I Chose To Walk Two Paths

Blessed With 2 Passions

I believe I am indeed very blessed.  I am not sure how many people can boast of having 2 wonderful “jobs” that they are very passionate about.  I certainly do.  They are not even considered jobs.  I feel fortunate that I get to wake up every day to a life that allows me the opportunities to make use of my skills within these 2 passions.  Together with the support of my family, they create my 10 of Cups moment when I live in joy and gratitude for these gifts as a marketer and a Tarot reader.

I am a marketing professional in my day job, helping to develop end to end demand-led marketing and communication strategies to support my company’s profitable growth.  My other job is a Tarot reader, helping my clients uncover options within their respective situations, so that they could make the right choices to influence the outcomes that they want.

While often, I experience this 2 of Pentacles situation of having to juggle multiple appointments, priorities, projects and commitments, on the whole, I love both with all my heart. 

And here’s where I found similarities in both passions the day I went professional as a Tarot reader, whilst continuing my career as a marketer.

Combining Skills As A Marketing Professional With My Passion As A Tarot Reader

Insights
A marketing communication plan always starts with consumer research.  I am a strong believer of insights-driven marketing plans.  The most important bunch of people involved in the marketing communications process are not the media planners or the creative agencies, but the customers, their needs, their purchase behaviors,  their pain points and any information that could help influence their purchase.

In Tarot, I am involved in research in a few ways.  One is my continuous study of Tarot, examining different aspects of exoteric teachings.  The other, is my “research” about my client.  I often connected with them through an initial numerological assessment that will ascertain some information about their personalities, decisions that they had taken, lessons that they had learnt, the energies surrounding their situation and the response to these energies.  This usually created a more meaningful conversation between my client and I, and the interpretations of their Tarot spread become even more meaningful.

The Brief
Before we got started on the marketing communications planning, we would always create a marketing campaign brief.  This is important as it puts together all information that is necessary for the planning process.  Other than the insights about the campaign target audience, the brief would include the marketing objectives, the media objectives, the business objectives, key messages we want to communicate, as well as the campaign evaluation metrics.

In Tarot, that “brief” is created with that conversation between my client and I.  He or she would provide me with a background of the situation, information about key parties involved in the situation, the past decisions that he or she had made, the outcome or goals that he or she desired.  With this background information, I would overlay her numerological and astrological information before I designed a Tarot spread for the client.

The Plan
The marketing plan always involved the inputs of multiple parties from my internal and external customers when I put ideas through consumer focus groups,  the creative agency, the media agency, the social media agency and the public relations agency.  The plan would  consist of  the full marketing strategy which included, the communications roll out plan, the field marketing plan, the channel marketing plan,  the creative idea and the rationale, the social media campaign ideas and the through-the-line media plan.  This plan allowed the management to make an informed decision about how we sold our products, which target audience to focus on at which stage, how we talked to them in the process and the right time to talk to them.

As a Tarot reader, my plan involved my Tarot spread designed to get insights about the client’s past decisions, current situation, developments around the situation in the next few months, outcome, external and internal influences, fears and hopes and advice.   The interpretation to the spread would provide my client the ability to make informed choices to influence his or her outcome.

Not Too Different

You see, there are very little differences between the two paths that I had chosen to tread.  When my friends asked me if I had to eventually choose a single path, or if both passions conflicted with each other, I always told them that they complemented each other.  With these two paths, there was only 1 single goal -  the goal of doing what is right to cater to the needs of the clients by holding the hands of these clients through each milestone of their lives.

An example of such a milestone is marriage.  As a marketing professional, I sometimes created a marketing plan to sell a product aimed at newly-weds.  As a Tarot reader, I sometimes provided advice with my Tarot cards to a newly married couple hoping to find a positive direction to manage their marital relationship moving forward.

As both a marketing professional and a Tarot reader, I am very humbled that I have the ability to use the skills that the Universe had blessed me with to do something good for my community.  Both these passions provided me with a sense of fulfillment that no money could ever buy.

Note:  The Tarot card image used within this blog post is from the Radiant Rider Waite Tarot deck by Virginijus Poshkus, published by US Games 2003

About The Writer:

The writer of this blog post is a marketeer by trade, and a tarot card reader by accident. She was awarded a Certified Professional Tarot Reader qualification from the Tarot Certification Board of America (TCBA) and is also a certified numerologist.  She currently runs her own Tarot consultancy called Sun Goddess Tarot which is based in Singapore.   A member of the American Tarot Association (ATA) and the Tarot Association of the British Isles (TABI), she is also endorsed as a reader for the Free Tarot Network and is a mentor for the ATA.   She can be contacted at www.facebook.com/SunGoddessTarot or www.sungoddesstarot.com