If I'm easily offended, I'm easily manipulated. So if you are that person where you are reactive, reactive, reactive, you're number one. Shut the f*** up. Because if you're looking to be respected, you need to manage yourself.
But there are times that people are in the cross and disrespect you. How do you deal with it? So there's a guy post that's toxic intelligence communities and it really, really helps when you're dealing with people. So one of the ways you deal with that kind of behavior is from protecting presidents to interrogating the world's most dangerous men.
She now teaches people how to develop mental strength and persuasive communication skills. How do they train you as a secret service agent to have that strong mental foundation that you have? There's a lot of things. So first, one of the biggest things that helps people back is the idea that I'm special.
You're not that special. For example, I was one of the first responders at 9-11. I watched thousands of people die. And one of the things that got me through it was understanding I wasn't alone in it.
And when you learn that you can get through anything. When you tell yourself, nobody knows what I'm going through. Nobody can help you because it's just you going through it. Now, the next thing, what's most important is this tool that we don't pay attention to, our body.
And there's a study where they started recording people walking. Then they laid into convicted felons and they said to them, who would you pick as prey? They all picked the same people. They were f***ing.
So there are simple things you can do with your hands, your voice, how you sit, and I will tell you everything. But also, the other thing that's actually interesting, which you didn't ask, I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.
I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you.
Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode. To summarize or define that, what is it that you think you're doing for people with the content of the books you've written, et cetera? It's a great question.
And I don't know if I have a clear answer. I think always, I think about how am I serving other people? I always go back to that. I remember even when I wrote my book, Becoming Bulletproof, actually my book was supposed to launch right at the height of COVID.
I mean, it's when the world was shutting down. And I remember I had a PR person, my agent, the publishers, everyone's like, hey, you know, this COVID thing is happening. All the media tour glitz went away. Why don't we postpone the launch of the book?
And nobody was advising me to launch the book. Nobody. Everyone's like, don't do it, don't do it. And I remember I was like, all right, I need to kind of tune everybody out.
And I paused and I thought to myself, why did I write this book? I wrote this book to help people. Okay, so if the goal is to help people, make them more resilient, help them live less fearlessly, the world right now is in a state of fear. So if I follow that principle, then right now I should launch the book.
And I remember against everybody's advisement, I launched it. And when you get DMs from people in private messages, what is it the essence of what they're coming to you for? So I was surprised with my book where people began writing in, I'm dealing with this problem. Your book helped me find a way out.
Or I'm dealing with this. Can you give me guidance on how to deal with it? What is the essence of what they're struggling with? It's always themselves.
It's not the world around you. I get it to some extent, but it's almost always where the problem. We either sabotage ourselves, we get in the way, we make decisions, or we think, I didn't do anything. Everything's cause and effect.
Anytime you say, do, act, or don't act, it has a consequence or an effect to it. And I think sometimes we're so blasé about it. In the Western world, the science shows that we actually downplay our faults. When we make a mistake, it's not that big of a deal.
We downplay ourself. And we actually lift up our positive attributes. It's okay, but to a point, because when you downplay things, and you downplay your involvement, you downplay your choices, you downplay what role you play in your life, then you really are essentially powerless. And you're blaming the world.
And I'm not saying that other people can't harm you. They will. They just will. I think if people make peace with the fact that there are bad actors out there, some I know, some I don't know, and in pursuit of their self-interest, people are going to make choices that hurt me, period, barn on the end.
If you can live with that and understand that, you will be okay. Because you just have more awareness. In fact, in me, when I did polygraphs in the interview room, after I interviewed so many people, and typically I would interview suspects, people that we suspected committing a crime. So, lie detector test.
But I was a lie detector, not the machine. A lot of people think you hook that thing up. Oh, ping, they're lying. No.
Like, you sit there, you assess people, you read people. What the polygraph does is it tells you, when you ask a series of questions to this person, I hook Stephen up, I ask him a series of several questions, I look to see what Stephen's autonomic nervous system is doing. Heartbeat, right? Does that change?
Your electrodermal activity, how much you sweat. Your breathing, the way you breathe. So that's why you have the blood pressure cough, you have the electrodermal plates, which actually look at sweating. You won't, it's imperceptible to you, but the plates will pick up sweating, the sweating activity, the change in breathing.
So if I'm asking you a series of questions, I'm looking at how your body deviates during those questions. You even have sensors, because sometimes people try to beat the polygraph. And so there's sensor pads that we have to see if they're doing certain movements or not. I personally don't think you can beat it.
But again, the test itself means nothing. You can't take it to court. You can't say, judge, they failed their polygraph. That's not what it's there for.
It's there to get more information. And look, who are you, if you're lying, who are you really in judgment of? Yourself, that's why your body's reacting. Secondly, you talked about how victims stay victims.
And this whole idea of becoming a bulletproof person, because regardless of what we do in our lives, bad things are going to happen. We're going to encounter narcissists and people that are looking to take advantage of us. There's a certain mental fortitude that you exude. You exude a certain type of mental resilience and strength.
What is the foundation? And I think that's really critical, because if you have that strong internal foundation, then everything else we're probably going to talk about today becomes much easier and possible. But without that strong foundation, when the wind blows, the house falls over. So if we think about step one in building that strong mental fortitude foundation that you have, where does one begin?
And especially if we're beginning from a very, very bad place. We're beginning from a place of... If you're interested in this episode, make sure you're interested in this episode and the rest of your episodes from other applications of the escucha.