There is a moment in my keynote set that reliably produces the most attentive silence of the entire performance. It is not a magic effect. It is not a reveal. It is not a dramatic pause before an impossible moment. It is a story about a hotel room in Zurich.
I tell the audience about a night during my consulting years when I was sitting on a hotel bed after a twelve-hour strategy session, too wired to sleep and too tired to work. I had been living this way for months — two hundred nights a year on the road, city after city, hotel after hotel. That particular night, I opened the drawer in the bedside table, found nothing but a Bible and a room service menu, and felt something I had not expected to feel: a kind of hollow loneliness that had nothing to do with being alone and everything to do with having nothing that was mine.
The next day, I bought a deck of cards at a shop near the train station. Not because I wanted to learn magic. Because I needed something to do with my hands.
When I tell this story, the room goes still. Every time. It does not matter if it is a group of tech executives in Vienna or a mixed audience at a conference in Graz. The story lands the same way. People stop fidgeting. People stop looking at their phones. People look at me with an expression I have come to recognize as the particular quality of attention that only personal stories create.
It is not astonishment. It is not amusement. It is recognition. They know this feeling. Maybe not this specific version of it, but some version. The late night in a strange city. The hollow moment when you realize your daily routine is missing something essential. The impulsive decision that turns out, years later, to have changed everything.
Ken Weber writes in Maximum Entertainment that telling stories is one of the most effective ways to communicate your humanity to an audience. He frames it as one of the tools for the second pillar — letting the audience know who you are as a person. But what I have discovered through experience is that personal stories do more than humanize the performer. They create a specific, powerful, almost magnetic quality of attention that is unlike anything else in the performer’s toolkit.
Why Personal Stories Create Unique Attention
I have spent a lot of time thinking about why personal anecdotes work as attention devices, and I believe it comes down to three things that happen simultaneously in the audience’s mind.
First, a personal story creates curiosity about the outcome. When someone starts telling you about something that happened to them, you want to know how it ends. This is basic narrative psychology, the same mechanism that makes you keep reading a novel or watching a film. An unfinished story is an open loop, and open loops demand closure. As long as the story is still unfolding, the audience is locked in.
Second, a personal story creates empathy. When someone shares an experience — especially a vulnerable one, one that involves struggle or uncertainty or self-doubt — the audience’s mirror neurons fire. They are not just hearing the story. They are, to some degree, feeling it. This emotional participation creates a quality of attention that is deeper than intellectual interest. It is embodied. The audience is engaged not just with their minds but with their feelings.
Third, and this is the one I find most interesting: a personal story creates trust. When a performer shares something real about themselves, something that is clearly not scripted for effect but drawn from genuine experience, the audience’s relationship with that performer shifts. The performer becomes a person rather than a function. The audience starts caring about the performer’s journey, not just the performer’s tricks. And once they care about the journey, they will follow wherever the performer leads.
These three mechanisms — curiosity, empathy, trust — operating simultaneously create a compound effect. The resulting attention is richer, more sustained, and more emotionally charged than attention created by any other means I have found. It is the difference between watching someone do something impressive and listening to someone tell you something real.
The Stories That Work
Not all personal stories create this effect. I have told stories that fell flat, stories that confused the audience, stories that went on too long or did not connect to the rest of the performance. Through trial and error, I have identified the characteristics that separate the stories that work from the ones that do not.
The story must be true. This is non-negotiable. Audiences can detect fabrication with a sensitivity that borders on supernatural. Something shifts in the performer’s voice, posture, and energy when they are telling a made-up story. The conviction wavers. The details feel generic rather than specific. The emotion feels performed rather than remembered. Even audiences who cannot articulate what is wrong will sense that something is off, and the trust mechanism — the most powerful of the three — collapses.
I am in an unusual position here, and I think it is worth acknowledging. My real story — an Austrian strategy consultant who started learning card tricks in hotel rooms because he could not bring his guitar on the road — is more interesting than anything I could fabricate. It is specific. It is unexpected. It has a built-in arc from skepticism to obsession. And it is true, which means I can tell it with the conviction that only comes from lived experience.
The story must be specific. “I once had a bad experience performing” is not a story. It is a vague reference to a category of experience. “I was performing close-up magic at a corporate dinner in Klagenfurt and a woman at the third table put her hand over the deck and said, ‘I don’t believe in any of this,’ and I had no idea what to do” is a story. The specificity — the city, the table number, the woman’s exact words, my exact emotional state — is what makes it vivid enough to engage the audience’s imagination.
The story must connect to something the audience can relate to. This does not mean the audience needs to have had the same experience. Most people in my audiences have never tried to learn card magic or perform mentalism. But they have all started something new and felt overwhelmed. They have all had a moment where their competence in one area of life was useless in another. They have all experienced the gap between how something looks in a tutorial and how it feels in your own hands.
The universal element is what allows a specific story to create broad empathy. I am telling a story about magic, but the audience is hearing a story about themselves.
Where Personal Stories Fit in a Performance
I use personal stories in three specific structural positions, each serving a different function.
The first position is the opening. When I begin a keynote or a longer performance, I almost always start with a personal story rather than with magic. This is counterintuitive — the audience came to see magic, so should I not give them magic immediately? — but it works because the story establishes who I am before the magic establishes what I can do. The audience meets Felix the person before they meet Felix the performer. And that introduction creates a foundation of human connection that makes everything that follows more impactful.
My hotel room story — the one about buying the deck of cards — is my most frequent opener. It takes about ninety seconds. It is funny in places (the absurdity of a management consultant learning card tricks), touching in places (the loneliness of the road), and it ends with a transition into the first effect that feels natural rather than mechanical. By the time I pick up the cards, the audience already knows who I am and why I do what I do. The magic means something because it is attached to a person, not just a skill set.
The second position is during effects, as a bridge between the procedural setup and the magical climax. This is where stories serve as the attention-sustaining material that fills what would otherwise be dead time.
For example, during a routine that requires a spectator to make a series of choices, I might tell a brief story about a specific moment when I realized something about how people make decisions. Not a lecture. A story. Something that happened to me, in a real place, with a real outcome. The story occupies the audience’s attention while the choices are being made, so the procedural phase does not feel like waiting. It feels like a conversation that happens to have a card trick woven through it.
The third position is the emotional anchor point, usually about two-thirds of the way through a longer performance. This is the moment where I go deeper. Where the story is not a brief anecdote but a more sustained piece of personal narrative. Where I talk about what magic means to me, or about a specific moment of failure or breakthrough that shaped how I approach the work.
This is the heartwarming road to rapt attention that I wrote about in the previous post. It is the moment where the audience stops thinking of the performance as entertainment and starts thinking of it as a shared human experience. When it works — and it does not always work, because it depends on the audience’s mood and the room’s energy — it creates the most intense attention of the entire show.
The Editing Process
Here is something that took me too long to learn: personal stories need editing just as much as any other part of the performance. The fact that a story is true does not mean it is automatically compelling. True stories can be meandering, unfocused, self-indulgent, and boring. The truth of the story is the foundation, but the craft of telling it is what makes it an attention magnet.
I edit my stories the way a writer edits prose. Every sentence must serve the narrative. Every detail must be either emotionally resonant or concretely specific. Every tangent must be examined and, more often than not, removed. The goal is not to tell everything that happened but to tell the version of what happened that creates the maximum emotional impact in the minimum number of words.
My hotel room story, in its first version, was about four minutes long. It included details about the consulting project I was working on, the name of the hotel, the weather that day, what I had for dinner. Over dozens of performances, I cut it down to ninety seconds. I removed everything that did not serve curiosity, empathy, or trust. What remains is the essential arc: the loneliness, the impulse, the deck of cards, the beginning of everything that came after.
The shorter version is better in every way. It lands harder because it is tighter. The audience never has a chance to drift because there are no unnecessary moments. Every word earns its place.
The Courage Requirement
There is one more thing about personal stories that I want to address, and it is the thing that stops most performers from using them.
It takes courage.
Not the kind of courage involved in performing a dangerous stunt or doing a show for a hostile audience. A quieter kind. The courage to stand in front of strangers and say, “This is something real about my life, and I am sharing it with you.” The courage to be vulnerable in a context that usually rewards invulnerability. The courage to risk the audience not caring, or not understanding, or judging.
I have a friend who is a strong technical magician. Excellent card work, beautiful coin work, years of dedicated practice. But his performances are emotionally flat. I once asked him why he never told personal stories during his sets. He said, “Nobody comes to see me to hear about my life.”
I think he is wrong. I think people come to see a performer, and a performer is a person, and the parts of that person’s life that shaped them are the most engaging thing they can offer. The magic is what they came for. The person is what they stay for.
Every story I tell on stage is a small act of trust. I am trusting the audience with a piece of my real life. And the audience, almost always, honors that trust with the most valuable thing they have: their complete, undivided, rapt attention.
Not because the story is more impressive than a card trick. But because a true story, well told, engages parts of the brain that magic does not reach. And those parts of the brain — the parts that process empathy, narrative, and human connection — are the ones that keep an audience’s attention for minutes, not seconds.
The deck of cards holds their curiosity. The person holding the deck holds their heart. And holding both is how you hold a room.