For the first year and a half of my magic journey, I practiced exclusively in hotel rooms. Cards, coins, the occasional small prop. I watched tutorials, read books, drilled techniques. My practice space was a hotel desk, a mirror propped against the wall, and the laptop camera for recording myself.
It was a solid system for learning the mechanics. I could run through a pass, a false shuffle, a force. I could rehearse the sequence of a routine from beginning to end, checking my angles, refining my timing, eliminating any visible tells. From a technical standpoint, I was making real progress.
But there was a problem. Hotel room practice teaches you how to handle objects. It does not teach you how to handle yourself. It trains your hands and your mind. It does not train the thing that audiences actually experience: your physical presence, your voice, your ability to occupy space and command attention.
I did not realize how large that gap was until I performed at a corporate event in Graz and watched the video afterward. The magic was clean. The audience seemed engaged. But the person performing the magic — me — looked stiff. My shoulders were tight. My feet were planted like I was afraid to move. My voice had a flat, procedural quality, the kind of voice you use to explain a quarterly report, not to create wonder. I was a consultant performing magic rather than a performer who happened to have a consulting background.
That video was the beginning of a significant change in how I approached my development. Not in magic. In everything around magic.
The Cross-Training Insight
Ken Weber makes a point in Maximum Entertainment that I initially read as a throwaway comment but that turned out to be one of the most consequential ideas in the entire book. He talks about communicating your humanity on stage and mentions that acting classes and theatrical experience help enormously with the skill of revealing emotions in the moment.
Weber writes from the perspective of someone who had formal speech and drama training, and his voice techniques — the way he discusses ignoring punctuation in delivery, changing emphasis to stay fresh, adding color to vocal range — clearly come from that theatrical foundation. When I read those sections, I recognized them as skills I did not have. I could implement them intellectually. I could not perform them instinctively, because my body and voice had never been trained that way.
Then I read Fitzkee, who approaches the same territory from a different angle. Fitzkee’s entire argument in Showmanship for Magicians is that magicians must study entertainment broadly, not just magic specifically. He analyzed what made popular entertainment successful — film, vaudeville, nightclubs, radio — and distilled audience appeals that most magicians were completely ignoring: movement, rhythm, grace, physical action, effortless skill. These are not things you learn from a card magic tutorial. These are things you learn from training your body and voice as instruments.
Between Weber and Fitzkee, the argument was clear: if I wanted to develop real stage presence, I needed to train outside of magic.
The Theater Experiment
I signed up for a weekend acting workshop in Vienna. It was not a magic workshop. It was a general acting class, the kind that attracts people who want to try theater for the first time, or who are preparing for amateur productions, or who simply want to become more expressive in their daily lives.
I was terrified. Not because the exercises were difficult — many of them were embarrassingly simple. Walk across the room. Say a line. React to what your partner says. The terror came from vulnerability. In magic, the props and the technique give you something to hide behind. In acting class, there is nothing between you and the room. You are the material.
The first exercise was an emotional memory exercise where the instructor asked us to recall a moment of genuine surprise and then re-experience it in front of the group. Not perform it. Re-experience it. The distinction was crucial. Most of us, myself very much included, defaulted to performing surprise — eyes wide, mouth open, the cartoon version. The instructor kept saying: “That’s what surprise looks like. I want what surprise feels like.”
It took me four attempts to produce something that the instructor accepted as genuine. And when I finally did, the room reacted. Not because I was acting well, but because something real had happened. A real emotion had crossed my face, and the people watching could feel the difference.
That single exercise taught me more about stage presence than six months of mirror practice with a deck of cards.
What I Actually Learned
The acting workshop ran for two days, and I went back for three more sessions over the following months. Here is what transferred directly to my magic performance.
First, physicality. Actors train their bodies to express intention. They learn how posture communicates confidence or vulnerability, how the speed of a gesture communicates urgency or calm, how stillness communicates power. I learned that my default stage physicality — the consultant stance, weight evenly distributed, hands near my waist, minimal movement — was communicating competence but not presence. Actors call it “being in your body,” and until that workshop, I had been in my head. My body was just the thing carrying my hands around.
Fitzkee writes about grace as one of his core audience appeals — an ease of attitude from ease of mind, an ease of action with smooth curves, no stress or strain. He suggests imagining movements made in water, slow and smooth and unhurried. That image only made sense to me after I had physically practiced moving with intention in an acting class. Reading about grace is not the same as training it.
Second, voice. The acting exercises included vocal work — projection, modulation, the physical mechanics of producing sound from the diaphragm rather than the throat. I discovered that my speaking voice in performance was about thirty percent of what it could be. I was using one color when I had access to an entire palette. Weber talks about the voice as an instrument and provides specific techniques for adding color and variation, and those techniques became practicable for me only after I had done basic vocal training.
Third, listening. This was the biggest surprise. Acting classes spend enormous time on listening — not the passive kind, but active, responsive listening where you genuinely take in what your scene partner is saying and allow it to affect you. For a magician, especially one performing mentalism, this skill is indispensable. The audience can tell when you are genuinely listening to their responses versus when you are waiting for them to finish talking so you can proceed to the next phase of the routine.
The Public Speaking Connection
I had been doing public speaking for years before I came to magic. Keynotes, conference presentations, workshop facilitation — this was a core part of my consulting work. But I had been doing it the way most business speakers do it: competently, clearly, with well-organized content and adequate delivery.
What I had not been doing was performing. There is a difference between speaking to an audience and performing for an audience, and the difference is not volume or energy or enthusiasm. The difference is intentionality about the audience’s experience at every moment. Speakers think about content. Performers think about experience.
Once I started applying performance principles to my keynote work, the keynotes got dramatically better. And then something unexpected happened: the keynote skills started feeding back into my magic performances. The ability to read a room, to feel when the energy was dropping, to adjust my pacing in real time, to use a pause not as dead space but as a tool — all of these skills transferred directly.
Adam Wilber noticed it before I did. He watched a recording of a show I did in Salzburg and said it looked like a different performer from six months earlier. The material was mostly the same. The person delivering it was not.
Why Magicians Resist This
I think there is a reason most magicians do not cross-train in theater or dance or public speaking, and it is not laziness. It is identity.
When you identify as a magician, you naturally gravitate toward magic-specific training. You practice sleights. You study methods. You read magic books, watch magic lectures, attend magic conventions. The ecosystem is self-reinforcing: magicians teaching magicians how to do magic for other magicians.
Fitzkee saw this problem in the 1940s and was scathing about it. He argued that magicians insist the public accept what they want to supply rather than studying what audiences actually want. His prescription was blunt: study the top entertainers in all fields, not just magic. Compare yourself to the biggest stars of stage and screen, not to other magicians.
That advice is eighty years old and still mostly ignored.
I think the resistance also comes from vulnerability. Learning magic in your hotel room is safe. You are alone. Nobody sees your failures. Nobody witnesses the awkward phase. Signing up for a theater class or a dance workshop means being a beginner in public, in a room full of strangers, with no props to hide behind and no tricks to impress anyone with.
It is deeply uncomfortable. I hated the first thirty minutes of my first acting class. I felt exposed and foolish and entirely out of my element. But that discomfort was the point. The discomfort was the muscle being exercised — the same muscle that, once strengthened, would allow me to stand on a stage and be genuinely present rather than just technically competent.
The Compound Effect
What I have found, now several years into this cross-training approach, is that the benefits compound. Each discipline teaches something that amplifies the others. Theater teaches emotional authenticity, which makes your magic more human. Public speaking teaches structural clarity, which makes your routines more compelling. Even something as seemingly unrelated as body awareness from physical training changes how you move on stage, which changes how the audience perceives you.
Weber writes that “looking natural on stage is an unnatural act.” That line used to puzzle me. Now I understand it. Naturalness on stage is a trained behavior. It is the result of enough cross-disciplinary practice that your body, voice, and emotional range all become available to you without conscious effort.
The confidence that audiences read as the “It Factor” is not confidence in your tricks. It is confidence in yourself as a physical, vocal, emotional presence in a room. And that confidence, like all confidence, comes from competence. You become confident when you become competent. And you become competent by training.
Not just in magic. In everything that supports magic. In every discipline that teaches you how to be a more complete human being in front of other human beings.
The hotel room will always be where I learn the moves. But the moves were never the hard part. The hard part was learning to be someone worth watching while I did them. And that lesson came from everywhere except magic.