How to go beyond puzzles when performing?
What are you doing in performance? Showing off a clever idea that you learnt that allows you to be socially competent?
Dont use Mentalism for that, please.
If you need social skills, first and foremost, learn how to engage in conversation. Read books about the subject and most important, know yourself so you can know what you can share as value at your present moment.
Puzzles, rational games are fine and very cool. Puzzles DEMAND a solution.
Mentalism is not a puzzle
Mentalism does not demand a solution.
Pure Mentalism is Pure Mystery, and mysteries are created to be a state of present enjoyment.
Effective Mentalism allows people to be connected with the emotional experience that you offer them in your Outer Reality, and that can be achieved only if your routine is solidly constructed so they dont have any logical space in which they can stand and most important, YOUR focus into the emotional experience for them.
The concept of "Emotional Mentalism" coined by my friend Luca Volpe teaches us something very powerful. ALL Mentalism is emotional perse, as any human activity and effort.
Why? Because WE ARE emotional beings, and we use our emotions as starter point to create our rational views. If you are more interested in this, you can read the work of Humberto Maturana and Antonio Damasio.
This post alone is an example of this. I feel passion about Mentalism, and from that emotional state, I wrote my rational ideas.
So, how to go beyond puzzles?
DONT focus just in the rational aspects in performance. Dont explain your boring procedures. Let people understand that what you do.
You can cancel methods of course, but dont focus your script just in that.
Sometimes we think that being explicit about what we do is "more powerful", and this just cant be further from the truth.
Be subtle, and let people influence themselves, thats the best way to influence someone.
"You can see that through this paper I cant see what you wrote, because this is not important, but what is important is your thought, and most important, what you feel whenever you think in that word..."
As you can see, a simple piece of script that cancels the idea of a "peek" (and as you know, you can still peek the billet) and flows into the emotional aspects of that thought.
Compare this two situations, from the participants perspective of your Outer Reality:
"He asked me to see a word from a book and he read my mind"
(using my Little Prince Book Test)
"He asked me to take 5 books and to select one.
From that one I choose a page number, which was used to select a row in other book.
From this we take a deck of cards and asked me to say a number between 1 and 52. I count to that number...
And I dont remember the rest..."
What is in your opinion the best experience for your participant?
Sometimes we think that because something is "more impossible" and has "better conditions", it is inherently better, and as you can read, it is not the case at all.
Everything that happens, must be an essential motivation in your performance. If it is not needed, dont do it.
Because we are emotional beings and the rational is at the surface, if you do Mentalism only for the brain, you will create superficial performance. Go beyond, go deeper, and structure your routines in a way that you can not only impact brains, but hearts.
It is complex? Yes
It is simple? Yes
It is difficult? Depends in yourself
CONVERSATION