There is a moment in every performer’s development when they realize they have been looking at the wrong thing.
I hit that moment about three years into my journey with magic, sitting in a hotel room in Linz after a corporate keynote that had gone, by all external measures, well. The client was happy. The audience had applauded. Nobody had complained. By every metric I knew how to measure, the show had been a success.
But something was off. I could feel it. There was a flatness to the audience’s response that I could not explain. They had been polite. Attentive. Appreciative, even. But they had not been moved. Nobody had grabbed a colleague’s arm during the mentalism piece. Nobody had come up afterward with that slightly shaken look that means the magic actually landed. They had watched a competent demonstration and responded with competent applause.
That night, reviewing the recording on my laptop, I tried something different. Instead of watching the video the way I always did — evaluating my handling, checking for flashes, assessing my timing — I tried to watch it as if I were sitting in the fifth row. As if I had never met the guy on stage. As if I were an accountant from Graz who had been told there would be “a magic segment” during the afternoon session and was mildly curious about what that meant.
What I saw was devastating.
I saw a man who was concentrating intensely on things the audience could not see. I saw hands that moved with precision but without meaning. I saw eyes that were focused inward when they should have been connecting outward. I saw a performer who was, in every possible way, experiencing the show from behind his own eyes — thinking about what he was doing, what he needed to do next, whether the secret work had gone smoothly — while the audience sat in front of him wondering why this technically proficient man seemed to be somewhere else entirely.
I was performing for myself. The audience was just watching.
The Inside-Out Problem
This is, I have come to believe, the single most common problem in magic performance, and it is almost invisible to the person doing it.
When you practice alone in hotel rooms — which I did for years, which I still do — you develop an intensely internal relationship with your material. Every move has a purpose that you understand. Every moment is loaded with significance that you experience from the inside. The pass is smooth. The force is invisible. The prediction is in place. You know all of this, and you feel a sense of satisfaction when it goes right, because from the inside, it feels like mastery.
But the audience is not on the inside. The audience is on the outside, looking at a person standing in front of them, and all they have to work with is what that person communicates through body language, facial expression, vocal tone, eye contact, pacing, and emotional presence. They cannot see the pass. They do not know the force happened. They have no idea that the prediction was placed earlier. All they see is a man handling some cards and talking.
From the inside, you are executing a sophisticated sequence of deceptions and presentations. From the outside, you are a person standing in a room. The gap between those two experiences is where most performers lose their audiences without ever knowing it.
The Visualization That Changed Everything
I was reading Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic when I encountered an exercise that stopped me cold. Brown describes a visualization process for developing what he calls a performance vision. The key instruction is this: see yourself performing from the perspective of the audience and an imaginary third party. Not from behind your own eyes. From the outside.
This sounds simple. It is not.
I tried it that same night in the hotel room. I closed my eyes and attempted to create a mental image of myself performing. Not what I see when I perform — my hands, the props, the volunteer’s face looking back at me — but what someone sitting in the audience sees. My posture. My expression. The way I hold my arms. The rhythm of my movements. The emotional atmosphere I create (or fail to create) through sheer physical presence.
The first few attempts were embarrassing. I realized I had almost no idea what I looked like from the outside. I had watched videos of myself, sure, but I had always watched them analytically — checking for technical errors, evaluating timing, looking for problems to fix. I had never simply watched myself the way a stranger would. I had never asked the question that Brown insists you must ask: what does this person make you feel?
When I finally managed to hold the image — me, on stage, seen from the fifth row — what I noticed was startling. The version of me that existed in my visualization was stiff. His jaw was slightly clenched. His shoulders were a centimeter too high. His eyes moved quickly from object to object, scanning, monitoring, managing. He looked competent and slightly nervous. He looked like a man who was working.
He did not look like a man who was doing something magical.
Stepping Inside, Stepping Outside
The full exercise, as I came to practice it, involves two positions. First, you see yourself from the outside. You notice everything — dress, manner, body language, how the effects come across to someone who has no idea what is happening behind the curtain. You observe yourself the way a director would observe an actor in rehearsal.
Then you step inside. You inhabit the character. You feel what it is like to be that version of yourself — the one who is relaxed, who is present, who believes in what is happening, who is genuinely fascinated by the impossibility unfolding in front of him. You experience the show from within, but informed by what you observed from without.
And then you step outside again.
This back-and-forth — inside, outside, inside, outside — is the exercise. It sounds almost absurdly simple written down. In practice, it is one of the most transformative things I have ever done.
Here is why: the outside view gives you information you cannot get any other way. When you are performing, you are inside. You are thinking about method, about timing, about the volunteer’s response, about what comes next. You are managing a hundred variables simultaneously, and you are doing it from behind your own eyes. The audience sees the outside of you, but you experience only the inside. The visualization exercise teaches you to bridge that gap — to develop an ongoing awareness of what the outside looks like even while you are operating from the inside.
What Changed
After a few weeks of practicing this visualization — usually in the mornings before keynotes, sometimes in the evenings in hotel rooms before sleep — I started noticing shifts in my actual performances.
The first thing that changed was my pace. When I visualized myself from the outside, I consistently noticed that I moved too quickly. Not in terms of rushing through material, but in terms of physical movement. My hands shifted from one position to the next without settling. My body moved before the audience had time to process what had just happened. From the inside, the pace felt natural. From the outside, it looked hurried.
So I slowed down. Not dramatically. Just enough that each moment had space around it. And the difference in audience response was immediate. People leaned in more. They responded more strongly to reveals. They seemed to see more of what I was doing, because I was giving them time to see it.
The second thing that changed was my facial expression. From the inside, I thought I was projecting engagement and confidence. From the outside, I was projecting concentration. There is a difference. Concentration reads as effort, as strain, as someone working hard at something. Engagement reads as fascination, as presence, as someone who is genuinely interested in what is happening. The physical difference is subtle — a softening around the eyes, a slight looseness in the jaw, the absence of a furrowed brow — but the perceptual difference is enormous.
The third thing that changed was my relationship with moments of impossibility. Before the visualization practice, when something impossible happened in my show, I would move through it with the competence of someone who expected it to happen. Because I did expect it. I made it happen. From the inside, this felt professional. From the outside, it looked like someone for whom miracles are routine, which is exactly the wrong impression to create. Miracles should not look routine. They should look miraculous.
Now, when the impossible moment arrives, I give myself permission to react to it. Not with feigned surprise — that would be dishonest and the audience would sense it immediately. But with genuine appreciation. With a moment of pause that says: even I am impressed by what just happened. Because if I am not impressed, why should the audience be?
The Ongoing Practice
I still do the visualization exercise regularly. Not every day, but before important performances, and whenever I am working on new material. It has become one of the most valuable tools in my practice arsenal, and it requires no props, no audience, and no setup. Just me, a quiet room, and the willingness to look at myself honestly.
Brown wrote that a performer who cannot view or criticize himself from external perspectives probably has no business performing professionally. That line stung when I first read it. It stung because I recognized myself in it. I had been performing from the inside for years, and I had never once genuinely tried to see myself the way my audience saw me.
The irony is that this is exactly what we do as strategy consultants. We step outside the organization to see it the way customers and competitors see it. We call it “outside-in thinking” and we charge good money to teach it. But it never occurred to me to apply it to my own performance until a book about close-up magic philosophy forced the issue.
The Test
Here is a simple test you can do right now. Close your eyes and visualize yourself doing something you do in front of other people — a presentation, a performance, a meeting, a conversation. See it from behind your own eyes first. Notice what you focus on. Probably the content. The words. The information you are trying to convey. The responses you are hoping to get.
Now shift the camera. See yourself from across the room. See your posture. Your face. Your hands. The way you hold yourself. The energy you project. The impression you create before you even open your mouth.
These are two radically different experiences. The first one tells you what you are doing. The second one tells you what you are communicating. And in performance — in magic, in speaking, in any form of public engagement — what you communicate is the only thing that actually exists.
If you do not communicate it, it does not exist. And if you cannot see yourself from the outside, you have no idea what you are communicating.
That is the shift. It is simple. It is difficult. And it changes everything.