A former Secret Service agent who protected Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has advice for getting anyone to do what you want: “shut up” and “listen.”
“There’s a myth that people think, ‘If I do most of the talking, I’m in control,'” explained former agent and interrogator Evy Poumpouras. “It’s rubbish.”
“The biggest mistake people make is talking too much,” according to Poumpouras.
‘If I do all the talking and you listen, you are learning all about me.
“You’re learning about what matters to me, my values, my belief systems, getting a good read on me.”
The key to getting someone to do what you want, he noted, is to learn why they do what they do.
“What you have to understand is the motivational mindset of that person,” he said.
Whether it’s respect, personal security, family, money, sex, status, freedom or anything else, Poumpouras said motivation is the essential framework that will help you explain to someone that doing what you want will help them get what they want. want and need.
“If you go in with the perspective ‘I need, I want,’ you’re going to lose,” he said. ‘Go in with perspective: What does this person need?’
In addition to public speaking and writing books, former US Secret Service agent Evyenia ‘Evy’ Poumpouras (above) served as a judge on Bravo’s ‘Spy Games,’ a 2020 American reality competition based on a show of World War II that evaluated and trained civilians to be spies.
For Poumpouras, whose role as an interrogator led her to administer lie detector tests as a polygraph specialist, listening is the best way to get a good read on someone.
‘Everyone is motivated by something different. But I have to listen to you and pay attention to understand what that is,” the former secret service agent continued.
“Everyone’s purpose is different… If you give people enough space, they will reveal themselves to you.”
Poumpouras provided this little hard-earned life advice in a candid interview with Steven Bartlett about his ‘Diary of a CEO‘ podcast.
The former polygraph expert, who was also part of the detail protecting then-First Lady Michelle Obama, published a book in 2020 that teaches people how to “read people, influence situations” and “live without fear,” titled “Becoming Bulletproof.”
The book, part guidebook and part memoir, turns his 12 years of experience in the Secret Service into life lessons that anyone trying to navigate an uncertain world of complicated and enigmatic characters can learn from.
One quick tip he learned in those twelve years protecting presidents, he said: “Whenever you hear someone say ‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing,’ that’s usually the last thing you should do.”
Poumpouras has also noted that paying attention to cues through body language is no less important, while actively listening to learn more about what someone is really telling you.
“Most of what we communicate is actually through our bodies,” he said, “not through the words we speak.”
“When I talk to people, the way I know that what I’m saying resonates is that I see their head move up and down and I see their eyes follow me,” as he once said. NBC News.
“If someone leans over and you suddenly say something and they cross their arms, now I know I said something that person didn’t like,” Poumpouras added. “But you’ll miss it if you’re not looking.”
Above, Secret Service Special Agent Poumpouras in 2010, standing as President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Malia and Sasha Obama walk through the Honolulu Zoo in Hawaii.
In the years since her government service, the former Secret Service agent has given talks and courses taught about the art of reading people, whether to gain better information, gain a strategic advantage, or simply become a more effective communicator.
According to Poumpouras, his skills—honed for cultivating informants and assets, as well as dealing with some of the most dangerous people in the world—can help anyone.
She maintains that listening deeply and carefully observing body language can help anyone identify “delaying tactics, stress indicators, and misleading language that typically appear when someone attempts to cloud our judgment and derail our intuition.”
These mental resources can be useful everywhere, from business to home to returning to the dating scene.
As a Greek-American New Yorker raised in Queens, Poumpouras attributes some of her gifts and knowledge on this topic to the street smarts that brought her to the Secret Service in the first place.
The early years of life showed him how to pick up on the many subtle cues that should capture the attention of any attentive listener, but they also taught him not to beat around the bush.
‘We are very busy talking. We are too busy making noise because we think everyone needs to hear me. “Everyone needs to know me, me, me, me,” as he said on Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast. ‘Did you know? Nobody cares.