BOOK EXTRACT: Magician and mentalist Keith Barry shares tips for kids on how to believe in themselves...

‘Mind Magic’ a new book by brain hacker and mentalist Keith Barry has been launched. Here we publish an extract, which gives children, aged seven to 12 tricks and tips on being happier and more confident. Mind Magic is aimed at 7-12 year olds, published by Gill Books.

CONFIDENCE is all about one thing: believing in yourself!

It sounds easy, as if anyone can just flick a switch and suddenly become the most confident person in the world. Of course, it’s much more difficult than that.

Every good magician knows that to perfect any trick, they need to practise. They need to repeat the trick over and over and OVER AGAIN, until eventually they can make it look like the smoothest and easiest thing in the world to perform. We need to practise confidence EVERY SINGLE DAY until we become confident without even thinking about it!

Think about someone you know who has confidence. It might be one of your best mates who has an amazing singing voice and loves to perform in front of people. It might be the star striker on your football team who is always encouraging other players to try harder. It could be your mam or your dad, or an older brother or sister. It could even be someone you’ve seen on the telly or at a concert.

Do you think they have ALWAYS been confident?

Well, here’s a little secret: nobody is born with confidence. Babies don’t come into this world full to the brim with confidence - just like they don’t come into this world with a mute button.

In the same way that you are not born with the ability to read, ride a bike, do keepy-uppies or tap-dance while balancing a sword on your nose, you are not born with confidence.

Confidence is a skill that you pick up and learn as you go through life. Folks who don’t have a lot of confidence have, unfortunately, had their skills, their looks or their thoughts put down and knocked time and time again by other people.

Everyone has had their confidence knocked at some point. Maybe it was a teacher who made us doubt that we could do something, or a coach who didn’t give us the chance to prove ourselves.

Maybe it was a classmate who said something nasty to us, or it could even have been a friend or a family member who didn’t realise what they were doing.

The niggling thoughts that you sometimes have in your mind have all been learned over time, e.g. ‘˜I could never stand up in front of all those people and sing like he does’, or ‘I could never play midfield like she does’.

Encounters with people who knock our confidence can end up reducing the amount of belief we have in ourselves overall: like the number of lives our character has in a video game.

In a video game, the more times we get squashed by a boss or zapped by a laser cannon, the more our health level will plummet. If it happens too many times, it might be ‘GAME OVER’ and we’re out.

Every nasty comment, every insult and every unkind joke directed at us will chip away at our confidence level, making us feel smaller and smaller every time.

If you’re constantly being zapped by the idea that you can’t do something, or that you’re stupid or less important than somebody else, then eventually you’re going to start believing it. And your video-game avatar’s number of lives will be left at ZILCH.

I was lucky enough to have very supportive parents and a pretty nice childhood, but my confidence has sometimes taken a battering too!

Growing up, everything was pretty - normal!

My primary school was just a short walk across the fields behind our back garden. My mum and I used to hop the ditch (avoiding nettles) every morning on the way to school. Along the journey, we would pass cattle and sheep, and in spring I often saw a calf or lamb being born before I sat down at my school desk!

Some people don’t like school - but I found it pretty enjoyable and I had a lot of pals. We played outdoors together in all weather after school, maybe like you do with your friends.

Growing up, I had two main interests:

1. ANIMALS OF ALL SHAPES AND SIZES.

2. MAGIC.

When I was just five, I got a magic set for Christmas. My first ever trick went like this:

The magician places a ball under a cup, then lifts the cup to reveal that

*GASP*

the ball has disappeared! The magician places the cup down, then raises it with a flourish to reveal

*GASP*

The ball is back!

It may not sound like much, but it amazed my parents and my sister, enough to encourage me to keep on performing tricks.

My parents saw how much fun I was having with that little magic set. Santa must have noticed too, because every year after that I would get a magic set for Christmas and my birthday (nowadays I mostly get socks, which is always a little disappointing).

As I got older and the tricks became more and more impressive, I grew to love fooling and astounding my audience: my family, my friends, classmates, teachers and even complete strangers!

Performing magic for friends and family was an amazing way to grow my confidence at a young age. My friends believed in the magic, and I began to believe in myself!

But then something happened that knocked my confidence pretty hard. I moved to a new school, which is often a really difficult thing to do. Maybe you’ve had to move school at some stage in your life, or have a mate who had to move to a new area and leave you behind.

There are new people to meet, new names to recognise, new teachers, new classrooms, and new rules to follow - it’s a lot for a kid to take in!

I’ll be totally honest with you: I found it REALLY difficult to fit in at my new school, and my confidence took a nosedive.

Most of the kids who went to Mount Sion lived near the school – so I was seen as an outsider. Not the cool sort of outsider that you see in films. Nope, I was the sort of outsider who got made fun of, got dead legs, bruised arms and the occasional glob of chewing gum in my hair (eugh!).

I tried changing things about myself to try to fit in (which is never a good idea, by the way), but nothing worked.

I tried out a couple of different hobbies to try to make some new mates and get my confidence going in the right direction, but nothing stuck (apart from the chewing gum, again: eugh!).

One thing that I still loved through it all was magic.

I didn’t ever really think I could make a career out of it, though, and had decided that instead I would grow up to be a vet. Like I mentioned earlier, I ADORE animals of all shapes and sizes and I spent the first summer of secondary school working with a local vet.

It may come as a shock to you, but rural Co. Waterford doesn’t play host to many pythons, tarantulas or hippopotomases hippopotamuses hippopotami, so I spent a lot of time on farms. I’d come home covered in cow dung most days and my mother wouldn’t let me into the house until I’d stripped off my work clothes. I must have stunk!

When I was 14, though, I got a taste of what it would be like to be a professional magician. I got paid to perform at a kids’ party at a hotel in Waterford City. My uncle had got the job for me and I was SUPER-excited, and also SUPER-nervous. I came up with a routine and practised it over and over again at home. This could be my big break! My ticket to stardom!

If this was a movie, then I would tell you about how amazing the show was. How the kids were dumbstruck from start to finish, how they lifted me up on their shoulders and chanted my name. Then I would tell you how a Hollywood agent signed me up the very next day for a 100-year residency in Las Vegas and how we flew off on a private jet with my name on it and I lived happily ever after.

But this is a true story, not a movie. So I have to tell you what really happened.

If you have ever seen a gang of ferocious piranhas descend upon a piece of meat on the end of a hook, then you will probably be able to picture the scene. Though the piranhas would. probably make less of a mess. Practising my tricks at home was one thing but performing them in front of 100 screaming kids was a completely different ball game.

They basically tore me apart for an hour. Every trick I did they would scream ‘It’s up your sleeve’ or ‘It’s in your pocket!’ or whatever else they could throw at me. They even grabbed my props and pulled my pockets inside out! The whole way through my act, my hands would not stop shaking. I could actually feel and see them shaking but I couldn’t stop them.

It. Was. Horrific. And it left my confidence at an all- time low. These kids weren’t particularly nasty people – they were just young kids! But that afternoon, they chipped away at my wall of confidence – they were a big monster at the end of a video-game level who I just couldn’t get past.

If those experiences happen again and again, you begin to doubt yourself. You might begin to withdraw into yourself a little, and not feel confident enough to express yourself and how you’re feeling in case you seem silly or stupid, or not good enough. People who are ‘shy’ often feel that way and it can be tough to try again – like it can be tough to go and pick up your controller from where you flung it the last time your health bar emptied and you were left at GAME OVER.

If people around you are constantly knocking your confidence, then the first thing to do is to use the word ‘stop’. It’s a small word, but it’s a very powerful one. Tell the person to ‘stop’ doing something that is whacking your confidence.

It’s hard to do – it can lead to some difficult conversations with people, people who might be friends or classmates or even members of your own family.

Some people would rather avoid confrontation AT ALL COSTS and will continue to allow people to knock their confidence over and over again instead. But the truth is: the only people who like confrontation are bullies – and very often those same bullies don’t realise they are bullies or the harm they are doing.

Now, I’m not calling the kids at the magic show ‘bullies’ – they were just little kids. But they behaved in a bullying way, and that first show left me running really low on confidence for a long time afterwards.

Slowly, over time, I realised that the best reaction to people who knock you, even after you tell them to STOP, is … Ready for it?

NO REACTION WHATSOEVER!

GIVE THEM AND THEIR THOUGHTS NO ENERGY. NONE. ZERO. ZILCH.

Instead of allowing a bad comment to drain your confidence, just imagine yourself coming across a golden confidence-booster ring and rushing straight through it, sending your confidence SOARING. Then imagine yourself finding another ring and smashing into it, topping your confidence up to the maximum. Then have a smile and give yourself a pat on the back, because even though they don’t know it, this person is actually helping you to BUILD your confidence, not flatten it.

When I told my granny about that first disastrous magic show with the piranha-children, she listened carefully.

I told her that maybe I wasn’t good enough to be a magician. She gave me some really great advice (which she was very good at doing).

She said: ‘Well, that’s life, Keith. Sometimes things don’t go as well as you’d planned. We all find ourselves in situations where we feel out of our depth and that we don’t deserve to be there. The thing you need to learn is that everybody feels like an imposter sometimes, just pretending to be good enough. The trick is to never give up and to keep doing the things you love until you realise you ARE good enough – or at least as good as anybody else.’ wwee aarree aallll iimmppoosstteerrss We are all imposters.

Now, don’t suddenly launch yourself at your teacher and try to pull off their mask to expose them as a bank robber or a 20-foot man-eating MONSTER. I’m not talking about that sort of imposter (though do take a very close look at your teacher, just to be safe).

An imposter can be anybody – it just means that someone is pretending to be something they’re not. And doctors who study the human brain (while it’s still inside your head) have come up with a name for that feeling of low confidence.

That name is: ‘imposter syndrome’.

It’s not a disease or anything like that, and you can’t catch it if someone sneezes on you. ‘Imposter syndrome’ is when you feel like you don’t belong in a certain situation, or that maybe you don’t deserve to be there.

It’s the feeling you get when you don’t believe in yourself. It’s as simple as that.

But something you may not know is that EVERYONE feels like an imposter sometimes. Everyone, at some point in their life, will think that they don’t have what it takes to do something, or that they were given an opportunity by mistake, not because they earned it.

Maybe you’ve competed in a dance competition where the dancers who went before you were so AMAZINGLY TALENTED that you began to think there must have been a mix-up and you weren’t supposed to be dancing alongside them. Someone with imposter syndrome might tell themselves, I’m nowhere near as good as those other dancers.

But you did deserve to be there. You just didn’t believe you did.

Seven out of ten people ON EARTH have had that feeling at some point in their lives. Athletes, movie stars, singers, astronauts, firefighters, nuclear scientists, brain surgeons – even presidents! Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama … all of these amazing people, at some point in their lives, felt the exact same way. Like they didn’t deserve to be there.

That they weren’t good enough. Even though they really were, and really did deserve everything they’d worked so hard for.

Every single one of the celebrities and sportspeople that I have helped over the years had the same reaction when I revealed this simple fact to them. 

They always said, with a huge sigh of relief, ‘So it’s not just me!’ They are incredibly talented people, but they don’t think they should be in the position that they’re in. They’re almost always waiting for somebody to expose them as an imposter.

This is good news for you! You should always remember that absolutely everyone has doubts about their looks, their talent, their intelligence and countless other things.

So, if you feel like an imposter before a hurling match or an audition, or when you’re joining a new team or class, or even just meeting new people for the first time, remember this:

THOSE OTHER PEOPLE ARE, MORE THAN LIKELY, FEELING EXACTLY THE SAME WAY – OR HAVE DONE IN THE PAST.

My granny encouraged me to keep practising my magic, so I did what I was told and practised even harder. On a trip to Edinburgh with my school, I stumbled across the most magical place I had ever set foot in: a real-life magic shop!

There aren’t many magic shops still around these days, but if you ever happen to come across one, I would strongly encourage you to take a peek inside. They’re amazing places, and this one was no exception. I was blown away when I walked through the door and saw the number of tricks, props, illusions, gadgets and books inside. I spent most of my pocket money on stuff that produced ‘smoke’ from your fingertips when you rubbed them together, and also a couple of magic books.

When I got home, I put my head down and practised for hours every single day, trying to perfect the tricks inside the books. The books gave me some great new ideas, but magic is meant to be performed for an audience and I wanted to try them out in public. I was still a bit nervous after my first magic show and didn’t really want to throw myself to the piranhas again. 

So I did a very smart thing and asked for some advice from my dad.

He told me: ‘Keith, if you practise, practise, practise, put the work in and know you have done the best you possibly can to be ready, then you can be confident of success.’ prraaccttiiccee mmaakkeess ppeerrmmaanneenntt There is an old magician’s saying that you should ‘practise until your fingers bleed, then put on plasters and practise until the plaster wears off. Then you know you’re ready.’ WAIT A MINUTE! Before you dash off to cover yourself in plasters, let me explain what this means.

To truly become the best you can be at anything – magic, singing, dancing, sword-swallowing – you have to practise until it becomes second nature to you. You should feel like you could almost do it in your sleep (though I wouldn’t recommend sword-swallowing unless you’re awake). Of course, you shouldn’t practise so much it hurts (whatever that old magician says), but a little every day really will go a long way.

So my dad’s piece of advice was a good one. I spent weeks and months with a deck of cards in my hands for up to EIGHT HOURS A DAY! I spent that time repeating all the classic moves that every magician must know: shuffles, cuts, slices, lifts and tricks. I would hold the cards all day long, so much so that eventually they felt like a strange sort of extension of my arm.

Anyone who came into my sight, I would pounce on (not literally) and show them a card trick. I still do this to this very day, so be warned: if I happen to spot you in the street, I might show you a card trick. If you want to see one, then great! If not, then I hope you have a good pair of running shoes.

Sometimes I made mistakes: producing the wrong card from someone’s ear, forgetting what to say or do next, or tearing apart a five euro note and being unable to put it back together (if you’re reading this, sis, I’m sorry I haven’t paid you back), but by making these mistakes in front of friends and family, it didn’t feel like such a big deal. And I learned from them, so they wouldn’t happen again, especially in front of an audience! It was win-win!

Practice is the key to defeating any challenge to your talents – it makes the risk of failure a lot smaller and allows you to ENJOY what you’re doing a lot more. A lion-tamer who hasn’t practised will probably find being locked up in a cage full of lions quite stressful – I know I would. But a lion-tamer who has practised their art for weeks, months or even years, will become more confident in their abilities to get along with the giant cats.

Making mistakes in front of people might sound as scary as being locked in a cage with lions, but you too can succeed if you practise. Try setting your mind to it and watch your confidence SOAR. Chess, football, skating, swimming, acting, even just speaking in front of a big group of people, giving a presentation to your class or making new pals. Practise whatever it is with your family, friends or someone that you trust. Make your mistakes in front of them so that you don’t make them when the time comes for the real thing.

Hang on, you might say, how can I practise making new pals? How can I practise speaking in front of a big group of new people for the first time? And this is where we come to a very special word … heelllloo A new classmate. A new teacher. A new friend. A new teammate.

You will meet thousands of new people in your life. 99.999% of them will be lovely, but meeting someone for the first time can still make us feel a little anxious. Feeling confident every time you meet someone new is tough, but a few simple tips can help you feel a bit more prepared and make a HUGE difference.

In my life, it was magic that helped me. It was a great way to introduce myself to new people.

Here was my script:

(ENTER KEITH) KEITH Hello, how are you?

NEW PERSON Hello, I’m grand. How are you?

KEITH I’m great! My name is Keith. I’m a magician. Do you wanna see something you’ll remember for the rest of your life?

NEW PERSON Erm … OK!

(KEITH PERFORMS AN AMAZING TRICK AND THE ROOM BURSTS INTO A HUGE ROUND OF APPLAUSE. A HELICOPTER CRASHES THROUGH THE ROOF AND A HOLLYWOOD AGENT JUMPS OUT, EXTENDING A HAND TO A DUMBSTRUCK KEITH).

AGENT Keith! Come with me to Hollywood, I’ve just gotten word that you’ve won every magic award on the planet simultaneously! We’ve got to go and buy your tuxedo!

KEITH WOOP WOOP!

Okay, so I might have gotten a bit carried away there, but the first bit is true.

‘Hello, my name is Keith. I’m a magician. Do you wanna see something you’ll remember for the rest of your life?’ At the end of this book, I’ll show you a few of my favourite tricks that I used to introduce myself.

But you don’t need magic to have confidence walking into a room full of new people. Preparing a couple of sentences, facts or questions will help a lot too!

If you’re going to a camogie camp over the summer, for example, then maybe you could prepare a couple of questions for your campmates. You could ask them who their favourite full forward is or if they’ve ever been to Croke Park or what their favourite position to play is. That’s sure to get the conversation rolling, or ‘break the ice’ as it’s sometimes called. Once you’ve asked these questions and added your own opinions then YOU’RE OFF!

One of my first proper magic jobs was working in a local restaurant, walking around the tables and performing little tricks for the customers. I was delighted to get the job (that was a great confidence boost), but it also meant that every weekend I was going to have to walk up to complete strangers and appear confident. GULP.

I thought long and hard about another way of ‘breaking the ice’ with all of these new people and finally settled on:

‘Hi, I’m the wandering magician and I was WANDERING if you’d like to see some magic?

DON’T GROAN! Yes, it’s a very corny joke – like something my dad would tell – but most of the time it worked! It was incredible how powerful the simple act of introducing myself in a fun way could be. And that’s the simple power of ‘hello’, a very magical word indeed.

It’s a good thing I could earn a little money from doing magic at the weekends, because I soon found out that I probably wasn’t ever going to be a vet! I scored pretty averagely on my exams when leaving secondary school – and to be a vet I needed much better grades.

So I plucked up my courage and told my parents that I wanted to be a full-time magician and hypnotist instead. Let’s just say … they weren’t DELIGHTED by the idea. In fact, they were pretty set against it. 

In their minds I might as well have told them I wanted to be the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! They knew that magic and hypnotism were talents of mine, but they saw them as hobbies – NOT as full-time jobs that could earn me money.

While magic had begun to earn me some pocket money, I still wasn’t entirely convinced that hypnotism was real – mainly because I had never seen it work! I tried to hypnotise members of my family at home, but nothing seemed to stick: I couldn’t get them to fall into a deep sleep and do whatever I wanted, however hard I tried!

Until that day in Irish class.

Trying to hypnotise my best mate, David, I sent him into a ‘deep sleep’ and commanded him to act like a chicken.

There was a pause, and SUDDENLY he leapt out of his chair, clucking and pecking around like a hen on one of the farmyards back home. As the class descended into chaos, I sat there as amazed as everyone else that my hypnotism had actually worked! He squawked, plucked, flapped and strutted around as my classmates laughed and my teacher bellowed at him to stop.

With a sudden jolt, the clucking stopped and David was back in the room, slumping into his seat, bewildered.

He couldn’t remember doing any of it, but he still got detention from the teacher.

That was the first moment I realised the true power of hypnosis.

I began to bring the art of hypnosis into my magic tricks, the excitement of this encounter inspiring me to spend even MORE time practising my tricks up in my bedroom. I spent COUNTLESS HOURS perfecting elaborate shuffling techniques, creating my persona of a confident and well- spoken magician with lightning-fast movements, invisible to the audience’s untrained eyes.

The more and more I practised, the more I came to recognise the elements of tricks that worked, and the parts that didn’t. I slowly but surely adapted the tricks to suit me, and they evolved into living and breathing beings that were entirely of my own making.

And they were working. Instead of awkward smiles from family friends when I messed up tricks, or giggles from my friends when things went wrong, I was nailing every single one. I was being clapped on the back and being begged to repeat amazing illusions. I was getting better, and my confidence was growing with every trick.

I was realising the true POWER OF PRACTICE!

Mind Magic is aimed at 7-12 year olds, published by Gill Books.