No matter what your job is, the most important part of your work is facing challenges. Whether you're a sales rep or an engineer on an oil rig, whether you're in customer service or the management team, inevitably your job comes down to trying to make the impossible possible.

As it happens, making the impossible possible is an exact job description of the professional magician. He makes the impossible possible with imagination, innovative thinking, specialized skills, experience, teamwork, creative problem-solving, and reasonable risk-taking. Jamy Ian Swiss knows about these tasks from firsthand experience, and he can speak about them to your organization with deep insight and high impact.

Magical Metaphors are thought-provoking and memorable presentations that illustrate and motivate creative and innovative thinking. Every talk is tailor-made for the audience and the subject, and may make use of any or allof these metaphors, along with others not described here.

Do you need:
--A dynamic keynote speaker to kick off an annual conference?
--An upbeat closing presentation filled with meaningful take-aways to cap an awards program?
--A focussed, hard-hitting dose of real-world motivation perfectly suited to results-oriented breakout sessions?

Let the Magical Metaphors of Jamy Ian Swiss work magic for your organization!

The Magical Metaphors

1. Think creatively

People draw conclusions based on their experience – and that very trait is exactly what magicians use to deceive us. Creative thinking begins when we reject the obvious choices, calling into question our most basic assumptions and every aspect of our thought processes. Jamy offers a striking demonstration of how magicians more often deceive the mind rather than the eye. This metaphor provides both an insight into the psychology of deception, and an important lesson on how to think creatively.

2. Working miracles

"Making the impossible, possible." That's how many people describe their jobs. Management asks for miracles everyday and the employees who can perform those miracles are the most highly valued. To the uninitiated, the feats of top performers seem impossible. Some may suspect divine intervention. Others think that, like magicians, top performers possess some secret, arcane knowledge. But in fact, anyone who masters their craft does so through a long process of dedication, mentoring, and experience - and while the magician may wear his secrecy on his sleeve (and occasionally up it!), the fact is that all of us possess specialized knowledge and highly refined abilities. Jamy makes this point in this demonstration, displaying a skill of almost unimaginable difficulty that, like your own refined skills, may look like magic to the uninitiated.

3: Teamwork

We all know that teamwork is part of being successful and productive on the job. But teamwork isn't just about sitting around a table together and trying to get along. When everyone is aligned toward achieving the same objective, real teamwork can even take place on an intuitive level, where all participants, both explicitly and implicitly, find themselves driving the team toward the goal.

4: Setting the climate for innovative thinking

To think creatively one can't be afraid of breaking the rules. Jamy establishes a truly creative climate by breaking one of the biggest rules of all: the Law of Gravity. "If you're going to learn to fly, first you have to learn to let go."

5: Creative problem-solving

First Jamy presents a magic effect that's impossible to believe. Then he invites the audience to brainstorm together on ways the impossible could have been accomplished. When the truth is finally revealed, audience members are left with a powerful metaphor that they will remember when faced with the challenge of creative problem-solving.

6: Take risk, take action

No tricks this time, just a genuine risk – often a critically important element of success. Your job is to mitigate that risk. Jamy discusses how magicians judge reasonable risks, then takes a dramatic one himself.