How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching With Meta Communication | Page 7

The Art Of Magical Seduction
In the movie “The Prestige”, we are taught that every successful trick has to
have 3 parts: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.
The pledge is the set up.
The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps
he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't.

The turn is the performance of the trick.
The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something
extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking.
You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something
disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the
part we call "The Prestige"."

The prestige is the effect of the trick itself.
While there's infinite ways to go about these stages, one thing is tantamount: the trick while unbelievable on its face
must be believed, even if only for a second. People must believe the impossible, they must believe the
unbelievable.
In order for the public to achieve this believe, the magician must find a way to by-pass their critical factors as a way
to get past their defenses and hang-ups.
In this sense, this is very much like dropping them into a trance-like state: make the public more open to suggestio