How a mentalist ended up in the boardroom

Gilan started as a mentalist. For over 20 years he's performed for audiences across more than 40 countries, reading people and creating moments that feel impossible to explain. It's a strange way to make a living, and he loves it.

What most people don't realise is what the work actually trains. It isn't a gift, it's attention. A mentalist learns to notice the things almost everyone else filters out, the micro-expression that contradicts the words, or the way a group's mood turns a half-second before anyone says anything. After enough years, you can't switch it off.

At some point Gilan started pointing that attention at leaders, and he couldn't stop seeing patterns.

He spent the first stretch of his career teaching the science of influence and persuasion, useful material drawn from behavioural science. He wrote a book about it, Persuasion Games, which became a bestseller. But over time he noticed something the influence techniques couldn't account for. Seasoned leaders who struggled often weren't struggling because they lacked technique. They were struggling because of what happened inside them when the stakes rose.

He watched senior leaders, again and again, describe a version of the same experience. A moment where the pressure to appear competent overtook their ability to think clearly, and where they stopped listening to the room because they were too busy managing how they were coming across. Gilan calls it “prove mode.” It's what happens when a leader shifts from real thinking to trying to show they know what they're talking about.

He's now had recorded conversations with close to 50 senior leaders about this, many of them on his podcast. Almost every one of them, once the conversation got honest, said some version of the same thing: “I didn't realise so many other leaders feel this way.” They'd assumed it was just them. Nobody has it fully figured out.

That's the work Gilan does now, under his company PeakAwake (formerly Influence Institute). He helps leaders see the patterns that narrow their thinking under pressure, and helps them practise a different way of operating. Not as a one-off insight, but as something they can actually do in the room when it counts.

The mentalism never left. It's woven into how he teaches, because the fastest way to show a leader how perception works is to let them experience it directly, on themselves. Gilan is a mentalist who teaches, not a teacher who happens to perform.