Confidence is a strange thing, isn’t it? You can’t bottle it, or take a pill to get it, you can’t actually see it (bit like electricity), yet without it, success can be harder to attain.
You see it best and most often illustrated in professional sport. The difference between a great team and an underachieving team, or between the best player and the second best, or between the no.1 driver and the no.2, is not usually so much to do with their abilities, but more to do with their confidence to execute at the highest level when under pressure.
So it is with magic performance too. Every time you work in front of an audience there is a pressure to deliver, to amuse and to amaze, to be the life and soul of the party, to live up to the hype of your publicity.
Sometimes everything drops seamlessly into place and you feel completely on top of your game. The magic garners great reactions, the lines and gags flow freely, and your confidence is boosted so that you feel you could do almost anything and it would work well.
Then on other occasions, you don’t feel quite up to speed. Maybe you’ve had a hard day leading up to the show and you’re actually a bit tired, or it was a stressful journey to the venue, or the performing conditions are far from ideal making it harder for you to entertain well.
Your confidence on these occasions can feel low, and as a result you become reticent to take any chances with your material, you avoid potential adlib opportunities, and your general timing seems a little off.
A truly confident performer can overcome potential difficulties and rise above them, someone lacking the necessary self assurance can be knocked off course by them, and thus produce a below par show.
The lockdowns everyone has experienced over the last 16 months, and the resulting interruption to our daily lives, has meant a lot of people are feeling a bit nervous about now having to contemplate resuming their more normal routines. Returning to workplaces, going out generally more again, dealing with outside pressures, coping with all these things once more is causing some people anxiety.
For us magicians, taking to the ‘stage’ again brings its own set of doubts. Will I remember all my routines and gags? Will I still know how to deal with my audiences? Will I be able to entertain properly? It’s totally natural to feel a drop off in confidence, especially if you have literally not done any performing at all since the early part of last year.
However, the fact is that for most entertainers, it’ll be a bit like riding a bike. As soon as you get back in the saddle, very quickly things will start to feel familiar again. Your brain will retrieve all those little bits of business and handlings that you need and I believe that in very short order you will start to feel relaxed about what you are doing again.
And as that smoothness returns, so your confidence levels will quickly start to rise again too. You’ll begin to feel at home with your show, and the more the confidence builds the better you will perform. Hopefully we will all soon be comfortable working again and the last year and a half will be just a memory.