/alexs-website-5/Logowebsite.jpg)
Home
Something didn’t feel right after my first large keynote in 2023.
It happened during a segment about framing - how the way information is presented can influence the decisions we make.
I began with a genuine demonstration of framing. Then I followed it with an entertaining trick designed to reinforce the point.
It worked. The audience participated, laughed and responded brilliantly. The keynote went really well.
But afterwards, that moment didn’t sit well with me.
I was explaining how framing can influence people while using a constructed trick to demonstrate how I had influenced their choice. But it was a trick.
The experience and the learning weren’t aligned.
That discomfort led me to ask:
Is the experience merely illustrating the learning - or is the experience itself the learning?
From what I’ve observed, keynote and motivational speakers who use use magic generally do it in one of three ways.
The magic is primarily entertainment, with a motivational message woven around it.
This is often seen when someone with many years of experience as a magician moves into keynote speaking. The keynote is built around their existing performance material, with a message layered over it - sometimes without a deep professional background in the subject being discussed. The trade-off is often greater entertainment at the expense of depth.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, provided it’s what the client expects. It can create energy, surprise and a memorable event.
But the magic and the message remain largely separate.
Here, a trick illustrates an idea.
A transformation might represent change. A restored object might symbolise resilience. Making something disappear could introduce a point about attention.
It may be a powerful visual metaphor, but the experience is essentially saying:
This trick is like the thing I’m teaching you about.
This was the category I had operated in for years when working in the corporate world and where that uncomfortable 2023 segment belonged.
This category is different.
The audience might experience their attention being directed, their expectations shaping what they perceive or their brain instinctively searching for patterns.
They don’t simply hear that these processes happen.
They experience their own brains doing them.
One signature moment in my keynotes is the Rubber Hand Illusion, which demonstrates the brain’s remarkable ability to update its internal model of the body.
Through carefully synchronised visual and tactile information, a volunteer can begin to experience a rubber hand as if it belongs to them and instinctively react to it.
The audience watches someone’s perception of their own body change. It becomes a visceral introduction to the brain’s adaptability and a bridge into understanding neuroplasticity.
The learning isn’t added after the experience.
It is happening within it.
My personal estimate is that at least 90% of keynote speakers who use magic fall into the first two categories. That isn’t based on formal research - just years of observing how magic is used by speakers in Australia and internationally.
The third category is much rarer. It's where I operate fully.
Perhaps that’s because it requires more than expertise in either speaking or magic alone.
You need to understand the subject deeply enough to identify what the audience should genuinely discover. You need the learning-design skills to turn that insight into an experience. And you need the performance craft to make the experience engaging, surprising and memorable.
My decade as a corporate leader, my study of neuroleadership and my background as a magician happen to intersect in that space.
It also requires significantly more development. I don't wish to simply take an existing trick and attach a relevant message. Each piece must be researched, designed and tested around the learning - and I must be willing to discard something entertaining when the experience and the message don’t align.
That combination may explain why I find myself in a minority. It's harder to do.
I recently discussed these categories with a magician friend from London and it was eye-opening!
He told me about a similar conversation he’d had with another performer years ago who had begun presenting himself as a behavioural, influence and body-language expert.
This speaker was using familiar magic methods to create impressive demonstrations of his apparent ability to read people - and presenting the outcomes as evidence of his body-language expertise, along side the text book learnings.
My friend was blunt:
“You’re lying to the clients. It’s like selling snake oil.”
The problem wasn’t that the method was hidden. Magic depends on concealed methods.
The problem was the attribution.
The audience was being told that the result came from the expertise being taught when it actually came from an unrelated magic method. The illusion wasn’t creating an authentic experience of the learning; it was manufacturing evidence for a claim.
A hidden method can serve an authentic learning experience. But when it is presented as proof of an ability that wasn’t responsible for the outcome, entertainment crosses into misrepresentation. And when a client is paying thousands for the supposed expertise behind that demonstration, it raises a serious ethical question:
Are they buying genuine expertise - or merely the illusion of it?
That discomfort in 2023 changed the question I ask when designing a keynote.
I no longer begin with:
What could I do that would be entertaining and get the point across?
I begin with:
What do I want the audience to genuinely experience, notice or discover for themselves?
I ensure each experience is true experiential learning. Otherwise it gets cast in the bin.
When we explore decision-making, the audience experiences how framing, assumptions and unconscious processes can shape a choice before conscious reasoning catches up.
My newest piece - which remains a secret to anyone outside the room - creates a deeply personal experience of reframing and future-focused thinking. It has become one of my most talked-about moments because the experience rises above the illusion.
Authenticity doesn’t mean every part of the method must be visible. Some mechanics are deliberately hidden.
What matters is what those mechanics create.
Are they manufacturing applause before a message is attached?
Or are they allowing people to experience an otherwise invisible cognitive process for themselves?
The method may involve illusion.
But the audience’s psychological experience - and the learning that emerges from it - is real.
That original 2023 piece has never appeared in one of my keynotes again. It lasted one keynote.
It still taught someone something important.
It taught me the difference between using magic to illustrate an idea and creating an experience through which people discover that idea for themselves and connect it to their life, team or business.
One creates a memorable metaphor.
The other can create genuine change.
I'd rather be in the minority and exist in the latter.