Advice

Just to be curious, if you could give one piece of advice to a brand new tarot reader what would it be?

Trust your instincts when reading cards!

Don't give up. In six months you'll be awed with how much you know about Tarot, and will be tempted to brag to everyone about your awesome skills and Otherworldly contacts. In five years, you'll be starting to notice that there are things you don't know. In twenty years or so, you'll be feeling like a beginner, learning thirstily every day. So you'll be learning for the rest of your life. Don't give up - it's worth it.

Oh, and never, EVER, presume that you know what's best for your clients more than they do.

So that's really two pieces of advice, but they're both crucial.

My advice would be that really learning how to read well takes time and a lot of time..
It's like learning a new language, you'll learn enough to get by quite quickly but to become fluent takes years.. Don't give up and enjoy the journey .

Throw the little white book away.

Read what YOU see and think it means, not what the books says the card means.

Barb

Never LIE.

If you find some really ugly things in the cards, there are ways to relate this to a Querent. If you see disaster and tell them everything is fine - you are doing a disservice to them - and yourself. If you can't make heads nor tails of what the cards are telling - say that to the Querent. Making something up is lying.

Find a deck where the court cards connect with you and the rest of the cards will follow!

It is just an extention of what Tarot Bear said, so what is said there is pretty important and connected to what I want to say here, which is an extension actually:

Make sure your querent realizes his Life and his decisions are for him to make. The Tarot is a tool, a book without words. Explain him that and make sure he gets it. What I mean is, don't make set-in-stone "predictions" that may do more harm then good even if they are or even if they aren't "correct" and present your readings in a way that actually manipulates your querent's Life. So many "readers" do that and make their querents lives their own, with catastrophic results in some cases. There are so many frauds out there, some of your querents may tell you how bad of an experience they had with other readers (some of my querents did tell me how readers destroyed parts of their lives with their "predictions"), so don't become a charlatan. Be an honest and genuine reader.

What Owl Tarot said is the most important thing, I think, but I'll add:

Relax. Enjoy it. You'll learn more easily and the tarot will work better, too.

Remain cautiously open-minded, and remember, there is usually more than one side to just about any situation.