03 Feb February 3, 2020 – SOB Dr. Gayle Carson and Lying Greg Hartley
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Dr. Gayle Carson – Host of Women in Business – Chief SOB and Founder of SOB Clubs
When women hit fifty there is something that goes off in their head
that says that they are not valuable, or not needed. I am a SOB,
a Spunky Old Broad!
Gayle Carson knew at a young age that she was born to coach entrepreneurs. Possessing that “silver lining mentality” has allowed her to build a company from 0 to 7 offices, travel globally as an international speaker, coach and consultant and produce over two dozen books, CD and DVD programs and work with over 1000 clients in 50 different industries. Surviving four bouts of breast cancer and over 16 surgeries, experiencing the death of her husband and her oldest son was not easy to say the least. Throughout all the cancer, she kept working even during radiation, chemo as Dr. Gayle believes we are all survivors in one form or another. This attitude transfers over to the mastermind groups and individual coaching and mentoring with her clients so that they not only survive but flourish and reinvent themselves personally and professionally. As an expert adviser to CEO’s and entrepreneurial managers around the world, she has been called on by major media to comment on business, communication, the conversation on boomer statistics and even customer service issues. A specialist in boomer women and beyond, she helps them deal with elder-care issues, feeling invisible, self-esteem and most important, knowing they can become whatever it is they want to be.
Gregory Hartley – Human Behavior Consultant – Author – Former US Army Interrogator – Author of How to Spot a Liar – Read interview highlights here
It is really about extreme interpersonal skills. Just pay attention
to people. We have forgotten to do that, and social media has not
made it any better.
Gregory Hartley’s expertise as an interrogator first earned him honors with the United States Army. More recently, it has drawn organizations such as the Defense Intelligence Agency, Navy SEALS, Federal law enforcement agencies, and national TV to seek his insights about “how to” as well as “why.” He resides near Atlanta, Georgia.
Highlights from Greg’s Interview
They’ll do what you want when you’re watching, if you pay them more. That’s typically what you find, right? Actually, I think I’m the opposite of a cynic. I spent 20 years in the Army, and I’ve been away from the army now and working in civilian life for about 20 years. You find that most people are actually good and intend to do good things. The monkey part of the human gets in the way sometimes, and we do stupid things because of that, but most of us don’t wake up in the morning wanting to be bad guys. That’s the reason there’s a job for interrogators, and a job for people who do that in law enforcement and the criminal world, is to root out those guys you can’t trust.
I say we’re nothing more than like an onion. We keep adding layers to who we are. And I didn’t join the army to be an interrogator. I first joined the army and spent time in infantry units and that, and I was in Arlington Cemetery for two years back in the 80s, in the Ronald Reagan era, and I can remember doing burials and White House arrivals and all that. Those are fantastic, and that’s an honor. But it’s mind numbing. At some point, you’re standing there thinking, “What else does the army have that I can do?” So, I started taking aptitude tests for another thing. There are language aptitude tests, and I took a language aptitude test, and I was scored high. So I had an appointment. Because you’re in Arlington, you’re kind of a golden-haired child, they take good care of you and fund your next assignment.
I went in to talk to the guy in charge of the language program. He showed me where all the options were and said, “Because your scores are high, you can choose Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, all level four by the army’s standards.” And I chose Arabic for a couple of reasons. One is, I don’t like cold weather, and I figured there’s a good option. And the other was that I’d lived in Korea, and really didn’t want to go back. It was one of those things. So then once you learn the language, and they invest two years in teaching you a language, you’re certainly not going to have the language as a hobby, you have to find a job to use it for. There were two options, those options being voice intercept, where you listen to radio signals all day—which, I’m a people person, so that really did not suit me, and the other was interrogation. When I say I’m a people person interrogation might sound like it doesn’t suit me, because it sounds horrible to people who don’t understand what we do. But it really is about influence and gaining trust and those kinds of things, so it was a natural fit.
I went from there to teaching resistance to interrogation to Navy Seals and Green Berets and those kinds of guys, in case they get captured, so they know what to do. And it started me down a lifelong path of passion for why people do what they do, helping people get past things, understanding why people do things, and rooting out all those things.
I would say there only three real drivers in humans that make them lie. There’s love, hate, and greed. And there are nuances, of course. People lie for love of self, narcissism and that kind of thing. They lie from love of another person to protect them. They may lie to protect someone they love who they’re in a relationship with or they may lie to protect theirself from someone they’re in a relationship with, stopping them from finding out that they’ve done something that is outside the relationship. So love, hate and greed are the typical three, and it’s nuanced from there.
A kid lying and telling mom he didn’t get his history test back yet is love of self. You’re protecting yourself, or as a child, your motivation may be you’re going to something Sunday or Saturday that you want to do and you don’t want to be grounded, so you wait till Monday. It’s love of self or greed.
Humans are pretty simple and pretty complex, right? I always say there’s no absolute simple answer to know when someone’s lying to you. The real magic is in learning what’s normal for the person—and you don’t need long to do that, you can figure it out in a few minutes—and then looking for deviation. All polygraph does is look for deviation and speech patterns and respiration, and a handful of other things, and that same stuff gives us away in body language, because blood leaves our face when we’re feeling apprehensive about being caught. That’s what the galvanic skin response is looking for. But your eyes can pick up on the lack of blood flow to the face, because people get pale and their lips get thin. Those are all things that people in the past would use to describe a liar: pale-faced liar, thin-lipped liar, those kinds of things. We’ve known this stuff in the past, we just turned it off, I think. So that’s one.
Number two, if you want to cheat with absolutes, be really suspicious when somebody has a mesmerizing stare into your eyes when they’re telling you a story, because it really focuses on whether you’re believing them or not. And very few people normally do that, your eyes move around your head when you’re thinking, and you don’t keep eyes locked. That lock is a bad sign.
Humans are pretty complex. Every one of us has a unique communication style, whether it’s the brand the army put on me or my Southern upbringing, or all those things, they’re all going to tie tightly to creating an individual that is different in communication styles, a thumbprint, but it doesn’t take long to look and notice something that doesn’t fit that normal communication style. When a person slows down when they’re talking to you, it means they’re thinking through something that’s inappropriate to an answer, but where were you Tuesday, that probably is an indicator. We talked about in books, a lot of those things, but humans have good instincts. And I always say if I do my job well, when you finish reading my book, you’ll say, “I know all that.” I just gave you words for it.
The good news is that a good interrogator, not one who’s simply after a confession, one who’s after fact, and after solving the problem, he’s not looking for you to give him something out of your norm. They establish a baseline by asking you questions and finding out how you normally respond. In casual conversation they may ask you about ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago, two days ago, they have nothing to do with the disappearance of the body. And then when they get down to the disappearance of the body, they’re looking for your speech patterns to change, for your lack of memory to change, those kinds of things that indicate that you’re trying to hide something. And I’ll rattle through an interview and think about a sine wave moving normally. As long as everything looks the same, we’re good. The minute I see that sine wave either contract or expand, now you’re going to get more attention. That’s the way most of my interrogations went.
This started with a publisher asking me to write a book about manipulation. I always say you can’t write a positive book about manipulation. You have to write the positive applications of manipulation. Having spent most of my life either in front of people in corporate America—which I do today—or in my interrogation days, dealing with bad guys, you’re constantly thinking about what they have in common. So, you go all the way back to some basic psychology, the basic psychology of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
That simply says that at the base, we all have to satisfy a simple need before we move to the next, and that first need is a physiological need. We need water, air, shelter, food, those things, those physiological things. Then you move to the second level, which is safety, and that’s about clothing and shelter and those things. And once you get those things satisfied, then you can move to thinking about belonging, being part of a group, and being a member of that group. If you think about your high school days, whichever group you were part of, that’s the how you fit in. Then once you’re part of the group, you can differentiate yourself and start to establish self-esteem by showing you’re the fastest guy in your group or you’re the smartest guy in your group or whatever your specialty is. And once you get past that, then you start to move towards self-actualization. Pretty simple. There have been people who said that’s not fact. I’ve spent my entire life working on people, that’s fact. If people don’t satisfy the lower needs, they can’t satisfy higher needs. And the interesting piece is in your daily life, you’re rarely going to meet anyone, you’re rarely going to have to deal with anyone who has to worry about food and shelter. Most people—forget the homeless for a minute—most people don’t have those two to worry about. Air, most people don’t have to worry about that. And you rarely meet people who are truly self-actualized. You’re dealing with people in the middle two tiers of that entire thing, which is belonging to a group and differentiating is all that makes sense.
Then as you move up the pyramid, more and more things can satisfy your needs. When you’re dying of thirst, water’s the only thing that works, but when you’re trying to self -actualize, you could be the biggest collector of shoes worn by Elvis Presley and be actualized by that. I don’t know what your thing is, but it becomes a very narrow band. Then if you think about where you’re going to be able to impact the person, it’s going to be in the individual’s needs in those two pieces, and it’s going to be about establishing belonging to that person, or giving them some esteem within the group. And I give you a couple of tools to use for that, those being bonding, making the person part of the group, or fracturing, differentiating them from the group. And if you use those two tools, you can use them constructively or negatively, to move them back and forth between the elements of belonging and differentiating. If they’re part of the group, you can show the rest of the group how much smarter and faster they are. If they’re getting too big for their britches, to use a southernism, you can force them back in by showing how much like everyone else they are. There’s some mechanical tools in the book to help you do it. But every one of us has the ability, it’s about having a strategy and a thought, a plan. You can use it positively to reinforce what a person needs. When people get what they need versus what they want, often, it’s fulfilling.
I always say we, every one of us, has a four-year-old covered in scars and hair. We just have become who we are through whatever reinforcement has worked for us. But humans are pretty complex, meaning that over time they all develop a different layering and different things work on them. When I interrogated prisoners, we had 14 psychological ploys we used, and those revolved around love, hate and greed, of course. And those drivers all had to be customized to the individual and tailored and all of those tied together. As soon as you’re dealing with people on a daily basis, and not prisoners that you captured and dragged in under duress, this is about people you work with and other people. I always say, if you’re manipulating people for sport, it’s one thing. But if you’re trying to take into account what the person needs and give them that, each of us is different. Some people respond better to positive reinforcement, some respond better to negative reinforcement, and that’s based on the number of coats they’ve put over that grain of sand to make the pearl they are.
Then you help them satisfy whatever it is that they need, or if they’re negative everybody goes about life. And I often say this is my next book, we all go about life in our youth being wide open, and everything in the world is possible, the world’s our oyster, and then somewhere in our 30s, we probably figure out that the world’s not my oyster, but I can do these things well, and we get really, really good at them. We, in effect, start painting the floor in front of us until we’re back in the corner. and then we have to figure the way out of it.
This is about is helping a person get out of that spot. If they’re a big fish in a little pond who can’t grow and who can’t go the next step, it’s helping them go to where they need to go. Or if they think they’re big fish in a small pond, and they’re causing duress in the group, how do you clean that up and make them more effective? It’s simply by paying attention to their Maslow’s needs, paying attention to what it means, what their esteem needs to be, whether they need to be told how fast and pretty and smart they are, or whether they be pushed into the group more tightly so that they can get something done. I give you some tools to look at the individual, what they’re saying and the words they’re using and the body language they’re exhibiting, because you need all that to be able to pay attention to whether their approach is negative or positive.
Those 14 interrogation ploys work really well when you have a finite audience and you’re going to work on those people one time, maybe two, or four or six. But if it’s somebody you see every day, they will feel manipulated in an ugly way if you do those. Things like love, hate and greed, we use those individually. So love, self-love, love of country, love of job, love of money, which is kind of greed. And then we use fear. Fear up harsh means I scream and yell and act like I’m crazy, and you get afraid and start talking to keep me off of you, or fear up mild where I say, do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you if you don’t cooperate? That kind of thing. Those things don’t work as effectively as the fear down. I always say to people, if you see a picture of me, I’m 58. Now, I look a little more friendly. But when I was young, I looked pretty physical, like a redheaded Frankenstein. They were automatically afraid of me when I walked in the room. And I would come back and say, “I don’t care how I look. I’m really here to get to the bottom of the truth,” you use fear down in that way. We would use things like, “We all where you were, we have pictures of you in a situation you shouldn’t have been in.” We stopped short of telling everything we know. And people give up. We use things like futility: “As I explained you, there’s no sense in wasting my time and yours. Why don’t you go ahead and confess?” that works really well. If you can show the person every time they lie, and point out those lies to them individually, that works very well if used effectively. I did a History Channel show a few years back called We Can Make You Talk. Really smart kids there were trying to hide information. And one young lady, I simply told her every time she lied. I would say, “That’s a lie. That’s the truth. That’s a lie. That’s the truth.” And she eventually just said, “Why am I wasting your time?” and told me what I wanted to know. So that’s futility.
There’s hate. If a person hates somebody so much they’re willing to tell you something to hurt that person, you get information that way. There are all kinds of different approaches that are psychological levers. Interestingly, we didn’t make those up yesterday, those have been around since the first noncoercive interrogator of record, who happened to be a German in World War II, a guy named Hans Scharf, who created noncoercive interrogation techniques and proved to the Germans that you could get more information by not being violent and coercive, and by gaining trust. The United States Army adopted those in the 1950s, and they’ve been the standard since.
All of these interrogation police shows on TV, most of them are garbage. They’re all intended to make you excited or that kind of thing. Most of them are not well done. Most of them show a lot of screaming and yelling, threatening, and some of them even point guns at people, and all of those kinds of things. In my old interrogation days, we always would say even if we were going to use violence to teach guys how to behave, we would say the power of a slap is in the draw. The minute you do whatever it is you claim you’re going to do, it’s over. Any stress you create, any anxiety you create is over once you play that heavy card, so all that they do in the movies is awfully incorrect. I occasionally run into shows that get it right. It’s all about the psychology and getting the person on your page. I think the show Criminal Intent, one of the old law and order shows did a pretty good job. There are handful out there, but most of them are not good.
Let me let me give you a couple of things that your people can get free and easy. I also do body language videos. If you have Alexa in your house, you can say, “Alexa, enable body language tactics.” And you’ll get a couple of free body language lessons a week over Alexa. Those are some free body language things. And we do some subscription classes as well if you want to go that far, but for the most part, we just put it out there, because I think it’s valuable for people to open their eyes as a primary thing. Occasionally I’ll do something on that channel for people to be able to pick up things for free just to find out something new. I would say to people, this is really about what I call extreme interpersonal skills. Just pay attention to people. We’ve forgotten to do that. And social media has not been any better for us and phones and those kinds of things. Because people cloistered themselves and wrapped themselves in a little cloth and don’t get other people’s ideas and don’t pay attention and become insular in their communication style.