I have a complicated relationship with the word “magician.”
Not because I dislike magic — I love it. I have spent years studying it, performing it, co-founding a company around it. Magic has changed how I think about communication, perception, and the nature of human attention. It has made me a better keynote speaker, a more perceptive consultant, and a more curious person. I am deeply committed to it.
But the word “magician” carries baggage. And for the first couple of years that I performed, that baggage was my biggest obstacle.
The Image Problem
When most people hear “magician,” they do not picture what I do. They picture a very specific thing. The image varies slightly by generation and geography, but in Austria — where I live and do most of my performing — the associations are remarkably consistent: a man in a tuxedo or a shiny vest. Top hat. Rabbits. “Pick a card, any card.” Sequins. A children’s birthday party. An act squeezed between the appetizer and the main course at a company dinner. Entertainment that is tolerated rather than anticipated.
I know this because I used to hold exactly these associations myself. Before I discovered magic as an adult, my only reference point was a bad childhood experience with a clown performer at a party. It left me with a firm conviction that magic was inherently childish — a form of entertainment you outgrow, like balloon animals or puppet shows. It took years of studying the art, its history, its psychology, its remarkable depth, before that conviction dissolved.
But my audiences have not had that journey. When someone introduces me as a magician, I can watch the preconception settle over the room like a film. Polite smiles. A slight lean-back in the chairs. The body language of people preparing to be tolerant. They are bracing for the tuxedo. For “pick a card.” For something they will have to pretend to enjoy because the event organizer booked it and it would be rude to leave.
That preconception is lethal. Not because the audience is hostile — they are not. They are polite, professional people who will give me a fair chance. The problem is subtler: they have already decided what category I belong in. And once a person has categorized you, they interpret everything you do through that category. If you are a “magician,” your sophisticated mentalism piece becomes a “trick.” Your carefully crafted moment of genuine wonder becomes “clever.” Your entire performance is filtered through a frame that strips it of meaning.
I needed to break that frame in the first five seconds.
The Phrase That Changes Everything
The solution came from Derren Brown, who describes in Absolute Magic how he used to introduce himself during his restaurant residency work. His introduction was deliberately incomplete: “My name’s Derren Brown, and I’m… a kind of magician.”
Three words. “A kind of.” And those three words do an extraordinary amount of work.
When you say “I’m a magician,” you confirm every preconception the audience holds. The mental file labeled “magician” opens, and everything you do gets filed into it. But when you say “I’m a kind of magician,” you introduce ambiguity. What kind? Not the usual kind, apparently. Something different. Something that does not quite fit the file they were about to open.
That ambiguity is gold. Because a confused preconception is a weakened preconception. The audience’s mental file for “magician” does not close — but it loosens. It opens a crack. And into that crack you can insert a new experience that is not pre-filtered by decades of accumulated assumptions.
I adapted this for my own introductions. At corporate events, when the emcee reads my introduction, it describes me as a consultant and keynote speaker who incorporates mentalism and psychological illusion into his work. But in less formal settings — at dinners, at private events, in those moments where I am introducing myself directly — I use my own version of Brown’s phrase. The exact wording shifts depending on the context, but the structure is always the same: a slight hedge that signals “I am not what you think I am.”
“I work with perception and psychology. A kind of magician, if you want to call it that.”
“I do things with the mind. Somewhere between a magician and a psychologist.”
“I’m… it’s hard to describe. A kind of magician.”
Each of these introductions does the same thing: it takes the word “magician” and puts it at arm’s length. Not denied. Not hidden. But held loosely, with a suggestion that the word is approximate rather than definitive. And that suggestion — that I might be something more than, or different from, or adjacent to what they expect — creates the most powerful state an audience can be in: curiosity.
Why Curiosity Beats Expectation
When an audience has firm expectations, they are essentially watching to see whether those expectations are met. This is a losing proposition for the performer. If you meet their expectations, you are merely adequate — you delivered what they already anticipated. If you exceed their expectations, you get a bonus, but the ceiling is limited by the category they put you in. And if you fail to meet their expectations — which is easy to do when those expectations are based on a caricature — you are dismissed.
But when an audience is curious — when they genuinely do not know what category to put you in — they watch differently. They watch to discover rather than to confirm. They are open rather than evaluative. They lean forward instead of leaning back. Every moment becomes information rather than confirmation, and information is interesting in a way that confirmation never is.
This is why “a kind of magician” works better than “not a magician.” Denial is just as problematic as confirmation. If I say “I’m not a magician,” the audience immediately thinks about magicians — and now the preconception is active even though I tried to negate it. The human mind does not process negation cleanly. “Do not think of a white bear” guarantees that you will think of a white bear.
“A kind of” does not negate. It reframes. It says: yes, there is something here that relates to what you think of as magic. But the relationship is imprecise. You will need to watch and discover for yourself what that relationship is. And that discovery process — the active engagement of an audience trying to figure out what they are watching — is the most powerful attention I can possibly have.
The Consultant’s Advantage
I have an advantage that many performers do not: I come to magic from outside the magic world. I am a strategy consultant who discovered magic as an adult. My day job involves standing in front of boardrooms and helping organizations think differently. When I perform mentalism at a corporate event, there is a genuine ambiguity about what I am. Am I the entertainer? Am I the keynote speaker? Am I the consultant? The answer is all three, and the blurred boundary between these roles creates a productive confusion that serves the performance beautifully.
When a CEO watches me apparently read the mind of his CFO, and he knows that twenty minutes ago I was leading a serious discussion about strategic innovation, the cognitive dissonance is extraordinary. He cannot file me under “magician” because he already knows I am something else. He cannot dismiss what he saw as “just a trick” because the person who did it is manifestly not “just a magician.” The ambiguity of my identity protects the experience from being cheapened by categorization.
This is something I stumbled into rather than designed. But once I recognized its power, I began to cultivate it deliberately. I lean into the ambiguity. I resist clean labels. At networking events, when someone asks what I do, I might say “I help companies see things differently” and leave the magic as a surprise for later. Or I might say “I’m an entrepreneur and a mentalist” and watch the confusion register. Both approaches serve the same function: they prevent premature categorization, which preserves the possibility of genuine surprise.
The Deeper Principle
There is a deeper principle at work here, and it extends far beyond introductions. The principle is this: what you withhold communicates more powerfully than what you state.
When you state something — “I am a magician” — you give the audience a complete piece of information to evaluate. They can accept it, reject it, or be indifferent to it. The communication is closed. It has a defined shape and a limited range of responses.
When you withhold something — “I’m a kind of…” — you give the audience an incomplete piece of information that their mind automatically tries to complete. The communication is open. It has an undefined shape and an unlimited range of possible completions. The audience’s imagination fills the gap, and whatever they imagine will always be more compelling than whatever you could have stated, because it is their own creation.
This is why mystery works. Not the mystery of “how did he do that” — which is puzzle-mystery, the lowest form. But the mystery of “what is this person” and “what is happening here” and “what does this mean.” Identity-mystery. Experience-mystery. These are the kinds of uncertainty that draw people in rather than pushing them away.
“A kind of magician” is not a description. It is an invitation to wonder. And wonder — not surprise, not puzzlement, not admiration for cleverness — is the state I am trying to create.
Practical Application
I have found that the “a kind of” principle applies far beyond the introduction. It applies to any moment where the audience is at risk of categorizing what they are seeing and thereby diminishing it.
When I am about to perform a mentalism piece, I do not say “I’m going to read your mind.” That confirms a category — mind-reading, which the audience already has opinions about (usually skeptical ones). Instead, I say something that suggests the experience without defining it. “I want to try something with you. I’m not sure what to call it.” Or I say nothing at all and simply begin, letting the experience define itself in real time.
When someone asks me after a show how I did something, I do not say “it’s a trick” or “it’s psychology” or “it’s a secret.” Each of those is a category that diminishes the experience. Instead, I might say “Honestly? I’m not entirely sure” or “It’s complicated” or simply smile and change the subject. The unanswered question preserves the experience in a way that any answer would destroy.
This is not evasion. It is stewardship. The experience of wonder is fragile. It exists in the space between what the audience saw and what they can explain. The moment you give them an explanation — even a false one, even a vague one — you collapse that space. “A kind of magician” keeps the space open. It says: I am not going to make this easy for you to file away. You are going to have to sit with it.
The Identity I Chose
I spent a long time being uncomfortable with the ambiguity of my identity. Consultant or magician? Speaker or performer? Serious professional or entertainer? The world wants clean categories. LinkedIn wants a job title. Event organizers want to know which line item to put you under.
But the ambiguity is the point. The ambiguity is what makes the experience possible. The moment I am cleanly categorized, I am cleanly dismissed. The moment the audience knows exactly what I am, they know exactly what to expect. And the moment they know exactly what to expect, wonder becomes impossible.
So I lean into the ambiguity. I am a kind of magician. A kind of consultant. A kind of speaker. A kind of something that does not have a clean name, and that is exactly how I want it.
Three words. “A kind of.” They disarm every preconception, create space for genuine discovery, and protect the experience from the most dangerous thing an audience can do: decide in advance what they are about to see.
I use them every time. And they work every time.