A Few Tips - The Secrets of Mentalists.

Before practicing the experiments described in this book, here are a few valuable pieces of general advice to help you during your performances.

Knowing How to Look at Your Spectators

Your gaze is the tool that will allow you to create a sense of intimacy with your audience. Through it, you will convince and charm them. Whether you are speaking to one person or ten thousand, the rules are almost the same.

The first piece of advice: truly look at the people in front of you. This means looking each spectator in the eyes. The audience does not exist as a single entity: it is made up of individuals.

If the audience consists of several hundred spectators, you will not be able to look at everyone individually. You should then “sweep” the room with your gaze from right to left and from left to right. This sweeping movement should be done by stopping for a few tenths of a second, or even one or two seconds, on five or six people with each complete turn of the head.

It is essential to take in the whole room visually. Do not neglect the sides, the people at the very back of the room, or those directly in front of you.

If you feel uncomfortable looking someone in the eyes, use the following trick: look at the bridge of their nose! Looking at the space between the person’s eyes will no longer unsettle you, and the illusion will be complete: your interlocutor will be convinced that you are looking them straight in the eyes.

Ar-ti-cu-late to Be Understood

Good elocution depends on good articulation. To articulate well, you must not restrict the movement of your jaws, lips, or tongue. You must open your mouth.

If you tend to swallow your words, you will need to work in order to achieve the desired result. Here is an exercise which, if repeated daily, will help you improve: place a pen between your teeth and read a text aloud. As soon as you remove the pen, the words come out easily.

Now work on your diction by reading different texts and emphasizing either the consonants or the vowels for a few minutes.

Speak a Little Louder

As a general rule, you should speak a little louder than you naturally would, even when you have a microphone. There are several reasons for this: stage fright and the size of the room.

If the people in the last row have to make a great effort to catch your message, you can be sure they will soon begin to doze off. Use the intensity of your voice to create contrasts: a strongly emphasized word or an almost whispered sentence will help your audience stay focused.

Finally, and this is probably the most important point: slightly raising the volume of your voice will naturally give you more conviction.

Pay Attention to Your Pace

Stress often tends to make us speak very quickly. Give yourself time to become aware of the words you are saying. If you speak too fast or too slowly, people grow tired of listening.

A slight acceleration followed by a gentle slowing down will help awaken your audience. Do not neglect silences: nature abhors a vacuum, but in the art of mentalism, it is precisely these little moments that will intensify your experiments.

Avoid Verbal Tics

Some people find it difficult not to punctuate their sentences with recurring little words such as “there you go,” “right,” “um,” “I would say,” and so on. These small flaws will greatly weaken your speech, however excellent it may be.

A single verbal tic of this kind can distract the listeners’ attention to the point of sometimes making the speech unintelligible.

Overcoming Stage Fright Through Breathing

To limit your stress, learn to breathe! Breathe in... breathe out... using abdominal breathing. Your stomach rises and falls slowly, setting the rhythm of the flow—inhalation—and the ebb—exhalation.

Why work on breathing? Because almost all of us have forgotten this natural abdominal breathing, which we had at birth, in favor of chest breathing. Abdominal breathing is the breathing of singers, athletes, speakers, and actors.

Managing Stress on Stage

Learn to put your emotions into perspective: your listeners do not perceive the changes in your physiology with the same sharpness that you do. It is neither willpower nor thought that frees us from stage fright; it is truly action.

So reassure yourself: after only a few minutes of performance, stage fright often tends to decrease.