What Are We Really Capable Of? | Mediumship & Human Potential
What Are We Really Capable Of? The Boundless Potential of Being Human
What are we really capable of — and who decided where our limits are?
That's the question I sat down with this week for the latest episode of Soul Sync, with my friend and returning guest Nicola Farmer. Nicola's a spiritual mentor, trance medium, teacher and author, and she's someone who's made me think properly about words over the years. Not just the words we say to other people — the words we use to define ourselves.
I can't. I'm not good enough. I'm trying. That's impossible.
At what point do those stop being descriptions and start being boundaries?
Why the word "try" might be working against you
One of the things Nicola said early on has stuck with me all week: the word try allows failure. The moment you're trying to connect with spirit, or trying to be more confident, or trying to be a "proper" medium, you've already built in the exit. You're pushing against a boundary you set up yourself.
I know that one from the inside. At the very start of my mediumship, it flowed. It was effortless, because I didn't know enough to overthink it. Then I started caring about getting it right, and that's exactly when it stopped working. More effort, less result. Nicola's answer to that isn't complicated, but it isn't easy either: stop trying to be something, and start being willing to be yourself, so spirit can blend with that instead of fighting it.
She teaches her students to swap "I think" for "I feel." It sounds small. It isn't. "Think" sends you straight into the analytical left brain — the part of you that wants proof, structure, the right answer. "Feel" is where the sensitivity lives, and sensitivity is the whole job. She does the same thing with the children she teaches: never ask "what colour do you see?" — ask "tell me what colour." A question routes through the analytical brain looking for the correct answer. An instruction doesn't.
Mediums are storytellers
Nicola put something into words in this conversation that I think matters far beyond mediumship: mediums are storytellers. Not because we invent anything — because communication is about bringing someone's personality, their memories, their relationships, their whole life, back into the room through words. That's the job. Not ticking boxes, not performing to a script someone else wrote about what a "proper" medium should sound like. Bringing a person back to life, as themselves, through you.
That pressure to perform a certain way — to sound like the medium people expect rather than the one you actually are — is, in Nicola's words, one of the biggest things holding developing mediums back. I've felt that pressure myself, plenty of times. The way out of it isn't more effort. It's more honesty.
Every strange, unrelated job you've ever had was preparing you
I've had what Nicola would call a catch-me-if-you-can life: magician, cabin crew, police officer, recruitment business owner, podcast host, and now — adding platform mediumship to the list. None of those felt connected while I was living them. But sit down and actually look back, and you can see exactly what each one gave the others.
Being a magician taught me how to hold a room. Police work sharpened whatever instinct it is that used to have colleagues calling me a magnet for finding trouble before it found me — years of trusting a hunch before I had language for what a hunch even was. Recruitment taught me to read a person in seconds. All of it, it turns out, was building the same muscle. I just didn't know yet what it was for.
That's the bit of this conversation I want you to sit with, whatever your own checkered history of jobs and detours looks like: none of it was wasted. It was grooming you for something you couldn't see yet.
Where science and spirituality actually meet
We also got into the relationship between science and mediumship — a subject Nicola and I are both genuinely into, not just as a debating point. The old framing is that science and spirituality sit on opposite sides of a fence. Neither of us buys that anymore. What we do as mediums is a form of working with consciousness, and consciousness is exactly what physicists and researchers are now taking seriously as one of the genuine open questions about reality — I've had similar conversations on this podcast before, including with quantum physicist Tom Campbell about his theory of everything, My Big TOE.
Maybe the two fields aren't opposed at all. Maybe they're both just trying to describe the same thing from different directions, and the most useful place either of us can stand is simply curious.
It's not about believing — it's about knowing you're the possibility
Nicola's closing thought is the one I keep coming back to: it isn't about believing in what's possible. It's about knowing that you are that possibility, and that whatever you're reaching for has already been there inside you the whole time. You won't find it outside yourself. You'll find it by getting quiet enough to notice it was never missing.
Human potential really might be far greater than any of us currently imagine. This conversation is a good place to start testing that for yourself.
Join Jason & Nicola live — Friday 28 August
Nicola and I are hosting a free Online Evening of Mediumship together.
Friday 28 August 2026, 7:30pm London/BST, live on Zoom. Completely free, no booking required, and everyone is welcome — wherever in the world you're joining from. Expect a spiritual talk followed by a live demonstration of mediumship, with plenty of love, connection and laughter along the way.
Join the Zoom meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81106195008?pwd=hE1Wp5v0AFYK4DCHCq1XBTxu4n7S7z.1 Meeting ID: 811 0619 5008 — Passcode: 252388
Connect with Nicola Farmer
Nicola Farmer is a spiritual mentor, spirit, psychic and trance medium, teacher, healer and author whose work explores consciousness, human potential and spiritual development. You can find her at nicolafarmer.com.
Listen to the full conversation