There is a moment I think about often. It was after a keynote I delivered at a corporate event in Salzburg, maybe two years into my speaking work. The talk had gone well. The mentalism pieces landed. The audience was engaged. During the networking reception afterwards, three people came up to me independently and said some version of the same thing: “You’re really good at this.”
One of them was the CEO of the company that had booked me. Another was a woman who had been a volunteer during one of my effects. The third was a guy who told me he had seen a lot of magic and mentalism, and that what I did was different. Better. More personal.
I thanked each of them. I smiled. I said something gracious. And then I went back to my hotel room, sat down at the desk, pulled out my cards, and thought: they are being polite. They do not know enough about magic to judge. They liked the talk, and the magic was a novelty, and they are projecting enthusiasm onto something they cannot properly evaluate.
Three genuine, unsolicited compliments from intelligent people, and my brain dismissed all three within minutes.
This was not a bad night. This was a pattern.
The Compliment Deflection Machine
If you had asked me at the time whether I believed in myself as a performer, I would have said yes. Of course. I run a magic company. I perform at corporate events. I have put in thousands of hours. I believe in myself.
But there is a difference between intellectually acknowledging that you are competent and actually, viscerally believing it. The intellectual acknowledgment is easy. It lives in the prefrontal cortex, the rational mind, the part that can look at evidence and draw logical conclusions. Yes, I have performed successfully many times. Yes, audiences respond well. Yes, the bookings keep coming. Therefore, logically, I must be good at this.
The visceral belief is different. It lives deeper. It is the feeling you have in the pit of your stomach when you walk out on stage. It is the voice in your head during the silent moments between effects. It is what you tell yourself when nobody else is in the room.
And for a long time, what I told myself when nobody else was in the room was: you are faking it. You got lucky. They did not notice the rough spots. Real magicians would see through you in seconds.
This is imposter syndrome, and it is well-documented. But knowing the clinical name for something does not make it go away. Understanding that your brain is running a faulty algorithm does not automatically fix the algorithm.
The External Validation Trap
Here is what I tried first: collecting more external validation. If three compliments were not enough, maybe thirty would be. If one successful show was not convincing, maybe fifty would be. If one booking agent said I was good, maybe five would make me believe it.
So I collected. I kept a mental (and sometimes literal) list of positive feedback. I noted every successful show. I catalogued every moment where an audience gasped, or laughed, or applauded in a way that felt genuine. I stacked evidence like a lawyer building a case.
And none of it worked.
Not because the evidence was flawed. The evidence was real. The compliments were genuine. The shows were successful. The problem was that I was trying to use external evidence to solve an internal problem, and those two systems do not connect the way you think they do.
External validation is like drinking salt water when you are thirsty. It looks like water. It tastes like it might help. But it does not solve the underlying problem, and the more you drink, the thirstier you get. Every compliment created a brief spike of confidence followed by a longer period of doubt. Every successful show raised the stakes for the next show. Every piece of evidence that I was good was immediately countered by the thought: but what about next time?
The problem with building your self-belief on external evidence is that external evidence is, by definition, external. It can be taken away. It can be contradicted. It can be reinterpreted. And your brain, if it is wired for doubt, will find a way to reinterpret every positive data point as something less than it appears.
What Adam Said That I Did Not Hear
Adam Wilber, my partner at Vulpine Creations, told me something early in our working relationship that I filed away but did not actually process for years. We were on a call discussing a new product, and somehow the conversation drifted to performing, and he said something like: “You know your stuff. You just need to know that you know it.”
At the time, I thought he was being encouraging. A pep talk. The kind of thing a friend says when they can see you are in your head. I appreciated it, filed it under “nice things Adam said,” and moved on.
It took me years to understand that he was not being encouraging. He was diagnosing the problem with surgical precision.
I knew my material. I had practiced it for hundreds of hours. I could execute my routines reliably under pressure. I understood the psychology behind my effects. I had studied the history, the theory, the craft. By any objective measure, I was prepared.
But I did not know that I knew it. There was a gap between what I could do and what I believed I could do, and that gap was not a knowledge problem or a skill problem. It was a belief problem. And no amount of additional knowledge or skill was going to close it, because the gap was not located in the domain of knowledge or skill.
The Discovery
The shift started — and I want to be precise about this, because it was not a single dramatic moment but a gradual reorientation — when I stopped looking outward for evidence and started looking inward at the process.
I had been reading about motivation and resilience as part of my broader study of performance psychology. One concept that kept surfacing across multiple sources was the idea that self-belief is not built by accumulating evidence of success. It is built by accumulating evidence of effort. Not the outcome, but the process. Not what happened on stage, but what happened in the hotel room the night before.
This distinction is subtle but it changed everything.
When I evaluated myself based on outcomes — did the show go well? did the audience like me? did the booking agent rebook me? — I was always at the mercy of factors I could not control. Audiences vary. Venues vary. Sound systems fail. Volunteers are unpredictable. The outcome of any given show is a complex function of dozens of variables, most of which have nothing to do with me.
But when I evaluated myself based on effort — did I prepare thoroughly? did I practice the difficult parts? did I work on the new material even when I did not feel like it? did I push past the comfortable repertoire into the uncomfortable growth zone? — I was evaluating something I could control. Something I could see clearly. Something that did not depend on anyone else’s opinion or reaction.
And the evidence of effort was overwhelming. Thousands of hours in hotel rooms. Hundreds of sessions working through difficult techniques. Dozens of routines built from scratch, rehearsed, refined, performed, refined again. Whatever doubts my brain could manufacture about my talent or my natural ability, it could not argue with the evidence of the work.
The Hotel Room Reframe
I started thinking about those hotel room sessions differently. Not as preparation for shows — which made them feel like a means to an end, valuable only if the show went well — but as the thing itself. The practice was not a prelude to the real work. The practice was the real work. The shows were a byproduct.
This reframe sounds small. It was not small. It fundamentally changed my relationship with self-belief.
Before the reframe, my confidence was contingent on external results. Good show, confidence goes up. Bad show, confidence goes down. Compliment, small boost. Criticism, significant drop. My emotional state was a seismograph connected to every tremor in the outside world.
After the reframe, my confidence was anchored to something I did every day regardless of what happened on stage. I practiced. I worked. I put in the hours. I studied. I pushed myself into uncomfortable territory. I did the thing that naturals do — they showed up and did the work — and the work itself became the evidence.
Not evidence that I was talented. Not evidence that I was the best. Evidence that I was serious. Evidence that I was committed. Evidence that I was the kind of person who does the work whether anyone is watching or not.
And that, I discovered, was enough. Not enough to eliminate all doubt — I am not sure that is possible or even desirable — but enough to stand on stage and feel like I belonged there. Not because three people at a networking reception told me I was good, but because I knew what I had done to get there.
The Belief Nobody Can Give You
Here is what I understand now that I did not understand in that hotel room in Salzburg: external belief is a gift, and it is a generous one. When Adam said I knew my stuff, that was genuine and it mattered. When audience members told me my work was good, that was real and I should have listened more carefully.
But external belief, no matter how sincere, operates at the surface level. It can encourage you. It can validate what you already feel. It can provide a helpful data point in moments of uncertainty. What it cannot do is create something from nothing. If the internal belief is not there, no amount of external belief will manufacture it. The outside voice cannot reach the inside place where confidence lives.
This is why some performers can receive standing ovations and still feel like frauds. This is why some business leaders can build successful companies and still feel like they are about to be exposed. The external evidence says one thing; the internal narrative says another; and the internal narrative always wins, because it is the one you hear when the audience goes home and the lights go off and you are alone with your thoughts.
Building It From the Inside
The process of building internal belief is not glamorous. It does not involve breakthroughs or epiphanies. It involves doing the work, noticing that you did the work, and allowing that evidence to count.
That last part — allowing the evidence to count — is the hard part. Because the same brain that dismisses external compliments will try to dismiss internal evidence too. You practiced for two hours? So what, everyone practices. You learned a new technique? Big deal, it is not that hard. You pushed past your comfort zone? You should have been doing that all along.
The discipline is in refusing to let those dismissals stand unchallenged. Not with positive affirmations or motivational slogans, but with simple, factual observation. I did the work today. That is a fact. That fact counts. Not because I say it counts, but because the work is the only thing that has ever made me better, and I did it.
Over time, these facts accumulate. Not like compliments that spike and fade, but like deposits in an account that earns compound interest. Each session adds a small amount. Each difficult practice that you showed up for anyway adds a little more. Each time you chose the uncomfortable path over the easy one, the balance grows.
And at some point — not all at once, but gradually enough that you only notice it in retrospect — you realize that you believe in yourself. Not because anyone told you to. Not because the evidence from the outside world forced the conclusion. But because you built the belief, brick by brick, session by session, in hotel rooms and practice spaces where nobody was watching and nobody was applauding and the only person who knew you were there was you.
What I Would Tell Someone Starting Out
If I could go back and talk to myself in that hotel room in Salzburg — sitting at the desk, dismissing three genuine compliments, wondering if I was any good — I would not tell myself to believe in myself. That is useless advice. You cannot command belief into existence any more than you can command yourself to fall asleep.
What I would tell myself is this: stop looking for belief in other people’s reactions. It is not there. It was never there. It lives in the work you do when nobody is watching. It lives in the choice to practice when you are tired. It lives in the decision to learn something new when the old stuff is comfortable. It lives in the thousands of small, invisible, unglamorous moments that nobody sees and nobody applauds and nobody writes about.
That is where self-belief is built. Not on stages, not in networking receptions, not in compliment collections. In the quiet, solitary, sometimes frustrating process of becoming better than you were yesterday.
It does not matter how many people believe in you if you do not believe in yourself. And the only way to believe in yourself is to give yourself something to believe in. The work is that something. It always has been.