For my first two years in magic, I was a copy. Not a deliberate copy — an unconscious one. I had watched so many performances by performers I admired that their gestures, their pacing, their word choices, and their presentation styles had colonized my own. When I performed, I was assembling a collage of other people’s voices and calling it mine.
A friend who had known me for decades watched me perform and said something devastating: “That does not sound like you.” He was right. The person on stage was a composite of five performers I admired, and none of those performers was me. The technical skills were developing. The personal voice was absent.
Finding your voice — in performance, in writing, in business, in any craft — is not about adding something. It is about subtracting everything that is not yours until what remains is authentic. The voice was always there, buried under layers of imitation. The work is excavation, not construction.
The Imitation Phase Is Necessary
Before I describe how to find your voice, I need to defend the phase that precedes it. Imitation is not a failure. It is a stage. And it is a necessary stage.
Every performer, writer, musician, and builder starts by copying. You learn by imitating the people who are good at the thing you want to be good at. You absorb their techniques, their structures, their rhythms. This absorption is how skill transfers from one person to another. Without it, every practitioner would have to invent their craft from scratch.
The danger is not in the imitation phase. The danger is in staying there.
Some performers never leave the imitation phase. They develop competence by copying and then mistake that competence for their own voice. Their performances are technically sound and personally empty. The audience can tell — not consciously, but as a vague sense that something is missing. The something that is missing is the performer themselves.
Deep practice develops technique. Personal voice is what you do with technique. The first is trainable. The second is discoverable. They require different processes.
The Subtraction Method
Finding your voice is a subtraction process. You remove everything you are doing because someone else does it until only the things that come from you remain.
Here is the process I used, and the process I recommend:
Step 1: Identify your influences. List every performer, writer, speaker, or creator whose style has shaped yours. Be honest. Include the ones whose phrasing you have adopted, whose gestures you replicate, whose structures you follow. My list had seven names, and I could identify specific elements I had borrowed from each one.
Step 2: Isolate the borrowed elements. For each influence, identify the specific elements you have adopted. “I use his pacing during reveals.” “I use her sentence structure in my writing.” “I open the way he opens.” These borrowed elements are not bad — they are someone else’s voice in your mouth.
Step 3: Remove them, one at a time. In your next practice session or performance, deliberately remove one borrowed element and see what happens. If removing it weakens the performance, the element is serving a structural purpose and you need to find your own version of it. If removing it does not change the performance, it was decoration you did not need.
Step 4: Fill the gap with whatever emerges naturally. When you remove a borrowed element, the gap it leaves will be filled — by your own instincts, your own rhythms, your own preferences. This natural filling is the beginning of your voice. It may feel awkward, uncertain, less polished than the borrowed version. That is fine. It is yours.
Step 5: Refine what emerges. The subtraction audit applies to your own emerging voice: keep refining what is naturally yours, removing what does not serve the experience, until the voice is clear and consistent.
This process took me about eighteen months. The result was a performing style that my friend from earlier would recognize as mine — informed by my influences but not controlled by them.
The Three Sources of Personal Voice
Personal voice emerges from three sources, and understanding them helps you cultivate rather than simply wait for your voice to appear.
Source 1: Your unique experience. Nobody else has lived your life. Your specific combination of experiences — twenty years of consulting, learning magic as an adult, building and exiting a company, building an accelerator programme in Austria — creates a perspective that no other performer has. When I stopped trying to sound like the performers I admired and started performing from my actual experience, the voice appeared immediately.
For any creator, the question is: what have you experienced that nobody else performing or writing in your space has experienced? That experience is the raw material of your voice. The adult learner’s advantage is relevant here — your accumulated life experience is not a deficit to overcome. It is the source of a voice that younger practitioners cannot access.
Source 2: Your natural rhythms. Every person has natural speech patterns — a default pace, a characteristic sentence length, a way of transitioning between ideas. These patterns are as distinctive as a fingerprint. When you stop imitating someone else’s rhythms and allow your natural patterns to emerge, the voice becomes recognizably yours.
Record yourself speaking naturally — not performing, just talking about something you care about. Listen to the rhythms. The pauses. The acceleration and deceleration. The words you naturally gravitate toward. These are the elements of your voice before the imitation layer was applied.
Source 3: Your values and perspective. Your voice is not just how you communicate. It is what you believe, what you find important, and what you choose to emphasize. Two performers telling the same story will tell it differently because they notice different things, care about different aspects, and draw different conclusions.
My voice emphasizes systems and mechanisms — I tend to explain why things work rather than simply showing that they work. That emphasis comes from my engineering and consulting background. Another performer with the same technique might emphasize emotion or humor or spectacle. Neither is right or wrong. Each is a voice emerging from genuine values and perspective.
Voice in Business
Personal voice is as important in business as it is in performance.
A brand without a voice is a commodity. It competes on price because it has nothing else to compete on. A brand with a distinctive voice — a way of communicating that is recognizably different from every competitor — creates preference that transcends features and pricing.
Building conviction requires voice. You cannot have genuine conviction while speaking in someone else’s words. The most convincing founders and the most compelling brands communicate in a voice that feels owned rather than borrowed.
At Vulpine Creations, our brand voice was specific and deliberate: precise, slightly understated, focused on craft rather than spectacle. That voice came from who we actually were — detail-oriented makers who cared more about the product working perfectly than about marketing hype. The voice was not designed. It was recognized and then refined.
For founders: your brand voice already exists. It is the way you naturally talk about what you do when you are not trying to sound like a business. Record yourself explaining your product to a friend over dinner. That is your voice. Refine it. But do not replace it with corporate language that sounds like everyone else.
The Courage of Voice
Finding your voice requires a specific form of courage: the willingness to sound like yourself when you are not sure that yourself is good enough. The imitation phase feels safe because you are using proven material. Your voice feels risky because it is unproven.
This is the same courage required to ship something ugly. The first version of your voice will be rougher than the borrowed version. It will lack the polish of the professional voices you have been imitating. Some audiences will respond less strongly to it, at least initially.
But it will be real. And realness, over time, outperforms polish. Because polish is available to everyone — any performer can copy a polished style. Authenticity is available only to you. It is, by definition, something nobody else can replicate. And in a world saturated with similar voices, the distinctive one is the one that gets remembered.
Key Takeaways
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Imitation is a stage, not a destination. Learning by copying is necessary and valuable. Staying in the copying phase is the risk. At some point, you must subtract the borrowed elements and discover what is yours.
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Voice is found through subtraction. Remove everything you are doing because someone else does it. What remains naturally is the beginning of your voice.
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Three sources fuel personal voice. Your unique experience, your natural rhythms, and your genuine values and perspective. All three are already present. The work is recognizing and refining them.
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Your voice already exists. Listen to yourself talking naturally about something you care about. That is the raw material. Refine it, but do not replace it.
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Authenticity outperforms polish over time. The first version of your voice will be rougher than the borrowed version. Ship it anyway. Realness compounds in ways that imitation never can.
