I want to tell you about the strangest piece of performance advice I have ever encountered. It contradicts everything I was trained to do as a strategy consultant. It runs counter to every instinct of analytical thinking. And it is, without question, the single idea that has most improved my performing.
The advice is this: delude yourself.
Not in the clinical sense. Not in the “lose touch with reality” sense. But in the specific, disciplined, performance-critical sense of treating your artistic vision as absolutely, unquestionably true while you are performing — even though you know, intellectually, that it is not.
Where the Idea Came From
I first encountered this idea in two places almost simultaneously, which made it impossible to ignore.
Derren Brown argues in Absolute Magic that the performer’s vision — the complete picture of what your magic should look and feel like — must be treated as absolute truth during performance. Even though intellectually you know it is just your set of answers, your particular interpretation, one possible approach among many. During the act, it must feel like the only possible truth. Without total commitment, the audience senses the gap. They feel the performer hedging, qualifying, holding something back. And that gap is where the magic leaks out.
Joshua Jay describes a parallel practice from a different angle. Before every show, he visualizes each effect from the audience’s perspective — seamless and magical, with no secret actions visible. He sees the magic happening as magic, not as technique. And then he tells himself: “I can do magic.” Not metaphorically. Not as a motivational affirmation. As a statement he inhabits completely for the duration of the performance.
Jay quotes the acting coach Sanford Meisner: “Actors and magicians must live truthfully in untruthful circumstances.” The phrase seems paradoxical, but the paradox is the point. You are doing something untruthful — creating an illusion. But you must live inside it truthfully, or the audience will not live inside it at all.
The Consultant’s Problem
I need to explain why this idea was so difficult for me specifically, because my resistance to it reveals something about the challenge adult learners face when they come to performance from analytical professions.
I spent my career dealing in evidence, logic, and measurable outcomes. In strategy consulting, you do not commit to an idea unless the data supports it. You maintain intellectual flexibility. You hold multiple hypotheses simultaneously. You are trained to be skeptical of your own conclusions, because the moment you fall in love with your theory is the moment you stop seeing the counter-evidence.
This is excellent thinking for boardrooms. It is terrible thinking for stages.
When I first started performing, I carried that analytical distance into my magic. I knew — always, at every moment — that what I was doing was a trick. I knew the method. I knew the mechanics. I knew exactly when the secret action happened and exactly how the audience was being misdirected. And because I knew all of this, some part of me was always standing outside the performance, observing it from the perspective of someone who knows how the sausage is made.
The audience could feel it. I did not understand this at the time, but they absolutely could. There was a subtle disconnection between what I was presenting and how I was presenting it. A quality of detachment that read as a lack of commitment. As though I was showing them something I did not quite believe in.
The effects still fooled people. The methods were clean. But the performances lacked something I could not name. A warmth. A conviction. A sense that what was happening mattered to me, the performer, as much as it should matter to them.
The Coin That Is Not There
Jay describes a moment that crystallized this for me. When performing a coin vanish, there comes a point where one hand appears to hold a coin that is actually in the other hand. Jay says he convinces himself the coin is in the displayed hand. Not that he pretends. Not that he acts as if. He convinces himself. For that moment, in that performance, the coin is where he says it is. His conviction is total.
“Artifice is the enemy of magic,” he writes. “It has to feel real.”
The first time I tried this — genuinely tried to believe, not just pretend to believe — something shifted. I was practicing a simple vanish in my hotel room in Vienna. I closed my hand around nothing and told myself the object was there. Really there. I could feel the weight of it. I could feel the edges against my palm. My hand curled around it naturally, because there was something to curl around.
I did the same thing without the self-delusion, just pretending, and watched both in the mirror. The difference was visible. When I believed the object was there, my hand looked natural. When I was acting, my hand looked like a hand performing an action. The distinction was subtle but unmistakable once I saw it.
This was the first time I understood that conviction is not an abstract concept. It is a physical reality. Your body responds differently when you believe something versus when you are pretending to believe it. The audience reads that difference, even if they could not articulate what they are seeing. They feel the presence or absence of genuine conviction the way you feel warmth or its absence when you walk through a room.
The Zone
Jay describes a state he calls “the zone” — the sensation of what it would actually be like to have magic powers. When conviction is complete, when muscle memory has taken over from conscious technique, and the performer can stop thinking about the method and start experiencing the effect from the audience’s perspective, something remarkable happens. The performer genuinely feels magical. Not in a delusional way. In a performance way. A way that is simultaneously false and completely true.
I have felt this state a handful of times. Not consistently — not yet. But enough to know it is real and to know the audience can tell the difference.
The first time it happened clearly was at a corporate event in Graz. I was doing a mentalism piece, one I had performed dozens of times. But that evening, something clicked. I stopped thinking about the method. I stopped tracking where I was in the sequence. I was simply present with the spectator, looking at her, listening to her, and when the moment came — when I revealed what she had been thinking — I experienced genuine surprise. Not surprise at the technique working. Surprise at the impossibility. As if I had not expected it myself. As if the connection between her mind and mine had produced something that startled even me.
Her reaction was unlike anything I had gotten from that routine before. She did not just gasp. She stepped back. She looked at her friend with an expression that was not puzzlement but something closer to awe. And then she laughed — a real, unguarded laugh, the kind that comes when something impossible feels undeniably real.
I am convinced — and I cannot prove this, but I am convinced — that her reaction was different because my experience was different. I was not performing the effect. I was inside it. And she could feel the difference.
The Thurston Counterpoint
There is a beautiful complementary practice from Howard Thurston, one of the great stage magicians of the early twentieth century. Jay describes how Thurston would stand in the wings before every performance, look out at the audience, and repeat to himself: “I love my audience. I love my audience. I love my audience.”
This is not self-delusion in the same way as “I can do magic.” But it operates on the same principle. Thurston was choosing a belief and making it absolute for the duration of the performance. He was priming his emotional state so that what the audience received was not a skilled professional going through his paces but a man who genuinely, in that moment, loved the people he was performing for.
The audience cannot see you standing in the wings. They do not hear your mantra. But they experience the result of it. They experience the warmth, the generosity, the genuine delight in their presence that this kind of deliberate self-priming produces. And that experience — the feeling of being liked, welcomed, and cared about by the person on stage — is one of the most powerful tools in performance.
I adopted a version of this. Before every set, I take a moment to remind myself why I am doing this. Not for the fee, not for the reputation, not to prove anything. Because the moment when someone experiences genuine wonder is one of the best feelings in the world, and I get to be the person who creates that feeling. That reminder is a form of self-delusion, too — or at least a deliberate narrowing of focus, an intentional amplification of one true feeling at the expense of others (tiredness, nervousness, self-consciousness). But it works. It lands me in the right state to walk up to a table or step onto a stage with the kind of presence that makes magic possible.
The Paradox of Belief
Here is the paradox, and I have not fully resolved it. The kind of conviction I am describing requires you to hold two contradictory truths simultaneously. You know the coin is not in your hand. And you believe the coin is in your hand. You know you cannot read minds. And you behave as though you can, with total sincerity, because in that moment, in that performance, you can.
As a consultant, this drove me crazy at first. How can both things be true? They cannot, in a logical sense. But performance is not logic. Performance is communication. And in communication, what matters is not what is objectively true but what is effectively true — what the audience receives, what they experience, what they feel.
If you hold back — if you maintain your analytical distance, if you hedge your internal commitment, if some part of you is always the skeptic watching yourself perform — the audience receives hedging. They receive distance. They receive a clever person doing clever things. But they do not receive magic.
If you commit — if you treat your vision as absolute truth for the duration of the performance, if you believe the coin is there and the mind is readable and the connection between you and the spectator is real — the audience receives conviction. They receive presence. They receive something that feels genuine, even though both you and they know, at some level, that it is an illusion.
The delusion is not about losing your grip on reality. It is about choosing which reality to inhabit while you perform. And choosing fully, without reservation.
How I Practice Conviction
Conviction is not something that happens automatically. It is a skill, and like all skills, it requires deliberate practice.
I practice it the same way Jay describes: before performing, I visualize the effects from the audience’s perspective. I see the impossibility happening as impossibility — clean, beautiful, unexplainable. I do not see the method. I do not see the secret actions. I see what the audience will see, and I let myself be impressed by it.
This sounds absurd. I am impressing myself with my own trick, whose method I know intimately. But the exercise works. It shifts my internal state from “performer executing a procedure” to “person experiencing something remarkable.” And that shift carries into the performance itself.
I also practice the physical component. When I rehearse, I spend time on the moments where conviction matters most — the moments where the audience must believe something that is not true. I do not just practice the technique. I practice believing. I practice feeling the weight of the object that is not there, sensing the connection with the spectator’s thoughts, experiencing the surprise of the impossible outcome. Over time, the belief becomes easier to access. The groove gets deeper.
The Audience Gives You Permission
One more thing. The audience wants to believe. This is perhaps the most underappreciated factor in the equation. Audiences do not come to a magic performance hoping to catch you. Most of them — the vast, overwhelming majority — come hoping to experience something wonderful. They want to suspend disbelief. They want to be transported. They are looking for permission to let go of their analytical frameworks for a few minutes and feel something they cannot explain.
Your conviction is that permission. When the performer believes, the audience is given license to believe with them. When the performer hedges, the audience hedges too. They match your energy. They mirror your commitment. If you are half in, they are half in. If you are all the way in, they follow you.
This is why the delusion matters. Not because reality is negotiable. But because performance is a shared agreement between the performer and the audience, and the performer sets the terms. If you set the terms with full conviction, the audience accepts them. If you set the terms with doubt, the audience doubts.
Delude yourself. Not because the delusion is true. But because the performance cannot be true without it.