Once upon a tarot

People ask me all the time how I came to tarot so I thought I’d share my story in a post.

I’ve always been drawn to what you might call the spiritual realm: psychic readings, angels, reincarnation, clairvoyance...whatever you want to call it or however you want to frame it, I was all over it. My favorite authors were Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Rice, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stephen King. I watched The Twilight Zone, Circle of Fear, and any other show about “spooky stuff” I could find.

Years ago, I bought a tarot deck with the intent of learning about the cards. But life and work got in the way and it ended up collecting dust on a bookshelf. In the back. Behind a 1994 edition of Financial Planning for Dummies.

A few years back, while doing some much-needed book purging, I came across the deck and felt an intense pull from it. This time, I stuck with it, devouring tarot books, blogs, websites, videos, and online courses as fast as I could find them.

The more I learned, the more fascinated I became. The more I practiced, the more confident I grew. The more people I read for, the more positive feedback I got. A tarot reader was born, and I never imagined I would love it so much. It wasn’t long before

I realized I hadn't found a completely new skill. I'd found a new place to use the ones I'd been developing for thirty years.

That’s because my advertising career centered around uncovering what’s important to a business or a brand and disregarding all the extra stuff that didn’t really matter in order to get to the heart of things. Whether you’re selling data protection software, fried chicken, or hydrogen batteries, you have to be able to tell your story: who you are, who you’re talking to, what you’re offering them, and how it helps them. That’s a lot of articulation, and it’s not nearly as easy as it may seem. It’s about telling a story.

To tell that story with any effectiveness for my clients, I learned to listen to them. Like, really listen. Not only to their words but also their underlying truths. Does the brand really mean what they said or are they actually trying to say something else? Do they truly believe their own words or is it empty jargon? Can they figure out their own motivations? I used to call this process of articulating the brand “corporate therapy” because that’s really what it amounted to.

These days, I turn these same listening and storytelling skills towards tarot because, for me, telling the story revealed in the cards is the beating heart of tarot...and of our lives. Helping people find that story—the common thread that runs through everything—is incredibly gratifying. Sometimes it feels like a puzzle. Or, as Michelangelo said of sculpting, one simply has to take away the parts of the marble slab that aren’t David.

So it’s really not as much of a stretch going from selling sauvignon blanc to reading tarot. For me, it’s a natural progression. A tarot reading always reveals a story in the cards. It’s up to me to see that story, find its center, and help clients see what they’re meant to see. It’s a real high to sit across from someone and watch the lightbulb go off as they make connections, see patterns, and absorb lessons.

That's how I found tarot. Now let’s discover the story in your cards.