I was at a corporate event in Linz, maybe thirty minutes after my keynote, and a woman from the audience came up to me at the reception. She said something that stuck with me for weeks.
“You looked so natural up there. Like you were just having a conversation with us.”
I thanked her, because that is what you do. But what I wanted to say was: natural is the last thing that performance is. What you saw was the result of hundreds of hours of practice, dozens of video reviews, ruthless self-critique, rewritten scripts, re-blocked movements, adjusted timing, and the deliberate suppression of every nervous habit my body naturally defaults to when a hundred pairs of eyes are watching me.
There was nothing natural about it. It only looked natural because the work was invisible.
The Naturalness Paradox
This is one of the most important paradoxes in performance, and it took me years to understand it fully. The more natural a performer looks on stage, the more craft is required to achieve that appearance. The less effort you seem to expend, the more effort was actually invested. The more effortless the performance appears, the more deliberate every element is.
Derren Brown articulated this better than anyone I have read. His philosophy of performance rests on the principle that naturalness is the foundation of deception — not in the sense of lying, but in the sense of creating an experience that does not trigger the audience’s analytical defenses. When something looks natural, the audience’s critical faculty relaxes. When something looks performed, their defenses go up. They start watching the performer rather than experiencing the performance.
Brown’s insight changed how I think about everything I do on stage. The goal is not to be natural. The goal is to appear natural. And appearing natural is a skill — arguably the hardest skill in all of performance — that requires enormous discipline to develop.
What Actually Happens When You Walk On Stage
To understand why naturalness is so hard to achieve, you need to understand what actually happens to a human being when they walk in front of an audience.
Your body tenses. Not dramatically — you do not freeze like a deer. But every muscle group tightens slightly. Your shoulders creep upward. Your jaw clenches. Your hands, if you are not holding something, do things you would never do in normal conversation. They grip each other, or they hang stiffly at your sides, or they fidget with your clothes.
Your voice changes. The pitch rises. The range narrows. The volume either drops to a near-whisper or jumps to a shout, depending on your stress response. The rhythm of your speech shifts — either accelerating to a breathless pace or becoming stilted and mechanical, with pauses in wrong places and no pauses where they should be.
Your gaze changes. In normal conversation, you look at people naturally, shifting your attention fluidly. On stage, you either lock onto one spot — often the back wall, the floor, or one unfortunate person in the front row — or your eyes dart around the room like a trapped animal looking for an exit.
Your movements change. In everyday life, you move through space without thinking about it. On stage, you become hyper-aware of your body, and that awareness creates a strange stiffness. You walk differently. You stand differently. You gesture differently. Everything that is fluid in private becomes deliberate and slightly wrong in public.
All of this happens automatically, below the level of conscious control. It is your nervous system responding to a perceived threat — the evaluative gaze of dozens or hundreds of strangers. And it is deeply, profoundly unnatural. Which means that looking natural on stage requires actively overriding every one of these automatic responses.
The Real-Then-Fake Progression
When I first started performing, my approach to naturalness was to try very hard to be natural. If you have ever tried this, you know immediately why it does not work. Trying to be natural is the most unnatural thing you can do. It is like trying to fall asleep — the effort defeats the purpose.
What eventually worked was a different approach entirely, one I discovered through my reading of performance psychology. Instead of trying to be natural, I focused on practicing each element of performance separately until it became automatic. Not natural in the spontaneous sense. Automatic in the trained sense.
The distinction matters. Natural means “happening without effort.” Automatic means “happening without conscious thought because you have trained the response.” They look identical from the outside. But from the inside, they are completely different processes. One is a default state. The other is a constructed state that mimics the default.
I practiced standing. Literally standing in a room, alone, with my weight balanced, my shoulders relaxed, my hands at my sides, and my breathing controlled. I practiced it until it felt normal to stand that way — not because it was natural, but because the repetition had made it automatic.
I practiced speaking. Recording myself, listening back, identifying the moments where my voice shifted into its stressed register, then re-recording with deliberate adjustments until the relaxed version became the default. Not natural speech. Trained speech that sounds natural.
I practiced eye contact. This was the hardest one. Looking at a single point in a room and holding my gaze there for a count of three, then shifting to another point and holding for three, then another. The rhythm feels artificial when you practice it. But in performance, it reads as warm, engaged, connected — the way a natural conversationalist holds eye contact.
Every element that looks natural in performance was, at some point, a deliberate, conscious, slightly ridiculous exercise done alone in a hotel room or in front of a camera.
The Stanislavski Connection
Dan Harlan’s lecture on magic as theater introduced me to Stanislavski’s method adapted for magicians, and one element of that system resonated deeply with this paradox. Stanislavski talked about the actor finding truth in the imagined circumstance — not pretending to feel something, but creating the conditions under which the genuine feeling could emerge.
For performers, the parallel is this: you do not pretend to be natural. You create the conditions — through preparation, through practice, through the systematic removal of everything unnatural — that allow naturalness to emerge.
The conditions are specific. You need to know your material so thoroughly that executing it requires no conscious attention. You need to have rehearsed your blocking so many times that your body knows where to go without being told. You need to have tested your script against enough audiences that you know which words land and which ones create friction. You need to have reviewed enough video of yourself to identify and eliminate every nervous tic, unnecessary gesture, and vocal habit that signals effort to the audience.
Once all of that is in place — once the mechanics are truly automatic — then something interesting happens. The space that was being consumed by conscious management of all those details becomes available for something else. Presence. Connection. The moment-to-moment responsiveness that audiences experience as naturalness.
What the Audience Actually Sees
The reason naturalness matters so much is that audiences are not just watching what you do. They are watching how you do it. And the way they process the “how” is largely unconscious.
When a performer looks stiff, the audience feels tension. Not because they are analyzing body mechanics. Because human beings are wired to mirror the emotional states of the people they observe. A tense performer creates tense spectators. A natural-looking performer creates relaxed spectators. And relaxed spectators are the ones who gasp, laugh, and lean forward in their seats.
This is why the naturalness paradox matters so much for magic specifically. Magic requires the audience to let go of their analytical defenses. To stop trying to figure out how it works and simply experience the wonder of what is happening. A stiff, effortful performance keeps those defenses up. A natural, effortless-looking performance lowers them. The audience stops watching the performer and starts watching the magic.
The difference between those two states — watching the performer versus watching the magic — is everything. It is the difference between a puzzle and a miracle. And the bridge between them is naturalness. Not real naturalness. Constructed naturalness so good that nobody, including you after enough practice, can tell the difference.
The Uncomfortable Middle Phase
There is a phase in this process that nobody warns you about, and it is brutal.
When you first start performing, you are unconsciously unnatural. You do not know what you are doing wrong, so the effort does not bother you. Ignorance is protective.
Then you start studying. You watch your videos. You read about performance craft. You identify all the things you are doing wrong. And suddenly you become consciously unnatural. You know what natural looks like, but you cannot achieve it. Every time you try to correct something — relax your shoulders, slow your speech, make eye contact — it feels forced and artificial, which makes you more self-conscious, which makes you more unnatural.
This phase is deeply uncomfortable. You feel like you have gotten worse. In some ways, you have. Before, you were bad but blissfully unaware. Now you are bad and painfully aware. The temptation to stop working on it — to go back to unconscious incompetence, where at least you did not feel terrible — is enormous.
I spent months in this phase. Every time I tried to “be natural” on stage, I could feel the effort. And I knew that if I could feel it, the audience could see it. The feedback loop was vicious: try to be natural, feel unnatural, become more self-conscious, look even less natural.
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to be natural during performance and instead focused on being natural during practice. Instead of correcting myself on stage — which is like trying to fix a flat tire while driving — I did the work offline. Practiced the relaxed posture until it was automatic. Practiced the vocal range until it was habitual. Practiced the eye contact pattern until it required no thought.
And then, on stage, I stopped trying. Not stopped caring. Stopped trying to manage my naturalness in real time. I trusted the practice. I let the automatic responses take over. And the naturalness emerged — not because I had found it, but because I had trained it so thoroughly that it no longer needed to be found.
The Consultant’s Irony
There is an irony in my professional life that I appreciate more with each passing year. In strategy consulting, I spend my days helping companies look effortless. The best strategy does not look like strategy. It looks like obvious common sense, executed with precision. The months of analysis, modeling, debate, and refinement that go into a strategic recommendation are invisible in the final presentation. The client sees a clean, logical story. They do not see the fourteen drafts, the discarded frameworks, the three-AM data reviews.
Performance is the same. The audience sees a person who looks like they are just being themselves. They do not see the years of practice, the hundred hours of video review, the scripts rewritten until every word is right, the physical training to stand properly and breathe correctly and use their hands with purpose.
In both domains — consulting and performing — the goal is the same: make the complex look simple. Make the deliberate look spontaneous. Make the trained look natural.
And in both domains, the people who are best at it are the ones who have done the most work to get there. The naturalness you admire in a great performer is not a gift. It is a construction. Built brick by brick, rehearsal by rehearsal, correction by correction, until the seams have vanished and only the seamlessness remains.
The most unnatural act in the world is looking natural on stage. And the only way to get there is to accept that truth, embrace the uncomfortable middle phase, and do the work — the deeply unnatural, painstaking, deliberate work — until the work itself disappears.