How to Read People Like a Book Before You Trust Them! | Chase Hughes

level of observation, like can they read the room? Can they read the person that they're actually talking to? And their level of communication. Can they speak influentially? Can they talk about outcomes in a way that inspire people and motivate people? And can they communicate in a persuasive way that moves people? And who exactly have you worked with? Lots of government agencies. Notably, I've worked with intelligence agencies. I've worked the Psychological Operations Department, U.S. Army, which is the Special Operations Command. I've trained a lot of the U.S. Navy leaders nowadays, and a lot of civilians are my main base of clients right now. What do you do for intelligence agents? So when we talk to intelligence agents, the number one thing that we train them in is recognizing human behavior. And we also teach interrogation. And we tend to teach like if I'm doing an interrogation, it's kind of the same as if I'm an intelligence officer somewhere trying to talk somebody into spying on their own country for us. Both of those things are about talking someone into doing something that's not really in their best interest. So when it comes down to that, that's really where we get to the point the rubber meets the road. Can you talk someone into doing something that they A, normally wouldn't do, which is maybe sales, because they normally they wouldn't have otherwise done that. Or B, in the interrogation world, can I talk you into something that you wouldn't want to do because it's not your best interest, like confessing to a crime or providing intelligence or something like that. And that's where we really do a lot of the training for police and government. Next to me, there's this massive book called The Behavior Ops Manual. It's probably the biggest book I've ever seen. What is the wealth of experience that have fed into this body of work? That book right there is my entire life. So probably 30 to 40,000 hours of research on this stuff, every technique that I've ever learned or taught, every method that we've ever used for interrogations or persuasion or influence, all of that stuff is inside of The Behavior Ops Manual. And I wrote that book, and we can get into that if you want to right now. I received a brain diagnosis where I thought I was going to lose my brain. And I was desperate. I'm just wondering, how's my family going to feed itself? So I wanted to put every single piece of knowledge that I've ever created or I've ever come up with for any government agent, everything all on the table. And that's what this book was. It's just the culmination of everything. And you served in the military yourself? I did for 20 years. What is the most common thing that people come to your work for? If you were to encapsulate it into a sentence, what they're searching for in their own personal lives? It would be a person that is lacking some degree of control in some aspect of their life. And it's typically, they think they need skills. Most of my clients come to me saying, I want the technique. I want the skill. Teach me the recipe to do X, Y, and Z. What do I say on the phone? Give me a new sales script. So I have this model called the ACSS model that I train to my entire staff. And that ACSS model stands for authority, comfort, social skills, and then skills. 90% of people say they need more skills, but what they need is authority or comfort. And they can't be comfortable in a conversation. So I could give you, like, I would talk to these clients and I would say, I could spend $10 million, write the best persuasion script for whatever your ideal outcome is, hand you this thing on a silver platter, and if you're not comfortable in that conversation, you're not going to be successful. So I could give it to somebody with social anxiety and have them go read this out loud. It's not Harry Potter. We're not reading spells. It's not a spell. So a lot of people's problems come from comfort, a lack of being able to be comfortable in a conversation and the level of authority that they might have. And I don't mean hierarchical authority. I just mean personal authority. But they don't know it. They think it's, I need more social skills, I need to learn small talk, or I need this little technique. So every time, the one thing I tell every client is, if I give you a flight checklist right now for a small plane, a Cessna 172, are you a pilot? No. Having this little checklist of what to do does not give you the skill. So a lot of that, so much of that comes from comfort. And the problem that a lot of people have is they're competing with other people on height, on looks, on social status, money, hierarchy, confidence, all this other stuff. The number one thing you need to compare yourself with other people on is comfort. That's it. Is, can I be more comfortable than the other person in this conversation? Because our brains are naturally wired to compete. We can't turn competition off, but we can change what they're focused on. And if they're focused on comfort, we win a lot more conversations. Comfort? Yeah. How does that manifest? Is that just like being physically comfortable? What is that? Yeah, it would be physical comfort. So one of the challenges I give to people is for your first week, the only thing I want you to focus on, I'm not going to give you this long list to go look into your phone and have to read it before every meeting. The one thing I want you to focus on this week is, can you move slower than the other people in the room? That's it. Just adjusting the speed limit on your body. So if you were standing in a swimming pool, how fast would your arms and legs move if you were underwater? And make that the speed limit for this entire week. That's all I want you to focus on. And that makes so many changes in people's mind because we change our bodies and we change how our emotions are feeling. And there's one thing that fear does, it speeds our body up. So if you see someone doing these rapid jerky movements, you're seeing mostly fear or stress in their body. So get more comfortable in an interaction conversation, even if it's on the phone or in person. Yeah, so on the phone, it would be speaking at a normal composed pace. And then, so step two is composure. Can I get you into a place where you have some composure? In the left and right side of composure, we have collapse and we have posturing. So we have a person that makes themselves small so other people can be comfortable, or I make myself big so other people can get away from me. And we have, we see that with every aspect of our lives. Like when I first started my business, or when I first got out of the military, these people called me for a keynote. So this guy calls me and he's like, what's your hourly rate? And I said, 6K. And I said, that's including travel and all that. And the only thing he did, he didn't say anything on the phone. He just goes, that's it. He just made that noise. And right away I said, well, yeah, but we could do a discount. I can probably do like 5K. We could even take some off 50%. I can even take 75% since you're here, here and I have to do this. It just made up excuses. And I almost got to the point where I was like, let me pay you. I'll give you some money if you come let me speak on stage for you. And that's collapse. So that's, I'm in collapse in some areas of my life, I might posture in some areas of my life. And our goal is to get out of that swing. But the problem most people have, if I'm living in collapse, the solution looks like posturing. And we see this in like guys that learn pickup. Like I'm going to learn how to posture because it's the opposite of what I'm doing. It's not the center where I need to be. And what is the center? That's composure. That would be composure. And I would say composure is the combination of the things that make up authority. And authority is made up of five things. And that's confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment. So I have an authority inventory. This is day one, the first thing that I give to intelligence people or I've got a guy that owns a car dealership, whoever the client is. And it's the authority assessment. It assesses you on those things. And wherever your lowest point is, that's what's keeping you from being successful in most conversations when you need to persuade somebody. And it pinpoints it very quickly. And if I could go into this a little further, the way that we live our lives off camera, I'm sure you would agree, you just had Vanessa Van Edwards on. It bleeds out in our body language. It bleeds out in not just body language, but how we breathe, how we talk, how we come across. So even if I read that article on LinkedIn of 19 ways to look more confident, and it says, well, have better posture, sit up straighter, shake hands, make better eye contact. I did all of that. And I look really presentable. But back home, I've got an eight-foot pile of laundry sitting in the bedroom. My bed's nasty. I've got dishes all piled up in the sink. There's a part of our brain that's somehow dedicated to reminding us, I'm faking it right now. And that comes across. So whether we're doing it consciously or unconsciously, we're manufacturing gut feelings in other people. So our job is to manufacture better gut feelings. And the five most common ways that those bleed out in our everyday life is how we manage five areas of our life. And that is our environment, like, do I take care of my environment, my time, appearance, my social life, and my financial life? Because those are the five things we worry about in the back of our head that start bleeding out these gut feelings. Because we've all had a conversation where everything on the surface looked great. But afterwards, we were like, something was off. I don't know what it was, but something just didn't feel right about that guy. And we've all had that little experience. And getting a hold of those five qualities that make up authority are the fastest way to get success in your life and just drastically start changing your life. So it's really about the controllable element. It's our environment, our time, our appearance, our social life, and our finances. That's the controllable foundation to all these other things that we talked about. Yeah. So that would be the bottom foundation of that little pyramid. And the far left side of that triangle would be confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment. Yeah. And those elements alone produce feelings in other people that make them see an authority figure. And you've heard of the Milgram experiment. Oh gosh, it reminds me of something I read when I was 16 in psychology class in a textbook. Probably did. That was the one where they got people to shock each other. Yeah. Please explain. All right. Let me give you a quick recap. It's Yale University, and I think it's 1962. And Yale runs an ad in the paper. It says, come help us with this study on learning, and we'll give you 20 bucks or lunch voucher or something like that. So all these volunteers come out, and there's a tall guy in a lab coat, an official clipboard there. And there's one other volunteer, and you draw straws. One of you is the teacher, one of you is the learner. So you're led into this room. You watch this learner guy get strapped up. He's on this table getting strapped up to this electric shock machine. And every time he gets a question on this quiz wrong, you've got to shock him. You have to hit the button. And every progressive question, you increase the voltage on this machine that goes all the way up on the far right to XXX danger, severe shock is what it says on there. But the whole time you're shocking him, you can hear the guy screaming on the other side of the wall. He's screaming, and midway through the process, the guy's banging on the wall. He's like, I have a heart condition. I don't want to do this anymore. I'm out. I quit. I don't want to do the experiment. And 90% of these people will turn around to the guy in the lab coat, and the guy in the lab coat is like, please continue. It's important that you continue the experiment. So they keep going and going, and almost to the end, no more response. It's just silence. The guy doesn't even respond to questions. And the guy in the lab coat says, any non-answer has to be treated as if it were an incorrect answer. Please continue. And they keep going and going and going. And you can watch some of these on video, and you just watch their faces toward the end. These psychiatrists at the beginning of this predicted less than 1% would go all the way. 67% of people go all the way. And 250 volts is enough to kill you. 100% went up to 250. The presence of novelty and authority did everything. It made a person commit murder. And that's, I would say, I would argue, that's more difficult than selling someone a car. And that authority comes, in that particular example, came from going to the university, the lab coat, et cetera. But how do we establish authority ourselves? Is it going back to the things you said there about environment, appearance, et cetera, finances? Yeah. Are there physical expressions of that authority on a day-to-day basis? There are. Slowness of movement is one of the most common. So we have slowness of movement. So the right side of that authority triangle has five letters on it. And that stands for movement, appearance, confidence, connection, and intent. Is our intent visible? That outward sign of authority is what a lot of people tend to look for. What does authority look like? But what we're really doing is I want to look at the symptoms of authority, not the cause. Because all these LinkedIn articles, YouTube videos that are saying how to have more confidence, how to do X, Y, and Z are how to have the symptoms instead of the cause of authority. So people with authority tend to sit up straight, but they don't sit up straight because they read an article. They sit up straight because they see the world a certain way. And that's so much of a difference between changing my worldview versus changing my posture. It's very different outcomes, and we're still generating those gut feelings in people. Interesting. Have you worked with many people that come to you and they've got a clear authority problem? Is there a particular example you can think of where you were able to help someone turn their life around? Many. Hundreds. Give me your favourite example. My favourite example was a big CEO. He's in Los Angeles, and he asked me for skills. He starts off, I need the flight checklist. I don't need to learn to fly. I just need the checklist. But it takes me a while to walk people back and say, let's get to the root of this, because you can't just openly say you have an authority and comfort problem. And his employees would openly make fun of him in board meetings and stuff like that, and he didn't like it. And his company was going downhill so fast. And I took him through this process of gaining, let's build up your confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, and enjoyment, all of those things. And let's find where your lowest point is of those five. If I could just find your lowest point on that five list, then I know the highest leverage thing that I can do. So if the highest leverage that he can do would be confidence, that's the number one thing I'm going to start working on. And the moment we took him through that process, it was only a couple of months, and we used a lot of hypnosis. We used a lot of, I literally used brainwashing techniques to help him. So it's the same techniques. And you know what? Cognitive behavioral therapy was also a form of brainwashing back in the day, and aversion therapy. But within just a few months, he went from around, I think, $600,000 to $800,000 per month to like $4 million a month. All of his employees were on board. He had this huge shift. The problem comes when you're a coach and you make someone's life change that fast, they have to have an excuse. They can't go back to the office and like, they're different, right? So they have to say, this thing happened to me. I had this thing. So that's the first thing I work out with every client is like, you're going to have to go back and tell them something happened that changed your life, because you have to have a reason that you're going back different. So watching that transformation is so, so rewarding and incredible. But the confidence is usually what you have to change first with people. How'd you do that? You change how, what's going on inside their head. So you've gone on stage before, probably 1,000 or 2,000 people. You were on TV for a while. Even after you've been successful, have you ever even heard a tiny voice that said, why am I here? Or like, do I deserve to be here? Yeah. I mean, doing this is a prime example of that. Yeah. Or I'm faking it. People are going to find out I'm faking it. Well, you feel like that when you're a podcaster because you didn't get any official qualifications and then people started listening and then there's, they think that you know what you're doing. So I think I can tell me that as a podcaster. Yeah. And they never go away. So the difference between a person who's confident and a person who doesn't have confidence is that they hear those voices as truth and I hear them or somebody with confidence hears them as fiction. They're both listening to the same thing. So imagine like as a quick story, if you and I were going to lunch, and I said, Stephen, I'm going to come pick you up. I pull up in front of your house, you jump in the passenger side, we're heading off and I'm listening to an audio book about a nuclear bomb going off, but it's inside the audio book, there's a fake news report about a nuclear bomb going off. Let's say it's a pretend BBC broadcast or something that's going on, that it's in the audio book. We start driving. I'm relaxed. I'm focused on the road. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Your heart rate's increased. You're fearful. Your amygdala is firing off. You're in this horrible state of like, oh my God, what's going to happen to my family? We're both hearing the exact same broadcast. We're listening to the same speakers at the same time. But I know that I'm hearing fiction and you are worried that it's truth. I don't mean to use you as that example, but that's the easiest way to describe it. And then just fundamentally changing how you hear that voice and nine times, I think 10 times out of 10, that voice was developed when you were eight or nine. What did that kid do? And this is what I would ask any of the clients. What did that kid do to make friends or keep them? So friends, to feel safe. Now we're in the safety. How did I get to feel safe? And what did I do to earn rewards? And for some people, that might be recognition. For other kids who had a bad start in life, that might be water or food might've been a reward for those kids. So the way that we keep or earn friends, the way that we get rewards as a child, and the way that we feel what we have to do to feel safe, those develop as little apps in our brain that run in the background of our adult lives all the time. And we typically, as a kid, they're great. They might've kept us safe. They might've kept us alive. They might've held us inside of these social circles, but I'm going to be a dick to people so that they don't get close to me. Or I'm going to kiss up to authority figures like mom and dad, so I'll get some recognition and praise. And that becomes an app that we carry into adulthood without knowing it, without our consent, without our awareness. That little kid brings these things into adulthood and they just modify. So I go from having to kiss up to a narcissistic mother to, I'm going to kiss the boss's ass every single day. And everybody knows me as the office kiss ass. So they just translate from child to adult behavior. And if I can start understanding that, then I can start getting that person to understand the fundamental way to change their life. And I make them put those phrases out in the open to where it's so, I want them to be pissed off. So I will make them get a desktop wallpaper that says, I don't deserve money. Money is for other people. Just to make their brain see how stupid it is on a regular basis and put it on a motivational poster. And the second part of that is anybody who's confident has a generalized expectation of positive outcomes. Not specific, but things are going to be fine. Things are going to be fine. So if I can do that, you can fundamentally change someone's life. So the final point of that, which leads into discipline is I need to get you to form a relationship with your future self. Because everything that goes on in our life has to do our mammalian brain, this lower part of our brain here. And it doesn't speak English. There's no affirmation that's going to penetrate that barrier. There's no like, I'm going to read a quote on a wall or a PowerPoint slide that's going to fundamentally change behavior. You have to change the animal, the mammalian part of the brain. So the question I ask everybody that I'm training is, how would I teach it to a dog? How would I show my goals if I'm setting goals for next year? How would I show that to a dog? Because I have to get it down to a mammal. So the fastest way to do that is through visual means. So I have all of my clients download this app. I can't remember the name of it. There's probably a hundred, but it makes you look like 95. And you're just covered in wrinkles. It makes a lot of your hair kind of go away. And I make them print it out and put it everywhere just for a couple of weeks. And now we start developing a mental mammalian relationship with our future self, which changes how I eat, changes how I spend money. It changes maybe what time I go to bed, how much alcohol I drink, and mostly where I'm getting my dopamine from. If I draw a map of everywhere I'm getting my dopamine from, and more than 50% of it is on alcohol or porn or all of these things that I want. You have to be very, very honest with yourself at that point of where do I need to get dopamine from in my life? And successful people, every single successful person that I've ever met has a good dopamine map. So they get dopamine from good sources instead of bad ones. And is there a relationship between discipline and confidence? I think so very much. Because if you and I were sitting in an airport together, let's say we're sitting in Atlanta airport, and I just asked you with, and you're not a behavior profiler as far as I know, but I said, Stephen, look around and find somebody that's disciplined. It would take you five seconds because we don't need to profile people. That's a natural thing that you picked up on it on purpose, but we pick up on it unconsciously all the time. So having that level of discipline elevates our level of confidence automatically, because we know that other people are going to pick up on it, but we also know I'm moving up and I'm probably more in control of myself than the person that I'm talking to or the people that I'm dealing with regularly. So how we live off camera is coming through in our confidence. That's the exact thing that we were talking about, that environment time appearance. And if I can live off camera the same way that I want to be perceived by everybody in my life, my confidence already starts to grow. And you said enjoyment as well was one of the five. Yeah. Why is enjoyment important? I added it on there. It took a while, but I walked through everybody I've ever trained. And if you look at everyone who is a natural leader and has that level of authority, they're not just partying in the moment, but just in calmly enjoying what is happening now. So maybe you could call it mindfulness, but I think in just the trait of enjoyment and being in enjoyment is the most magnetic human trait that there is. What do I need to know about observation, which is the second part of your triangle to success or failure? Observation, being able to read a room. Is it possible to be able to read a room? Yeah. How would I go about reading a room? Okay. So if you're reading like a public area, let's go back to the airport, maybe. If I'm in a public area, I really want to pay attention to the slowest moving person in the room. I want to pay attention to who is more confident than the other person. And that's typically going back to speed. And if I'm reading other people well, I'm also making a lot of eye contact with them. So that's also one of the fastest ways to get a read on another human being is how often they're blinking. And if a person is blinking fast, it's a sign of high stress. If they're blinking really slow, it's a sign of focus. So it's not always relaxation. So if I talk to a psychopath in an interrogation room or in a business negotiation, and they're focused on prey, so we call that a prey focus because they're going to manipulate somebody, their blink rate will almost be a zero. If I talk to somebody who's being deceptive, their blink rate can go up to like a 75, 80 without us even knowing it. So one of the reasons that blink rate is so reliable is that it's unconscious. We don't realize the shifts in blink rate and we don't manually control it very well. And if all that I would ever need to teach somebody, you don't have to count or know how many times per minute it's going on is if I'm in a conversation, I'm going to start the conversation and say, is the blink rate normal? Does it look fast? Does it look slow? So what I'm really looking for in human behavior are changes, changes. So if I'm on stage, let's say I'm doing a keynote and across the room, I'm making eye contact with all these people and I start seeing an increase in audience blink rate, I know I need to change the subject or change the topic right away. So would you be looking at one particular person? No, so... Generally? Yeah, so I would look at all of these eyes and pretend like I'm looking at one human. Okay. Does that make sense? Getting an average of the... Yeah. So as I'm looking around, how many blinks do I see? And I'm going to pretend as if that was one human eye. Okay. So when you get a lower blink rate, people are paying more attention. You're doing a great job. And I go to these pitch meetings where these entrepreneurs will go up and pitch these angel investors and stuff like that up in Washington. And you can measure who will pitch based on blink rate. You see a blink rate drop, that is the most interested person in the room. You do the same thing with jury selection. It's so reliable. And you read these articles about like someone breathing into their chest. It takes a while to get good at that with your peripheral vision because I've taught it to people and they would spend a conversation with someone staring at their chest. And especially if you're talking to a woman, it's a bad idea. So blink rate is incredibly reliable. So to recap that skill, I start a conversation. Does it look pretty normal? Is it pretty fast or kind of slow? Then I'm going to look for changes. And that's all I'm looking for in a room of people is what's changing. So 70 is deceptive and zero is psychopath. 70 is stress, not always deceptive. Okay. And zero is psychopath, basically. Zero might be psychopath. Context is the second letter C. There's five C's that we talk about in behavior profiling. So change, then context. So now like somebody just crossed their arms and you read the internet, it says it's being defensive, withholding, closed off, see all that stuff. Well, what if it's freezing cold? So now we have context. It's so interesting. That actually happened in my last conversation. I try not to close off my body when I'm doing this because sometimes my natural reaction is to go like this. And then sometimes, especially in here, when it gets later and we didn't have the fan and the heater, I would go like this. And I was thinking, but this is rude. It's rude to the guest. But I looked at my arms and I had these massive goosebumps. And I was like, that's the context. The context is I'm freezing. But to the guest, it would look like I'm going like this. So this is why body language is so delicate, I think. It is delicate. And it's so hard for people to do peer-reviewed research on it because there's a million variables. It's like saying, well, why should Roger Federer win a tennis match when he doesn't have any peer-reviewed studies to back up what he's doing? It's the same thing with body language because they're doing interrogation research. So they're saying that a college kid who gets a lunch voucher and walks in and pretends to lie about a duck is exactly the same as someone who's been captured in combat, sleep deprived for a few days, has a black hood over their head, and they're drug into an interrogation room. And they're saying those behaviors are identical. Then there's the peer-reviewed research on lying and not lying. You cannot replicate human behavior that well. And people treat it like it's a pharmaceutical, like I can put a Tylenol on somebody and I can measure all these responses. And it doesn't really go into a spreadsheet like that. And there's a lot of great research out there. But I'd say it's just so incredibly hard to replicate everything with perfection like that. So what was the first C? First C is change. I want to look for a change. And then you want to look at context. Is there a third C? That would be clusters. Clusters. So then you read articles that say someone looks a certain way or does a certain thing that might be deceptive. Like the most common one I hear is someone touches their nose. So someone touching their nose might be being deceptive. If you're just seeing one thing, I would say that almost never means anything. You want to look for a cluster of behavior. So they started getting nervous, which is a change there. It's because I'm asking about where they were on Wednesday night. There's the context. And while they were getting nervous, they also started protecting their genitals.