Becoming Bulletproof: Life Lessons from a Secret Service Agent

by Evy Poumpouras

when it seems like the world is ending, being willing to help others is the antidote to fear. And that is the first step toward becoming bulletproof.

Survival is about mastering yourself and your fear response, being able to think and act while keeping your panic at bay.

Managing your fear requires a deliberate act of courage. It is a choice that you make, and it’s one that everyone is capable of making.

The best way to manage fear is preparation. It isn’t hiding from the things we’re afraid of—it’s facing them head-on, taking responsibility for our own safety, and giving ourselves the tools and knowledge we need to manage any situation that might come our way. It’s about confidence, personal strength, and self-sufficiency.

If you want to be capable of facing conflict and crisis without falling apart, you must first understand yourself, your fears, and then strategize how best to manage them.

I was not unstoppable, but I was harder to stop.

Being keenly aware of what can still harm you actually helps you better prepare, defend, and often avoid threats altogether.

Courage is knowing what not to fear. —PLATO

Fear can also be a limiting influence in our lives. It can prevent us from pursuing goals that we long to go after, from speaking openly and honestly, from being who we’re truly meant to be.

Every generation seems to grow up with some type of societal fear. Today we fear radicalization—whether it’s from gangs or radical religious groups—and its effects on our cities through terrorism, stabbings, and mass shootings.

The Flight response is designed to protect you by getting you out of a volatile situation as quickly as humanly possible.

Just as our cave dwelling humans survived by running away from dangerous animals.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are. —EPICTETUS

Fear doesn’t have to limit you.

It’s the things we don’t do that tend to haunt us long-term—such

What makes us the best? I tend to think it’s the struggle. It’s the choice to face a challenge head-on instead of turning our backs to it. It isn’t solely about physical strength or bravado. It’s about endurance. And by this, I mean mental endurance—the ability to endure whatever life throws at you, to keep going no matter how hard it gets.

you shouldn’t allow someone’s cruelty or negligence to throw you off your game.

Your mental armor is an internal firewall against the harmful words or actions of others that might otherwise undermine or diminish you. Developing this kind of shield gives you agency; it allows you to choose what you want to take in and what you want to keep out.

we can’t shut ourselves off from others completely. That’s an incredibly lonely and isolated way to exist. Mental armor is meant to be used when you need it.

I know it’s a fear of mine, I don’t want it to control me, so I condition myself to face it. I take cold showers. I go for runs when it’s raining or snowing. And last winter, in the middle of January, I headed to Long Island, New York, slipped on a 4mm wet suit, and surfed the Atlantic Ocean. None of it was fun, but all of it was empowering. I still hate the cold, but I refuse to let it dictate what I can and can’t do.

Walking away isn’t about weakness—it is about implanting strength and strategy to deal with conflict. The true essence of inner strength is seen in how you respond to conflict. It’s about checking your superficial ego and being smarter than your adversary.

The key is to be able to determine when it makes sense to fight and when it makes sense to walk away.

Your ability to accept a situation—the real situation—will ultimately help you overcome it. This means that when unplanned shit happens, and it will, you must forgo the I can’t believe this is happening to me attitude, and instead adopt the mindset of This is happening to me. This is my reality. So now what?

During one class assignment, I ask my students to come up with solutions for reducing the recidivism rates of juvenile offenders. I divide them into groups, hand out several yellow sticky pads to each group, and give them five minutes to write down any and every idea that comes to mind, no matter how foolish, how expensive, or how illegal. The point is not to judge ideas, but to generate them. At the end, my class often has more than a hundred ideas.

“That’s why you didn’t struggle,” Dr. Drew said. “You found meaning in that tragedy.”

It can be a struggle to talk to your children about safety and worstcase scenarios. But you do far greater harm by shielding them than by teaching them. You shouldn’t rely solely on others—their teachers or their schools—to show them how to protect themselves.

Our instincts exist to help shield us from harm. Even if we don’t know why a certain person or situation gives us a bad feeling, we must listen to and trust our instincts.

I trust the internal intelligence I’ve developed that tells me that the smartest thing I can do in a given moment is get the hell out of there.

my success in standing my ground wasn’t really about my physical strength. It was about my mental conviction.

The world is full of people who will try to dismiss you, intimidate you, and violate you. And there are those moments in our lives where we must speak up, push back, and fight.

it takes great courage to fight. But it takes greater courage to know when to walk away.

Predators primarily seek out those they perceive as weak. The ones they think will go down easy, who won’t put up a fight. You know why? Because they don’t want a fair fight. They want someone they can conquer. They are looking for an easy target. Don’t give them one.

Seven minutes is a long time to fight—especially when you’re getting hit back. Mixed-martial-arts matches do only five-minute rounds and boxing matches go for only three.

Seven minutes is nothing when you’re reading a book or watching television. It’s an eternity when you are fighting for your life.

Where they could read and retain information in one sitting and still magically have time to grab a beer with friends, I had to spend hours locked in my room, going through the same material over and over again.

Same with me

treating people like they’re garbage means that most of the information they offer will be garbage, too.

I tried to figure out what had gone wrong in their life that led them to this moment, in which they found themselves in the extreme situation of being interrogated by a federal agent.

Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb. —PYTHAGORAS

Every time I teach or am asked to speak to a large group, the first thing I do is get out from behind the podium because I know a podium creates a “meversus-them” dynamic. I want my words to reach the people listening so they can feel connected to me, and that we are in this together.

When we write speeches or presentations, we rehearse our sentences and memorize talking points. We pay attention to our clothes, to the image we present to the world. But we rarely pay attention to the vehicle we use to make ourselves heard. This is where the importance of our paralinguistics comes into play.

Do you think when President Barack Obama was speaking live on prime-time television he ever thought, I better hurry up. I’m interrupting Grey’s Anatomy? No. He took his time, because he knew his words were both important and worth saying. And this mindset made him a remarkably powerful speaker.

You don’t have to be a world leader to speak with conviction.

If there is something in your speech that you don’t like, take note of it and try it differently.

The stars never lie, but the astrologers lie about the stars. —HOMER

In 500 BC, for example, priests in India required any subject who was accused of a crime to enter a dark tent where a donkey was tied up and pull its tail. According to the priests, if the donkey brayed when its tail was pulled, the subject was considered a liar. If, however, the donkey remained quiet, the suspect would be deemed truthful. Little did the suspects know that the donkey’s tail had been covered in soot. If the subjects exited the tent with clean hands, the priests knew they had never touched the tail, thus finding them guilty.

Mental cognition is our capacity to take in and understand knowledge.

When most people lie, they lie linear. They’ll make up a story and then tell it in the order that it would really happen,

Research shows that when a person self-corrects in the middle of a story, it’s more likely to be a sign of truthfulness because liars often think it’s an indication that they’re lying,

To become a dealer of words, you must first understand that the words you choose are not about you. They’re about the person who hears them. Instead of trying to force your listener to see the world through your eyes, try seeing it through theirs. Talk to people in a way that makes sense to them.

At the start of any interview, negotiation, or business meeting I attend, one of the first things I do is turn off my phone. And not only do I turn it off, I make sure the person I’m meeting with sees me turn it off and place it inside my purse.

Never in my entire career as a Special Agent did I see any of the presidents—or First Ladies, for that matter— hold a phone in their hand or leave it out on a table while talking to someone. Whether they were negotiating with another world leader, chatting with the coffee shop barista, or asking the White House butler about his weekend, they understood the power of giving whoever they were talking to all of their attention.