Does this person consistently demonstrate emotional maturity, self-awareness, and social skills?
We all live in a world that is disproportionately dominated by those who are the most domineering. Our acts are often compelled by the most compulsive, and controlled by the most controlling.
Even our day-to-day moods are routinely usurped by the moody people around us, and many of our anxieties are created by the overly anxious.
These intrusive, emotionally unstable people often gain great power—not just in companies, cities, or social groups, but even in entire nations, where they callously degrade and destroy the lives of millions of people they’ve never met. Consider the criminal insanity of Adolf Hitler. Or Joseph Stalin. Osama bin Laden. Saddam Hussein. Pol Pot. Bashar al-Assad. These are only a few of recent history’s major-league villains, and there are also millions of minor-league monsters in the world, as well as a virtually infinite number of ordinary idiots who’ve never learned how to act like decent human beings.
That’s not how most of us would like life to be, but it’s the way it’s always been. The tyranny of the troubled is a sad fact of human nature that’s almost as immutable as the laws of physics.
Even so, the power of the imbalanced remains reasonably bearable—unless we’re called to war, taken to prison, or similarly harmed—because it’s the only real price we have to pay for enjoying our own unsung luxury of emotional stability, while the fretful crazies stew about the problems that they’ve created for themselves.
The price we pay is usually worth it. To be in the mind of any of these people would be like living in hell.
Many of the most distressed and demented people—even those whose power is tiny and mundane—see themselves as superheroes, power players, or victims who now deserve to be victimizers. But that’s not how other people see them. With certain exceptions, we see emotionally unstable people—no matter their place in the human hierarchy—as shaky, sly, and at least slightly deranged. Even if they’re wealthy and powerful, they look like imposters to us and are impossible to respect, predict, or ally with.
You probably realized long ago, after meeting hundreds of ten-cent villains, that they acted that way because, at some point, they were so miserable that they traded their own sense of self for a reward they may already have lost, or to escape a punishment they may have deserved. But whether they won or lost the tangible prizes of life, they almost certainly lost control of their own lives, and that’s a loss that few souls survive.
Countless troubled but courageous people—thank God—have clawed their way back from the abyss of emotional instability, but some people just can’t. They lose control of their behavior and environments and become the architects of their own doom. As their desperation for control deepens, their sense of worth disintegrates, and they begin an eternal search outside themselves for the peace of mind that’s only available within.
But you do not have to live in their world.
With work, luck, help—and a free country—you can create a world of your own. Not everyone will choose to live in your world, of course. That would be too much to hope for (and too much trouble!). But you can exclude virtually anyone you want from your world, if you’re willing to move forward without them. And from that point on, no one can tell you what to do, without your consent.
That might sound risky or overly ambitious, but it’s the deal that’s now on the table in front of you. It’s been there most of your life and it will never go away—even if you don’t take advantage of it.
It’s a good deal! It’s the same one I made with myself years ago. And now I wake up every morning in what feels very much like my own world, tailored to fit my own desires, abilities, obligations, and goals. It’s not a perfect world. (How could it be? I’m in it.) But it makes life inordinately richer in one central way: It allows me to be myself.
That’s huge, because if you’re not yourself, it’s almost as if you don’t exist. I’m sure you’ve met many people who have surrendered their sense of self—and that you’ve seen the blank look in their eyes, and heard the hollow sound of their voice.
Life can be a tough challenge for anybody, and it’s easy to lose your sense of self. It happens—to at least a moderate degree, and for a finite period of time—to most people. It happened to me.
In my younger years, I was a typical type-A, all-American dumb-ass who wasn’t remotely as confident as I acted, so I set out to reinvent myself, sort of like The Great Gatsby did—but I was more like The Pretty Good Gatsby.
I was luckier than most. I failed at an early age. I had the misfortune to succeed as a student and athlete in high school, and that success, and the rewards it left, revealed my emptiness. I was considered cool—but only by people other than myself.
Like so many people, I was my own best enemy, because I always knew which of my buttons to push, which of my fears to exaggerate, and how to piss people off if they slighted me. And the more I criticized myself, the more I rebelled against it, and hid behind my pride. With my insecurity churning, I skewed more toward arrogance than humility, believing that the only reason most people were humble was because they had a lot to be humble about. But even then, I knew my facade was paper thin.
As an antidote, and a matter of patriotism, I entered the U.S. Marine Corps with the lofty goal of shedding that callow feeling of vulnerability, longing, and unworthiness that’s often called innocence. Similarly to many young people, I was filled with worry about my failings thus far, and what they might mean to my future. Those feelings emerged mostly as disappointment in myself, and as shame: just garden-variety guilt.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop feeling guilty about what I’d already done wrong, and I didn’t even know what it was. That’s youth, right?
But as I kept studying human behavior, I found that the most accurate and granular definition of guilt is: fear of not being loved. We’re afraid that when people—or deities—discover the bad things we’ve done, their love for us will fade. That simple but profound threat is usually the root cause of the empty, sick feeling that always goes with guilt.
We’re less likely, though, to feel remorse or shame when we think that we’ll get away with something. That phenomenon is a form of the previously mentioned power paradox: Powerful people are more likely than vulnerable people to break rules, betray trust, and not worry too much about it.
But even if you’re one of the rich, famous (and unindicted) people, there’s still no easy way out of this dilemma, because if you hide your transgressions, you’ll always know that the people who love you don’t love the real you.
So innocence and guilt—generally seen as opposites—share some of the same shaky ground in the eternal search for love. And both can hurt.
The pain comes from facing your hunger for love, and accepting the changes in yourself that love requires, without losing your sacred sense of self. It’s a balancing act, and when you attempt it, you will at some point fall.
We will all fall.
We all know that the concept of a perfect world—even one you craft around yourself—is an illusion. But it’s a hard illusion to resist, and impossible to leave behind without some regret.
We all want to strip away life’s illusions, but—as I learned on 9/11—who among us wants to be disillusioned? I’d lost enough of my own illusions—on that grave day—to clearly see my vast number of humbling limitations. And it actually made me feel better! That may sound paradoxical, but it’s not. Most people who don’t see their limitations are also largely unaware of their powers, because the nature of insight is to see everything . . . or nothing. You can’t cherry-pick self-awareness.
People who can’t handle the challenge of seeing inside themselves tend to preen, pose, dominate, and manipulate, never knowing that these sad acts carry them further and further from the primal desire they wanted in the first place: self-acceptance. It’s the foundation of all emotional stability.
Some people who aren’t emotionally stable try to compensate by being perfect—but perfectionism is generally just another face of fear. Perfectionists always want more-more-more, but people who are humble usually believe they’ve got nothing to prove. They think that they’ve already done enough to earn the right to live in their own world, without sacrificing their individuality, strengths, and desires.
So humility offers an enormous head start on the road to emotional stability. Even so, humility is one of those funny things that we all want, but don’t always like. When you first sample it, you feel let down, as if you’re just like everybody else. You forget that that’s what you wanted all along: a sense of belonging, with the warmth of family, friends, and professional allies—even if every one of them has some flaws.
But if you’re lucky, you meet somebody else who’s humble. You accept and respect them—but not because you think they’re better than you. To you, they’re just another member of the tribe.
Then you see them do something incredible, and the single best and hardest lesson of emotional stability starts to sink in: You don’t have to be better than other people to be amazing.
Here’s a fact of life: No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be majestically, inordinately better than you’ve always been—but that’s good enough. You won’t be loved by everyone, but you’ll be loved truly by the people who are capable of true love. They’ll be the only ones whose love really matters to you, because they’ll love you for being you, and won’t need you to fulfill the fantasies that are so important to people who are incapable of true love.
I first found that lofty level of love and acceptance in my wife and kids. Family is where most people find stability. And then it filters out to some close friends. Sadly, that’s often where it ends. When many people head for work, it’s often gone, because they believe in (and thereby help to create) a work-world dominated by attitudes of dog-eat-dog, killer-instincts, take-no-prisoners, nose-to-the-grindstone, trust-no-one—and all the other clichés that just aren’t necessary in an emotionally stable, self-created world. Even the rough-and-tumble world of the Marine Corps, I found, was governed far more by camaraderie and shared mission than by aggression and selfish ambition.
After the Corps had kicked some sense into me, I gravitated naturally to the FBI, as do many people from the military who are looking for another role that will require great discipline, a way to bring their patriotism home, and the chance to serve greater gods than money and power.
By that time, I was a fairly humble, stable guy (by the crazy standards of young American males), and I believed I could be a great FBI agent during the day—and a human being at night! (My wife more or less insisted on it.)
So even as a young agent, I was still a little rough around the edges. That’s me.
But it was all working!
Until September 11, 2001. All hell broke loose—even in my world—and peace in America never really returned.
At that time, as I’ve mentioned, I was working Russia, mostly in New York. I spent my days helling around Manhattan like a batshit-crazy bloodhound, sniffing out spies, and finding spies of my own. But when the Bureau was blindsided by 9/11—as was practically every three-letter agency—it gave the Russians a window of opportunity to grab back some of their empire. They invaded Chechnya and killed about fifty thousand people, mostly civilians. They unleashed a vicious storm of terror, kidnapping, hostage taking, torture of entire families, beheading, degradation, and rape, with a special focus on sex crimes, which horrified the conservative Chechen culture.
America, though, was understandably obsessed with the Middle East, and was vulnerable to Russia’s propaganda programs. Their line was: “Chechnya is full of Muslim terrorists, and we’re doing your dirty work for you—so, you’re welcome!”
America’s perception of the Russian narratives tilted toward acceptance. It was a crazy perception, and allowed the rebirth of Russia as an unstable, loose cannon nation.
The shift in attitude was alarming. I’d already learned that most aberrant behavior starts with misperception—rather than evil, or outright insanity—and that America was choosing to perceive Russia as benign.
I was bewildered by it—until I joined the Behavioral Analysis Program—because the BAP specialized in why things were happening, rather than the issues of who, what, when, or where. When the BAP taught me not to look at things from strictly my own context, I realized that American citizens were tolerating Russia’s cruelty and greed simply because we could not, at that time, tolerate having another enemy. From the American public’s context of fighting virtually permanent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, any war seemed destined for disaster.
In the Behavioral Analysis Program, my understanding of human nature grew exponentially, partly because I had to parse my own perceptions practically every day, in order to understand those of others. It opened my eyes, and revealed a more rational, warmhearted world. When I stopped seeing my life as a never-ending melodrama, it no longer was. When I started looking for people to trust, I found them. When I stopped allying myself with emotionally unstable people, my world got healthier.
Over several years, with the help of my Jedi Master Jesse and my family, I drove myself sane, and—guess what?—it felt like the world was getting sane right along with me! That perspective was mostly just my own perception, but the immediate environment in my own world did become more sane, and I did everything I could to help that condition spread.
In the BAP, I got an incredible crash course in the predictable cause-and-effect mechanics of human nature, as my life improved immeasurably—even among my family and friends. The approach hinged on one powerful principle: If you do A with someone, you’ll usually get B—whether you want to or not, work hard or not, or apply resources or not. People are people. Therefore: People are predictable.
I rode that principle all the way to the top of the program, and never looked back. In 2011, I was appointed head of the BAP. I was only its fourth leader in history, so I took the job very seriously. I felt obligated to leverage the most potent power I’d ever had into making America feel safe again.
I loved my new job. Time glided by with the peace of mind that comes naturally when you accept the fact that almost everything that people do—from their perspective—makes sense! (It may suck, but it makes sense.)
And if it makes sense, you can predict it.
And if you can predict it, you can act accordingly.
And then, far more often than not, the things people do won’t even suck—especially in your own world—because you’ll see them coming and can deal with them appropriately.
When people master that simple set of rules—as you probably have by now—they can easily become a resource for the success of others, which elevates their own success, as they form more and more alliances.
At that point, virtually all good things seem within reach.
“Do me a favor?” It was Jesse calling, shortly after I’d become head of the Behavioral Analysis Program.
“Name it.”
He said he was calling on behalf of a young New York agent who felt like she was in over her head. She’d approached him because he was a legend at simplifying complex challenges.
Jesse was retired, but still helped the agency as a contract specialist, and was embedded with her squad. She was working Russia, which was raising all kinds of hell again.
This time the issue was: Would Russia become a genuine democracy, or regress once more into the kind of criminal dictatorship that had haunted the nation for three hundred years? (Spoiler alert: Don’t get your hopes up.)
Vladimir Putin had just pulled off a rigged election that had triggered rioting in the streets and mass incarcerations, including the arrests of about a thousand political prisoners.
Even the concept of Russian political prisoners created terrible images in my mind, and I longed to help.
Russia has never abandoned the use of torture and terror, and there was no doubt that they were used in this situation. Some people lived to talk about it, and some didn’t. The details are too disturbing to recount here.
The endless spiral of arrests, interrogations, imprisonment, abuse, and merciless intimidation of victims and their families that began then is still happening.
The agent Jesse called about was a young New York woman named Linda, who had recently earned a PhD in psychology. She’d just been briefed by another three-letter agency in NYC, and he’d pointed her toward a target who was suspected of running the current media whitewash of Russia’s sadistic brutality. He supposedly worked at the Russian consulate and the United Nations, but he had a background in media, and seemed to know the soft spots in the American psyche. The program Russia was using at this time was almost exactly the same strategy it had employed during the Chechen War: Blame Middle Eastern terrorists.
But to get to the target, Linda needed to take a circuitous path, through an Iraqi defector who’d reportedly worked directly with Saddam in his Baghdad palace. He wasn’t a CHS, but we had reason to believe he might help us. He was attending a series of brown-bag lectures at Fordham University on Russian history—and so was the target.
Linda was freaked out, Jesse said, by the life-or-death elements of the case, even though the deaths were occurring thousands of miles away. The mission was a far cry from the cases of depression and anxiety she’d treated as a clinical psychologist before signing on with the FBI in order to, as she later put it, “make a difference.”
“I told her I could teach her by example,” Jesse said, “but that you could show her a system that she can keep using forever. She needs something like that.”
Then he said softly, “She’s not”—he hesitated—“functioning at her best.” That was as close as he ever got to criticizing people. He generally expressed negativity by what he didn’t say, which packed more punch than the explicit attacks of most people.
Jesse said that Linda had the potential to be a great agent, but that she was very sensitive, and her emotions seemed to be taking over. Her feelings were crowding out her rationality, and making her hesitant about what to do.
“Tell her I’d be happy to help,” I said.
My plan was to do a standard BAP consultation: invite her—and her team, if possible—to Quantico, and help her create a strategy based on behavioral analysis. We’d try to discern the predictable behavior of the people involved, and offer suggestions, and points to consider. The execution of it, as always, would be up to the agent in charge: her, in this case.
For starters, I was concerned about the Iraqi that she needed to interview. He sounded like a spooky guy with a cloudy past.
There was some vague mention of him being the only man in Iraq that Saddam had feared—even though Saddam had his own torture chamber in the basement of the palace where he lived with his wife and kids. Saddam wanted it there because he enjoyed his own version of a rec room, just as his sons enjoyed their own rape rooms. He also had one in Manhattan, across the street from Michael Bloomberg’s home, deep in the basement of the Mission of Iraq, where he authorized the kidnapping and abuse of Iraqis living in the U.S., using them for leverage against family members who were still in the Middle East. The torture chamber remained until federal investigators raided the building following Saddam’s fall in 2003.
There were similar rooms in Iraqi embassies all around the world.
I could see how this level of horror might make Linda feel off-balance. Russia was successfully executing the most repulsive shift toward tyranny in recent history, and when you’re that close to depravity, paranoia can chill your blood and make every possible fear seem dreadfully real.
Linda’s reaction wasn’t even unusual. Many people quickly become unstable in dangerous and hostile environments. And most people act irrationally when they’re desperate. You never really know somebody until you see them try to function under fire.
But threatening events aren’t even the most common cause of erratic, unpredictable behavior. Even people in typical, unremarkable environments can be pushed toward irrationality by many different factors: childhood abuse (which often prompts rebound abuse), adult PTSD, serious biochemical imbalances, substance abuse, head injuries, and neurological illnesses.
Even more people exist in a gray area of emotional instability that is not obvious, constant, nor even severe. These people are often expected to function as well as people with robust mental health, but they just can’t.
Fortunately, though, other powerful factors can help people who “go crazy” to “go sane” again. These healing forces include medication, healthier lifestyles, counseling, the help of friends and family, meditation, support groups, spiritual fulfillment, and substance abuse treatment.
Those forces—of personal redemption and generous support—are among the most highly evolved functions of humanity. They allow us to remain stable in an unstable world, and to help others regain their stability.
Even so, emotional instability—even if temporary—is a hell of a monkey wrench to throw into the pursuit of predictable, laudable behavior.
The lack of emotional stability is arguably the most important deficit in all of the six signs—because it makes unstable people so hard to predict. Like everybody else, unstable people do what they think is in their own best interests, even if it isn’t, which can set them off on a cycle of reckless or irrational behavior—which cannot be predicted.
Even more problematic, anyone with significant emotional instability usually destroys their ability to engage effectively in any of the other signs for predicting people.
So without the foundation of emotional stability, it can be very hard for people to properly exercise the other five signs, and they become virtually unknowable.
The best way to navigate that ocean of the unknown is to learn to spot emotional instability, and stay as far from it as possible, unless you feel morally obligated to help.
If I saw significant instability in Linda, I’d probably have to help her explore a role that was more suited to her. That’s not quite like, “You’re fired,” but that’s almost certainly how she’d see it.
In early January, Linda walked uncertainly into my office, exuding an attitude of: I do not belong here.
My first thought was: Damn! This woman looks about as old as Dora the Explorer! Who’s going to take her seriously? Russian spies?
But I’ve learned that second impressions are almost always more accurate than the overrated first impression, because you’ve had time to think. Going with your gut is popular, but I guarantee you that your brain is smarter than your gut.
“Linda! Great to see you!”
I shook her hand, and it was cold. Nonverbal explanation: fear. Everybody knows that “cold feet” refers to fear—not just figuratively, but also literally, since fear constricts blood vessels, and impedes circulation to the extremities. But many people don’t know that cold hands are just as indicative of fear, and are much harder for someone to conceal in a social situation. (So if you’re going into a scary meeting, put your hands under warm running water, which masks your nervousness to anyone whose hand you might shake, as a literal expression of the fight-flight-freeze response. It sends your brain a feed-forward message of reassurance, the same way that taking a deep breath does.)
“Thanks for seeing me,” Linda said, in sort of a little-girl voice that fit her appearance, but was almost certainly a career handicap.
She was breathing hard and said something apologetic about traffic.
I smiled, waved it off, and said, “Take a breath!”
I took one myself, because I was, to some extent, absorbing some of her fear, and coming up with stuff of my own to worry about. It’s a natural instinct. Fear is the most contagious of all feelings—much more than love—because it’s stored not just in the thought-dominated, rational forebrain, but in the even deeper regions of the primitive, mammalian brain, and even the reptilian brain.
But I was here for Linda, so I put my thoughts on rewind, and looked at her again. The single best way for me to achieve emotional stability in a relationship—and also to recognize stability in others—is to see people as they are, without emotional bias. Something trivial—such as simply having a youthful face or a high voice—may make someone different from me, but it was nothing more than a challenge to overcome. Unfortunately, though, difference is the underlying trigger of most phobias, and creates the multifaceted, broad-spectrum fear known as xenophobia. So it’s not always easy to feel comfortable with people who are clearly different from you.
Even so, most of us don’t need to be victims of any phobias, if we simply allow rationalism to lead the way.
Besides, I didn’t want to let my own concerns make Linda feel even worse. How we feel, even when we think it’s not obvious, has a powerful effect on how others feel—especially people who are already unstable. Their tipping point is too easy to reach.
So I took another breath, and looked at her again, trying to see her for who she was, without imposing my own prejudices.
She looked better! Older! Wiser! (Kids grow so fast!)
I asked her how I could be a resource for her, because vesting in someone’s success is a phenomenally fast and effective way to gain an ally, and prompt people to open up.
She didn’t really respond, though. Maybe she just felt helpless, and needed me to reach out even further. The best thing you can do with most people is to just keep trying.
“Jesse thinks you’ve got huge potential,” I said. She seemed very flattered and relieved. I don’t use fake flattery—people smell it a mile away—but I rarely see people who think they don’t deserve a sincere compliment, even if it’s a little exaggerated (because it rarely seems like an exaggeration to them).
I told her that I’d worked Russia for about twenty years, knew the culture, and that she could count on my help for as long as she needed it. As always, I sought her thoughts and opinions, validated her context, spoke in terms of her priorities, and empowered her with choice.
I trust you know the power of that approach by now.
She warmed up, but she was still scared. She had to go meet the Iraqi contact the following day. “I’ll go with you tomorrow,” I said.
Her nonverbals told me that much of her fear had just evaporated.
“I’ll frame it to my supervisor as an urgent request for an informal consultation. Know why?”
She shook her head.
“Less paperwork.”
For the first time, she smiled.
The next day, as we drove out to Long Island to see the Iraqi, she was tense again. I knew that the stress, from a medical perspective, was impairing her cognitive function, including her memory and rationality. It’s arguably the best single reason to control your emotions.
The man’s house was nice—red brick with forest green shutters, and kids playing in the street—and it calmed my nerves a little. His wife answered the door. “Yeah?” she said. It reminded me of how Leo’s grandson had answered the phone every time his caller ID showed it was me—at least in the early days.
I told her who we were and that we had an appointment with her husband.
“We’ll see,” she said, and closed the door.
We could hear her raise her voice. After some time, the man came out and started sizing us up. I put on my happy face, Linda was charming, and we managed to get in the door. I felt, as I often did, like a salesman—which was basically what I was. One way or another, we’re all in sales, and like all salespeople, what we need to sell first is ourselves.
I brought up the class he was taking at Fordham University, because that was his link to our target. At the dining room table, I edged into understanding him better, so I could strategize a dialogue. But his wife suddenly appeared and shouted, “Oh my God—you’re invading our privacy!”
Linda looked stunned. I gave her a look that said, Don’t buy into the drama.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I said, “but your husband invited us here. We’ll leave if you want.”
“You have no right!” She cited a law, and said she worked with the American Civil Liberties Union. I figured it had probably been a big stretch for her to go from Saddam’s palace to the ACLU, so I shrugged it off.
The man stood, took her by the arm, and asked her to let Linda and me finish, as he guided her toward the door—to the best of his ability.
She barged in two more times, pissed and weird, and after the second time he escorted her out, we gave him a high-speed rundown on gathering some information about the presumed Russian spy. We could hear her just outside the door.
“I regret I cannot help you,” he said.
Linda’s expression went sour. I shook my head almost imperceptibly—meaning, Don’t let him emotionally hijack you. Then I said to him, “Why? Are you concerned it’s dangerous?”
“Yes,” he said, motioning with his thumb toward the kitchen door. “But take this.” He wrote down a phone number and the name Susan, and handed it to me. It seemed as if that had been his plan all along. “She, too, takes the class. She is very intelligent. Perhaps she would find this work . . . easier to schedule.”
I gave the number to Linda, to help underscore her power for the Iraqi (and herself). I’ve found that if you hand off power often enough, the person you give it to will begin to feel and act empowered—not necessarily because you changed their degree of power, but because you acknowledged it. We’re all pretty powerful, unless someone is trying to control us—and even then, most people rise to the occasion and make themselves heard.
We heard a pan hit the floor, probably to remind us that his wife was still home.
At that point, I had nothing to lose, so I said, “I heard something about you being the only man in the world that Saddam Hussein feared.” I was just curious. I thought maybe he was some kind of secret police hitman—the kind of thug who emerges from nowhere during a coup, then disappears forever.
He smiled. “Yes. He did fear me. I’m surprised you know that.”
“Why?”
I braced myself for a potentially chilling answer. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Linda do the same.
“I was his dentist,” he said.
We heard, “Shit!” from the kitchen. And another pan.
“I, too, fear only one person,” he said. He used his thumb again, to finish the thought.
I subscribe to the psychological theory that there are only two basic emotions that are hardwired into the brain, and are the ultimate drivers of human thought and behavior: the opposing forces of love and fear.
All other emotions, in the end, are derived from them.
Even the deeply held emotion of anger, for example, comes from fear, because anger—in all its ferocity, and with all its comorbid conditions, such as hate or panic—commonly subsides and can even disappear when there is nothing left to fear from whatever caused the anger. Similarly, sadness—which most often comes from loss—is, at rock bottom, the fear of living forever without whatever is gone and will never return. The same basic principle of feeling relief when a threat is gone also applies to the other forms of fear, such as disgust, cynicism, distress, contempt, or insecurity.
Love, the other primary emotion that we’re born with, emerges in its own forms of expression, including romance, security, protectiveness, appreciation, loyalty, enchantment, devotion, worship, and allegiance. And sometimes love is necessary to survive, and fear is necessary to thrive. They run that deep.
Fear is necessary to survive, and love is necessary to thrive. The same can’t be said of any other single emotion.
The most beautiful thing about love—first widely proposed by prominent Duke University psychologist and author Dan Baker, PhD—is that it is mentally and emotionally impossible to be in a state of fear and a state of love at the same time. Love, therefore, is life’s only reliable, eternal, and universal antidote to fear.
Love, in the broadest sense of the word, must also be present for trust. As I’ve delineated several times, there’s a huge difference between liking or even loving someone, and trusting them. Trusting and liking are not at all synonymous. But they are in almost all cases simultaneously present, simply because trusting someone is impossible without a certain feeling of allegiance or identification, even if it comes only from having corresponding goals. It’s also hard to see someone engage in the first sign of trust—vesting in your success—without feeling at least a little gratitude, which is essentially the same as appreciation, the all-giving, highest form of love.
Because of this, the conflicting emotions of love and fear are at the root of almost all the tells of emotional stability and instability.
I think of these two polarized conditions—love and emotional stability vs. fear and emotional instability—as the “quiet mind” vs. the “noisy mind.” The quiet mind speaks with a single, consolidated voice, calmed by reason, while the noisy mind is often a cacophony of contradictory feelings, ungoverned by rationality, and muddled with emotion.
Love is the pure essence of the quiet mind, and fear is the constant cold shriek of the noisy mind.
The problem that blocks many people from achieving a quiet mind begins with the unavoidable fact that we are all descended from ancestors who learned to be survivors. Every single person who is now alive comes from a genetic lineage in which every ancestor from time immemorial not only survived, but gave birth to new life: humans who became stronger and smarter for generation after generation, ending with you.
How? With survival skills embedded deeply in the most primitive part of the brain. We’re built for it—hardwired for hard times. We’re endowed with genetic coding that urges us to put our own needs first, to seize power in each moment, and to remember insults and threats. That’s the function of the noisy mind.
But over the millennia, we learned to override this genetic coding and organize our actions around the needs of others—an act that, paradoxically, provides the ultimate protection. That sense of social responsibility is a function of the quiet mind, which resides in the brain’s most advanced area—the forebrain, near the forehead—and governs all rational thought.
The more primitive noisy mind is dominated by the very back of the brain, behind the forebrain and the mammalian brain, in the area known as the reptilian brain. It sits just above the spinal column, and mostly just handles automatic action and fear. It does very little thinking, but lots of neural housekeeping, like breathing and heartbeat. But those can be handy, too.
Virtually every element of trust is guided by the quiet mind, because the act of trusting people is—or should be—a thoughtful process. People who feel safe enough to assign trust rationally—and therefore effectively—have the ability to see others the way they are, rather than the way they want them to be. When you see people the way they are, you can see yourself the way they see you. When that happens, your assessment of their behavior becomes flawless—perfectly predictable—and together you can achieve great things.
The opposite outlook, driven by the fear found in the noisy mind, is animated by instinct and impulse, and is responsible for greed, compulsion, envy, and insecurity.
The survivor-based mindset is especially hard for type-A people to avoid, and they tend to become immune to the havoc they create, and the harm they do to themselves in the name of advancement. They sometimes dominate entire societies, but still do harm.
Ironically, one manifestation of the noisy mind—a fear-based feeling of unchecked egotism, and the choices made in its wake—is often a direct result of success. This subversive trait can be very hard to avoid. It’s common for people to be blind to their own arrogance. The first sign they see often comes when others pull away. But by then it’s often too late to repair the relationships.
Another unfortunate product of the noisy mind that’s hard to avoid is the destructive habit of assigning negative labels to the person you’re trying to size up. To predict people accurately, you can’t even think in terms of someone being a liar, a manipulator, a cheat, or a betrayer. Most people have an uncanny ability to know when they’re being judged, even when no judgments are voiced. These judgments, besides alienating people, can actually spur people to adopt the negative behaviors that they are suspected of having. When derogatory categories are assigned to people, I can’t always tell what they will do, but I can predict a negative response with almost 100 percent accuracy.
Another failure of the noisy mind is to trust too much or too little. Both behaviors stem from the single most common destructive force in business and in life: fear. People trust too much because they’re apprehensive about facing challenges alone, and people are too wary of trust because they’re worried that others will take advantage.
Most incorrect choices in predicting trust in someone are due to their fear—of not having enough or not being good enough—even if only in fear’s familiar disguises of greed, vanity, envy, authoritarianism, anger, insecurity, and perfectionism. One of the most common ways fear asserts itself is in anxiety about rejection from one’s own coworkers, supervisors, and even family and friends—in effect, one’s “tribe.”
Despite the power of the noisy mind, it can generally be overridden by the quiet mind, which has a multitude of fear-fighting factors. To state the obvious, the quiet mind is smarter than the noisy mind.
The outlook of the quiet mind is characterized by calmness and confidence, with the ability to see things realistically, and the discipline to avoid self-deceit, with its many traps, including unrealistic optimism.
The quieter your brain becomes, the more easily you’ll recognize opportunities to move your goals forward in a seamless and easy manner.
Achieving this mindset is one of the great challenges of predicting behavior, and requires people to lead themselves to it. That’s why another phrase I use to describe the actions of the quiet mind is “self-leadership.”
Like other primary aspects of personality, the quiet mind is individualized and self-sponsored, and can’t be created by other people unless you offer them your consent and active participation.
When you are assessing people for their most deep-seated behaviors, it’s very important to look for the people who have the qualities of the quiet mind.
But nobody is perfect, and people should not be distrusted or disliked just because they’re naturally pessimistic, insecure, or depressed—especially if they make an honest effort to refrain from acting out their troubled feelings on you. When they do have moderate emotional flaws—as so many of us do—you can still trust them, by establishing a baseline of their behavior, and being alert for deviations from that norm. For example, if you propose an idea to someone who is typically pessimistic, it’s not necessarily a problem if they’re pessimistic about your idea. It’s just how they are, and they may have some interesting things to say about the idea, even if it’s limited to potential problems.
Emotional stability exists on a continuum, and most people are adequately stable, while others have abundant emotional stability, characterized by self-control, consistency, communication skills, empathy, and the golden, self-sustaining quality of empathy that’s combined with stoical acceptance, which I call stempathy.
Paradoxically, however, many people in our current compartmentalized, mechanized culture—particularly in the technological sectors—are skewed toward overreliance on rationality and emotional control, and have difficulty operating outside their narrow emotional bandwidth.
But who knows which of them will become the next dot-com billionaire? And whoever that may be will probably find that people are quite willing to talk to them, about whatever they want.
TEN NEGATIVE TELLS FOR EMOTIONAL STABILITY
1. People learn to be helpless. We’re all born helpless, but some people seem to get better at it as they age. At first, it’s not because they want to, but because they get stuck in insoluble situations that they seemingly have no control over. Most people keep trying—but not everybody.
Some people respond to this as if it’s a valid life lesson: You’re helpless—in every situation!
That conclusion may seem ridiculous, but it’s very common, and results in a trait called “learned helplessness.”
The desire among people with learned helplessness to give up in difficult situations can become a deeply held trait. It’s so instinctual that it even occurs in animals.
2. People surrender their right to positive perceptions. People can be born with mood chemistry that’s so skewed that it darkens their perceptions.
Trauma can also create mood disorders, including depression and anxiety.
But in many cases among people who are consistently negative, there is no organic cause of a mood disorder, nor evidence of significant trauma.
It appears to simply be a choice.
It’s a bad choice—and often a lazy one—and with persistent freezing behavior—also called “dissociation”—the choice can become as immovable as an iceberg.
When someone perceives life as inherently negative, they are hard to predict, because they’ve usually lost touch with their goals. They’re like the Titanic (a metaphor I keep coming back to): big ships with tiny rudders. It’s particularly dangerous in iceberg country.
When they don’t know what they want, you don’t know, either, and then it becomes very hard to trust them, vest in them, or perceive a long relationship.
3. People catastrophize. Some people have an extremely low tolerance for problems, and have a hard time sorting big problems from little ones. To them, almost every problem looks like a fearful catastrophe.
Their expectations have a way of fulfilling themselves, especially when other people are involved, since fear is one of the most contagious of all emotions. It is very difficult to trust people who think every little thing is a disaster. They’re out of control, and totally unpredictable.
Even so, you can establish their negative attitude as their baseline behavior, and then interpret their reactions accordingly. When you accept the stoic reality that most things simply are—without judging them as good or bad—you can often deal successfully with damaged people.
4. People show signs of the “3-P” personality. It harbors three toxic traits: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.
Permanence is thinking that today’s problem will be there forever. These people deserve kindness, but kindness need not translate into trust and partnership. So be kind, but beware.
Pervasiveness is thinking that a problem in one part of your life is sure to infect other parts. But that usually doesn’t happen, so if you can’t talk somebody out of it, don’t trust them with something important—or you may become their next problem.
Personalization is assuming that every problem is your own fault—even the weather, as in: “I should have known it would rain. When will I ever learn?” Don’t get sucked into this vortex of negative self-absorption. Try to steer clear of anybody who has a full-blown 3-P personality.
But you can help people, as I mentioned, to go sane. That’s achieved through kindness, patience, practical help, insight, and the tough-love quality of empathy plus stoicism that I call stempathy. However, if somebody has multiple, connected, self-destructive instabilities, the smart thing to do is to limit your interaction with them in serious matters.
5. People perceive themselves as victims. I’m not one of those people who deny the existence of victimization. It’s all around us.
Even so, countless people habitually feel sorry for themselves, despite only mild suffering. It’s based in fear, and can limit the lives of not only the self-professed victims, but those who try to help them.
That’s not hard-hearted. It’s rational—and it’s the best way to have the energy to help the people who really need it.
6. People have a sense of entitlement. Keep your eyes open, especially at work, for people who seem too carefree, have time to waste, and don’t get much done. They are the entitled.
They may be amusing and charming, because those qualities come easily to the well rested, but every day that you get stronger, they get weaker.
Affiliation, respect, and trust belong to those who have something to offer, or it’s not win-win—and if it’s not win-win, it won’t last.
7. People wait to be rescued. This is another toxic behavior of the modern era. Self-reliance is out of style.
Overdependence upon others is contrary to human nature, and the very laws of nature itself.
All creatures are provided with almost every resource they need, but the resources that nature offers must be gleaned, developed, divided, and stored. There’s no way around it.
The demand for emotional rescue is even more common than the demand for physical rescue, and is just as insidious.
The hidden tragedy is that the rescuer is almost always overly idealized, and is expected to keep it up. If you don’t, you’ll be the new villain!
8. People think blame is constructive, because it exposes the weak links, and keeps people on their toes.
But it’s really the ugly flip side of rescue. It’s a way of finding another person to take responsibility for what happens to you.
Start with the fact that whoever screwed up knows it, and feels worse than anyone.
Most people realize that scapegoating is wrong, but fail to see that finding the “right” person to punish is quite similar. Efficient functioning depends solely upon getting the job done, not singling out the person who failed. It’s only good for venting, feeling superior, creating grudges, generating fear, and encouraging people to lie.
Don’t ally yourself with somebody who thinks blame is an efficient mechanism for optimal function. You could be next.
9. People are volatile. But they’re not stupid, so sometimes they’ll leaven their angry volatility with something positive, but equally inappropriate. They’ll celebrate a moderate victory as if it’s world-changing, or they’ll promote somebody in a fit of grandiose generosity. From their perspective, they’re exuberant, ultratransparent, and spontaneous.
They’re actually just emotionally unstable, and get off on inflicting their mood swings and psychological imbalance on the people around them.
It enables them to retain their narcissistic position as the center of attention.
But if you like walking on eggs, it’s fine.
10. People are manipulators. If they’re good manipulators, you won’t even notice until it’s too late. They’ll treat you great, then grab something you deserve, leave you out of an alliance, or just make you look bad.
If they’re really good, you won’t have a single opportunity to correct the damage they’ve done to you.
Manipulation is the antithesis of productive, positive behavior. In a C-suite setting, it’s the pure essence of the power paradox.
Their ultimate goal may be to provoke you, but there is one thing they can’t control: your reaction.
You can learn about the dark side of human behavior from them, but stay as far away as possible.
“Two weeks left and I’m outta here!” Linda said. “That’s the bad news—for you. I’m okay with it!”
Linda was funny. And a great FBI agent. But now I was going to lose her, because she’d landed a teaching job at a prestigious California university. Made me sad. She was supplying good information on her Russian target, and we’d both learned from each other.
She took me deeper into behavioral psychology than any of my course instructors had, and it gave me a theoretical foundation for the techniques I now apply in the real world. I’d taught her to distrust the noisy-mind messages that she’d once considered a key element of critical thinking.
For about a year, we’d gotten together or talked on the phone every couple of weeks, and she’d given me everything she had on a small coterie of Russians, through her CHS named Susan, the woman who knew the Iraqi dentist. Susan saw most of them almost every week, usually at the ongoing lectures at Fordham.
It looked to me as if Linda’s original target, as I’d suspected, was spreading disinformation about the protests in Russia, and the victims of Putin’s police state. I was noticing a lot of articles, news conferences, think tank reports, news clips, and print ads about the Russian campaign against “domestic terrorists.”
The name of the diplomat—Adrik Petrov, let’s say—was never attached to any of the releases about Chechnya, but it all originated in the New York Russian consulate, where he worked.
We had determined that Adrik had filled the slot of a diplomat who had clandestinely worked in intelligence, and Linda had discovered that he’d also replaced a spy in London several years prior. Adrik didn’t tell her the guy was a spy, but he’d mentioned the name and we’d confirmed his role, so I wanted to get as much as I could.
But now she was leaving.
“Gonna miss you,” I said.
“Me, too. I owe you one. I was seriously down on myself when we met. So many pressures to act a certain way, and say the right things. It carried over into my whole life. But you showed me I could act like myself, and if somebody had a problem, it was their problem.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I just saw what was there already. It’s you. You did it.”
“Still owe you one. And here it is. I’ve got an idea,” Linda said. “I’ll have Susan launch it. She’s leaving town, too—for real. She’ll tell Adrik that she’s met somebody—a guy who works for investment bankers in Eastern Europe—who’s looking for ground truth for investors, and that she’s been writing research reports for them. The ‘investor’ will be one of my people—or you, if you’d prefer.”
“Don’t say ‘ground truth,’” I said. “It’s spy-talk.”
“Okay, ‘inside information.’ Susan will tell Adrik she’s leaving town and needs to have somebody cover for her during the next few months. She’ll ask Adrik if he’ll do it, as a favor to her. They’re pretty tight. Susan likes him. Doesn’t trust him, but likes him. She’ll tell him that it’s a really good gig, with big money floating around. He’ll see it as a chance to grab more information. Susan told me he’ll probably do it anyway, because he’s a nice guy.”
Linda said other complimentary things about him, and it worried me a little, because her descriptions of him didn’t fit the profile of a spy. For one thing, Russians like their spies to be extreme risk takers, because they want them to take extreme risks. The FBI has the opposite perspective. They don’t like risk takers, since they’re too likely to flame out. Adrik was more like an FBI guy. Linda thought he was just conflict-avoidant.
She also said the only thing he didn’t like about being a diplomat was the “importance” of the job, which she interpreted as “power.” She said he worried about not giving his aides and office staff enough of what they needed, and that once he’d had to fire a guy and had almost quit himself.
I thought about Linda’s idea for minute. “You’re good,” I told her.
“I know.” She was matter-of-fact, not boastful.
Three weeks later, I was in an overpriced steak house on the East Side, not too far from the United Nations, with Adrik Petrov.
Adrik was about my age, was thin and fit, and he seemed to be observant, glancing around the restaurant in the seemingly distracted but very focused manner of a Secret Service agent, or personal bodyguard. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt, and I was impressed by its simplicity. We were in a style-heavy neighborhood that was often too heavy. I was dressed better than usual, because I was supposed to be one of the rich guys who wanted inside information.
After we ordered, I tried to steer the conversation to the new wave of protests in Russia, but he was clearly uncomfortable. “I saw too much of conflict. In the streets,” he said. “When I was young. Those were bad days. It was after I got home from the Afghan War and the Soviet Union was dissolving. Life should have been good.” He was lost in thought, and suddenly seemed more interested in his steak. We stopped talking, and he seemed comfortable with silence.
He wasn’t as I’d imagined, and I could see why Susan had connected with him. Sometimes you just can’t get a fix on somebody until they’re sitting right in front of you, and then you can read them like a map. A word of advice: Don’t live in the e-world 24/7. Go face-to-face at every reasonable opportunity.
“Susan said you have business interests in Eastern Europe,” Adrik said.
“I do. I need to be cautious about revealing what they don’t wish to be public, but they are substantial people with many interests.”
Instead of following up on that, Adrik went back to the subject of Susan. That was interesting. Most people, when given the chance to talk about money or a mutual acquaintance, will talk about the money.
I realized he had no interest in doing business, but was just doing a favor for Susan.
I asked Adrik about his family, and he brightened. His two children, he said, were coming to New York for the remainder of his tour here. He didn’t mention anything about a wife.
I started talking about my own kids, and he seemed genuinely interested, but I wanted the focus to return to him.
It never did. That was all I got. Happens all the time.
We met a few more times, and he gave me some written information that I requested. It was very precise, and quickly worked its way up the Bureau hierarchy.
It got me noticed, and put the BAP in a favorable light.
Not every relationship leads to glory, but in the end, those that do and those that don’t can be hard to tell apart.
TEN POSITIVE TELLS FOR EMOTIONAL STABILITY
1. People show an abundance of appreciation. If the two most primal emotions are love and fear—with love leading the way to emotional stability—appreciation is pure elixir of emotional stability, because it is the finest form of love. It is the outward-flowing, self-perpetuating aspect of love that gives everything, and asks for nothing.
As such, it is the single most potent force against fear—and fear is the worst enemy of emotional stability.
When someone is in a state of appreciation, they are literally incapable of feeling fear. The two states are mutually exclusive.
Appreciation makes not only the giver, but also the recipient, far more capable of attaining the courage that creates bold visions and life-changing relationships.
2. People are hard to scare. Fearlessness is the single most natural companion of appreciation, and is indispensable for people who are trying to inspire your trust.
Fearlessness is even greater than the very similar quality of courage, because courage is the ability to overcome fear, while fearlessness indicates an absence of fear.
The condition of fearlessness cannot be constant, because fear is not only endemic to the human race, but also indispensable.
But a little fear goes a long way.
Fearless people are usually fun and effective, and can be genuinely inspiring.
In an age of constantly churning crises, fearless people rise above the fray and are virtually immune to one of the great saboteurs of trust: desperation.
3. People are impeccably rational. Rationality is in shockingly short supply in an era dominated by emotion. Our society is now almost bereft of the once common checks and balances of an unbiased media, and a dedication to civil discourse, and that has taken a terrible toll on rationality.
Those who treasure it, though, have a big head start on being trustworthy, because it’s easy to predict what they’ll do in almost any rational scenario. Rationality is governed by rules: very old rules, which have the same basic application now as they did eons ago.
Rationality, like love, is also one of our strongest forces against fear, since fear is an emotion that arises from the most primitive part of the brain.
The most incredible “wiring” in the human brain dictates that 95 percent of all incoming information goes straight to the brain’s most advanced portion—the forebrain—and only then is shipped to the fear-driven part of the brain.
Many people don’t take advantage of that gorgeous work of wiring. And then they wonder why they’re regarded as a loose cannon, with very few allies.
4. People adhere to the Code of Trust. Even if they’ve never heard of it, they have intuitively adopted its five principles as a practical and ethical part of their behavioral code. When you find somebody who does that, you’re good to go: They’re among the easiest people in the world to trust.
They’ve put a lid on their ego. They validate people by taking the time to understand them, by finding some common ground. They don’t judge people, so they get to hear almost everything. They’re reasonable and rational, which makes them predictable, even in the worst crisis. And they’re generous enough to always go win-win.
Use that decoding method, and you’ll never fail to meet the right people.
5. People offer you choices. What’s not to trust? It’s your choice, so it’s hard to go wrong.
Having choice is what freedom is all about. It feels good, and it works even better.
Having limited choices feels like being in jail, and can come from something as common as just being micromanaged.
Self-autonomy is the path to self-esteem.
When people offer that to you, you feel like you live in your world—the one you’ve always wanted, where you’re in charge—and you’re in the company of the people who helped make it happen.
6. People are happy with themselves. That allows them to be happy with you. Nothing is worse than a relationship with people who don’t like themselves. Sooner or later, they’ll decide they don’t like you, either.
It’s not so easy to be happy with yourself. There are too many people who enjoy being critical of you. And there are also innumerable people in business, government, and culture who want you to feel inadequate, and in need of what they provide.
People who aren’t satisfied with themselves are hard to satisfy. They undermine your efforts, even at the expense of their own. That creates classic cases of people who don’t work in their own best interests. It makes them impossible to predict, and therefore impossible to trust as an ally.
People who aren’t happy with themselves tend to be unemotional, negative, and critical, and they even direct a lot of their own sour attitude toward themselves.
People who like themselves tend to be pleasant, accepting, funny, and healthy. You know what they like and where they’re headed, so it’s easy to trust them, and build great alliances.
7. People have power, but don’t love it. It’s easy for trustworthy, centered people to rise to positions of power, because they’re magnets for other positive people, and work with diligence and self-responsibility.
But they take little pleasure, if any, in the power they have over other people. Because of their suspension of ego, they don’t pat themselves on the back for being able to tell other people what to do. For truly sane people, power is nothing more than a lot of work.
Why? Because they care about people, try to be fair, and like to serve as a resource for the success of others.
They may have a corner office, but many of them speak nostalgically of the days when they had fewer management responsibilities, and more time in the field.
These people are extraordinarily valuable as a force against the power paradox. For the power-paradox people, just trying to reach for power can doom their dream, because we all have a natural tendency to distrust someone who loves power.
Those who are truly worthy of power don’t pursue it. It pursues them.
8. People are flexible. Life changes, and if you don’t change with it, you get left behind. You’ll pay for your rigidity with anxiety, dissociation, depression, and various practical penalties, such as loss of income, or outdated skills. All of this can quickly add up to desperation.
Because most desperate people will do almost anything to escape their peril, they’re hard to predict.
Flexible people feel as if life has innumerable opportunities, so they’re eager to accept new people, ideas, and places into their lives. They’re open and reasonable with those who reach out to them, and see change as an opportunity, instead of a threat.
9. People are calm. This trait reflects fairness, friendliness, optimism, and generosity. As a rule, people like this are successful, because they’re great in a crisis—and even better at not creating crises.
An old cliché is, “The bigger they are, the nicer they are.” But behavioral studies show that this variation of that theme is also true: “The nicer they are, the bigger they are.”
One study showed that “givers” are more likely to succeed than “takers.”
Calm people function more effectively than hyperactive people, and are much easier to work with.
Part of their relaxed attitude comes from having no enemies, because they’re nice to people, and attract trust.
It’s good that we’re motivated to trust nice people. It makes life feel far more sensible.
10. People don’t look for problems. They don’t need to. They don’t feed on the drama that manipulators like, or play games of power.
Emotionally stable people look for the best in others, so they’re usually the first to find it.
A businessperson I know who depends upon internet research in his job always starts his search by looking at sites that tell him what he wants to hear. That’s not where the research ends, of course, but by starting with a search for good news, he remains optimistic, as he finds supporting information. Only then does he look for problems. If he started from the negative end, he says, he’d probably give up before he got to the bottom of the situation.
One interesting study about optimism in the workplace showed that optimistic people process information more effectively than people who feel negative or neutral, theoretically because a troubled mind is a greater distraction than a positive one.
Okay, I know you’ve figured out the anecdote in this chapter.
You know who I trusted, who I didn’t, and why. You’ve learned to think like an agent.
You ignored the distractions caused by emotion.
You were brutally honest.
You didn’t trust people just because you liked them.
You resisted manipulation.
You forgot about your own political leanings.
You read between the lines.
But let’s honor the process and break it down.
Adrik: What a nice guy! He turned out to be a straight-up diplomat, with nothing on his record but honor. You trusted him, Susan almost trusted him, and Linda kept an open mind, which was one of her greatest assets.
I finally did, too. We all came to that conclusion in spite of the fact that he was a nice guy.
We had to be tough, right? What kind of people would we be if we trusted someone just because he was nice, and allowed him to continue to be complicit in a propaganda program that tried to legitimize false imprisonment, torture, and occasional murder? The circumstantial case against Adrik—that he replaced spies in two different embassies, and was peripherally associated with a propaganda program—made him a person of interest, but that’s all. He was a regular diplomat with nothing on his record but honor.
Let’s look at his numbers. He was obviously a hard guy to scare (Positive Tell #2), because he’d fought in the plains of Afghanistan and served in a government that too often turned on its own.
He’d also seen enough of war to make him rational about it in the way that only those who have served can understand (Positive Tell #3), while millions of others who’ve never been near war see it almost as a spectacle, or even a sport.
Even before I met Adrik, I’d learned from Linda that he accepted power only as a burden (Positive Tell #7), that he was conflict-avoidant (Positive Tell #10), and that he was generous enough to work with her until she’d make the move to California (Positive Tell #4).
From the first time I met him, I could see that he had a very calm, nonvolatile personality (Positive Tell #9). I also noticed that he had no problem with what many people perceive as awkward silences during our conversations. It’s been my observation that people who are like that feel very comfortable with themselves, and people who like themselves the way they are tend to stay that way, and are easy to predict (Positive Tell #6).
From the several other times I saw him, I never perceived even one of the negative tells of trust.
And you trusted Susan, didn’t you? Hell yeah! You didn’t get many details about her, but what you saw was a true patriot who operated efficiently, with nothing to gain for herself.
Linda: She’s a little more complex. At first, when she seemed to be having an emotional crisis, we saw signs of learned helplessness (Negative Tell #1), the desire to be rescued (Negative Tell #7), and a propensity for catastrophizing (Negative Tell #3). I didn’t trust her early on. If I had, I wouldn’t have gotten as involved as I did. But when I offered help, stempathy, and patience, she practically became a different person. Sometimes that’s all it takes! So remember that when you run into people you don’t initially trust. Over time, as I soon predicted, she became calm (Positive Tell #9), happy with herself (Positive Tell #6), and rational (Positive Tell #3).
You probably trusted the dentist, too—despite his connection with Saddam Hussein—because you didn’t have enough hard data to indicate that he was a willing accomplice to crime. All you knew was that he’d escaped from that situation at the first opportunity. So that act alone—a reflection of Sign #4: Actions—was sufficiently redemptive to trigger a tentative level of trust, especially since it was reinforced by positive, transparent communication (Sign #5: Language).
Trust the dentist’s wife? Not so much. You undoubtedly observed her almost constant state of desperation—the “kryptonite” of trust—which was not consistent with any of her stressors of the moment. She seemed like the kind of person who would find a way to screw herself up. But you had plenty of data indicating that she’d been through quite an ordeal, and maybe was still healing. So you probably thought her PTSD was understandable, and predictable. She would have been scarier if she’d acted like Mrs. Perfect.
Now: Can you imagine trying to size these people up without my behavior assessment system?
I can’t. I often wonder how I ever evaluated anybody with just the tools of conventional decision making: intuition, open-source research, legwork, libraries, and the opinions of various people, along with other surface-level information—some of which is often falsified, as so much is these days.
Around the time I met these people, I was applying my system on a virtually daily basis, and it became vastly easier to size people up and predict what they’d do.
As more operatives were neutralized, Americans gradually stopped hearing—and believing—that Russia’s barbarism was a heroic battle against terrorists.
So hopefully the system helped to indirectly save some lives, at least, or stop some atrocities. But we’ll never know. Fine with me. All that matters is that it stopped.
For the next six years, I became increasingly involved with the science and application of understanding people, and accurately predicting what they would do.
It gave meaning to my life in the FBI, and to the new life I began after I retired from the Bureau in 2018.
If the American public becomes interested in this rational way of evaluating other people, I think it will change the country. Or certain segments. Who knows?
If it ever happens, maybe you’ll be part of it.
In this newly blossoming millennium, invigorated and informed by the new wave of people who feel most at home in history’s newest era, you will search for the allies you need—protected by this system—as you offer prosperity and power to all who join you.
The search will enable you to build your own life—free from devastation, if you fall—and then build it again, as the positive people around you grow wiser, happier, more abundant, and closer, in a journey of humankind that will, with great good fortune, never end.