What I Wish I'd Known When I Started

If I could go back fifteen years and have a coffee with the woman who'd just had her first proper spirit communication and was thinking about starting a development circle, I'd want to tell her a few things. Not to spare her the difficult bits, because she needs them. But to spare her some of the panic, self-doubt, and weird shame she's about to spend a decade carrying.

What follows is the list. Some of it is from places I've documented in my book; some from stories I've never written down. All of it is what I genuinely wish someone had said to me at the start. If you're a developing medium reading this and any of it applies to you, take it. I'd rather it landed with you now than after another five years of working it out the hard way.

It will be much harder than the marketing suggests

I came to this work assuming that if it was for me, the path would be obvious. I thought I'd get clear signs, easy openings, a sense of being divinely guided through every door. The books I read all seemed to describe mediums who had known they were mediums since childhood, who had drifted into their awakening on a fluffy cloud, who'd felt called and welcomed by spirit from the start.

I had none of that.

I had a single profound experience at twenty-nine that blew my world open, followed by years of feeling like I was failing at something I wasn't sure I was supposed to be doing. Circles where I got nothing. Books that made me feel like a fraud. Long stretches where I wondered if I'd imagined the whole thing. Practical chaos that kept interfering with my development. A persistent sense that spirit was either ignoring me or had picked the wrong person.

I want to tell that earlier me, and you if you need to hear it, that the difficulty was normal. It was not a sign that I was wrong about being a medium. It was not a sign that spirit didn't want me. It was just how this work actually unfolds, which is much messier than the curated version online would have you believe.

If you're finding it harder than you thought it would be, you're not failing. You're meeting reality.

The early months of a circle will probably feel terrible

I want you to know this because it almost made me quit before I'd really started.

I sat in my first circle for weeks getting absolutely nothing. Week three I saw the colour red and made up some hammy message about love. Week five I got something about bumps in the road that could have applied to anyone. Week eight I felt goosebumps and then noticed the window was open. I genuinely became the woman who brought biscuits as penance for getting nothing.

Eventually my teacher said "you're trying too hard" and I wanted to reply "I don't know how to try softly." She was right. I was forcing it because I thought every week I had to produce something. Nobody had told me that early circle work is often just sitting there, building familiarity with your own internal space, learning what nothing feels like before you can recognise what something feels like.

If your first circle feels embarrassing, you are not bad at mediumship. You are in the bit where everyone is bad. Some get through it faster than others, but everyone has it. Keep going past the awkward stage; the awkward stage is the stage.

You will quit at least once

This one I want to be properly honest about, because it nearly took me out.

After my first stretch of circle, I quit. The teacher had to take a break for personal reasons and I took it as a sign that spirit had withdrawn the invitation. I packed the whole thing up in my head, told myself I'd imagined the calling, filed away the magic, and went back to my normal life.

Six months passed. I felt little tugs occasionally but talked myself out of them. The 3am wakings, the song that came on when I was thinking about something, the small synchronicities; I batted them all away as overactive imagination. I had decided I wasn't a medium, so I made sure not to notice the evidence against my decision.

Then the teacher messaged to say she was starting a beginners' circle on Thursday mornings. And something in me said yes before my head had finished its objections.

If you're a developing medium and you've already quit once, please don't take that as proof you weren't meant for this. A lot of us quit. Some of us quit several times. The ones who become working mediums are the ones who eventually come back, not the ones who never wobbled in the first place.

The "real friends" will probably not be the people you started with

A small but important thing nobody tells you.

When I started this work, I expected my existing community of friends to come on the journey with me. I imagined them being curious, supportive, asking questions. What actually happened is that some of them quietly drifted away, some of them stayed friendly but visibly uncomfortable, and a few openly mocked what I was doing. One particular friendship group, who I'd thought were the closest people in my life, treated my development as faintly embarrassing and eventually phased me out.

It hurt enormously at the time. I felt like I was losing myself trying to fit into spaces that no longer fit me. I spent too long contorting myself to keep people who weren't really there.

What actually happens, over time, is that you build a new community. Other developing mediums. Working mediums. People in adjacent spiritual fields. People who don't roll their eyes when you mention what you do. That community grows slowly, but it's the one that lasts.

If you're losing friends as you develop, please don't take that as a reason to stop developing. It's part of the realignment. The right people are still arriving.

Your spirit guides are probably nothing like you imagined

I expected my spirit team to be ethereal, wise, slightly disappointed in my humanness, talking in poetic riddles, generally above the ordinary mess of life.

What I got was a team of guides who crack sarcastic jokes in the supermarket, roll their eyes when I ignore their advice, and have absolutely no time for my self-pity. They're loving, fierce, occasionally hilarious, and considerably less precious about the whole thing than I expected.

If your spirit team doesn't sound like the ones in mediumship books, that's because the books often describe one particular flavour and pretend it's the only flavour. Your guides will match your energy. If you're sarcastic, they'll be sarcastic. If you're wordy, they'll be wordy. If you swear, they'll work with that. They meet you where you are, which is a much more useful relationship than the reverent stained-glass version you might be expecting.

Don't try to make your guides match the version in someone else's book. Let them be who they are.

"Nice" mediums are not necessarily good mediums

This took me longer than it should have.

I assumed that the spiritually advanced version of being a medium involved being calm, gentle, soft-spoken, never frustrated, never irritated, dressed entirely in flowing fabrics, with a wind chime in every window. Spiritual people were nice, in a particular way, and I needed to become nice in that particular way too.

I'm not. I never have been. I'm fiery, opinionated, sweary, low-tolerance, sometimes too direct. For years I thought this was a flaw I needed to spiritualise myself out of.

What I eventually learned is that the fire was the engine. The same fierce energy that made me hard work in some contexts was what made me a good teacher, a useful podcaster, someone willing to challenge dynamics in the industry that needed challenging. Trying to file off my edges to look more spiritual would have produced a smaller, blander, much less useful medium.

If you're not the soft, gentle, lavender-and-essential-oils version of a spiritual person, please don't try to become it. Whoever you actually are is the medium you're supposed to become. Edit yourself into your own potential, not someone else's aesthetic.

Healing isn't fixing, and you can't push it on people

I learned this one the embarrassing way.

I'd just qualified as a Reiki practitioner, and I was full of myself about it. There was a woman at the school gates, a friend of a friend, who had a chronic problem with her feet and was visibly in pain a lot of the time. I cornered her one day and offered her free healing. She wasn't sure. I bulldozed her into yes. She said "if you think it'll help," and I took that lukewarm maybe as a sacred commission.

I prepared like she was royalty. Hoovered twice. Lit a candle. Folded blankets so neatly you could've measured them with a set square. Gave her the most powerful healing session I'd ever channelled. Felt completely smug about how amazing I was being.

That night I saw her on Facebook out on the town doing tequila shots.

I sulked. Then I cried. Then my spirit team told me, very directly, that I had completely overridden her free will. She hadn't asked for healing. She'd said "if you think it'll help" out of politeness. That's not consent; that's social courtesy. I had decided I knew what was best for someone else and bulldozed in, and the tequila shots were her exercising the agency I'd ignored.

I want you to learn this faster than I did. Healing, mediumship, spiritual support, all of it requires the other person to genuinely want it and be ready for it. You're not their saviour. You're a service they can use if they choose to. The moment you decide you know what someone else needs, you've stopped doing healing work and started doing ego work. Step back. Let people come to you when they're ready.

You don't need a special calling to do this

I spent years waiting for spirit to confirm I was supposed to be a medium. I wanted the trumpeting angels, the dream where my guides told me directly, the unmistakable sign that this was my path.

I never got any of it.

Every time I asked spirit if they wanted me to do this work, the answer was the same: "Do you want to do this? We will love you whatever you are." Not the divine commission I'd been waiting for. Not a celestial job offer. Just a calm reflection back at me that the decision was mine.

What I now understand is that you don't become a medium because spirit chose you. You become a medium because you choose this work, repeatedly, in the face of all the reasons not to. The choosing is the calling. The willingness to keep doing the work is the qualification. There isn't a separate moment of being anointed, and waiting for one will keep you waiting forever.

If you're a developing medium hoping to be told you're supposed to be doing this, that confirmation isn't coming. The fact that you're drawn to the work and willing to do it is the answer. Choose it. Keep choosing it. That's how this works.

Saying yes to please an audience is not the same as saying yes

I learned this through someone else's reading.

My friend Linda and I went to a small demonstration in a village hall. The medium picked Linda, opened with a couple of strong-sounding details, and Linda said yes. Then the medium kept going. More details. More yeses. By the end of the link, the medium had given Linda a tweed-jacket grandfather, a perm-and-pearls grandmother, ballroom dancing on Saturdays, a privet hedge, a gold watch, the whole tapestry. Linda said yes to all of it. The audience was delighted. It looked like a beautiful reading.

On the drive home I asked her, casually, "So who were they?"

Linda said, "I've got no idea."

She'd said yes because everyone was staring at her, because she didn't want to be the one making it awkward, because she couldn't bear the social weight of disappointing the medium in front of an audience. Every one of those yeses was a politeness yes, not a soul yes. The medium hadn't connected with anyone; she'd performed connection, and her sitter had performed receipt.

What I took from that drive was that as a medium, my job isn't to collect yeses. It's to find the right person and make sure the information actually lands with them, not just sounds like it lands. The wobble of a sitter going "I'm not sure about that" is worth more than ten polite yeses, because the wobble is honest.

If you're a developing medium, please don't optimise for getting yeses. Optimise for the felt yes, the one where there's a click in the centre of the room and you can both tell it's right. The other kind isn't real. It's just everyone being British about it.

You won't outgrow the doubt

Probably the single thing I most wish I'd known.

I assumed for years that there was a future version of me who would feel confident in this work. Who would walk on stage without nerves. Who wouldn't hear the imposter voice. Who would just know she could do it.

That version doesn't exist. She isn't coming. I am, by any reasonable measure, a working professional medium now, and I still feel terrified before I walk on stage. I still doubt myself. I still have the voice that says "you're making this up, you can't really do this, this is the moment everyone finds out." The voice has not got any quieter with experience.

What has changed is my relationship to it. I now know that the voice is part of the architecture, that everyone has it, that it isn't a signal I should stop. I work alongside it. It pipes up, I notice it, I carry on. That's it. That's the great secret of mediumistic confidence, which is barely confidence at all. It's a willingness to keep going despite continuing uncertainty.

If you're waiting to feel confident before you do this work, please stop. The feeling isn't coming. What you can have instead is a track record of doing it anyway, and that turns out to be enough.

Most of this work is on yourself, not on spirit

The biggest surprise of the whole journey.

I came to mediumship expecting to learn about spirit. To understand how the other side works. To get good at receiving information. To develop my clairs. Most of which I've done, but none of which has been the main work.

The main work has been on me. Learning to sit with myself in my own company. Learning to be vulnerable in front of strangers. Learning to receive feedback without collapsing. Learning to trust my own gut even when it disagreed with my wallet. Learning to hold space without trying to fix everyone. Learning that the fire I'd tried to extinguish was actually the engine. Learning that the doubt wasn't a problem to solve, just a permanent companion.

Spirit have been with me the whole time, doing what they do. The work has all been on the human, by the human, for the human. The clearer I get with myself, the cleaner the work flows. The more honest I am with myself, the more honest the readings become. There isn't a mediumship development that runs parallel to your life development. They're the same thing.

If you're approaching mediumship as a set of techniques to learn, please reframe it. It's mostly a self-development practice that produces, as a side effect, the capacity to do mediumship. The order matters, and most teachers don't say it clearly enough.

A last honest word, to you and to me

If you'd told me, at the start, what was coming, I'd probably have made a different decision. I'd have looked at the years of difficulty, the quitting, the friends lost, the embarrassments, the painful Reiki lesson, the long stretches of self-doubt, and concluded that it wasn't worth it.

I would have been wrong. It was worth it. The medium I am now, the work I do, the community I've built, the way I think about my own humanness, none of it would exist if I'd taken the easier path. The slaps that hurt the most are the ones I most needed.

But I'd still have wanted someone to tell me what was real. Not to spare me, just to spare me the extra layer of confusion about whether my experience was normal. Other people had similar journeys, and knowing that earlier would have saved me a lot of unnecessary self-flagellation.

If you're a developing medium, here's the version of that I can offer you. What you're going through is probably normal. The doubt is structural. The mess is part of the work. The wobbles don't disqualify you. The slaps that feel personal are usually part of the curriculum. And the version of you on the other side of this is genuinely worth the trouble, even if you can't see her yet.

Keep going. Or stop and start again. Either way, the choosing is what makes you a medium.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is mediumship development so much harder than people expect? Because the path is consistently presented as a calling, a gift, or an effortless awakening, when in practice it's a years-long skill development that runs through your own humanness, requires significant self-work, and includes plenty of moments where it'll feel like you can't do it. The difficulty is normal. It isn't a sign you're wrong about being a medium.

Is it normal to want to quit during mediumship development? Yes, very. Most developing mediums hit at least one point where they seriously consider quitting, and many of us actually do quit at some stage before coming back. The wobble is not a sign that this isn't your path. The willingness to choose it again, even after walking away, is part of what makes a working medium.

Will I lose friends as I develop my mediumship? Some, probably. Not everyone in your current circle will be comfortable with what you're doing, and some friendships drift, some go quiet, and a few may end. New community arrives in time, made up of other developing mediums, working mediums, and adjacent people who understand the work. The realignment is real, and it usually settles into something better, not worse.

Will I ever feel confident enough to do this work easily? Mostly no, and that's normal. Most working mediums still feel doubt, nerves, and uncertainty before working, including very experienced ones. What changes is your relationship to those feelings. You stop waiting for them to leave and start working alongside them. The confidence you're looking for is actually a track record, not a feeling.

What's the biggest mistake new developing mediums make? Assuming that the technical side of mediumship is the main work. The technical side matters, but most of what determines whether you become a working medium is the self-development running underneath it. Most people who get stuck are stuck for personal reasons, not technical ones, even though it usually looks like the opposite from inside.

Should I expect my spirit guides to feel particular or special? They'll feel like a version of you, but wiser. They tend to match your energy, your humour, your way of being. If you're expecting solemn poetic guides and you're a sarcastic person, you may be surprised. Trust what arrives, even if it doesn't match the version in books. The mismatch with expectation is one of the most common signs you're actually perceiving something real.

What should I focus on most in my first year of development? Sitting in the power regularly, building familiarity with your own internal space, getting comfortable with not knowing what you're doing, and being in a supportive enough environment that you can survive the early embarrassment. Resist the urge to collect lots of courses; the first year is mostly about settling, not about technique.

Will my mediumship change me as a person? Yes, though probably not in the ways you expect. You may not become more zen, more peaceful, or more conventionally spiritual. What's more likely is that you become more honest about who you actually are, more comfortable with your own humanness, and more willing to take up space as the slightly messy person you've always been. The change is towards yourself, not away from yourself.

If you want a much longer companion through these realities, my autobiography "Spiritual Slaps Volume 1: Beginnings" tells the whole story of my development in honest detail, including all the wobbles, slaps, and embarrassments this article only touches on. Written for the developing medium who suspects this work might be harder than they were told, and wants company on the path.