For a long time, my instinct about opening a performance was to establish credibility quickly.
By credibility, I meant: demonstrate that I can do something remarkable. Show the audience, within the first few minutes, that they are in the presence of someone who has real skill — something worth watching, something that will not waste their evening. I thought of this as building trust through demonstration. Prove first, then perform.
The logic seemed sound. In my consulting work, establishing credibility early is essential. You walk into a room of senior executives and you need them to understand, relatively quickly, that you know what you are talking about. You do not spend the first twenty minutes building rapport while they wonder whether you are competent. You demonstrate that you can add value, and from there the relationship can deepen.
I transferred this logic to performance. It was a mistake.
What the Research Actually Shows
Amy Cuddy’s social psychology research on first impressions found something that seems obvious in retrospect but runs contrary to how many performers think about their openings: people assess warmth before competence. Always. Not sometimes, not in certain demographic groups, not only in casual or social contexts — always.
The sequence is fixed. When you meet a new person or a new performer, the first question your brain is answering is not “can this person do something impressive?” It is “is this person safe to be around? Do they mean me well?” Only after some answer to the warmth question is arrived at does the brain turn to the competence question.
This is evolutionary logic. A competent person who intends you harm is a significant threat. A warm, well-meaning person who is not very skilled is much less dangerous. The brain evolved in environments where misjudging warmth was more costly than misjudging competence, and so warmth gets priority.
The practical implication for performers is direct: if your opening prioritizes demonstrating your skill before establishing your warmth — before the audience feels that you are a person who is genuinely present with them, who enjoys being there, who has their interests at heart — then your best moments will land on an audience that is still in assessment mode rather than open and ready to be moved.
My Opening, Before
In my earlier keynote structure, I opened with an effect. Sometimes a fairly impressive one. The thinking was: hook them immediately, show them something they have not seen, earn their attention through the first impression of genuine astonishment.
What I noticed, over time, was that the opening effect — even when it went well technically — produced a particular quality of response that was not quite what I was after. The audience was impressed. Sometimes genuinely amazed. But there was a slight remove to it. A watching-someone-be-impressive quality, rather than an in-it-with-you quality.
The applause was correct. The response was polite and appreciative. But something was off.
Looking back through Cuddy’s framework, I understand it now. The audience had not yet had enough time with me as a person to decide whether to trust me. So when I showed them something impressive, they were impressed, but they were also slightly on guard. Who is this person? What is he selling? What does he want from us? The warmth question had not been answered. And so the competence demonstration — however effective technically — landed in a context of mild caution.
What I Changed
I restructured the opening to lead with connection rather than demonstration.
This does not mean being fake-warm — the performative bonhomie that audiences can smell from the back row. It means something more specific: giving the audience a person rather than a performance for the first few minutes.
I tell them something real. Not manufactured vulnerability, not engineered relatability, but something that is actually true about how I ended up here, what I was trying to do, what I got wrong along the way. The hotel rooms. The awkward early attempts at showing effects to colleagues who were polite but clearly baffled. The fact that I am, at my core, an innovation consultant who got inexplicably and completely absorbed by card magic in my thirties.
This is not stalling before the good stuff. This is the good stuff, in the sense that it is the thing that makes everything that follows land differently.
When someone knows who you are — even in a brief, sketched way — their relationship to your skill changes. They are not watching a demonstration. They are watching a person they have some sense of, doing something that person finds meaningful. The context transforms the reception.
The Warmth-Competence Sequence in Practice
What Cuddy describes is not a choice between warmth and competence. She is not arguing that competence does not matter — it obviously does. She is arguing that the sequence matters. Warmth must precede competence for competence to land correctly.
In performance terms: the audience needs to like you and trust you before they can be fully astonished by you.
This is particularly important in mentalism, which is the direction my work has increasingly moved. Mentalism creates its effects through a kind of intimate engagement — the audience member who participates is allowing something, giving something, being affected in a way that requires a degree of trust. If I have not established warmth before I ask someone to think of a card or write down a number or focus on a memory, I am asking them to be intimate with someone they do not yet trust.
That is not a comfortable place to be, and the audience feels the discomfort even when they cannot name it. The effect may technically succeed, but it does not fully land because the conditions for landing were not established.
The Consulting Trap Again
The parallel to my consulting instinct is worth dwelling on, because I think it is a specific trap for people who come to performance from professional worlds that prioritize demonstrated competence.
In business contexts, warmth and competence are both valued, but competence has a special status. Being liked is nice. Being trusted for your expertise is essential. The person who is enormously warm but clearly does not know what they are doing does not survive long in professional services. The person who is difficult to deal with personally but demonstrably brilliant does.
So people who come from those worlds bring a competence-first model to everything, including performance contexts where the model simply does not apply. The audience at a keynote or a corporate event is not evaluating you on a consulting rubric. They are evaluating you on a human rubric. And the human rubric is warmth first.
The consultants I know who struggle with public speaking are often technically very polished — their slides are excellent, their logic is rigorous, their data is well-organized. But they open with their expertise, and the audience never quite warms up, and the whole thing is efficient and forgettable.
One Concrete Test
Here is the test I now apply to any performance opening: what does the audience know about who I am as a human being after the first two minutes, separate from what I can do?
Not my credentials. Not my impressive effects. Not my social proof. But who I am: what I find funny, what I care about, what happened to me that led me here.
If the answer is “nothing” — if the first two minutes have been entirely demonstration and setup — then I am building on sand. I am asking the audience to care about what I do before they have any reason to care about me.
Give them warmth first. Give them a person. Then show them what that person can do.
The astonishment is better. The connection is real. The whole thing lands differently.
I know this not because the research told me to believe it, but because I changed my opening structure and watched the room change in response. The warmth-first approach works. You feel it from the stage.
That is the most reliable data I have.