The recording was brutal. I was watching a video of myself performing at a corporate event in Graz — one of my first attempts at a thirty-minute set — and I noticed something I had not noticed during the performance itself: I never stopped talking.
Not for a single second. From the moment I walked to my position to the moment the last effect landed, there was a continuous stream of words pouring out of me. Commentary. Narration. Explanation. Jokes. Transitions. Filler. An unbroken wall of language that left no room for the audience to feel anything, because every available moment was being filled with my voice telling them what to feel.
I sounded like a tour guide in a museum. “And now if you look to your left, you’ll see…” Informative. Efficient. Completely devoid of the one thing that makes magic powerful: the space for impossibility to land.
That night in the hotel room, I started experimenting with silence. I performed the same routine to an empty chair, but every time I felt the urge to speak, I stopped myself. I just stood there. Held the moment. Let the imaginary audience sit with what had just happened.
It was the most uncomfortable sixty minutes of practice I had ever done. And it was the beginning of the most significant improvement in my performing life.
Why We Fill the Silence
The instinct to fill silence is not a performance problem. It is a human problem. Silence in social situations creates discomfort. We interpret silence as absence — the absence of connection, of engagement, of competence. A speaker who pauses is a speaker who has lost their place. A performer who stops talking is a performer who has forgotten what comes next.
These interpretations are wrong, but they are deeply wired. And for performers, the wiring is even stronger, because we carry an additional fear: the fear that silence means we are losing the audience. If I am not entertaining them right now, this second, they will disengage. They will check their phones. They will start whispering to the person next to them. The silence will fill with the sounds of an audience that has mentally departed.
This fear drove my verbal diarrhea for the first year of performing. Every pause felt dangerous. Every moment without words felt like a moment without value. I was performing with the anxious energy of someone who believed that attention must be constantly earned through speech, rather than someone who understood that attention, once captured, can be held through presence alone.
Anthony Jacquin, in his book on the psychology of suggestion, describes a principle that maps directly onto this: the idea that confidence in the performer creates expectation in the audience. When you are confident enough to be silent, the audience does not interpret the silence as emptiness. They interpret it as significance. They lean in. They wait. Because the silence communicates, more clearly than any words could, that what just happened — or what is about to happen — is important enough to warrant a pause.
The nervous performer talks through silence because silence feels like failure. The confident performer holds silence because silence feels like power.
The Three Silences
Over years of practice and performance, I have identified three distinct types of silence, each with a different function.
The first is the silence before. This is the pause that precedes an effect or a key moment. It is the intake of breath before the sentence. The moment where the audience can feel something is about to happen but does not yet know what.
I use this silence constantly. Before I reveal a prediction. Before I turn over a card. Before I ask a spectator to name their thought out loud. The temptation is to narrate right up to the moment of revelation — “And now, if we look at the card, we’ll see that…” — but this narration bleeds the tension. It gives the audience a verbal track to follow, which distances them from the raw experience of what they are about to witness.
Instead, I stop. I look at the spectator. I look at the audience. The silence builds like pressure in a sealed room. And then the effect happens — and it happens into silence, which means the audience experiences it without the buffer of language. It hits them unmediated. And unmediated experiences are always more powerful than narrated ones.
The second is the silence during. This is the silence that accompanies the effect itself. The moment where something impossible is happening and the appropriate response is not commentary but witnessing.
This is where most performers fail most spectacularly. The effect is happening, and they cannot resist adding verbal decoration. “Watch closely now.” “Can you feel that?” “Something is changing.” Each of these phrases pulls the audience out of their direct experience and into their analytical mind. They shift from feeling the impossibility to evaluating the performer’s claim about the impossibility. The language becomes a barrier between the audience and the moment.
When I learned to shut up during the effect itself — to simply let the impossible thing happen in silence — the audience’s reactions doubled in intensity. Not because the effects were stronger. Because the audience was finally experiencing them directly, without the filter of my narration.
The third is the silence after. This is the most important silence and the one that took me the longest to develop the courage to hold.
After an effect lands — after the prediction matches, after the card appears where it should not be, after the thought is revealed — there is a natural moment of audience response. Gasps. Applause. Exclamations. But before that response arrives, there is a fraction of a second where the impossibility is settling in. The audience is processing. Their reality is adjusting. The critical faculty, as the hypnosis literature would put it, has been momentarily bypassed, and the experience is sitting in their minds unfiltered.
If you speak into that moment, you kill it. You give the audience’s analytical mind something to grab onto. “Pretty cool, right?” The analytical mind grabs “right?” and starts evaluating. “That was your card, wasn’t it?” The analytical mind grabs “wasn’t it?” and starts reconstructing.
But if you hold the silence — if you just stand there, still, present, looking at the spectator or the audience with an expression that says “Yes, that just happened” — you let the full weight of the experience settle. The gasps come. The applause comes. But they come from a deeper place, because the audience had a moment to feel the impact before they had to respond to it.
What Silence Communicates
Silence is not the absence of communication. It is the most potent form of communication available to a performer. Here is what silence communicates, depending on how it is held.
Silence held with stillness communicates significance. It says: this moment is important enough that I am giving it space. I am not rushing past it. I am not filling it with noise. I respect this moment, and so should you.
Silence held with eye contact communicates connection. It says: I see you. I am present with you. This is not a performance delivered at you. This is a shared experience between us. And in this moment, the most honest thing I can do is be quiet and let us both feel what is happening.
Silence held with a slight smile communicates knowing. It says: I know something you do not. But I am not going to tell you what it is. The mystery is the gift, and I am giving you a moment to sit with it.
Silence held after an effect communicates conviction. It says: I am so confident in what just happened that I do not need to underscore it. I do not need your validation. I do not need to explain it. It happened. You saw it. We both know it was extraordinary. And I am comfortable letting that truth sit between us without diluting it with words.
Each of these is a form of suggestion. Derren Brown describes the principle in his writing on performance — the idea that what you withhold communicates more powerfully than what you display. The grandeur of performance should be felt rather than seen. The more you hold back, the more the audience feels it. Silence is the ultimate form of holding back.
The Hotel Room Training
I trained myself in silence the way you train yourself in anything: through deliberate, uncomfortable repetition.
I would set a timer for three seconds after each effect in my rehearsal routine. Three seconds of complete silence. No words. No movement. Just holding the moment.
Three seconds does not sound like much. But in the context of a performance, three seconds of silence feels like an eternity. The first few dozen times I practiced this, my body physically rebelled. My hands wanted to move. My mouth wanted to open. My feet wanted to shift. Every instinct screamed at me to do something, say something, move on.
I stayed still. I breathed. I counted. And slowly — over weeks and months of this practice in hotel rooms across Austria — the discomfort faded. The silence stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like a tool. I learned to hear the silence not as absence but as presence. My presence. The audience’s presence. The shared presence of people experiencing something together without the distraction of language.
Gradually, the three seconds became five. Then eight. Then I stopped counting and started feeling. The silence ends when it ends. When the moment has been given its full weight. When the audience has had enough time to feel the impact and is ready for what comes next. Sometimes that is two seconds. Sometimes it is ten. The right length is not measured in time but in tension — you hold the silence until the tension is at its peak, and then you release it.
The Paradox of Control
Here is the paradox that took me years to understand: silence gives you more control over the audience’s experience, not less.
When you are talking, the audience is processing your words. They are evaluating your claims, following your logic, critiquing your delivery. Their analytical mind is active and engaged. You are giving them something to think about, which means you are competing with their thoughts for control of their experience.
When you are silent, the audience is processing their own experience. They are feeling the impossibility. They are marveling at what they saw. They are looking at the spectator’s face. They are sitting with the uncertainty. Their analytical mind has nothing to grab onto, so it quiets, and the direct experience takes over.
This is why silence is the mentalist’s best friend. Mentalism effects — predictions, mind-reading, impossible knowledge — are most powerful when they are experienced as raw impossibility, unfiltered by narration. The moment you narrate a mentalism effect, you reduce it from an experience to a demonstration. The audience shifts from “That is impossible” to “He is showing me that he can do this.” The first is wonder. The second is admiration. And admiration, while pleasant, is not what I am after.
When to Break the Silence
Silence is not always appropriate. A show that is entirely silent would be a different kind of performance — perhaps a beautiful one, but not the kind I do. The question is not whether to speak, but when to speak and when to hold.
My rule is simple: speak when your words add something that silence cannot. If you need to set up a condition, explain a choice, introduce a spectator, build a narrative frame — speak. These are moments where language does essential structural work. But when the effect is happening, when the impossibility is landing, when the audience is in the grip of the moment — shut up. Get out of the way. Let the experience speak for itself.
The best performances I have ever given are the ones where I talked the least. Not because silence is inherently better than speech, but because the moments that mattered most were the moments where no words were needed. The prediction matched. The thought was revealed. And the only sound in the room was a hundred people exhaling at once.
That sound — the collective breath of an audience encountering the impossible — is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. And you can only hear it in silence.