I spent the better part of a year learning to control my voice. How to project. How to pause. How to eliminate filler words. How to warm up. How to use a microphone. How to vary pace, pitch, and volume. How to treat my voice as an instrument and play it with intention.
And then, at a corporate event in Innsbruck, a woman in the audience said something after the show that brought all of that work into sharp focus. She came up to me, smiling, and said: “You know what I liked most? You sounded like an actual person up there. Not like a performer.”
She meant it as a compliment. And it was one — probably the best one I have ever received. But in the moment, it also felt like a paradox. I had spent months learning to sound like a performer. She was praising me for sounding like I had not.
It took me a while to understand what she was actually saying. She was not praising the absence of technique. She was praising the invisibility of technique. She could not hear the warm-ups, the pause placement, the dynamic range work, the filler-word elimination. What she heard was a person who seemed genuine, relaxed, and present. The technique had done its job — it had gotten out of the way and let the person through.
This is the capstone lesson of everything I have learned about voice and delivery. Technical skill is the foundation. But what the audience needs to hear is not your skill. They need to hear you.
The Trap of Technical Proficiency
Ken Weber makes an observation in Maximum Entertainment that I find both humbling and clarifying. He notes that performers are often better during their lectures than during their acts. When a magician stands in front of a room of peers and talks about their work — their ideas, their passions, their frustrations — they are engaging, funny, warm, and real. Then they walk on stage to perform, and something changes. They become stiff. Formal. Performer-ish. The humanity that made their lecture compelling disappears, replaced by a polished but emotionally distant stage persona.
Weber’s explanation is that the lecture allows the performer to be themselves, while the act forces them into a character they have constructed — and that character is often less interesting than the real person.
I recognized myself in this immediately. When I am sitting at dinner with friends and talking about magic, I am animated, enthusiastic, and expressive. I lean in when I am excited about an idea. I lower my voice when I am confiding something. I laugh at my own mistakes. My personality is fully present in my voice.
When I first started performing, all of that disappeared. I adopted what I now think of as “performer voice” — a slightly louder, slightly more formal, slightly less human version of my normal speech. It was not artificial in the way that a funny accent or a dramatic announcer voice would be. It was subtler than that. It was the voice of someone trying to sound competent rather than the voice of someone being themselves.
Scott Alexander talks about this exact problem when he discusses sincerity and authenticity. He warns against going on “automatic pilot” and delivering patter in a stilted, artificial way. The audience, he argues, wants interesting, genuine people. They want the real version of you, not the performing version.
The Difference Between Sounding Good and Sounding Like You
Here is a distinction that took me far too long to understand. There is a difference between a technically proficient delivery and a personally expressive one. They are not the same thing, and you can have one without the other.
A technically proficient delivery is one where the voice is well-controlled. Projection is good. Pauses are placed effectively. Filler words are absent. Pace is varied. Articulation is crisp. If you checked all the boxes on a vocal performance rubric, this delivery would score well.
A personally expressive delivery is one where the audience can hear the performer’s personality through the words. Their humor. Their enthusiasm. Their vulnerability. This delivery might or might not check all the technical boxes, but it communicates something that technical proficiency alone cannot: a human being.
The ideal is both. But here is the problem. When you are learning technical skills, you tend to focus so intensely on technique that personality gets squeezed out. All of that conscious attention on where to pause and when to drop your volume leaves very little bandwidth for being yourself.
This is the paradox of skill acquisition. In the early stages, the skill requires so much conscious attention that it crowds out everything else. Only when the skill becomes automatic — when it drops below conscious awareness and operates as habit — does the bandwidth open up for personality, spontaneity, and genuine human connection.
My Evolution
I can trace my own path through this fairly clearly.
Phase one was unconscious incompetence. Before I studied voice and delivery at all, I performed with no technique and no awareness. My delivery was whatever came out. It was authentic in the sense that it was unfiltered, but it was also uncontrolled, full of filler words, flat in dynamic range, and inconsistent from show to show.
Phase two was conscious incompetence. Once I started studying voice technique, I became aware of everything I was doing wrong. I heard my filler words. I noticed my flat delivery. I recognized my lack of dynamic range. This phase was useful but deeply uncomfortable.
Phase three was conscious competence. I could execute the techniques, but only with active concentration. Pauses were placed deliberately. Filler words were caught and replaced with silence. Volume varied because I was thinking about varying it. This phase produced technically better performances but emotionally colder ones. I was performing my technique rather than performing for the audience.
Phase four — where I am now, inconsistently but increasingly — is unconscious competence. The techniques are becoming automatic. Pauses happen where they belong without me thinking about them. Filler words are rare because the habit has shifted, not because I am policing myself in real time. Dynamic range flows naturally because my voice has been trained to vary.
And in this phase, the bandwidth opens up. When I am not thinking about technique, I can think about the audience. About the moment. About what I am actually saying and why it matters. About the person in the front row who looks skeptical and the person in the back who is already smiling. My personality starts coming through not despite the technique but because the technique has freed me from having to think about it.
What Personality Sounds Like
Personality in a voice is hard to define but easy to hear. It is the difference between a newsreader and a storyteller. Between a textbook and a conversation. Between a performance that you appreciate and one that you remember.
For me, personality shows up in specific ways. It shows up in my tendency to be slightly self-deprecating — to acknowledge that I do not have all the answers, that I am still learning, that things sometimes go wrong and I find that funny rather than devastating.
It shows up in my enthusiasm. When I genuinely find something fascinating — which happens constantly, because the psychology of magic is endlessly interesting to me — that fascination leaks into my voice whether I intend it to or not. My pace increases slightly. My pitch rises. My eyes widen. These are not performed reactions. They are real reactions that I have learned to let through rather than suppress.
It shows up in the way I talk to volunteers. Not as props. Not as stooges. As people I am genuinely curious about. When I ask someone what they are thinking, I actually want to know. That genuine curiosity has a sound. It is warmer and more open than a performer going through the motions of asking a scripted question.
And it shows up in the moments between the big moments. The transitions. The setup. The conversational patter that is not building to a punchline or a reveal but is just… me, talking to the audience, sharing the experience of being on stage together. These in-between moments are where personality lives, because they are the moments where the script is loosest and the performer has the most freedom to be themselves.
The Bridge to Language
There is a reason this post marks the end of the voice and delivery section and not the end of the performance craft conversation. Because voice and delivery are only half of the equation.
The other half is language. The actual words you choose. The phrases you construct. The vocabulary you use. The sentences you build. If voice and delivery are how you sound, language is what you say. And what you say carries personality just as much as how you say it.
The word choices that make you sound like a generic performer versus the word choices that make you sound like you. The phrases that every magician uses versus the phrases that only you would use. The scripts that sound like they were written by a committee versus the scripts that sound like they were written by a specific human being with a specific worldview and a specific sense of humor.
That is where we are going next. From the instrument to the composition. From the sound to the substance.
The Lesson of the Voice Section
If I had to distill everything from these posts into a single principle, it would be this: learn the technique so thoroughly that you forget it.
Learn to pause. Then forget about pausing and let it happen.
Learn to project. Then forget about projecting and let your voice fill the room because you have something to say.
Learn to warm up. Then forget about the warm-up and let it be a routine as automatic as putting on your shoes.
Learn to eliminate filler words. Then forget about monitoring yourself and let the clean delivery be your default.
Learn to work a microphone. Then forget about the microphone and let it capture whatever you naturally do.
All of this technique, all of this practice, all of this deliberate work serves one purpose: to get out of the way. To remove the barriers between who you are and what the audience hears. To create a channel clear enough that your personality — your humor, your curiosity, your vulnerability, your enthusiasm, your specific way of being in the world — comes through without distortion.
The audience does not come to hear a voice. They come to hear a person. The voice is just the vehicle. Your job is to make the vehicle so reliable, so well-tuned, so automatic in its functioning, that the audience forgets it exists. All they hear is you.
That woman in Innsbruck did not compliment my vocal technique. She complimented my presence. She heard a person, not a performer. And that, after a year of working on how I sound, is the only review that matters.
The technique serves the personality. The personality serves the connection. And the connection is the whole point.
Now, about those words I am choosing to say — that is a different conversation. And it starts next.