The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Former FBI Agent: If They Do This Please RUN! Narcissists Favourite Trick To Control You! They're Controlling You Like A Puppet!
Mon, 21 Apr 2025
Former FBI agent Joe Navarro reveals the body language mistakes silently destroying your success, and how to fix them today. Joe Navarro is a former FBI special agent and internationally renowned expert in nonverbal communication, human behavior, and body language. He is also the bestselling author of over 15 books, including ‘Be Exceptional: Master the Five Traits That Set Extraordinary People Apart’. He explains: The body language trick FBI agents use to gain instant control How to read any room and decode hidden emotions like a pro The silent body language habits sabotaging your confidence The negotiation techniques used by FBI agents - and how to master them How to spot liars and manipulators through subtle body language cues 00:00 Intro 02:25 Who Are You and What Have You Spent Your Life Working On? 04:30 What Is It You're Giving People? 07:16 How Would My Life Change If I Applied Your Knowledge? 11:13 Your Career 12:01 Behavioral Program at the FBI 15:01 Have You Caught Spies? 22:08 Story of Catching a Spy Using Flowers 26:42 How Many People Could Be Spies Walking Among Us? 29:16 Is Body Language Important? 34:43 First Impressions 37:33 How Do We Synchronize With Someone? 44:15 Eyebrow Knitting 46:08 Eyelid Touching 49:45 What Do Our Lips Give Away? 51:14 The Supersternal Notch 55:54 How Do We Negotiate? 1:02:49 Writing Down the Goal of Your Negotiation 1:06:51 Taking Control of a Situation 1:11:07 When Should We Walk Into Rooms? 1:15:09 Why Does Height Matter When Speaking to Someone? 1:20:25 What Clues in Someone’s Posture Should We Look For? 1:26:00 The Importance of Observing 1:27:42 Can You Train Confidence? 1:31:59 Don’t Rise at the End of a Sentence 1:34:20 Speaking in Cadence 1:36:31 Hand Gestures 1:38:12 Eye Contact 1:39:40 What to Do When Greeting People 1:42:59 Should We Be Taking Notes? 1:46:07 Handshakes 1:48:42 Behaviors You Wouldn’t Want From a Leader 1:49:34 Self-Mastery 1:51:52 The Importance of Taking Action 1:53:22 Observation 1:53:42 Psychological Comfort 1:57:59 How to Spot a Narcissist 2:04:07 Narcissism and Self-Belief 2:06:02 How Has Seeing All of This Changed You as a Human? 2:11:22 Is There a Proudest Day in Your Career? 2:13:10 The Importance of Connecting 2:14:53 What Do People Say They Like About You? Follow Joe: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/mEIBxWMqESb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/2r4SCkOqESb Body Language Academy - https://g2ul0.app.link/xDCgWDRqESb You can purchase Joe Navarro’s book ‘Be Exceptional: Master the Five Traits That Set Extraordinary People Apart’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/gbRf5uWqESb The 1% Diary is back – limited time only: https://bit.ly/1-Diary-Megaphone-ad-r… The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Get email updates: https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt Think like a CEO – join the 100 CEOs newsletter: https://bit.ly/100-ceos-newsletter Follow Steven: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Perfect Ted - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What insights can we gain from a former FBI agent about human behavior?
I was in the FBI for 25 years. I have sat with spies and enemies of this country, and I learned a lot about human behaviors. Imagine being able to read other people and circumstances faster. It gives you a tremendous advantage in your life. I want to hear everything. So one of the first things I teach is... Joe Navarro is a former FBI agent turned world-renowned body language expert.
He helps people decode body language to improve communication, trust, and influence.
One of the things that I found in negotiations is we, as humans, communicate quite a lot with our faces. For instance, we push this together when we don't understand something. And then the minute we hear something we don't like, blood actually begins to leave the lips and then we begin to tighten them. Another behavior is that when there's a lack of confidence, insecurities, people immediately.
So once we understand these behaviors, you can take command of any situation. Confidence. Is this something that you're born with? Or do you think confidence can be trained? It can absolutely be trained. So the FBI actually teach confidence. And there's a lot of strategies. One of them is the most powerful gesture that we can use. And you see Musk do this a lot.
But what I tell people is that the easiest way to learn confidence is to... Joe, we actually videoed my interaction with you when I met you.
And I've got the video here.
So one of the things you immediately did was... Don't do that. It's a no-no.
Quick one before we get back to this episode. Just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. It means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place.
But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started. And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24% of people that listen to this podcast regularly and follow us on this app. Here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future.
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Chapter 2: How can body language influence negotiations?
They say, well, you know, I'm concerned about that, or I don't know if that's a good investment, or we'll have to do some due diligence. The brain only recognizes fear. And so once you understand that, it gives you such amplitude to then pursue whatever it is that you're interested in doing more effectively.
And your career. Yeah. So you were an FBI agent for more than 30 years? Yeah.
Well, I was in law enforcement for 30 years. I was in the FBI for 25 years, principally working in the area of counterintelligence. But in the FBI, you never wear one hat. I was also a pilot, so I flew surveillance. I was a SWAT team commander, so I did SWAT stuff and actually worked with the SAS from London. And then I was in the behavioral analysis program.
So we used that skill set to work on catching spies.
What is the behavioral analysis program?
In the 89, 90, the FBI developed a very secret program to analyze not people that were dead, but actually... How do we use human behavior to catch spies, to catch terrorists? And then once we catch them, how do we get into their heads? How do we get them to tell us what they're up to, what their purpose is, and so forth? So we created this program.
I, along with five other agents out of 12,000, were selected from the FBI to become part of this new behavioral analysis program, which was supposed to be classified, except it was accidentally leaked. And our job was to look at the threats, national security threats, and then see how we can use our knowledge of human behavior to then attack that.
So when you say much of your work was to catch spies.
Right.
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Chapter 3: What are the key body language cues to identify confidence?
The military wanted to find out if he knew anything about some missing documents, if he had seen anything. During my interview of him, which again, I thought he was a witness, he was smoking a cigarette at his house. And I just mentioned an individual's name that had been at that base, but who had been under investigation by German authorities.
In fact, by the Bundeskriminalamt, which is the equivalent of the FBI. There's no reason why he should react to that. It's just a name. But when I mentioned the name, his cigarette shook. And I knew enough about human behaviors to know that that physiological change had to be caused by something significant. Why would a name affect him?
And so the scientific method talked to him for 20 more minutes about something else. And then I mentioned that name again. And sure enough, his cigarette shook again. And at that point, I was convinced that there was something nefarious there. As it turns out, the Germans arrested Conrad. Clyde Conrad, that was the name of the person that had been under suspicion.
The guy that I was interviewing, Rod Ramsey, was not. And so I left that interview and then I persuaded my supervisors to continue to talk to Rod Ramsey. And that led to a 10-year investigation and the arrest of three, four, five, six, seven additional individuals.
So that Roderick Ramsey guy with the shaking cigarette was a, he was spying on America?
What he was doing, and that's a good question, and forgive me for not explaining. While he was in the army, he and Clyde Lee Conrad were stealing military secrets. From? From the US Army. They were taking US Army secrets and then selling it to the Soviet Union through the Hungarian intelligence service. So he was a traitor of the United States. So he was a traitor.
And that is often the biggest problem for any nation state is the traders from within. And they had elevated espionage to an industrial level. I mean, to the point where they actually no longer even use 35 millimeter cameras to photograph the documents. They were actually videotaping them so that they could expedite the thousands of pages.
It was the most damaging espionage case in the history of the United States because they had compromised the United States nuclear go codes in Germany. And that left all of Western Europe exposed.
nuclear go codes. Yes. What is that?
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Chapter 4: How can we spot liars and manipulators?
Okay, so someone could have changed the codes, put a fake one in, which meant that it wouldn't work anymore.
that at the highest level, then nothing would work if you had it accessed at the highest level. Did they go to jail? Oh, yes. Yeah. The shaking cigarette guy went to jail. 33 years. Let me just finish it by saying this. This case put all of Western Europe in danger as well as the United States.
The general who testified in this case said that had hostilities broken out, the defeat of the West would have been assured within three days. That's how devastating this was. Yeah, let that sink in. Those are his words. The defeat of the West would have been assured because of the damage these individuals had done.
Not all cases are as significant in terms of catching spies. I was reading about another one where you caught a man because of the way he held some flowers.
Yeah. A lot of times, it's just based on the behavior. You see how often somebody looks at their watch, right? But maybe when they're operational, they look at their watch more often.
And they filmed this guy who we thought was what we call an illegal, and in the parlance of espionage, an illegal is someone who magically appears in the United States and pretends to be an American, has always been an American, like the series, The Americans.
But we had some clues from one of our sister services from another country and said, we think this individual may be someone who you need to look at that is pretending to be an American. We're looking at the unit. We bring the whole team together, all six of us. And we're looking at the movie. And it was filmed. Just serendipitously, it was filmed. on Valentine's Day.
And so we see him entering a flower shop and leaving the flower shop. When he exited, I said, definitely he's not an American. You know, everybody looked at me like, excuse me? I said, he's not from here. And he said, how? And he says, look how he's carrying the bouquet. Americans carry the bouquet, bouquet up. Eastern Europeans carry it bouquet down. And continued to carry it that way.
So I did what's called a presumptive. So we stopped him one day and I said, you know, I'm with the FBI. And I said, do you want to know how we know? And that was the first trigger I was looking for to see how he reacts to it. And he fell for it. And he said, go on. Most people would say, get out of here. Go away. And I said, it was how you carried the flowers. His chin came down.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the suprasternal notch in body language?
Chapter 6: How can understanding body language improve our communication?
Well, that's one way to look at it. I'm not sure that anybody knows the precise reason for it. But what we do understand is that the still face, which if you're in a virtual call, you want to nod, you want to tilt your head, you want to make different gestures. But the worst thing you can do is hold still.
And then in negotiations, when you're talking to the team and saying, look, when we're going in there... I don't want anybody to just sit there. I want expressions. And when someone is speaking, you're looking at them in the same way that the other side would do. But you have to plan.
Now, the other thing I find with negotiators, one thing I did in the FBI is I always planned my interviews in exquisite detail. Who would enter the room first? Who would say what? Where I would sit? Who gets offered water and when? Because I need to be in control. Who's going to say what? These are things people don't think about.
But at the levels with the people that I deal with, you have to have a certain amount of advantage. You have to have a certain amount of psychological leverage to say, look, you may be the world's largest manufacturer of this, and I'm just starting out, but I am not down here.
And so I would appreciate if you would begin to value me, and I do that by doing certain things in the manner that I walk in. Who walks in first? Where do I sit? What gestures do I use to point, right? So you never use your finger. You always use the full hand in the vertical position. You take command of the situation and it looks aesthetically pleasing. Oh, isn't it nice?
He's offering me something to drink. Or the assistant or someone says, would you like some tea? How would you like it? And so forth. And what we're actually witnessing is the transformation of you have now accepted become the dominant person by becoming the archetypal, the father or mother figure. Because you're offering something.
Because you're offering it, and you're in control of the food and the brain. People often wonder, well, why was it in Stockholm, Sweden back in the 70s that the Stockholm syndrome took hold so fast with those bank robbers? where they had such an effect on their victims that within hours, the victims were defending the bank robbers. It was very simple.
They became the father figure and the hostages became the children. So I actually don't know that story. What happened was there was a bank robbery in Stockholm. And the bank robbers went in, held the victims hostage. Eventually, they were rescued. But what they found was that in a matter of hours, the victims were rising to the defense of the criminals.
And it became known as the Stockholm Syndrome. And what it showed us was the robbers became the archetype of the parent and the hostages became the children. And in an instant, they became subservient.
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