Why Mediumship Is 90% Self-Development

If you've started developing your mediumship, you've probably noticed that most teachers, courses, and books focus on the technical side. The clairs. How to sit in the power. How to give evidence. How to work with energy. All of which matters, and none of which I'm dismissing.

But here's the bit that doesn't get said often enough: the technical stuff is maybe ten percent of what makes someone a working medium. The other ninety percent is self-development. And until you understand that, you'll keep collecting techniques while quietly wondering why your mediumship isn't getting where you want it to go.

I'm going to give you the version of this conversation I have with my students, which is more direct than the version most people get online. Because if you came here looking for the warm reassuring version, this isn't it. The warm version is in some of my other posts. This one is the honest one.

What "self-development" actually means in this context

Before we go anywhere, I need to define what I mean by self-development, because the term has been thoroughly diluted by the wellness industry and now sounds like crystals, affirmations, and journalling prompts.

That's not what I mean.

What I mean is the much less photogenic work of actually dealing with your own humanness. Learning to sit with your own discomfort. Receiving feedback without collapsing. Holding space without making it about you. Trusting your instincts and acting on them. Recognising your own patterns of avoidance. Making peace with the parts of you that are difficult, embarrassing, frustrating, or shameful. Accepting that the doubting voice in your head is never going away and learning to work alongside it.

That's the work. It's harder than learning the clairs. It takes much longer. It can't be cheated. And it's the actual thing that turns a developing medium into a working one.

Why the technical bits are the smaller half

Let me be honest about why I think the technical side is overrated relative to the self-development side.

You can teach a willing person the mechanics of mediumship in a few months. The clairs, the blend, sitting in the power, how to receive and share evidence: all of that has clear principles that can be taught, understood, and practised. It's not trivial, but it's also not the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is the medium themselves. Specifically, who they are when they're working. Their ego, their fear, their need to be liked, their unprocessed stuff, their inability to take critique, their reluctance to sit in someone else's discomfort without trying to fix it, their tendency to make every reading about them.

A medium with brilliant technical skills and unaddressed personal stuff will give wobbly readings forever. A medium with simpler technical skills and proper self-development will give cleaner, deeper, more useful work. The variable that predicts quality isn't usually the technique. It's the human.

This is why two students can sit through exactly the same training, do exactly the same exercises, get exactly the same teaching, and produce wildly different work years later. The teaching wasn't the variable. The willingness to do the inner work was.

Shadow work, properly defined

People in spiritual spaces love the phrase "shadow work" and then nobody explains what it actually means. So here's the definition I work with.

Shadow work is learning to deal with your human.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

It's sitting with yourself in your own company, with no distractions, and noticing what comes up. It's accepting that the embarrassing things you said fifteen years ago will still occasionally wake you at 3am, and that's just part of the deal. It's recognising the patterns you've used to avoid being uncomfortable, and starting to push gently into the discomfort instead. It's understanding that you are a vessel for this work and that the vessel comes with all its dents and chips and quirks, and learning to use the vessel anyway.

It's particularly not the idea that you do some magical clearing work and then your shadow is gone. Spoiler: it isn't gone. The voice that tells you you can't do this never leaves. I've been working as a medium for years and the voice is still there when I walk on stage. I've been at the gym five or six times a week for over two years and the voice still tells me I can't lift the weight when it gets hard. The work isn't to make the voice go away. The work is to stop letting it stop you.

The mediums who develop well are not the ones who've miraculously transcended their humanness. They're the ones who've made friends with it. Including the bits they don't particularly like.

What sitting in discomfort actually means

This one is huge, and most developing mediums don't realise how much it matters.

If you can't sit in discomfort, you can't be a working medium. You will not survive the work.

Here's what I mean. In a real reading, you will get nos. You will have moments where nothing is coming through and the sitter is looking at you expectantly. You will give a piece of information and the sitter will look unimpressed. You will sometimes need to say something they don't want to hear. You will have to hold space while they cry without making it about you. You will sit in front of an audience knowing they're judging your every word. You will, in development, get feedback from teachers that stings.

All of that is uncomfortable. And if you can't tolerate discomfort, you'll do one of two things. You'll start fishing for information to avoid the gaps. You'll start telling sitters what they want to hear to avoid the disappointment. You'll start dressing up your readings with generic comforting statements that fit everyone ("they're around you," "they love you," "they're proud of you") because the specific evidential work is harder and the misses sting more.

That's how mediums become poor ones, by the way. Not by lacking ability. By lacking the capacity to be uncomfortable.

The developing mediums I've watched flourish are the ones who learned to sit with the awkward bits and not flinch. The wobbly silence in the middle of a reading. The moment of "no, that doesn't mean anything to me." The teacher saying something they didn't want to hear. The stranger crying in front of them about loss they couldn't fix.

You can't out-technique an inability to sit with discomfort. You can only develop that capacity, slowly, by repeatedly putting yourself in situations where it's required and finding out you survive.

Learning to receive feedback

This is one of the most important pieces of self-development for any working medium, and it's where a lot of developing mediums get stuck.

Most beginners get into mediumship in lovely encouraging spaces where everyone is kind, everyone validates, everyone says "lovely, lovely, lovely" after any attempt. That's appropriate at the very beginning, because it builds confidence. But it can't be the end of the journey.

At some point, you have to step into spaces where the work is critiqued properly. Where someone tells you exactly what wasn't working. Where you get the equivalent of "I'm not sure about that bit" and "that didn't quite land" and "what were you thinking when you said that?" That kind of feedback is essential for development. You cannot become a good medium without it.

And here's the bit nobody warns you about: you will not enjoy it. It will sting. You will go home and lie awake replaying it. You will at some point sit with a teacher's feedback and think fuck you, what do you know. That's not a sign you've found the wrong teacher. That's a sign the teaching is doing its job.

If you find yourself only able to learn from teachers who tell you you're wonderful, you have a self-development gap rather than a teaching problem. The gap is in your capacity to receive critique without falling apart, and it has to be addressed if you want to work with the public eventually. Sitters don't owe you protection from your own ego. Your teacher's job is to prepare you for that.

The developing mediums I worry about are not the ones who get hurt by feedback. Everyone gets hurt by feedback. I worry about the ones who can't use it. Who collapse, or get defensive, or quit, or start avoiding the teachers who challenge them. Each of those is a self-development issue, and it'll show up in the work for as long as it goes unaddressed.

Holding space without making it about you

This is the one most spiritual people don't realise they're getting wrong.

When a sitter is crying, or sharing something heavy, or in a moment of genuine spiritual unfolding, the loving thing to do is to not put your energy into their space. Not your reassurances, not your hugs, not your own similar experiences, not your "I had something like that happen too." Hold the space. Stay quiet. Let them be in their own process with whatever is happening.

This is the opposite of what most well-meaning people do. They want to soothe. They want to comfort. They want to take the discomfort away. And in doing so, they invade what was supposed to be the sitter's own private moment with their own grief, their own unfolding, their own work.

You can't be a good medium or healer without learning this, and it requires significant self-development to manage, because the impulse to soothe is strong and usually well-intentioned. Your job is to override that impulse, sit still, and trust the process. Trust that the sitter can hold their own discomfort. Trust that spirit knows what they're doing. Trust that your presence is enough without your interference.

The self-development this requires is enormous. You have to be comfortable enough in yourself not to need to fix everything. You have to be settled enough not to flinch when someone else cries. You have to be aware enough of your own energy to keep it out of someone else's process. These are not technical mediumship skills. They're the work of becoming a grown-up.

Trusting your instincts (and acting on them)

This one came up for me recently, and it's worth sharing.

I was running a Facebook group that had become a source of frustration. People posted things they shouldn't. The platform was holding everything back. The energy was off. And I kept tolerating it, telling myself I'd given up enough already, that I didn't need to add another thing to the cut pile. Then one morning, someone broke a rule and I just snapped. I closed the group.

In the moment it felt disproportionate. By the afternoon I realised it was the most aligned thing I could have done. I'd been ignoring my own instincts for months, telling myself it wasn't bad enough to act on, putting up with a misalignment because I didn't want to seem dramatic.

Mediums need to learn to trust their own instincts. To act on them. To not wait until something gets so bad they have no choice. The whole work of mediumship rests on listening to subtle internal signals, and if you've trained yourself to ignore them in your own life, you'll struggle to listen to them when spirit is using them to communicate.

A lot of mediumship development is, weirdly, just learning to listen to yourself. To notice when something feels off. To honour that signal even when it seems disproportionate. To make hard decisions because alignment matters more than comfort.

If you spend most of your life overriding your own knowing, please don't be surprised when mediumship feels difficult. The muscle you're being asked to use is the same one, just turned outward.

The fire that makes you difficult is also what makes you capable

A quick note on a piece of self-development that I think is underrated.

Most spiritual development encourages you to soften. Be calmer. Less reactive. More zen. And there's value in all of that, sometimes. But there's also a real risk of trying to spiritualise yourself out of qualities that are actually serving you.

I'm fiery. I get frustrated. I have a low tolerance for nonsense. I am, frankly, not the calmest person in any room. And the fire is also what built my podcast, what made me speak up against things in the industry that nobody else was challenging, what got Spirit Social built, what made me a teacher who tells students the truth instead of comforting platitudes. The fire is not a flaw I need to work past. It's the thing that lets me do the work.

Self-development is not the same as self-erasure. The goal isn't to become a uniform, smooth, palatable version of a spiritual person. The goal is to know yourself well enough to use the difficult bits intentionally rather than at random. Your fire might be the thing. Your sharpness might be the thing. Your stubbornness might be the thing. The work is to make peace with all of who you are, not to file the awkward edges off.

This matters because a medium who's tried to spiritualise themselves into smooth pleasantness usually ends up bland, vague, and ungrounded. The mediums I most respect have all their edges intact. They've just got them under their own command rather than being run by them.

Where to actually start

If you've read this far and you're wondering how to do this work, here's the honest answer.

You start by spending time in your own company without distractions. Not meditating in a particular way, not journalling a particular prompt, just being with yourself. A walk without headphones. A sit without your phone. Long enough that you actually have to be there with whatever comes up.

You push yourself gently into situations that are uncomfortable. Not dramatic ones. Small ones. The reading you've been putting off. The conversation you've been avoiding. The feedback session you keep rescheduling. The thing your gut tells you to act on that you keep ignoring.

You find a teacher or community that will tell you the truth, not just the lovely bits. Get used to feedback that stings. Notice your reactions to it without collapsing into them.

You stop trying to escape your humanness. Stop trying to ascend it. Stop waiting for it to disappear. Make friends with it, including the bits you'd rather not have. Accept that the doubting voice is permanent and develop a working relationship with it.

You do this alongside the technical work, not instead of it. Both matter. But if you only do the technical work, you'll stay stuck.

A last honest word

Mediumship is not the technique. The technique is the small visible part on top of the actual work, which is mostly about who you are.

This is good news, if you can hear it that way. It means that the time you spend dealing with your own humanness is mediumship development, even when nothing spiritual is happening. The hard conversation you had this week was development. The moment you didn't flinch when someone cried was development. The bit you noticed you wanted to fix and didn't fix was development. The feedback that stung but you sat with anyway was development.

You're already doing it, more than you realise. You just have to keep doing it deliberately. The mediumship will deepen as you do, because the vessel will be cleaner, the energy will be steadier, the work will have somewhere worth landing.

You don't get to skip this part. But you also don't have to be afraid of it. The self-development isn't separate from the spiritual development. It's the same work, looked at from a different angle.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is mediumship more about self-development than technique? Because the medium is the vessel, and the quality of the work depends largely on the quality of the vessel. You can teach technique relatively quickly; building the kind of human who can do the work cleanly, professionally, and sustainably takes much longer. Ego, fear, the need to be liked, inability to sit with discomfort, and avoidance of feedback all show up in readings if they haven't been worked on personally.

What does shadow work actually mean for a developing medium? Shadow work is learning to deal with your humanness. It's sitting with yourself without distractions, accepting that the doubting voice in your head is permanent, pushing into discomfort instead of avoiding it, and making friends with the bits of you that are difficult. It is not the idea that you do a course or a ritual and then your shadow is gone. The shadow doesn't go anywhere. The work is to stop letting it run you.

Can I be a medium without doing personal development? You can practise mediumship, but you'll struggle to do it well or sustainably. Mediums who haven't done the personal work tend to fish for information, give generic comforting messages instead of specific evidence, perform for approval rather than serve the work, and often burn out or lose their connection. The personal work isn't optional if you want longevity and integrity in this field.

Why do mediums need to be able to sit with discomfort? Because the work involves a lot of it. Gaps in readings, sitters who don't like the information, your own no moments, audiences who judge you, teachers who critique you. Without the capacity to be uncomfortable, you'll either fish for information, soften your work into generalities, or quit. The capacity is built by repeatedly facing the discomfort, not by avoiding it.

Is therapy useful for developing mediums? For many, yes. Therapy can be a hugely useful part of the self-development work, particularly if you're carrying unprocessed trauma or significant emotional patterns. It's not a requirement, and not every developing medium needs it, but if something's blocking you in your life it'll probably be blocking you in your work too. Treat therapy as one possible tool among many.

Will my mediumship improve if I work on myself? Almost certainly, yes. The cleaner the vessel, the cleaner the work tends to be. The medium who has done the inner work gives more specific, more grounded, more useful readings than the same medium would have given before. It's the single highest-leverage investment most developing mediums can make.

Why do some mediums seem to skip the self-development part? Some try to, and it usually shows in their work over time. Some are doing the work quietly without labelling it as such. Some get away with it longer than expected because they're naturally well-regulated humans. But almost everyone, eventually, has to face the work. The ones who try to skip it tend to either plateau or burn out.

Is it possible to do too much self-development and not enough mediumship practice? Yes, this is a real trap. Some developing mediums use endless self-development as a way of avoiding the actual practice. The inner work and the technical practice need to happen together, each supporting the other. If you've spent two years doing inner work and not many readings, that's not balance, it's avoidance. Both legs matter.

If you want a longer companion through this kind of inner work alongside your mediumship development, my book "You Are a Medium (You Just Don't Know It Yet)" goes deep into the self-development side of the journey. It's an honest read on the human work that mediumship asks of you, written from my own experience of doing it (and continuing to do it).