“Make space for people to reveal themselves.” How former Secret Service Agent Evy Poumpouras learned to spot a liar.

How can you tell what a person’s intentions are? Look at their behavior and what their actions are showing you.?

So says former Secret Service Agent and Author Evy Poumpouras who had to learn the hard way when a woman had complained that she hadn’t received her IRS tax refund check. Even though the woman was being cagey and difficult to set up a meeting with, Poumpouras accepted everything she said as fact. To Poumpouras, the woman was her ‘victim.’?

“She didn’t look like what I thought my fraudster should look like,” Poumpouras said.

Finally they met at a diner in Queens where Poumpouras authorized the reissuing of a new check. The woman finally relaxed. As they were exiting, she introduced her father who had been sitting at the diner counter surreptitiously watching them the entire time. Poumpouras and her partner were stunned. They were being surveilled and didn’t even know it.?

“As an agent, you have to have situational awareness,” Poumpouras said. But she had let her guard down because, “I had a narrative, [the woman] gave it to me and I followed it.”

Later, when Poumpouras was training to be a polygraph examiner interrogator, she looked back on that incident—how difficult the woman had been, how cagey, and how she involved her father—and realized she’d been fooled.?

“Sometimes we get lost because we’re so quick to label… that we don’t pause to really look at the behavior,” Poumpouras said. “Pay attention to people. When you’re speaking to people, talk less, listen more. In fact, shut up.”?

Tune into this episode of Catalyst to see how Evy Poumpouras was able to identify the child’s assailant through her new approach, and what her advice is for truly seeing people for who they are.?

Have you ever misjudged someone? What steps did you take to rectify the labels you put on someone else? We want to hear from you in the comments!??

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