There is a moment early in every show — somewhere between the opener and the first big routine — where I am doing two things at once. The audience sees one of them. The other is invisible.
What the audience sees is my personality piece. The section of the show where I step out from behind the magic and let them meet me. I tell a story, usually something about my consulting life or how I stumbled into magic as an adult. I make a joke. I slow the tempo down. I let the room breathe. The purpose, as far as the audience is concerned, is connection. Human to human. Person to person. The part of the show where they decide whether they like me.
What the audience does not see — what happens underneath the personality piece like a current running below the surface of a calm lake — is reconnaissance. I am scouting. I am reading the room. I am cataloging faces, postures, energy levels, and micro-reactions. And I am mentally flagging the two or three people who will become my volunteers for the rest of the show.
This dual function of the personality piece is something I did not understand for a long time. I thought the personality piece was purely about connecting. It is. But it is also about preparing, and the preparation it enables is what makes the rest of the show run smoothly.
The Night I Picked the Wrong Volunteer
Before I learned to scout during the personality piece, I chose my volunteers essentially at random. Someone looked friendly, I pointed at them, and we rolled the dice together.
Most of the time, this was fine. Most people are pleasant, cooperative, and willing to play along. But one night in Linz — a private event, about forty people, a mix of ages and energy levels — I learned what happens when you pick wrong.
I chose a man in the front row. He looked confident. He was smiling. He seemed engaged. What I did not pick up on — because I had not been watching carefully enough during the opening minutes — was that his engagement was not the warm, receptive kind. It was the competitive kind. He was not smiling because he was enjoying himself. He was smiling because he was waiting for his chance.
The moment he hit the stage, he started performing. Not assisting. Performing. He mugged for the audience. He interrupted my patter with his own commentary. He tried to be funnier than me. He wanted to be the star, and he was willing to hijack the routine to get there.
The routine technically worked. The effect landed. But the audience’s attention had been split between us the entire time, and the moment had lost its shape. Instead of a clean, focused experience, it had become a negotiation — me trying to steer the routine back on course while he tried to steer it toward himself.
Afterward, I replayed the evening in my head and realized something: the signs had been there from the beginning. During my opening material, this man had been leaning forward more aggressively than the people around him. His reactions were louder than necessary. His eye contact was not the kind that says “I am with you” but the kind that says “I am ready.” He was not an audience member enjoying a show. He was an audience member auditioning.
If I had been paying attention during the personality piece — really paying attention, not just performing but observing — I would have seen this. And I would have chosen someone else.
What I Watch For
Ken Weber talks about the personality piece as a diagnostic tool. While you are sharing yourself with the audience, you are also taking their temperature. How warm is the room? How responsive? Are they with you or are they waiting to be convinced?
I have built on this idea over the past year, developing a mental checklist that I run through during the personality piece. It is not complicated. It does not require extraordinary observational skills. It just requires paying attention with intention.
The first thing I watch for is natural laughter. Not polite laughter — the obligatory chuckle that people produce because someone said something that was technically a joke. Natural laughter. The kind that catches people by surprise, the involuntary burst that opens their face and relaxes their posture. When someone laughs naturally during my personality piece, I note them. Natural laughers tend to be natural reactors. They will be expressive on stage, genuine in their surprise, and generous with their astonishment.
The second thing I watch for is leaning. When I am telling a story or building toward a point, who leans forward? Leaning forward is one of the most reliable indicators of engagement. It is unconscious, uncontrollable, and almost impossible to fake. People who lean forward during the personality piece are people who are invested in the experience. They want to see what happens next. They are ready to participate without knowing they are ready.
The third thing I watch for is eye contact. Not the eye contact that seeks you out — the eye contact that responds when you seek them. During the personality piece, I let my gaze move across the room naturally, landing briefly on different faces. When my eyes meet someone’s and they hold the contact for a beat — not looking away, not looking at their phone, not glancing at their companion — and then smile, that person is telling me something. They are saying: I am here. I am present. I am open.
That combination — natural laughter, forward lean, responsive eye contact — is my profile for an ideal volunteer. When I find someone who displays all three during the personality piece, I mentally flag them. I do not approach them yet. I do not point at them or acknowledge them in any visible way. I simply note their location and their face and file it away. By the time the personality piece ends and the middle section begins, I usually have two or three candidates mapped.
What I Avoid
The flip side of knowing what to look for is knowing what to avoid. And the mistakes I have made in this department have been at least as educational as the successes.
The overly eager person is the most common trap. They are easy to spot because they are working too hard to get your attention. Their hand goes up before you have asked for anything. Their reactions are disproportionately large. They are signaling, sometimes literally waving, that they want to be chosen. The instinct is to reward their enthusiasm. The reality is that their enthusiasm is often a warning.
Overly eager volunteers frequently want to share the spotlight rather than support the moment. They are not interested in being part of your show — they are interested in having an audience. And while some overly eager types turn out to be wonderful, the risk-reward ratio is poor. I have learned to appreciate their energy from a distance.
The stone-faced person is another trap, but in the opposite direction. Sometimes I have been tempted to choose the person who is not reacting, thinking that winning them over would be a dramatic arc — the skeptic converted. This sounds great in theory. In practice, a person who is not engaging during the personality piece is unlikely to transform into a warm, reactive participant when you put a spotlight on them. Their stone face on stage reads as discomfort to the audience, and the entire room contracts with sympathy for the awkward situation.
Then there is the person who has had too much to drink. At corporate events and private functions, this is a real consideration. Alcohol makes people unpredictable. Someone who seems pleasantly relaxed during the personality piece may become loud, uncoordinated, or forgetful once they are on stage and their adrenaline kicks in. I look for signs: is their laughter a beat behind? Are their movements slightly loose? Are they talking too loudly to their neighbor? These are disqualifying factors. Not judgmentally — just practically.
And finally, there is the person who is sitting in the worst possible location. They might be perfect in every other respect, but if they are in the far back corner, wedged behind a pillar, sitting at the end of a row that faces the wrong direction, the logistics of getting them to the stage will burn time and energy that the show cannot afford. Location matters. When two potential volunteers are equally good, I choose the one with the cleaner path to the stage.
The Mental Map
By the end of my personality piece — which typically runs three to four minutes — I have built a mental map of the room. I know who my primary volunteer candidate is. I know who my backup is. I know who to avoid. And I know the general temperature of the room: are they warm and ready, or cool and cautious?
This map changes the rest of the show in subtle but significant ways.
If the room is warm — lots of natural laughter, lots of leaning forward, lots of responsive eye contact — I know I can take more risks in the middle section. I can extend participation moments, let them breathe, allow the audience’s energy to carry the experience. A warm room is a room that wants to play, and the show can be more expansive in response.
If the room is cool — polite but reserved, arms crossed, eye contact that slides away — I know I need to earn more before I ask for anything. I might shorten the first participation piece. I might choose a seated participation format instead of bringing someone up. I might invest more energy in the transition material, working harder to generate the warmth that the personality piece did not fully achieve.
The point is that the personality piece is not just a fixed segment of the show. It is a diagnostic tool that informs every decision that follows. The personality piece gives me information, and that information shapes the performance in real time.
Preparation Disguised as Performance
This is the part I find most interesting, both as a performer and as someone who came to magic from strategy consulting. The personality piece is preparation disguised as performance. The audience sees connection. They see warmth. They see a performer sharing himself, being human, being accessible. What they do not see is the calculation underneath — the mental scanning, the volunteer profiling, the room-temperature assessment.
And it should be invisible. The moment the audience suspects you are evaluating them, the warmth curdles. Nobody wants to feel like they are being assessed. Nobody wants to feel like their laughter is being graded or their body language is being analyzed. The observation has to happen underneath the genuine connection, not instead of it.
This is why the personality piece has to be real. You cannot fake connection while simultaneously scouting. You have to actually connect — actually tell the story, actually share the moment, actually be present with the audience — and allow the observation to happen as a secondary process, the way a driver watches the road while also checking mirrors.
Some performances, the observation is effortless. The room is so clear in its signals that I know my volunteer within thirty seconds. Other performances, the signals are muddled. Nobody stands out. Nobody is obviously ideal. Those are the nights where I rely more heavily on the backup plan — seated participation, asking a general question and working with whoever responds, using the first volunteer piece itself as a scouting tool for the second.
But even on those muddled nights, the personality piece has given me something invaluable: it has given me time. Time to read the room before I need the room to do something. Time to adjust my plan before the plan is tested. Time to think, while appearing to simply be talking.
What This Has Taught Me
The broader principle here extends well beyond magic. In any situation where you need to work with other people — a meeting, a presentation, a negotiation, a conversation — the opening minutes are not just about establishing rapport. They are about gathering intelligence.
Who in this room is an ally? Who is a skeptic? Who is waiting for their moment to take over? Who is disengaged? Who is the person you want in your corner when the stakes get high?
Every audience, whether in a conference room or a theater, is composed of individuals with different energies, different postures, different degrees of readiness. The performers who succeed — in magic, in business, in communication — are the ones who read those differences early and adapt accordingly.
The personality piece taught me that. Not as theory. As practice. Night after night, room after room, audience after audience. Reading the room while the room reads me.
Both of us, deciding what happens next.