I probably needn’t point it out, but I will, that making their future all too beautiful, too wonderful, too glorious, too talented, too lucky, too filthy rich, too sexually attractive and far, far too healthy is stupid. You will never see that client again – or her friends, probably. I am sure that you get the general idea.
You should not lose sight of the one difference between our advice and that of their close friend Betty. Betty isn’t a gifted sensitive or a Tarot Advisor (with capital letters!). Betty may even give pretty good advice, but we have that magick ingredient – the client’s belief.
It’s a close cousin of the placebo effect, as far as I have been able to analyze it.
It is a very powerful magick, and therefore our words to our clients are much more meaningful. After all, we “know things,” as more than one client has explained it to me. There are psychological forces at work in a well-structured reading that can build on this belief/placebo effect, small step by small step, until you can have them
believing your reading to be nearly miraculous.
Client Commitment and Involvement
The fact that the client has made the arrangements to walk through your door means that he/she is now already partly committed to regarding your advice to be more valuable than advice they might receive from a friend. They, like all people, like to seem consistent. People value consistency, and all cultures expect it from its members.
Consistent with coming to see you is the belief that your reading will be worth what they pay for it.
Or, to put it differently, to justify the time and money that they spent coming to see you, they are more likely to see their own judgment as good, i.e., you are a great Tarot reader. If you are a crummy rip-off, that means that they’ve foolishly wasted their time and money, and that their judgment was bad, a feeling that people do not like to experience. They will change their opinions more often, and to a greater degree than might be expected, to avoid feeling wrong, but you must do a good reading!
How often, during an election year, have you seen people who were unsure about which candidate to vote for? They voice the arguments for one candidate, and then arguments for another. The following day, they’ve switched positions entirely.
Over the weeks, they may flip-flop their opinions back and forth a number of times.
Then comes Election Day. Have you noticed that, after they’ve voted for a candidate, there is no more uncertainty? Now that they’ve committed themselves,
they repeat only the arguments for their candidate and the arguments against the others. Now ‘their’ candidate is the best, brightest, most honest, most charismatic, most experienced, etc. They almost become fanatical! This is another example of how a person, once they have made a commitment, will do and say a lot of things to justify that choice.
While a commitment made privately, only to themselves, can be a strong force, a person who has publicly committed to something is even more driven to justify their choice. They are far less likely to change their direction. Smoking clinics know this, as do diet clinics.
Some psychologists see this attempt at consistency as one of the major shapers of human behavior. Certainly, inconsistency is universally viewed negatively.
People who ‘shilly-shally’ with their opinions are judged to be stupid, impressionable, weak, and so on.
Of course, when you think about it, a race of beings whose opinions and judgments changed hourly or daily probably wouldn’t have survived to this day.
Likely it’s a part of what makes us human, a part of our mental wiring.
Once a person has made up his/her mind about some issue, most do not easily go back and revise, update, or double-check their past judgments. It’s fairly axiomatic that many of our inner, unexamined viewpoints were formed back in our teenage years, or even earlier. People get into all sorts of psychological troubles by reacting to some new, troubling situation with responses that were learned long, long ago, in some other situation.
I call this mode of non-thinking behavior ‘being on autopilot.’ Everyone does it to some extent, and a lot of people live much of their lives this way. They decided that they “didn’t like” spiders when they were seven, and they still shudder and scream in terror over the tiny, harmless bugs when they’re fifty!
In your own life, I am sure that you can pick out a number of examples when someone was unsure, but the moment that they committed themselves to a course of action, there was no longer a shred of doubt within them. Whether it was a lousy marriage, a rotten job, a used car, or a losing football team, once they made a choice, they went to great lengths to justify, alibi and make excuses about it. All of this is simply an effort to make them feel that they have made the right choice!
So, what were the previous four or five paragraphs all about?
To convince you that if you can create ways for your clients to commit themselves to your reading, they will convince themselves to believe, more and more and more, that you are very, very good!
What I said earlier about your client choosing to come to your table for a reading might seem clearer now. They have trekked to you, which is a form of commitment, certainly. As I have said, I think that the client’s belief is the major factor in the success of a Tarot reader. Wouldn’t it be nice to give some sort of belief test, and thereby weed out the cynics and critics ahead of time?
In a way, this has already been done. People who feel that Tarot readers, palm readers, and rune throwers are all weirdos don’t go for readings, and those who walk to your table have already been through a self-selection process for you! This gives you a partial success even before you begin, and you must not disappoint those clients. You must do everything you can to reinforce their decision to come to you.
Let me give you some more ideas on how you can do this.
First, have them pay you for the reading before you give it!
Remember the old Gypsy in the movies?
“
First you must cross my palm with silver. . .
” Note that she said “First.”It was no accident. Before they have paid, how much is the reading literally worth? Well, consider that until you are paid, you are doing it, for the moment, for nothing. That, then, is its worth. After they pay, however, the reading has a definite value, and it will be more meaningful! Do you see that? Do you understand that expensive medicine often seems to work faster and better than cheap stuff?
People who know nothing at all about art will seriously stand very still and study a $250,000 painting far longer than one that costs $400. The more difficulty, time and expense involved in obtaining something, the more it will be valued. If you could get a reading on any street corner for fifty cents, do you think many people would find the readings to be very meaningful or valuable?
How do they pay first? In the case of psychic fairs, this is usually taken care of through the registration process. They go to a central table and arrange for a reading from a particular reader. The reading is paid for at that time. They are given a card or some sort of receipt with the reader’s name and an appointment time on it. That solves that.
I don’t always insist on payment first in a one-on-one reading; like everything else, it depends. I prefer being paid beforehand. Even at a house party, I like the envelope from the hostess when I arrive:
“
I am giving you something of value, something rare and difficult to find. It’s all a matter of balance. You must give me something in return. Everything costs something, after all
.”A good salesman would, no doubt, do the pricing part of a twenty-minute reading this way:
Quote them a price for a full hour reading first, even if you have no desire to take that much time, or rarely do so. It’s a high price, although not outrageous, but then you let them know that your schedule is too busy at the moment, so you could give them the shorter reading (not so many complex layouts) for X dollars, which is just under half of the full hour price.
This, of course, is what you were after all along. You have, along the way, shown that you can and do get more money, but you will fit them in with a less expensive (though a bit shorter) reading, almost as though it’s a favor, but not quite.
You present it as though you are trying very hard to be accommodating. You now have sort of done them a favor, and they aren’t paying the high fee mentioned at first.
See how you are willing to help? How can they resist being appreciative?
In all those mythical stories about going to the wizard or the old witch, keep in mind that the journey was always long, difficult and dangerous. Gurus always seem to live on mountaintops, don’t they? The advice the traveler gained after the long, exhausting journey was, correspondingly, seen as much more valuable and magick.
Near the end of the Wizard of Oz movie, the good witch is asked why she didn’t tell Dorothy the secret of the ruby slippers before the long and dangerous trip to the Emerald City. She tells them the truth: “Why, she wouldn’t have believed me.”
One of the cults that I researched in the early Seventies required that potential members write a five hundred word essay on occult and mental powers before they could be considered seriously for membership. I asked the leader why this was done, and he explained, rather candidly, “First, it weeds out the lazy and the dilettantes.
Second, my teachings are far more wonderful after they do all that work.”
This idea came in handy once when I was pestered by a bright, but socially awkward young man who wanted me to ‘teach him sorcery’. I haven’t any idea why he thought I knew such things, but he was persistent, and grew bothersome. I told him that I just might consider it, if he wrote me a thousand word essay on sorcery first. I never did, thank the gods and goddesses, see him again. Can you imagine how wonderful a reading might seem if the client had to write a five hundred word essay first? Talk about commitment – that would be a client who really wanted a reading!
Over the past two years or so, I have looked over my reading structure from the point of view of all the latest psychological information available. I wanted to see
what steps I might add, or delete, or what factors I could use to further involve the client, something they must do to further commit themselves.
For one thing, I have them shuffle the cards a lot. Every reader does it, as far as I know, but I’ve never timed them. I have my clients mix the cards, while I am telling them that they should focus on their life and frame, in their minds, the questions they want to ask the cards. I go on just a bit, allowing them to shuffle for maybe a full minute. Not only are they personalizing the eventual card layout, but they are also becoming involved. They are becoming participants!
When there is time, I will sometimes spread the cards face down on my tablecloth, making the three long rows of cards.
“I would like you to use your left hand – or your right, if you’re left handed – and hold it like this, palm-down, over the cards. Not quite touching, but close.
Now slowly move it over the cards to the end and then back again. When you get a feeling – an attraction, perhaps – or when one card just seems right or interesting, would you slide it over here toward me, please.
Let your intuition guide you. Don’t consciously select cards, that’s why I wanted you to use your unfamiliar hand. Just do what feels right, considering the questions that you brought with you today. This one?
Excellent; now another. Just use your own psychic abilities, let your intuition choose for you. Another one, good . . . don’t force it, allow your hand to choose freely . . . ah, three that time . . . good . . . two more . . .”
I allow them to go on like this for fifteen or eighteen cards, which is why this is only good for situations that allow for it.
“I didn’t tell you how many at the outset; I didn’t want your mind cluttered up with counting and numbers. . .”
I like that line for some reason!
My point of view on this is that most of the people who go to psychics wish that they were psychic, too. Most readers understand this. If you are a believer in
‘powers,’ then the next natural step is that you would like to have such powers. That’s why all of us tend to confirm that our clients have quite strong latent, undeveloped psychic powers (“. . . and not all that undeveloped, either”).
I know that they love playing the psychic, if only for a few moments, with me!
Some of them make a rather big production number of choosing those cards, with eyes closed, hands twitching, etc. The only drawback is that it can be time consuming
if they’re really into their act. Yet, keep in mind, the more seriously they choose, the more significance they will find in the layout.
The reading has become something in which they are actively participating!
They chose the cards that I will interpret for them.
They are far more committed now. Think about this: the more often you can get them to do some small, easy thing in the reading process, the more they will believe in it. Re-read that sentence. Every first-year psychology student understands that a participatory experiment has far more personal impact than one simply read about or watched on a video tape.
I will show you a few more magick tools to make you far, far better in your advice giving than friend Betty, or almost anyone else the client knows.