“Fear is a green light that means GO!”

-Heather Monahan

The evening was going well. 

Not my greatest performance, certainly, but more than good enough. In just under three hours I had made my way through the crowd of 200 people – accountants and financial industry folks – and showed nearly every single one of them a couple of magic tricks.

My contract was fulfilled. I started to pack up, removing odds and ends from my pockets that would make a non-magician look like a crazy person. A piece of string here, a coin with a hole in it there, a Rubik’s cube, a pack of cards, a pen with two caps, and so on. Each was returned carefully to the correct location in my brown leather briefcase. 

“Hey buddy!”

Nah, I thought. That can’t be for me.

“Hey magician guy!”

Damn.

I forced a big smile just before turning around.

“What’s up, fellas? What can I do for you?”

“We never got to see a trick!” he said. “We’ve been hearing about you all night. You got something for us, quick?”

“Of course!”

What else could I do? I grabbed the deck of cards from my briefcase and launched into a trick I’d done tens of thousands of times before, relying on muscle memory to carry me home.

He chose a card at random (truly). I gave him a Sharpie marker and he signed his name across the face. Then he placed his signed card into the center of the pack. When I snapped my fingers (because how else are you supposed to know magic has happened?) his card was suddenly on top of the deck.

“Whoa!” 

The whole group laughed. They were impressed, but more to the point, they were drunk.

This particular trick relies on repetition. It’s interesting the first time, but increasingly frustrating when you know what’s coming and still can’t catch it.

I placed his signed card into the center of the pack. I was just about to snap my fingers when something unexpected happened. 

“Wait!” he exclaimed.

He swiped the pack of cards off the table and furiously shuffled them a half dozen times before slamming them back down and stating, with exuberance,

“There – do it now!”

I flashed a sly smile. Then I snapped my fingers and just stared at the pack of cards.

“No,” he said. “There’s no way.”

I didn’t say a word. He turned the top card over. It was his signed card. The group erupted in a mix of screaming, laughter, and applause. 

That night I entered the party as a magician, but I left as a legend.

Do you want to know the secret?

I had no idea his card was going to be on top of the deck. He hadn’t given me a chance to do the secret move yet. And he shuffled so many times the card could have been anywhere.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. As a young, aspiring magician I would have completely panicked – the trick was ruined and there was no way out! But as a seasoned professional with thousands of events under my belt I had learned there many worse things than screwing up a magic trick. 

So I smiled. I snapped my fingers and assumed the card he turned over wouldn’t be his.

What was my plan if that happened?

“Boy, that woulda been great!” 

I would have just laughed it off and performed some other trick. Confidence is born out of experience. The longer you’ve been in a field the more you learn how to recover if something doesn’t go according to plan. 

Fear of failure is paralyzing to the inexperienced and insecure. But to the confident? It’s a green light that just means GO!

When you learn to push fear aside – or better yet, use it as a guiding light – you discover previously hidden opportunities. I took a risk at the end of that trick. But I wasn’t worried about screwing up. I’d survived plenty worse and the show would certainly go on. Thus the risk, messing up a magic trick, was relatively low, but the potential reward was incredibly high.

A miracle occured for that group. We were given the gift of a truly impossible moment, simply by leveraging confidence.

Building True Confidence

Plus we discussed the role of luck in success, she told me a terrific story she’s never told in public before, and she offers a killer piece of advice for anyone looking to build a sustainable career in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Listen or watch the conversation on the Beyond Networking podcast: https://www.beyondnetworkingpodcast.com/building-true-confidence-with-heather-monahan/