I was performing at a corporate event in Linz last year. One of those post-conference evening things where a company brings in entertainment after the strategy presentations are done and the open bar has been running for twenty minutes. The kind of gig where half the room is genuinely curious and the other half is wondering when they can leave without being noticed.
I was working the tables, doing close-up mentalism and card work. Table one was fantastic. Smiles, gasps, the whole thing. Table two was warm. Table three had a man in an expensive suit sitting with his arms crossed, leaning back in his chair, wearing the kind of smirk that says: go ahead, try to impress me. I dare you. I explored this further in The Audience Member You Made Fun Of Remembers It Forever.
He was a senior executive. You could tell by the way everyone else at his table oriented their body language toward him, the way they glanced at him before reacting to anything, the way the air around that table felt like it was waiting for his permission.
My first instinct was to skip that table entirely. Work the friendly crowds. Get the easy wins. Come back to him later, maybe, if the energy in the room was high enough that his skepticism would not matter.
That instinct was wrong. And understanding why it was wrong changed how I handle every difficult audience member I encounter.
The Insight That Flipped Everything
I had been reading Oz Pearlman's Read Your Mind around that time, and one idea had lodged itself in my brain and would not leave. Oz makes the point that the person who seems most resistant to your performance is not disengaged. They are the opposite of disengaged. They are hyper-engaged. They are paying more attention than anyone else in the room.
Think about it. The person who does not care about your magic is the one scrolling through their phone under the table. The one chatting with their neighbor and barely glancing at you. The one who smiles politely and claps at the appropriate moments but whose eyes are somewhere else entirely.
The person with their arms crossed, the skeptic, the one who is actively challenging you with their body language -- that person is locked in. They are watching everything you do. They are analyzing your words, your movements, your timing. They have committed more cognitive resources to your performance than anyone else at the table.
They are not your enemy. They are your most invested audience member.
The question is: why are they behaving this way? And the answer, once you see it, is almost always the same. They feel out of control. You have walked up to their table with knowledge and abilities they do not have. You are about to demonstrate something impossible, and they do not know how you are going to do it, and they do not know what role they will be asked to play. For someone used to being the most competent person in the room -- and senior executives are almost always used to being the most competent person in the room -- this is deeply uncomfortable.
The crossed arms are not a rejection. They are a defense mechanism.
What Most Performers Do Wrong
Most performers, including earlier versions of me, respond to a skeptic in one of three ways. All three are mistakes.
The first mistake is avoidance. You skip them. You perform for the friendly people and hope the skeptic either warms up passively or does not poison the table's energy. This does not work because the skeptic is often the highest-status person at the table, and the rest of the table is taking cues from them. If the senior executive is not buying it, nobody fully buys it. You can get polite applause from the rest of the table, but you will never get genuine astonishment, because everyone is subconsciously checking whether the boss is impressed before they allow themselves to be.
The second mistake is confrontation. You try to prove them wrong. You make them the butt of a joke. You use your performer's authority to put them in their place. This might get a laugh from the rest of the table in the moment, but you have just made an enemy, and you have done it in front of their colleagues. Nobody wins in this scenario. The skeptic doubles down. The table gets uncomfortable. Whatever magic you perform after that is happening in a room that smells like conflict.
The third mistake is overperformance. You try to be SO impressive that the skeptic has no choice but to submit. You pull out your strongest material, your cleanest technique, your most impossible effects, and you throw everything at them hoping something sticks. This rarely works either, because a committed skeptic can always find a reason to stay skeptical. And even if you do fool them completely, you have not won them over. You have just forced them into a corner, which makes them resent you more.
None of these approaches address the actual problem. The actual problem is that the skeptic feels out of control and does not know what you want from them.
What I Did at Table Three
So there I was in Linz, staring at this executive and his crossed arms, with Oz's insight echoing in my head. Instead of avoiding him, instead of challenging him, I walked straight up to him. I wrote about this in How Kreskin Handled a Heckler Without Anyone Noticing.
"You look like the toughest person in this room," I said. "I want YOU for this."
Watch what that sentence does. It acknowledges his status. It does not challenge it. It does not diminish it. It elevates it. I am telling him, in front of his colleagues, that I think he is formidable. That I respect his skepticism. That I am not afraid of it -- in fact, I am seeking it out.
His eyebrows went up. Just slightly. The smirk softened by about ten percent. Not because he was won over -- not yet -- but because he was surprised. He expected me to avoid him or to try to charm the easier targets. He did not expect to be chosen.
Then I gave him agency. I asked him to make choices. Real choices, not the kind where a performer says "pick a card, any card" and you can tell the choice does not actually matter. I asked him questions. I let him set the terms. I made it clear, through my words and my body language, that what happened next was going to be shaped by him.
This is what I think of as the "one carrot or two broccolis" framework. The phrase comes from a parenting idea -- when you want a child to eat vegetables, you do not say "eat your broccoli." You say "do you want one carrot or two broccolis?" Either way, they are eating vegetables. But they feel like they made the choice. They have agency within your framework.
With the executive, I was doing the same thing. Every choice I gave him was a choice within my framework. The outcome I needed was going to happen regardless. But he did not know that. From his perspective, he was driving. He was in control. He was the one making the decisions that shaped what happened.
His arms uncrossed about thirty seconds in. By the time the effect reached its conclusion -- and it was a strong conclusion, the kind that makes people lean back and exhale -- he was not just impressed. He was delighted. And he was loud about it.
"How the hell did you do that?" he said, turning to his colleagues with the kind of grin that completely transforms a face. He went from being the skeptic at the table to being the champion. And because he was the highest-status person there, everyone else's permission to be amazed went through the roof.
The rest of that table was the best table of the night. Not because my technique was better there. Because I had the executive on my side, and everyone else followed.
The Status Transaction
Keith Johnstone's Impro is not a magic book. It is a book about theatrical improvisation and the dynamics of human interaction. But it contains an idea that has become central to how I handle every difficult audience situation: the concept of status transactions.
Johnstone's insight is that every human interaction involves a continuous, mostly unconscious negotiation of relative status. Who is higher, who is lower. Who is leading, who is following. And the crucial, counterintuitive discovery is this: the highest-status move you can make is giving status away.
Think about the most powerful person you have ever been in a room with. The CEO, the celebrity, the person everyone defers to. The ones who are genuinely powerful -- not insecure about their power, but genuinely powerful -- are almost always the ones who make other people feel important. They ask your name and remember it. They ask your opinion and listen to it. They give you status.
When I walked up to the executive in Linz and said "I want YOU for this," I was giving him status. I was telling him: you are important enough that I am seeking you out specifically. You are not a random volunteer. You are the person I chose because you are the toughest challenge in this room.
That is a gift. And people respond to gifts by reciprocating.
The De-Escalation Principle
There is a related principle that I had to learn the hard way, through a handful of performances that went sideways before I figured it out. The principle is: never charge up on someone who is running hot. This connects to what I found in The Yes And of Audience Interaction: Treating Every Reaction as an Offer.
When someone is resistant, skeptical, or outright hostile, your energy needs to go in the opposite direction. Not matching their intensity. Not meeting their challenge with a bigger challenge. Going lower, not higher. Calmer, not louder. More curious, not more defensive.
This is incredibly difficult in the moment. When someone is actively undermining your performance, every instinct tells you to escalate. To demonstrate that you are in charge. To use the performer's authority -- the microphone, the stage, the audience's attention -- to put them in their place.
But escalation creates opposition. The harder you push, the harder they push back. And now you are in a power struggle in front of an audience, which is a situation where nobody wins. Even if you "win" the exchange, the audience watched a fight, not a performance. The magic is gone.
De-escalation, on the other hand, creates space. When you respond to hostility with genuine curiosity -- "I can see you are not buying this, and I respect that, so let me ask you something" -- you disarm the conflict without surrendering. You are not backing down. You are redirecting. You are turning a confrontation into a conversation.
And conversations, unlike confrontations, have room for magic in them.
The Consulting Parallel
I see the same dynamic in my consulting work, and recognizing the parallel has made me better at both crafts.
In every strategy project, there is a stakeholder who pushes back harder than anyone else. The one who pokes holes in your analysis. The one who challenges your assumptions. The one who sits in the workshop with their arms crossed -- literally or metaphorically -- and radiates skepticism.
Early in my consulting career, I treated that person as an obstacle. Someone to work around. Someone to neutralize. I would build my coalition with the friendly stakeholders and hope to overwhelm the skeptic with consensus.
I was wrong then, too. Because the skeptic in a strategy project is almost always the person who cares the most about the outcome. They are not pushing back because they do not care. They are pushing back because they care so much that they are terrified of getting it wrong. Their resistance is a form of investment.
The solution in consulting is the same as the solution in magic. You do not avoid them. You do not fight them. You seek them out. You give them agency. You make them the co-author of the solution, so that when the final recommendation lands, they are not the person who was overruled -- they are the person who helped shape it.
Win the skeptic, and the project succeeds. Win the heckler, and the room follows.
What I Do Now
These days, when I scan a room before performing, I am not looking for the friendliest faces. I am looking for the crossed arms. The leaned-back posture. The person who is already deciding they are not going to be fooled.
I look for them because they are my most important audience member. Not despite their resistance, but because of it. They are paying the most attention. They have the most influence over the people around them. And if I can turn them from skeptic to champion, the entire room shifts.
The approach is always the same. Acknowledge them directly. Give them status. Give them agency within your framework. De-escalate, never charge up. Be genuinely curious about their resistance rather than threatened by it. Make them the star of the experience, not the obstacle to it.
It does not work every single time. Some people are genuinely committed to not enjoying themselves, and that is their right. You cannot force someone to have fun, and trying to do so violates the very principle I am describing -- it takes away their agency.
But most of the time, the person with the crossed arms is not committed to unhappiness. They are committed to not being made a fool of. They are committed to maintaining their status. They are committed to feeling in control. And all of those commitments are things you can honor while still creating an experience that astonishes them.
The heckler is not your enemy. The heckler is your best audience member, wearing a disguise. Your job is not to fight the disguise. Your job is to see through it.