What Confidence Really Looks Like in Mediumship

People often assume that the hardest part of mediumship is learning how to connect, how to open yourself up, quiet your mind, and let your intuition become the language between you and the other side. In my experience teaching this work for over twenty years, that part isn't actually the challenge. Intuition can be taught. What's much harder to teach, and what I believe is the real work of mediumship, is confidence. And for me, that has always required a huge helping of faith.

Confidence is what allows you to walk into a room full of strangers with zero expectations and trust that not only can you make a connection, but that you can bring it through clearly enough for someone else to understand it. It's not about having to be perfect. It's about trusting yourself enough to say what you're receiving, even when the person in front of you isn't giving you anything back.

This is part of why I never encourage students to practice on family and friends. It feels safer, but it isn't more validating. If anything, it's less. When you already know someone, both of you start to wonder whether what's coming through are real messages or just familiarity. A blank slate, a total stranger, is what actually builds the muscle. It forces you to trust the message on its own, without anything else propping it up.

I want to share a story that tested that trust more than almost any other night of my career.

It was over a decade ago at an in-person event I call An Evening with Spirit. I still host these to this day. It is a live event where I am making connections for members of the audience with their loved ones in spirit. That night, I brought through many messages of love. But I also connected with three different women, and each one of those readings felt, in the moment, like things were going wrong.

The first woman was validating everything I brought through, until she suddenly stopped. No matter what I said next, she wouldn't accept it. I checked in with spirit again and again, and the information kept coming through clean and accurate, but she just wasn't taking it. At a live event, you have to keep moving, so I did. But spirit kept pulling me back to her, again and again, at different times throughout the night. Right before I closed the event, they led me back to her one final time, and I said the word Bermuda. That was the moment everything shifted. She accepted all of the messages and thanked me. I was more than confused at how that all played out.

The second woman had a mother sitting beside her who stayed completely silent through the whole reading. I was bringing through very specific information about her father's side of the family, people who lived overseas, people she didn't have much history with. She couldn't validate most of it in the moment. Her mother could have, but didn't say a word.

The third woman's father was coming through insistently about her vehicles. Check the tires when you get home, he kept saying. Are any bald? Low? Need rotating? It didn't feel dramatic. It felt like maintenance, like a heads-up. She was testing me that night, pushing back on almost everything I said, and I genuinely didn't understand why.

By the end of the evening, I felt the heaviness of those interactions. Not because I doubted the accuracy of what came through (I didn't), but because none of it had landed the way it usually does. I remember thinking maybe I should stop doing these live events altogether and just stick to one-on-one sessions and teaching. So, I said, plainly, to God: you're going to have to make it very clear to me whether I should keep doing this.

The answer came fast.

While we were packing up to head to the parking garage, the Bermuda woman found me and apologized. It was her first time experiencing mediumship, and the truth was, she'd only wanted to hear one thing: her mother saying the word Bermuda. Everything else I'd brought through, all of it accurate, all of it meaningful, hadn't mattered to her until that one word came. Once it did, she recognized how difficult she'd made it for me, and she wanted me to know she was sorry.

By the time I got home, the second woman had emailed me. Her mother had finally validated the memory, word for word: when you were two, we were visiting, there was a wooden bowl of cherries on the coffee table, no one was watching you, you ate all of them, and you were sick the rest of the day. Exactly what I'd described. She was frustrated with her mother for staying quiet during the event (more connections might have come through if she'd spoken up in the moment), and she didn't understand why her mom had hesitated when the details were so clearly, unmistakably hers.

And the next day, while driving through Mississippi, I stopped for gas and found a message from the third woman. The one who'd tested me all night. Her daughter had a blowout in her tire that morning. She sent a photo. She apologized, and she finally understood why her father had come through the way he had, not vague, not sentimental, just trying to keep his family safe.

I never backed away from any of that information, even when it didn't land. That's the piece I want you to sit with. Sometimes what comes through in a session doesn't make sense yet, not because it's wrong, but because the moment for it hasn't arrived. Sometimes someone will get validation from a family member who remembers what they don't. Sometimes the message is about something that hasn't happened yet at all.

Twenty years into this work, I've had to learn, over and over, to trust myself more than I trust the reaction in front of me. Mediumship is rooted in love: the love you carry for the person you lost, and the love they still carry for you. My job is to honor that by staying accurate, by never bending a message to make someone feel better in the moment, and by trusting that Spirit knows exactly what each person needs to hear, even when it doesn't arrive on schedule or how they expected it to.

In the end, love finds its way through. Sometimes it just needs a little more time than we'd like.

That surrender, trusting myself enough to be of love and service, is what I try to instill in every student I teach. Confidence isn't a nice-to-have in this work. It may be the most important tool you'll ever build.

Confidence like this doesn't happen overnight, it's built.
If you're ready to start building yours, I'd love to guide you through my mediumship mentorship program.
Learn more here.