We recently connected with Lex Ritchie and have shared our conversation below.

Lex, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, let’s start with a hypothetical – what would you change about the educational system?

Oh, I love this question! It really hits home for me as someone who has worked as a teacher across many different fields and in many different contexts.

As the owner of a spiritual business education is a huge part of what I do. I teach tarot and ancestor work classes regularly and also do a lot of general education through blogs and other content on many spiritual topics – everything from “how do I read tarot?” to “is tarot sinful?”. This is a part of my business that I am incredibly passionate about because I have spent many years teaching. I have taught dance classes, tutored Physics students, TA-ed while in grad school, and even did a short stint teaching high school environmental science!

As a teacher one of the most frustrating things is a lack of curiosity from students. Often they are just looking for the right answer, because that is what our educational system values and rewards. But so much of learning is in the curiosity, the wondering, asking questions, trying and failing. Years of this kind of schooling can make it so that, even when studying topics we are genuinely curious about, there’s still a fear of failure and the desire to seek the “right” answer. Education is a part of my business and the services I offer and I have worked hard to create online learning environments that encourage the curiosity and willingness to ask questions, to try and fail at something that is essential to a pleasant, affirming, and empowering learning experience.

Education, in my opinion, is a practice in empowerment. It’s the phrase “Knowledge is power” in action. Through learning students grow their capacity and capability. Through teaching, teachers pay forward the gift of empowerment that was invested in them during their educations. And through both learning and teaching, we all grow our understanding of this world and deepen our relationship with it.

That kind of education isn’t about just knowing the facts, just passing a test. The empowerment of education comes when the student actually gets to practice growing their capacity – whether that is the capacity for problem solving, how to complete a particular task, communicating clearly, or understanding historical events in context. This means that true education comes through practice and failure. That also means that the teacher needs to deeply honor the students’ autonomy.

The thing I would change about the educational system is the idea that failure is a problem, that the goal is to find the right answer, or at the very least find an answer that is close enough to right so that you don’t fail, and that the person who holds that one right answer is the teacher. In order to truly master a skill or a concept you have to fail at it over and over in many different ways, you need to be allowed to fail at it.

The ‘find the right answer’ and ‘avoid failure at all costs’ mindset that I learned from my education was my single biggest barrier in starting my business. I thought that in order to have a successful business I needed to find the right strategy, the right framework and then everything would fall into place. But business (and life!) doesn’t work like that! You have to try new and unique things and those things have to fail sometimes. And that’s totally ok. But at every turn in our educations we are told that is an outcome to be avoided at all costs. But trying and failing and trying again is the secret to finding the things that work really really well, that you really really enjoy, and getting really really good at them. Which, in my opinion, is an essential part of finding one’s path in life. That thing that you uniquely can do, that you will try and fail at over and over and over until it’s every bit as good as you dreamed of, that’s your purpose, that’s your fulfilling path in life and our educational systems do not prepare any of us for that at all.

Lex, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was first introduced to tarot in middle school by a friend’s grandmother. She was a professional tarot reader herself and she showed me the basics of how to read the cards. I played around with the cards on and off for a few years, but as a young queer working class kid there was so much about conventional tarot interpretations that simply did not resonate for me and even felt deeply alienating. I resolved to put them away for good when I entered college as a physics major. The cards eventually came roaring back for me when I was in grad school. At the time, I was uprooted, far from home, burnt out, exhausted, and deeply disillusioned about my degree and future career path. Tarot brought me back into relationship with myself, with my desires, with my values, and brought me clarity on what truly mattered to me. This time, though, I made a commitment to myself to find a way of working with the card that honored my identity and my lived experience. Eventually this re-connection with myself and the world around me through tarot and spirituality led to me leaving grad school, moving back to the land and ecosystem that I deeply loved, starting my gender transition, and starting to make a life based on my own desires and values. I knew how much tarot and spirituality had helped me once I was able to work out understandings of the cards that honored my identity and lived experience, and I wanted to share that with others, which is how my business began!

Through my business I now offer tarot and ancestor work services and provide education and mentorship on the topics of tarot, ancestor work, spirit communication, devotional work, & queer spirituality. I offer these services with the goal of helping folks bridge the mystical and the mundane in a way that will allow their spiritual practice to become an embodied part of their daily life. I help my students and clients connect with the ancestral guidance of their bones, to their heart as a compass, and the divine spark within them so that they can find healing, connection to spirit, and their power to follow their path. I want my students and clients to fall in love with this life and find the power and liberation they need to pursue their dreams. I want them to weave connections to the magic of the world around them

I help the seekers, the rebellious, and the inquisitive – those who wanna follow the liberating path of the magical, mystical, & spiritual so that they can manifest a more beautiful, lovelier, more pleasurable and just world. Whether they are seeking healing, the reclamation of ancestral gifts, magic that will bring them their heart’s desire, or simply more connection with the cycles of the natural world, if they are ready to explore the beyond I am here to help them navigate their path.

My history of skepticism and scientific analysis sets me apart from others in my field. I was not raised in a religious family – my parents even caused a family scandal by choosing not to have me baptized! I came to my spirituality through experimentation and testing. I have seen how this has vastly improved my quality of life, my mindset, and my satisfaction with my life. But it’s not because I am uniquely or especially gifted. Anyone who desires to can learn to do this and I want to help them learn it! Whether in a tarot session or in a workshop, I always take the approach that I am not here to tell you what to do; I am here to help you connect to your intuition, your spirits, your deepest wishes and desires, and the power you have within you to make it happen.

In my business, I am most proud of the number of repeat clients and students I have. The fact that clients keep coming back – and coming back with new questions, new challenges, new curiosities that show that they have grown in their lives and in their practices – is the highest testimonial I could receive and it makes me confident that I am succeeding in helping them connect to their paths and find the growth, healing, and connection that they are seeking.

The main thing I want folks to know is that – if you’ve ever been curious about tarot, magic, or spirituality – that these are things that humans throughout time have engaged with. They are part of the human experience. And they can improve your life. If you have ever been curious about connecting to the beyond, to the numinous, to a higher power, what have you, know that you do not have to special in order to do that. This is something deeply human that you deserve to be in connection with if you have a desire to do so!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Early on in my business, I had the phrase “consistency builds trust” written on the white board over my desk. It was originally something I had said off-handedly while chatting on Zoom with another small biz friend of mine, but it kept echoing in my head sounding truer and truer each time. I took it as an operating principle for all areas of my business.

Every Friday at noon, for over 2 years now, I send out my Love Letter from the Liminal – my weekly newsletter where I wax both poetic and scholarly on spirituality and magic. Every Wednesday I post a collection of memes that I call “Memes for Mercury”. I make sure I set clear expectations with my followers, my audience, and my community about what I share and when and how they can connect with me.

But this goes beyond the structural aspects of my business, extending into my behavior, my business policies, how I show up in public (whether at in-person events, or online) and how I present myself and my business. I’m running a business that operates on a personal brand, and I think this kind of integrity is especially important for the personal brand! (I also happen to think it’s just the right thing to do, but the fact that it also helps build a trustworthy reputation is also very nice!)

Operating in a market that has historically been viewed with some skepticism and at a time when scams of all sorts are rampant, showing up consistently and with integrity is vital for gaining my clients’ trust.

And let’s be real – people are savvy. There’s often a sense that something is off when someone isn’t being real, truthful and authentic in presenting their offers. You might get some folks that way, but you definitely won’t get them as return customers. Consistency and integrity are a part of taking your customers seriously and demonstrating respect for them!

Having deep clarity my values; working to ensure that as many aspects of my business and marketing align with those values; expressing opinions and ideas rooted in those values consistently – and when I do change my opinion or make a mistake being open, honest and clear about it!; not engaging strategies that rely on inflammatory and unnecessarily divisive hot takes to drive engagement and instead sharing in service of education and conversation are all vital parts of my business strategy that extend from the idea of “consistency builds trust”. And over time this has brought me dedicated customers who trust me, a strong community of fellow business owners in my market who I trust and who trust me, and strong word-of-mouth refferals (or as is more the case in the online business world, the sharing of posts in DMs and forwarding of newsletters to friends!)

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

My biggest unlearning lesson in business has been unlearning the idea that there is a “right” way to do business. (Aside from the legal and financial aspects, obviously!)

Early on in my business, I was always looking for frameworks, systems, blueprints, etc. that would tell me HOW to do business – how to launch, how to start a newsletter, how to market, how to post to social media to get followers and make sales, etc. I had just gotten out of an engineering PhD program where the name of the game in class was to find the answer that would make your professors happy and in the lab to find the answers that were publishable and would get you through your dissertation smoothly. There were clear standards and procedures. There were clear expectations and milestones.

That does not exist in a small business. In my field the job of a business is to provide something compelling and innovative, something that comes uniquely from you, something that your customer desires but cannot or doesn’t yet know how to achieve for themselves. That CANNOT come from a standardize process. That CANNOT come from thinking that there is ONE right way to run your business, to market, to create an offer.

The only right way to run your business is YOUR way, and the only way you can find that through self-reflection and trial and error.

There was a point a few years into my business where I had to take a HUGE step back from following and learning from people posting about and offering small business education, and move through the process of slowly letting myself trust my own instincts and intuition about how running a business works for me.

After many years of formal schooling where there is a focus on standardized testing and one right answer, it has been a process to slowly unravel the many layers of feeling like running my business is just one more test where I need to try to find the solution that is expected. The more I have worked to trust my own way of doing things, even when it has varied greatly from what is standard, the more success I have had.

Contact Info:

• Website: thelexritchie.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/thelexritchie
• Other: threads: threads.net/@thelexritchie newsletter: https://thelexritchie.com/liminal-letters/