All the world’s a stage, especially for persuasion.

“But the whole time I’ve been a performer I’ve been interested in the interplay between the world of acting and the world of business,” he said. He began developing his Act Professional curriculum 12 years ago. To test his mettle, he signed on as a trainer at Performance of a Lifetime, an organizational development firm started by two sometimes actors. In 2008, Act Professional opened for business, working mostly with nonprofits and universities. Through the years, Mr. Grupper has taken clients as disparate as Unicef, Citigroup and Estée Lauder.

This WSJ article profiles Grupper as both a successful stage actor and business consultant for CEOs. Grupper clearly gets the performance part of persuasion and the emphasis upon playing for the Other Guys. He helps muggles struggle with their Sincerity and shows them how to find the art of persuasion.

Remember: All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

You see this all the time. A web story attracts your attention with the Top 10 Ways to Get Lucky or Top 10 Ways to Get Rich or, you know the drill. You fall for it and click . . . into a 10 page slide show replete with new ads on each refreshed slide. Like this one about Top 12 Best Email Marketing Tips for Professionals.

No marketing professional would find anything of use in this listing. No tips. No wisdom. No insight. No nothing but a Top List. Sure, it attracts hits or Reception in the first stage of the Cascade, but realize the persuasion emptiness of the ploy. The click represents an atom of attention, processing, or response, the smallest indication, a mere twitch. Aggregate a million of these twitches and what kind of Change can you Count?

See again the difference between Smoke and Mirrors, and Persuasion.

The Internet beguiles with Big Data of traces, glimmers, and evaporations as if you are Dr. Frankenstein and can create life from the assembly of small dead parts.

Here’s an interesting WSJ article that looks at American health care delivery and divides it into two well known camps: Best Practices or Market Forces. The Best Practices approach argues that experts should acquire scientific knowledge, evaluate its quality, then define Best Practices that should be delivered throughout the system for both providers and people. Market Forces argues instead that delivery should be based on what people want and will pay for with providers who decide what they want to give and at what price.

You can see metaphorically the two approaches to persuasion in this case. Persuasion can take either a Source or a Receiver orientation. With the Source approach everything depends upon how the Source thinks and acts, the process and the outcome flow from Source creativity and action. The Receiver orientation is just my Rule, It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid. It doesn’t matter what you do, it matter whether the Other Guy changes.

The Best Practices approach to health is that Source orientation. The Source is the expert and drives everything else. By contrast, Market Forces hit that Receiver orientation and the emphasis upon the Other Guys.

Sure, it takes two to tango and you always have Source and Receiver mixed in every persuasion play if only because we’re talking about communication and those parts must always play. This isn’t Either-Or. It is emphasis.

My bias from both experience and research is on that Receiver, Other Guy orientation. I was never smart enough and could not find enough smart enough partners to get close to the Queen of Tomorrow solution where a bunch of us experts Made It Happen. As long as I kept my own supreme intelligence and efficacy in a straightjacket and maintained a laser beam focus on Other Guys, I could occasionally find success.

Given the size of the persuasion problem here with over 300 million Americans and a couple of million providers of various types, I don’t see how any expert or group of experts can possibly arrive at a solution that actually works. Sure, you can pretend like the Obama Administration does with their health and safety interventions, assuming, of course, you can get them past a court – whodda thought persuasion had to be legal? But even when legal, they don’t produce much Change in Other Guys.

And, isn’t that the TACT?

Really.

TRY this: place a forkful of food in your mouth . . . Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry. Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam. Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating.

Okay, stop giggling there in back. This is serious. There’s a pay off. Keep reading.

“As we practice this regularly, we become aware that we don’t need to eat as much,” said Phap Khoi, 43, a robed monk who has been stationed at Blue Cliff since it opened in 2007. “Whereas when people just gulp down food, they can eat a lot and not feel full.” It’s this byproduct of mindful eating — its potential as a psychological barrier to overeating — that has generated excitement among nutritionists like Dr. Cheung.

The article then details a variety of mindful eating experiences weaving threads of Buddhist mediation as a metaphor that guides the mental state behind the chewing. Remove the spiritualist notions and the inevitable Silicon Valley example (Google holds a weekly one hour silent vegan lunch in their cafeteria) and the New New Thing here is quite familiar: WATTage.

Most of us, most of the time, buy and consume food in a Low WATT state. We Cue from color, smell, recommendation, comparisons or scribbles on the menu chalkboard. Then, most often surrounded by family, friends, or just a mass of humanity in the café, diner, or table we eat while we talk, laugh, drink, hoot, stare, drift, or hurry. With food easily accessible, safe, abundant, tasty, affordable, and omnipresent, just throw the WATTage switch to Low and you get that spare tire.

We don’t need synonyms or metaphors or religion or the Google Cool (Lunch)Table for this from a persuasion theory perspective. We’re just talking about good old WATTage, that dimmer switch we turn from moment to moment, but most often left in the efficient and effective Low WATT setting. No fooling: think while you eat and you will eat less.

Thus, standard persuasion theory strongly supports mindful eating as a reasonable intervention to control eating and overweight. But, persuasion theory and research also proves that High WATT plays are the most difficult to trigger and maintain. Most people most of the time simply cannot sustain High WATTage in the way mindful eating requires. Let’s recall the brilliant Professor Whitehead from 1911.

A society advances by the number of operations it can perform without thinking.

This from the guy who cowrote the Principia Mathematica. Whitehead goes on to note.

Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Thus, even before your favorite 1970s dual process model (Kahneman and Tversky, Petty and Cacioppo, Shelly Chaiken and just on the persuasion side), we’ve got a mathematician, of all people, seeing WATTage and its variation. Whitehead’s military comparison also illuminates the rarity of High WATT operation, restricting it to decisive engagements, not everyday experience.

Thus, mindfulness advocates are essentially arguing for “Charge!” everytime we eat which is easy, fun, and popular if you score high on the Need for Cognition scale. Those in the top 15% have no trouble with daily cavalry assaults and cannot understand why the rest of us want to sit in the shade pounding down Twinkies with nary a thought. These differences in cognition and human nature escape even the mindful.

Thus, mindful eating is yet another example of confusing the word for the thing, of, gasp, eating the menu. To say, “Think!” and believe we have a solution is like clicking your heels and thinking of Dorothy, Toto, and Kansas when you want to escape. You only awaken to the loving arms of Auntie Em in the movies.

Or more artfully expressed with George Booth.

The last words go to Whitehead.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.

Think about it, mavens and muggles.

One of the great things about growing up slightly Southern in the 1950s is all the great health stories I can relate. When I was a little kid I had bad earaches, but my mom had a fabulous down home solution. She’d sit me her lap, whispers sweet nothings in my ear while blowing smoke from her cigarette. Of course, I’ll probably develop cancer of the ear someday and her treatment was no cure for my earaches, but it sure felt good.

Which may be your response while reading . . .

And noise is no minor nuisance. It is one of the great underappreciated health hazards of our time—the secondhand smoke of our ears.

Thus, begins yet another attempt to persuade with the smoking metaphor. Beyond the fact that second hand smoke is largely a Tooth Fairy tale with trivial effects in highly adjusted equations – please, read the methods and results – the smoking metaphor is merely this writer’s attempt to model my mom and blow smoke in your ears.

No doubt, smoking is the single most destructive health behavior you can perform – again, please read the methods and results. That smoking kills is so obvious that everyone, including the tobacco companies, feels the Apples Falling on their heads. Thus persuasion muggles seek the Smoking Metaphor as the Low WATT drug of choice to lull readers into WATtapping agreement. Ahh, noise is like smoking (second hand), sip, tap.

And what about Noise? Again, read the damn methods and results section, not the damn headlines, intro, or discussion. Noise was an important area of study at NIOSH during my time and among specific occupational groups was a major concern, but note the worst effects were highly limited to very specific conditions and almost always under very long exposures, years and years of a career. As I’ve noted before, usually the largest problem to persuasion here was not workers or owners, but the damn zealots blowing their horns for the Noise Bandwagon.

With everyone living so long nowadays, you are virtually guaranteed to experience hearing loss pretty much regardless of your actual exposure to dangerous noise levels. Aging gets you everywhere. If you are a zealot who confuses passion for science, then this increase in hearing loss must be a capitalist plot to rob the 99% of everything including their ears.

With today’s quote we see this zealotry on a smaller scale, but with at least an attempt at persuasion. The author is making the best case to sell a book and if you buy noise as second hand smoke then he’s tripped you over the persuasion log and letting the persuasion gravity of that metaphor pull you in his direction.

There’s a Difference Between Persuasion, and Smoke and Mirrors; with Persuasion the Illusion Lingers.