Just a thought...
Everytime she mentioned this 'older man' she could tell I was responding to what she was saying to me, so if she was just judging on how I react to things then why did she say that Leon was in the same age group as me?
As long as you wanted an informative answer and don't just think this is cynicism for the sake of it...
1 technique you will see (used quite frequently by Colin Fry) when fishing for dates or ages is just to change what you meant as you get responses.
Imagine trying to cold read the age of a person's younger sister:
"She is quite a lot younger than you"
1) [
positive response/body language]
"Its a lot of years between you, and this meant you didn't always get on perfectly" (note the second half is virtually certain and deflects from the date fishing)
This is now a judgment call, but I guess:
a)
[Firmly positive]"Sometimes siblings with 8-10 years between them have (...xyz issue, make something up)"
[Above is an indirect guess, reconfirm a positive response as though you knew it, adjust guess otherwise, it will be considered correct from 6-15 maybe 20 years]
b)
[Medium response]"She is around 5, maybe 6 years younger than you"
c)
[Weak Response] "3 - 4 years, maybe more"
OR
"She is quite a lot younger than you"
2) [
weak response/body language]
"1 or 2 years at least"
The latter is where you need to be a salesman and deliver the line completely confidently and congruently, in text its clearly silly, but live, with someone who wants to believe and you have created good rapport with, its quite possible it will be remembered as a successful hit, and certainly not a failure.
I don't know how the conversation went in your case, but a guess would be that she said "around the same age range" and got a strong positive response and, went for within months (or you said "yes, within months!"), and hit first time. I guess if you had looked uncomfortable at the 'same age range' comment, she would have said "yes, similar age range, within 10 years?" and tried to sell it as a hit.
I should add, because I think someone hinted at this earlier in the thread, that some of these pyschics could well believe what they are doing (unconcious fraud). This is because instructional books on tea leaf reading or palm reading tell the learner what phrases to say based on patterns or lines. The phrases are worded as per the cold reading, but perhaps even the author believed it and didn't realise that.
Because of the correct wordings, the hits are believed by both the reader and the subject, and they both come to genuinely believe in the supernatural. Add to this someone who reads people well anyway and will trust their intuition (although probably without realising they are unconciously picking up all the queues from theit customer), and they can genuinely believe they are doing something magical.
Having said that, Colin Fry and John Edwards are conmen who have earnt fame and a living preying on vulnerable people. So some cynisism is healthy...
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