Nick Fitzherbert - Presentation Magic

Copyright 2011 Nick Fitzherbert

Cover design: Opal Works Co. Limited

Published in 2011 by Marshall Cavendish Business
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eISBN 978-981-4351-79-9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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I dedicate this book to all the magicians around the world who have been good enough to share their creativity, learned advice and inspiration.

Reinventing everything I do career-wise has given me a whole new lease of life. For that I am also indebted to The Magic Circle and to Paula, Louis and Eliza for loving support on the home front.

that supports you as a presenter

Ask most magicians what got them started and they will invariably tell you tales that begin with receiving a first magic set at around the age of six. For me it was very different; it started in 1991 when I was running a PR company and needed some entertainment for my staff party. I hired a magician called Fay Presto whose talents included pushing lit cigarettes through guests jackets and bottles through solid tables, while your own bank notes floated in mid-air. Fay did all this and much more besides, and from that moment I was hooked I sought out the shops, the clubs, the magazines and the conventions. Magic also started creeping into new business pitches for my PR company and this got me mingling with magical inventors and some extraordinary thinkers.

The more I learned about magic, the more I started to think that many of the principles that lay behind the tricks could be extremely useful in business. Directing attention, persuading and convincing were, after all, what my job as a PR consultant was all about. If you leave aside the deception elements, it seemed to me that the worlds magicians and I were essentially in the same game. Confirmation came from James Randi, who as the Great Randi is widely admired as one of the gurus of the magic world. He said: Magicians are the worlds greatest communicators; its just that everything they are telling you is wrong!

So there really was scope, I thought, to apply the psychological principles that lay behind the tricks to something more useful than simply pulling rabbits out of hats and making perfectly useful items disappear. My early immersion into magic happily coincided with the emergence of a new breed of young magicians, such as Andy Nyman, Marc Paul and Anthony Owen, who were performing at John Lenahans Monday Night Magic club nights in London pubs. They had a fresh take on magic that leant towards mind reading and deployed a range of associated psychological skills. Eventually another magician appeared from the restaurant scene in Bristol. His name was Derren Brown, and when I saw his first lecture at a magic convention in the late 90s, everybodys jaws dropped to the floor. He soon teamed up with Owen and Nyman to make TV programmes, and the rest is history. Importantly for me, Derrens arrival brought fresh new reference points to the world of magic no longer would peoples perceptions of magic be confined to memories of childhood parties and the likes of Paul Daniels and Tommy Cooper.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to apply for membership of The Magic Circle the worlds foremost magic society with a massive library and access to many of the worlds greatest magical minds. These resources enabled me to refine my thinking and identify the Rules of Magic 20 principles that are used instinctively by the best magicians, and that I believe prove equally effective in business. The Rules are really quite simple; that, for me, is where their beauty lies, and it is the magical context that brings them alive.

The Rules are very much about why magic works rather than how it works. I am not allowed to tell anyone how magic works I would be expelled from The Magic Circle in fairly short order! What I probably can risk revealing is that one of the reasons it is so important to keep the secrets is that many are so childishly simple you would be severely disappointed were you to uncover them. More often than not it really is almost all in the presentation.

When I first meet the people I am coaching in Presentation Skills with The Rules of Magic, I explain that coming up is everything they would expect from more standard training programmes, with the addition of principles I have gleaned from the world of magic. I usually start with a short introduction to the principles, along the following lines:

I take out a pack of cards and shuffle them, as I tell everyone I am a member of the world famous Magic Circle. I say that we meet at a very secret place on Monday nights, before revealing that its actually near Londons Euston Station and if they ever need a lovely venue for a corporate event it makes a fine choice. Some people know it and we have a brief chat about the HQ to build some rapport. On Monday nights, however, it is full of magicians of all shapes and sizes, many huddled around tables showing each other card tricks. As I continue to shuffle my cards I paint a scenario of myself among the magicians. Pick a card, I say, any card. Where would you like me to stop? They indicate a choice and I ask if they would like to change their mind. Eventually they pick a card, show it to the others and I start to supposedly read their mind. I say: I could go into an entire Derren Brown-style routine, getting you to think of colours, shapes, values, images, and so on, or ... I could just tell you that you have the two of hearts (which they do). At this stage I interject quickly before they do anything embarrassing such as applaud.