In my previous post I talked about the paradox of memorizing a script so thoroughly that you can forget it. That idea — performing from thought rather than from text — was the single biggest leap in my development as a performer. But it raised a question I could not answer for a long time: if the words are supposed to come from genuine thought and genuine feeling, where do the thoughts and feelings come from?
You cannot just will yourself to feel something. You cannot stand in front of an audience and decide to be surprised by the card you are about to reveal, or decide to be moved by the connection you are about to demonstrate. You already know what is going to happen. You have done this trick a thousand times. The surprise is gone. The wonder is gone. The genuine emotional response that the audience craves — the one they can feel in your body language and your eyes — seems impossible to manufacture.
Unless you learn to ask the right question.
The Question That Changes the Frame
In Absolute Magic, Derren Brown describes Stanislavski’s “Magic If” — a technique from the father of modern acting that has profound implications for anyone who performs. The idea is deceptively simple. Rather than acting the cliche of an emotion — trembling lips for fear, wide eyes for surprise, a slow grin for delight — the performer asks a single question: “What would I actually do if this were really happening?”
Not “how should I look.” Not “what facial expression conveys wonder.” Just: what would I actually do.
When I first encountered this idea, I thought I understood it. I did not. I thought it meant imagining the scenario and then performing the imagined response. But that is still acting. The Magic If is something different. It is a way of entering a mental state where the imagined circumstance feels conditionally real, and the response that follows is not performed at all. It is simply what happens.
The Corporate Dinner That Taught Me
Let me describe the moment this clicked. I was performing at a corporate dinner in Salzburg — about sixty people, a stage with a handheld mic, a mentalism piece where I was going to reveal a word that someone had been thinking of. I had done this piece many times. I knew every beat. I knew the script. I knew the moment of revelation and the pause before it.
In every previous performance, I had delivered the revelation with what I thought was appropriate drama. A slight pause. A knowing look. A slow, measured delivery of the word. It was professional. It was polished. It was a performance of someone revealing a thought. And it was hollow, because I was not actually surprised or moved or astonished. I was executing a planned moment.
That night, instead of preparing my “revelation face,” I asked myself: if I could genuinely sense what this person was thinking — if that were a real thing that was actually happening to me right now, in this room, in front of all these people — what would I actually do?
The answer was not what I expected. I would not pause dramatically. I would not look knowing. I would be confused. Slightly overwhelmed. A little scared, honestly. Because if you could actually perceive another person’s private thought, the first response would not be theatrical confidence. It would be disorientation. You would hesitate. You would look at the person with genuine uncertainty.
So that is what I did. I hesitated. I let myself feel the strangeness of the idea. My voice got quieter, not louder. I said the word almost as a question, as if checking with her whether what I was sensing was correct.
The reaction in the room was unlike anything I had experienced with this piece before. People leaned forward. The woman’s eyes went wide. The applause that followed had a different quality — not the polite applause of “that was clever” but the slightly nervous applause of people who were not entirely sure what they had just witnessed.
The trick was identical. The method was identical. The words were almost identical. But the internal question had changed everything about how those words landed.
Why the Magic If Works for Magicians Specifically
Actors use the Magic If to inhabit fictional circumstances. Hamlet asks what he would do if his father were murdered. The actor does not need to have experienced this — he needs to enter the conditional frame and let his honest response emerge.
For magicians and mentalists, the Magic If operates on a stranger level. We are not inhabiting someone else’s fictional life. We are inhabiting a version of our own life in which the impossible thing we are pretending to do is real. What would I actually do if I could read minds? What would I actually feel if a solid ring genuinely melted through a solid rope? What would my face look like if a card I just saw in my hand genuinely vanished?
These questions produce responses wildly different from the standard magician’s presentation. The standard presentation assumes confidence and control. The magician knows what is going to happen because he is the one making it happen. He is the god-figure, snapping his fingers and commanding reality to change.
But the Magic If reframes the performer’s relationship to the impossible. If this were real, you would not be in control. You would be experiencing something extraordinary. Something you do not fully understand. Something that frightens you a little. You would be the hero encountering the unknown, not the god dispensing miracles.
That shift changes everything the audience sees.
The Cliche Eliminator
One of the most practical benefits of the Magic If is that it eliminates cliched performing. When you ask “what would I do if this were real?” the answer is never the standard magic-performer response.
A card appears in an impossible location. The standard response: display it triumphantly, as if scoring a goal. The Magic If response: bewilderment. A kind of nervous fascination. The feeling you get when something happens that should not be possible and your brain has not yet found a category for it.
You reveal a word someone is thinking of. The standard response: confidence and showmanship. “The word is ELEPHANT!” Exclamation marks everywhere. The Magic If response: hesitancy. Quietness. You might deliver the word almost apologetically, uncertain whether you should be saying it at all.
The Magic If produces responses that are surprising in their specificity and their strangeness. They do not look like what performing is “supposed” to look like. They look like what real life looks like when something impossible occurs. And that departure from the expected performance cliche is what makes the audience feel they are witnessing something genuine.
Applying It to Everything
Once I understood the Magic If for climactic moments, I started applying it everywhere. The approach. The setup. The handling of props. The interaction with volunteers.
When I pick up a deck of cards, I ask: if I could actually influence which card a person would choose, how would I handle the deck? The answer is: carefully. Almost reverently. Not with the showy casualness of a card sharp, but with the attentiveness of someone interacting with something that has power.
When a spectator tells me their chosen word, I ask: if I were genuinely trying to receive this information through some extraordinary means, what would I do? The answer is: I would listen differently. I would be still. I would create space for the information to arrive, rather than rushing to prove I already have it.
When something apparently goes wrong during a performance, I ask: if the magic were genuinely failing, what would I feel? And I allow that feeling to show, briefly, before the recovery. The audience sees a moment of genuine concern, and that moment makes the recovery land with far more impact than if everything had appeared effortlessly under control.
The Connection to My Consulting Life
My background in strategy consulting gave me an unexpected lens on why the Magic If works. In consulting, we talk about empathy mapping — inhabiting the client’s perspective so that your recommendations come from genuine comprehension rather than assumption. Good consultants do not fake understanding. They build it.
The Magic If is empathy mapping directed inward. Instead of asking “what is my client feeling?” you ask “what am I feeling, given the fictional reality of this moment?” Just as genuine empathy produces better consulting, genuine self-empathy produces better performing. The audience can tell the difference between a consultant who genuinely understands their problem and one who is going through the motions. They can equally tell when a performer genuinely inhabits the moment versus when a performer is performing the appearance of inhabiting it.
The Honest Cost
There is a cost to performing this way. The Magic If requires vulnerability. When you genuinely ask “what would I feel if this were real?” and allow the honest answer to show on your face, you are exposing something real about yourself. The awe, the uncertainty, the intimacy — these are not constructed emotions. They are real responses to an imagined stimulus.
Some nights this feels wonderful. The connection with the audience is vivid, and the performance transcends entertainment and becomes something closer to shared experience.
Other nights it feels exposing. The vulnerability is real, and not every audience receives it with the same generosity. Sometimes the response is so quiet, so internal, that it reads as uncertainty rather than conviction. On those nights, I have to trust the process and resist the urge to retreat to the safety of performed reactions.
But overwhelmingly, performing with the Magic If produces better results. The audiences are more engaged. The reactions are more genuine. The moments land harder and stay in memory longer.
Because the audience does not want to see my impression of a person experiencing magic. They want to experience it with me. And the only way to give them that is to experience it myself — fully, truthfully, every single time.
What would I actually do if this were really happening?
I ask that question before every performance now. The answer is never what I planned. It is always better.