My Hands Shake When I Perform Magic Tricks

My hands shake when I perform magic tricks

Pedro writes: 'I have been struggling lately with two things. Firstly, when I try to perform I start shaking, my hands tremble a lot, and I can’t pull off the card tricks that I have practiced in private. I also still struggle with false shuffles and double lifts because it is still easy for people to see what I am doing. Can you help, please?'

Hi Pedro,

Many thanks for getting in touch. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to getting good at sleight of hand; we wish there were a magic spell, but sadly it is just a matter of practice, practice, practice!

Here are a few pointers to help you out, though.

Firstly you must learn everything correctly. When you watch a tutorial and go back to a move later, you may have misremembered a key finger placement or grip that may be pivotal to the sleight working well. So make sure you have all the parts of the sleight remembered correctly.

Secondly start slowly. You can always build speed into your sleight of hand work but start slowly. It is better to master the technique at a slow tempo and then add the speed to it later. Just imagine learning to drive at top speed, it would be near on impossible, and things would go wrong pretty quickly!

Thirdly, Repeat, repeat, and repeat. As you repeat your sleight of hand skills, they will begin to be ingrained in your muscle memory. Once your hands unconsciously know what to do, you will be able to add patter and presentation to your effects. Tying your shoelaces does not require conscious thought, your hands just do it. Because you have done it thousands of times, your hands know what to do, sleight of hand should be like that!

Shaking hands when you perform magic tricks

With regards to the shaking hands, do not worry, this is something that many people experience when put in front of a group in public to perform or speak. One of the problems can be the lack of experience in performing to people. You can practice a routine a hundred times in a mirror but when you perform for people ANYTHING can happen. A spectator may ask to shuffle the cards at the wrong time, or they may just be loud and not listening to you properly. Many things are different when you go out and perform for real spectators.

Here are a couple of links that should help you out. I wrote a blog post on overcoming nervousness where I let you know how I helped myself stop being so nervous that my hands visibly were shaking. You can read that here:

Overcoming Nervousness

We have lots of other tips and advice in our Blog; you can use the search function for keywords if you are looking for something particular. I am sure you will find lots of great advice and articles of interest.

We have an eBook detailing the problems with performing magic to friends and family, some of the tips here should help you out also:

How to be Confident When Magic Tricks Go Wrong

by Dominic Reyes Leave a Comment

Matt writes: 'What close up magic would you recommend for someone like me? I'm not very confident at performing tricks. The magic tricks go wrong when I try them on my mates.'

Hi Matt,

Many thanks for getting in touch. This can be a common problem with people starting out in magic. We will of course help but there is so much more to magic than just the tricks involved, true deception and truly fooling someone comes from a great performance. So we will try to help you with all of it!

The danger of too many close up magic tricks

Firstly, try not try to look at getting lots of new magic. Stop and try to look at why the magic tricks you have tried so far are going wrong. Most problems aren't solved simply by adding more tricks to your workload. Cut right back to a bare minimum of a few tricks to work on. Continuing to pile on new material just avoids having to do the real work of practice. We will of course help out as much as possible but there is only so much we can do, it is your job to make sure you practice, practice, practice and learn all you can and focus on where you think you are going wrong.

Confidence performing magic tricks

You mentioned in your email that you are not very confident when you perform. Confidence can be a big problem because it will negatively impact what you do, causing your mind to go blank leading to hesitation. When you hesitate, you give people moments to look at things they shouldn't be paying attention to. Essentially when you are not confident and nervous you are not presenting magic like it should be and people will catch you out as they are not misdirected or engaged.

Build your confidence as a magician

Here's some advice from Ben Williams on the subject of confidence:

'Lacking confience when you perform magic tricks doesn't mean all is lost. When I first start performing I would shake violently, have heart palpitations, sweaty palms, blank mind, just about everything that you could have as a physical manifestation of fear and nerves. I have personally experienced. Here is a blog post I wrote about overcoming nervousness. It talks about some of the things that really helped me, techniques for breathing, focusing your mind and relaxing.'

Running before you can walk

If you have practiced your magic and know what moves you have to do and are not cheating yourself, the rest is all in your head. Magic tricks go wrong if you are not properly practicing your magic before going out to perform them. Lack of practice will lead to you naturally making mistakes. Make sure you are not cheating yourself and performing things too soon just because you are excited. Also, just because it goes right 5 times in a row in front of a mirror that does not mean it is performance ready. When you perform in front of a group the experience is very different to being in front of a mirror.

Caring too much

This is a weird one. You should try to not care so much. Within your performance try not to give off an intense vibe, try to relax and act like it nothing bothers you. If something goes wrong, it goes wrong, it really isn't the end of the world. If people try to make you feel bad for getting it wrong by laughing or stating how badly it went wrong then shrug it off.

Never get into an argument or try to deny that it went wrong, this will only inflame the situation. Instead you can say something like, 'yep, that wasn't at all like when I learned it at Hogwarts!' This will get a laugh and diffuse the situation for you. If you can relax then so will your audience, they will stop trying to figure out how it works and begin enjoying it!

With all of this being said, here are some suggestions of great magic to help you ease into it. These are all pretty much self working, so you can concentrate on your performance. Basically I will list a whole load of links for you to help you out Matty!

FREE ARTICLES FROM BLOG RELATING TO PERFORMANCE

Overcoming Nervousness

Pitfalls of Performing to Family and Friends

TRICKS YOU SHOULD LOOK UP

Ultimate Self Working Card Tricks Vol 1, 2 and 3

Sponge by Jay Noblezada

Pen Thru Anything

Invisible Deck by Oz Pearlman

Invisible Deck (Deck alone)

Coin Unique

FREE TRICKS AND EBOOKS

Ultimate Self Working Card Tricks Trial

Misdirection E-Book

Duplex Free Trick Video

Turnover Pass Free Video

School of Cool Free Trial

How to Learn Magic Tricks eBook

Free eBook Range

We hope this helps Matt, please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.

Performance Versus Magic Practice

by Dominic Reyes 1 Comment

Performance vs. practice – Do you practice your magic to perfection or get out and perform in order to perfect your magic tricks?

Sam writes:

'I've been into magic for a while now, and when I was young I could perform magic to people without worrying if I were going to mess up the trick. I'm 21 now and for some reason I feel the need to practice the trick to perfection before I can perform it to anyone, even family. Is this a good or bad thing?'

Here is what Ben Williams said in reply, hopefully if you have the same issues this advice will help you out too!

When we mature our brains develop much more of a realisation of consequence. When you were younger, you probably didn't think about any consequence of performing a magic trick due partially to this fact. It is not a bad thing to practice an effect to perfection before performing it. The problem would be if you are not performing the trick because of fear it is not good enough, not that you don't know it inside out. When going to perform we all have fears at the last minute, such as the trick you feel like doing is just not going to fly or get the reactions you imagine. The real truth is that you just don't know how your magic is going to go down and in all reality it most likely is going to get a much better reaction than you imagine.

Magic Practice

I truly think that practice is not a bad thing at all, but you should be able to realise when you have practiced something enough. Take a punt on performing it, this is where your skills will become honed.

You can practice a move in front of a mirror until it looks invisible, but if you go to pieces in front of someone when performing then no amount of practice at home will get you past that. My advice would be to practice some easy tricks that you can do without a hitch. Even if they are self-working, get two of those tricks, one to begin a set with, and one to end it. Sandwich those magic tricks around a new trick that you want to perform, but haven't road tested yet. This way, if it goes wrong, it doesn't matter.

It's not the end of the world

There is nothing wrong with a trick not working; it is only your ego that is harmed. If you can brush that off, then there is nothing left to worry about. If a mistake doesn't matter to you then how can a spectator be bothered by it or harass you? Sure, you may feel for a moment like you have egg on your face; or that you have not done yourself justice. However, if you let those feelings pass and look at it from a different perspective, that of it being a positive experience to learn from then you will only get better and better. Learn from your mistakes, remember a mistake is only a mistake if you refuse to learn from it, if you learn a valuable lesson then how can it be anything other than a positive experience?

A friend of mine, Justin Flom said he will ALWAYS offer magic up to his friends and people he meets, he always has something prepared and will always try new things on his friends. True friends would not care if anything went wrong, they may laugh at you for a moment but if they are real friends it won't change anything, just laugh with them. It is true; it can feel horrible if you are trying to make an impact with your magic and then it goes wrong. If the secret is revealed or just does not work at all, the illusion you are trying to create falls to the floor like a backdrop curtain revealing all that is behind it. But in truth nothing is that bad, yeah an effect won't have worked, an illusion is destroyed but did anyone get hurt? Was anything illegal done? Did anyone lose their life savings? No! So in the grand scheme of things nothing has happened. Just brush yourself off and forget how it made you feel and make sure you get to the bottom of why it went wrong. Then work on the issue so that you do not make a mistake by repeating it.

Think like Dr. Pepper, what is the worst that could happen? Take a deep breath, clear your mind of any negative thought. Just rock up with an opening line that gets the ball rolling so you cannot simply back out, and you will have a great time. I used to turn up at gigs worried sick that it would be terrible and after every gig I would leave and feel amazing as it was never as bad as I had imagined!