Former Secret Service agent shares a “spy technique” to influence people to comply

An ex-Secret Service agent who protected presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has a tip 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 have control,” former agent and interrogator Evy Poumpouras explained. ‘It’s garbage.’

‘The biggest mistake people make is they talk a lot,’ according to Poumpouras. 

‘If I’m doing all the talking and you’re doing all the listening, you’re learning everything about me. 

‘You’re learning about what I care about, my values, my belief systems, getting a good read on me.’

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 is respect, personal safety, family, money, sex, status, freedom or anything else, Poumpouras said that motivation is the essential framework that will help you make the best case to someone that doing what you want will help them get what they want and need. 

‘If you go in with the perspective ‘I need, I want’ you’re going to lose,’ she said. ‘Go in with the perspective: What does this person need?’ 

For Poumpouras, whose interrogation role saw her administering lie detector tests as a polygraph specialist, listening is the best way to get that good read on someone.

‘Everybody’s motivated by something different. But I have to hear you and pay attention to you to understand what that is,’ the former secret service agent continued. 

‘Everybody’s purpose is different… If you give people enough space, they will reveal themselves to you.’

Poumpouras delivered this bit of hard-won life advice in a candid interview with Steven Bartlett on his ‘Diary of a CEO’ podcast.

The former polygraph expert, who also served on the detail protecting then-First Lady Michelle Obama, published a book in 2020 teaching people how to ‘read people, influence situations’ and ‘live fearlessly,’ entitled ‘Becoming Bulletproof.’ 

The book, part guide and part memoir, turns her 12 years of experience in the Secret Service into life lessons that anyone trying to navigate an uncertain world of tricky and enigmatic characters can learn from.

One quick tip she has learned in those dozen years protecting presidents, she said: ‘Whenever you hear someone saying ‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing’ — that is usually the last thing you should do.’ 

Watching out for tells via body language, Poumpouras has also noted, is no less important while do that actively listening to learn more about what someone is really telling you. 

‘The majority of what we communicate is actually through our bodies,’ she said, ‘not through the words we speak.’ 

‘When I talk to people, the way I know that what I’m saying is resonating is I see the head nod up and down and I see their eyes follow me,’ as she once told NBC News. 

‘If someone is leaning in and all of a sudden you say something and their arms crossed, now I know I said something that this person didn’t like,’ Poumpouras added. ‘But you’ll miss it if you’re not looking.’

In the years since her government service, the former Secret Service Agent has given talks and taught courses on the art of reading people whether to elicit better information, gain a strategic advantage or just become a more effective communicator.

Her skills — honed cultivating informants and assets as well as dealing with some of the world’s most dangerous people — can help anyone, according to Poumpouras.

She argues that deep listening and careful viewing of body language can help anyone identify ‘stalling tactics, stress indicators, and deceitful language that typically show up when someone’s trying to cloud our judgment and derail our intuition.’

These mental resources can come in handy everywhere, from business to the home or when getting back on the dating scene.

As a Greek-American New Yorker, brought up in Queens, Poumpouras attributes some of her gifts and insight on this topic to the street smarts that got her into the Secret Service in the first place. 

The early life showed her how to pick up on the many subtle cues that should catch any careful listener’s attention, but it also taught her not to mince words.

‘We are so busy talking. We are so busy making noise because we think everyone needs to hear me. Everyone needs to know me, me, me, me,’ as she told Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast. ‘You know what? Nobody cares.’