There really is no set period of time that your psychic ability should take to develop. How long it takes depends on lots of things, including how motivated you are to work at it, how much time you spend on hit and miss/trial and error approaches and your willingness to stick at it.

But there are some approaches you can take which make the process more challenging and time-consuming than it needs to be. I’ve listed here the four approaches I’ve found unhelpful – from my own experience and from the experience of others, so that you can avoid them.

1. Putting Pressure on Yourself

I’ve noticed that sometimes people can get frustrated because they expect their intuition or psychic abilities to be like a switch that you can ‘switch on’ and life suddenly becomes easier. Actually, intuitive development really is a whole-person growth experience and because of that, it rarely happens overnight.

It’s a process of tuning back in to your spirit, shedding the conditioning of a society which says you’re crazy and just talking to yourself and getting over your self-doubt. It sometimes requires you to develop courage, self-determination, patience or faith. And If you have unhelpful beliefs about the world and yourself, sometimes you need to shed them as part of the process. Often you’re learning important lessons before you can see the results. Those are the lessons which can make it time-consuming, but they are also the lessons and growth experiences which make it a worthy undertaking, from a spiritual perspective.

So, intuition develops best in an environment of allowing, exploration and non-detachment. If you’re dying to see results, putting pressure on yourself or full of impatience, frustration or fear, the process will be much more challenging than it needs to be.

If your approach to psychic development is a little too goal-oriented, remember why you’re doing it. You aren’t developing your intuition so you can psychically find out the lottery numbers, you’re doing it to develop yourself. It’ll happen on time.

Let’s have a look at the second approach that trips people up and slows them down in psychic development:

2. Trying to Develop the Wrong Gift

Did you know your intuition is not just one gift? It’s made up of many gifts.

The five main psychic gifts are dreaming, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance.

(Other sub-gifts will fall under the umbrella of one of these main gifts.)

Some of these gifts you have naturally and can just awaken, and some will come less naturally to you, so you need to work much harder on those if you choose to develop them first.

About your intuitive gifts and how they work

Think of your inherent psychic ability a bit like a television set and aerial. On your television set, you have several different ‘channels’ to get intuitive messages. You might be born hard-wired with really good ‘signal’ on one channel. Let’s say clairvoyance (seeing Spirit) is your primary channel, clairaudience (hearing your inner voice and your Spirit Guides) may be your secondary channel, clairsentience (gut feelings and emotions) is channel three and claircognizance (getting Divinely-inspired thoughts and ideas) is channel four.

Some of us are specially designed or ‘wired’ to broadcast really clearly on one channel only. Others on two or three channels. A few people can broadcast really well on all channels without any practice. Actually, most people are naturally good at receiving some transmissions through one or two channels, with some practice, so this is what we need to do, as intuitives:

We need to find out which is our strongest channels (our strongest gifts) and work on developing those first.

Most people just take one gift at random which they think is kind of cool and try developing that.

That was also my approach to intuitive development, in the beginning. I wanted to be clairvoyant but it wasn’t my strongest gift. I wasted several months thinking I wasn’t very intuitive simply because my clairvoyance wasn’t developing fast enough.

But when I hit upon automatic writing (which utilises claircognizance) I couldn’t believe the difference – I was getting much more connection. It was clear and the information just flowed. Whereas clairvoyance felt exactly like some dodgy, untuned channel – little clarity or flow. The same with my clairsentience (gut feelings and feelings in general) – I was already getting information through clairsentience as I needed it. But those two ‘channels’ – clairsentience and claircognizance – I wasn’t really seeing as valid channels through which to tune into Spirit, I wanted to be clairvoyant like most other psychics.

I’ve seen clients in a similar situation – trying to make their intuition come through a gift or a channel which isn’t one of their strongest and it makes the process more difficult than it needs to be. On the other hand, finding out what you are already gifted in, and developing that makes the process more satisfying and saves a lot of time and energy.

But this does not mean you have to settle only for the gifts we already have and just forgetting the rest.

What usually happens then is that as your primary gifts become stronger, you also become more accomplished at tuning in the other ‘channels’, if you want to, because you’ve done it once and you know what to do now – your overall ‘signal’ is good. Your primary gift is a starting point.

If you want to speed up your intuitive development, I’d recommend you find out what your natural gifts are and develop those first. Because if you don’t know what your personal psychic strengths are, then you will probably waste some time with a hit-and-miss/ trial and error approach.

If you don’t know what your primary gift is, I have an online quiz here which can help.

3. Not Having a Plan

Most of the people who are slow to develop psychic ability are those who don’t have a program or a process they’re following consistently. They’re often not setting aside time in their week or day for intuitive development. They’re just trying a few things here and there to see what happens.

To develop your intuition, it really helps to have structure. You want processes which teach you to awaken your psychic ability, a process to teach you to develop your gifts and a process so that you can access them at will whenever you want – and you only want processes which suit you and utilize your natural, existing strengths.

Investing energy, time or money in an intuitive development plan broadcasts an entirely different intention to the Universe than just doing a couple of exercises here and there. The more invested you are in terms of time and energy and the more structure you give your intention to develop psychically, the quicker you’ll get results.

I also reveal my process for psychic development in this article:

• My 6 Step Formula for Learning to Communicate with Spirit

4. Letting Fear Get the Better of You

Like attracts like, so if you hold yourself in a place of fear, you’ll create more things which make you fearful. But if you acknowledge the fear and allow yourself to rise above it, you just won’t encounter anything that scares you.

I personally remember being so scared when I was developing psychically and it took me months to get over that. But once I let go of my fear, psychic phenomena and intuition became an ordinary part of my experience. I found out that my clairaudience was just an inner voice that sounded like mine, my clairvoyance was just like day-dreaming, only directed by Spirit and my claircognizance was a subtle intrusion of inspired thought into my consciousness. I realized that nothing was out to scare me unless I invited it to.

Here are two more articles on overcoming the fear of the spirit world:

• How to Overcome a Fear of the Spirit World
• 4 Ways to Make Spirit Communication Less Scary

Further Reading:

• How Long Does it Take to Develop Psychic Abilities?