1986
International Teen Award Winner
Winner of the Tannen's International Competition in New York.
• About Guy Bavli
Everyone has something they were told they could never become.
I was the fat kid, bullied, ignored, and made to feel like I didn’t belong. But the story others write for you doesn’t have to become the story you live.
Change what you believe about yourself, and you can change what becomes possible.
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Well...
Before any of this I was the kid no one picked
I was overweight. I was bullied. I was the kind of child adults forget is in the room. I wanted, more than anything, to be liked.
If you have ever felt invisible in a room you were physically standing in, you and I already know each other.
Where it began
Three moments that rewired me before I was ten.
Uri Geller on television
The first was a man bending a spoon on TV.
I saw Uri Geller on Israeli TV. I was five years old, sitting on the floor of our living room, and I realized something that changed the shape of my life: the people who do impossible things in front of audiences don't have to look like superheroes. They can look like anyone. They can look like me.
Charlie Chaplin
The second was Charlie Chaplin.
I watched a man with no dialogue make a roomful of strangers feel things they didn't have words for, and I understood something that has guided every show I have ever performed: the most powerful moments on a stage are not the loud ones, they are the ones the audience feels.
My father's spoon
The third was my father.
He showed me a spoon trick. A simple one. I took it to school the next day, and for the first time in my life the kids in my class wanted me near them. Three years later, a country club booked me for my first paid show. I was eight.
That is the moment I understood, before I had the language for it, that the way you make an audience feel can change your entire life.
Seventeen
At seventeen,I lost seventy pounds
I woke up one morning and decided the kid who had been carrying that body around since he was five was not the man I wanted to be. So I changed it. Thirty-six kilos. Gone.
The moral isn’t the weight. The moral is what I learned in the doing of it: the mind is the muscle that does the work. You program yourself differently and the rest follows.
That single idea sits underneath every keynote I deliver, every book I write, and every stage I walk onto. I didn’t fix myself at seventeen. I learned that the mind can be retrained, and everything since has been a lifelong study of how that actually works.
My pivot
The military is where I stopped being a magician
I served in the Air Force entertainment group. I performed for soldiers and officers who had been awake for three days, who had no time for pulled-from-a-hat tricks, who were not impressed by props.
What they responded to was a man who could read his audience and make them feel something true in the seven minutes he was given.
That is when I pivoted from magic to mentalism. A trick ends the moment the surprise lands, and what I had wanted to do since the living room with Uri Geller was to work inside the audience’s mind: to change what people think, feel, and believe is possible.
The audience is the star of the show. I simply take them on an unforgettable empowering journey of the mind.
Career timeline
Then I worked. A lot.
What decades of reading audiences taught me
Mentalism taught me much more than how to create impossible moments. It taught me how people focus, what they overlook, why they trust, how assumptions shape decisions, and how quickly possibility expands when we question what we believe.
Today, I bring those lessons into every keynote, corporate experience, and live show. The format may change, but the purpose remains the same: to help people see more, think differently, and recognize what their minds are truly capable of.
Three things that make me stand out from the rest.
Everyone has their own version of the fat child.
Mine was a body. For someone else it is a stutter, a shyness, a story they were told about themselves at six years old that they have not yet stopped carrying. Some part of the wiring that says: people like me don’t get to do things like that.
I am living proof the wiring is movable. The overweight five-year-old who could not get the kids at school to look at him is the man on the Carnegie Hall stage, on the Superhuman set, holding the Dunninger Award. Not because the five-year-old got fixed. Because he learned that what he had been told about himself was not the same thing as what was true.
Everything I do is in service of one idea: you are not broken. The wiring is movable. You program yourself differently and the rest follows.
I demonstrate it instead of telling you about it, because people believe what they see happen in front of them.
Where am I now?
I live in Fort Lauderdale with my wife and three children.
I tour. I write. I run a residency in South Florida. I am a certified clinical hypnotherapist. I am working on the next two books. I am playing more piano than I used to.
And I am, as my wife will gladly tell anyone who asks, still completely unable to read her mind.
