How to Use Tarot to Build Your Brand as a Creative

Today’s post is by Chelsey Pippin Mizzi, author of Tarot for Creativity: A Guide for Igniting Your Creative Practice.

After years of working 9–5 at an agency, my client, Nina decided to strike out on her own and launch a copywriting business. In the early stages of building her business, she came to me to explore the ways that tarot could support and inspire her as a creative business owner.

One of the things Nina was most concerned about in that moment was figuring out how she wanted to be perceived by her customers—her main job as a copywriter was to help small businesses express themselves, but she felt she’d lost her own identity amidst all her efforts to help her clients articulate theirs.

The tarot is an incredibly powerful brand building tool for creatives, because it gives us a rich language for finding—and articulating—ourselves, so Nina and I dove into some exercises that ultimately helped her develop a clear vision of who she was a small business owner, what she wanted to say to her potential customers, and create a framework for how she wanted to say it.

Here are two of the tarot exercises that helped Nina—and many of my clients—discover and solidify their brands.

Own your creative archetype

First, I asked Nina to write down three adjectives she would love her ideal clients to use to describe her and the service she provides them. Nina landed on “Honest, Bold, and Bright.”

From there, I laid out all 22 cards of the Major Arcana between us, and asked Nina to pick one or two of the cards that she felt most clearly illustrated what Honest, Bold, and Bright meant to her.

She narrowed it down to two cards: The Fool, and The World, two cards that she felt embodied Honest, Bold, and Bright—but there was more work to do. Which one, I asked, felt more like her? Nina’s answer came immediately: while she admired The World’s wisdom, she was deeply drawn to the Fool’s playfulness. Both cards possessed a confidence, an openness, but Nina knew that she saw herself as that clever, unassuming Fool much more than she saw herself as the simultaneously vulnerable and untouchable World.

So, the Fool became Nina’s creative archetype. Which means that when she’s representing her business—through online content, at networking events, or in client meetings, she refers back to the Fool as a guiding light for how she wants to be seen, and how she wants to interact. Embracing the Fool as her creative archetype gave Nina a fresh new way of thinking about her point of view as a copywriter and small business owner, and she returns to the card regularly while navigating her career and building her brand.

When she’s not sure what to post about on LinkedIn, she thinks about the Fool, and how she can summon the card’s playfulness, its boldness, its honesty, its brightness to articulate a helpful tip or thought-provoking opinion. She plays up her sense of humor, because that’s what the Fool would do. Her brand is full of bright colors, and whenever she enters a room—IRL or digital, she brings the Fool’s charisma and try-anything attitude with her. These days, Nina even turns to the tarot with some of her copywriting clients, inviting them to identify their own brand archetype through the Major Arcana. She then uses conversations that the cards strike up as a foundation for the tone of voice and point of view she infuses into the writing services she provides.

Try it yourselfWrite down three adjectives you’d like your ideal audience or customer base to use when describing you and your creative work.Lay out the Major Arcana in front of you, and choose a card (or two) that best captures those three words, and that feels true to you and how you want to show up in the world.Brainstorm at least three ways you can use the card you’ve chosen to inform your approach to your creative business, brand, and communications.Whenever you feel stuck in your business, refer back to the archetype you’ve chosen, and use it as a jumping off point to figure out what to do next.Tarot your way to content

One of the most common ways that I use tarot cards as creativity tools is incorporating them into my content planning. I regularly use cards as jumping off points for my blogs, newsletters, and social media posts. It’s simple: I draw a card and ask myself a couple of questions:

How does this card relate to the way I want my audience or customers to feel?How can the message of the card help me solve a problem for my audience or customers?What’s one thing this card inspires me to tell my audience or customers?

Of course, as a tarot reader, it makes sense that I would turn to the cards for content generation, but the truth is that my method for content generation through tarot can work for any small business owner.

Let’s look at Nina and her copywriting business once again as an example.

Last year, Nina challenged herself to write a short, regular newsletter in which she shared a daily tip for writing more compelling copy. She decided to use tarot cards to inform what she wrote, just like I do in my tarot business. Once a week, she would sit down and draw five cards—one for each day of the week that she would send out her newsletter. And she asked herself the questions that I shared above.

The Ten of Wands, a card that often represents someone biting off more than they can chew, inspired Nina to write a tip about doing more with less in your copy. Instead of trying to cram every bit of information into a paragraph, she suggested that her followers try focusing on the three most important messages they wanted to share, and she provided a formula for figuring out what those three messages could be.

Judgement, a card about revisiting things we’ve buried and shining a new light on them, was the foundation for a piece Nina wrote about how to find new ideas in old copy. She even ended up offering a service to help her clients audit their past newsletters and blogs and create fresh content based on their previous ideas.

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And the Eight of Pentacles, a card about practice and craft, prompted Nina to share a personal story about how she learned to improve her own copywriting skills and why she still practices writing, even as a professional writer.

None of Nina’s final versions of her articles mentioned the tarot; she simply looked to the images to spark her thinking so she could generate content that was in line with her business.

You can do the same by drawing cards and answering the questions I shared above—you’ll be surprised by how many ideas you’ll be able to generate!

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out Tarot for Creativity: A Guide for Igniting Your Creative Practice by Chelsey Pippin Mizzi.