With enough mental power, Gilan Gork could apparently bend spoons and forks in public. But he called it quits on his cutlery-destroying habit after he was kicked out of restaurants one too many times. Today, he is billed as "South Africa's Mentalist", rather than a psychic. And although many people are rightly sceptical of anyone claiming to have special powers, several blue-chip South African companies, including Vodacom, MTN, FNB, Adcock Ingram, Sasol and Toyota, have hired him to entertain or to rev up their sales team, and to improve their deal-clinching skills.Initially, companies hired the 30-year-old Gork only as an entertainer: his reputed bag of tricks include an ability to read minds and predict outcomes, which is what earned him the title of mentalist.But quick-thinking CEOs and sales managers soon realised that they could use him to improve their margins."I've always had CEOs and sales managers come up to me afterwards and ask: 'If that's what you can do for fun, can't you use these techniques in business?'" he told Business Times this week.That was a couple of years ago, and Gork has been running training seminars for companies since, in South Africa and across the continent.Gork's seminars touch on aspects of exploiting the subconscious through persuasion and influence, starting from how to read people's body language to the psychology of leadership and sales. At a personal level, these skills can be adapted to situations such as negotiating a salary increase, succeeding in a job interview, wrangling the right price for a house and even convincing someone to go out on a date.Recently, he crammed these techniques into a book, Persuasion Games, about the mind games of influence. In the next few days, Gork will teach these techniques in one-day seminars across the country, from Port Elizabeth to Bloemfontein.His party tricks lean heavily on psychology, rather than magic."I'm not psychic. I don't hear your voice in my head. I specialise in things like reading people's body language. It's not like I'm actually reading your inner deeper secrets. It's more like strategic psychology," he said.He also relies on the power of suggestion and psychology, including hypnosis and persuasion, some of which underlies so-called psychic readings, which is another mystery he will debunk in the seminar.So what will he do in these seminars? Teach people to read minds?Not exactly."I explain how in the animal kingdom there are fixed response patterns: animals will respond in a fixed way to a certain stimulus that completely bypasses logic and conscious thought."Humans, too, have a fixed response to certain stimuli, so learning the psychology of how brains work and how people perceive the world can be effective when it comes to persuasion - "to get them to start thinking along certain lines without them even realising," he said.This is how Gork, who had been mentored by mentalists since his teens, "reads" minds.Persuasion, although not a foreign concept, was a skill that many people did not understand, he said.Even though someone may learn persuasion through life experience, usually it cannot be applied in a cut-and-paste fashion to various contexts.But this doesn't explain his mysterious ability to bend spoons.Gork puts his cutlery-bending mental powers down to a strong mind, which he said he developed from playing with educational toys his parents sold as a business.Those hoping to learn the sorcery behind mind-reading might be disappointed, but Gork said the techniques he taught could help people avoid being exploited by others...