There is a moment I remember from a corporate show in Vienna — maybe eighteen months into performing seriously — that still makes me wince when I think about it.
I was performing for about sixty people at a product launch event. The room was good, the lighting was decent, and the audience was warm. Everything was set up for a strong performance. And for the first fifteen minutes, it was going well. Effects were landing, the audience was engaged, I was finding the rhythm.
Then a prop malfunctioned. Not catastrophically — nothing visible happened from the audience’s perspective. But I knew something had shifted in my pocket, and the next sequence required that thing to be in the right position. I had about thirty seconds to figure out a workaround.
Here is what I should have done: maintained eye contact with the audience, kept talking naturally, and fixed the problem with my hands while nobody was paying attention to them.
Here is what I actually did: I hesitated. My sentence trailed off. I said “um” — probably two or three times. My eyes dropped to my hands. I shifted my weight. I made one of those small apologetic half-smiles that performers make when they know something has gone wrong and they are hoping nobody notices.
Everyone noticed.
Not the prop issue. Nobody in the audience had any idea what had happened mechanically. What they noticed was the shift. One second I was in control, confident, commanding the room. The next second I was uncertain, fumbling, visibly uncomfortable. The transition was instant and unmistakable, and I could feel the audience’s energy change with it. They went from engaged to concerned. From “this is entertaining” to “is he okay?”
I recovered. Fixed the issue, got back on track, finished the show to reasonable applause. But the performance had a dent in it, and everyone in the room could feel it, even if they couldn’t identify exactly what had happened.
That night, back at the hotel, I sat with a glass of wine and tried to articulate what had gone wrong. The prop malfunction was annoying, but it wasn’t the problem. The problem was me. The problem was that the moment something unexpected happened, I stopped being the performer and became the person behind the performer. The confident, commanding presence dissolved, and what was left was a nervous adult who was worried about his trick not working.
The Superman Analogy
Months later, I came across a passage in Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment that described exactly what I had experienced, using an analogy that I have never forgotten.
Superman does not hem and haw. Superman does not apologize. Superman does not shift his weight nervously or make small self-deprecating gestures when something goes wrong. Superman radiates control, confidence, and certainty. He is the person in the room who has everything handled, and everyone around him can feel it.
Clark Kent does all of those things. Clark Kent hesitates, fumbles, second-guesses himself, apologizes unnecessarily. Clark Kent leaks doubt. Clark Kent communicates, through every mannerism and micro-expression, that he is uncertain and slightly overwhelmed.
Same person. Two completely different modes of being. And the question for every performer is: which one are you on stage?
The analogy is deceptively simple, but it contains an entire philosophy of performance presence. The audience does not come to see Clark Kent. They come to see Superman. They want to be in the presence of someone who has everything under control, who is completely at ease, who radiates the kind of unshakeable confidence that makes the extraordinary seem effortless. That is the performer’s job — not just to execute effects, but to project the kind of command that makes the effects land with full weight.
When the performer hesitates, when they fumble a transition, when they fill silence with “um” or “well” or “so” — when they show the Clark Kent underneath the Superman — the audience’s trust erodes. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But steadily, incrementally, in ways that accumulate over the course of a performance.
My Clark Kent Inventory
After reading that passage, I did something that my consulting background made natural: I audited myself. I asked a friend to film three consecutive performances, and I watched them with the specific intent of cataloguing every moment where Clark Kent showed up.
The results were uncomfortable.
I counted fourteen instances of filler words in a thirty-minute performance. Fourteen. “Um,” “uh,” “well,” “so,” “like” — scattered through the set like small cracks in a wall. None of them were devastating individually. But collectively, they created a pattern that communicated something I absolutely did not want to communicate: that I was thinking as I went rather than executing from a position of total preparedness.
I found six moments of unnecessary physical movement — weight shifts, hand adjustments, small steps backward that served no purpose except to discharge nervous energy. I found three instances where I verbally acknowledged a mistake that the audience would never have noticed if I had just kept going. And I found two moments where I apologized for something that required no apology — a brief equipment delay that was not my fault, and a moment where I lost my place in a script and said “sorry, let me start that again.”
Each of these was a Clark Kent moment. A moment where the Superman facade cracked and the nervous human underneath became visible. And here is the thing I want to emphasize: not one of these moments was caused by a lack of technical ability. I could execute every effect in the set. The problem was not competence. The problem was presence.
The Asymmetry of Control
There is an asymmetry in performance that took me a long time to understand: the audience extends trust generously, but withdraws it at the first sign of doubt.
When a performer walks out with confidence, the audience grants them enormous latitude. They will accept pauses, unconventional choices, moments of deliberate silence, even awkward interactions — as long as the performer appears to be in control. The audience reads confidence and concludes: this person knows what they are doing. Whatever happens next is intentional.
But the moment the performer signals uncertainty — a filler word, a nervous gesture, an apologetic glance — the audience recalibrates instantly. They switch from “this is intentional” to “something went wrong.” And once that switch has been made, it takes significant effort to switch it back. The trust that was granted freely now has to be earned back through sustained, flawless execution.
This is what makes the Clark Kent moments so costly. A single “um” at the wrong moment can undo five minutes of confident performance. Not because the audience is harsh or judgmental. Because the audience is wired to read social signals, and uncertainty is one of the loudest signals a human can broadcast.
I think about this in terms of my consulting work all the time. In a strategy presentation, you can deliver forty-five minutes of brilliant analysis, and if you hesitate on one question from the CEO — if you say “well, um, that’s a good question, let me think about that” — the entire room shifts. The forty-five minutes of brilliance does not disappear, but it is now filtered through the lens of that one moment of doubt. The audience — whether it is a corporate board or a theater full of spectators — remembers the cracks more vividly than the surface.
Building the Superman
The realization I came to, sitting in that hotel room after reviewing my performance footage, was that Superman is not a natural state. Nobody walks on stage as Superman without deliberate construction.
This was a paradigm shift for me. I had been treating my hesitations and filler words as minor imperfections — things that would naturally diminish as I gained experience. Just keep performing, I told myself. The rough edges will smooth out over time.
They do not. Not automatically. I have seen performers with twenty years of experience who still leak Clark Kent all over the stage. The rough edges become habits, and habits do not smooth out through repetition. They calcify. The performer who says “um” in their first year will still be saying “um” in their tenth year unless they specifically, deliberately, systematically address it.
Building the Superman requires intentional work on three fronts.
First, you have to identify the leaks. Film yourself. Watch it. Make a list. This is painful, and I understand why most performers avoid it. But you cannot fix what you have not diagnosed.
Second, you have to replace the leaks with intentional choices. Every “um” needs to become a pause. Every nervous gesture needs to become stillness. Every apology needs to become either silence or a confident redirect. You are not eliminating behavior — you are substituting one behavior for another, one that communicates control instead of doubt.
Third — and this is the part that takes the longest — you have to internalize the replacements until they become your default mode. This is not a weekend project. This is months of deliberate practice, of catching yourself mid-”um” and stopping, of feeling the urge to shift your weight and choosing stillness instead. It is the kind of deep behavioral change that requires patience and self-compassion alongside discipline.
The Night It Clicked
About six months after my Clark Kent inventory, I was performing at a conference in Graz. Smaller audience than the Vienna event — maybe thirty-five people. And midway through the set, something went wrong. Not a prop malfunction this time, but a spectator interaction that did not go as planned. The person I brought up to help with an effect was more intoxicated than I had realized, and they were not following instructions.
Old Felix would have panicked. Old Felix would have shown the panic on his face, would have stumbled through an improvised redirect, would have leaked uncertainty from every pore.
What I actually did was: nothing visible. Inside, yes, I was recalculating rapidly. But externally, I maintained eye contact with the audience. I kept my face relaxed and slightly amused. I turned the spectator’s unpredictability into a comedy moment — “we’re going off-script here, and honestly, this is more fun than what I had planned” — and the audience laughed because my confidence told them that laughing was the appropriate response.
I guided the spectator gently back to usefulness, completed the effect through an alternate path, and moved on. The audience never sensed that anything had gone wrong. From their perspective, the entire interaction looked intentional. Because the Superman had stayed in place. No Clark Kent. No cracks.
After the show, one of the organizers said to me: “That bit with the guy who was clearly drunk — that was hilarious. Was that planned?” And I just smiled and said, “Everything is planned.” Which was both a lie and the deepest truth about performance I know.
The Ongoing Discipline
I want to be honest: maintaining Superman is work. It is not something you achieve and then possess permanently. It requires ongoing attention, ongoing self-monitoring, ongoing correction.
There are still nights when Clark Kent sneaks out. When I am tired, or distracted, or performing in a venue with poor acoustics, or dealing with a personal problem that is occupying mental bandwidth — on those nights, the “ums” return. The hesitations reappear. The nervous energy finds its way to my hands and feet.
The difference between now and eighteen months ago is not that I have eliminated Clark Kent entirely. It is that I catch him faster. Where I used to let a chain of filler words run for an entire segment before realizing what was happening, now I catch the first one. I feel the “um” forming and I close my mouth instead. I feel the weight shift beginning and I plant my feet. I feel the apology rising and I swallow it.
Superman is not a destination. Superman is a discipline. The performer who believes they have permanently arrived at complete stage control is the performer who stops paying attention, and that is exactly when Clark Kent walks back in.
The analogy stays with me because it is so perfectly clear. Every time I prepare for a performance, I ask myself the question: Are you about to walk out as Superman, or as Clark Kent? Are you going to radiate control, or leak doubt? Are you going to project the absolute certainty that everything is handled, or are you going to show the audience the nervous human who is worried about his tricks?
Same person. Same skills. Same material. The only difference is which version of yourself you choose to present.
Choose Superman. Every single time.