Healthcare Speaker: Secrets from a Magician for Medical Innovation
As a magician and healthcare motivational speaker, I will reveal how healthcare professionals can think differently to boost innovation, solve problems, transform patient experiences, and more by applying magician mindset principles.
As a magician and healthcare conference speaker, I'm often asked how learning to Think Like A Magician™ can transform healthcare, from hospitals to private practices to public health clinics.
The truth is, that thinking like a magician opens up new perspectives that uncover possibilities where other physicians see none, whether they're fresh out of med school or have decades of experience.
It empowers you to challenge assumptions, make unexpected connections, and shape perceptions, causing a major improvement in medical practice and patient experience.
What Does It Mean to Think Like A Magician™ in Healthcare?
To Think Like A Magician™ is to perceive healthcare and the patient-centered experience in a whole new light beyond just medical science. Whether you're a clinical professor, chief executive officer, biomedical research specialist, nutrition expert, family physician, executive director, or board president, learning to Think Like A Magician™ will uncover new ways of providing patient care, education, and healing.
It means seeing, thinking, and acting in ways that another practicing physician cannot.
Think About Thinking
Thinking like a magician also involves thinking about thinking itself. It means perceiving your own healthcare perceptions from an objective viewpoint to create a clear vision of possibility.
It involves reviewing and challenging ingrained healthcare beliefs and assumptions, pushing past preconceived notions for the patient's well-being.
Embrace Wonder
Thinking like a magician allows you to regain a sense of wonder, seeing healthcare anew with fresh eyes. It helps conjure up new care options, procedures, and opportunities that may not be obvious at first glance.
It enables understanding the role perception plays in care, stepping outside your own perspective to see things from different angles.
New Connections
A magician's mindset reaches into the unknown to make unexpected connections and associations, thinking about health expansively. It develops a deeper understanding of patients and their needs, probing below the surface.
Thinking like a magician shapes healthcare perceptions in purposeful ways, taking an active role rather than leaving things to chance.
How This Mindset Can Transform Healthcare
As a healthcare keynote speaker, I teach that adopting a magician’s mindset can bring tremendous benefits across all areas of healthcare:
Foster Healthcare Innovation
Thinking differently breaks status quo mentalities and unlocks creativity. By questioning assumptions, you can conceive innovative treatments, procedures, devices, and solutions.
Making connections between disparate ideas merges different perspectives in medicine and care. This cross-pollination delivers originality.
A beginner's mindset and curiosity lead to exploring healthcare concepts in new ways. Known ideas become fresh again.
Improve Healthcare Problem-Solving
Seeing any healthcare situation from multiple viewpoints provides clarity. You understand the true underlying issues.
With this clarity, you can develop targeted, effective solutions that tackle the root causes of health problems.
Thinking expansively about healthcare issues pulls in diverse ideas. The synergy provides answers.
Enhance Healthcare Communication
Understanding patient perspectives allows you to better convey care instructions and build rapport.
Expressing healthcare ideas creatively makes communication engaging. Patients tune in.
Flexible thinking helps you decode patient meaning and craft messages they grasp.
Boost Healthcare Morale
Regaining a sense of wonder makes healthcare work exciting, not monotonous. Providers feel energized and empowered.
Creativity and mental playfulness produce satisfaction and fun. Enthusiasm increases.
Collaborating on novel solutions gives providers a sense of collective accomplishment.
Streamline Healthcare Processes
Like a magician looking to finetune a routine, looking at processes with a beginner's eye highlights areas for improvement. Even small tweaks can optimize medical workflows.
Thinking about processes in new ways reveals overlooked steps that can be removed or consolidated.
Strengthen Healthcare Culture
Flexible thinking fosters an open, collaborative healthcare culture. People feel safe suggesting ideas.
Creativity and innovation become integral to organizational identity. This attracts top talent.
Leadership emphasizes learning and growth. The organization stays competitive.
As a healthcare speaker, trainer, and facilitator, I teach that a magician's mindset can benefit all aspects of healthcare, but one of the most profound impacts is on patient experiences. Let's look closer at how when you Think Like a Magician™, you can transform patient perceptions.
Use Magicians' Thinking Tools In the Healthcare System
Many healthcare speakers teach about patient-centered care, but when I speak to physicians, doctors, hospital group leaders, medical associations, and private practices, I speak (and entertain) from the unique vantage point of a magician. I teach that magic is a rich source of thinking tools. Those tools apply to any medical organization and any healthcare role, but they also apply to individuals. You can make magic work for you, at work in healthcare.
To prove it, I’m going to share a few magician’s secrets that can help you improve your medical career in the following areas:
Innovation and lateral thinking
Perception management
Social intelligence
Innovation and lateral thinking
Magicians have always had to work backward: They come up with a surprising effect and then devise a means to accomplish it. They must consider all mental, visual, and physical tools available.
That’s why magicians were the first to employ mirrors, magnets, and electromagnets, and why they are often a decade or two ahead of the mainstream in using new technologies or scientific principles to surprise their audiences.
And to continue astonishing people, a magician can’t stick with the same tactics. Their tricks must constantly evolve, but - here’s the key - their approach to developing new material stays the same: Magicians start the creative process by acting as if anything is possible. They don’t limit themselves.
To be creative and innovative in health care, you have to be able to see existing resources as more than they are, you have to seek methods and technologies unknown to you (and maybe to others).
You can’t do any of those things when you decide preemptively that any end goal - a new service, treatment, patient care model, or healthcare system - is outside the range of what’s possible.
Magicians start the creative process by expanding that range to include anything and everything. That mindset is the takeaway that you can apply to medical innovation in health care, whether you directly manage 30 nurses, perform critical frontline physician work, or you're doing groundbreaking work in university cancer research.
Perception Management
However creative, no magician’s trick is complete with only physical tools and technologies. To fool an audience, a magician has to do something the other person doesn’t know, recognize or perceive. Knowing and managing an audience’s perceptions are what make the trick.
Similarly, to be the most effective in health care, it’s not enough for doctors to just be creative. Healthcare professionals must also accurately understand what people around you - patients, doctor coworkers, hospital leadership - perceive. What they believe and expect about medical care and your healthcare role.
If you’re going to communicate better, produce better patient outcomes, manage care better, or provide better service, you need to know what others see. How? Perform your own informal surveys. Do some digging on what your patients believe about the medical care they will receive before an appointment. Find out what delighted or disappointed them last time they visited the doctor's office or hospital - and why.
Simply taking the time to do this in health care will put you ahead. Do the work beforehand to more deeply understand what others believe they know, how they see you, and what they are looking for in their medical care, and you’ll be able to deliver and even dazzle by exceeding expectations.
Social Intelligence
Really successful magicians aren’t just good at tricks. They’re great entertainers. They pull people in. They enchant. Why? They read people in a way others don’t. They take our second secret a step further. Perception management - the ability to understand how people perceive you and your healthcare work - is a skill that can be learned, developed, and refined in healthcare. Practice taking others’ perspective long enough and you’ll develop a powerful tool: social intelligence.
Magicians influence imaginations and suspend reality, but influencers of all types practice the kind of empathy that rises to the level of social intelligence.
Being a great medical provider doesn’t just mean having great knowledge; it’s understanding and anticipating the thoughts and needs of patients, doctors, and nurse coworkers.
It’s knowing how they think and feel and making informed guesses on how they will react. It’s about being ready instead of reacting in panic. And you can do the same thing in your healthcare role.
Constantly assess what those you serve and work with in the medical field are perceiving, what they expect, and how they feel.
Do this not just during crucial moments, but at every point of interaction. Do it well enough and it will be what sets you apart. It will become your magic, your own wow factor in delivering patient care.
Transforming Patient Perceptions
As a magician, my goal is to create wonder and astonishment for my audiences. But the true magic lies not in performing illusions, but in transforming perceptions. The principles magicians use to manipulate perception can be powerful tools in healthcare.
In the next part of this post, I'll share key lessons on influencing perception that I share in my healthcare keynote presentations. While a magician's role is entertainment, these perception principles can help healthcare professionals create more positive patient experiences.
Attention and Awareness
A key magician skill is directing audience attention. We hyper-focus attention on certain actions to disguise others happening secretly.
In healthcare, we must balance attention and awareness. Attention is hyper-focused, while awareness sees the big picture. A waiter focused on refilling water won't notice another customer waiting to order. Someone checking vital signs may not be aware of a patient's uneasy body language.
When you enter a patient's room, open your awareness to signals they project. Notice their facial expressions, posture, tone of voice. Then focus your attention on addressing their needs. Avoid tunnel vision on medical tasks so you don't miss emotional cues.
Assumptions and Acknowledgement
Magicians assume audiences will be skeptical, so we acknowledge those feelings. "I know what you're thinking - this trick looks impossible!" Addressing assumptions builds trust and connection.
Patients make plenty of assumptions when they visit your facility. Acknowledge their mindset to ease anxiety. "I know you've been waiting a while. We had an emergency, but I just finished up, and I'm here to take great care of you now."
Simple acknowledgement shows you're paying attention beyond just medical procedures. Find opportunties, even through humor, to address assumptions to create rapport.
Attitude and Approach
Magicians tailor their approach to each audience's energy. Is the group excited or skeptical? Open and laughing or stone-faced? We quickly assess attitudes and match their mood.
To connect with different patients, adjust your attitude and approach. A outgoing, talkative person appreciates enthusiasm and humor. A quiet, analytical type may want you to get right to medical facts.
Learn to identify patient personalities quickly, like the suits in a deck of cards:
Diamonds want fun, variety, compliments
Hearts need support, kindness, partnership
Clubs require facts, accuracy, time to decide
Spades demand efficiency, control, and authority
Flex your approach, not just your medical actions. The same treatment plan presented emotionally can comfort a Heart, logically convince a Club, or as an empowering choice engage a Spade.
Reading Your Patients
Just as a magician closely observes their audience, healthcare professionals can better serve patients by reading their personalities and adapting care accordingly. Let's do a deeper dive into the four main personality types in my Personality Magic system.
Identifying the Suits
You can identify someone's personality type, or "suit", by observing two factors - their speed and their temperature.
Fast talkers with lots of excitement and energy are Diamonds and Spades. Slower, more methodical people are Hearts and Clubs. Warm, engaged individuals are Hearts and Diamonds, while reserved, analytical types are Clubs and Spades.
Diamonds crave attention and exploration. Hearts seek harmony and support. Spades want control and decision-making power. Clubs value expertise and being right.
Adapting Care
Knowing your patient's personality type allows you to interact with them more effectively. For example, you can:
Let Clubs analyze test results and share their expertise. This makes them feel valued.
Give Spades some control in decision-making so they feel empowered.
Show appreciation and reassurance to Hearts to make them feel supported.
Recognize Diamonds' needs and give them attention, or even an audience amongst the other medical staff.
When you adapt your care to suit each patient's personality, you build trust and achieve better outcomes, just like a magician meeting the needs of their audience. Reading your patients is a critical healthcare skill.
Anticipation and Astonishment
Magicians build anticipation by revealing key parts of a trick upfront. Surprises satisfy once, but known outcomes create eager anticipation.
Reduce patient fear and build anticipation by explaining treatment steps: "First we'll get your vitals, then the doctor will examine you, and after that we'll go over your medication plan." Knowing what to expect is calming.
I also change the language of my scripts to spark anticipation and maximize the astonishment of the effect. Instead of "watch as the cards turn face up except yours," I say "all cards will turn face down except your card." That focused expectation increases their amazement when it happens.
In your healthcare facility, look for opportunities big and small to direct patients' anticipation. From showing them the surprise gift they'll receive after treatment, to previewing step-by-step what you'll accomplish together, you guide their expectations to create better experiences.
Applying the Principles
While healthcare is serious business, Think Like a Magician™ principles help build connection and trust with patients. What matters most:
Balance attention and awareness of each patient's state
Acknowledge assumptions to create rapport
Adjust your attitude and approach to their personality
Direct anticipation to reduce anxiety and build astonishment
Small tweaks to your language and behavior can transform patient perceptions. I hope these lessons from my magician's perspective provide fresh insight on influencing the patient experience in your healthcare work.
Bringing the Magic to Your Next Healthcare Event
As a professional magician and speaker, I incorporate lessons on magicians’ thinking into entertaining and inspiring healthcare keynotes. I'll work with you before the event to understand your goals, tailor the message, and deliver a one-of-a-kind experience that will be quite different from other medical speakers, healthcare speakers, or motivational you've heard from in the past.
My keynote presentations blend motivation, education, perception, entertainment, technology, and transformation. In addition to simply being a fun motivational speaker, I promise attendees will leave with new perspectives along with practical healthcare takeaways to solve challenges.
Tell Me What You’re Planning
If you want to infuse more innovation, inspiration, and vision into your healthcare organization, let's talk. Whether you'd like me to kick off your conference or be your closing speaker, contact my team to brainstorm how we can bring a touch of magic to your next healthcare event, conference, or meeting.
