In the realm of personal growth and coaching, tarot is an under-utilized tool to gain wisdom and insight. If you’re not familiar with tarot,  the mention of the word “tarot” likely conjures images of crystal balls, fortune tellers, or witches. But the reality is that the cards are merely a coaching tool that we can use in a form of coaching called metaphor coaching, to deepen self-reflection and significantly speed up the coaching process. 

A tarot deck consists of 78 cards that are rich in symbolism and imagery and archetypes. Without even knowing anything about tarot, you can look at a card and intuit a meaning. There’s a real familiarly and stickiness to the metaphors and archetypes in tarot. The cards are reflections of all the joys and heartbreaks and challenges and changes we all go through. They speak to the human condition in such a powerful and easily accessible way, that they are the perfect tool to use in metaphor coaching and in self-coaching.

Metaphor coaching is an approach to coaching that harnesses the power of metaphors to facilitate a coaching process. Now that sounds very formal. Basically it’s distinct from other coaching methods in that it introduces a third party, the tool (whatever you may be using) as a way to gain perspective and encourage transformational change. 

Metaphor coaching leverages pictures and symbols, such as we find on tarot cards, to aid individuals in their journey of self-discovery and personal growth. It helps the client draw parallels between two seemingly unrelated concepts, so they can connect the dots and see the bigger picture much faster and more easily than you can through traditional coaching. It helps introduce more possibilities for action and can help the client shift their perspective so profoundly and so quickly, which is really unlike any other type of coaching out there.

Let’s talk about the 5 main benefits of tarot-based coaching: 

• Greater Self-Awareness: Tarot-based coaching is an introspective process and you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and underlying beliefs. 
• Increased Clarity: While the cards don’t provide you with answers, they provide you with the right questions so that you can access the answers that are always within you. 
• Improved Communication: Using the cards as metaphors, you’re able to draw connections between ideas and challenges and patterns in your life and see the bigger picture. You’ll be able to put words to what you previously couldn’t describe.
• Deepened Self-Trust: Metaphor coaching with tarot is all about tapping into your own inner wisdom and intuition. Once you start to recognize that all the information you need is within you, and you now have this tool to be able to access it, you don’t need to go searching for outside sources of validation, you can make better decisions faster, and ultimately you can live more authentically.
  
  

Quick Transformational Growth: Coaching for transformational growth usually takes a long time, but using tarot as a tool allows that transformation to happen faster. I hear it from every client that I work with and I’ve seen it in my own experience self-coaching with tarot. It introduces a third party into the coaching container that facilitates so many more perspectives and possibilities for action.

In a tarot reading, there is an assumption that the cards have definitive meanings and that the reader has some type of mystical ability to pull a card that connects to a truth about the client. Usually this means telling the client something about their future. That’s not what metaphor coaching with tarot is. In a metaphor coaching process, both the coach and the tool (in this case, tarot cards) are there to elicit wisdom from the client (not from beyond) and create space for shifts in perspective by asking questions and providing reflections. Neither the coach nor the cards provide answers. While I personally think any coaching process benefits from bringing in a spiritual component, especially since the coach, the client, and the tool all exist in an energy field, there’s nothing particularly mystical about tarot-based coaching.

I’m not a medium, a tarot reader, or a witch. I’m a coach. I facilitate transformational change through conversations with my clients, and I use tarot cards as a tool to do that more effectively. While I am spiritual, and I do believe that there is meaning behind the randomness of choosing a particular card at any given point in a conversation, I don’t believe that it’s any mystical power of mine that is driving the process.

There have been several papers published about metaphor coaching. There was one in the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching in 2021 that looked at how metaphor may play a significant role in persuasion and developmental change processes; in relationship building; in challenging assumptions; and in introducing new frames of reference when used in coaching. The team did an analysis on 90 source documents looking at the use of metaphor in coaching, and it revealed some interesting findings. 

“Metaphor seems to be intimately involved with the processes of goal-setting, challenging the client with the status quo, and in designing or visioning a desirable future outcome”

“Metaphor allows a coach to enter into this shared world and/or reflect back to communicate understanding of the client’s developing situation.”

“Metaphor can be used to both neutralize difficulties and provide motivation to provide an effective way for the coach-client to connect on a deep level to support and safely challenge the client’s meaning-making to achieve results.”

“Artful use of metaphor serves to engage client attention on a deep (unconscious) level in co-constructed exploration. Meaning-making and the ambiguity can then be experimented with in the safety of the figurative space.”

“Self-discovery/meaning-making are the result of this supported metaphoric inner world exploration. There is a perceived need within coaching and in developmental coaching, specifically to help people express themselves with more authenticity and to have more authentic dialogue. Perhaps the role of metaphor in this regard has been somewhat unrealised to-date.”

The ultimate conclusion of the paper:

“It is clear from this research that metaphor has a significant role in so-called helping conversations concerning transformation and transformative learning.”

Tarot-Based coaching is a process of coaching the whole person. It works for all kinds of challenges, personal and professional, because this type of coaching operates under the assumption that your mind, body, soul, thoughts, emotions, behaviors, work, family… all of it makes up who you are as a human being and can’t be coached to in a vacuum. That’s part of why we can potentially make so much progress so quickly with tarot-based coaching, because everything is on the table, everything is fair game, and you can start to see the connections and the patterns that permeate through all area of life and when you can transform or shift those, it doesn’t just affect one part of your being, it actually impact who you are and how you show up in the world.

Sorry to disappoint you, no. The cards don’t give you answers, they give you the questions. They provide new perspectives and can take the conversation in unexpected directions. The cards don’t have magical powers and sadly, neither do I. The answers, the wisdom, the insight… it all comes from without YOU.

Self-Coaching is the process of having a conversation with yourself. The hardest part about self-coaching is that you need to be fairly skilled at being able to take a third party perspective and remove yourself from the story and the emotion to provide enough space for you to raise good questions and reflect. This is why a third party tool is really useful to help facilitate a self-coaching process. So a common one is journaling, and journal prompts. The prompts facilitate the self-exploration process and you’re communicating with yourself through writing, gaining insights, and oftentimes it can help you get a new perspective. 

In my opinion, tarot cards are the ultimate self-coaching tool. The symbolizing and the archetypes are easy to intuitively understand, you can build a relationship with the cards and now you have this whole language through which you can communicate with your inner knowing and access that wisdom within you.

You do not need to be spiritual for tarot-based coaching to work for you. 

We’re not using tarot as a tool of divination, it’s not a fortune telling thing. Tarot-based coaching is a form of metaphor coaching, which by itself has nothing to do with spirituality. 

That said, my ideal client and the clients I think this works best for are those who have a willingness to bring their spirit into the conversation. I mean we’re talking about accessing the wisdom within you, so there needs to be some level of belief in what you can’t explain, in something beyond your physical being. If we invite spirit into the conversation with mind and body, we’re bringing in language, and emotion, and somatics, and spirit, then we just have a much richer field from which to surface insights and perspectives, and ultimately lead to transformational change.

Tarot-based coaching is best for anyone who believes that their professional growth is inseparable from personal development. It is a whole person approach to coaching, and it doesn’t operate within the silos that exist for leadership coaching, or life coaching, or spiritual advising, it’s all of it. It’s all of YOU. Tarot-based coaching is a form of metaphor coaching where we’re using the cards as a way of accessing your inner wisdom, so this type of coaching is for anyone who wants to build self-trust, confidence, grow professionally, bring their career or life to the next level, improve relationships with others, get to know themselves better. Whatever wisdom you have locked away, tarot-based coaching can help pull that magic out of you.

While I think almost anyone can benefit from tarot-based coaching, there are a few exceptions. First and foremost, this process does not work if you’re not coachable. If you’re not willing to change, if you’re not curious about who you are, if you’re not open to new possibilities, you’re not going to get any benefits from tarot-based coaching. 

Also, this doesn’t work if you don’t have a belief in something bigger than you. There needs to be some level of trust that you were meant to receive the cards that you get in any given session. That’s a fairly low spiritual bar that most people who are interested in this tend to meet.