The Power of Presence in a Performative World™

Drop the Act is a behavioral intervention that reduces performative communication so leaders and teams can think more clearly, decide faster, surface problems earlier, and build trust without the cognitive and emotional cost of constant self-monitoring.

We live in a world that rewards performance.

We learn to stay polished, legible, persuasive, and controlled. Over time, that performance becomes automatic. It looks competent on the surface, but it comes at a cost. Attention fragments. Conversations flatten. Trust erodes quietly. What people say and what they actually think begin to diverge.

Most organizations experience this not as a “communication problem,” but as slower decisions, hidden risk, artificial harmony, and teams that sound aligned while struggling to move.

Drop the Act starts from a different premise:

The problem is not skill.
The problem is unconscious performance.

And the solution is not more polish, scripts, or executive presence training.
It is reducing the behaviors that force people to perform in the first place.

ABOUT THE WORK

Drop the Act sits at the intersection of psychology, communication, embodiment, and lived experience.

At its core, it is a practical, repeatable method for reducing performative communication under pressure. When performance load drops, people become easier to trust, harder to misread, and more capable of thinking together in real time.

This work does not ask people to be raw, unfiltered, or vulnerable for effect. It does not reject structure, authority, or professionalism.

Instead, it teaches people how to:

  • Stay present without self-abandonment

  • Speak clearly without managing perception

  • Listen without preparing their next move

  • Hold authority without armor

  • Surface what matters earlier, with less emotional cost

The result is what we call bounded absorption™: people are fully engaged and responsive in the room, without losing boundaries, role clarity, or control.

Drop the Act workshops are live, experiential, and diagnostic. They are not content delivery. They are behavioral practice labs designed to change how people actually show up when the stakes are real.

This work was successfully piloted over two years at the Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire, where it was developed and refined in practice with leaders, students, and professionals preparing for high-stakes roles.

ABOUT MICHAEL CINQUINO

Michael Cinquino has spent his career studying what happens to people under pressure and what allows trust, clarity, and real collaboration to emerge when outcomes matter.

He began in high-stakes environments as a United States Navy Rescue Swimmer, where presence was not a mindset but a requirement for survival. After his military service, he trained as an actor, earning a BA in Acting and Directing and an MFA in Acting from Rutgers University, where he studied with William Esper, a protégé of Sanford Meisner. That lineage instilled a deep respect for listening, embodiment, and unforced response, as well as a firsthand understanding of how performance collapses when it becomes self-protective.

Michael’s work later moved beyond the stage into leadership and organizational life. He spent nearly a decade working behind closed doors with the founders of the CIO Strategy Exchange, an invitation-only forum that convened senior Chief Information Officers from Fortune 70 organizations including Goldman Sachs, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, Disney, Lockheed Martin, and Target. These leaders met for extended, off-the-record conversations designed to surface real tensions, think forward together, and speak candidly without performance.

Those rooms made something unmistakably clear: innovation and trust do not emerge from politeness or impression management. They emerge from environments where productive tension is allowed to exist and people are not punished for thinking out loud. As Edwin Land once observed, politeness can be the poison of collaboration. Michael saw that principle lived, not theorized.

He later brought these insights into academic and applied settings, teaching at the University of New Hampshire’s Paul College of Business and Economics and building psychologically safe practice environments where people could rehearse human interaction without the cost of performance.

Today, Michael continues to develop Drop the Act through writing, speaking, and applied organizational work. He is currently pursuing a second master’s degree in Applied Psychology at Northwestern University, deepening the integration between communication science, nervous-system regulation, and leadership behavior.

Drop the Act is not about becoming someone else.
It is about removing what gets in the way of who you already are.

When people stop performing, they think better together.
When they think better together, everything else moves faster.

That is the work.