Strength

Upright

Not force. Nobody in the image is straining. The whole point is that the hand is resting, not gripping. This is strength as patience: the ability to sit with the thing that frightens you without either fleeing it or beating it into submission. The lion isn't defeated. It's accompanied.

Reversed

White-knuckling. Or self-control that's curdled into self-suppression — you've stopped calling it discipline and started calling it being good.

Its correspondence

Leo — fixed fire, ruled by the Sun, and confident enough not to have to prove it. That's the distinction the card is making. Loud is what people do when they're not sure. Leo at its best just is, and doesn't require the room to agree.

How it's usually misread

It's not about being nice. It's about being unhurried, which is much harder and much rarer.

Knowing the card isn't reading it

Every entry on this site is free, and always will be — meanings are the easy half. The hard half is what a card does in a position, next to another card, for a real question. Learn to Read is the lessons for that, plus a practice partner that critiques your interpretations — $111, once.

Or read this card in your hand: the deck is all 78 drawn the way you see it above.