The first time someone pointed out a verbal tic of mine, I did not believe them.
It was Adam. We were reviewing footage from a show I had done at a Vulpine Creations product launch event, going through the recording to assess how the new effects played with an audience. Adam was watching quietly, making occasional notes, when he paused the video and looked at me.
“You know you say ‘just like that’ after literally every effect, right?”
I told him he was exaggerating. There was no way I said it after every effect. Maybe once or twice.
He rewound the footage. And then he played it forward, and every time I said “just like that,” he held up a finger. By the end of the twenty-minute set, he was holding up seven fingers for one hand and had started on the other.
Nine times. I said “just like that” nine times in twenty minutes. Once every two minutes and change. And I had not heard it. Not once, in all the performances where I had said it, and not while watching the footage until Adam hit pause. The phrase was so embedded in my delivery that it had become invisible to me. It was the verbal equivalent of a nervous habit you do not know you have until someone films you.
That evening, alone in my hotel room, I rewatched the footage without Adam there. And this time, because I knew what to listen for, the phrase jumped out at me every single time. It was not just frequent — it was mechanical. It came at the same point in every routine: immediately after the magical moment. Card changes? “Just like that.” Prediction matches? “Just like that.” Object vanishes? “Just like that.”
It was as if I had programmed myself to stamp every effect with the same verbal seal of completion. Like a notary stamping documents. Here is your magic, certified with my patented catchphrase.
Why Verbal Tics Are So Dangerous
Ken Weber, in Maximum Entertainment, calls out “just like that” specifically, labeling it tedious and redundant. Those two words capture the dual problem with verbal tics in performance.
Tedious because repetition without variation is boring. The first time you say “just like that,” it is harmless. Unremarkable. The audience does not notice. The second time, they might register a vague sense of familiarity. By the fifth or sixth time, they are hearing the pattern, and the pattern has started to override the content. They are no longer reacting to the magic — they are anticipating the catchphrase. And anticipation of a verbal tic is very different from anticipation of a magical moment. One is exciting. The other is grating.
Redundant because the phrase adds no information. The audience has just watched something impossible happen. They saw it. Their eyes work. Saying “just like that” does not enhance their experience of the impossibility. It does not add emotional weight. It does not reframe what they have seen. It is a verbal exclamation mark added to a sentence that already ended with one. The magic has already made the point. The phrase is gilding a lily that was already gold.
But the deeper problem — the one that took me longer to understand — is that verbal tics signal something about the performer’s level of craft. They signal automation. They signal that the performer is running on a track rather than being fully present and responsive. A performer who stamps every effect with the same phrase is a performer who is not genuinely experiencing each moment as unique. They are processing a routine, not living a performance.
The audience may not articulate this consciously. They will not think, “This performer has a verbal tic that suggests they are operating on autopilot.” But they will feel it. They will feel that something is slightly mechanical, slightly formulaic, slightly less alive than it could be. And that feeling will color their experience of everything else you do.
The Common Offenders
Once I started paying attention to verbal tics — in my own work and in other performers I watched — I began cataloging the most common ones. The magic community has its own particular set, distinct from the general verbal tics that plague public speakers (the ums, the uhs, the you-knows).
“Just like that.” My personal nemesis, already discussed. Usually deployed as a verbal punctuation mark after the climax of an effect. Communicates nothing. Becomes maddening through repetition.
The finger snap with “Presto!” or some variation — “Abracadabra,” “One, two, three,” or just a sharp snap paired with an expectant look. This is not exactly a verbal tic, but it functions as one when it becomes the performer’s go-to mechanism for triggering every magical moment. When the audience can predict that you are about to snap your fingers before every reveal, the surprise of the reveal is diminished by the predictability of the setup. The snap becomes a telegraph. It says “magic is about to happen” in a way that makes the magic feel like it is on a timer rather than spontaneous.
“Watch!” or “Watch closely!” before a visual moment. This is one I caught myself doing, particularly with card work. Right before a visual change or vanish, I would say “Watch” — as if the audience needed to be reminded that they should be paying attention to the performer performing in front of them. The word is redundant. If your performance is engaging, they are already watching. If your performance is not engaging, telling them to watch will not fix the problem. And it has a second, more subtle cost: it telegraphs the moment. It tells the audience that what is about to happen is the important part, which means they tense up and scrutinize rather than relaxing and experiencing.
“Right?” or “Okay?”** after statements. “I’m going to shuffle these cards, right? And you’re going to pick one, okay? And I’ll have no way of knowing which card you chose, right?” Each “right?” or “okay?” is a tiny request for validation. The performer is asking the audience to confirm that they are following along, which subtly communicates that the performer is not confident the audience is following along. It is insecurity dressed as a question.
“Now…” at the beginning of sentences. “Now, what I’d like you to do is…” “Now, the interesting thing here is…” “Now” is a verbal runway. It is the speaker’s version of revving the engine before pulling out of the driveway. It contributes nothing. The sentence works identically without it. But it becomes habitual, a comfortable word to lean on at the beginning of any new thought.
“Basically.” I mentioned this one in the previous post about scripting, but it is worth revisiting here because it functions as a verbal tic rather than a deliberate word choice. “Basically” tells the audience that you are about to simplify something, which implies that you think the thing is too complex for them. It is condescension disguised as helpfulness. And when it shows up multiple times, it becomes noise.
The Video Revelation
The only reliable way I have found to identify your own verbal tics is to watch yourself on video. Not once. Not casually. Systematically.
I began doing this after the incident with Adam, and I developed a simple process. I would record a performance, then watch it back with a notepad and make a tally mark every time I said a specific word or phrase. Not just the ones I was already aware of — I would listen for any repeated pattern, any word that showed up more often than its meaning warranted.
The first few times I did this, the results were painful. Beyond “just like that,” I discovered that I had a habit of saying “so” at the start of nearly every sentence. “So I’ve got these cards here.” “So what I’d like you to do.” “So you can see that the prediction matches.” Watching the tally marks accumulate was like watching the odometer on a long drive — the numbers kept climbing, and I could not make them stop.
I also discovered something I had never noticed in real time: I had a physical tic that accompanied one of my verbal ones. Every time I said “right?” I would tilt my head slightly to the side. It was a small movement, barely noticeable in person, but on video it was clear. The head tilt and the “right?” were a package deal, a unit of insecurity that I was broadcasting on two channels simultaneously.
This is why video review matters so much for language work specifically. You cannot hear your own tics in real time because they have been normalized by repetition. They are part of your internal soundtrack. You process them the same way you process the sound of your own breathing — automatically, without conscious awareness. Video strips away that familiarity and forces you to hear yourself the way your audience hears you.
How to Kill a Tic
Identifying the tic is the first step. Eliminating it is harder than you might think, because verbal tics are deeply grooved habits. They are neural pathways that have been reinforced through thousands of repetitions. You cannot simply decide to stop saying “just like that” and expect the decision to hold under the pressure of live performance.
Here is what worked for me.
First, I scripted the specific moments where the tic usually appeared. In my case, “just like that” showed up after climax moments. So I wrote specific lines for those moments — different lines for each effect, tailored to the specific thing that had just happened. Instead of a generic stamp, each climax got its own response. After a prediction reveal, I might say nothing at all and simply let the audience react. After a visual moment, I might say something that reframed what they had just seen in the context of the larger theme. The key was replacing the default with something intentional.
Second, I practiced the replacements in isolation. Not the whole routine — just the climax moment and the three seconds after it. Over and over, until the new line felt as natural as the old one. This is essentially what happens when you are trying to overwrite a habit: you need the replacement to be at least as automatic as the original.
Third, I asked Adam and a few trusted friends to watch me perform and hold me accountable. Any time the tic resurfaced, they would note it. This external accountability was crucial because in the early stages of replacing a habit, you will slip back without realizing it. You need someone outside your own head to catch the slips.
The process took about three weeks for “just like that” to fully disappear. Other tics took longer depending on how deeply embedded they were. “So” at the start of sentences took nearly two months because it appeared not just in performance but in everyday speech, which meant I was reinforcing the habit twenty hours a day for every one hour I spent trying to break it.
What Replaces the Tic
The most powerful replacement for a verbal tic is often silence.
When I stopped saying “just like that” after every effect, what filled the space was… nothing. A beat. A moment of quiet where the audience could simply sit with what they had just seen. And something remarkable happened in that silence: the audience’s reactions got bigger.
Without a verbal stamp closing the moment, the moment stayed open. The audience had space to gasp, to laugh, to turn to each other with wide eyes. When I said “just like that,” I was inadvertently closing the window of reaction. I was putting a period on a sentence that the audience wanted to leave open with an exclamation point. The phrase was not just redundant — it was actively suppressing the very response I wanted to generate.
This taught me something I think about constantly now: the magic moment does not need a narrator. The audience does not need you to tell them that something amazing just happened. They were there. They saw it. Your job is not to annotate their experience. Your job is to create the conditions for the experience and then get out of the way.
There is a parallel here to writing. The best prose does not tell you how to feel about what you just read. It trusts you to feel it. The worst prose is the kind that follows a powerful scene with a paragraph explaining why the scene was powerful. The explanation kills the power. The same principle applies on stage. Let the moment speak for itself. Trust the magic. Trust your audience.
And trust the silence. It is not empty. It is full of everything your audience is feeling.
That is worth more than nine “just like thats” could ever be.