Confidence Classic: How To Decode Behavior And Instantly Understand People with Intelligence Behavior Expert Chase Hughes

0:00The title, Fake It Till You Make It, automatically carries some negative connotation. where I think we should maybe replace that with just give yourself permission to do it because that's the threshold. That's the threshold between faking it and doing it for real. The moment you give yourself permission, no one else cares. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up. Did you know I recently celebrated having created 450 episodes of this podcast? And we are still going strong.

0:38Thank you for listening. That is a lot of topics and amazing guests. So I thought I would put together a few of my listener favorites for the month of September as bonuses on Thursdays to help you catch up on what you may have missed. So you can keep growing your confidence with these confidence classics. Let me know what you think.

1:04You are going to freak out at how good my guest is today. I'm freaking out. I love this guest. I think this is one of the best interviews that I've had, especially over Zoom. We were able to have such a strong connection. He's such a talented and amazing man. Chase Hughes retired from the U.S. military in 2019 after a 20-year career. Chase now teaches interrogation, sales, influence, and persuasion. He developed the 6MX system for intelligence agencies, which is now the gold standard in tradecraft. Chase is also the only trial consultant in the world who offers a whopping 300 % money back guarantee.

1:41That's crazy. Chase is the author of the number one bestselling book on behavior profiling, persuasion, and influence, the ellipsis manual chase is a total badass and you are gonna love him so hang tight we're gonna be right back chase thank you so much for being here with me today yeah glad to be here thanks for having me heather oh my gosh i'm so excited i can i can't believe featured with elon musk top 20 CEO list for 2020. Are you kidding me? I know. I still, it doesn't feel real at all. I mean, do you get to hang out with him now? Like what does this include? I don't know. I've been waiting for some kind of an access card to Tesla or something.

2:25I haven't, I haven't gotten anything yet. All right. Well, hopefully I hope COVID wraps up soon and they have some kind of award ceremony that you get to hang out because that is going to be an amazing day for you. It should be cool. And much deserved. I mean, as you were saying, I mean, this was not something that happened overnight. You've only been living the civilian life for just the past couple of years. Two years. Yeah. The amount that you have accomplished in two years is mind numbing. What does that look like behind the scenes? I write every day from four to 11 a.m. and I'm booked in 15 minute increments until 9 p.m.

3:01after that on calls and stuff. And I take one day off a week, but I still write from four to 11. So four to 11 is the sacred writing time every day. I would assume that the discipline comes from the military experience. I think, you know, a lot of people assume that, but most guys in the military, and I'll be the first to admit it, you're waking up early because you don't want to get in trouble. You don't want to get your ass handed to you. So you get up early. So a lot of what we think is discipline is actually habit. So these are just habits you've created for yourself. That's it. Yeah. So you just need a little teaspoon of discipline and then the habit starts.

3:37Like, you know, you see somebody going to the gym, working their butt off every day. You know, you hear people say, oh, I wish I had that kind of discipline. That's not discipline. That's just a habit. Well, a teaspoon, a little, a little bit of discipline. Just a little bit just to get it started off. Yeah. Well, I'll take that kind of discipline. For me, writing a book was definitely not a 4 to 11 a.m. window. I feel like that your regimen makes a lot better sense to be consistent with it. Yeah, I got that from Dan Brown, the guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code. That's his routine. So I just copied it.

4:10I figured if he can write a bestselling book, then I'll do the same. I definitely like that. And I'm going to have to try that next time, too. I mean, don't reinvent the wheel, people. If it's working for Da Vinci, like I think I'm going to jump on that. All right, Chase. So what's so interesting to me is obviously the massive amount of success that you're having. It's mind blowing. But for people who don't know, as a child and a teenager, you were anxious or had social anxiety. Tremendous. Yeah. I just kind of learned to mask it growing up. I got my start doing that in my whole career. Like some girl turned me down one night and I just asked her on a date.

4:49And I went home and I literally typed into Google how to tell when girls like you and printed out a giant stack of stuff, went down the wormhole and got addicted to reading behavior. And I got addicted to behavior profiling because I could see people's insecurities, their fears. I could see all kinds of stuff way behind the curtain after a while. And I started realizing that everybody else is screwed up, too. Everybody's screwed up. Everybody's suffering. Everybody's insecure. Then I'm like, oh, it's not just me. And I didn't feel superior to anybody. It was just, it made people more human. And I think it just injected some empathy into me that I think that's the number one thing that's lacking in people with social anxiety is that empathy factor that that guy's screwed up too.

5:34That guy has insecurities or that woman does just as well as anybody else. I completely understand how you Googled, how do you know when a girl likes you? Because I Google everything and I get that. But the fact that you took it down the rabbit hole, as you said, I mean, that's beyond. Where was that curiosity? Or do you just think this was what you were meant to do? You felt something different with this topic? It seemed like a superpower. So I wanted to study reading people. And then once you can read people, you can persuade them on a completely different level. It's not just the normal, here's a persuasion technique.

6:11That technique becomes surgically sharp when I know the exact way that this person's brain works. So I wanted to compound this into a superpower and I couldn't find it. So I wound up spending my life putting this stuff together and eventually started bringing this into intelligence operations and overseas interrogations. And I wanted to make this a tool to where it wasn't just something that I did, but something that was saving people's lives. And that's what really pushed me over the edge to really get obsessed with this stuff because it was so effective. That had to be intimidating, or at least it sounds intimidating to me to think of making the leap of studying something in theory and then going into the military to the level at which you rose and actually implementing it.

6:57It's hard only because they've got a we've got it figured out mentality. We've paid some guy a bunch of money, which means that your information, it's free, so it couldn't be very valuable. which is, you know, I was offering it for free. And at that time, there was a lot of budget constraints and things like that. But bringing it in, I only asked that you test it out. If it doesn't work, then don't use it. I'll teach 10 people. And if it's not the best, then don't ever use it again. And so clearly it worked. It did. And it does. Yes. What are some of the things that you can teach us about how to utilize profiling and really help us understand?

7:39Because to me, it seems like a movie. It seems so far away from the natural teachings or things that we learn in school and day-to-day life. One thing I think that's an essential ingredient in doing any of this stuff, surprisingly, is confidence. And I think that confidence is a manufacturable trait or skill, you know, whatever the heck label you want to stick on it. But it's so hardwired into us to feel unconfident because it's a default to safety. And if you go back 100 million years, when our brains were evolving, go back 200 million years, our brains were still evolving back then. You know, the average group of people was about 100 to 150 in a little tribe.

8:19And if you were overly confident and got smacked down, you had social consequences, which means you probably wouldn't have sex or reproduce. Your DNA stops existing the moment you become too confident for your britches, we say in Texas. But that moment also happens when if I'm overconfident and I piss off the wrong guy, now I'm just dead. Now I get thrown off a cliff or I get my head smashed with the club, that was millions of years of that stuff happening. And so we have an existential fear that happens there. And it's the same part of our brain. If you stick your fingers in your ears, that's the part of the brain that we're working with.

9:00It's all in the limbic system. So all of our fear is right in there. And back in this time, a million years ago, if you didn't feel that fear, like if you're walking past a bush and a stick breaks and you don't care about it, and it's a saber-toothed tiger, it's kind of a big deal. Luckily, none of our ancestors died a virgin. None. So, you know, we all got that instinct passed down. So literally the exact same part of the brain that's afraid of a saber-toothed tiger is the same part of the brain telling you, no, you shouldn't ask for a discount on that coffee. Don't do it. So our brain is thinking there's a tiger.

9:38I will get killed or I won't reproduce. So it's interesting in that regard, thinking of it from an evolutionary perspective, just understanding and just getting a grip on the knowledge that there is a little animal in there that's afraid of tigers standing with you in Starbucks. And it's trying to tell you like the tiger is going to get you if you ask for a discount on your coffee or whatever. And I think it helps to just understand that there's no tigers. There are no tigers. And just repeating that and understanding that there's a little piece of my brain. It's not my conscious human part of my brain that's doing that.

10:17It's an evolutionary holdover. It's a little residue from how we evolve. And just the knowledge that that is in there really does help to understand, whoa, that thought wasn't real. And you had a quote in an interview. I don't remember where it was. I stalked you on YouTube before we did our recording here. But you had a quote, you said, fear is a lie or fear is a liar. One of those two. Oh, it's from the Elvis Duran show. Yeah. Fear is a liar. Yes. Yeah. That really rang true because it's not a truthful fear that's going to represent I'm in some kind of danger. And what we're doing is like what we need to feel confident in these tribes when our ancestors are growing up is proof.

11:05If this guy respects me, this guy's always respected me, and everyone's always listened to everything I say, I have evidence and proof. Those are the two things that we're scanning for, and that gives me permission. And that's the key word. Once I see evidence and proof, now I have permission to act a certain way. I can be more confident. But most of us and people who lack confidence, of course, me on many occasions, we're looking and waiting for evidence and proof or permission that is never going to come. No one's going to come tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, hey, Heather, you've got permission to be confident today.

11:43That's never going to happen. And no one needs to. You can do that yourself. Or if you need it from me, you've got permission. And that's the thing, that we need some kind of permission. guests each week.

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15:02And that's where the confidence ladder really starts. And there's three things internally and two things externally, in my estimation, that happen when confidence occurs. We have an internally assumed permission to act. So I just think there's no tigers. Nobody's going to give me permission. I'm going to start acting a certain way. And that produces the next phase internally for us is a lack of reservation and doubt. So it reduces reservations. It reduces the amount of doubt that we experience. And the third thing is it gives us a sense of authority. And I want you to think of the word authority a little bit different.

15:37Like the first part of that word is author. I'm creating what's happening right now. I'm not responding. I'm involved in the creation of what's happening right now. And once you feel like the author of this situation or this part of your life, then it goes external. And that there's an external acceptance from the other person. Because guess what? those other people around you, they won't act confident without proof either. So they will assume, automatically assume that if you're acting a certain way, you have proof other places. You have already gotten proof from other people. If he's acting this way or she, they must be respected by everybody.

16:17So they automatically get something called social proof just from that confident behavior. And the true essence of confidence is the final stage here. So it started with internal permission, and now we're passing the permission over to the other person to act in a different way. So the true power of confidence is in your ability to transfer it to someone else and not just possess it. If you go to the dark side of that, like Frank Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can, his true power of confidence was to give it to others. He made other people confident in him. And that turns into a chain reaction because the moment that it works just for a little bit, your brain collects a piece of data.

17:02And we're looking for evidence and proof. And your brain starts to collect that from the first time that you just push yourself and get that done. And collecting that data, is that what the profiling is? Well, collecting the data is done on an unconscious level. Your brain is saying, well, you really pushed yourself out of your comfort zone, but it actually worked. So next time it'll be a little bit easier. You're not going to have to fight the little kid in there worried about tigers anymore. He might still have a voice, but his voice is going to get quieter and quieter because we're looking for evidence and proof before we act confident, which is never going to come.

17:39This is just so interesting to me because how you just described it, I've never heard confidence described that way. I agree 100 % with everything that you're saying. And I mean, the fear and I mean, it can be visceral and feeling and I mean, everything that you're explaining is so spot on. How did this become applicable in the military for you when you were just initially researching and learning about this when it's starting with girls? I don't understand how that ended up taking you into the highest levels of government and military? It started with a mentor I had. It was a 72 year old intelligence guy, a military intelligence guy.

18:17And I had bought this book. I won't say the name of it because I'm going to talk poorly about it, but it was on like these tactics to meet women. I was 20 years old. I was a naive kind of a douchebag. And I tell this guy we're having lunch together and I'm a kid. He's agreed to mentor me. And I bring the book. I've got it in a bag. I'm telling him about this book. I'm excited about it. And he goes, do you have it with you? And I said, yeah. He said, put it on the table. So I brought it up there. It's got a girl on the cover. And he said, I want you to flip through there and find one technique that isn't a way to fake or pretend like you have your shit together.

19:00And I couldn't do it. And at that point I was done, but I still understood that, that all of those things in that book were, if you have your stuff together and you work at a certain level, you are confident. All those fake things are just byproducts of a good person. So once you level up, those things are just a byproduct of your personality or your character. So I started working in the correctional part of the military in detention facilities. And I initially got on as a counselor and just talking to people and started seeing that this stuff is working. I'm seeing interrogators come in and out.

19:37and it got to a point where that stuff became, just for this one little facility, it became something that people started to use. And I thought, wow, I'm gonna just figure out a way to package this up and I can replicate it to other people because it started doing a lot of good. And that's kind of how it came into the military side of it. And that was you transferring confidence to them? The whole transferring confidence came about when we had a guy who worked for me and he was one of the guys who talked to these prisoners regularly. I'll just say that. But he was super confident. Everyone would describe him like, oh, he's extremely confident.

20:16But he didn't transfer it to anybody else. He was the guy that was confident and kind of pushed other people down. The more confident he was, the further down he made other people feel. So that's not confident. We all see people like that for sure. That's not confidence. So what you see in a situation like this is that person believes in themselves. They might have a high self-esteem, but their confidence is low because it relies on the external world. So esteem and confidence, of course, are absolutely different things. But the true power of confidence, the guys who did really well talking to detainees, the guys who do well in sales, the guys who are good therapists or good clergy or good parents are very confident and they make other people confident.

21:02So even somebody that's around you with social anxiety, we think, oh, if I just kind of crumble down a little bit, it'll make them more comfortable. But it works the opposite. You know, it makes them feel bad, too. Now it's like double awkward. So somebody who has a natural confidence, even if they're around somebody that has social anxiety, they lift them up and they bring them up. So I noticed that that was one of the key things. And it wasn't just military. It took me a while to realize that. It wasn't just interrogations or stuff like that. It was everything. And I realized I wasn't learning hardcore intelligence skills.

21:37I was learning human. This is just applied to all humans. It took me a long time to figure that out. But I didn't think anybody outside the military would ever be interested in this stuff. Isn't that so funny? Whatever bubble we're immersed in, we only see within that lens and think it's so unique to that one little area. Oh, yeah. So true. Thankfully, you know, you were able to look beyond that and see that it's ubiquitous. I mean, it's unbelievable. And when you brought up just now, you were talking about when you try to shrink yourself down in order to make someone else feel better, whether they have social anxiety or whatnot.

22:13For me being in a negative work environment and seeing that someone felt threatened by me, I tried that same tactic, not aware of what you're teaching now, but okay, maybe that will make her feel more comfortable. And again, it did not work. In fact, it actually made my situation much worse. However, still today, Jason, I don't know what it is. I there's this sense out there or this understanding that isn't talked about that if you appear too confident, it's a negative. Or if, you know, you speak out about, you know, your success, or you just are an open, strong person, that there's something that, ooh, you might want to, you know, dim that down a little bit.

22:59It could intimidate others. I think that that might be that I don't think they're talking about confidence, Because if confidence made you ruin relationships, Emma Stone would not be a badass. She's one of the most naturally confident people on camera, off camera that I've ever met. And that's true confidence. So that doesn't need to put anybody else down. And I think the trouble comes when you have a confident person who is unconsciously thinking about status on a very regular basis. They walk into a new conversation and they think, where am I? Am I on top? Am I a little below? They may not be trying to climb.

23:43They may not feel the need to be on top all the time, but they're thinking about status probably more than they should. And that bleeds into their behavior. You brought up the fake it till you make it with that first book that you were sitting with your mentor reviewing. Does that mean you don't believe in the concept of fake it till you make it? No, I absolutely do because there's no such thing as faking it. If you act confident, then you're confident because other people will see confidence. So I think fake it just means that I'm doing something without mental permission from myself to do it.

24:17Oh, wow. I like that because I agree with you. The more you start behaving a certain way, the more you start feeling it. And like you said, other people are responding to it as if it is as if it is real. So that has been a successful tactic in moments when I've needed it for sure. Yeah. And I always ask people, where's the line? Where's the line from faking it to reality? Are you judging this by how other people respond? Then if that's the case, then faking it is for the rest of your life. If you're going to keep growing and keep wanting to go to that next level and keep entering into that next Starbucks to negotiate, you have to be able to keep challenging yourself to do that.

25:01And I think the whole concept or the title, Fake It Till You Make It, automatically carries some negative connotation. Yes. Where I think we should maybe replace that with just give yourself permission to do it because that's the threshold. That's the threshold between faking it and doing it for real. The moment you give yourself permission, no one else cares. They care so little whether or not, hey, does he really feel this way? No one gives a shit. So I think that's the threshold. When you talk to a human, it's even if you're faking confidence until you make it, there's no graduation ceremony where you get a certificate.