If you have a gaggle of geese and a pride of lions, what would you call a gathering of mentalists? I’m going for a mess of mind readers!
Tomorrow I’m going to convene with said mess, because tomorrow is the day I fly to the Meeting Of The Minds, and annual get-together of about 80 of the best mentalists from around the world.
You may be wondering what we do when we get together in a convention. Do we hang around reading one another? No so much. Mostly we swap lies about our work, our greatest feats, and life on the road. Of course, since we all know when each other is lying, that gets old pretty fast. So then we retire to a bar or a hotel lobby and read random strangers. Imagine being normal person expecting an ordinary weekend, when suddenly almost everybody you run into starts feeding back to you your personal secrets! I feel sorry for them already.
We do trade ideas and techniques, though, which is amazing in itself. Mentalists are a generally solitary lot, and we hate revealing our secrets. But if you’re going to learn and grow, you do have to open up eventually. The key is to set boundaries and rules. In our case, we’ve established that our techniques are only to be shared within our small closed communities. Enough of us take that vow seriously that it (mostly) makes the process work.
This post isn’t really about the convention, however. It’s really about the need to continue our educations. With anything you want to excel at, you have to adopt the attitude that you’re never done learning. And it helps to have at least one other person to trade ideas with. We would all like to think that we’re self-sufficient, but we’re not. So if it’s your goal to learn body language, try to find yourself a partner, somebody to learn with. You’ll be amazed at how much that speeds up the process.
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