Every mentalist I know ends up wanting the same thing. They want to sit across from a stranger and, completely proplessly, tell that person intimate thoughts about themselves that nobody ever said out loud.
I don’t think that’s a fantasy, and I don’t think it’s psychic either. Most of what people call genuine mind reading is paying attention, staying calm and having the nerve to say what you noticed, in a way that’s kind enough that the other person wants to hear it, and you can train every bit of that.
So there’s no system in this piece, nothing to memorise and nothing to buy, and I’m not going to explain a single method, because there isn’t one. This is my own philosophy of presenting mind reading to people and crafting an experience that’s real and actually means something to them. The impact and the rapport I get out of a reading all come from it, and it’s grounded in psychology, in how people actually work and in knowing how to talk to them.
And the reason it works is that people love hearing about themselves. There’s a Harvard study where people actually gave up money just to talk about themselves instead of other people, and the brain scans showed it switches on the same reward system that responds to things like food and money. So when someone sits with you and talks about your life with full confidence, no props, and they get it right, that touches you. The attention is all on you for a few minutes and most of what you hear is good.
I can’t tell you what intuition actually is. I don’t know, and I don’t trust anyone who says they do. What I do know is that it gets better the more you use it and worse the harder you try, and the people who are really good at this are almost always good listeners first.
Before you start
When you’re under pressure you notice less. If you’re desperate for a hit you end up watching your own nerves instead of the person, and whatever you say comes out of that.
There’s a line in Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature I keep coming back to: “Stop your incessant interior monologue and pay deeper attention to people.” Honestly that’s most of the job. You can’t really be present with someone, or build rapport or have any charisma, while your own head is chattering away. It has to go quiet so all your attention can go to the person in front of you.
So slow your breathing down and stop worrying about being right for the next few minutes. You will be wrong sometimes and that’s fine, I’ll get to that.
You already do this
You know when a friend has had bad news before they say a word. You can tell when someone laughs at your joke just to be polite, and you probably knew in the first ten seconds who you’d get on with at the last party you went to. Nobody taught you any of that.
Reading someone on purpose is the same thing, you just do it when you mean to. Most people get those flashes all day and ignore them because they can’t explain where they came from. The first skill is to stop ignoring them. When one comes, keep it and check later if you were right.
Think about the last time your brother or sister, or anyone in your family, came to you with a problem and needed your advice. Remember how closely you listened to them, how you knew what was really bothering them before they got to it, and what you ended up saying. You put yourself in their shoes, you saw the whole thing from where they were standing, and then you gave it back to them in plain words, maybe with a small piece of advice or something that helped them settle their mind.
You can do exactly that with a complete stranger. If you have the empathy to understand their situation the way they see it, and you can put it back to them clearly, it lands as something you picked straight out of their head and explained to them.
What people show you
Stand in a supermarket queue and watch the people at the tills. Look at the way they pack their bags, how they pay, how they hold their card and what their face is doing while they wait. You can usually tell who has trouble at home, who’s living a pretty good life, and who has so much going on in their head that they aren’t really there for any of it.
It’s the same in a library or on a train. Glance at the cover of the book someone’s reading. People say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the kind of book a person picks up tells you something about them, and it’s a fair place to start.
This isn’t just my opinion, it’s been tested. In the early nineties two Harvard psychologists, Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, showed strangers three ten second clips of college teachers with the sound turned off, half a minute per teacher, and asked them to rate how warm, confident and enthusiastic each one seemed. Those snap ratings lined up closely with how the teachers’ own students rated them at the end of a whole term. In a later round they cut the clips down to six seconds per teacher and the ratings still held up. The strangers never heard a word. They got all of it from faces, posture and the way the teachers moved.
The psychologist Sam Gosling did something similar with rooms. He had strangers look around the bedrooms and offices of people they’d never met and rate what the person who lived or worked there was like. When their ratings were checked against how those people described themselves and how people who knew them described them, the strangers were surprisingly accurate, especially about how open and curious someone was and how organised they were. The books on the shelf, the posters, how tidy the desk is, every one of those is something that person chose.
The reason it works is simple. Most of what makes us who we are shows up in small things we never think about, how we move, how we dress, what we pick up and what we leave lying around. We can’t hide it because we don’t know we’re showing it, and other people pick it up without knowing how they did.
Faces are the same. Just by looking at someone you can get a feeling for whether they’re worried or calm, collected or happy, lost in thought or a bit distracted because their mind is somewhere else. A face on its own can fool you, so read it together with everything around it, but you can see a lot in a few seconds when you’re actually looking.
All of this happens every day, all day long, and most people are blind to it. They think that to give a strong reading without props, phone apps or impression devices they need a method in place, or a head full of Barnum statements and cold reading lines. None of that is true. You need to have noticed enough real life that you can describe someone’s situation back to them clearly, and that only comes from being present with your audience and giving them your complete attention.
Forget your props
Next time you go to perform a reading, forget about your billets, forget the techniques and principles you’ve learned, and forget your apps and your impression devices. Imagine everything else drops away and it’s just you and the person or the audience in front of you, and take your performance from there.
Don’t let the props you use enslave you to one presentation or one way of doing things. Think about what you can do before the effect even starts, so that by the time you get to the actual prop it isn’t limiting how you express yourself, and the whole thing hits harder.
It’s very easy to fall into this. When we watch the tutorial for a prop we own, we tend to take the presentation from whoever is teaching it as well. Then we’re stuck with the prop and we default to a presentation that might not suit our style or our persona at all.