The Noticing Tool
A practice tool. Read the card before you read the book.
Look first. Meaning second.
Most people learn tarot the wrong way round. Keywords first, then you spend years bending the picture to fit the words. The Noticing Tool flips it. You get a card, you say what you actually see, and only then do you get the meaning.
And it’s practice, not a reading. You’re not telling anyone their future here. You’re rehearsing the one move that makes reading actually work, looking before you reach for the words, so it’s there when you sit down for real.
One card at a time. No guidebook in your other hand. It’s the single most useful thing I do every time I sit down to read, and now you can practise it too.
This is how you build your own reading
There’s a gap between reciting a card and reading one, and the whole gap is trust. Trust in what you notice before anyone tells you what it’s supposed to mean.
That’s the muscle this builds. The more you do it, the less you reach for the book, and the more the cards start to feel like yours. The card doesn’t predict anything. It puts something in front of you and asks what you make of it. Learning to answer that in your own voice is the actual skill, and it’s the one nobody really teaches.
How it goes
You get three goes, and they step up. First a single card for you, like a card of the day. Then a pretend reading for somebody else, one card. Then three cards for that same person, a proper little spread. It’s all practice, made-up scenarios to read into, not readings for anyone real.
Every card, you look first. Jot down what you notice, at least three things, no wrong answers. Then I show you the symbolism, so you can see what you caught and what you walked past. After that you pick the meaning, the general keywords or one focused on the scenario you were given.
Stop after the first go if that’s your lot, or take all three. Either way you can download what you did and keep it.
Why I Made This
I learned from books, like most people. I could give a reading, but the cards weren’t really telling me anything. I was telling them what to mean.
What changed it was learning to look before I reached for the words. To sit with the image for a second and let it say something first. Uncomfortable at the start, sitting there with a card and nothing to lean on. But that discomfort is the muscle working, not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It gets easier every single time.
This is the tool I wish I’d had when I started.
Have a go
It opens on its own screen. Nothing to download, and you can shut it whenever you like.
Keep everything you notice
This tool is the free version. You get your three goes, you can download them, and that's that.
Inside Simply Tarot, none of it disappears. Every card you notice, every meaning you land on in your own words, saves to your own journal. Card by card it builds into your own book of meanings, the one you actually trust because you wrote it.
And you're not doing it on your own. There's the Circle, where we get together over a spread and actually talk it through, and DisGord, where it all carries on between sessions. The people are half the point.
If you want any of this to stick, and to do it with people who actually get it, that's what Simply Tarot is for.
