Starting Your Own Business: Testing Your Deeper Motivation

The website that is never finished. The training you supposedly still need. The moment that is never the right one. If you recognize yourself, you are not alone: it is the usual entourage of the project you do not dare to launch.

What most people expect from a spread on this subject is validation. What it can really bring is different, and more useful.

What a spread will never evaluate

Let us say it right away to avoid any misunderstanding.

It will not say whether your project is viable. No symbol does market research, checks a business model or calculates a cash flow need.

It will predict neither success nor failure, set no date, and say nothing valid about the financial or legal aspects of your business. Those areas belong to qualified professionals, and a serious practitioner will refer you to them.

This limit applies to all material questions, and it deserves to be stated once and for all.

What it really sheds light on: the nature of the brake

That is the legitimate use, and it is valuable.

When a project has been stalled for two years, the reason is almost never technical. It lies elsewhere, and it has a name that has not been said.

Fear of failure. The most admitted, and not always the truest.

Fear of success. Far more common than you might think. If it works, you will have to keep it up, show yourself, take responsibility.

Fear of being judged. By family, former colleagues, those who said it was not sensible.

Perfectionism. The most honorable excuse for standing still. There is always one more thing to improve before launching.

A lack of real desire. Sometimes the project belongs to a self image rather than to a desire. It is uncomfortable to discover, and it saves years.

Flushing out these motives is precisely what a symbolic practice turned toward self observation makes possible, as long as you accept an answer that does not suit you.

A spread to test your motivation

Six positions, defined before shuffling. To be laid out with a cool head, not in a moment of enthusiasm or discouragement.

1. What really drives me toward this project.
2. What I am trying to prove, and to whom.
3. What I would lose if I launched it.
4. What I gain by not launching it.
5. What I concretely lack.
6. The first step, the one that takes an hour.

The fourth position is the most revealing. You always gain something by not acting: security, the comfort of a project still intact, the absence of a verdict.

The sixth is the only one that produces an effect. A reading without a concrete step is useless.

Blocking cards, misinterpreted

When a card of hindrance, waiting or suspension comes out on this subject, the spontaneous reading is catastrophic: the project is doomed.

That is almost always wrong. These cards describe a present state, the one you are already in, and they ask a question: how much longer?

The risk of self indulgence

It is the subject on which people lie to themselves most easily, because the project touches on identity.

Three pitfalls come up: reading cards of movement as green lights, dismissing cards of patience as off topic, and redrawing until you get encouragement.

The safeguards for reading for yourself are essential here: question written down before shuffling, positions set in advance, a second draw forbidden.

The test that never lies

Outside the spread, one question is often enough: what have you done for this project over the last three months?

Not what you thought, read or considered. What you did. A call, a quote, a prototype, a first sale.

If the answer is "nothing concrete", the subject is not the project, it is the brake. And it is the brake that needs working on.

The link with who you are

Behind the project, many people are looking for a direction that would make sense. Is this really my path?

Calculated approaches offer useful readings of temperament on this point, without ever naming a specific activity. The link between life path and calling explains what these frameworks can reasonably offer, and why they do not replace concrete experience.

Faced with a business project, the temptation is strong to ask the cards for a simple green light. Before you do, read our overview of the free yes or no tarot reading method and its limits: an open question will often teach you more.

The Emperor often comes up in these spreads, to remind you of the importance of solid foundations. His meaning in tarot, between stability and structure will help you assess the structure of your project.

If the Moon appears in your spread, it signals a blur to clear up before you launch. See the meaning of the Moon in tarot.

A piece of timing advice

Do the same spread again three months apart, without rereading the first one. Then compare.

If the two readings converge and something concrete has moved forward in between, the project is alive. If nothing has moved and the reading is identical, you have your answer about the nature of the impulse.

To place this approach within everything a perspective brings to a career path, what a spread says and does not say about your professional future lays out the framework. The first phone call, however, will not make itself.