Most of us tend to spend a great deal of time and energy on ways to develop and track a career. We know that a plan and long term goals are essential for any business or startup. In the process, it’s easy to forget about something just as important—ways we can...
FBI firearms training pushed new agents to think on their feet when under pressure. I have vivid memories of one exercise where I walked down an abandoned ally. Observers watched from a platform above and behind me, so they could critique my every decision, my every...
Popular movies and books lead people to believe spies are coerced to work for the U.S. government. To be successful, the FBI agent resorts to either sheer force or extortion to goad the foreign spy to be cooperative. Once beaten into submission, the free world is...
Successful FBI agents understand that it’s vital to create power poses that will produce results, and they’ll do it within the first few seconds of meeting someone. Often, people focus on how to memorize important points and rehearse their presentation so they’ll come...
As proof that we’ve become a society of wimps, consider this: new research confirms that when we run out of legitimate threats to face, we begin to call things that we judged to be harmless in the past now as a threat. The study was undertaken to understand how...
During my four months in the FBI Academy, I shot over 3,000 rounds of ammo in firearms training, spent untold hours in the gym building up enough muscle to pass the fitness test, and endured an endless number of mock interrogation sessions. We spent hundreds of hours...
I joined the FBI to make a difference, but I soon learned that I’d need to develop the self-esteem to impress my boss before important cases would be assigned to me. Otherwise, I’d be relegated to second-tier on the squad. That meant I’d run investigative leads for...
I learned quickly in the FBI that success would not make me confident; instead, confidence would make me successful. Easier said than done, and I should know because I’d never shot a gun when I showed up at the FBI Academy. Guess what? FBI agents are required to...
One of the first things I learned as an FBI agent was that the public had expectations when I walked through the door. They expected a confident, polished, and competent agent to listen to their concerns. Their first impression was the critical metric by which they...
The reason most people get stuck in mediocrity is because they refuse to fail. The reason people refuse to fail is because they associate failure with defeat. Their fear of defeat paralyzes them to the point that they won’t move forward. People are not finished when...
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