Ex-Secret Service agent reveals ‘spy trick’ to get people to do what you want
An ex-Secret Service agent who protected Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has a tip for getting someone 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,’” explains former agent and interrogator Evy Poumpouras. “It’s garbage.”
“The biggest mistake people make is that they talk a lot,” Poumpouras said.
“If I just talk and you listen, you’ll learn everything about me.
“You learn what I care about, my values, my belief systems, and you get to know me well.”
The key to getting someone to do what you want, she noted, is learning why they do what they do.
“What you want to understand is that person’s motivational mindset,” she said.
Whether it’s respect, personal safety, family, money, sex, status, freedom or anything else, Poumpouras said motivation is the essential framework that will help you make the best of someone who does what you want, will help him get what he wants. want and need.
“If you go into it with the ‘I need, I want’ perspective, you’re going to lose,” she said. “Go in with the perspective: What does this person need?”
In addition to her public speaking and book writing, ex-US Secret Service agent Evyenia ‘Evy’ Poumpouras (above) served as a judge on Bravo’s ‘Spy Games’ – a 2020 US reality competition based on a show from the World War II in which civilians were trained as spies
For Poumpouras, who administered polygraph tests in her interrogation role as a polygraph specialist, the best way to properly read someone is to listen.
‘Everyone is motivated by something different. But I need to hear you and pay attention to you 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 gave this hard-won life advice in a candid interview with Steven Bartlett about his ‘Diary of a CEO‘podcast.
The former polygraph expert, who also worked to protect then-First Lady Michelle Obama, published a book in 2020 in which he teaches people how to “read people, influence situations” and “live fearlessly,” titled “Becoming Bulletproof.”
Part guidebook, part memoir, the book turns her twelve years of experience in the Secret Service into life lessons that anyone trying to find their way in an uncertain world filled with difficult and enigmatic characters can learn from.
She said one quick tip she’s learned in her 12 years protecting presidents: “Anytime you hear someone say, ‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing,’ that’s usually the last thing you should do.” ‘
Paying attention to body language cues, Poumpouras also noted, 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,” she said, “not through the words we speak.”
“When I talk to people, I know what I’m saying resonates because I see their heads nodding up and down and their eyes following me,” she once said NBC News.
“If someone leans in and you suddenly say something with your arms folded, I now know that 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 lectured and courses given about the art of reading people, whether you want to get better information, gain a strategic advantage, or simply become a more effective communicator.
Her skills – honed in cultivating informants and assets and dealing with some of the most dangerous people in the world – can help anyone, according to Poumpouras.
She argues that listening deeply and carefully watching body language can help anyone “identify stalling tactics, stress indicators, and deceptive language that typically emerge when someone tries to cloud our judgment and derail our intuition.”
These mental resources can come in handy anywhere from business to home or when you’re back on the dating scene.
As a Greek-American New Yorker raised in Queens, Poumpouras credits some of her gifts and insights on the subject to the street talent that got her into the Secret Service in the first place.
Early life showed her how to pick up on the many subtle cues that should grab the attention of any careful listener, but it also taught her not to mince her words.
‘We’re so busy talking. We’re so busy making noise because we think everyone has to hear me. Everyone needs to know me, me, me, me,” she told Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast. ‘You know what? Nobody cares.’