I was standing at the side of a small stage in a conference room in Graz, waiting for my turn to go on. The event was a corporate innovation summit — about eighty people, lunch settling in, that dangerous post-meal energy dip that every performer dreads. I had maybe twenty minutes to deliver a keynote segment with some mentalism woven through it, and I needed a volunteer for the centerpiece.
In the old days — and by “old days” I mean roughly eighteen months before this gig — I would have done what most performers do. I would have stepped to the front, asked “Can I get someone to help me out?” and then waited through the excruciating silence while eighty professionals suddenly found their shoes fascinating. Or worse, I would have pointed at someone in the front row and watched their face cycle through surprise, reluctance, and the kind of forced smile that says “I will endure this for the sake of my colleagues.”
Neither of those approaches gets you what you actually need, which is a person who will be genuinely engaged, naturally expressive, and cooperative enough to make the moment work for the entire room. A volunteer is not a prop. They are a co-performer. And the wrong co-performer can sink a routine faster than a fumbled sleight.
But on this particular day in Graz, I was doing something different. I was scanning.
The Pre-Show Scan
The concept came from Darwin Ortiz’s Strong Magic, a book that treats spectator selection not as an afterthought but as a systematic audition process. Ortiz argues that the selection of your assistant is a craft decision as deliberate as the selection of your material. You do not leave it to chance. You do not leave it to volunteers. You certainly do not leave it to the person who waves their hand the most enthusiastically.
Instead, you scan the room before you begin. While the emcee is introducing you, while the previous speaker is wrapping up, while the event coordinator is fussing with the schedule — you are looking at faces.
What you are looking for is simple: openness. A smile. A forward lean. Eyes that track the action on stage rather than drift to a phone screen. The body language of someone who is present and engaged, someone whose posture says “I’m here and I’m enjoying this” rather than “I wonder when the coffee break is.”
What you are looking to eliminate is equally simple: closed arms, blank stares, deep absorption in a side conversation, anyone who appears to have had too much of the complimentary wine. These are not bad people. They are simply bad candidates for the role you need filled.
The scan takes maybe sixty seconds, and most of the time nobody notices you are doing it. You are standing off to the side. You are smiling pleasantly. You look like someone who is politely waiting for their turn. In reality, you are conducting auditions.
The Moment That Changed My Approach
On that day in Graz, while I was scanning the room from the side of the stage, something happened that Ortiz had described in his book but that I had not yet experienced firsthand.
I was looking across the room, just moving my gaze casually from face to face, and a woman in the third row caught my eye. Not because she was doing anything dramatic — she was simply looking in my direction, probably wondering who the person standing near the stage was. Our eyes met for maybe a second. And she smiled.
Not a polite corporate smile. Not the reflexive twitch that people give when they accidentally make eye contact with a stranger. It was a genuine, easy smile — the kind that comes from someone who is in a good mood, comfortable in their surroundings, and naturally inclined toward friendliness.
In that instant, her selection as my volunteer was secure.
I did not know her name. I did not know her role at the company. I did not know anything about her personality beyond what that two-second exchange had told me. But what it told me was everything I needed. She was present. She was warm. She was the kind of person who smiles at strangers, which meant she was almost certainly the kind of person who would be expressive and cooperative on stage.
When the time came during my set, I walked toward that section of the room, made eye contact with her again, and asked if she would join me. She said yes without hesitation. She came up, she was lively, she reacted beautifully to the routine, and — crucially — the audience reacted to her reactions. The whole room lit up because the person on stage with me was genuinely enjoying the experience, and that enjoyment was visible and contagious.
Why the Smile Works as a Selection Tool
I have thought a lot about why this particular test is so reliable, and I think it comes down to what that spontaneous smile actually reveals.
First, it reveals comfort. A person who smiles easily at a stranger is someone who is socially at ease. They are not anxious about the event, not stressed about the presentation they have to give later, not resentful about being forced to attend. Comfort translates directly to stage behavior — a comfortable person will be natural and relaxed under the mild pressure of being in front of their peers.
Second, it reveals expressiveness. The smile itself is a data point about how this person communicates. If their face is naturally mobile and responsive in a passing moment of eye contact, it will be naturally mobile and responsive when something astonishing happens three feet from their face. And expressiveness in your volunteer is gold, because the audience reads the volunteer’s reactions as a proxy for their own.
Third, it reveals a kind of implicit consent. Not consent to be selected as a volunteer — they do not know that yet. But consent to engage. The smile is a micro-agreement: “Yes, I see you. Yes, I acknowledge you. Yes, I am open to this interaction.” That micro-agreement makes the eventual request to join you on stage feel like a natural extension of a connection that already exists, rather than an imposition from a stranger.
This is the difference between approaching someone cold and approaching someone with whom you have already shared a moment. It is small, but it matters enormously. The audience does not know about the eye contact exchange. They just see a volunteer who seems genuinely happy to be there — which makes the entire interaction feel organic rather than staged.
What I Got Wrong Before
Before I learned the eye contact test, my volunteer selection was based on proximity and guesswork. I would pick someone in the front row because they were close, or someone who looked friendly because they were laughing at my jokes. Neither of these is terrible, but neither is reliable.
Proximity is the worst selection criterion because front-row seats are not always chosen voluntarily. In corporate events especially, front rows are often occupied by the most junior people who arrived late and had no choice, or by the most senior people who were seated by the organizer. Neither group is necessarily the best candidate for an on-stage role.
And “looking friendly” is a more nuanced judgment than it appears. Some people look friendly because they are genuinely warm. Others look friendly because they are performing friendliness for professional reasons — and that performance may not translate to genuine expressiveness when the context shifts to a magic routine. The eye contact test cuts through the ambiguity because you are not interpreting an expression aimed at someone else or at the room in general. You are reading a response directed specifically at you, in real time.
The Distinction That Matters Most
There is one crucial refinement to this approach that took me a while to internalize. When you are scanning the room, you will sometimes catch the eye of someone who does not just smile but actively leans forward, waves, or otherwise signals “Pick me! Pick me!” This person seems like the ideal volunteer. They are enthusiastic, they are engaged, they are practically begging to be selected.
Do not select this person.
Ortiz makes a distinction that I did not fully appreciate until I ignored it once and learned the hard way. The distinction is between expressiveness and extroversion. An expressive person communicates their internal experience through their face, their body, their voice. They are transparent. When they are surprised, you can see the surprise. When they are delighted, the delight is unmistakable. This is exactly what you want in a volunteer.
An extroverted person, on the other hand, wants to be the center of attention. They may be expressive too, but their primary drive is not to experience the moment — it is to perform in the moment. And when your volunteer starts performing, they are no longer your co-performer. They are your competition. They will try to get laughs. They will add commentary. They will play to the crowd independently of what you are doing. And suddenly you are not guiding an experience — you are managing a rival entertainer.
The person who smiles back at you during the scan is almost never the person who waves and shouts “Over here!” The smiler is expressive. The shouter is extroverted. The difference between them is the difference between a routine that soars and a routine that turns into a wrestling match.
Building the Scan Into a Habit
I now do the pre-show scan at every event, regardless of size. At a corporate keynote for three hundred people, I scan during the introduction. At an intimate dinner performance for twenty, I scan during the cocktail hour. At a private party, I scan during the first few minutes of conversation with the hosts.
The scan has become one of those invisible professional habits that nobody in the audience is aware of but that fundamentally changes the quality of the performance. It is like a musician tuning their instrument before a concert. The audience does not see the tuning. They only hear the music. But without the tuning, the music would be noticeably worse.
Over time, I have found that the eye contact test works in reverse too. When I am on stage and need to select someone mid-routine, I can generate the test on the fly. I make eye contact with a specific person and give them a small smile. If they smile back warmly, they are my candidate. If they look away or give me a neutral expression, I move on to the next face. The whole process takes three seconds and looks, from the outside, like a performer simply scanning the crowd.
The Deeper Lesson
The eye contact test taught me something that extends well beyond volunteer selection. It taught me that performance is a relationship. Every interaction between performer and audience is a conversation, even when no words are being spoken. The pre-show scan is the opening line of that conversation. The spontaneous smile is the response that tells you the conversation is going to go well.
When I stood in that conference room in Graz and caught the eye of a stranger who smiled at me, I was not just identifying a good volunteer. I was establishing the first thread of connection between myself and the room. That thread would strengthen throughout the performance, pulling the audience closer and closer into the experience, until the moment of impossibility landed not in a vacuum of detachment but in a web of human connection.
The volunteer is the audience’s representative on stage. They are the bridge between the performer and everyone else in the room. Choosing that representative well is not a minor logistical decision. It is one of the most important creative decisions you make in any performance.
And sometimes, the decision takes exactly two seconds and a single smile.