There was a performance early in my development that went technically well and felt terrible.
I’d executed everything cleanly. No fumbles, no dropped moments, reasonable timing. The audience saw what they were supposed to see. The impossible things happened when they were supposed to happen. The feedback afterward was polite and generally positive.
But something was wrong with the room throughout the performance. I could feel it — a quality of distance, of the audience observing rather than participating, of me performing at them rather than with them. The applause was correct. The engagement was not.
I went back to the hotel and tried to diagnose what had happened. The technical execution had been fine. The material was solid. The sequence made sense.
What I eventually admitted, reluctantly, was that the audience hadn’t liked me. Not strongly disliked — nothing dramatic. But they hadn’t been drawn toward me as a person. And without that basic warmth, everything else had functioned at reduced capacity.
The Liking Principle
Cialdini’s liking principle is the most socially uncomfortable of his six principles of influence, which is perhaps why it’s the most important one to confront directly.
We are significantly more likely to say yes to people we like. More likely to believe them, trust them, engage with them, give them the benefit of the doubt. This isn’t a shallow observation about social pleasantness. It’s one of the most powerful and consistent findings in social psychology.
The factors that drive liking are well documented: physical attractiveness (which matters and which we have limited control over), similarity (we like people who seem like us), familiarity (repeated exposure increases liking), association (we like people connected to things we enjoy), genuine compliments (we like people who see good things in us), and cooperation (we like people who seem to be on our side, working toward shared goals).
In a performance context, attractiveness and familiarity are largely fixed. But similarity, genuine compliments, association, and cooperation are all things a performer can actively build.
The uncomfortable truth that Cialdini’s work makes unavoidable is this: in most situations, technical excellence is downstream of liking. We evaluate the work of people we like more generously. We forgive mistakes from people we like that we would hold against people we don’t. We engage more fully with experiences offered by people who feel like us, or who seem to like us, or who create the feeling that we’re in this together.
Technical skill is necessary. It is not sufficient. And it is not the primary variable.
The Consultant’s Error
I came to performance from a world where technical competence is paramount. In consulting, you’re hired for your analytical ability, your frameworks, your demonstrated expertise. Clients don’t particularly care whether they like you as long as they trust your work.
I imported this value system into performance. I focused on craft, on execution, on the quality of the material. I assumed that if I did things well enough, the audience would respond appropriately.
This is completely backwards in a performance context.
An audience doesn’t come to a show to evaluate your craft. They come to have an experience. And their experience is filtered through whether they like you. A perfectly executed routine performed by someone the audience doesn’t like reads differently from the same routine performed by someone they’re drawn toward. The technique is the same. The experience is not.
The performance that went wrong — technically fine, emotionally empty — was the result of me ignoring the liking variable entirely. I had given the audience no reason to like me. I hadn’t found genuine similarity with them, hadn’t offered warmth, hadn’t created the feeling of being in this together. I’d performed efficiently at them and then been confused when they kept me at a polite distance.
Building Liking: What Actually Works
Cialdini’s research gives a roadmap, but the application in performance requires thought.
Similarity is the most powerful and the most subtle. Audiences like performers who feel like them — who seem to share their values, their perspective, their experience. For me, the genuine similarity I have with most corporate audiences is: I’m a professional who discovered an obsession in adult life and went deep on it without a clear reason why. That’s extremely relatable to driven, curious professionals. When I surface that authenticity, the similarity connection is real, not manufactured.
The mistake would be trying to manufacture similarity — claiming to share experiences I don’t have, performing a persona that’s more “relatable” than I actually am. Manufactured similarity is detected, consciously or not, and produces the opposite of liking. Genuine similarity, offered honestly, is one of the most powerful connection tools available.
Genuine compliments work, but they have to be earned and real. Hollow flattery is obvious and annoying. But noticing and naming something true about a spectator — their confidence, their specificity, their humor — creates genuine connection. This takes attention and authenticity, but it costs nothing and produces real warmth.
Cooperation means the audience feels like you’re on their side, not performing against them. This is particularly important in magic, where there can be an adversarial dynamic: the performer is trying to fool people who are trying not to be fooled. The moment the audience feels like they’re in a competition they can’t win, you’ve lost the liking variable. The frame I work hard to create is: we’re all here to experience something together. I’m not trying to make you feel foolish; I’m trying to give you something.
Association matters too. The way you’re introduced, the context in which you perform, the associations you allow to cluster around your persona — these affect whether audiences start with positive or neutral affect toward you. I can’t fully control these, but I can think about them.
The Painful Reality Check
The honest check for the liking factor is one that took me a while to be willing to perform.
After a performance that went wrong, the natural instinct is to review the technical execution. What fumbled? Where did the timing slip? Was the material right for this audience?
The harder question is: did the audience like me? Not as a permanent state — not “am I likeable” — but in that specific room, on that specific evening, with that specific group of people, did they feel warmth toward me?
If the answer is no, technical analysis is a distraction. The technical execution might have been perfect. The fundamental problem was upstream of technique.
Asking this question honestly requires a certain tolerance for uncomfortable self-assessment. It’s much easier to identify a technical problem than to admit a relationship problem. Technical problems are fixable in the next practice session. Relationship problems require deeper work — on how you show up, how you present yourself, how much genuine interest you take in the people in the room.
What I Changed
After the performance that went technically fine and felt wrong, I made some structural changes.
I created more genuine contact with audience members before performing. Not a formal pre-show ritual but actual conversation — asking questions I was genuinely curious about, listening to answers, finding real things to appreciate about the specific people in the room. By the time the performance started, I knew several people in the room a little bit. That changed how I felt about them and how they felt about me.
I built more genuine warmth into the opening. Not performed warmth — not professional-grade friendliness — but actual expression of the genuine interest I have in these particular people having a particular experience. When that’s real, it reads as real.
And I stopped treating the performance as something I did to the audience. The reframe to something I did with them changed the dynamic in ways that are hard to quantify but easy to feel.
Liking is not a soft variable. It’s the foundation that everything else rests on.
Build it before you need it.