Can magic help us nail our work/life balance? Meet the career adviser with a difference

Ask the cards a question,” urges Annie Ridout.

I peer into the Zoom window at the palm-sized deck in her hand and feel just a little bit foolish. Nevertheless, I take a breath and ask what I really came here to ask. It’s a big question, one that could change the entire direction of my next decade.

Annie draws a card and holds it up – the Four of Wands. She reads the caption on it. “Success. You have reached a period of stability after all your hard work. This may also denote a time of repose or recovery after certain challenges and hardships have finally passed…”

Despite having zero attachment to tarot as a concept, I feel a prick of emotion. I’ve been dancing around a point during an hour of talking through my personal goals and frustrations, and the card seems to make it simple for me. It’s so dead-on that I repeat one of the words on the card absentmindedly as soon as she says it. “Peace”. Annie is a life coach and career guide who reckons magic is the key to success. Am I really just about to make a major life decision based on the card she’s turned over?

When Annie was a teen, she found a spell book in a dusty alternative shop in Brighton. Giddy with an early crush, she bought it and cast a spell on the object of her affection. To her delight, he suddenly took an interest in her. At university, she was agonising over whether to stay or leave a course she felt was wrong for her, when her mother pulled out a deck of oracle cards. “Ask the cards,” she said sagely. She can’t remember the exact card drawn, but the message seemed clear: get the heck out of there.

“What I really read was my own subconscious mind, which had already checked out,” she reasons now. “But the card prompted me. It helped me to access my deeper thoughts.”

Magic is not a new fad in Annie’s life. It’s always been there, from her family believing they’d been visited by dead loved ones if they smelled a certain scent, to manifesting romantic relationships. But it’s only in the past couple of years that she became sure that an active spiritual life was the key to a better career, personal life and sense of purpose.

Annie has branded this everyday use of magic – which encompasses carrying crystals, reciting mantras, and asking tarot cards and deities for guidance – in career planning “spiritual intelligence”, or “SQ”. She believes that improving our SQ can directly improve our work/life balance, and she’s writing a book to that effect, as well as running life coaching sessions on how to do it.

Two days earlier, I’d ripped open a parcel to find some gemstones, each the size of a grape, plus a little note from Annie telling me they represented love (rose quartz), strength (green aventurine) and mental clarity (clear quartz). It’s generous, but there was something a little earnest, a little teenage-girlish, about it for me. I left them on the dining table and dived back into my work week.

As I was sitting down to our video call that soporific Friday afternoon, I was feeling unprepared. Beaming luminously from the screen, Annie tells me she has lit a candle, rung a Tibetan singing bowl and set an intention for our meeting. I nod brightly, aware that I haven’t so much as made time to boil the kettle.

She tells me she first started incorporating spells and objects into her workday after launching a business with her husband. With three children to look after, growing the company became an all-consuming mission.

“At first it was a form of meditation, I suppose,” she tells me. “Every morning I’d open the loft window above my desk and speak to Vester, goddess of home, hearth and harmony, asking her to bring me prosperity.” She goes one further: “I’d imagine this feminine figure with her arms outstretched, pushing this energy towards me.” She also put a plea out to Zeus, who she’d read could help mere mortals achieve success.

“I would have been really embarrassed if someone had walked in and seen me,” she admits. “But after a while I realised it genuinely helped me. Not just to focus, but to really believe and hope that I would become more successful and win more business and clients.”

And she did. As her family business grew and all things “woo-woo” became more visible in mainstream culture, Annie decided her love of a magic moment could prove useful for other entrepreneurs. And folks like me, dissatisfied in a life rut I’m not sure how to climb out of.

Alternative and superstitious lifestyle practices, from deciphering your personality with an astrological natal chart, to carrying meaning-infused crystals, are undeniably on the rise. Witchy Instagrammers such as Harmony Nice (bio: “Mother Nature’s bitch”) wax magical to audiences of 329,000; the astrology app Co-Star has had more than 20 million downloads, and is used by a quarter of all women aged 18–25 in the US. One 2019 LA Times headline went as far as to suggest that millennials were replacing religion with gemstones and astrology.

“Astrology has really risen in popularity because people want a symbol system that’s not sexist, racist, homophobic, that helps them connect to each other across all demographics,” psychological astrologer Dr Jennifer Freed (Instagram followers: 36,000) told Refinery29 last year.

But Annie disagrees that SQ is about fostering a sense of community in a faithless world. “I was talking to the entrepreneur Sharmadean Reid about this the other day. She said she grew up with formal religion, but hadn’t realised until adulthood that faith and religion were separate – that she could have faith without religion,” she says. “The best thing about spirituality is that you don’t need to connect with other people to have it. You can find the beliefs, rituals and practices that work for you.”

Halfway into our session, Annie asks me to visualise the sort of life I want – day to day, week to week. This isn’t purely about work, she explains: it could be a matter of flexibility, factoring in creative pursuits, taking time outside, framing each day with a goal or intention.

So far, so normal, right? In fact, somewhat anticlimactically, there’s nothing weird or kooky about our chat. In fact, much of it feels like common sense mixed with some five-year-planning, pepped up with a bit of magical thinking. She talks a lot about being “open to” things; she senses my level of cynicism and works with me rather than preaching at me.

Xural.com