I was standing backstage at a corporate event in Graz, waiting to go on after a colleague who was performing a card routine. He was good. Technically polished, confident, clearly experienced. And then he opened his mouth and said the words that made me wince.
“Okay, I’m going to do a card trick for you.”
The audience smiled politely. They settled in. They assumed the position of people who were about to watch a card trick. They became spectators at a puzzle demonstration, ready to observe, analyze, and try to figure it out. The emotional ceiling for the next five minutes had been set, and it was low.
He did the effect beautifully. The audience applauded. It was fine. But it was never more than fine, because the frame he set in that opening sentence told them exactly what to expect: a trick. Something with a method. Something to figure out. Something that would end and they would move on.
When my turn came, I opened differently. I said something along the lines of, “There is something I have been thinking about all day, and I want to share it with you.” No mention of cards. No mention of tricks. No mention of magic. Just a person with something on his mind, inviting them into a moment.
The audience leaned in. They were curious. They did not know what was coming. The emotional ceiling was uncapped — anything could happen. And when the impossible thing eventually did happen, it landed differently. Not as the climax of a trick, but as a surprising turn in a shared experience.
The difference between those two openings was not talent, not technique, not years of experience. It was a handful of words.
The Catalog I Started Building
Ken Weber, in Maximum Entertainment, makes a point that stuck with me like a splinter: the language you use does not just describe your magic — it defines the experience your audience is about to have. And Derren Brown, in Absolute Magic, takes this further by arguing that genuine astonishment requires the performer to build a frame around the effect that elevates it beyond mere trickery. The words you choose are the primary material of that frame.
After that night in Graz, I started keeping a list. Two columns. On the left, phrases I heard performers use that seemed to build mystery, wonder, and anticipation. On the right, phrases that seemed to deflate the moment, reduce the stakes, or signal to the audience that what they were about to see was just a trick.
The list grew fast, and the patterns became clear quickly. Mystery-building phrases share certain characteristics. Mystery-killing phrases share others. And the differences are not subtle. They are structural.
Mystery Killers: The Phrases That Shrink the Room
Let me start with the killers, because they are more instructive. Once you recognize them, you hear them everywhere, including in your own mouth.
“I’m going to do a trick for you.” This is the worst offender, and it is everywhere. The word “trick” immediately establishes the experience as a puzzle. Something with a method. Something that can be figured out. It positions you as a demonstrator and the audience as observers of a demonstration. There is no mystery in a trick. There is only a solution that has not yet been revealed.
“Watch closely.” This one is insidious because it sounds like good showmanship. It sounds like you are building tension. But what you are actually doing is telling the audience that the method is visible if they look hard enough. You are inviting them to become detectives. You are saying, “The secret is in what I’m doing with my hands — see if you can catch me.” That is the opposite of mystery. That is a challenge to solve a puzzle.
“Here, take a look — it’s a normal deck.” The moment you start proving that things are normal, you implicitly acknowledge that they might not be. Audiences do not think about gimmicked props until you suggest the possibility. Proactively establishing normality creates suspicion where none existed.
“This next trick is called…” Naming the effect before you do it is a habit borrowed from magic club culture, where performers announce effects like items on a menu. In a real performance, it robs the audience of discovery. They know what they are about to see before they see it. The surprise is pre-spoiled.
“Let me try this — I hope it works.” The false modesty gambit. It is supposed to create tension through uncertainty, but what it actually does is undermine your authority. If the performer does not believe it will work, why should the audience invest emotionally in the outcome? Mystery requires confidence. If you are hoping, you are not in command.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t going to embarrass you.” Said to a volunteer, this might seem kind. But it plants the seed of concern about embarrassment that the volunteer may not have been feeling. And it frames the experience as something potentially uncomfortable, which is the opposite of wonder.
“For my next trick…” This one is structural. It treats the show as a sequence of disconnected demonstrations. Trick, then trick, then trick. A list. Not a journey. The audience is being given items off a menu, not taken on a ride.
Mystery Builders: The Phrases That Open Doors
Now the other column. These phrases share a common quality: they create space for the impossible without predicting it. They invite the audience into an experience without telling them what the experience will be.
“Something has been on my mind.” This is personal. It is invitational. It suggests that what follows comes from a genuine place — a thought, a preoccupation, something the performer finds fascinating. The audience does not know if they are about to hear a story, witness an experiment, or participate in something strange. The frame is open.
“I want to share something with you.” The word “share” is powerful. It is not “show” — which implies a demonstrator and a passive observer. It is not “do to” — which implies a subject and an object. Sharing implies a mutual experience. Both performer and audience are in this together.
“I have been thinking about this for a long time.” This signals depth. It says that what follows is not a casual demonstration but something the performer has invested real thought in. It invites the audience to take it seriously without telling them to take it seriously.
“Something impossible is about to happen.” Bold. Direct. And effective precisely because of its audacity. This phrase does not hedge. It does not say “something unusual” or “something surprising.” It uses the word “impossible,” which triggers a specific psychological response: skepticism mixed with curiosity. The audience thinks, “Nothing is truly impossible — but I want to see what this person considers impossible.” They are engaged before anything has happened.
“What I’m about to show you, I cannot explain myself.” This is the honest mystery frame. It positions the performer not as someone who controls the impossible, but as someone who encounters it. The effect is not a demonstration of skill. It is a shared encounter with something inexplicable. The audience is not watching a puzzle. They are participating in a mystery.
“There is no way I could know this.” Stated before a revelation, this phrase does two things. It establishes the conditions of impossibility — the performer claims to have no way to access the information. And it creates anticipation — the audience is now waiting to see if the claim holds up. When the revelation lands, the impossibility is not just visual. It is verbal. The performer said it was impossible, and then the impossible thing happened.
“I want you to think of something — and keep it completely private.” Privacy is the foundation of mentalism, but it is also a powerful mystery builder in any context. The moment something becomes private — truly private, known only to the volunteer — the stakes change. There is now something in the room that exists only in someone’s mind. And if the performer can access it, that is not a trick. That is something else entirely.
The Underlying Philosophy
As my catalog grew, I started noticing the deeper pattern. Mystery-killing phrases share a common trait: they reduce the experience to a transaction. I do a trick, you watch. I demonstrate, you evaluate. There is a method, and you try to find it. The relationship is adversarial — performer vs. audience, secret-keeper vs. detective.
Mystery-building phrases do the opposite. They create a collaborative frame. We are going to explore something together. Something real is about to happen. Neither of us fully understands it. The relationship is participatory — we are on the same side, facing the unknown together.
This maps directly to what happens in my keynote speaking. When I present a business concept, I do not say, “Let me teach you something.” I say, “Here is something I discovered that changed how I think about this problem.” The frame matters. It determines whether the audience listens as students or engages as fellow thinkers.
The Replacement Exercise
Once I had the catalog, I went through every script I had written and highlighted every mystery-killing phrase. Then I replaced each one with either a mystery-building phrase or — often better — nothing at all. Silence instead of the wrong words is almost always an improvement.
The results were immediate. Not in the technical execution of the effects — those stayed the same. But in the audience’s posture, their engagement, their reactions at the critical moments. The same effects, performed the same way, landed differently because the verbal frame had changed.
One replacement I remember vividly: I had been saying, “Let me show you something with this deck of cards.” I changed it to, “Something strange happened to me yesterday, and it started with a simple question.” Same effect. Same cards. But the audience’s entry point into the experience was completely different. They were not watching a card trick. They were hearing about a strange event that happened to a real person. By the time the cards came out, they were already invested.
The Discipline of Listening to Yourself
The hardest part of this work is not writing better phrases. It is catching the bad ones before they leave your mouth. Mystery killers are habits. They are the default language of someone who learned magic from instructional videos and magic books, where “Here’s a trick” is the standard frame. Breaking that habit requires active monitoring.
I record every performance now, and I listen specifically for mystery killers. Every time I catch one, I mark it. Then I write a replacement and rehearse the replacement until the new phrase is as automatic as the old one was. It is tedious work. But the cumulative effect is profound.
The words that come out of your mouth in the first fifteen seconds of an effect determine the emotional ceiling for everything that follows. Get them right, and the audience is open, curious, invested. Get them wrong, and the best technique in the world is performing inside a box that the performer himself built.
I am still building the catalog. I add to it every time I watch another performer, every time I catch a new phrase that either opens a door or closes one. Language is not decoration for the magic. Language is the architecture of the experience. Choose the wrong words, and you are performing tricks. Choose the right ones, and you are creating moments of genuine wonder.
The difference is often no more than a sentence. Sometimes just a single word. But that word changes everything.