I was sitting in a hotel room in Linz, practicing a routine that involved pretending to receive information I did not have. The effect, from the audience’s perspective, would look like genuine thought reading — I would appear to pluck details from a spectator’s mind through concentration and psychological insight.
The method was solid. I had rehearsed the mechanics until they were clean. But the presentation was lifeless. I was going through the motions of pretending to read someone’s thoughts, and it felt exactly like what it was: pretending. Hollow. Performative. The kind of acting that an audience can smell from the back row.
Then something shifted.
I had been practicing the same sequence for perhaps the thirtieth time that evening, and somewhere in the middle of it, the pretending stopped feeling like pretending. The pause I was taking — ostensibly to “receive” information — started to feel like I was actually listening for something. My hand, which I was holding near my temple in a gesture of concentration, felt like it was doing something real rather than theatrical. The words I was about to speak felt less like scripted reveals and more like observations I was genuinely making.
Nothing had changed mechanically. The method was identical. My hands were doing the same things they had been doing for an hour. But something internal had crossed a threshold. The performance had gone from acting to believing.
That was the night I first understood conviction.
What Conviction Actually Is
Joshua Jay, in his collection of essays on magic philosophy, describes conviction as one of the most important and least discussed concepts in the craft. His insight is deceptively simple: when a performer practices something enough, the imaginary starts to feel like something. The nothing becomes something. The pretend act of reading a mind or sensing a card’s location stops being pretend in the performer’s internal experience and starts feeling genuine.
This is not self-delusion. The performer knows, intellectually, that they are not actually reading minds. But the body, trained through thousands of repetitions, begins to execute the presentation with an authenticity that transcends acting. The pause feels like listening because the performer’s nervous system has learned to associate that pause with the moment of revelation. The gesture feels purposeful because it has become connected, through practice, to the emotional arc of the effect.
Jay describes this as the point where “nothing feels like something.” And that feeling, he argues, is what the audience detects. Not the method. Not the technique. The conviction.
Why This Changes Everything
Here is what I have come to believe about performing mentalism, and increasingly about performing magic in general: the audience’s experience of impossibility is directly proportional to the performer’s conviction that what is happening is real.
This sounds mystical, and I am an Austrian strategy consultant who deals in frameworks and evidence, so mystical does not come naturally to me. But the evidence from my own performances is hard to argue with.
When I perform a mentalism effect in a mode of pure technical execution — hitting my marks, delivering my lines, executing the method cleanly — the audience responds with interest. They are entertained. They might be impressed. But there is a glass wall between us. They are watching a performance, and they know it.
When I perform the same effect in a state of conviction — when the pause feels like actual listening, when the revelation feels like genuine discovery, when my body language reflects authentic concentration rather than theatrical concentration — the audience response changes qualitatively. They lean in. Their breathing changes. The person whose thoughts I am apparently reading often looks genuinely startled, not just surprised. The room gets quieter.
The difference is not in what I am doing. It is in how much I believe what I am doing.
The Brown Connection
Derren Brown makes a related point in his writing that struck me hard when I first encountered it. Brown argues that technical skill, no matter how refined, means nothing if the presentation is weak. A performer can execute a flawless method and still produce a mediocre effect if the presentation lacks conviction. Conversely, a performer with modest technique but absolute conviction can create moments that feel genuinely impossible.
This was a difficult idea for me to accept. I come from the card magic world, where technique is king. You practice your moves until they are invisible, and the invisibility of the method creates the impossibility of the effect. The better your technique, the stronger your magic. That equation made sense to my analytical mind. It was measurable, improvable, systematic.
Brown’s argument inverts that equation. He suggests that the performer’s internal state — their belief in the reality of what they are presenting — is the primary driver of audience experience. Technique supports that state, but it does not create it. You can have perfect technique and no conviction, and the effect will feel hollow. You can have adequate technique and overwhelming conviction, and the effect will feel like a miracle.
I resisted this idea for months. Then I tested it.
The Hotel Room Experiment
I set up my phone to record and performed the same mentalism routine twice. In the first version, I focused entirely on technical execution. Clean method, clear reveals, professional pacing. In the second version, I focused on believing. I tried to actually listen during the pauses. I tried to actually see the information forming in my mind before I spoke it. I tried to experience the revelation as a genuine discovery rather than a scripted moment.
Watching the recordings back, the difference was visible even though I was performing alone in a hotel room with no audience. In the first version, I looked competent. Polished. Professional. In the second version, I looked like someone who was genuinely doing something. My eyes were different. My posture was different. The timing was different — not because I had changed the timing consciously, but because believing in the process created natural pauses and accelerations that pure technique did not.
If I could see the difference on a phone recording of a solo practice session, an audience would feel it from thirty meters away.
How Conviction Develops
Conviction is not something you can decide to have. You cannot walk on stage and think “I will now believe that I am reading minds” any more than you can think “I will now believe that I can fly.” The conscious mind does not work that way. It knows what is real.
What I have found is that conviction develops through a specific practice process. It begins with mechanical repetition — learning the method, drilling the technique, building physical fluency. This stage feels empty. You are going through motions that have no emotional content. Most performers stay here forever, because the mechanics are enough to create a workable effect.
The next stage is emotional rehearsal. You stop practicing the mechanics in isolation and start practicing the experience. You practice the pause not as a timing mark but as a moment of genuine concentration. You practice the reveal not as a scripted line but as a discovery you are making in real time. You invest emotional energy in the imaginary process.
This feels foolish at first. I felt ridiculous sitting alone in a hotel room, pretending to concentrate on reading the mind of an imaginary spectator, trying to genuinely believe I was detecting their thoughts. It felt like method acting for an audience of zero. The analytical part of my brain — the strategy consultant, the framework builder, the evidence-based thinker — was screaming that this was absurd.
But I kept doing it. Night after night, hotel room after hotel room. And gradually, the pretending stopped feeling like pretending. The concentration started to feel like concentration. The pauses filled with something. I do not know what to call it — attention, perhaps, or presence, or simply the accumulated weight of having practiced this emotional state so many times that it became automatic.
And then, one night at a corporate event in Vienna, I performed the routine for a real audience and something happened that had never happened before. A woman whose thought I had apparently read looked at me with an expression I had never generated in a spectator before. Not amazement. Not surprise. Genuine uncertainty. As if she was not entirely sure I had not actually read her mind.
That expression was the fruit of conviction. She felt it because I felt it. And I felt it because I had practiced feeling it until it became real.
The Paradox of Conviction in Magic
Conviction applies to magic as well as mentalism, though in a different way. In mentalism, conviction means believing in the mental process — the mind reading, the prediction, the psychological influence. In magic, conviction means believing in the impossibility — treating the magical moment with genuine wonder rather than performing it as a technical demonstration.
I notice this in my card magic. When I produce a card at an impossible location, there is a choice in how I react to it. I can react as a performer executing an effect — a satisfied “ta-da” expression that says “I did this.” Or I can react as someone who is genuinely surprised by the impossibility — a moment of shared wonder that says “look what just happened.”
The second reaction requires conviction. It requires believing, in the moment, that something impossible occurred, even though I know exactly how it occurred. It requires treating the method as invisible to my own experience, so that what remains is pure effect.
This is not easy. The performer’s knowledge of the method is always present, always threatening to undermine conviction. You know the card is not really lost. You know the prediction was not genuinely precognitive. You know the thought was not actually read. That knowledge is a constant pressure against belief.
The practice of conviction is the practice of setting that knowledge aside. Not denying it. Not pretending it does not exist. But learning to operate in a state where the knowledge of the method does not contaminate the experience of the effect. Where the performer can simultaneously know how and feel what.
What I Practice Now
My practice sessions have changed significantly since I understood conviction. I still drill technique — that will never stop. But I now spend equal time on what I think of as conviction rehearsal. This is the practice of performing the effect with full emotional investment, alone, in whatever hotel room or home office I am occupying that evening.
I practice believing in the pause. I practice experiencing the reveal as discovery. I practice reacting to impossible moments with genuine wonder rather than performer satisfaction.
Some nights it works and some nights it does not. Conviction is not a switch you flip. It is a muscle you build. But on the nights when it works — when the nothing genuinely starts to feel like something — I know that the next time I perform this routine in front of an audience, the glass wall will be thinner.
And when that wall disappears entirely, even for a moment, what remains is the purest form of magic I have ever experienced. Not a trick. Not a demonstration. A shared moment where both the performer and the audience genuinely feel that something impossible just happened.
That is conviction. It is the strangest skill I have ever developed. And it is the one that matters most.