How I Started The Best Site To Find A Medium- Sally Hawk

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Everybody, this is Brian D Smith back with another episode of Grief to Growth. And today I've got with me Sally Hawk. And Sally has started a very interesting service for mediumship, which I think is very much needed. I've tried it out myself. It's awesome. So I can't wait to talk to you about it today. Sally is a medium, and she's the founder of VeriSoul. It's verisoul.com is the website where you can find this mediumship service. She started her corporate career as an actuary and a risk manager, and eventually ran a series of large global financial businesses with complex risks. After she retired from corporate life, she refocused on giving back. By mentoring teens working to overcome poverty, and executives with strong pay-it-forward potential. She also started to research more about the spiritual experiences she'd been having, and eventually realized that she was a medium. She began her formal training as an evidential medium in 2020, studying with some of the top experts in the world. And in early 2021, she received a series of detailed inspirations about a global platform needed to address the unique needs of mediums and their clients. So VeriSoul started as a simple 20-person prototype in October of 2021, and has already grown to over 2,000 users in 31 countries. VeriSoul's goal is to help over a million people around the world experience quality mediumship over the next few years. So with that, I want to welcome to Grief 2 Growth Sally Hawk.

Hi, Brian, thank you so much for having me.

I'm really excited to talk to you today, Sally, about what you're doing and how you got to be doing what you're doing. It sounds like you had a pretty high-powered corporate career and you retired from that. What made you inspired to start something like VeriSoul?

You know, it's such a strange story how it all comes together. You know, all these things that we do in our lives, even banking, how that plays into something like doing mediumship. The way VeriSoul came to be was I was studying mediumship, and about a year into my studies, I was working with a teacher who was helping me do what we call deep blending. And deep blending is when we learn to really open ourselves up to the experience of spirit and to blend very fully with that. And that resulted in me starting to have experiences beyond my mediumship sessions. So what was happening was I was, you know, in bed, ready to go to sleep, and ping, something would come into my mind. And in particular, I remember it was about— it was February. I felt like I was being handed engineering packets, and I couldn't go to sleep until I would go write down copious notes about the things that were coming into my head. And at first, I didn't fully understand what was being asked of me because it was just coming so frantically every night, every night. And I have, you know, notebooks full of this information. Um, when I did start to understand the patterns and the trends and what was being asked, I thought, you know, this is crazy. Are they really asking me to build a platform like this? Like, I just retired, I'm really enjoying my retirement. Um, but when I started to share it with some of my friends who were also mediums and some of my friends who aren't mediums, um, everybody said it makes so much sense. That they would be asking for this. And it makes really good sense that they would choose you to pass the information through.

Interesting. So what— so you were— when you were— before you retired, and you said you started studying mediumship, this is after you retired, right? So what, what prompted you to start studying mediumship, though?

You know, a bunch of things. I had having experiences throughout my life, but probably the biggest one about 17 years ago, when I was still in banking and traveling all over the world and very busy with my corporate life. I had a relative, my husband's mother passed in another country. And the night she passed, before anyone else knew she had passed, she visited my daughter who was in bed with me that night. She visited my daughter to say goodbye. And I experienced that energy.

Wow.

It was visual for me, like I could see her, I couldn't see a face. It was beautiful. I knew it was loving energy. And somehow I knew who she was and why she was there. She had a very tight bond with my daughter. And she came to say goodbye. Wow. About a half hour after that happened, my husband called from— this was in Canada, they were living in Canada. My husband called and said, the hospital just called, my mother died unexpectedly during the night. And I said, 'I know.' Oh wow, wow. That was for me the very beginning of really wanting to explore this deeply and understand what is that. Um, and then I quickly came to understand from reading books and doing research that it's actually not an uncommon experience. Um, you know, that a lot of people have these kinds of experience, but nobody wants to talk about it.

Yes, absolutely. I understand that after my daughter passed, and we had a few experiences and started sharing them with people that we had known for 20+ years, then suddenly they were like, oh yeah, well, I had something similar. So I understand what you're saying, that people have these experiences, they don't typically share them.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then you go through your own reckoning process with it, right? Because your logical mind wants to say, did I make that up? Did I dream that? Was that real?

Right?

No, in your gut, that was real. And then all the evidence says that was real. I mean, for me to have that experience 30 minutes before the hospital called.

Yeah.

And she was not, she was not expected to pass. She was, you know, she was fine. She was in for a routine procedure. So that was, I just, I knew it was real.

So you knew it was real. Okay. And then you, you retired, I assume, much after that. But when you retired, apparently you started getting some nudging to start studying mediumship.

Well, I got, I got more nudging before I retired. I got nudged to retire. I had lots of different experiences. But yeah, after I retired and decided that I wanted to spend more time helping the community and doing things that I wasn't doing as a banker, I started to have gained some understandings of how some things work and started to be more open to things like meditation, for instance. I went to my first meditation retreat, and in that process, I had some pretty profound experiences in just my first weekend, even though in the first 3 hours of it, I couldn't sit still. I couldn't stop. You know, my monkey mind kept going. But by the end of the weekend, I was seeing things completely differently. So it was gradual. And then from time to time, I would have other experiences with spirits in different ways, either coming directly to me or coming to me through a medium to get to somebody else. And I had some pretty significant experiences like that. So it, you know, it all just kept kind of snowballing. Right.

So you started studying mediumship, it sounds like, with some pretty, pretty high-level mediums, I guess, for lack of a better word. And did it come to you right away, the ability to connect to people on the other side?

It took me about 3 months to be able to make what I would call a purposeful connection.

Okay.

I firmly believe that we all have accidental connections, you know, where we're not trying, but for one reason or another, somebody reaches through. And that will often feel to us like intuition, or it'll feel like, I feel compelled to do this and I'm not sure why. Those are kind of our accidental experiences. But it took me about 3 months of training to have my first purposeful experience. And then it's just a matter of how quickly can you kind of relax into it. So for somebody like me, I'm pretty Type A. It's hard for me to relax into it. It's hard for me to not want to overachieve on something that you just cannot overachieve on. And you just really be one and let it happen.

So, so then you started getting these, these downloads, I think, as you call them, these inspirations, you call them packets. So what were they? Was it like, start a website? Or what were the packets like?

You know, some of it was what I would call like mission statements. Some of it was, you know, the parameters, kind of the guidelines, the boundaries. So things like, you know, build no barriers, keep it agnostic, you know, things like that. Some of it was very, very detailed in terms of the engineering of how things should work. How people would access the site, how people could get matched to a medium. So for instance, in the medium matching process that'll be coming out in our new system, um, I was asked to install a random number generator in certain parts of that matching process.

Oh wow.

That allows for influence, um, from spirit to help make sure people get matched to the best instrument for them.

Interesting. Yeah, very interesting.

Yeah, it's a— I'm sorry.

No, go ahead.

Oh, I was just gonna say it's a, it's, it's kind of a, I think one of the most misunderstood things for people who enjoy mediumship, but don't do mediumship is, I think we're all looking for who is the medium, who is the one who can connect me to my loved one, right? And in fact, it doesn't really work that way. Each medium needs to have a certain amount of skill, needs to have a certain amount of ability and confidence to do the work. But then we're each unique instruments, you know, they use our knowledge, our experiences, the memories in our brain, they use all of that to help communicate. To the person they're trying to talk to. And that means that any one medium might not be the best medium for everyone. Right? And in fact, is not the best medium for everyone.

Right? Right there. I absolutely believe that 100%. I've had lots and lots of readings. And sometimes with some of the best people, you think it's going to be a great connection, and it's not so great. And sometimes it might be someone that you've never heard of, and they just really, you know, they really tap into your loved one and you. It's a three-way connection. And there has to be that fit.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's hard for us, it's hard for us to logically get to that fit. So what I tell clients when they're, when they're struggling, you know, they may go to somebody who they've been referred to by so-and-so, or they've been referred to by 5 people, and then that, that mediumship session doesn't go as well as they'd like. I tell them, don't try so hard. You know, look at the picklist of choices. Find a group of mediums you know you can trust. Picklist of choices and see who you're drawn to. Where's your intuition take you? Because that's when you're allowing them to help you make a good choice.

Yes, that's exactly what I say. Because people ask me all the time because of what I do, you know, can you recommend a medium to me? And of course, I know lots and lots of mediums. They're like, oh, which one's the best one for me? And I Can't tell you that, you know, which one's the best medium there. I can't tell you that either. It's like, I'll give them a list and say, just who are you drawn to? What's your— what does your intuition tell you?

Yeah, which I know from having been on the other side of that, you know, when I was looking for mediums to have an experience, that can feel frustrating because, you know, sometimes it's expensive. Sometimes it's a long waitlist.

Yes.

And you, and you don't know who to trust. And you don't know who's even qualified. You don't know who's a real medium and who's a pretend medium.

Right.

There's a lot to navigate there, and especially when it feels really important because of who you're trying to get in contact with. You don't want to go through the wringer on this. You don't want to have to try 20 times because every time it doesn't work, you then start to question, are they really there?

Yes, absolutely. And I understand that, that almost desperation to get it right and to know this is the right person. But as I said, I've also seen people spend a lot of money and wait for many months for a particular medium because they've been told that that person is like the best person. And then they get really disappointed when it doesn't— when it doesn't work out.

Yeah, it's disappointing for the client, but it's also disappointing for the mediums.

Sure.

The mediums know they are not the best instrument for every client and for every spirit. They know that, right? So, but they generally have a high intention to serve well.

Yeah.

So it serves everyone the best if that, if that matching process can be done in a way that allows for intention.

Yeah, absolutely. So as far as VeriSoul goes, I'm really curious about, you know, how do you even go, how do you get started even doing something like this coming from a banking background?

Yeah, so just to give you kind of the range of things in my background that I think are playing into why I was chosen to do this, and I learn a little bit more about this every day as we hit barriers or new issues and we have to solve them. And I think, oh, that's why I had that. Yeah, that's how this thing comes into play. A couple things. One, my work in actuarial work and, you know, heavy mathematics of risk management is all about complexity. And dealing with not just the complexity of numbers and systems, but also the complexities of human behavior. Because when you're trying to manage a portfolio of any kind of risk, take a stock market portfolio, for instance, you need to, you need to know how, what kind of fear will drive certain activities in the market. You need to know. So you're not just looking at things from a numerical standpoint, you're looking at things from a human human standpoint at the same time. Another aspect of my background that's proven to be really important and actually kind of insanely important, I worked for GE mid-career, and one of the things that I did with GE was I helped them start what's called their Six Sigma program. It's an engineering program that helps to reduce waste and to help make things streamline processes and make them work more smoothly.. And in that work, I discovered not just how to make things super efficient, which is part of what VeriSoul does. It's taking a very inefficient process of how mediums develop, how they practice, and then how they deliver their service to clients and how clients find those mediums. Taking a very inefficient process and making it efficient. But it also gets to a really important point about root cause analysis. So in Six Sigma, you're trying not to solve at a symptomatic level. So let's say there's a, you know, there might be an issue, everybody knows what the outcome of the issue is. For instance, one of my projects at GE was to look at why are we not able to hire top executives? Why do a lot of top executives not choose us. When we analyze that, it came to a root cause of fear. It wasn't fear on their part. It was the fear of the people who were part of that recruiting process. So what was happening was we were interviewing these executives like we're putting them through like 20, 25 different interviews. And after a while, if you're an executive, you think, well, that's bureaucratic. I don't want to be part of that.

Right, exactly.

But it was the fear. Nobody wanted to let go of the possibility in the hierarchy that they might not have touched that client. So things like that. So it's the engineering is the streamlining, but it's also understanding that fear and why people might behave in ways that aren't necessarily to their best interest.

Yeah, well, you've done a fantastic job with that. I'm curious, how do you go about finding your mediums? How do you go about qualifying them? What was— what's that process like?

Yeah, so, um, so first of all, the, the, uh, the platform does a couple of things. It helps mediums, uh, practice with other mediums, which is the first stage of mediumship. Most people don't know this, they never hear about this part of the process. Um, mediums take classes, they study, but then they have to do hundreds and thousands of practices, um, just to refine their skills. Because at the very beginning, like I told you that I, um, had my first purposeful connection 3 months in, that doesn't mean that I interpreted all the information correctly. Um, because what happens is, um, at the very beginning as a medium, you, you get sensations, you get information but your, your mind can interfere. So for instance, if I, if I get balloon, my mind might layer in red balloon, and that makes it wrong. So you have to learn to kind of differentiate and separate what's them and what's me. And you do that through practices. So we welcome any mediums who can make a purposeful connection to join our platform, and they are kept in that practice zone. Um, and through their practices, after every practice, they are reviewed by their partner. And after, uh, their reviews show that they're ready— so they'll do hundreds of those practices— once the reviews start to show compelling results, then we invite them to the next level, which is a, um, a select client base. And I say select because they've been selected to be people who aren't in high need, people who we really can't hurt if we get it wrong.

Okay.

Okay. They're kind of like our practice clients. Once the mediums have compelling results with the practice clients, then they can move on to what we call the outreach clients. And that's where we provide donated sessions, free sessions to the general public, for people who can't afford to, to buy a session with a professional medium. And then once they have compelling results at that stage, then they can move on to be a professional medium with us.

Wow, that is— that's impressive. I have to say, that's really impressive. Because one of the things, again, with mediumship is there are no regulatory bodies, there's no objective test that we can really put people through. I know a few people are doing some testing of mediums, but most mediums aren't. So anybody could put themselves out there and say that they're a medium. And I love the process that you're saying, because you're, you're not turning people away if they're not at that level yet, but you're allowing them to develop within a safe environment.

Yeah, and helping them to feel safe too, because that's important. Part of the pro— you know, you make yourself so vulnerable in this work. And most people come to the table not used to being wrong. My first year was pretty rough. Yeah, yeah. But another way to look at it is in the United States, you're right, Brian, like, there isn't much in the way of regulatory bodies or any kind of career pathing or anything like that. There is over in the UK. The UK has a pretty standardized process through their Spiritualist National Union. And so I think part of what this was, was taking some of those pieces of what has worked there, but streamlining it, making much more efficient, and bringing it online.

Yeah, absolutely. And I know Verisol is set up as a public benefit company. What is— what does that mean?

Yeah, so public benefit company allows for profit, but more importantly, it allows you to be a mission-first company. Okay, so, um, right now, um, we are privately held, so there's no, um, there's no problem with, uh, being mission first. But if it ever wasn't privately held, which is not our intention, um, if it ever wasn't privately held, by being set up as a public benefit corporation, we could still keep it a mission-first company. So that structure allows mediums to earn money and be paid same time that, that we are delivering a lot of free sessions.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, as I said, I've been on it a couple times. I had a reading just last week with someone. I was very impressed with what the process, with the finding a medium, the way that's set up, the way that it goes so smoothly. And, you know, there are a few issues when you're looking for a medium, you know, one is, are they going to be any good? The other is, you know, what are they going to cost? And are they going to be available? Because oftentimes people, again, they'll get their heart set on somebody, and they've got a 6-month waiting list or 2-year waiting list for some of the very popular ones. And you've solved all those issues.

Stay with us. We'll be right back.

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Yeah, I mean, you could say I solved them, but I didn't solve them. You know, I'd love to take credit for it. I think this is a brilliant design, but I can't take credit for it. I am I'm just the implementer along with a team of people, including, you know, full-timers and lots and lots of volunteers. So, but yeah, it does solve a lot of the problems, and it also, um, it also takes up a lot of the slack, um, in terms of— there was a lot of wasted potential in what I would call the intermediate-level mediums who were regularly delivering great sessions, but they were stuck doing that for other mediums because they didn't have easy access to find clients to share those skills with and didn't feel ready to charge yet. So, you know, this just does a beautiful job of maximizing the potential at every stage without putting anyone at risk, without You know, without creating an unsafe environment for the mediums or the clients in any way. It's just, it's, it's brilliant.

Yeah, it really is. And as I said, it's very much needed because people, we don't know where to go. There's not a, there's not a clearinghouse to go to, to find, you know, mediums and to find out who's good and who's not good and to find mediums that are, again, that are affordable and available. Because we know, we know, we all want that. So I'm really happy to have it for myself as a resource to refer my clients to. So how's it been so far in terms of recruiting mediums? Are you getting the number of people that you need?

Yeah, so far we have about 1,200 mediums on the platform. And I have it on good advice from my team, my spirit team, that will be 10,000 by the end of this year. We had to make some big technology decisions last fall. And when I asked them for guidance, you know, this way or that way, you know, this way if it's going to be this big, this way if it's going to be that big, the number 10,000 came. And now I see, I mean, back then when that happened, we were still in the early hundreds. But now I can say absolutely it's going to be 10,000 because what's happening is You know, every medium that has a good experience with this then tells their 3 or 4 friends, right? And the need that it fills for the mediums is so significant. You know, they really— they're in this work to serve. They don't necessarily want to be sending Zoom links and spending time on their email making appointments and you know, trying to find clients and marketing themselves. Most of them are very uncomfortable marketing themselves.

Right?

Right. They're just, that's not who they are. They want to be of service, and they want to help people.

That's a great point. I never even thought about it from that perspective. But you're right, most mediums, they're not, they're not necessarily business-minded. They're not in it to make money, in spite of what some people think. They want to serve and as someone who runs my own business and has for a long time, I— that's a lot of— it's a lot of work, and it requires a pretty particular skill set to be able to market yourself and set appointments and all that kind of stuff. And so you've, you've solved that for the meeting. So I could see why it would be so attractive to people to say, I can just come in, put in my availability, you know, put out my rates, and then, you know, clients come to me.

Yeah. And, and, you know, the other part of it is, if, if they are comfortable with that kind of thing and they do want to go that direction, they're free to do that. Right now, this is in no— by no means are we trying to like capture, you know, capture the mediums or anything like that. They're welcome to come in, practice, ramp up their skills, and go off on their own. That's completely fine. Or they're welcome to have a foot in both— on both sides of that, you know, to have their own website, take clients through VeriSoul that's okay too. Um, we, we've had an interesting number of mediums who already were, um, out on their own websites and already were charging clients and had good skills, you know, decent skills, but not the level of skills that it would take to be considered professional on our platform. Um, and they are willing to come in and just go back to the practice zone, which is where we start everybody, in the practice zone. Yeah, well, it's serving a purpose there too, which is, you know, to bring the skills of everyone up.

It, it does. And I, I've been a test sitter for, for other people, and, you know, it's interesting, sometimes people think they're better than they are. I don't know of a, a polite way to say that. And that you get them in a test situation and they're just they're just not up to standard. So having this more objective standard that you're able to offer people and to, again, to bring them along if that's what they need to do, is, I think, great and also gives people confidence. If I come to your site, and I pay for reading, it's going to be someone who at least has shown some level of proficiency.

Yes. And I think that goes both ways, Brian D Smith. I mean, I think there are some mediums who who think they're further along than they are in terms of developing their skills. But I think there's a lot more mediums who are actually on the other side of that, who don't have as much confidence in their skills as they should have.

True.

And so you end up with this kind of out-of-balance model. And so I think VeriSoul is really about, let's get that in balance. Let's help people have a good balance. You know, I talked to the mediums about having a good balance between confidence and humility, right? And if you're too humble, if you're so humble that you don't have confidence in your skills, you'll have a hard time doing the session because there's a lot to navigate and it requires a lot of trust on our part in that connection, right? If you're overconfident and you lack humility, it's a different problem. It creates some other blockages for the communication. So really finding that sweet spot in the middle where I'm well calibrated. I understand what I'm good at. I understand what I'm not good at. And I've got a good balance between humility and confidence. That's, that's what we're trying to do. Yeah, that's what we're trying to get people.

So do you, do you offer training to the mediums also? Are they still doing the training? I know they have the practice zone, but do you do any, anything beyond that with them?

Yeah, so we don't specifically do training. There's really great training all over the world with some very talented teachers who invested a lot of time and who are you know, just so good at what they do. So Verasoul really is intended to support the whole ecosystem of mediumship, so we don't want to get in the way of any of that. Um, but what we do do is we help, um, we help the mediums know about trainers, training that's available. And we've actually got some things in the works right now that we haven't published yet about doing that, but it's going to help mediums find teachers that are a good fit for them a little bit easier and faster. Um, but we also, uh, in the process of the practices, through their feedback, they get a lot of feedback from each other, which means they're getting feedback from the perspective of multiple teachers because each student is a student of some teacher. Um, they're also getting feedback from a diverse range of perspectives just in life. Right? Like, I'm an extrovert, so I'm going to give certain types of, you know, feedback versus somebody who's more introverted might give different, you know, it's all different things on the range of personalities. They get that. But also we have some what we call coaching sessions. We do, we do have debrief sessions where mediums can sign up at any time if they're super confused about an experience they've had, and sign up with one of our expert coaches to have a short session to help them work through that.

Oh, wow.

We would never, we'd never want to replace the great one-on-one coaching relationships that go on for months. We just, we use this as kind of a stopgap measure to help people understand what coaching can help them with, so that they seek out the right teachers.

Awesome. And I know that feedback is important for mediums. So how do you, how does that work with, with VeriSoul?

Yeah, so VeriSoul may be the first place where evidential mediums regularly get written feedback from every session, whether that be a practice partner, whether that be, you know, an early-stage client or an outreach client or, you know, paying client. Every time they get feedback, um, and we ask people to be very honest in that feedback because it's helping the mediums understand themselves from other people's perspective. And that's the calibration process we were talking about, right? Right. If a medium too confident in their skills and maybe their evidence isn't very compelling yet, it's too general, they need to hear that. And the first time that they hear it, it might hurt a little bit. But with the right headset, we encourage them to take the information, figure out what's valuable in that, and then move on, go do another session. So it's like this giant self-coaching machine. Is the way I would explain it.

Yeah, it is. I think it's— I like the fact that, you know, after I had my session, you know, you sent me a feedback form and I could give feedback to the medium because it will do both things. As you said, it can build their confidence and also maybe let them know these are some things that you need to work on if they're not doing it so well. So it's a nice feedback loop to continually get them to be able to improve.

Yeah, it also gets to one of the basic design tenets that I was given, which is build resiliency.

Okay.

You know, so as mediums, we can be very sensitive. I mean, we're sensitive in a lot of ways, including sometimes we're emotionally sensitive. And so that's— that feedback could really hurt if it's direct. But you know, if I get feedback like that every third time, after a month, doesn't hurt me so much, right? I'm a little more resilient, right? And I learned a little bit more about being the facilitator that I'm supposed to be. Because some people come to mediumship thinking they're going to be the healer. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that's not really our job. Our job is to be the facilitator of a beautiful healing energy that knows what it wants to do. Right. And we don't really participate in that outcome. Like, we participate in the process. We can feel the energy. We get to feel the love of that. But the outcome is going to be what the outcome is going to be.

Right. So I know your goal is to serve 1 million people over the course of the next few years. How do you see yourself getting there?

Um, yeah, it's, uh, you— so we're, we're at about— where are we now? Um, I would say we're close to 2,000 sessions so far. Um, so that seems like just a little drop in the bucket compared to a million, right? Except that we just started doing these sessions, uh, late last year.

Yeah, yeah.

And we've been slowly ramping up the number of mediums that are public-facing. -facing, right? So the way we're going to do it is we're going to continue to graduate mediums as they're ready into that, um, uh, outreach client pool and, and professional status. And the math works is the best I can put it, you know. Yeah, graduate them and they all do their 2 or 3 sessions a day, um, you know, 5 days a week, uh, we will definitely get to a million people.

Yeah, I think it'll start to grow exponentially. I think it'll, it'll, it'll ramp up very quickly as word gets out. So are most of the mediums part-time or are they full-time with you or a mixture?

You know, it's interesting because that was one of the things that came through in the original packet of engineering packets was about the flexibility of what we had to build because we have mediums in all different situations. We have mediums who have full-time careers in other technical skills. We have mediums who are raising a family full of kids, you know, when they've got the busyness of that life. We've got mediums who are retired and commit their whole day to this process. We've got mediums who only want to do one session a week. We've got mediums who want to do 5 sessions a day.

Yeah, okay.

We've got mediums who don't know what their schedule is going to be more than, you know, 48 hours in advance. So, um, you know, we really had to create the system to be able to accommodate all of that, right? We've got even more to deliver to make sure that that happens. But one of the, um, one of the capabilities that we're going to have up and running soon is our on-demand system where clients can come on and immediately get matched to a medium who's just ready to go, doesn't have an appointment that day, and is ready to do a session right away.

Oh, wow. That's— yeah, the— I'm an engineer. So I'm fascinated with the background, with the behind the scenes, because I know, you know, having that, that scheduling flexibility. And I can imagine— I know how mediums are. So some of them, as you said, I know one, she's a full-time hairdresser, she just does mediumship on the side. And other people, they want to do mediumship full-time. And people have— so it's nice that you're giving the mediums that flexibility, as well as, again, the clients, because that can be a big issue when people are looking for a medium is there— a lot of them are getting booked up now. I mean, it's not just the celebrity ones, it's some of the other ones too. And when people feel like they want a reading, they, you know, they don't want to necessarily wait 2 or 3 or 4 months.

Yeah, yeah, it's You know, there's a misperception that there's a few mediums, you know?

Yeah. Yeah.

It started with the celebrity mediums. You're right, it's gotten broader. But still, there's a misperception of how few mediums there are. There's actually a lot of really good mediums out there, a lot of them. Just clients don't know how to find them.

Right, right. So are you, are you doing any advertising at all? Or is this all, is this all growing organically at this point?

You know, we haven't started doing a lot of advertising yet. We haven't needed to because, you know, at the beginning we, we didn't have any problems recruiting, recruiting the first rounds of mediums. Up until December of last year, we were pretty much working behind the scenes and not out to the public yet, right? I just started doing some podcasts like this to start getting the word out. We Interestingly enough though, about a year ago, actually it was over a year ago, they gave me the first commercial. So we already had a commercial before we even wanted to advertise. Yeah, that commercial is sitting, is still sitting and is still highly applicable. It's just we haven't played it anywhere yet.

Yeah.

And there's also other marketing pieces that they gave me that are ready to go.. And we're just not— we don't quite have the capacity to handle what they could— what it could create yet. So we're opening slowly.

Yeah. So I have to ask you, how can you offer so much for free? I mean, for as little as you are, how are you able to do this?

Yeah. So along with the engineering plans, believe it or not, came some funding. And, you know, I can't get into a lot of details on the funding. But with that funding also came a promise of, don't worry, there's going to be plenty. And given how compelling the rest of this is, all of my experiences with Spirit, and, you know, the engineering and how this business plan, how everything just made sense, you know, I'm just— we're just keep going and we just keep trusting.

Yeah, I have no doubt. As I said, I've been working kind of in this business for about 4 years now, working with mediums for longer than that, probably 6 or 7 years. And again, I see the gaps, the problems, you know, availability, affordability. How do I know the medium's any good? You know, people, they do, they put everything into this, you know, they get a reading scheduled for 6 months out or something, they paid $500 or $800. And then they get disappointed. And this just, this just eliminates so many of those problems. I have no problems, you know, directing someone to VeriSoul to say, I think this is a platform that you can trust. And it's, it's not so much of a risk when you're— because you're not waiting at that amount of time, or you're not spending, you know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars on readings, because Nothing can guarantee that every reading is going to be great, but we can do things to kind of make that, you know, more, more probable.

Right, right. So, you know, a couple of things aligned to that. One, through the feedback, we can see if there's problems, you know, so we can see if there's a trend of problems, for instance.

Right.

Just knowing as a client that somebody is watching that, I think should help give people confidence.

Exactly.

Um, two, uh, the prices that we charge, that our mediums charge, are pretty reasonable. Now they pick their own prices, and 100% of that pay goes directly to them. Um, so we have no vested interest in whether somebody gets paid, gets paying session, or whether it's a donated session. And I think that's a really important thing to know about VeriSoul. Because that way you can trust that we're not promoting somebody or something because there's revenue generated for us. There isn't any revenue generated for us. So I think trust, being able to trust the platform, trust the vetting process, and just know that somebody has taken the time, you know, that together we've taken the time to ensure that we have credible providers.

Right, exactly.

And, and if something doesn't go right, we'll figure that out. We'll figure that out together.

So let's talk about the donated sessions versus the, the paid sessions. If I'm, if I'm a person I'm interested in, I come to your site, what am I going to see?

Yeah, so you would first see that you can choose between the paid or the free session. We do recommend to people who can't afford to pay that they choose the professional session. That'll help us deliver more free sessions to the people who really can't afford it. But we understand sometimes people are, you know, reluctant to open their pocketbook until they're sure it's good. So we also have in our professional offerings, we have mediums who are willing to be paid after the session. So after a session is completed successfully, Um, so you'll have choices of who your medium is if you choose a professional session. Um, if you choose a free session, you'll get assigned to a, a medium. The mediums who are doing the donated session, um, there's a mix of mediums. So some of those mediums are a little bit earlier in their development. They still have very, very good skills. Um, they're just not at the stage yet where they're charging. Right. If you choose a paid session, obviously, they're all— they've all been approved for charging.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's great. Because it offers— again, when I looked at the prices just the other day, the prices are very reasonable. So it's not that much of a risk for people that are, that are new to mediumship who might not, you know, might not be confident in it. They can— I think they can come here. And again, it's not such a big a big risk to take. Um, and so currently what it is, is so if I do a first session, I'm going to be scheduled for some time in the future. So I pick a time that the medium's available. Is that correct?

That's right. That's right. You pick a time that's convenient for you. They've already said that time is convenient for them, and then you're both sent an email with a Zoom link.

Okay. And I know you mentioned earlier you're working on a, even an on-demand system, which would be really awesome.

Yeah, we call it our little Uber, Uber of mediums, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Call a taxi driver. We want you to be able to, you know, connect with a medium.

Yeah, I guess that I am. I think this is so cool. I'm really glad to have you on today to talk about it. I've experienced it a little bit, you know, a couple of times as you've been going through the beta. I had her, I had a session last week. It was, it was awesome. She was, she was really good. And it goes so smoothly. It was so easy to set up the appointment. Now she was on time and everything, did it by Zoom so I could do it just from my house. So I'm very impressed with the way things are going so far.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's, you know, it's been interesting, Brian, that, you know, as somebody who's run large, complex businesses, and as a risk manager, I'm always looking for what could go wrong next, constantly, you know, on the lookout for that. And I'm used to in the corporate world having more things go wrong. And frankly, this has been pretty smooth. I'm not saying there aren't, you know, challenges along the way that we have to address, but I continue to be surprised by how brilliant this plan is. How well it serves everybody. You know, not just the clients, not just the mediums, but, you know, it's helping serve the teachers who, who get more opportunities from this.

And it's, yeah, it's just, yeah, I really, well, I hadn't thought about it from the medium's perspective until, you know, you mentioned it, but I could see it actually, you know, growing the mediumship community as people find that You know, yes, I could, I can train, I can, I can come into this platform, I can do it again, low risk, it doesn't have to be a full-time thing. I don't have to develop my own website. I built a couple of websites for people that are mediums. And you know, they're trying to figure out how do I, how do I get my name out there? Do I go to, do I do spiritual fairs? Or, you know what, and this, this is a, this is a great way, reminds me of, I use Fiverr all the time to hire people to to work on my business. It's a great way to bring, bring people together. So to bring the mediums to a place where I can go, I can trust that this person is legitimate. I can trust Barry Soule, you know, because you've talked about how this works. And from the medium's perspective, it just makes their lives, I think, you know, it's gonna be a lot easier as well. So congratulations, I think you're doing a fantastic job.

Thank you. Thank you. It, it also helps make sure that we retain mediums because that's the one thing, like in a corporate world, you come from a corporate world, so you know this, right? Like you watch your retention numbers. You don't want to spend all the time and money to bring talent in to only have them leave 3 or 4 months later, right? If people have these skills and have an interest in these skills, we want them to be successful with it. We want to make it as easy for them as possible because The, the potential benefit of these skills is so enormous for the things that we're up against in our world, you know, for the suffering that people experience. I, I frankly, and my husband and I have this conversation regularly, cannot think of a more important thing that we could be doing for the world than bringing these kinds of skills to greater use and to bigger fruition.

Yeah, well, that brings up another point, you know, that a good medium reading can be as healing as several years of therapy. If people have a great medium reading— this is, this is, it's been proven by people have done studies, they've taken people through therapy, and they've also had them do medium readings. And they're like, they'll say that the medium, I feel like they connected with my soul, that the therapist connected with my head, but they connected with my soul. And Knowing that our loved ones are still here and still caring is such a healing thing. And mediumship is one of the primary ways of doing that. And again, we talked about several times all the problems and all the risks that we have here in the US because it's not regulated, because we don't know how well trained they are. We don't know if they're just— if they're— I tell people, there are great mediums, there are good mediums, there are bad mediums, and there are frauds. They all exist just like in any other profession. So it makes sense to be cautious and to try to mitigate our risks as much as we can when we're going out to look for a medium. I always tell people, you know, get referrals. Don't just— we don't have Yellow Pages anymore. But just don't go, you know, look up a medium in your neighborhood, ask someone, you know. And then the thing about Barry's Soul is you are a referral service. You are, you're actually vetting these people before you put them on your website.

Yeah, and we're vetting them in a way that is more representative of what you will experience, right? So for instance, we could put them through a test, right? Some people do do tests. The problem with the test is that if I'm a nervous test taker, I might not do well on the test, right?

Right.

Because in fact, the last— the thing that's worse for mediumship is being nervous. You know, like, it shuts you down.

Yes.

Do mediumship well, you have to be open and relaxed and comfortable and confident. And so we didn't want to do tests. We certainly don't want one person judging somebody's skills. We want to see, like, in the, in the diverse population, how does this person perform? And we want them to do it on their schedule.

That is a really good point too. And I do want to stick with that for just a moment, because I done testing, you know, of mediums. And as you said, the medium gets very nervous. It's a very unnatural environment because, you know, you're— they know they're being judged. And it's a, you know, yes/no type thing. And it's really hard to design a great mediumship test because it's more of a feeling. I mean, there does have to be evidence as well. But it's like, how did you make the client feel? Did they feel like there was a connection? Did they get healing from it? That's, that's the most important thing. So I like the fact that your, your environment is much more organic as people are going through this process.

Yeah, that's not to say that the testing environments are bad. They're not. But, but I, before I became a medium, I had, I bought sessions with mediums who had those credentials. And they weren't always stellar readings. For lots of the reasons that we already discussed. Yeah.

So yeah, and I didn't mean to knock the testing environments at all. Because again, it's just, it's something that's not easy to test. You know, it's, it's, it's more of a, it's more of a feeling. It's more of a, it's that, it's that human connection that you make with a medium. And so there's always this debate in mediumship, like, well, is it about the message? Or is it about the evidence? And It's both.

Yeah, yeah. But what's interesting is you know it when you see it. You know, I get to see thousands and thousands of reviews, and you can tell the difference between what I would call an arm's-length reading, you know, where I may have given you some important evidence but I didn't feel like I was a part of it.

Right, right.

Versus when the evidence has a depth, has a tenor, has a, you know, an emotion that you can connect to, and you just know that that's your person. It's pretty clear in the reviews, and it's pretty compelling. And I'm proud to say that our mediums who are doing the outreach and professional work like The things people are saying in those reviews about how life-changing it is for them, it's, it's phenomenal.

Yeah. Yeah.

Let me go back to one thing, Brian, because this is, this is important. It just reminds me of one of my early experiences. I remember when I was, when I was first coming into my intermediate level mediumship, and one of my coaches said, I needed to get out of my head more. I'm a very analytic person, and she could tell that I was holding myself back. And she said, you just need to get out and start working with some clients. And she didn't mean that to be frivolous. She meant you've got the skills, you need to get out of the practice environment because you're overanalyzing it. You just need to go feel it. And so I did. I reached out to some friends and I said, who knows somebody who wants a reading? Like, I'm still early, don't have high expectations. But anyone volunteer, I would take this. I take the time with them. And one of the first people that I read for was a young man, couldn't have been more than 22. And I didn't feel like the session was technically that good. I knew that we were making connection, and I could tell from his reactions that he was pretty in awe of what was happening that was helping him connect to a father figure. He, he had never had a father, and his, um, but this, this guy was a father figure to him, um, had passed 20 years earlier, uh, 20 years earlier. So I don't know, maybe this guy, he must have been more like 30 or something. Anyways, um, but he filled out a form for me afterwards and he said, life-changing. I never thought I would hear from him again. I'm so glad God put you in my path. Like, he just went on and on. A young man who was generally consumed by things that are not of a spiritual nature.

Right, right.

And I thought to myself, who am I to judge what we just experienced together? I, I was sitting there judging my, my, you know, performance, call it. Performance and faking it. I mean, my—

no, I understand.

Yeah. Did I, did I do it, you know, to the book, the right way, where all of my skills work the right way? I was judging it from that perspective instead of just letting it happen.

Right. Well, that's, again, that's the, that's the, the art to it, as opposed to that there's a technical stuff. And I've worked with mediums, and I have friends that are trained as training as mediums. And I know some of the teachers and the way they're like drill sergeants, it's got to be this way. And it's got to be that way. And you can't say this and you can't do that. And I'm like, no, I don't. It's, it's, or it's organic, it's making that connection. And the readings I really remember, or when I, when I felt like I connected with the medium and the medium connected with my loved one. And the evidence is really, really cool. But it's more of that, it's a feeling that you get when you have that reading that that, you know, you just know that your loved one was there.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, one of the interesting things I found out in hanging out with mediums and doing classes with mediums and, you know, being in these Facebook groups with mediums— I had no idea that many mediums start from trauma. Yeah, you know, I would say a good 15 to 20% of our mediums have, have lost children.

Yeah.

Um, have, you know, lost a spouse early, um, have experienced some kind of significant childhood trauma that really causes you to consider your life differently and consider that energy differently.

Yeah.

And so a lot of mediums, they're not coming from easy lives. They're coming from pain, um, but they've figured out how to translate their experience to a service, to a service that they can experience as well.

I just, I can only speak of my own experience. I've known a lot and lots of mediums. Of course, there's some in it to make money. And there's some that are, I know some that are celebrity mediums. But everyone I know is in it for service, they may be making money, but they're in it because they want, they want to serve, they want to, they want to provide that healing, they want to provide that connection. It's a, it's a very sacred calling. It's, it's, I believe it's a calling. I mean, some people argue that anybody can train to be a medium. I don't know whether that's true or not. But there are people that feel like this is just, this is what I'm here to do. And they're going to do it whether they get paid or not.

Yeah, I'm in the camp that you can, that anyone can train to be a medium. Because if I can, I mean, highly analytic, I'm Type A, I'm like, everything a medium should not be, right? Yeah. I can train to do it. I really think anyone can.

I've heard that. I have a friend that says he can train anybody to sing. I've challenged him to that. I've done a little bit of studying in mediumship. I'm still convinced I can't do it. But we'll see. Maybe.

Bob Dylan, you know, he was a singer, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Sally, thanks for being here today. Thanks for telling us. So it's verysoul.com. So it's a very very easy website to remember, B-R-Y-S-O-U-L. You're open for business so people can come check it out.

Yeah.

So yeah, I encourage you, if you're thinking about getting a reading, it's a great place to go. I just had a couple experiences there. They've been good experiences. So I'll be recommending it to people.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian. I really appreciate your time.

Yeah, good seeing you.

Thank you.

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