How do I do a tarot reading for a friend

The separation is procedural, not a matter of trying harder to be objective. You build the setup so your opinion has nowhere to land.

Before you draw

• Take their question in their own words and write it down. If you can't repeat it back to them verbatim, you don't have their question — you have your version of it.
• Fix the seat names and the spread before you look at a card. Once the seats exist, you can't quietly add an "advice" seat that will hold what you already want to say.

When you read

• Picture first, dictionary second. Describe what's on the card: who stands there, what the hands are doing, what's on the ground. A description is much harder to bend toward a conclusion you already hold.
• Attach every judgment to something they can go and check — a document, a date, a conversation that already happened. "The written scope" and "what they said when you asked what happens when the first project slips" count. "This person isn't ready for you" doesn't.
• Write the conditional. *If* that thing comes back one way, then this; if the other way, then that. A seat you can't read leaves the judgment stopped at the condition — you don't fill the gap with a guess.
• Never report what's inside their head. You can read what you watch them do; you can't read a decision they haven't made yet.

The part that's actually yours
Say it out loud, separately, at the end: "Here's what the cards show; here's what I want for you, and those aren't the same thing." Naming the difference is the whole technique — once it's in the air, they get to decide what to do with it.

The check
Reread your own notes and ask: would I write this for a stranger with the same question? If you'd soften it for them, or quietly drop the seat that bothers you, that's your feeling in the reading, not the card.

Want me to draw a practice spread on a situation that isn't yours — nothing of your own to leak into it?