There is a story Ken Weber tells in Maximum Entertainment that I think about at least once a month. A mentalist — a working professional, someone who performed regularly for paying audiences — had a word in his act that he mispronounced. Every single show. For years. The word was “calisthenics,” and he said it wrong, consistently, in front of hundreds and eventually thousands of people.
Nobody told him.
Not a single audience member. Not a fellow performer. Not a friend, a spouse, a booking agent. Nobody. He went on saying it wrong, show after show, until one day someone finally mentioned it — casually, almost as an afterthought — and the performer was mortified. Not because the mispronunciation was catastrophic. It was not. The show still worked, the audience still reacted, the checks still cleared. He was mortified because of how long it had gone on. Years. In front of people who noticed, who perhaps winced slightly, who maybe even mentioned it to each other on the way home. And none of them said a word to him.
When I first read that story, I laughed. Then I stopped laughing because I realized how many things I might be doing wrong right now that nobody is telling me about.
The Isolation Problem
Mentalism, more than almost any other form of performance, breeds isolation. A card magician can practice with other card magicians, compare techniques, workshop routines together. A stage illusionist works with assistants who see the act from the inside. But a mentalist, especially one working corporate events and keynotes the way I do, often develops material alone, tests it alone, and refines it alone.
My practice studio is a hotel room. My rehearsal space is my apartment in Vienna. My development process involves a laptop, a mirror, and whatever props I am working with at the time. I record myself, I watch the recordings, I make notes, I adjust. It is a thorough system. I learned it from Ken Weber’s videotape method and it has served me well.
But here is what the system cannot catch: the things you do not know are wrong.
A camera does not know that you are mispronouncing a word. A mirror does not know that the gesture you make during your prediction reveal looks awkward from the audience’s angle. Your own ears, trained to hear what you intended to say, will not flag the phrase that sounds completely different to someone hearing it for the first time.
My Own Calisthenics Moment
I had my version of the calisthenics story. It was not a mispronunciation — it was a transition. Between two pieces in my mentalism set, I had developed a line that I thought was a smooth bridge. Something about how the next demonstration would build on what the audience had just experienced. I said a version of this transition for months. It felt natural to me. It flowed. I was proud of it.
Then a friend — not a magician, not a performer, just someone who happened to see me perform twice within a few weeks — said something that stopped me cold. “That bit where you explain what you are about to do next — it sounds like you are reading the instructions on the box.”
I asked what he meant.
“You sound like a teacher setting up the next lesson. Like, ‘Now we are going to explore…’ It takes me out of the moment. Everything else feels like you are just talking to us, and then suddenly you shift into this presenter mode.”
He was right. I went back and watched my recordings with fresh ears, specifically listening for that transition, and the shift in register was obvious. I had been hearing it as smooth because I knew the intention behind it. The audience was hearing it as a gear change — a moment where the human being disappeared and the presenter showed up. It was not a disaster. My shows still worked. But it was a crack in the surface that had been there for months, and nobody had mentioned it because nobody knew I wanted to hear it.
Why People Do Not Tell You
This is the part that matters most, and it took me a long time to understand it. People do not withhold feedback out of malice. They do it for three perfectly rational reasons.
First, audiences do not think of themselves as your quality control department. They came to be entertained, not to workshop your act. If something is slightly off, they notice, they process it, and they move on. It does not occur to them that you might want to know.
Second, fellow performers are afraid of being rude. The magic community, for all its camaraderie, has an unspoken agreement: you do not critique someone’s act unless they explicitly ask. And even then, the critique tends to be gentle. “That was great, maybe you could try…” rather than “That transition sounds like you are reading from a manual.” We are all insecure enough about our own work that criticizing someone else’s feels dangerous.
Third, and this is the most insidious one: the people closest to you — friends, family, partners — have seen your act evolve. They remember how nervous you were at the beginning. They have watched you improve. They are so proud of your progress that pointing out a flaw feels ungrateful. Your partner is not going to say “You mispronounce ‘calisthenics’” when they remember the days you could barely get through a performance without your hands shaking.
The result is a feedback vacuum. You perform inside a bubble where the only negative signals that reach you are catastrophic failures — a trick that completely falls apart, an audience that visibly checks out, a booking that does not lead to a rebooking. Everything short of disaster gets filtered out by politeness, social convention, and love.
Building the Feedback System
After my transition wake-up call, I started building what I think of as a deliberate feedback architecture. It is not complicated, but it requires consistent effort and a willingness to hear things you do not want to hear.
The first layer is the trusted observer. I identified three people in my life — one is a fellow performer, one is a friend with no connection to magic, and one is a professional colleague who regularly sees me give keynotes. I asked each of them, explicitly and specifically, to watch my performances with critical eyes. Not “tell me if you liked it.” Not “give me your honest opinion.” Those phrases are invitations to be polite. Instead: “I need you to tell me every moment where something felt off, where you lost focus, where something I said sounded strange, where a gesture or word choice took you out of the experience.”
The specific framing matters. When you ask people to identify specific moments, they feel permission to be granular. When you ask for general opinions, they default to “it was great.”
The second layer is the post-show questionnaire I give to event organizers. Not a feedback form — that sounds corporate and gets corporate responses. A short, specific set of questions. What moment got the strongest reaction? Was there any point where the energy in the room dipped? Did anything I said or did seem out of place for this particular audience? Event organizers are a goldmine because they watch their audience more than they watch you. They notice when someone checks their phone, when a table leans in, when the room shifts.
The third layer is recording from multiple angles. I started placing a second camera — just my phone on a discreet stand — at a different angle from my primary recording device. The front angle shows me what I look like. The side or audience angle shows me what the audience is doing while I perform. You learn different things from each. The front camera caught my awkward transition. The audience camera showed me that during one of my strongest pieces, a particular moment was landing harder than I thought — people were leaning forward, turning to each other, reacting in ways that my front angle could not capture.
The Mentalism-Specific Challenge
Mentalism has a unique feedback problem that pure magic does not. When a card trick goes wrong, the evidence is immediate and visible. The wrong card turns up. The coin is in the wrong hand. Failure is binary and obvious.
When mentalism goes wrong, it is often invisible. A prediction can be technically correct but emotionally flat. A mind-reading demonstration can reveal the right information but feel mechanical rather than miraculous. The audience applauds because the outcome was impressive, but the experience was not extraordinary. And you walk off stage thinking it went well because the trick worked, when in fact the performance around the trick was mediocre.
This is where Derren Brown’s thinking in Absolute Magic changed my approach. The idea that conviction matters more than technique, that the performer’s belief in the moment creates the audience’s belief — this means that even technically flawless mentalism can fail at the level that actually matters. And that failure is almost impossible to detect without external feedback, because from the inside, you felt the conviction. You believed in the moment. The fact that it did not transmit to the audience is invisible to you.
The Courage to Ask
Here is what I have learned about feedback that nobody tells you: asking for it requires more courage than performing does. Walking on stage in front of three hundred people is frightening in a familiar way. Your body knows what to do with that fear. You channel it, you use it, you perform through it.
But sitting down with someone you trust and saying “Tell me everything that was wrong” — that is a different kind of exposure. It is not the exposure of performance, where you control the frame and the lighting and the script. It is the exposure of vulnerability, where someone else controls the narrative and you have to sit with whatever they say.
I have gotten better at it. Not comfortable with it — I do not think you ever get comfortable with it. But better. I have learned to listen without defending. To write down the feedback before responding. To thank the person for specifics, even when the specifics sting. To go home and sit with the notes for a day before deciding what to change and what to keep.
The mentalist with the calisthenics problem was not a bad performer. He was a professional who worked steadily for years. The mispronunciation did not ruin his career. But it was a small, persistent crack that he could have fixed in five minutes if anyone had told him about it. And the fact that nobody did — for years — tells you everything you need to know about the feedback environment most performers operate in.
What I Do Now
After every performance that matters — and increasingly, I try to make every performance matter — I do three things.
I watch the recording with the sound off first, looking only at my body, my hands, my positioning. Then I listen to the audio without watching, hearing my words and my timing as pure sound. Then I watch it complete, looking for the moments where visual and audio do not align, where what I see does not match what I hear.
Then I send the recording to one of my three trusted observers and ask the same question every time: “What would you fix?”
Not “what did you think.” Not “how was it.” What would you fix.
The answers are sometimes brutal. More often, they are small. A gesture that is too big for the room. A phrase that sounds rehearsed. A moment where I look at my props instead of at the person I am performing for. Small things. Calisthenics things. Things I would never catch on my own because I am inside the experience, feeling the conviction, hearing my intention instead of my actual words.
The mentalist who mispronounced “calisthenics” for years was not failed by his talent. He was failed by his feedback system — or rather, by the absence of one. Every performer is one honest conversation away from eliminating a flaw they do not know they have. The trick is creating the conditions where that conversation can happen.
And if you are reading this and thinking “I do not have anyone who would give me that kind of feedback” — that is the problem. Start there. Find that person. Ask them. Give them permission to be specific.
Because right now, there is something in your act that everyone notices and nobody mentions. And the longer it stays there, the more it becomes part of who you are on stage.
Fix it while it is still just a mispronunciation.