and having your professional days scheduled in advance. You might also get a receptionist to take appointments for you. The shared office could be a problem if you're there alone, if the other people don't want you to display your brochures or business cards on your days off, if there's a fundamentalist receptionist who wants to burn you and your cards, and if there's very little chance to expand your office hours.
Three final options do not rank among my favorites, but I offer them here anyhow. These are psychic fairs, parties, and psychic phone lines. While there are some very good practitioners involved, these options generally attract a clientele who have a "show me" attitude and who are searching for spooky entertainment or quick fixes rather than tools and processes that can assist them to take more responsibility for their own lives.
Professional tarot reading is a terrific opportunity to share your passion for tarot and your hard-won reading skills with a vast array of interesting and wonderful people. It won't be all almonds and roses, but then what is? It's possible to earn a good living through offering your tarot services, but be prepared to be patient and to work at it. It's not an overnight success story. But the myriad rewards, both internal and tangible, are truly worth it. I wish you well!
by James Wells
~from The Llewellyn Tarot Reader 2006
There comes a point in many people's tarot journeys when they decide to read the cards for a living, whether full-time or part-time. It's not for everybody. Many of my friends and students elect to use the cards only for themselves and their intimate circle of loved ones. However, if you've chosen to take the Fool's leap into the abyss of professional tarot counseling, this article is for you. As this is a vast topic, any tips and exercises herein are merely springboards, albeit important ones, based on personal experience. I'll focus on the qualities of a good professional tarot consultant, five key questions to answer before starting out, promotion, setting fees, and location.
Helpful Qualities
What qualities are woven into the fabric of a good tarot professional? Competence, curiosity, ethics, humility, and self-awareness.
Competence
A tarot professional knows his or her tool and craft well before offering any services to the public. It sounds elementary, bit I've seen some very shabby readers charge money for a skill they have not yet grasped. Read the best tarot books, join an internet group, attend workshops and conferences, take classes, practice on yourself and others, know your cards inside and out. There's no rush...I began to explore tarot in 1979 and didn't charge a professional fee until 1994.
Also, part of being competent is not scattering your attention. A client's confidence in your tarot abilities will not be kindled if they see you also "specialize" in tunes, palmistry, tea leaves, scrying, astrology, archangelic healing, and hepatoscopy. Focus! Do one to three things well rather than ten things poorly. It's also helpful to relate your tarot knowledge to, or derive more tarot knowledge from, other disciplines...psychology, mythology, literature, and so forth.
Curiosity
Curiosity is important. A good tarot reader aches to know the questions behind the questions. If you're curious enough to probe deeper, it will rub off on your clients. They'll ask richer questions, which will lead to more constructive answers and a more enjoyable interaction for both parties. Your curiosity should also prompt you to explore what's new in tarot. Investigate the latest books, newe4st decks, most recent historical theories, and twenty-first-century applications.
Ethics
The Compleat Tarot Professional is ethical. Be conscious of what you do and don't do as a tarot reader, and be comfortable saying so out loud. As an ethical reader, you quote your fees and stick with them. You're clear about session durations before the appointment begins. The ethical tarot consultant does not predict death or dire illness. Period! Nor does she or he offer unsolicited intuitive information. Several times, people have walked up to me (usually in metaphysical bookstores) to tell me there's a spiritual message that they absolutely have to convey to me. My response has generally been, "No, you don't." It's bad manners and a bad ego trip. Don't do it. Period!
An ethical tarot reader only does what she or he is qualified to do. If you're not a trained lawyer, psychologist, homeopath, accountant, physician, or other non divinatory professional, don't dispense advice that is better left to those who know what they are doing. Keep a list of names and the contact information on non-tarot practitioners so that you can refer querents to these resources as needed.
Ethical tarot consultants do not make judgment calls on a client's choices, behaviors, lifestyle, financial status, sexual orientation, gender, and so forth. It is not your job to convert people to your spiritual or moral worldview, but rather to simply provide helpful information. Neither is manipulation a good thing. To use a reading to push your own agenda will have the Karma Police on your butt so fast, it won't be funny.
An ethical tarot reader knows his or her boundaries around third-party readings. Will you or won't you read for an absent person that a client inquires about?
And lastly, ethics demand that you don't blab about people's sessions behind their backs, no matter how juicy the information may be. Confidentiality is always courteous.
Humility
The ideal professional reader is humble. Anyone who declares that he is 100 percent accurate (whatever "accurate" means) is either lying or deluded. We're human, we make mistakes, and we're not perfect. Get a hard helmet and deal with it. Humility also incorporates the realization that a tarot session is not an epic dog-and-pony show with you as its reigning star. A reading is a co-created experience made up of you, the client, the cards, the topic, the questions or spread positions, and the presence of whatever you believe your source of wisdom to be.
Self-Awareness
A self-aware tarot practitioner is a good tarot practitioner. Work on yourself. Healers and counselors need healing and counseling too. If you plan to be of any use to those who seek guidance in your consulting room, you need to be as clear and healthy for them, and for yourself, as possible. Go to analysis, see a therapist from time to time, talk with another professional, explore your dreams, do honest journal work, go for a massage and energy work. Your clients will thank you for it.
Five Key Questions
Before opening your professional tarot practice, go through the list of questions provided below and respond to them in writing. Answer them in the order presented. Be honest. Ask and answer these five questions once a year to check in with yourself and your business. For extra clarification and inspiration, turn these questions into a tarot spread and pull cards for them. Do this only after you've answered them on your own.
1) Who are you as a person? List your strengths and weaknesses, personality traits, people skills, philosophy of life, likes and dislikes, etc.
2) As a tarot reader, what do you do? What special trait, technique, or tool sets you apart from the rest? What's your consultation style? Some readers are interactive while others do all of the talking. Some are predictive while others are therapeutic. One mat be peppy and another colleague may be very quiet. Some consultants enhance their tarot practice with other modalities in which they've trained, such as flower essences, herbs, essential oils, movement, dance, energy healing, or guided imagery. One might work methodically, card-by-card, while another might simply toss a bunch of cards on the table to trigger psychic insights.
3) What is your mission statement as a tarot professional? Be clear, in one sentence, about why you do this. For example: to facilitate the process of choice through a blend of intuition and intellect; to assist people to see symbolic patterns and how they play out in their lives; to yank people's thinking out of the box in creative yet practical ways.
4) What benefits do/can people derive from a session with you? What's in it for them? Make a list of these benefits. For example, people experience a focused sense of direction; they realize how wise they truly are; clients are forewarned, therefore forearmed; they feel relaxed and lighter; people see their options more clearly, so they can choose more efficiently.
5) Who would benefit from your tarot services? Brainstorm a list of people who would resonate with your personality, your reading style, your mission statement, and your benefits. Take into consideration age, gender, profession, income bracket, hobbies, location, and so forth. A few hours later, go back to your list and narrow it down to three or four. These people are your target market.
Promoting Your Business
Your answers in the previous section are the building blocks for promoting yourself. You now have a target market: a specific set of people you want to reach out to. This will save you a great deal of time, energy and money, because you won't scatter your marketing efforts willy-nilly. You'll be focused. Your business cards, brochures, classified ads, flyers, and display ads will contain words, phrases, and imagery which not only reflect the essence of your services, but will also appeal to the three or four groups you've chosen.
In all of your printed literature, be sure to highlight the benefits, not yourself. The general public is not interested in your life story, scintillating though it may be. Neither do they care that you're a ninety-third generation psychic trained by ascended Pleadean tarot masters at the Egyptian Academy of Timeless Truth. Keep the bio to a maximum of three or four sentences. People want to know what's in it for them!
The general public is also lazy. Don't bombard them with too much text. Keep your written material brief and to the point. Fonts should be clean and easy to read, so no frilly pseudo-Gothic scripts in varying shades of pink. Leave enough blank space to keep it tidy.
Find out where your target people shop, live, eat, and socialize. Leave your printed materials in or near these places. Also find out which publications they read. Place ads in them. Know their favorite radio and television stations. Get yourself an interview on them. What organizations do these people belong to? Send a letter of introduction suggesting that you give a talk at one of their meetings. What causes are close to your potential clients' hearts? Donate gift certificates to their favorite charity auction. Speak at their local library. Be omnipresent!
Setting Fees
This is simultaneously everybody's most and least favorite topic. Some people say that one should not charge a fee for what believe is a "spiritual" service. Fie on them! The day that landlords don't charge rent, supermarkets give away food, and university education is a gratis is the day I won't charge for a tarot consultation.
Part of knowing what to charge is based on your target market's income bracket, but it's also based on whether you're in an urban, suburban, or rural area. It also depends on how much money per year you'd like to earn your tarot work and how many clients you're willing to work with every week. Remember too that the only things people are paying for are your time and expertise, not the content of the reading. A person recently asked me, "What do I get for $150"? to which I responded, "An hour of my time."
A rough formula for setting your fee is:
desired yearly income divided by 52=x
x divided by number of desired number of clients per week = y
round off y to the nearest number ending with five or zero.
Here are a couple of examples. Madeleine decides that her target market includes bank CEOs and architects. She figures that $100 to $200 per hour is an appropriate fee range. Madeleine would like to earn $50,000 per year from tarot consultations and work with up to eight clients per week.
$50,000 divided by 52 = 961.53
$961.53 divided by 8 = 120.19
Madeleine decides to charge $120 for an hour-long consultation.
Herman wants to work with college students and stay-at-home parents. He feels that $60 to $100 per hour is a fair range for his desired clientele. He's willing to work with a maximum of 10 people per week and would like to earn $40,000 per year.
$40,000 divided by 52 = 769.23
$769.23 divided by 10 = 76.923
Herman chooses to charge $75 for his hour-long sessions.
If you'd rather not do all of that math, then a fair price to begin with is one dollar per minute.
Where?
You now have your well-honed tarot skills, promotional material, a set fee, and a clientele. Where do you intend to offer your consultations? I work in my home, seeing clients and students in the living room where I also do sessions over the phone for out-f-province or international querents. Three or four times a month, I offer "meet-the-public" readings at a large metaphysical bookstore. It suits my personality to work from home, with the occasional excursion elsewhere. Many other options exist, though.
The plusses of working at home are that there's no extra overhead to pay, you're in your own familiar space, it's easy to make people feel at home. It's private and safe (assuring confidentiality), and you don't have to schlep across town. Potential pitfalls might be inviting total strangers into your home, not getting out of the house enough, household distractions such as laundry (ha! Not in my house), housemates or significant others who inhibit a sense of privacy and having to keep the place somewhat presentable.
Some readers like to do house calls. It keeps their home address unknown, it gets them out of the house, and they get a better feel for the people in their own surroundings. The down side of house-calls is having to get there, especially if you're in a northern clime, in midwinter. There are also safety issues around visiting a new person's home. If you decide to do house calls, leave the name, number, and address of the person you're visiting with someone you know.
A metaphysical book store has the advantage of being a neutral space. You're more likely to find a sympathetic audience here and meet new people to add to your client base. This option also gets you out of the house. Problems include not being able to charge as much (proprietors want people to buy products, not blow all their money on a reading), being subject to the store's policies and rules, less privacy (even with a curtain or booth), and the fact that metaphysical bookstores occasionally attract whackos who want to explain to you they're the product of a half-human half-Venusian marriage.
Another possible workspace is a coffeehouse or tea room. One of my colleagues does quite well by doing readings in upscale hotels during afternoon tea. It's an enjoyable and elegant way to work. Draw-backs are the lack of privacy and the need to charge a lower fee. One generally can't go as in-depth during these consultations either. No maitre d'hotel wants to see his paying guests breakdown at some profound, soul-shaking discovery.
You could also rent office source shared by another professional - masseur, psychotherapist, astrologer, etc. - on certain days of the week when it's not in use by them. This has the plusses of lower rent, potential for cross-referrals, and having your professional days scheduled in advance. You might also get a receptionist to take appointments for you. The shared office could be a problem if you're there alone, if the other people don't want you to display your brochures or business cards on your days off, if there's a fundamentalist receptionist who wants to burn you and your cards, and if there's very little chance to expand your office hours.
Three final options do not rank among my favorites, but I offer them here anyhow. These are psychic fairs, parties, and psychic phone lines. While there are some very good practitioners involved, these options generally attract a clientele who have a "show me" attitude and who are searching for spooky entertainment or quick fixes rather than tools and processes that can assist them to take more responsibility for their own lives.
Professional tarot reading is a terrific opportunity to share your passion for tarot and your hard-won reading skills with a vast array of interesting and wonderful people. It won't be all almonds and roses, but then what is? It's possible to earn a good living through offering your tarot services, but be prepared to be patient and to work at it. It's not an overnight success story. But the myriad rewards, both internal and tangible, are truly worth it. I wish you well!
If you cant explain it simply, you dont understand it well enough.-- Albert Einstein
Blessings Bright and Dark,
