Colin Fry: Commitment to Excellence

To many working Mediums and fans Colin Fry is the Take That of the Mediumship field. A man who has worked tirelessly for many years to demonstrate Mediumship to the highest possible standards, and a man whose genuine love for human beings has become the watchword of the work he does.

Anyone who has ever seen Colin on stage will know that his kindness and compassion for both his audience and the Spirit World is tinged with a remarkable sense of humour that keeps the evening joyful, uplifting and interesting from start to finish. However, there is a side to Colin that many people may not have discovered – he is also a qualified Life Coach, an inspirational speaker, a trained counsellor. He is also a talented writer who draws on an eclectic mix of spirituality and down-to-earth commonsense in his latest book “The Message”.

“The Message” is a remarkable endeavour by someone who is best know for his Mediumship and stage and television persona, yet has taken a personal step aside and instead focussed his efforts on helping people to deal with that most ravaging of all emotions – grief. In the book he combines his experiences as a Medium with his real-world training to provide people with a 7 step plan to ‘leave hurt and hardship behind’. As it says on the back of the book “his work has given him life-enhancing insights that can benefit us all”.

“I had an agenda with my books; I never intended to do books that just repeated good messages. I wanted my books to be inspirational and help people to come to terms with their grief. Teaching people to look beyond the message, to work out what you’re going to do with it. Your loved ones come through for a specific reason, every communicator has a purpose, either to help the human move on or to bring comfort and stop you getting trapped in grief. Every message should be a healing moment.”
“A Medium needs to open themselves up to passion and love and feelings, you can be a brilliant technical medium but if there’s no passion and emotion it’s like receiving a text from the Spirit World. If I hadn’t been through the joy and pain in my life I couldn’t be the Medium that I am. When I was told this at 17 it made no sense, but now I know how important it is to be able to relate to the feelings.”

“Life is full of passion, joy, arguments, making up, lacking money. When you’re working on platform you’re working with people who have lived through the extremes of emotions and they need to hear that you know and understand that.”

As the longest-standing TV Medium of his time Colin has spent a lot of his working life in the public spotlight, and we asked him how it has felt to live and work in the glare of stage lights and through the lens of television cameras. The first thing that is clear is that Colin loves his work, the good and the challenging, and wouldn’t change anything for the world. He doesn’t complain about the difficult things because he knows that fame that allows him to reach so many has a price that he is willing to pay.

“Years ago I met Lesley Flint and he said to me ‘to be a Medium you have to remain soft on the inside and have skin as hard as a rhino on the outside’.” He also says that the behaviour of his audience never ceases to amaze him and he’s “lucky if 99.9% of the audience have come for the right reasons.” He finds it sad that a small percentage of people come to disrupt an evening of Mediumship because of their own personal beliefs, which he finds disrespectful not to him but to other audience members and to the Spirit World. One thing you quickly realise is that Colin isn’t the reason he does his work – you are.

He obviously finds bad press hurtful “Especially when it’s untrue or has been distorted” but says it is best ignored because “For every sarcastic comment that you get there are 10 positives.”

He feels that one of the pitfalls that beginners to the field can drop into is to “Want everyone to like them, agree with them and approve of what they do.” He points out that this is impossible in any walk of life and as with all things it is better to gravitate towards the positive and try not to get too involved with the negative. In common with other television personalities he has taken his share of hurtful comments from sceptics and we asked him how he copes with it. He says that he doesn’t “waste energy on it.” Over the years he has developed some understanding of the sceptic psychic and feels that “Hard nosed sceptics are so angry and aggressive and you often find that at the bottom of it they’re terrified of the concept of death. I used to go into combat with them but it’s a waste of time, whatever you say they won’t accept it and will always attack what we do. Better to focus your energies on people that are interested.

In an audience situation he hopes for open minded people and welcomes healthy sceptics who are prepared to listen and make their own judgements based on what they see. The only thing he asks is that sceptical audience members respect the beliefs of other members of the audience and allow them to receive their messages without disruption.

We asked Colin for advice for new Mediums who may consider a working life in the public spotlight and he said “Don’t put your head above the parapet until you’re absolutely equipped to fend off the slings and arrows of outraged sceptics. New mediums need to be taught to cope as part of their development and they shouldn’t be put into the public arena until they can cope.” He is concerned about some of the changes in teaching style saying that “In the old days there was more mentoring.” He feels that mentoring is important because it offers on-going support to new workers who may not be as ready as they imagine to take the plunge onto the stage and into the spotlight.

He strongly supports training both in small local circles “Excellent ways to train” and also experiencing the wider training available through national organisations.
However, he suggests that people “Focus on your own spiritual gift; you don’t always have to be a Medium.”

As for television work he says that “The more well known Mediums have spent years training and working in their spare time. They didn’t suddenly appear on television.”
He also believes in supporting your Mediumship with other appropriate training. The late Gordon Higginson – a legend in Mediumship circles – trained in public speaking. Although he never wished to be a counsellor, Colin has studied counselling because he believes that “It’s important to understand how to take people through an emotional process.” He is also a qualified Life Coach, and does courses and lectures on positive thinking, even so, he believes that “Certificates aren’t as important as training and good experience; it’s the knowledge not the certificates.”

Colin is ambivalent about recent moves to formalise and structure the field of Mediumship since the EU Consumer legislation came into force in early 2007. He has a problem with the formalisation of the field asking “Who will appoint and approve of assessors, the Government? When dealing with regulatory bodies there can be a considerable lack of understanding. The laws in place are good and if you do your job properly there is no need to panic. The Fraudulent Mediums Act (now repealed) was there to protect us. Under the new law people do need to be protected from those who misuse the field.”

Colin is a member of United Spiritualists, he likes to support them and he likes their beliefs - “But I don’t get involved in their politics.” In all other respects he remains independent and has no wish to align himself with any organisation or philosophy. This is in line with his personal philosophy about individuality. “My favourite form of education is the Steiner System that encourages people to be individuals. All the well known Mediums are very individual. Education across the board is a matter of square pegs being forced into round holes.” It’s clear when you talk to him that Colin believes in finding your own way guided by not just Spirit Guides but also by your own ethics and sense of right and wrong.

We asked Colin whether his working style has changed over the past 30 years. “I think that my Mediumship changes every four or five years and that I work in different ways; the way I receive the information and deliver it changes. I think it has to be like that because your work is in a constant state of flux and that’s how it should be. I always consult with my Guides on important issues. Guides are there to help you in your work, but it’s what you’re doing with your work that’s important.”

We asked Colin how, as a Medium, he deals with grief. He said “In exactly the same way as everyone else, there is the initial moment of shock and sadness, but I very quickly try and remember that their life had purpose and I learned things from them. Whether that’s what I do want to be or what I don’t want to be; you take something good out of every relationship that you have. I also hope that in the stage they’re moving onto now they will find what they needed and that they will be able to sort out what they couldn’t sort out on this side.”

“For example, when the agent who supported me and took my career to places I never thought it could go passed into the Spirit World, it was important that I didn’t give up otherwise I would have wasted everything she’d done for me and all her hard work. I would have stopped engaging in the relationship.” By continuing to ‘engage in the relationship’ Colin is referring to his belief, as stated in his new book, that although we must accept that people who have passed into the Spirit World have left this life that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still have a relationship with them. We must be realistic and accept that it is an incarnate/disincarnate relationship, but their passing should not mean that we ignore their continued existence and dismiss their memories along with all the good they did in our lives.

It’s a very special and comforting thought that you can continue to engage with those you have loved and lost, whilst remaining completely realistic about their altered state – for want of a better term. Prior to losing someone important in their lives people can feel very afraid that they will be unable to cope when the time comes, but Colin has great faith in the ability of human beings to deal with this emotionally charged situation.

“As beings we are actually capable of dealing with and coping with the extremes of grief and bereavement and we can work through it. If we acknowledge that spirit continues, that we can have that soul-to-soul connection. The people who have passed over haven’t died, they haven’t changed. Sadly it can sometimes seem that the people on this side are the ones that have died.”

“All human relationships are about constantly renewing the information and adding new input into the relationship, even just by asking ‘how was your day?’ When people pass over you need to keep engaging with them by sending out thoughts to them so that you continue to be part of each others’ lives. You also need to continue to live so that you maintain pace with them and have things to tell them later.”

Colin has found that Spirit may not come in to a reading if they feel that they no longer have relevance in their loved ones lives, or if they feel that the sitter is so grief stricken their presence might make matters worse; particularly at a public demonstration.

Colin is an extremely busy Medium, driving from one end of the country to another to demonstrate at sell out events. He works with TJ Higgs and Derek Acorah in “The Three Mediums”, and with TJ alone in “The Best of British Mediums”. He had a new television programme “Colin Fry Live” start on Living TV 2 in September.

He is making notes for his next book, and would one day like to write a book focussing on Spirituality for young people who may not want to take the religious path.
When you speak to Colin you find him to be genuine and remarkably untouched by his star status. His commitment to helping people is always close to the surface, and anyone who has seen him work on stage will have witnessed the genuine emotional connection he has to beings on both sides of life; interspersed with moments of true hilarity.

He is also quite a tough cookie, having little time for discourteous behaviour and rudeness, and he isn’t afraid to stand up for his beliefs publicly. He is credited with moving Mediumship forward in the UK, and supporting and inspiring other young, up and coming Mediums to find their feet both on the stage and in the television studio.
He is a deep thinker who can speak easily for an hour and mesmerise the listener with his insights. He says that he’s not ready to write an autobiography yet “Maybe one day I will be ready to do so.” We’re sure that in the meantime he will write many more inspiring books, but quite frankly we can’t wait for the autobiography; it will be fascinating.

In the meantime we will just have to wait and see what develops, if his work changes every five years we are sure that Colin will continue to go from strength to strength whilst he amazes, amuses and inspires everyone whose life he touches.

© Deb Hawken - First published in Eternal Spirit Magazine, Winter Solstice 2010