Being articulate and educated helps as does a decent outfit and polished shoes but whatever you do, you have to have the conviction to believe in yourself and your abilities else no-one else will.
You need to have a polished, erudite and charismatic persona. If you look like a snotty nosed precocious kid or look like Yaniv Deautsch, forget it. Being a mentalist you have to be convincing. However, the first goal of mentalism is to entertain and emotionally touch people in a way that they will remember. If you want to perform or make people believe you have special gifts, great, you are getting there. You cannot control people in any reliable way but you might just be able to give the impression you can. Mentalism can do the former, it can't do the latter despite what Derren Brown appears to do. What are you trying to get out of it? Do you want to impress the girlies or do you want to control people like a Jedi master? Let me get one thing clear. When beginning mentalism you have to first decide if mentalism is for you. I might not be right but then again judging from some of the brainless posts on the Cafe, I'm not entirely wrong when I say that there is so much conflicting crap when it comes to advice for newbies I decided to cut through it all and see if I can make life a lot simpler and save you motherfuckers a few bucks in the process. Call it an attack of conscience but I've dug deep and decided to distill my take on beginner's mentalism.
I've had many people write to me and say, 'Tommy, you seem like a knowledgeable kind of guy, why all the abuse? What about giving us some advice and doing something constructive?'.
Welcome Gunnsters to my first non abuse based bullshit free 'educational' pieces.