This is the part of my work that genuinely breaks my heart. We are losing so many ambassadors for the spirit world. Good ones. Talented ones.

And it's not because they're bad at mediumship. It's because they're perfectionists.

They expect themselves to be flawless. They punish themselves for every no, every missed detail, every reading that didn't feel good enough. And eventually they walk away — convinced they don't have what it takes. After thirty-plus years of teaching, I'd say we lose most of our truly promising mediums exactly this way. Not to lack of talent. To the voice in their own head.

A confession from thirty years in

Here is something I don't think I've ever said quite this plainly: in over thirty years of working for the spirit world, I have never felt like I delivered the perfect message. Never. Every single time I work, I feel I could have given more, gone deeper, caught something I missed.

Back in the day, that feeling used to destroy me. For my first twenty-five years I punished myself after every reading because I thought I was a lousy medium. Today I still get the feeling — but now it lasts half an hour instead of weeks, and I've stopped asking "why am I not good enough?" and started asking "what did I learn?"

The dissatisfaction isn't failure — it's fuel. I need that feeling to keep growing.

The "no" that isn't a no

Most quitting begins with a no. You offer a piece of evidence, the person shakes their head, and something in you collapses: I'm making this all up.

But a no is just more learning. Your mind is interpreting energy — and when you "get it wrong", it often isn't wrong at all. You just don't understand it yet, or your own assumption coloured it. I'm terrified of spiders; if spirit shows me one, my instinct says this person feared spiders — when they may have loved them, kept them, thought they were wonderful. The spider was right. My assumption wasn't. That's not failure. That's the actual mechanism of learning this craft.

And here's the uncomfortable truth underneath it: if you never get a no, you're not stretching. You're circling your comfort zone. I get nos every single time I work, and every single time I learn something new — otherwise I'd still be the same medium I was twenty-five years ago.

Who decides if a reading was good?

Sometimes I finish a sitting feeling disappointed in myself — and the person opposite me is over the moon, crying with gratitude. So who's right? My harsh inner critic, or the human being I actually served?

If the client is happy, who am I to punish myself? Mediumship is easy — it's our mind that's the complicated one. The spirit world shows up. The love comes through. It's our demand for perfection that blocks the flow, not our lack of ability.

What spirit actually asks of you

So if you're developing and you're sitting there tonight thinking you're not good enough — please hear me, because I was you, for decades:

You don't need to be perfect. You just need to be willing. Willing to explore, willing to get the no, willing to keep showing up. That's all spirit asks of you.

Confidence comes after that — through the work, not before it; I've written about how to build it. And if your doubt comes from feeling less as you develop rather than more, that's not decline either — it's a stage almost everyone misreads.

The world doesn't need you perfect. It needs you still here.