There is a moment at every corporate event I perform at — the moment just before I begin — that I used to waste. I would walk up, smile, launch into my opening line, and start performing. The audience was polite. The effects landed well enough. But something was missing. A quality of attention that I could not name but could definitely feel the absence of.
The breakthrough came from an unlikely direction. I was reading Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic late one night in a hotel room in Vienna — one of those nights where I had a keynote the next morning and could not sleep — and I found his description of four beliefs he holds in mind during every performance. He does not state them. He does not script them. He communicates them entirely through behavior. And according to Brown, these unspoken beliefs do more to shape the audience’s experience than any line of patter or any effect he performs.
The four beliefs stopped me cold, because I recognized immediately that I was communicating the opposite of all of them.
The Problem With Spoken Frames
Before I explain what those four things are, I need to describe what I was doing wrong. Because I think most performers make the same mistake, and it is so embedded in standard practice that it feels invisible.
I was telling people things. “Welcome, I’m Felix, and tonight I want to share something with you.” “This is going to be unlike anything you’ve seen.” “Pay close attention, because what happens next is important.”
Each of those sentences is reasonable. None of them is offensive or awkward. But each one is doing the wrong kind of work. They are asserting things that should be presupposed. They are declaring frames that should be felt. And the act of declaration undermines the very frame you are trying to create.
When you say “pay close attention,” you are implicitly telling the audience that they might not pay close attention unless prompted. That is a sign of low status. A surgeon does not say “please pay attention while I explain your diagnosis.” The gravity of the situation communicates the need for attention. The surgeon simply begins.
I needed to become the surgeon. I needed to stop asking for what I wanted and start behaving in ways that naturally produced it.
The First: This Demands Your Full Attention
The first thing I communicate before every performance is that what is about to happen is worthy of undivided focus. I do this through stillness and patience.
When I walk to my performance position — whether it is a stage at a conference in Graz, or the head of a table at a private dinner in Salzburg — I do not begin immediately. I arrive. I settle. I look at the audience. Not with aggression, not with pleading, but with the calm expectation of someone who has something worth sharing and is perfectly willing to wait until the conditions are right to share it.
This waiting is not passive. It is one of the most active things I do. In those few seconds of silence, I am scanning the room, making brief eye contact with individuals, registering who is ready and who is still distracted. But more importantly, I am communicating — through the simple fact of my patience — that I am not in a hurry. That whatever is about to happen is important enough that it will not start until the room is ready.
The room always gets ready. It takes between three and eight seconds. People settle. Conversations trail off. Eyes come forward. The silence I created becomes the audience’s silence, and in that silence, they have already given me the first thing I need: their attention.
I never asked for it. I presupposed that it was coming, and I waited for it to arrive.
The Second: You Will Treat This With Respect
The second communication is more delicate. It is the belief that the audience will engage with what I do respectfully — that they will not heckle, grab at props, or treat the performance as an invitation to prove they are smarter than me.
This is communicated primarily through how I treat the audience. Respect mirrors respect. When I address someone, I use their name if I know it. I make eye contact. I speak to them as an equal, not as a target. I acknowledge their presence as people first, audience members second. I ask permission before involving them physically. I say thank you. I listen when they respond.
All of this communicates a very specific message: this is a space where people are treated well. And the unspoken corollary — which the audience intuits without being told — is that this is therefore a space where the performer should also be treated well.
I learned this through its violation. Early in my performing life, I had a couple of experiences at corporate events where audience members became disruptive. In every case, looking back, I could see that I had failed to establish the respect dynamic at the beginning. I had been so eager to get to the material that I skipped the human groundwork. The audience did not know how to relate to me, so they related to me the way they relate to any uninvited entertainer at a business dinner — as an intrusion to be tolerated or resisted.
Once I started taking the time to establish genuine human connection before any magic happened, the disruptions virtually disappeared. Not because I was managing behavior, but because I had communicated a social contract through my manner. The audience agreed to the contract without it ever being spoken.
The Third: This Is Real
The third communication is the most philosophically loaded, and it is the one that transformed my mentalism performances entirely. It is the belief that what is about to happen is not a trick, not a demonstration, not a clever puzzle — but something genuine. Something that touches on real forces, real psychology, real phenomena that most people do not encounter in their daily lives.
I am not claiming supernatural powers. I am not lying to the audience. What I am doing is something more subtle: I am treating the experience with the weight and seriousness that would be appropriate if it were genuinely inexplicable. And the audience, taking their cue from my treatment, invests the experience with the same weight.
The mechanism here is straightforward. If I bounce onto stage with the energy of a children’s party entertainer and say “Want to see something cool?”, I have communicated that what follows is entertainment. Fun. Light. Disposable. The audience will enjoy it the way they enjoy any diversion, and they will forget it by the time they reach their cars.
But if I approach the same effect with quiet intensity, with a pace that suggests consequence, with language that treats the experience as meaningful rather than amusing — the audience’s perception shifts. They do not know why they feel differently. They just do. The effect is the same. The method is the same. But the experience is transformed because the frame is transformed.
I achieve this through tempo, tone, and the quality of my attention. I slow down. I lower my vocal register slightly. I look at what is happening as if I am genuinely interested in it — which, when the performance is going well, I am. I do not narrate with the voice of a tour guide (“And now watch as the card rises to the top”). I narrate with the voice of someone describing something they find remarkable (“Look at this”).
The difference between those two framings is the difference between a puzzle and a moment. One invites analysis. The other invites awe.
The Fourth: Something Extraordinary Is About to Happen
The last communication is the simplest and the hardest. It is the bone-deep conviction that what is about to happen will affect the people watching it. Not in a vague, generalized way. Specifically. Personally. The person standing in front of me is about to have an experience they will remember.
This conviction is communicated through a quality that is difficult to describe but instantly recognizable: a kind of contained certainty. A glint. A readiness. The body language of someone who knows a secret and is about to share it.
I discovered this quality accidentally during a keynote in Linz. I had been performing a mentalism piece that I had done dozens of times, and for whatever reason — maybe the energy of the room, maybe the quality of the volunteer, maybe just the alignment of a good night — I felt genuinely certain that the effect was going to land perfectly. Not hoped. Not believed. Knew.
The audience felt it. I could see it in their posture, in the way they leaned forward, in the way the room seemed to contract around the performance. They were not just watching. They were bracing for impact. And when the effect landed, the reaction was unlike anything I had experienced for that same routine. Because the audience had been primed not by words but by the sensation that the person on stage knew exactly what was coming and was excited about it.
I have been chasing that sensation ever since. And what I have found is that it cannot be faked, but it can be cultivated. It comes from thorough preparation, from having performed the material enough times to trust it completely, from having done the work so deeply that you can stand in front of an audience and be genuinely present rather than mentally running through your checklist.
The Infrastructure Beneath the Performance
These four communications — attention, respect, reality, certainty — form an invisible infrastructure that supports everything I do on stage. They are not techniques in the traditional sense. They are ways of being. They are the difference between a performer who walks on stage and performs material, and a performer who walks on stage and creates an atmosphere in which extraordinary things become possible.
I think about them the way I think about the infrastructure beneath a building. No one sees the foundation. No one admires the steel beams. But remove them and the building collapses. These four unspoken communications are the steel beams of my performance. Without them, even the strongest material feels flimsy. With them, even simple effects feel significant.
How I Practiced This
You cannot practice an unspoken belief in the same way you practice a sleight or a script. But you can practice the behaviors that communicate it.
I started with hotel room recordings. I would set up my phone camera, walk to my “performance position” (usually the desk chair), and simply stand there. No words. No props. Just the arrival, the stillness, the waiting. I would watch the footage and ask: does this person look like someone who has something important to share? Or does this person look like someone who is about to do a trick?
The differences were minute but visible. The angle of my chin. The speed of my breathing. Whether my hands were still or fidgeting. Whether my eyes were scanning purposefully or darting nervously. Each of these tiny signals communicated volumes.
Over weeks of this practice, I developed what I think of as my “opening state” — a physical and mental configuration that I settle into before every performance. It is not a character. It is me, but with the volume turned up on certain qualities: stillness, patience, attention, warmth, certainty. These are all qualities I possess in my normal life. The performance version simply amplifies them.
The Audience Already Knows
Here is the uncomfortable truth that I wish someone had told me when I started: the audience has already decided how they feel about you before your first effect begins. They decided it in the first ten seconds. They decided it based on how you walked, how you stood, where you looked, how you held your hands, whether you seemed nervous or calm, whether you seemed important or trivial.
All of the scripted patter in the world cannot overcome a bad first impression. But a good first impression — communicated entirely without words — can make even mediocre material feel compelling.
The four beliefs I communicate before every performance are not magic. They are not mentalism. They are not even technique, in the traditional sense. They are the decision to take full responsibility for the audience’s experience from the very first second — and to use every available channel of communication, not just the verbal one, to create the conditions in which wonder becomes possible.
I wish I had learned this before I learned my first sleight. It would have saved me years.