The first time someone told me to “just be yourself” on stage, I nodded and thought: of course. Obviously. Who else would I be?
The answer, as it turned out, was: almost anyone else.
For the first two years of performing, I was not myself on stage. I was a character I had unconsciously assembled from every magician I had watched, every performer I admired, and every assumption I held about what a “magician” was supposed to look and sound like. I was louder than I am naturally. More theatrical. More assertive. I used hand gestures I would never use in conversation. I spoke in a cadence that was nobody’s cadence — a strange hybrid of every YouTube tutorial and magic DVD I had consumed.
I was performing a performance of a performer. And I had no idea I was doing it.
The Convention Observation
Ken Weber makes a devastating observation in Maximum Entertainment about what happens at magic conventions. Performers get up and do their acts — polished, rehearsed, character-driven — and the audience responds. Then the same performers give lectures about their craft — unscripted, conversational, being themselves — and the audience responds more.
Not a little more. Significantly more. The lectures are often better than the acts. The teaching is more engaging than the performing. The person is more compelling than the character.
Weber’s explanation is simple: during the lecture, the performer is being themselves. During the act, they are being someone else. And the someone else is almost always less interesting, less engaging, and less human than the real person underneath.
This observation landed on me like a boulder because I recognized myself in it immediately. The Felix who talked to people at a dinner table before a show was funnier, warmer, more engaging, and more interesting than the Felix who then stood up and performed. The pre-show Felix told stories, asked questions, made observations, laughed naturally. The performing Felix became stiff, scripted, and slightly artificial.
Why?
The Magician Persona Trap
Because I thought I needed to be a Magician. Capital M. A special kind of person doing a special kind of thing. And in my mind, a Magician was not a strategy consultant from Austria who had picked up card tricks in hotel rooms. A Magician was something grander, more mysterious, more commanding.
So I adopted a persona. Not a ridiculous one — I did not start wearing a cape or speaking in a dramatic baritone. It was subtler than that. I changed my vocal register slightly. I stood differently. I used language I would never use in normal conversation. I created a thin layer of performance between myself and the audience, a veneer of “Magician” that I thought the audience needed to see.
The problem with a veneer is that it is always visible. It might look fine from a distance, but up close, the audience can sense the disconnect. They can feel that the person in front of them is performing a role rather than being a person. And that feeling — even if they cannot name it — creates a subtle distance that no amount of good material can bridge.
Weber tells a story that has become a kind of touchstone for me. An agent is watching a young performer who is trying desperately to be flashy, to be impressive, to be what he thinks the business wants. And the agent says: “Kid, I like you. Be yourself.” That is the whole note. Be yourself.
It sounds like the easiest advice in the world. It is, in fact, the hardest. Because being yourself requires you to believe that who you actually are is enough. And most of us, in the vulnerable context of performance, do not believe that.
The Derren Brown Process
Derren Brown offers something much more actionable than “be yourself” in Absolute Magic. He describes a specific process for developing an authentic performance character.
Step one: sit with someone who knows you well — a close friend, a partner, someone who has seen you at your best and worst — and ask them to describe your social character honestly. How do you come across in groups? What is distinctive about the way you talk, move, react? What makes you you?
This is uncomfortable. It requires the kind of vulnerability that most of us avoid. But it is essential, because the traits that make you distinctive as a person are the same traits that should make you distinctive as a performer. You do not need to invent a character. You need to discover the one you already are.
Step two: identify which aspects of your natural personality are most conducive to the kind of performance you want to create. Not all of your traits will translate to the stage. Some will be too subtle, some too private. But the core of who you are — your humor, your curiosity, your intensity, your warmth, whatever defines you — those are the building blocks.
Step three: theatrically enhance those real traits. Not by adding mannerisms or affects, but by relaxing into them and allowing them to fill the performance space. Brown quotes Stanislavski via Gogol: “First grasp the soul of a part, not its dress.” Start from the inside. The outside will follow.
What struck me about Brown’s process is that it is the exact opposite of how most magicians develop their stage presence. Most magicians start with the outside — the costume, the voice, the gestures, the character concept — and hope the inside will follow. Brown says: start with who you actually are, and let the performance be an amplified version of that truth.
My Process
I tried Brown’s approach. I sat down with a close friend — someone who had known me for years, through my consulting career, through the early magic obsession, through the founding of Vulpine Creations — and asked her to describe how I came across in social settings.
The answers surprised me. She described someone I did not recognize from my stage performances. She said I was quietly funny — that my humor was observational and slightly dry, not broad or theatrical. She said I was intensely curious about people — that I asked questions and genuinely listened to the answers. She said I had a quality of quiet confidence that was different from the louder confidence I projected on stage. And she said I was at my best when I was genuinely fascinated by something, because my enthusiasm was specific and infectious rather than performed.
None of these traits were present in my stage persona. My stage persona was louder, broader, more theatrically confident, and less genuinely curious. I had stripped away the most interesting parts of myself and replaced them with a generic “performer” overlay.
The Rebuild
Rebuilding my performance identity around my actual personality was not a quick process. It took most of a year, and it happened in stages.
First, I dropped the vocal register changes. I stopped pitching my voice lower and speaking more slowly when I performed. Instead, I spoke the way I speak when I am explaining something interesting to a friend — with natural variation, natural energy, natural pauses.
Second, I incorporated genuine curiosity. When I work with a volunteer, I am now genuinely interested in them as a person. Not performing interest — actually interested. What did they choose, and why? What is their reaction telling me? This is not a technique. It is who I am when I am not trying to be someone else.
Third, I leaned into the dry humor. My natural comedic register is observational and understated. For years I had been trying to be funnier in a bigger, broader way, because I thought that was what performing required. When I gave myself permission to be quietly funny instead — to let the humor come from observation rather than setup-punchline structures — the laughter became more genuine. Both mine and the audience’s.
Fourth, I stopped hiding the consultant. For years I had treated my professional background as something to play down on stage, as if being a strategy consultant was somehow at odds with being a performer. In reality, my analytical nature, my fascination with decision-making, my experience reading rooms full of executives — these are assets, not liabilities. They are what make my mentalism distinctive, because the interest in how people think is not a character choice. It is who I actually am.
The Result
The shift was not dramatic from the outside. Nobody who watched my shows before and after would have said: “He completely changed his act.” The effects were the same. The structure was similar. The scripts had evolved but were not unrecognizable.
What changed was harder to see but easier to feel. There was a coherence to the performances that had not been there before. The person talking to the audience before the show was the same person performing for them. The humor that got laughs during the set was the same humor that got laughs at dinner afterward. There was no switch, no veneer, no moment where Felix the Person became Felix the Magician.
And the audience responses changed. Not in volume or enthusiasm, but in quality. People started saying things like “You seem so natural” and “It felt like you were just talking to us.” Event organizers started telling me that the feedback was about me as much as about the magic — that guests mentioned how much they enjoyed my company, not just my tricks.
This is the payoff of being yourself. When the audience connects with the real you, their connection to the magic deepens automatically. Because the magic is not happening to a character. It is happening to a person they feel they know. And that is a fundamentally different experience.
The “Best Version” Distinction
I want to be precise about what “be yourself” means in practice, because I think it is easily misunderstood.
Being yourself on stage does not mean being exactly who you are when you are alone in your apartment on a Sunday morning. It does not mean bringing your worst self, your lazy self, your anxious self, your unfiltered self. You are not aiming for raw, unedited authenticity.
You are aiming for the best version of yourself. The version that shows up when you are at your most engaged, most curious, most alive. The version your best friend sees when you are excited about something. The version your colleagues see when you are in flow on a project.
That version is still you. It is not a character. But it is a curated you — the version where the best qualities are amplified and the self-defeating ones are managed.
Weber puts it perfectly: be yourself, the polished version. Not a different person. Not a character. Just you, on a good day, with the volume turned up slightly.
Why This Is Actually Hard
The reason this advice is hard has nothing to do with technique. It has to do with fear.
Being yourself on stage means accepting that who you are is enough. That you do not need a character to hide behind. That the real Felix — the consultant who learned card magic in hotel rooms, who gets nervous before shows, who is genuinely fascinated by how people think, who co-founded a magic company almost by accident — is interesting enough to hold an audience’s attention.
For years, I did not believe that. I thought the audience wanted something more than a regular person. Something special. Something magical in a way that a strategy consultant from Graz could never be.
What I have learned — slowly, painfully, through years of performing both as a character and as myself — is that the audience does not want something more than a regular person. They want a real person. A person they can connect with, relate to, invest in. A person who happens to do extraordinary things.
The extraordinary is in the magic. The person doing it should be human, relatable, genuine.
Be yourself. The polished version. It is the hardest thing you will ever do on stage, and it is the most important thing you will ever do on stage. Everything else — the technique, the material, the scripts, the production — rests on this foundation.
If the foundation is authentic, the building stands. If it is artificial, everything wobbles, no matter how impressive it looks from the outside.
I spent two years building on an artificial foundation. I have spent every year since rebuilding on a real one. And the difference is not something I can quantify. It is something I can feel, every time I step in front of an audience and allow myself to be the person I actually am.