There is a moment, just before you walk on stage, when your face settles into whatever expression it defaults to under pressure. For most people, that default is not a smile. It is a mask of concentration. A tight jaw. A furrowed brow. The face of someone running calculations, reviewing checklists, bracing for what comes next.
I know this because I have seen photographs of myself in exactly that moment. A friend who was documenting a conference in Innsbruck caught a shot of me in the wings, thirty seconds before my cue, and the expression on my face was somewhere between a man solving a differential equation and a man waiting for bad medical news. It was the face of intense preparation. It was not the face of someone the audience would want to spend the next forty-five minutes with.
That photograph changed how I think about the transition from backstage to stage. Because the face you carry through the curtain is the first thing the audience sees. Before your words, before your effects, before your carefully written introduction has finished resonating in the room — your face arrives. And it tells the audience everything they need to know about whether they are going to enjoy the next few minutes.
The Problem with “Just Smile”
The obvious advice is to smile. Walk on smiling. Simple. Except it is not simple at all, because the smile you produce under pressure — the smile you force onto your face when your nervous system is in a state of heightened alertness — is not a real smile. It is a grimace wearing a smile’s clothing.
The difference is visible and the audience detects it instantly. A genuine smile involves the muscles around the eyes — the orbicularis oculi — not just the mouth. It produces warmth. A forced smile involves only the mouth. It produces something that looks like a salesman who has just been told to look friendly for the company photograph.
I tried the “just smile” approach for months. I would remind myself to smile as I walked on, and what the audience got was a stiff, performative expression that communicated effort rather than warmth. Watching it on video was painful. I looked like I was auditioning for a toothpaste commercial rather than beginning a performance.
Ken Weber, in Maximum Entertainment, discusses the importance of communicating your humanity to the audience from the very first moment. The smile is central to this — it is the universal human signal for “I am glad to be here, I am glad you are here, we are going to have a good time together.” But the principle only works if the smile is genuine. A fake smile communicates inauthenticity, which is the opposite of what you need in that critical first impression window.
The question, then, is not whether to smile. The question is how to produce a genuine smile in a moment when your body is flooded with adrenaline and your mind is cycling through a hundred technical details.
The Memory Technique
The answer, for me, turned out to be absurdly simple. I use a memory.
About sixty seconds before I walk on stage — after the posture check, after the stretching, after the breathing exercises, in the final moments before the introduction begins — I deliberately recall a specific memory that makes me genuinely happy. Not vaguely happy. Specifically, viscerally, unmistakably happy. The kind of memory that produces an involuntary smile, the kind that reaches the eyes.
I have a small collection of these memories that I rotate through. They are personal and I will share a few because the specificity matters.
One is from a performance at a small private event in Vienna. I had performed a mentalism piece that ended with a revelation that genuinely shocked the participant — a woman who had been skeptical and guarded throughout the effect. The moment the revelation landed, her face transformed from controlled skepticism to wide-open astonishment, and she grabbed my arm and said, “How did you — no. No. That is not possible.” The laughter and applause from the room were wonderful, but it was her face in that split second of genuine wonder that I remember. That memory makes me smile every time.
Another is not from performing at all. It is from a morning in Salzburg, years ago, when I was walking along the river before a consulting engagement and a street musician was playing something on an accordion that I did not recognize but that was so beautiful I stopped and stood there for five minutes, coffee getting cold, just listening. The memory is the sound and the morning light on the water and the feeling of unexpected joy at something I had not planned or anticipated. It makes me smile because it was a gift I did not earn.
A third is from the early days of Vulpine Creations, when Adam Wilber and I received the first customer review of one of our products. Someone had bought it, performed it, and written a detailed review about how it had become the centerpiece of their show. A stranger, on the other side of the world, building their act around something Adam and I had created together. The feeling of that moment — the validation, the connection, the sense that something we built was genuinely useful to someone — is a reliable source of genuine warmth.
These are not rehearsed affirmations. They are not visualization exercises. They are real memories of real moments that produce a real physiological response. When I recall the woman grabbing my arm in Vienna, my face does not have to be told to smile. It smiles on its own. The smile reaches my eyes because the emotion reaches my eyes.
Why This Works Better Than Willpower
The reason the memory technique works and “just smile” does not is neurological. A genuine smile is not a conscious decision. It is an involuntary response to a positive emotional state. You cannot will a genuine smile any more than you can will yourself to blush. You can produce the muscular configuration that resembles a smile, but the warmth, the crinkling around the eyes, the subtle relaxation of the forehead — these are produced by the emotion, not by the instruction.
By recalling a memory that produces genuine happiness, I am creating the emotional state that produces the smile, rather than trying to manufacture the smile without the state. The smile is a symptom. The memory is the cause. Get the cause right and the symptom follows automatically.
This is the same principle that Derren Brown discusses in the context of conviction in performance. In Absolute Magic, he writes about the importance of genuinely believing in what you are doing rather than performing the appearance of belief. The audience detects the difference. The same applies to warmth and approachability. The audience detects the difference between a performer who is genuinely glad to be there and one who is performing gladness.
The Timing
The timing matters. I trigger the memory about thirty seconds before I walk on. Not five minutes before — the emotional effect fades with time and gets overwritten by technical thoughts. Not in the moment of walking on — that is too late, and the face has already settled. Thirty seconds gives the memory time to produce its emotional effect, which then carries me through the walk to the stage, through the introduction, through the first eye contact with the audience.
By the time I am on stage, the smile has already done its work. The audience has already received the impression of warmth and approachability. And here is the remarkable thing: the genuine positive emotion that produced the smile does not disappear once the performance begins. It lingers. It colors the first few minutes with a warmth and ease that would be impossible to manufacture through willpower alone.
The audience feels this. They may not know why this performer seems more approachable, more likeable, more relaxed than the last one they watched. But they respond to it. They lean in. They smile back. They give you the benefit of the doubt. And that goodwill, established in the first seconds by nothing more than a genuine smile, compounds throughout the entire performance.
The Feedback Loop
There is a feedback mechanism here that makes the technique even more powerful than it initially sounds. When you walk on stage with a genuine smile, the audience smiles back. When the audience smiles back, you feel welcomed. When you feel welcomed, your body relaxes further, your voice warms, your gestures open up. The audience responds to this increased relaxation with even more warmth. And so the cycle continues, each loop reinforcing the last.
The opposite feedback loop is equally real and equally powerful. Walk on stage with a tense, concentrated expression and the audience mirrors it. They sit back. They cross their arms. They adopt a “prove it to me” posture. You sense this resistance, which increases your tension, which tightens your expression further, which pushes the audience further away. Within thirty seconds, you are fighting an uphill battle that started with nothing more than the wrong expression on your face.
I have experienced both loops. The difference between them is the difference between a performance that feels effortless and one that feels like pushing a boulder uphill. And the trigger for which loop you enter is a single moment, a single expression, a single genuine or artificial smile.
Building Your Memory Library
I would encourage anyone who performs — magic, keynotes, presentations, music, anything that puts you in front of people — to build their own library of reliable happiness memories. Not dozens. Three to five is enough. They should meet a few criteria.
They should be specific. “I was happy on vacation” is too vague to trigger a genuine emotional response. “I was sitting on the balcony of that hotel in Graz watching the sun come up and my coffee was perfect and for the first time in weeks I had no email to answer” — that is specific enough.
They should be personal. Someone else’s happy moment will not produce a genuine smile on your face. It needs to be yours, drawn from your own experience, connected to your own emotional history.
They should be reliable. Test them. Recall the memory in a neutral moment and see if it produces an involuntary smile. If it does, add it to the library. If it produces a pleasant thought but not a physical response, find something stronger.
They should be refreshed. Memories lose their emotional charge over time through repetition. If you use the same memory before every show for six months, it will fade from a genuine emotional trigger to a cognitive habit. Rotate through your library. Add new memories as they accumulate. Keep the collection fresh.
The Connection to Everything Else
This technique is the final link in a chain that stretches back through every post in this category. The grooming, the clothing, the lighting check, the sound check, the room setup, the introduction, the posture and breathing — all of it builds toward a single goal: walking on stage as the best possible version of yourself, prepared in every dimension, ready to connect with the audience as a human being rather than a nervous technician.
The smile is the capstone. It is the moment where all the preparation becomes invisible and what the audience sees is simply a person who is happy to be there. Not a person who is worried about their props. Not a person who is mentally reviewing their script. Not a person who is hoping the lighting is right. Just a person who walked on stage smiling, and made three hundred strangers feel like they were in good hands.
I think about that photograph from Innsbruck sometimes. The man with the face of someone solving a differential equation, about to walk into a room full of people who wanted to have a good time. He was prepared. He was skilled. He was ready. But he had forgotten that none of that matters if the first thing the audience sees is a face that says “I am working” instead of a face that says “I am glad to be here.”
The trick I use to put a smile on my face is not really a trick at all. It is a memory. A real one. And the smile it produces is real too. That is the whole point.