The first time I noticed what was happening to my body in the minutes before a performance, I was backstage at a conference center in Vienna. I was about to deliver a keynote with mentalism for a room of about three hundred people — an insurance company’s annual gathering, the kind of event where the audience is polite but skeptical and the stakes feel higher than they probably are.
I caught my reflection in the glass of a fire-safety cabinet near the stage entrance. What I saw was alarming. My shoulders were hunched up toward my ears. My jaw was clenched. My breathing was shallow and high in my chest. I looked like a man bracing for a car crash, not a man about to walk out and captivate a room.
I walked on stage anyway. The keynote went fine — the material was solid, the audience responded, the effects landed. But when I watched the video afterward, I could see the tension in every frame of the first five minutes. My movements were stiff. My gestures were tight and controlled rather than natural and expressive. My voice was pitched slightly higher than normal, because shallow breathing does that — it raises your vocal pitch and reduces your resonance. I sounded competent. I did not sound commanding.
That video was the beginning of what has become a non-negotiable pre-show ritual. Three minutes. Posture, stretching, breathing. It sounds like something from a yoga retreat. It has done more for my stage presence than any technique I have ever learned.
The Tension Nobody Warns You About
Here is what nobody tells you about performing: your body absorbs anxiety before your mind does. You can feel mentally prepared — script memorized, props checked, introduction handed to the emcee, grooming checklist complete — and still walk on stage with a body that is broadcasting nervousness to every person in the room.
The audience reads this instantly. Not consciously. They do not sit there thinking “his shoulders are tense.” But they register it the same way they register a bad smell or a wrinkled shirt — as a vague impression of something being off. An impression of someone who is not entirely comfortable, not entirely in command. And as I have written about before in this blog, the audience’s first impression forms in seconds and colors everything that follows.
Dan Harlan, in his Tarbell lecture on magic as theater, discusses standing and movement technique as a fundamental aspect of stage performance. The idea that how you hold your body communicates as much as what you say is not new — actors and dancers understand this intuitively. But for those of us who came to performance from non-theatrical backgrounds, from consulting and business and hotel-room practice sessions, the body is an afterthought. We focus on the script, the effects, the technical execution. The vessel that delivers all of it gets ignored.
My body was ignored for years. It showed.
What I Do Now
My pre-show ritual takes three minutes. I do it after the grooming checklist, after the prop check, after the introduction handoff — in the last window of time before I walk on. I find a quiet corner backstage, in a greenroom, in a hallway, in a bathroom if that is all that is available. The location does not matter. The privacy does, because what I am about to describe looks slightly ridiculous to anyone who does not understand why I am doing it.
First, posture. I stand against a wall with my back flat, heels touching the baseboard, shoulder blades pressing into the surface, and the back of my head touching the wall. This is a posture reset. After hours of traveling, sitting in conference rooms, hunching over a phone, and loading props, my posture has collapsed. The wall gives me a physical reference for what “upright” actually feels like. I hold this for about fifteen seconds, just long enough for my spine to remember what it is supposed to do.
Then I step away from the wall and find my neutral stance. Feet about shoulder-width apart, weight evenly distributed, arms at my sides. I check in with my shoulders — are they creeping up toward my ears? They always are. I roll them back and let them drop. I check my jaw. Clenched? Almost certainly. I open my mouth wide, move my jaw side to side, then close it with my teeth slightly apart. I check my hands. Fists? White knuckles? I shake them out, letting my fingers go loose.
This entire sequence takes maybe thirty seconds. It is embarrassingly simple. And it transforms how I feel and how I look.
The Stretches
Next comes a brief series of stretches that target the specific areas where I hold performance tension. I am not a physiotherapist, and I am not prescribing a medical routine. I am describing what works for me, discovered through trial and error over several years.
Neck rolls. Slow, controlled, five seconds in each direction. My neck carries an enormous amount of stress, and a stiff neck produces stiff head movements on stage, which makes eye contact look mechanical rather than natural.
Shoulder shrugs. I pull my shoulders up as high as they will go, hold for three seconds, then drop them completely. I do this three times. The drop is the important part — it teaches the shoulders where they should be, which is much lower than where anxiety puts them.
Side bends. Arms overhead, lean gently to each side. This opens the ribcage and creates space for deeper breathing. After hours of sitting, the intercostal muscles between the ribs compress, which restricts breath capacity. A few side bends reverse this.
Wrist and hand stretches. I extend each arm, pull the fingers back gently, then push them forward. This is particularly important for close-up work and card handling, but it also releases tension that has accumulated from gripping props, carrying cases, and clutching a phone.
Finally, I shake everything out. Arms, hands, legs, torso — a full-body shake for about ten seconds that looks absolutely absurd and feels absolutely liberating. The shake interrupts the freeze response that anxiety triggers. It moves stagnant energy. It makes me feel less like a marble statue and more like a human being.
Total stretching time: about ninety seconds. Ridiculous to watch. Transformative to experience.
The Breathing
The last minute of my three-minute ritual is breathing. This is the part that has had the most dramatic impact on my actual performance, because breathing directly controls vocal quality, nervous energy, and the ability to project calm authority.
My breathing pattern before I discovered this ritual was typical of someone in a state of low-grade panic: shallow, rapid, high in the chest, with occasional held breaths that I was not even aware of. This pattern is the body’s preparation for fight-or-flight. It floods the system with oxygen for physical action. It is exactly what you do not want when the physical action you need to perform is standing still, speaking clearly, and projecting confidence.
The breathing exercise I use is simple. I breathe in through my nose for a count of four, expanding my belly rather than my chest. I hold for a count of four. I exhale through my mouth for a count of six. The exhale is longer than the inhale. This is not a meditation technique — it is a physiological hack. The extended exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the body’s braking system for stress. It lowers heart rate, relaxes muscles, and produces a tangible sensation of calm that arrives within four or five cycles.
I do six cycles. The whole thing takes about ninety seconds. By the end, my heart rate has dropped, my shoulders have relaxed, my voice has dropped to its natural register, and I feel — genuinely feel, not pretend to feel — calm and grounded.
The difference this makes to the first sixty seconds on stage is extraordinary. Instead of walking out with a tight body and a high voice, I walk out with open posture and resonant delivery. Instead of rushing through my opening lines because adrenaline is compressing my perception of time, I take my time, because my nervous system is no longer screaming at me to hurry.
Why This Is Not Optional
I used to think of this ritual as a nice-to-have. Something I would do if I had time, if I had privacy, if I remembered. Then I performed twice in the same week — once with the ritual and once without, because I was running late to a corporate event in Graz and went straight from the car to the stage.
The difference was stark. Not in the material. Not in the audience. Not in the venue or the lighting or the sound. The difference was entirely in me. Without the ritual, my first five minutes were tight, rushed, and slightly breathless. With the ritual, my first five minutes were relaxed, paced, and commanding. Same performer. Same material. Same experience level. Different body state.
I stopped treating it as optional after that. Now it is as non-negotiable as checking my props or testing the microphone. If I do not have three minutes backstage, I do a compressed version in ninety seconds. If I do not have ninety seconds, I do thirty seconds of breathing in the wings. There is always time for at least that, and even thirty seconds of intentional breathing changes the physiological state I carry on stage.
The Consulting Parallel
In my strategy consulting work, I used to do something similar before high-stakes presentations to boards and executive teams. Not the stretching — that would have drawn questions in a corporate boardroom — but the breathing. I would find a quiet moment, usually in a bathroom or an empty corridor, and run through five or six breath cycles before walking into the room.
The effect was the same. My voice was steadier. My thinking was clearer. My presence was more grounded. The board members could not have told you why this particular presenter seemed more confident than the one before, but they responded to it. They leaned in. They asked better questions. They engaged with the material instead of checking their phones.
The body speaks a language that the audience understands without knowing they understand it. A tense body says “I am afraid.” An open, relaxed body says “I belong here.” The audience does not translate these messages consciously. They simply react to them, the same way they react to a warm smile or a firm handshake.
What I Wish I Had Known Earlier
I wish someone had told me about this when I started performing. Not the specific exercises — those I would have had to discover for myself through experimentation. But the principle. The principle that your body’s state when you walk on stage determines the quality of the first five minutes, and the first five minutes determine the audience’s impression of you for the entire show.
I spent years focusing on what I would say and what I would do, and almost no time focusing on how my body would feel while I was saying and doing it. I practiced effects for hours and never once practiced walking on stage with open, relaxed, confident posture. I memorized scripts and never once rehearsed what my breathing pattern would be during the opening lines.
The three-minute ritual is the correction for all of that. It is the bridge between preparation and performance. It takes everything I have done — the practice, the scripting, the prop preparation, the grooming, the introduction handoff — and delivers it through a body that is ready to perform rather than ready to flee.
Three minutes. A wall for posture. A few stretches. Six breath cycles. And then the walk to the stage, with shoulders back, jaw relaxed, breathing deep, and a body that finally matches the preparation behind it.